Guardian Agent (2 page)

Of course, could be Gabe had meant for her to escape. Maybe he thought he could follow her from a distance. Good luck with that. She’d become a master of evasion in the last few weeks, learned every island, every canal in the city. With her twists and turns and doubling back, she was confident that she’d shaken him.

One final test, then she could go home and get some sleep.

The canal glistened darkly in the moonlight, leading to the harbor a few blocks ahead where U.S. Congressman Richard Wharton’s whale of a yacht bobbed on the waves, overshadowing the smaller vessels around it. She didn’t go that far, just past the hideously expensive gondolas and the only slightly better water taxis to catch a
vaporetto.
The water buses, used by locals, were the least expensive way to get around in Venice.

A half-asleep teenager asked her something in the local language as she stepped on board.

“I speak very little Italian. Sorry,” Jasmine told her.

The girl turned from her and asked another person.

Jasmine went to stand in the back. She never sat. She preferred to be on her feet, ready to leap and run at short notice. Or leap and swim. Hopefully, not tonight. She didn’t like the look of the cold, dark water.

She inspected every person on board from her vantage point. No sign of Gabe.

“Bella Signora, you’re an American, si?” A young man in his twenties sidled up to her with an exaggerated smile and an I-want-to-ravish-you look.

She ignored him.

“Antonio show you real good time. I’m very special for ladies. Very confidential. Two hundred American dollars. All night,” he added with wide-eyed enthusiasm.

If the situation wasn’t so sad, it would have been funny. Since… the incident… she couldn’t stand the thought of a man touching her.

“No thanks.”

“Are you sure?” He dragged out the last word, probably thinking she just needed encouragement. But when he touched her arm and she flinched, jerking away from him on reflex, he finally got that she meant what she said and moved away from her, looking for another potential customer.

She got off at the last stop, Soremo, an out-of-the-way island that once had been famous for its salt warehouses. The giant storage rooms had been cut up into small flats at one point, now housing teachers, shop assistants and blue-collar workers--people too busy cranking out a living to pay her much attention.

She slipped through a broken window in the back of an abandoned building and listened. Heard nothing but the water and rats scurrying in the far corners. She moved to the top floor, careful of the rotting stairs. Between the saltwater and the sea winds, anything not paid attention to quickly deteriorated here.

“It’s me,” she called out when she reached the door in the very back. And as she opened it, she could see Mandy lowering the only gun they had left.

“Did you bring food?” The seventeen year old looked her over with sleepy eyes.

“I do what I promise.” Jasmine reached into her shirt and pulled a Panini then the small bunch of bananas she’d snatched while weaving through the streets. She gave a third to Mandy before she went to check on her brother.

“I got antibiotics.” She presented the small Ziploc bag that held half a dozen white pills.

“What did you sell for it?” Not even the several days’ growth of beard could hide Jake’s sunk-in cheeks.

“Nothing.” She’d stolen those earlier in the day.

Back when her life had been normal, she used to think the line between right and wrong stood pretty clear, the whole black and white thing. These days she lived in gray, moving toward darker and darker tones every day. If she hadn’t sold Jake’s backup gun for food weeks ago, she might have shot Gabe on the roof before she recognized him.

She wasn’t comfortable with that thought, but she couldn’t afford to be caught. Mandy and Jake needed her to take care of things until Jake recovered.

“You have to take Mandy and leave,” he said under his breath after he swallowed one of the pills. “It’s not safe for you here.”

Her muscles stiffened. “It’s not safe for us anywhere.”

A moment of dark silence passed between them, filled with her nightmarish memories.

Guilt made Jake’s face look even gaunter. “I never meant for you to get hurt. But this place isn’t any better. I should have taken you someplace else. I can’t protect you like this.”

He’d taken a bullet the week before. She’d removed the slug with a pair of knitting needles she’d lifted off an old lady at a cafe, but the wound was getting badly infected, immobilizing the whole leg and bringing on fever. That he also had a broken arm from a nasty fall didn’t help.

“We’re not going anywhere without you,” Mandy said around the food in her mouth. Then coughed.

She’d been coughing last night, too. Jasmine shot her a questioning look.

Mandy shrugged. “I think I’m allergic to mold. Or rat poop.”

They had plenty of both.

“Are the men still in the city?” Jake asked in a casual tone, shifting on his folded cardboard box bed, keeping his right arm out, careful with the makeshift cast.

Jasmine went back to the stained, ancient mattress she’d salvaged from a dumpster and sat next to her sister, pulling the blanket higher around Mandy’s shoulders. The temperature wasn’t bad for February—low fifties since the sea tempered the city’s climate—but they were far from comfortable without heat.

Sometimes, on moonless nights when nobody would see smoke coming from the window, they burned garbage in a steel barrel that stood next to the last window in the back. Mostly they relied on the sun to warm up the south-facing room during the day, and the thick brick walls to radiate that heat back overnight.

“They were out hunting tonight. I tried to lead them away.” Doing her best to impersonate her brother. “At least to the mainland.” To the airport in Mestre.

She’d wanted them to think that Jake had gotten on a plane, but they’d caught up with her at the old palace. “Gabe Cannon is with them now.”

Jake sat up, his forehead wrinkling as he considered the news. After a long minute, he shook his head. “Don’t go anywhere near him. We can’t afford to trust anyone at this stage. If they caught you--”

She couldn’t bring herself to confess that Gabe already had. A miracle that the night hadn’t turned out worse.

About twenty mercenaries hunted them, organized into two teams. One searched the city, the other secured the railroad bridge and Ponte della Liberta, the five kilometers long Liberty Bridge that connected Venice to the mainland for car and bus traffic.

Jasmine swallowed her food without tasting it. She needed to find a way to outsmart those men, and she needed to find it quickly. Today’s plan had failed. She would have to come up with something better for tomorrow.

Jake finished his meager ration and hobbled over to a window, looked out into the night. Mandy slid down onto the mattress. Normally, she had the most energy among the three of them. And the biggest mouth. But not tonight.

Jasmine reached out to feel her forehead, then squeezed her eyes shut for a second, a sense of hopelessness washing over her. “You’re burning up with fever.”

“I’ll be fine by morning.”

“Why didn’t you say anything?” Jake’s knuckles turned white, he gripped the windowsill so tight. Didn’t take a psychic to figure out that he blamed himself for putting them into this situation.

“I didn’t want to be any trouble,” Mandy said with a small voice.

The sight of her vivacious, chirpy little sister being beaten down like this just about killed Jasmine.

Jake hobbled over to them and sat on the corner of the mattress. Although he would never say it, his leg couldn’t support him longer than a few minutes at a time. He pulled the Ziploc bag from his pocket and passed a pill to Mandy who raised her head and swallowed it obediently.

They both needed so much more than that. Real medical care, preferably a hospital, the sooner the better.

Jake lay down and gathered Mandy to him, his own teeth chattering, his face drawn. And as she looked at them, Jasmine had to accept at last that he wasn’t going to get better any day now and take charge again. He wasn’t going to lead them out of here to safety.

She
had to do it.

Gabe Cannon’s blue eyes flashed into her mind, the way they’d turned silver in the moonlight. They stood out in contrast to his dark lashes and dark hair, a spellbinding combination of coloring that had wreaked havoc with her teenage heart. Thank God, she was a lot more mature now. She wasn’t going to let him bamboozle her this time.

She shoved the last of her food into her mouth and slipped her flashlight back into her pocket as she stood, knowing that what she was about to do would either save them or bury them.

Jake frowned. “Where are you going?”

Better that he didn’t know. He might try to stop her. “You both need something for that fever.”

Her brother held her gaze for a long moment. “Be careful.”

“Take the gun,” Mandy offered from under the blanket.

“You keep it. Anyone else but me comes through this door, you shoot. Okay?” She hated putting that kind of burden on her sister, but she could find no other way to make sure they were safe. Jake could barely move his right arm, let alone aim a gun with it. She gave them her most confident smile before she slipped away.

At one point, out of sheer desperation, she’d tracked the men who hunted her brother to the
pensione
they rented on the main island. She’d wanted to know what kind of enemy she faced. She’d gotten the answer to that: overwhelming.

She had promised herself she would stay away from the place.

Of course, back then she hadn’t known that one of the hunters was Gabe.

Chapter Three

Gabe kept his eyes on his laptop, giving no sign that he’d noticed the woman who’d been observing him through his window for the last ten minutes.
Jasmine.

Brent should have listened to him when he’d recommended setting up perimeter security. But the team leader was too arrogant to think that anyone could ever turn the tables on him.

He made a show of yawning and stretching. His gun hid in the desk drawer. She would have seen if he tried to retrieve the weapon, so he simply turned the key with a slight motion then palmed it. At least now he knew she wouldn’t be able to get to it while he left the room in the hopes of luring her in.

He scratched his chest, stood and headed for the bathroom. Going to the window would have scared her off, and his goal was to make her feel as secure as possible. Maybe Tekla was ready to turn himself in and sent her as a messenger.

He closed the bathroom door behind him, waited two minutes then flushed the toilet. She would be pushing the window open, using the noise he made to mask any possible creaking. After a few more seconds, he turned on the tap. She would use that to move into the room, knowing he’d turn the tap off when he was done, giving her warning before he came out of the bathroom.

He left the water running and put his hand on the doorknob. Then he slammed the door open and burst forward.

He registered the empty room a split second before she dropped on him from the storage shelf above the bathroom door, nearly knocking him off his feet.

“Hey. Stop that.” He tried to twist to get hold of her, but his temple caught her sharp elbow and he saw stars. He staggered toward the bed and flipped her down at last, but she managed to hook her leg behind his neck and he ended up on the bottom somehow, with her sitting on his chest.

Her wild, shoulder-length waves framed cheeks pink from effort, her chest heaving as she leaned forward to pin his hands next to his head on each side. She ended up with her fine breasts inches from his lips.

He could have subdued her in two moves, but he liked her on top of him. She might be more likely to answer his questions if she thought she was in control of the situation. If their position sent some heat zinging through him, she didn’t need to know about it.

He relaxed his muscles and gave her a thorough once over now that he had her in a lit room and could fully see her. The barely disguised triumph in her eyes, the color of aged Bourbon, amused him.

“Anything I can help you with, Jasmine?”

She looked nothing like the gangly teenager he’d met ten years ago. She had filled out in all the right places and turned into a beautiful woman. A woman who reminded him that he’d been lonely way too long. He would have given a lot right now if she weren’t related to his mission and came to him simply to spend the night with him.

She pulled back enough so she could search his face. “Why are you chasing Jake? He was your friend once.”

Oh, hell, nothing in life was ever simple. “My friends don’t turn rogue.”

“He was framed.” She spoke with full-conviction, her eyes flashing.

“Your brother killed three men. One of them was a U.S Army officer.”

Her generous lips narrowed to a thin line. “You don’t know the circumstances.”

She had gumption, passion and loyalty in spades. He felt a twinge of respect—a twinge of something else, too, but he was going to ignore that. “So what changed between the roof and now? Why run away if you were just going to come back to me?”