Ice Cold (13 page)

“I have no idea.” Honey resisted the urge to rub the goose bumps on her arms, keeping her hands resting on the keyboard. Her suspicions were unfounded, because it couldn’t be her first choice and there was no second. “She could be anyone.”

“But she wasn’t disguised as
anyone,
was she, Winston? She showed up as
you
.”

“Charlie had never met me, so we don’t know how
good
that disguise was. A blonde in a black coat. She breezed in, stayed only a few minutes, and rushed out. All cats look gray in the dark.”

“That’s not true. I saw the surveillance footage. If it wasn’t you, she was your identical twin. She had your security info down pat. She was that good.”

A cold, clammy chill, like the brush of ghostly fingers, eddied around her. The plastic keys beneath her fingers, cool and familiar, grounded her. “Why haven’t
I
seen the footage?”

“Charlie sent it while we were talking. I sent it to your computer.”

Honey hit send/receive. Her breath snagged raggedly in her throat. If she didn’t know unequivocally that she hadn’t walked through that door, she’d swear on a stack of bibles that she was the woman talking to Charlie. “God…”

“You, right?”

TEN

 H 
oney had to draw in a calming breath. “She certainly
looks
like me.”
Exactly
like me. The ramifications of someone impersonating her at the safe house in London, while she was in London, were daunting.

From across the room, he pointed at the video. “Who knows you well enough to pull
that
off?”

“No one,” her mouth went dry, and she made a path across her lips with the tip of her tongue then chewed the side of her lip for a second. “People know me, but whoever that is
studied
me. My walk, my mannerisms… It’s uncanny.” And creepy as hell.

“You’re known for your creative and inventive disguises, right?”

“So are dozens of other operatives.”

“Savage?”

“She taught me what I know,” Honey admitted. “But this couldn’t have been Catherine. She’s in her supermax prison cell in Colorado as we speak. Inmate number 765432. Catherine Jayne Seymour. Present and accounted for. Solitary. Twenty-three hours a day, seven days a week. She’s in Range Thirteen- what they consider ‘
ultr
amax’, virtually no human contact. No access to computers or television. No calls. She’s there. I checked. Double-checked, and triple-checked.”

“You knew she was incarcerated, yet you still confirmed?
Why?
”

There was a wealth of suspicion in that one damned word. There was no point prevaricating. “First, because it’s my job to be sure; for all we know, she might’ve escaped somehow. Unlikely, improbable—hell, even impossible, but she knows a
lot
of people in a lot of unsavory places. The good, the bad, and the people who know people. Under the circumstances, the visit coupled with…” She paused, then blew out a breath. “I received a text from her personal account when we were at the Internet café the other day.”

He straightened. “What the fuck?” Now he had both size-fourteen boots planted on the floor as he leaned forward. If she’d thought he’d been intense before, she’d been sadly mistaken. His laser-scope focus made her heart beat faster. “From
Savage
?”

“So it said. But we both know it couldn’t have been, just as we know the woman yesterday couldn’t have been Catherine. She didn’t get a day pass from the most locked-down section of a maximum-security prison to travel to Europe to pull my chain. She’s there. We have eyes on her.”

“Shit.”

Determined to stay focused, she stayed on point. “So we have two people we know one hundred percent it
wasn’
t—Catherine and me. Someone is playing us, wanting us to follow this doppelganger.”

“You’re only reporting this text to me
now
?” His voice hardened.

“She said ‘trust no one.’ I opted to do just that until I knew more.” His clenched jaw said he wasn’t done reaming her a new one, but he needed answers first.

“You traced the e-mail, right?”

She arched her brow but refrained from being a smart-ass. “It led nowhere.”

“The message was signed Savage?”

“Catherine,” Honey corrected.

“What did the e-mail say?”

“Trust no one. Things not as they appear. Wait for word.”

“That it? Any further contact?”

“No.”

“Someone is fucking with us.” He sat back.

Who and why
. “Apparently. Why couldn’t she have impersonated Mandek? He seems like an easygoing guy.” He was also black, six feet five, and built like a brick outhouse.

“That British accent would be hard to disguise.” Navarro’s lips twitched.

She was glad someone found this amusing. “Aren’t you going to the site today?”

“Why, trying to get rid of me?”

“We both have work to do.”

“I’m gathering intel sitting right here in a warm room. Since we don’t have to be anywhere until morning, I thought we could get to know each other. Our lives might depend on how well we know one another.” The damned spectral visit from her doppelganger, coupled with that suspicious e-mail, had him second-guessing her presence on the op. She could tell in his every mannerism and the tone of his voice. She hated that both events were all about her.
Specifically,
all about
her
.

“What more do you need to know, other than I’m as well trained as you are, I can make a computer sit up and sing, and I’ll always cover your back?”

“That’s a good start. We can do this fast, like ripping off a Band-Aid. Or we can do this slow.”

He let the implication of what that meant hang in the air for a moment. He had an agenda, Honey knew it. He wasn’t the kind of guy who gave a flying fig about a fellow operative’s personal life—not that they had time for one. No, he wanted inside her head to see what he could find.

Being inside Navarro’s head was a tempting place to be.

The two brief kisses they’d shared promised she wouldn’t be disappointed if she ever did have sex with him. But he would be. Very. Sex wasn’t a priority for her. It was okay occasionally if the right man and the right opportunity presented itself. However, those had been few and far between. And never—
ever
—sex with a fellow T-FLAC operative. Savage had drummed that into her head after Catherine’s hot and heavy affair with Navarro had broken her heart.

“Fine. I’ll ask and answer. You ask and answer, then we can both go back to work.”

His lips twitched. “You mean like a game of Truth or Dare?”

Honey didn’t answer him on purpose. She didn’t want this going any further than it needed to in order to get the job done. “How did you get that scar?”

“You were reading my personnel dossier on the flight over, don’t you know?”

“You were reading mine too.” Honey leaned back and crossed her legs, resting an out-flung arm across the back of the chair. “So I guess there’s no need to ask questions, we both know everything relevant?” She cocked her head, feeling the cool slither of her hair across her throat. “Want me to tell you what I know without reading your dossier?”

He nodded, his expression smooth.

“You like to give the impression you’re putting everything on the table. But you use your affability to disguise who you are, much like I do when I put on a wig and braces.”

His eye twitched.

“You consume food as if you’ve done without. You sport a lot of scars. Not all of them from your years at T-FLAC. That one on your cheek? Not on T-FLAC’s dime. They would’ve sent you to plastics.”

“Maybe I like looking dangerous. Women in particular seem to find scars sexy.”

“No.” Honey shook her head. “You don’t need scars to attract women. You’re not vain enough to give a shit about your scars one way or the other. That one,” she drew a line in the air indicating the scar that ran across his cheek, “happened when you were quite young. You probably almost died from that—what? A knife wound? Yet you didn’t get stitches. Same with the broken nose. It was never set.”

“How do you know it happened when I was a kid?”

She had said “young,” not kid. “Because neither would’ve happened with your current level of skill. And I’d bet my next paycheck soon after that happened, you started collecting self-defense skills like other kids collect baseball cards. Did the injuries happen in the same altercation or doled out over time? There are probably plenty more dings to your body that weren’t treated. That implies neglect.”

He went still, with not so much as a blink, then elaborated without emphasis. “Single mother. Her drug habit. My survival. I was on the streets off and on from an early age.”

It was hard to imagine Rafael Navarro small and helpless, but somehow, Honey did. It twisted her heart to know that once he’d been vulnerable and unprotected by the one person who should’ve kept him safe. She shared next. “Two parents. Drugs. Survival. Only difference was I lived in a mausoleum surrounded by people. Still, alone.”

“Flip side of the same coin. I was a little older, but not much smarter for this one.” He lifted the side of his shirt to expose tanned, rock-hard abs ridged with muscle. He jerked his chin down to indicate the four-inch scar sliced across his side. “A bar, a pretty woman in the wrong place, and a guy with a lot to lose.”

She wondered who the woman had been. A girlfriend? One of the tangos? “What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger, right?”

His eyes darkened a fraction, if that were possible. “We’re in a dangerous business, Winston. Wanna compare scars?”

“I don’t have any,” she lied smoothly, as he pulled his shirt back down over his impressive abs. Her pulse rushed in her ears, making them ring. “I stay away from knives and wear my LockOut gear when in dangerous situations.
Multiple
more guns in the world than people. Our odds of being shot, rather than stabbed, are astronomical.”

“The majority of gun-related deaths are suicides, so you have to take those out of the equation.”

“Over fifty percent, I know. But over
forty
percent of those deaths were homicides. Factor in who
we
deal with on a daily basis and in what seedy underbellies of the world, and that number increases exponentially. I calculate the risks and then consciously forget about the danger when I’m working.”

“So you go on an op and you aren’t afraid?”

Anyone in this business who claimed they weren’t afraid was lying. “I’m afraid the moment I walk out of my front door. Doesn’t mean I’m not good at my job.”

“You’ve got a shitload of security at that fancy ranch of yours. What do you keep out there? Gold bullion?”

“That’s veering into the personal.”

The skin around his eyes tightened slightly, revealing small creases at the edges. “So was the show-and-tell with the scars. You don’t have anything to hide, do you? It’s no secret that you have one of the biggest cattle spreads in Montana. Cattle and a lot of open land. And an inordinate amount of security, even for an orphaned heiress or a paranoid operative. What are you protecting out there?”

Something more precious than all the gold in the world. Pollack
. She also had a state-of-the-art computer system to rival the Pentagon’s to protect her home. She and Jack had often worked there instead of at T-FLAC HQ, twenty miles away. Her super computer was a well-kept secret.

Only a small handful of high-level people in the organization knew about it, and other than Jack, Dolan, Pollack, and herself, no one had access, or even knew exactly
where
it was located on the property. Now there were just three of them left who knew.

“Priceless art collection, gold bullion, and a queen’s ransom of valuable jewelry,” she said lightly. She was kidding about the gold bars, but not about the jewelry or the artwork. Priceless was an understatement.

His lips twitched “Have you been dating royalty lately?”

“You know already that my parents left me quite well off.” Robert Winston and Roxann- Pottratz had each, in their own right, been the highest paid actors in the world. They died at the pinnacle of fame. It was all there in her file.

Called the king and queen of Hollywood, the Legendary Winstons, or the Warring Winstons, depending on the day and how much dirty laundry they were willing to share on any given press junket.

“You don’t wear much jewelry.”

“My father was extraordinarily generous to my mother every time he had an affair, or every time he remembered he loved her, or every time
she
had an affair. It was hard to keep track. Their jewelers were happy; they weren’t.” She shrugged. “With the economy the way it is, it’s not worth selling, and since I don’t wear it, I keep the place secure.”