Kentucky Confidential (11 page)

Her stomach rumbled in response, making them both laugh. She rubbed her stomach, where the baby was kicking up a storm. “Junior votes yes to the food, too.”

Connor reached across the space between them, resting his hand on hers where it lay on her stomach. “We never talked about kids before.”

“We hadn’t been married that long.” She took his hand and pressed it against her belly. “We thought we had time.”

Connor’s fingers flexed against her stomach. “Time. Everybody think there’s time. Until there’s not.”

The baby kicked against her belly, and she heard Connor’s soft gasp of surprise. She suppressed a smile. “And sometimes, you just have to figure out how to make more time for what’s important.”

“Like Junior.”

Exactly
, she thought, blinking back the sting of tears.

* * *

T
HE
R
EST
S
TOP
Motor Lodge a few miles west of Harlan was two stories of shabby brick and mortar, held together, the best Connor could tell, primarily by years’ worth of grime. The bedding on the double bed in the room they rented for the night looked relatively clean, but just in case, Connor retrieved the emergency camping kit from the SUV and spread the two sleeping bags over the bedding for them.

“Resourceful,” Risa said, her tone approving as she sat down on one side of the bed, her legs crossed beneath her rounded belly. Digging in the bags they’d picked up at a burger joint on the way out of Cumberland, she retrieved a small box of French fries and started nibbling.

She grinned at him as she passed him the bag, feeling a strange sort of exhilaration as the food hit her empty stomach. Or maybe it was just the feeling that she was, finally, herself again, after months of being someone else. She was Risa McGinnis, she was with the man she loved, and she was weeks away from giving birth to their child.

Even the threat of ever-present danger didn’t seem to quell her sense that she was finally where she was supposed to be.

But the sight of Connor’s sober face took a little edge off her sudden sense of well-being. He ate his hamburger slowly, methodically, as if his mind was somewhere far away.

Back at Campbell Cove Security? Or somewhere else altogether?

Something Dal had told her a couple of weeks ago, when she’d asked if he knew anything about what Connor was doing now, flashed through her mind, chilling her mood further.

Seven months is a long time when you think your wife is dead.

Chapter Eleven

The Friday night crowd at The Jewel of Tablis was larger than Maddox Heller had anticipated. For cover, he’d brought along his wife, Iris, for this trip, leaving their two children with Iris’s sister Rose and her husband, Daniel, who’d been nearby in Lexington for the week doing research for Daniel’s latest book on criminal profiling. They’d agreed to take the kids through the weekend.

“That’s Farid,” he murmured to Iris, glancing toward the emailed photo saved on his phone. “Quinn and Cameron said he might be the weak link. If we can convince him it’s worth his while to tell us why the man wanted to look around inside Risa’s apartment.”

“Do you think it was really Tahir Mahmoud?” Iris was trying to appear unfazed, but he knew the thought that Mahmoud might still be alive disturbed her. The man had nearly killed her eight years ago. She’d had nightmares about him for a couple of years before she’d finally managed to conquer the residual fears of that encounter.

“You saw the photo,” he said, wishing he could give her a definitive no. But he and Iris didn’t lie to each other. It was one of the cardinal rules of their marriage.

“I did.”

“What did
you
think?”

“It looked a lot like him,” she said after a brief pause. “Damn Alexander Quinn for telling you they’d found the body when they hadn’t.”

He reached across the table and took her hand. As always, he felt a light quiver of energy where their fingers touched. “Are you afraid he’ll come after us?”

“I don’t know.” Her fingers tightened under his. “I guess it’s a plus that he hasn’t bothered us in eight years. Assuming he’s still alive.”

“That’s how I’m choosing to look at it,” he admitted. “But I’ve asked Quinn to harden the security at our new house, just in case.”

“What about the kids? Daisy rides a bus to a public school every day. Jacob is about to start school next year. How do we protect them?”

“By finding out if this guy really is Tahir Mahmoud,” Maddox said quietly, glancing across the restaurant at a pretty young woman wearing a bright green scarf over her lustrous dark hair. Darya Nahir. Risa McGinnis had identified the young waitress as a person to interview, since she had waited on the table of the men in question and might have gleaned a little information about them. “There’s Darya. You ready?”

Iris nodded. “Showtime.”

Darya approached their table, a friendly smile on her face and a pair of menus in her hands. “Welcome to The Jewel of Tablis. Would you like something to drink while you’re looking at your menus?”

“I’ll take a mint tea, iced,” Maddox said. “Sweetheart?”

“The same, only I want mine hot.” Iris smiled up at Darya. “That is a gorgeous
roosari
. It looks handmade.”

Darya smiled. “It was. My mother made it.”

“The embroidery work is exquisite.”

“Thank you.” Darya looked pleased by the compliment.

“Oh, I bet you’re the girl Con was telling us about.”

Darya’s dark eyebrows lifted as she finished jotting down their drink orders. “Con?”

“Connor. A friend of ours who was in town earlier this week. He’s the one who recommended the restaurant to us. I think he was here the other night—maybe Tuesday or Wednesday? He couldn’t stop talking about the pretty waitress he saw—he said she was beautiful, like a bright flower.”

“Wow, I don’t know if he was talking about me.”

“Well, you’re definitely not the other waitress he mentioned,” Iris said with a laugh. “That woman was about nine months pregnant.”

“Yasmin,” Darya said, her smile fading. “Yes.”

“Is something wrong?” Iris put her hand on the young woman’s arm. Her fingers trembled, and Darya gave her a curious look.

“I’m a little worried,” Darya admitted. “Yasmin was supposed to work the past two nights but she didn’t show, and she’s not answering her phone.”

“Do you think she had her baby?” Iris asked, dropping her hand away from the young waitress’s arm. She slanted a look at Maddox, her light brown eyes dark with meaning.

Darya gave Iris a troubled look. “I don’t know. Farid—our boss—tells me not to worry, but it hasn’t really made me feel any better. I wish I knew what happened to her.” She cleared her expression deliberately, flashing them a smile that wasn’t quite convincing. “I’ll be back in a few minutes for your order.”

Maddox waited until Darya was out of earshot before he leaned across the table toward his wife. “Well?”

“She’s tense. Definitely worried about Risa. If there’s a terrorist plot cooking in this town, she’s not part of it.”

“Then maybe she could be an ally,” he murmured.

“Maybe,” Iris agreed. “But I think the person who can really tell us the most about what happened here Wednesday night is her boss.”

Maddox glanced across the room, where Farid Rahimi stood talking to a couple sitting at a table in the corner. From this angle, he looked vaguely familiar.

Where had he seen him before?

* * *

A
S
WEARY
AS
he was, after the past two eventful days, Connor found that sleep was elusive. Beside him, Risa had fallen into an occasionally restless slumber, lying on her side, her body curled up around her pregnant belly as if she were protecting her child, even in slumber.

He lay on his back, gazing up at the ceiling, where the faint thread of light seeping in through the motel room curtains cast odd shadows on the water-stained Sheetrock.

Something wasn’t right. Actually, a lot wasn’t right, but the one thing that continued to bug him was how quickly their pursuers had found them at the Christmas-tree lot.

They’d guessed that the tracker might have been added to the car when they stopped in Lexington. But how had anyone found them in Lexington if they didn’t already know where to look for them? He was pretty sure he hadn’t been followed out of town, at least once they hit the long stretch of highway between Cincinnati and Lexington. So either someone had spotted them leaving together in Cincinnati, seen the direction they were going and made a calculated guess about their route, or...

That’s where he hit a wall. What was the “or”? Was there any other way someone could have put a tracker on the car before they arrived at the safe house?

“You’re still awake, aren’t you?” Risa’s sleepy voice rasped softly in the dark.

“How did someone put a tracker on the Tahoe?”

She rolled over, propping her head on her hand and looking at him. “You said you thought it was when we stopped in Lexington.”

“But how did someone find us in Lexington that fast? Yes, I know I used my credit card, but we were gone within a few minutes after that transaction was processed. No way did anyone have time to reach our location and put the GPS tracker on the Tahoe that quickly.”

“You’re right,” she said, her voice sober. “So someone was either expecting us to be in Lexington, at that place we stopped, or...”

“Or someone had already put the tracker on the Tahoe in Cincinnati.”

“But it’s Quinn’s car.”

“I know.” He rolled over to face her, a light shiver running down his spine as he studied her features in the dim light. She was so familiar to him, and yet, somehow after these seven months apart, she seemed like a stranger. A beautiful, intoxicating, very pregnant stranger.

“Maybe someone was tracking Quinn.”

Possible, he supposed, though his new boss was known for his fanatical security measures. “I don’t think they would have been able to put the tracker on the Tahoe until Cincinnati,” he murmured. “Quinn would have had the vehicle checked before he left Campbell Cove. But someone could have spotted him when he arrived and put the tracker on his vehicle then.”

“So maybe it’s really someone after Quinn?” she asked hopefully.

“Maybe.” But he didn’t think so. Whoever had disabled the generator at the tree lot had to have known that Connor and Risa were the people in the SUV. He growled. “I can’t make this make sense. Even well-organized terrorist groups don’t have the resources to be so Johnny-on-the-spot with surveillance. Do they?”

“No,” she agreed. “They’re more and more technologically savvy these days, yes, but what you’re suggesting would have to be...” She frowned, shadows falling over her eyes as her brow furrowed.

“It would have to be a government,” he finished for her. “And Kaziristan sure as hell doesn’t have that sort of capability.”

“No. But people in our own country do,” she said soberly.

“You think our own government could be behind this?” It seemed to physically hurt to say those words aloud. He’d dedicated the better part of his adult life to serving the government of the United States. And while he certainly didn’t trust every member of the bureaucratic behemoth that was the federal government, he couldn’t believe his country would target a woman who had given most of her own adult life in government service.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t want to believe it, but it wouldn’t exactly be the first time someone in government went rogue, would it? Barton Reid’s treason wasn’t that long ago, after all. Ask Maddox Heller.”

Barton Reid had been a State Department official who’d played terrorists and other enemy elements against the US government for his own financial gain. A lot of damage had been done before the man was taken down and sentenced to life in prison for his treachery.

Could the attempt on Risa’s life have been ordered by another government official gone rogue?

“But why would you have been targeted?” he asked. “What were you working on last? Is it something you can tell me about?”

“The last thing I was working on was pretty mundane. And kind of gross.” She rolled over onto her back, gazing up at the ceiling, a smile playing at her lips. “I was tasked with doing basic background analysis and surveillance on a group of Kaziri entrepreneurs who were planning to start an agri-tech company. Their goal was to research and implement the best agricultural practices for Kaziristan’s climate and ecosystem. You know, selecting drought-resistant crops and livestock that have the best chance of thriving in Kaziristan. They were looking for UN grants as well as grants from the US and the government of Kaziristan.”

“That sounds...fun.” Connor’s tone sounded skeptical.

“Actually, they were nice guys. Young, forward-thinking. Well-educated and hoping to pull even the rural parts of Kaziristan kicking and screaming into the twenty-first century. They wanted to improve the chances of profitable agriculture in Kaziristan that didn’t include growing poppies for warlords to turn into drugs to fund their turf battles.”

“Did you turn in your final report before the crash?”

“If things had gone smoothly, I would have been able to give them a green light, but something came up at the last minute that was going to require more investigation. I was supposed to meet with another agent when I got back to DC, but...”

“But you didn’t get there.” He nodded. “So, what was the holdup?”

“One of the big things the guys wanted to do was harvest bat guano from the caves in the mountains. From a chemistry standpoint, it was showing great promise as an affordable, effective fertilizer for some of the crops that needed extra nutrients not available in the soil. But the guys discovered that some of the bats in the area they were targeting had started coming down with a hemorrhagic disease. At the time of my investigation, the disease hadn’t jumped into another species as far as we could tell, but there was a very strong concern that the disease might spread to livestock or even humans through the guano.”

“That doesn’t seem as if it should have put a stop to the project,” Connor said. “It was just one source of fertilizer, right?”

“Yes, but it was a pretty significant part of the cost-control aspect of their plan. Other sources of fertilizer, like cow and goat manure, weren’t naturally occurring the way the bat guano was.”

“That’s what you were coming back to DC to discuss?”

“Yes. I was supposed to meet with someone in the CDC to determine if there was a way to test the guano on-site to ascertain whether the bats in the area were diseased, and what kind of costs that might incur. Also, I was hoping to meet with some people in the Department of Agriculture to see what protocols for food safety might be involved.”

“And they say a career in the CIA is mostly a big bore.”

She smiled. “I know it sounds kind of dull, but if these guys were able to accomplish their goals, it could mean that hundreds of thousands of people in rural Kaziristan could live vastly improved lives.”

“Well, it certainly doesn’t sound like anything that would put you on a hit list,” Connor agreed. “But I guess it’s something we should look into.”

“How do you propose we do that? How do we look into anything at this point?” Her voice was tight with frustration. “Do we dare risk trying to contact Quinn if someone’s out there tracking your electronic trail?”

“I have enough cash to buy a burner phone. Nobody will know to track it, and we can reach Quinn that way.”

“Unless they’re tracking Quinn’s electronic trail, too.”

“Quinn is pretty savvy. It would be hard to track him without his knowing it.”

“It’s still a risk,” she warned. “But since we don’t have internet access at the moment, he may be our only option to do a little digging into that possibility.”

He turned over, facing her. “We can’t do anything before morning. So why don’t you try to stop those wheels in your head from turning and get some sleep?”

Her lips twitched up at the corners.

“What?” he asked.

“Remember how you used to help me go to sleep when my mind wouldn’t stop running in circles?”

He did. Vividly. “I could give it a try.”

Her eyes widened. “You’re serious?”

“Turn over.”

She stared at him, her dark eyes gleaming in the low light. Then she rolled over to her other side and went very still.

He shifted until her body was spooned against his. She felt small and deliciously warm, tucked against him beneath the blankets. He could feel the tension in her body, as tangible as a low-level electric current running through her muscles.