Kentucky Confidential (6 page)

“Well, let’s check.” He opened the refrigerator, revealing that it was partially stocked. There were a couple of cartons of eggs, both with expiration dates several days away. The gallon of milk was also new, and in the freezer, there were several frozen dinners, frozen fruit, a couple of fish fillets wrapped in butcher paper and cellophane, and a pint of chocolate ice cream.

It was the ice cream that made Risa’s stomach growl. As if in response to the rumbling sound, the baby started to kick wildly against her abdomen.

On impulse, she shut the freezer door and grabbed Connor’s hand, placing it on the swell of her belly. “Feel that?”

His hand went tense beneath her touch and he frowned. Then the baby gave another hefty kick and Connor’s gaze snapped up to meet hers. “Was that the baby?”

She smiled at his thunderstruck expression. “Yeah. That’s him. Or her.”

“How far along are you?” He moved his hand lightly over her belly, as if willing the baby to kick again.

“A little over eight months. About thirty-seven weeks. Not long now.”

Connor dropped his hand from her belly and looked around the small kitchen, his brow knotting with dismay. “And you’re stuck out here in the middle of nowhere.”

“We have a vehicle. We’re not that far from civilization, are we?”

He shook his head, though his expression showed no sign of relaxing. “I think we’re maybe ten minutes northeast of Cumberland.”

“So we just get online in the morning and figure out where the closest ob-gyn can be found.”

“Assuming there’s a way we can get online here,” he muttered.

“We have phones.” She put her hand on his arm. “It’s all right, Connor. Women have been having babies for years, and some of them do it without a doctor in sight. Plus, I’m still nearly four weeks away from my due date, and since it’s my first baby, I might even be a week late. We don’t have to worry about this tonight. Okay?”

He looked at her hand on his arm. “And you’ve been going through this all by yourself for seven months?”

“I had Dal to talk to.” She dropped her hand away, not wanting him to feel sorry for her. She had made the decision to handle the danger hanging over her head the way she had, hidden and alone.

Her choice. Her consequences.

* * *

W
HEN
R
ISA
EMERGED
from the bathroom, her hair was wet. She’d taken a bag into the bathroom with her and had changed into soft cotton pajamas obviously cut to accommodate her pregnancy.

Connor watched, mesmerized, as she entered the den where he’d started a blazing fire to ward off the cold. Outside, snow had begun to fall in earnest, already covering the ground outside with a fluffy blanket of white. He’d tried checking the weather on his phone, but he could barely get a signal, and certainly not one strong enough to sustain an internet connection.

He’d made only a cursory exploration of the rest of the house, enough to see that they seemed to have cable TV, which he hoped might mean there was some sort of cable or DSL connection available for the internet. But he’d worry about that later. He and Risa both needed sleep.

“Feel better?” he asked as she crossed to where he sat in front of the fire.

“Cleaner, anyway.” She reached her hands toward the fire, flexing her fingers. “Lovely fire.”

Pregnancy suited her, he thought. It softened the angular edges of her face and gave her skin a warm glow that even her weariness couldn’t quite extinguish.

And he’d missed most of it, damn it. “I wish I’d known.”

He hadn’t meant to say the words aloud, but he didn’t have to explain what he meant. Risa followed his gaze to her pregnant belly and gave him a regretful look. “I should have told you. I shouldn’t have let Dal talk me into trying to handle everything by myself. But it’s just—”

“It’s how you’ve always done it. I know. I remember.”

She drew her hands away from the fire’s heat and twined them together on what was left of her lap. “It wasn’t anything to do with us. With you or the way I feel about you. I need you to understand that.”

“I do.” He knew she loved him. Love had never been an issue between them. “But you can’t let go of even a tiny piece of your autonomy, can you?”

“I’ve had to take care of myself all by myself for a long time. Letting someone else take care of me, take risks for me—”

“Doesn’t come naturally.”

She leaned her head back against the chair cushion. “I know I’ve been a disappointment to you.”

“Don’t do that.”

Her eyes, which had drifted shut, snapped open to look at him. “Do what?”

“Turn this around on me. Don’t try to make me feel guilty about the way I’m feeling. You’re the one who left. You’re the one who lied.” As the anger and pain he’d been bottling up started to bubble to the surface, he rose from the chair and walked away, needing the distance to get his emotions back under control.

“You’re feeling something?” she shot back at him. “That’s new. I thought you never let yourself feel anything on a mission.”

Her comeback hit painfully close to home. “So this is my mission? And you’re what, the client I’m charged to protect? Is that how you want this to go, Risa? Because I’m trained to handle it.”

She closed her eyes again, slumping deeper in her chair. “I don’t want to dive headfirst into the mess I’ve made of our marriage right now. Okay? I just want to get some sleep. In the morning, we can rip what’s left of it to shreds if you want. But not tonight.” She staggered to her feet and headed down the narrow hall, opening the door to one of the two bedrooms and disappearing inside.

Connor stared after her long after the door clicked shut behind her. His gut was burning with restrained emotions, love, anger and pain all wrapped up in a writhing knot in the pit of his stomach.

“You didn’t make the mess alone, sweetheart,” he whispered.

Chapter Six

Risa woke to the mouthwatering aroma of eggs and toast, but the bedroom was cold enough to give her pause before she finally crawled out from beneath a pile of warm blankets. She dressed quickly in maternity jeans, thick socks and a long-sleeved sweater, and wandered down the hall to the kitchen to find Connor.

“Good. You’re up.” Connor was at the counter, spreading butter onto a couple of pieces of toast. He waved toward the stools on the other side of the breakfast bar. “Can you drink coffee?”

“I’ve given it up for now,” she said with regret. “The doctor said I could probably have a cup a day, but you know me and coffee. I can’t stop at a cup a day.”

He gave her a sympathetic wince. “Had to go cold turkey, huh?”

“Yeah.” She found herself eyeing him warily as he spooned scrambled eggs onto two plates and added a slice of toast to each. Considering the tension still roiling between them the previous night when she went to bed, Connor seemed awfully chipper. “Did you get any sleep?”

“A couple of hours. I didn’t want to sleep too long, though. We have a lot to do today.”

She scooped up a forkful of eggs. “We have an agenda for the day, I take it?”

“Well, I do. And I could use your help if you feel up to it. But I can do it alone, at least for a while. If you want to catch up on your sleep.”

She glanced at her watch. It was only nine thirty. She’d managed about four hours of sleep. It would have to do. “No, I’m good. What are we doing today?”

“A little mission analysis, I guess you could call it. You and I have been working what seems to me to be two angles of the same investigation. Plus, there’s Dal’s death and the plane crash earlier this year.”

She chewed a bite of toast and thought about what he was saying before she spoke. “For you, it started with that surveillance photo, right? You saw the pregnant Kaziri woman and realized it looked like your dead wife.”

“Right.” His earlier bright facade slipped a bit.

Imagining what that must have been like for him, she barely kept herself from reaching out to touch him. “That had to have been a real shock.”

He ignored the comment. “We think al Adar or some other foreign group—maybe al Qaeda, maybe ISIS—is planning some sort of mass casualty attack. Maybe for the Christmas holidays. But we don’t know if it’s specifically for Cincinnati, or if they’re using Cincinnati as their base of operations.”

“Cincinnati doesn’t seem as if it would be a big enough target,” she said. “They’d want to make a bigger impact, wouldn’t they?”

“Maybe. Or maybe they’re looking to spread terror out of the bigger cities and into the heartland.”

He had a point, she supposed. In the past few years, lower-casualty strikes had already taken place in locations such as an Army base in Texas, a processing plant in Oklahoma and a Navy reserve center in Tennessee. And there was that Christmas party shooting out in California...

Connor picked up his empty plate and took it to the sink. “Those two men from the restaurant—what made you decide to follow them?”

“A couple of things,” she said after giving it a thought. “Their flamboyance, for one thing. Most of the people in the Kaziri community try to keep a low profile just out of habit. They came here because of the danger and persecution from al Adar and other jihadi groups, so nobody in the neighborhood likes to stand out. Then here come those two guys, dressed up in their Kaziri finest, throwing their weight around—it was just something out of the ordinary.”

“You said there were a couple of things. What was the other?”

“There was something so familiar-looking about one of the men at the diner, and I finally realized why,” she said. “Dal used to keep a wall of photos in his office, stuck up on a corkboard. Sort of like most-wanted posters, but in his case, he called them wins. Terrorists who’d been killed or captured.”

“And he was one of the people on that wall?”

“I think so. Maybe. It was a glance at a wall months and months ago. And I don’t even know his name or anything about him.”

“If you’re right, this guy clearly wasn’t killed. And if he was captured he escaped. Do you know anything about an escaped terrorist?”

“No.”

“Neither do I.” He leaned back in his chair. “I’ll say this about those guys, though. If they’re part of a sleeper cell, they’re not doing a very good job of blending in.”

Also a good point, she had to concede. “What if they’re the diversion?”

“To make us keep an eye on the shiny baubles while the real sleepers make their move?”

“Maybe. They sure weren’t happy to see me following them, though.”

“They were worried enough to get your boss to help them take a look around your apartment.”

She rubbed her chin. “Maybe we shouldn’t have left Cincinnati. It makes me look as if I have something to hide.”

“You do.”

“But now I’m in no position to find out who the real sleepers are, if our theory is correct.”

“I don’t think you were in any position to find out at all.” Connor nodded at her mostly empty plate. “You done?”

“Yeah.” She handed over the plate. “You think that being a woman automatically puts me in no position to find out anything that might be going on behind the scenes. That’s what you meant, right?”

“You weren’t just a woman. You were a pregnant woman with no husband, no family, no money and no standing in the community. I don’t know what the hell Dal was thinking putting you in that position.”

“I think the idea was that, as a woman, I’d be almost invisible. Able to move around without attracting any real concern.”

“Maybe if you were a married woman. Or part of an influential family. But nobody was going to talk freely in front of you.”

She hated to admit he was right. But he was.

What had Martin Dalrymple been hoping to accomplish by putting her in the middle of the Kaziri community in southern Ohio? Had he had a secret agenda he hadn’t lived long enough to reveal?

“What are you thinking?” Connor asked from where he stood at the sink, washing their breakfast dishes.

“I was thinking about Dal,” she admitted. “Everything you’re saying is true. I wasn’t at all the best choice to go undercover in that community if he was looking for information on jihadis. Unless...”

“Unless what?”

She turned in her chair to face him. “What if he thought there was a terrorist threat coming from the female side of the Kaziri community?”

He leaned against the counter. “You mean female jihadis?”

“We know more and more females are getting involved in terrorism.”

“Usually as a sidekick to males.”

“If we’re right about those two obnoxiously chauvinistic Kaziri men being decoys to hide a sleeper cell, what better place to hide their plot than among the women they openly disdain?” She stood up, stretching her back. She had been in the habit of taking a long morning walk since she’d learned she was pregnant, but there was at least four inches of snow on the ground outside, and none of the clothes she currently owned were very practical for tromping around in the snow. “Don’t suppose your company has a home gym hidden in this safe house somewhere?”

“Carrying around Junior in there isn’t exercise enough?” There was a hint of affection in his voice and an endearing softness in his gaze as it settled on her pregnant belly.

“I’ll need my strength when it comes time to give birth.”

He came closer, almost close enough to touch, though he kept his hands at his sides. “Have you been preparing for it?”

“Childbirth?”

He nodded.

“Some, yeah.”

“Have you taken Lamaze classes?” His tone was uncomfortable, as if he’d brought up a particularly delicate subject.

She stifled a smile. “No, it’s not really something that’s popular in the Kaziri community. But there’s a Kaziri midwife in the neighborhood—I consulted her along with my doctor. And I’ve done some reading and practicing on my own.”

“On your own,” he echoed faintly, turning away to look out the window at the snowy side yard.

She joined him at the window. “I didn’t know I was pregnant when this all went into motion. By the time I realized it, it was too late to back out.”

He inhaled deeply, releasing his breath in a slow whoosh. “How did we get here?”

She didn’t have to ask what he meant.

He turned to look at her. “I thought we were happy.”

“We were.”

“Then how could you have just walked away?”

“Dal convinced me you would be in grave danger if the people trying to kill me had any inkling I was still alive.”

“Dal.” He growled the word with disdain. “Now Dal’s dead and you can’t even be sure he was telling you the truth, can you?”

“No,” she admitted. “But you know there were things I did in Kaziristan that would have made me a pretty valuable target to al Adar.”

“Which means you’re still a target. If Dal was telling the truth.”

“Yeah.” The heat of his body beside hers was both a comfort and a source of intense frustration. Every instinct was screaming at her to put her arms around him and bury her face in his chest, to let him wrap his strong arms around her and remind her that she wasn’t alone anymore.

But the “don’t touch” vibes he was giving off kept her at arm’s length. And reminded her that, in all the ways that mattered, she was still alone.

* * *

T
HEY
HAD
MET
on one of the coldest days of the year in Kaziristan, shivering in the icy wind pouring through the mountain gap to whip through their layers of clothing like a hot knife slicing butter. For the first hour, Connor had thought she was a Kaziri informant, there to guide his unit through the treacherous pass on their way to a top-secret, gravely important meeting between the Marines and one of the most powerful tribal leaders in the country.

American efforts to quell the uprising that once again put the troubled republic at risk of another long, deadly civil war had come down to gaining the support of the tribes. Gulan Mohar’s good will could potentially save hundreds, even thousands, of lives.

Connor wasn’t a politician. He was a warrior, and it had been his job to stay outside the tribal leader’s home with the woman while the brain trust talked to Mohar. As they’d waited, she’d started slanting looks at him around the edges of her
roosari
, curious, sultry glances that had set his heart racing.

Then she’d said something in Kaziri he couldn’t understand.

“I don’t speak the language,” he’d told her in Kaziri, some of the only words he’d known at the time.

“No, you really don’t,” she’d answered in perfect, Georgia-accented English, her broad grin making her hazel eyes sparkle like jewels.

He’d been halfway in love with her before they left Mohar’s compound and headed back down the mountain to the operating base.

It had taken a while longer, he remembered with a faint smile, to convince her she was in love with him as well.

She sat at the breakfast bar with her laptop, surfing the internet for information, while he searched the refrigerator for something to turn into lunch. They’d found where the cable modem and wireless router were stored, along with written instructions for setting it up and using the equipment. After appeasing Connor’s worries by making a list of obstetricians within a thirty-mile radius, Risa had started looking for information on Martin Dalrymple’s death.

“There’s no public record of exactly how he died,” she’d told him after an hour of searches. “I mean, yes, the reports all say he was shot, but the police seem to be treating it as a robbery gone wrong, not an execution.”

“You know the cops aren’t going to tell the press everything they know. Especially if they suspect a professional hit.”

She’d fallen silent but kept searching the web while he went outside to scout their surroundings.

The snow was soft and wet and would probably melt before nightfall, as long as the temperature rose into the forties as the forecast predicted. A melt-off would certainly make it easier to make a fast escape if they needed to. But it would also make it that much easier for someone on their tail to find their way up the mountain to this safe house.

At least they were well armed. Both he and Risa had personal weapons, and the set of keys Quinn had given him included a key to a closet down the hall that contained a couple of rifles, a Mossberg shotgun, and hundreds of rounds of ammunition including .45 ammo he could use in his Ruger and .40 rounds that would fit Risa’s Glock 23.

“Why did you join Campbell Cove Security?”

Connor looked up from his refrigerator search to find Risa looking at him from her perch at the breakfast bar. Her head was cocked slightly to one side, her eyes bright with curiosity.

“Since I was already planning to leave the Marine Corps before...the plane crash, I went through with it. But then I needed a job. We’d talked about both of us doing something in security consultation, so when Maddox Heller contacted me to see how I was holding up, I guess he realized I needed something to occupy my mind. He, Quinn and a woman named Rebecca Cameron had started the security company a few months earlier. They had also started an academy for ordinary citizens and civilian law enforcement—teaching them skills and tactics for combatting terrorism in their own communities.”

“That’s a great idea,” she said.

“I know. So when he offered the job. I took it.”

“I’m glad you had someone looking out for you.”

He wondered if he was ever going to reach the point where talking about the plane crash and the nightmare afterward, knowing the truth about what had really happened, wouldn’t make him angry.

He hadn’t reached that point yet.

“Just say it, Connor.”

“Say what?”

“Say something. Anything. Tell me you hate me for what I did. Tell me you don’t even want to look at me. Just say something, because I know you’re furious and it’s making me crazy to watch you try to hide it.”

Something snapped inside him, and as hard as he tried to hold on to his calm, it slipped like water through his fingers, leaving him shaking. “You left me, Risa!”