Liam's Witness Protection (Man On A Mission 4) (2 page)

“Not a mark on her.”

“Keep her safe.”

“You know I will.”

There was silence on the other end. Then, “Call Cody when you get the chance,” Alec said.

“You read my mind. What’s the situation there?”

“Both shooters are dead, but you already knew that. No ID, nothing to say who they are. The serial numbers on the Uzis were filed off, but the FBI thinks they might be able to raise them—we might get lucky there.”

“What about the people they shot?”

“The lead prosecutor’s in the morgue, the other one’s critical. I think the marshals are going to make it. Hey, gotta go. The FBI’s bearing down on me again, and I don’t want them to hear this conversation.”

After Alec hung up, Liam’s thoughts kept circling back to the events as they had unfolded.
Uzis in the courthouse,
he reminded himself. He knew they were Uzis—the sound was unmistakable. This hadn’t just
happened.
Someone had plotted and planned very carefully.
How did they get Uzis past the metal detectors and the guards?
he asked again, still without an answer. At least not a palatable answer. Because the answer was—they couldn’t. That meant a conspiracy. A conspiracy that included someone with enough authority, enough clout, to smuggle the submachine guns in. Someone with a lot at risk. Someone who would do anything to keep Caterina from testifying.

Liam dismissed the idea that the prosecutors had been the targets. They were collateral damage, nothing more. Caterina was the one they wanted dead. He only knew the bare bones of the case she was testifying in, the few bits and pieces Alec had shared with him, but he knew one thing for sure—she was lucky to be alive. Damned lucky. And even luckier she’d fallen in with someone who could protect her now that her US Marshals bodyguards were out of the picture.

Liam had been driving in silence for fifteen minutes when he suddenly realized something and cursed softly. Despite the fact that Caterina had to be smothering underneath the blanket on the floor even with the SUV’s A/C blasting on max power, she hadn’t moved, hadn’t complained, hadn’t asked if she could come out from beneath the blanket yet.

In fact, Caterina hadn’t spoken one word since this whole thing began. Not a single word.

Chapter 2

C
ate had escaped into a self-induced fugue state. She’d learned how nine years ago, how to disassociate her mind from her body so that what was happening to her body was as remote as if it was happening to someone else. It was the only way she’d been able to survive those two years with Aleksandrov Vishenko. The only way she’d been able to bear the pain—mental and physical. The only way she’d been able to stay sane in a world that had gone sickeningly insane.

But she hadn’t had to escape this way for years. Not since she’d physically escaped Vishenko’s clutches, not since she’d regained possession of her own body...her own soul. But she hadn’t forgotten how. Just as she would never forget what Vishenko had done to her, she would never forget the coping mechanism that had allowed her to survive those two hellish years.

She floated in darkness beneath the blanket, remembering the rosebushes in the garden at her cousin’s house. How she’d envied her cousin living among all that beauty! Angelina’s mother’s prized rosebushes, which she’d nurtured as if they were all the other babies she could never have after Angelina was born. Red roses, yellow roses, roses with fancy blended colors and even more fanciful names, like Fire and Ice and Dream Come True. But Cate had always preferred the white roses. Plain. White. Pure. Like a young girl in her First Communion dress. Untouched. Cleansed of mortal sin.

She’d been that girl a long time ago. A lifetime ago. But she’d never be that girl again. She could never undo what had been done to her. Could never undo what she’d done to survive.

Suddenly she wasn’t floating anymore. Suddenly she was remembering what she’d long-ago sworn she would
not
remember, waking or sleeping. The memories her brain had successfully blanked out for years, until Alec Jones had erupted into her life and forced her to remember. Alec, who’d convinced her to testify against Vishenko and the others about what she knew, about the evidence she’d secreted away. Alec, who was married to Angelina now.

He
hadn’t judged her. Not the harsh way she judged herself. Neither had Angelina. They’d treated Cate tenderly, lovingly, but with a matter-of-factness that allowed her to retain that mental disassociation from her past. As if those things had happened to someone else. Not to her.

Now that she was aware of her surroundings, Cate realized she could barely breathe beneath the blanket. It was hot, stuffy, smothering. She was also aware of the steady rumble and vibration caused by the engine and the SUV’s wheels as they ate up the miles. Putting distance between themselves and the men who’d tried to kill her. Vishenko’s men. She had no doubt about that.

The SUV slowed. Then veered to the right. Then stopped. Cate heard the driver’s door open and close, but she didn’t move. Didn’t speak.

Suddenly the side door opened. “Sorry,” a deep voice said above her as the blanket was abruptly removed. “Why didn’t you say something?”

Strong yet gentle hands helped Cate rise and come out of the SUV to stand next to it, and for a moment the world swung dizzyingly around her as she regained her equilibrium. Then she steadied and was able to focus on the man in front of her.

He looked so much like Alec Jones that he could be his twin brother. But there were differences, and though Cate couldn’t have said exactly what those differences were, she knew in an instant this man wasn’t her cousin’s husband. He was tall and broad-shouldered, just as Alec was, with a muscular compactness that spoke of a man who kept himself in fighting trim. Close-cropped auburn hair, also just like Alec. And soft brown eyes.
Is it his eyes that are different?
she wondered distractedly. Not the color, no. But the expression in them. An expression that told her plain as words he found her attractive. Man-woman attractive. Alec had never looked at her that way. Alec had known she never wanted any man to look at her that way...ever again.

But there was something else in this man’s expression that bothered her even more. Gentleness notwithstanding, Cate knew he’d made a snap judgment about her...and found her wanting. It wasn’t obvious from his manner, but she had a sixth sense about these things.

“Who are you?” she asked abruptly. “You’re not Alec.”

“Liam. Liam Jones. Alec’s my brother.”

She glanced around now, taking in their surroundings. They were in a rest stop on the highway. Not deserted, but not overly crowded, either. There were no other cars in the parking area, but there were a couple of tractor-trailer trucks on the other side of the divider. “Why have we stopped here?”

He smiled ruefully, and Cate caught her breath. That smile changed his whole face from pleasantly masculine to something extraordinary. “You were so quiet I forgot you were under the blanket in the back,” he said in a deep voice that sounded like Alec’s in a way, but was also different somehow. “When I remembered, I was kicking myself for not letting you out sooner. I stopped the first chance I had.”

His hand went to brush back her tousled hair—a perfectly natural response under the circumstances—but Cate shied away. Then despised herself as a coward when the smile faded from Liam’s face.

“Sorry,” he said again, but there was a watchfulness in his eyes now. A guarded expression she couldn’t read. Not exactly. But she knew he hadn’t missed her reaction to his innocent gesture. His gaze dropped from her face to her dress and then to her arm, and when she looked down she realized the blood had already dried. Not her blood, of course. The blood of the men who’d risked their lives protecting her. Men like this man.

She didn’t know how she knew Liam was a bodyguard, too. There was just something about him. She had only vague, disjointed memories of their flight from the courthouse—she’d already entered that escapist fugue state almost the moment the first shots were fired, the moment the two US Marshals had thrown themselves on top of her to shield her with their bodies. But Liam had carried a gun, she remembered that now. And he would have used it, she remembered that, too. Had he already used it? Was that how the machine guns targeting her had been silenced?

“Did you kill them?” The question popped out before she could stop it.

He obviously knew to whom she was referring. “I killed one of them,” he said quietly. “Alec got the other one. But there could have been others around—backup killers—there was no way to know. So Alec told me to get you out of there.”

She culled her memory, trying to recall the frenzied voices around her during and after the attack. Then she said slowly, “‘She dies, this case dies, too.’ That was Alec, yes?”

“Yeah. I didn’t like leaving him in that situation, but he was right. I had to get you to safety. That was more important.”

“Who are you?” she asked in a voice barely above a whisper.

“I told you. I’m Alec’s brother Liam.”

She shook her head impatiently. “No, I mean,
what
are you? Are you a US marshal like the men who were guarding me?”

“Diplomatic Security Service. DSS. Like Alec. The DSS is responsible for a lot of things, including protecting foreign dignitaries when they visit the US, and I’ve done my share of that. In fact, I was on the detail guarding your Princess Mara when she first came to this country. Alec and I both were. So yeah, I knew what to do when bullets started flying. That’s my job.”

“So what is next? Where do I go?”

“We,” he told her. “Where do
we
go. I’m not sure. I’ve got to call a man.” He pointed to the dried blood on Cate’s arm, then indicated the restroom a short distance away. “You might want to wash up a little and use the facilities while I do that. My call will take a while.”

When Cate agreed, she was surprised he led the way to the ladies’ room but prevented her from entering until he’d checked it out. “It’s clear,” he told her when he returned. Then he moved away from the doorway a couple of paces, pulled out his cell phone and hit speed dial.

He was still on the phone when Cate came out of the ladies’ room. She’d washed the blood from her arm and done her best with the dress—which was still damp in places, although she’d blotted as much of the water from it as she could—but anyone who looked closely could still see the faint discolorations that would probably never go away completely. She didn’t care. This dress didn’t really belong to her, it was a dress designed to present a certain appearance for the jury. Well-to-do, but not too expensive. Not the Mayflower Madam, but not a street hooker, either. The dress had been picked out by the prosecutors, who wanted her to look young and wholesome. The girl next door.

Cate
was
young. In years, if nothing else. But she wasn’t wholesome—she was damaged goods. She would never be wholesome again. But the jury didn’t have to know that, and she had no intention of telling them how she felt about the two-year nightmare when she’d been Vishenko’s prisoner.
Stick to the facts,
the prosecutors had hammered home,
don’t volunteer opinions.

Angelina had said the same thing. But she’d also advised Cate to let her emotions show just enough so the jury empathized with her, believed her implicitly. If she was too cold the jury wouldn’t like her. And the jury needed to like her, Angelina had said. Angelina, who had at one time been a prosecutor herself long ago, but who had also been a bodyguard for Zakhar’s Queen Juliana. Angelina, who now headed the queen’s security detail, but who had come over to the States to be there for Cate during the trial.

“Okay,” Liam was saying to the man on the other end of the phone. “Call me back as soon as you can. I’ll be waiting.” He listened for a minute, then laughed and said, “Yeah, you’re right. It’s a hell of a way to start a vacation.” Then he disconnected.

“Who were you talking to?” she asked.

“Let’s sit in the SUV,” he told her. “I don’t want you out in the open if I can help it.”

He held the passenger door for Cate but didn’t touch her at all, as if he knew she couldn’t bear to be touched in a personal way. Then he got into the driver’s seat, saying, “That was Cody Walker. My brother-in-law. At this point he’s about the only person who can help us that I
know
I can trust. He was already working on it—can you believe it?—he’ll call me back when he has something definite.” He chuckled softly, shaking his head. “Alec called Cody a half hour ago, told him I was in trouble and I’d be in touch. Even before I talked with Alec. Damn! Alec’s always one step ahead of me—he can read my mind.”

“I know him,” she said. “Your brother-in-law. I met him when I first met your brother. You told him where we are?”

Liam shook his head again. “The first thing you have to learn about security, Ms. Mateja, is a concept called ‘need to know.’ At this point Cody doesn’t have a need to know where we are, so I didn’t tell him. When and if he needs to know, I will.”

Cate waited for one heartbeat, then two, before she said, “Cate. Please just call me Cate. I... I don’t like Caterina.” She couldn’t suppress the little shiver as she said the name. “And I don’t use Mateja anymore.”
Not for seven years.
“Except in court, of course. I must use it there—it’s my legal name.”

“What last name do you go by, then?”

She laughed a little. “Would you believe... Jones?”

“You’re kidding.”

“No, I’m not.” She darted a look at his face. “I wanted an American name so common no one would be able to trace it...or me. The only names I could think of like that were Smith and Jones.”

“‘Alias Smith and Jones,’”
he murmured under his breath.

“Pardon?”

“Nothing. Just an old TV western Alec and I used to watch on cable.” He looked as if he were going to explain more, but changed his mind.

She waited, but he didn’t say anything, so she continued. “Cate Smith sounded too much like Kate Smith, the singer—I didn’t want anyone to remember me for any reason.” Her smile faded. “The book I read in the library about going underground advised not changing your first name too much, especially the first letter. Too easy to slip up and say your real name—or at least
start
to say your real name—if you’re taken unaware. Same thing for signing your name. So I became Cate Jones.”

“Cate Jones.” He tilted his head to one side as he considered it. “Not bad. And most people who heard you say it would think
K
not
C
, making it even less likely they’d recognize your name.” Then his soft brown eyes hardened. “So why were you going underground in the first place?”

She wanted to look away from that hard, uncompromising stare, but she couldn’t. “Alec knows,” she said finally. Painfully.

“But you don’t want me to know, is that it?”

Cate shook her head. “You don’t have a ‘need to know,’” she reminded him.

“Touché,” Liam said with a little huff of laughter. “Touché.”

* * *

“Escaped?” roared Aleksandrov Vishenko in Russian to the two men who were the bearers of bad tidings to their boss. “What do you mean, she escaped?”

“It wasn’t supposed to happen,” said one man as he tried to placate his boss. “But there was interference from an unexpected source—Diplomatic Security Service agents who happened to be in the courthouse...armed. Both of our men are dead. At least they cannot talk.”

“They would not have talked anyway,” insisted the other man.

“Perhaps. Perhaps not,” the first man said, glancing at him. “They are dead, so it no longer matters.” Then he faced his boss again. “The courthouse is swarming with FBI agents and men from the US Marshals Service—both marshals guarding the woman were wounded. One of the federal prosecutors is dead, the other could die any moment. And the woman was spirited away by one of the men who foiled the initial attempt on her life. We do not know where he has taken her. Not yet.”

“Find out,” Vishenko hissed at his men. “Find out where she is and take care of her. Permanently. If she lives to testify, we are all dead.”

* * *

Liam’s cell phone shrilled, interrupting his conversation with Cate, and he grabbed it. “Hello?”

“It’s me,” said Cody Walker, Liam’s brother-in-law. “I spoke with my boss, Nick D’Arcy, in Washington.”