Run Among Thorns (2 page)

Waring had her arms wrapped around herself, hunched over the desk, unblinking gaze fixed on the metal tabletop. Now and then she moved almost imperceptibly, rocking back and forth.

An impatience to have her in his care made him restless and irritable. He flicked the cigarette through a high arc into a metal bin across the room, and braced his hand on the glass by his head, leaning in to see more closely. Now he had made a decision to take on the job, he wanted to get on with it. He wanted her in his sole care, away from that bunch of goons down there. Idiots, all of them, a pack of dogs fighting over a bone.

As he watched, Dawson entered the room below, carrying a clipboard and a glass of water. He spoke to the goons, called them off, emptying the room in seconds. Waring didn’t even seem to notice the others had gone. Dawson tucked the clipboard under his arm and approached the table from behind her, holding the glass like it was a bomb about to go off. He seemed hesitant.

McAllister’s hand on the window balled into a fist. “Come on,” he muttered. “Don’t screw up now, office boy.” He intended to get Waring out of there in a hurry, and with minimal fuss and red tape. He wanted her to walk out of there, with him, like they were going on an ordinary trip, nice and easy.

Which was why Dawson was about to drug her for him.

Dawson reached over her shoulder and set the glass down on the table. She stirred then, turning suddenly to lay a hand on Dawson’s arm. McAllister saw her lips move, shaping one word clearly. Dawson’s bent head was still.

Then he tugged his arm out from under her grip and backed away, leaving her in the room alone.

“Come on, baby,” McAllister said. “You’ve got to be thirsty. They haven’t given you anything to drink for the last twelve hours. Drink it up like a good girl.”

He was conscious of a twist of tension inside him that wasn’t usual for him at this stage in a job, but wondered at it only briefly.

Her eyes slid to the glass. She glanced back over her shoulder, and then wrapped shaking hands around the glass and drank deeply.

McAllister smiled.

The door behind him clicked, and Dawson entered.

“McAllister,” he looked at him. “You have everything you need?”

He turned back from the observation window and nodded. The office boy seemed to hold a lot of clout here, or at least a direct line to the people with clout.

“I believe so. You’ve provided the clothes? Her passport? Tickets?”

“Yes, sir,” said John, nodding. “Documents are in your case in the truck, and everything else is in a holdall in the back.” He sat down at a metal table, identical to the one Waring was hunched over in the interrogation room below, and invited McAllister to sit opposite him.

McAllister complied, grudgingly impressed by the organisation that had got him all his requirements in so short a space of time. He was getting far too used to having to deal with incompetence, and for some reason he just didn’t want to explain why he needed everything he’d asked for today.

Passport for Jenny Waring
. It is hard to prove kidnapping if you’ve handed in your passport yourself at the airport before getting on a plane for home.

New clothes for Jenny Waring
. Well, she needed clothes. And he didn’t want her getting comfortable in her own stuff.

Plane tickets to Glasgow, Scotland
. Because he wanted to take her to his Galloway longhouse. The two-roomed cottage in the middle of nowhere would give her nowhere to run to. Nowhere to hide from him. And no interruptions.

He dragged his attention back to John again, who was speaking.

“Er … Mr. McAllister? We’re going to need a more, er, precise location. I can’t just tell my superiors you’re going to Scotland. They’ll want more.”

“Then tell them not to be greedy.”

“I don’t think …”

“I’m not asking you to. I believed I had specified my conditions for involvement clearly. I take the subject to a location of my choice. I debrief the subject there, without interruptions. Revealing the precise location would compromise my privacy and negate the usefulness of solitude.” And he’d just said more than he usually did, anyway.

“I, er … I see, sir.” John looked back down at the clipboard, pulled a sheaf of papers free, and pulled a pen from his pocket. “Then if you’ll just sign here, sir, I’ll confirm the transfer of funds to your account by phone.”

McAllister hesitated, then leaned forward and made a large, flamboyant cross on the signatory line. He smiled.

John blinked at it. “Sir? I…”

“I don’t sign anything. Ever. Okay, John?” He was impatient to get going, to crack her open and see what was inside, and he was tiring of this polite charade. He tried to keep the temper out of his voice.

“You make the call. I get a call from my bank. I leave, I do the job, I report back. I maintain contact with daily phone calls. Finite.” He watched the doubts flicker across John’s face and guessed he was going to have to do some more talking. Which, just now, was the last thing he felt like doing.

He found himself thinking about Bradley’s job offer. His old comrade in arms was one of the few people on this planet who had a vague idea where McAllister was and what he was doing from year to year, although they hadn’t met up for more than eighteen months now.

Bradley had walked into a gem of a job, handling security deployment and training for an international airline. He had dropped an e-mail into McAllister’s private account a couple of months back, offering him the opportunity to head up the security office in a country of his choice. Kier had had no hesitation in refusing, but Bradley made it clear that the offer was open indefinitely.

There was nothing in the prospect that attracted him. He liked his job; he was good at it. And if some projects left a bitter taste in his mouth, well there was no such thing as one hundred percent job satisfaction was there? He was satisfied with ninety-five percent.

And he’d worked for these people before.

They called themselves the Agency, nothing more, nothing less. Working from this one facility, their headquarters, they seemed to act on their own agenda without external interference. From the work he’d done for them he had pegged them as something in counterterrorism, maybe counterespionage. But, frankly, he wasn’t interested in their aims and objectives. They gave him the sort of work he was best at, the sort of work he thrived on. It was enough.

John was reshuffling his papers, not quite looking at him. He got up and went to the phone on the wall, began speaking into it quietly. McAllister went back to the window. Waring was still sitting there.

There was something about this woman that intrigued him, quite apart from her obvious skills. She just didn’t fit the mould, didn’t conform to the usual agent profile, even for deep, deep cover operatives. She seemed too … fresh, too natural.

He wondered how long those dark curls actually were, when they weren’t scrunched up into an untidy mess at the back of her head. Then he frowned at the thought. Since when had hairstyles come into his job, exactly? He sighed and scrubbed a hand over his face. He needed to get going. This whole thing would fall into place once he’d gotten her safely to Galloway and started working on her.

Behind him, John hung up the phone. “There is one last thing, sir. In light of the fact you won’t sign anything, I will simply have to ask for your assurance.”

McAllister turned back to him and raised an eyebrow.

“My superiors would like the subject back in one piece. That means no lasting physical harm.”

With the cynicism he’d perfected over the years, that one shouldn’t have made him mad, but it did. “Perhaps you’ve hired the wrong man,” he said, smooth as silk. “My work is entirely mental, Mr. Dawson. I won’t say I don’t lay a finger on my subjects, because I do. But I don’t physically abuse them.” Why would he, if the mental approach did the job so much more easily? “If you were wanting bamboo splinters under the fingernails, you called the wrong man.”

Dawson held up placatory hands. “I had to say it, sir. They insisted.”

McAllister nodded. Then, “What did she say to you?”

He hesitated, just a fraction too long to get away with
who?
or
what do you mean?
“She said, ‘please.’“

Was that a trace of condemnation in Dawson’s voice? McAllister stared, but could read nothing in his face. Then the phone rang, and Dawson motioned McAllister towards it. He took the call, listening to the confirmation of a tidy little deposit from his bank. That would see him through the year without having to take another job, if he didn’t get the urge. Problem was, he got the urge far too often.

He was good at his job, after all.

McAllister looked over at the woman who was now his charge. He didn’t really anticipate any trouble over this one. There were a few facts that intrigued him, mostly what had triggered her to take action in that office courtyard, why she had broken such a perfect cover.

Watching the road ahead, he reviewed in his mind his likely tactics over the next few days. She was already suffering from sleep deprivation and exhaustion. The Agency’s interrogation at the facility had taken care of that. They were not the most subtle of men there. True, the only marks on her had been there before they got their hands on her, but he’d seen the transcripts. About thirty-six hours of questions.

She must be a fine actress, this Jenny Waring. Her repertoire evidently included confusion, fear, desperation, and hysteria. And then there was the terror. Reviewing the tapes of the interrogation, he hadn’t been able to help the little shiver that went down his spine when she’d slipped into that perfectly executed catatonic state, rocking backwards and forwards and talking rubbish.

She was good.

But he was better.

In his opinion John had shown an error of judgement in calling medical advice on that one. She had to have been running out of energy; she would have slipped up soon.

No matter. He had her now. Mentally she might possibly be a match for him, but physically she wasn’t even close, and if necessary he could use that.

Even the best of them had only lasted four days.

Slipping another glance at her as they headed north out of Newton Stewart, deep into the Galloway forest, he assessed her again. That generous mass of dark curls almost hid her slight build. It was the thinness and fragility of her wrists that betrayed it the most.

In exhaustion, her skin was translucent, like porcelain, the blue lace of fine veins showing here and there. Her eyes were closed but he recalled hazel eyes, fringed by thick long lashes that now lay fanned across her cheek. Her lips were pale now, pinched, her mouth slightly open.

A few locks of her hair had fallen forward over her bare throat, highlighting the whiteness of her skin.

He wanted to touch it.

His brows snapped together in a sudden frown. Imperceptibly his assessment had moved off the professional into another realm. He pulled his mind back to the job at hand, aware of a faint distaste about the whole business, which certainly hadn’t been there when he’d worked on others.

He’d been something of a prodigy. His quick mind and forceful personality put him at the head of his field at a younger age than most. He’d been doing work like this for, what, twelve years? He’d drawn satisfaction from a job well done, had come close to enjoying it once or twice, once too close for comfort, and he’d never had any trouble with his conscience.

Not once.

Ranks of pine trees flashed by, dark and tall. The harsh late sunlight broke through them at intervals, slicing across Jenny’s eyes like a hot wire. Light. Dark. Light. Dark.

After a while her eyesight blurred, and she lifted her head from the door frame and leaned it back against the headrest. The Land Rover Discovery was huge, comfortable, very English. It was right-hand drive and with a stick shift McAllister was using very competently. There was a jolly little pine tree swinging from the rearview mirror.

Jenny still felt dull, lifeless. The shock that had paralysed her for what seemed like days in the cell and in the interview room was still chilling her limbs and dulling her mind. Distantly, she registered that shock shouldn’t last this long, but nothing shifted this lingering heaviness.