Seducing the Accomplice (7 page)

“You don’t know that for sure.”

“Neither do you,” she countered.

“You’d travel home with a fake passport?”

She looked away, unable to keep her uncertainty from showing. “I don’t want to but I will.”

“You want to get away from me that bad?”

She lifted her head off the back of the couch and didn’t know what to say. She wanted to be with him, but not like this.

Leaving the TV on a travel channel, Calan leaned forward and put the remote down on the coffee table. “You’re staying.”

“Why are you so worried?” Somehow she’d get him to talk.

“They’re going to assume you know about the money.”

She decided to go along with his reasoning for a little longer. Maybe something would compel him to tell her the truth. “So? If I leave without it, they have no reason to come after me.”

“Even if they knew you didn’t take it with you, they’ll assume you know how to find me. And when they can’t find me, where do you think they’ll go for answers?”

“You’re that sure they won’t find you?”

He looked back at her from his slightly forward position on the couch in silent answer.

Did he think he was that good? “They found out you were at the embassy with me.”

That reminder cleared some of his overconfidence. He didn’t know who he was dealing with and until he did he had no way of knowing what they were capable of.

No more tap dancing. It was time to get to the point. “Why is it so important to you that I stay?”

After meeting her eyes for several seconds, he sighed and she saw him relent to something, some thought or knowledge that he’d kept from her until now.

“There has to be a reason,” she persisted, leaning forward like him to bring her face closer to his. “You’re concerned for my safety, but more than that is driving you.”

As he blinked, a shield vanished to reveal resignation filled with sorrow. He was going to tell her.

She dared not move or say anything, just let him take his time to form thoughts into words, thoughts she could feel were deeply rooted and painful to bring to the surface.

“I’ve been after a man for a long time,” he finally said. “For years.”

“Who?”

“A terrorist.”

Given all that had happened, his revelation came as no great surprise. “Why were you after him?”

“He was hard to track,” he said as if she hadn’t asked the question. “Every time I found out where he was, he always disappeared before I caught up to him. But not this time. This time I found him.”

“In Tirana.”

He nodded a couple of times. “I followed him to an old warehouse. He met with two other men who gave him the money in the suitcase. I couldn’t take the chance of not catching him again, so I did what I came here to do and took the money.”

“He was the target you talked about with Odie?”

Again he nodded, and she knew without asking that he’d killed the man. The idea should bother her, but it didn’t. A terrorist wasn’t an ordinary man. A terrorist was someone whose warped ideologies made him evil.

“His name was Abu Dharr al-Majid,” he said. “Anyone giving him money means it was going for an illicit purpose. Terrorism. He had to be stopped.”

So he hadn’t really stolen the money. “I thought you said you weren’t a bounty hunter.”

“I’m not.”

“Do you work for the government?”

He hesitated. “No. Dharr was a special circumstance. I’ve waited a long time to see him dead. An opportunity came up that helped me do that.”

Special circumstance? An opportunity? Years he’d been after this man. One man. One terrorist. She was getting closer to peeling back the layers and finding the core of what drove him. “You must have really wanted to get him.”

His face grew stony.

“What happened? What did he do?”

While he didn’t respond, thoughts bombarded her. He didn’t work for the government, so he’d come here unofficially. He had a personal vendetta with a terrorist. How had all that come to be? When had he crossed paths with such a man? Had he been somewhere during an attack? Or had his profession led him to this point? What had led him to work in the shadows?

“What are you going to do with the money?” she asked as a roundabout way to get her answer and to give him time.

“Give it to my employer.”

“Who is your employer?”

He raised his brow with a gently admonishing look. “This is when I tell you to stop asking questions.”

She paused awhile, and then asked as gently as she could, “What made this terrorist significant?”

“We had a mutual friend.” Turning away, he picked up the remote and started surfing channels again.

It was time to start pushing. “Was it someone in your family?”

“No more questions.”

“You never want me to ask questions. I could ask you if you have all ten toes and you’d skirt the issue.” She was so sick of that. “You need to start telling me things. You owe me that much. None of this is my fault. I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for you. I’d be at the hotel waiting for my passport…my
real
passport.”

He stopped surfing. Leaning back against the couch, he stared ahead for a while. Her heart expanded with sympathy for him. She could feel his turmoil.

Finally, he turned to look at her.

“A long time ago, a friend of mine called and told me about a man who was holding a woman against her will. I owed him a favor, so when he asked if I’d go get her, I agreed.” He stopped and she watched the pain of memory wrench him.

She leaned back against the couch with him and slid her hand onto his thigh.

“It happened when I was still with the Army Delta Force,” he continued. “We stopped in Istanbul on the way to the location of our next assignment. That’s when I got the call. The woman who’d been abducted was his sister. When I met him to get the details, he told me the man who kidnapped her was her boyfriend. When she tried to end the relationship, he wouldn’t let her go.”

Realization slammed into her.

“Her boyfriend was Dharr?”

He didn’t answer. He didn’t have to.

“You rescued her?”

“Yes.”

“Why didn’t you kill him back then?”

“He didn’t get in my way. I rescued the woman without incident.”

She was missing something. “Then, why did you go after him after you rescued her?”

“After my assignment was finished, I had a few weeks off. I went back to Istanbul and stayed with my friend. I wanted to see his sister again. I spent every day with her while I was there. When I returned home, we had a long-distance relationship for a while, and then I helped her come to the States. A year later we were married.”

He married her.

“Dharr didn’t know about us at first,” he said. “But somehow he learned she wasn’t in Istanbul anymore. That’s when he went to her brother and found out she was with me in the States.”

He stopped.

“What happened?”

Calan leaned forward and turned off the television. “Three months after he discovered I married her, he found a way into the U.S. and killed her.”

Sadie drew in a breath. “Oh, I’m so sorry.” She really was. “That must have been terrible.”

“That was more than seven years ago.”

It had taken him that long to catch Dharr? “Have you been looking for him all that time?”

“Yes, every spare moment I had. But he was good at hiding. Moving around. Like a regular Bin Laden. I was on assignment most of the time. Sometimes that put me where I needed to be to track him and other times it didn’t. I came close to killing him once when I tracked him to Yemen. I wasn’t on assignment then, but I caught him in the middle of intercepting another special forces team. They didn’t know he was there. It was a setup. I could tell the moment I saw him, hiding in a vehicle while his men swarmed a building where soldiers were waiting for rebels. The team was supposed to help the Yemen government, but someone betrayed them and told Dharr where they’d be. I tried to save them, but I was too late and I was only one man. I took down a few of Dharr’s men but not in time. Dharr got away.”

“Why did Dharr want American soldiers dead? Was it just because they were American? Who would tell him the location of U.S. soldiers?”

His hesitation and the way he averted his eyes revealed a lot. There was more.

“Years after my wife died, I met a woman who worked intelligence for the CIA. She helped me uncover an arms deal a U.S. broker was arranging for Dharr. The broker arranged for a U.S. senator to bribe an executive he knew at an Albanian military export company to do business with Dharr. Kate must have been close to uncovering that because she was murdered shortly after I told her what I knew about Dharr. It gave her the lead she needed to expose the senator.”

One that led to her death. Her heart ached for him. “He killed two women you were involved with?”

His face became a mask of indifference.

“Is that why the soldiers were killed? They knew about the arms dealing?”

“Yes. One man on the team did.”

One man had known something and all of them had been killed. A bonus package for a group of terrorists.

Dharr had killed all those people. His wife, the soldiers and then a woman who’d tried to help him. It was overwhelming. She couldn’t imagine how difficult that must have been for him. And probably still was. “What happened with the senator? Did you know he and an arms broker were doing business with Dharr?”

“No, I didn’t know. No one did, not in time anyway. Anyone who got too close to putting it together was killed. The senator didn’t murder anyone, but he alerted Dharr, which in my mind is the same as committing the crime right along with him.”

Except not in his wife’s case. “Did you go to Kate because you knew she could help you?”

“No. I met her because we knew the same people within the military. The senator was her stepfather.”

Sadie gasped. What an awful thing. Quite a coincidence, too, but Sadie didn’t believe in coincidences. The senator was working with the terrorist Calan was after and neither he nor Kate had known. But their joining together had exposed the senator and led to Calan finding Dharr. Talk about divine intervention. Or just plain rotten luck. His probing had gotten another woman killed.

“Was the senator caught?” she asked.

“Yes, but he killed himself before he was arrested. The arms deal fell through, and Dharr got away.”

Until he’d found him in Albania, ending years of anguish. Or not. How could any man put something so terrible behind him?

“I don’t blame you for wanting him dead,” she said and was amazed that she meant it. How strange, to be talking about killing someone and not finding it in the least unwarranted.

He didn’t seem happy about it, though, as if killing Dharr hadn’t been enough. It hadn’t brought Kate back. Or his wife.

She almost didn’t want to ask. “Were you close to Kate?”

“We were living together.”

Living together but not married.

“We talked about getting married.”

Talked about it but never made plans.

“She wanted to, but I wasn’t over Rachel yet,” he said.

The scars he carried from losing his wife were too deep. He’d never stopped loving her and couldn’t marry another until he could put it behind him.

“I should have married her, though. It hurt her knowing why I hesitated,” he continued.

She saw his pain, the pain of regret, the worst kind.

“You loved her.”

He nodded. “Yes. And I would have married her.”

“I’m so sorry, Calan.” Twice he’d fallen in love and twice that love had been ripped from him. “How long ago did she die?” she asked, even though it bothered her. She was falling for a man whose heart belonged to two other women.

“It’s been six months.”

Sliding her hand off his thigh, Sadie struggled with disappointment. That wasn’t very long. He’d loved his wife and, later, his girlfriend, but both of them had been murdered. Taken from him in the worst possible way. By a terrorist’s hand. She couldn’t imagine how awful that must be.

Now more than ever she understood why he couldn’t let her go, why he had to protect her at all cost. But it wasn’t necessary. She knew that now.

“You have a good reason to be concerned for my safety, Calan, I can never argue that. But you’re overreacting because of your past.”

“I’m not overreacting.”

“My father is a wealthy man. He can protect me.”

“Would he?”

That stopped her. She looked down. The truth was, she didn’t know what her father would do. He wanted her to grow up and handle her problems on her own. He’d left her in Albania for that very reason. And he might not even believe her if she told him what had happened since she’d last spoken with him.

She’d met a man who had killed a terrorist and taken money. The terrorist’s business associates were after him, had seen her with him, and she was now embroiled in his situation. Would her father believe her? It was so different from her other situations. Much more dangerous. Far removed from the social scenes she frequented. She didn’t think her own father would abandon her, not once she convinced him the most outlandish story she’d ever told him up to this point was true.

“Even if he did try to protect you,” Calan said, “he won’t have enough experienced men to do the job, and the police won’t be able to do much. The feds, either, since I’d have to deny everything.”

Because he couldn’t talk about his current profession? He’d told her personal things, but when it came to what he did for a living he wasn’t talking.

“Who are you?” She’d asked it before and hadn’t gotten the answer she sought. She didn’t think she’d get an answer now, but she was too baffled not to say anything.

“Just an ex-Delta soldier trying to do the right thing.”

Just? It was more than she expected to hear. “But you aren’t with the Army anymore.”

“No.”

“Is the company you work for legitimate?” She didn’t want to find out he was a mercenary or some kind of extremist.

“The company I work for doesn’t exist.”

That was sort of like saying he wasn’t wearing underwear when he really was. But his face showed no sign of mischief. He appeared completely justified in what he said. Righteous, but not in an egotistical way.