The cool air in the restaurant calmed her nerves. She sat at the table she had specifically chosen, looking around her curiously. It wasn’t quite what she had expected. The lighting was natural, coming from overhead skylights. It wasn’t a place to conduct secret business. People couldn’t hide behind potted plants here.
So she was wrong about him again. A dark, secretive man who boldly sat in the open. She knew he had noticed her the moment she walked in, even though he hadn’t really looked in her direction. She sat showing him her profile because he was a man who liked mystery, who expected everyone to hide from him. Besides, she didn’t think she could meet his eyes as she had the other night and not show recognition. It wasn’t time yet.
Fate and timing were strange companions. They bound people together, that was how history was made. Her history, unlike his, had been deleted. He, on the other hand—she peeked at him sitting to her left—wished his would suffer the same fate.
The other night she had wanted to feel his space, to judge him from afar. She didn’t trust the words people wrote about him; she preferred to see how and where he lived. She had watched him when he was at the opera with his date, and he had been too distracted to notice the show. His eyes had constantly strayed down to a group of people, one of whom she recognized, and she caught a yearning so strong coming from him that it made her heart ache.
That was the first wrong fact she was given. The man wasn’t as cold as the files made him out to be.
Then fate and timing intervened again. Her sources had assured her that his date was with him all weekend, so she had thought Sunday night would be perfect for her stroll in his space. The elevator door had opened on his floor and there he was, looking straight at her. Even with his arms around another woman, his eyes and mind had reached for her. The tingle of connection was instantaneous. She had to block the urge to walk out of the elevator right then.
The sandwich she ordered was delicious. This was the first good meal she had since returning to D.C., and she found her appetite returning. She called for the dessert cart and spent a good five minutes joking with the waiter over what to have.
She was enjoying the last spoonfuls of the fluffiest cheesecake when a tall glass was placed in front of her. She looked up. The waiter smiled and said confidentially, “The gentleman sitting to your left highly recommends that you try our strawberry daiquiri. He sends you his compliments.”
Nikki slowly turned to meet those green eyes that glittered back from a hard, proud face. His gaze pierced her, and she felt that jolt again, as if he had touched her. He didn’t smile but nodded. She nodded back, searching the expressionless face for…something. He was good at blocking, too.
She thanked the waiter and then returned her gaze to the man. His eyes were still on her. Without looking away, she took a long sip from the straw. The cold nectar filled her mouth. She drew back, savored the fruity flavor with the hint of rum, and swallowed. Strawberries—her favorite fruit.
Rick didn’t believe in coincidence. Or fate. Or luck. Not that Nikki Taylor cared, one way or another. She sat there seemingly oblivious to everything but the food in front of her.
Her hair was even longer than he had thought. She had twisted a knot in it around waist-length, to keep it in place. She was the second person he had ever seen who wrapped her hair around her neck like a scarf before she sat down. That solved the problem of having it sweep the floor, of course. He blinked, annoyed with himself. Here he was imagining the feel of her hair when he should be watching her closely. He didn’t hide his interest. She walked in because he was here. What did she want from him?
Her profile showed small and delicate features, and he wished she had chosen to sit facing him. He wanted to see her without that veil of hair. It distracted him. A woman could possess a man with hair like that. But that was just a faded memory. Just like the lingering dreams that left him unsatisfied this morning.
Nikki Taylor’s hair could cover his whole body easily. He wondered what it would be like, with that curtain around them, wrapping his limbs with hers. She could hide her nakedness behind it, and he would part its thickness to reveal her secrets, starting from the top.
Rick’s eyes traveled down her body. Small. Delicate. One couldn’t trust small or delicate. He knew that from the past. What was Nikki Taylor hiding from him? Why did she ask Agent Jones those questions? And why was she following him?
He kept staring at her, as if his will alone would compel her to turn toward him, but she continued to ignore him, her whole attention on her meal. She was enjoying it with a singular delight that amused even the headwaiter, and Dakkar
wasn’t an easily impressed man. Still she ignored him, asking for the dessert cart when she was finished. Watching her made him hungry. He wanted to taste her. He wanted to look into her eyes again, as he had the night before.
So he forced her hand, calling the waiter over to send her that daiquiri. Satisfaction welled up inside when she finally gazed at him. Liquid dark eyes. The kind that saw too much. They didn’t flare with recognition, didn’t show any sign of fear at all. He waited for her to accept his offer, to acknowledge him.
The tip of her tongue teased the corner of her mouth briefly. The merest hint of a smile. Her lips touched the straw. Her hand caressed the chilled glass. And her eyes never left his face as she took her time finishing the whole daiquiri.
Rick didn’t open his briefcase to read his notes. His lunch didn’t whet his appetite. A man his age shouldn’t get a hard-on by watching a woman suck on a straw. She hadn’t flirted with him. She drank the daiquiri like she ate her meal—with a sensual intentness that bordered on intimacy. He was still hard when he paid his bill. On the way out, Dakkar quietly handed him the paper bag with the glass in it.
“Love me,” she whispered, twining pale sallow arms around his waist. “You promised to love me forever.”
His hands were lost in her familiar long hair and he parted it, looking for her face. His heart thundered as if he had been running hard, and his breathing came out harsh and uneven. He started pulling the hair out of the way. Nothing. He couldn’t see her.
“Liar!” he screamed out, and he saw that his hands were bloodstained.
“You promised! You promised to love me forever!” her voice accused over and over. “Liar! Traitor!”
He tore at the hair, looking for her. Her arms lifted, and long strands of hair gathered around him, swallowing him in sensual heat. “Love me,” she demanded again.
“You’re the one who lied to me. You betrayed me.” He fought the cold hands that seemed to move all over his
nakedness, his own limbs tangling with hair that snaked around his body lovingly.
“Love me again.”
“Never.” He pushed off as he made the vow, but her hair imprisoned him to her. He had once loved its dark brown thickness so much. Now she hid from him, and her hair mocked his attempts to get away. And still he couldn’t see anything. He roared, “Show yourself!”
Her laughter, as always, was scornful, derisive. He resisted the pull of her arms this time, roughly tugging the hair away from his body. His breathing was as loud as his heartbeat echoing in his head. The more he fought the thickening need to give in, the more he thought he saw her shadowy face. Gathering fistfuls of hair, he strangled her, and her seductive caresses turned to struggles. She continued laughing even as she choked, and finally she stopped.
He looked down. His hands were still bloodstained.
He slowly parted the curtain of hair, expecting to deal with the usual ending. She would be dead and it would be his fault. But this time, it wasn’t his traitorous wife.
Nikki Taylor opened her eyes and stared up at him. He drew back onto his haunches in shock, letting go the thick strands of dark hair. She lay there, with a half smile, those dark brown eyes calm and assessing. His heartbeat thudded into a regular rhythm as she raised her hands to him. And her touch was very warm. Tender. She put his bloody finger in her mouth and sucked.
“The daiquiri tasted good,” she said, “but now I want to taste you.”
Rick jerked up with a start, exhaling a long rush of air from his lungs. His heart was racing madly and he ran a hand across his forehead, wiping off the perspiration. He kicked away the bedsheets so the fan overhead could cool him down.
Crossing his arms behind his head, he broodingly stared at the shadowy moving blades as they went round and round. He would never conquer his ghosts. How long had it been since he had this nightmare? It returned in spurts and faded
for long stretches, until he was lulled into forgetting. Then, it would spring out of its dark prison, like a Jack-in-the-box.
Only, this time, it wasn’t really a nightmare. It had a different ending.
She
was in it. He stared downward in the darkness. It wasn’t fear that had roused him from sleep. A nightmare wouldn’t give a man this kind of reaction; he was too old to deal with waking up like a teenager with raging hormones. He turned over onto his front abruptly.
The fan was small relief to his heated body, and he knew he wouldn’t be falling back to sleep for a while. He turned to look at the alarm clock. Barely four in the morning. Muttering a sharp expletive, he buried his face in his pillow, trying to block out the image of Nikki Taylor sucking on his finger.
“I want to taste you.”
He cursed and turned over again. The semidarkness reminded him of her. The fan caressed like her hair did. The sheets tangled like her legs were around him. He needed relief.
“Nikki Taylor,” he said her name out loud. He thought about the way she ate, and the release he sought and received was strangely more satisfying than the past weekend’s excess.
R
ick didn’t go jogging that morning, and that put him in a bad mood. He didn’t like breaking his routine without a good reason. A nightmare and a stranger weren’t good enough reasons.
Today he would get the results from that glass at the restaurant and he would have something concrete on Nikki Taylor. She might turn out to be exactly what she claimed, but he doubted it. Those questions she’d asked Erik yesterday were too clever. Besides, the replies she gave intrigued him even more. The vague description of her story, about saving a man in trouble, about disappearing files and political investigations—very general, and yet almost seemingly given to catch his interest. He would like to go a round of questions and answers with the mysterious woman.
When he had one of those nightmares, he had one place to go lick his wounds. His study. He rebuilt Ricardo into Rick Harden there. When he felt the merest hint of a crack exposing any softness, all he needed to do was enter this room and be reminded of what was at stake.
That woman had somehow slipped through and gotten inside his head because not only was he sure he was seeing her everywhere, now he was dreaming of her. He needed a dose of reality. And what he had in his study served as that reminder.
So instead of breathing in fresh air and sunshine at a punishing pace, he spent the extra hours in the shadowy secrecy
of his den, with the flickering computer screen the only light in the room. This was his private sanctuary. No one was allowed in here.
This was his reality, what made him as he was today. Things people knew about him and things he knew about them. Facts that he couldn’t change, like his past, but the image that he now projected, he had built with the deliberate care of a toddler playing with Legos.
He had learned the hard way that information was power. He now gathered it for his protection as well as use, if necessary. He had been trying to move up the ladder since his personal disaster, but one person had always stood in his way. Gorman. The ex-director of TIARA was his enemy; he was also his teacher, showing him how a mere piece of information could be used repeatedly to destroy one’s future. But now Gorman was in jail for selling information to the enemy.
Rick typed in his password to activate his encrypted system. The program started to run after a series of executed commands. There were secret encoded files within his puppet files, things that only he knew about. He had collected a large one on Gorman, but he might as well toss that out. All these years of trying—and failing—to find something tangible to push Gorman out, only to have a hotshot SEAL operative sent into his very team blow the whistle. He didn’t feel bitter about that. Just…an overwhelming disappointment that revenge wasn’t his.
Rick frowned. Of course, with Gorman now incarcerated, there was the problem that Task Force Two was going to be under investigation because they were essentially Gorman’s team. Not to mention the fact that Rick himself was the team’s operations chief, Gorman’s handpicked man. But if he could escape I.I., he could finally move up and regain access to certain archives. With Gorman and his threats out of the way, he would be able to request closed cases to be reopened.
He opened Gorman’s file after a series of special coded prompts that disabled several firewalls. Cam’s wiretap before Gorman’s capture was going to play an important part in Task Force Two’s defense, and Rick knew that he had better
back up any evidence before politics started to dip its stinking fingers into the mess. Things had a strange way of disappearing when they caused big waves at the Department of Justice, especially if they involved big, important names.
He slipped the tiny silver diskette into place and started data transfer. It took him a long time to learn how to program Shadow files, a new technology that scanned and transferred without trace. Cam’s recording at the department might disappear, but if they were going to use him for a sacrificial lamb, Rick wasn’t going down without a fight. Backups. Always have backups.
Once the data transfer was completed and encrypted, he emptied the temp file cache and redisplayed the puppet files to cover his tracks. He was now an expert at that. It had become second nature to back up and cover and re-back up and hide. Sometimes he wondered if he peeled off all the layers he had put on, would he still find himself inside. He looked at the blinking cursor for a few seconds. Maybe not. Maybe he wasn’t inside there anymore. Maybe that was why he hated himself and his life sometimes. He had buried himself alive.
One last thing before he finished. A new file. Nikki Taylor. He was going to have her in here, in a little box he could fill with data, where he could build her bit by bit so he would see the whole picture, where she couldn’t slip in and out of his dreams.
By the time he relocked the study, Rick felt at ease, in charge of the situation. He was Hard-On again, bureaucrat and nobody’s victim.
Nikki walked out into the open, making sure she didn’t interrupt any joggers. He hadn’t shown up this morning. He was, by all reports, a creature of habit. He took this hilly path, a scenic route favored for its hard climb and its direct contrast to the two-lane curvy highway across the chasm with its cars speeding down to Connecticut Avenue. On this side, the cars looked tiny and insignificant, and the winding jogging trail let everyone set his own pace.
She could see its attraction for Rick. She felt sorry that
she had interrupted his one enjoyable thing; his decision not to jog meant that she had jolted him out of his daily routine. He was thinking, and not about rules and regulations. That was what had bothered her when she read those files on him. She wanted to see him behind all those papers and rigid policies.
Two joggers passed her, panting hard. She looked around her, seeing the deep green of the trees, her favorite color. It was the shade she missed most when she was living in darkness, and she would never forget the deep joy she had felt when she had caught sight of the deep dark green of freedom.
She sighed. She would love to walk along here and enjoy every minute of it, but she wasn’t here for herself. Ricardo Harden used this path for harmony, and today she had caused him to miss his ritual. The path would miss him. A missing link in the chain weakened harmony, and she didn’t think Mr. Harden needed any more discord in his life. In fact, he was probably in a bad mood. She smiled. How was it that she could always make everything end up her fault by sheer argument alone? And about a stranger, at that.
She twirled her braid into a bun and clipped it securely. She couldn’t just leave this place; she caused the imbalance and she would fix it. Today she would run for Ricardo Harden, in his place. See what he saw. Breathe the air and feel his need to run. She set out at a trot.
Why would anyone do this disgusting exercise day after day? It disrupted the lungs and it was, she was sure, very bad for the brain to bobble up and down like that. Nikki burst out laughing in mid-stride.
“Hello there! What a surprise. What’s so funny that has you laughing all alone?”
Nikki turned to see Erik Jones, the operative from the day before, running up the path in sweat-damped T-shirt and shorts. He caught up with her and stopped.
“Hi, Mr. Jones, I didn’t know you jogged here, too,” she said.
“Nah, this is my first time. I wanted to check out some
body.” Erik winked before wiping his damp forehead with his sleeve.
“Ahhh, doing spy stuff.” Nikki smiled, relieved. She needn’t run after all; someone was here to bring balance. She sent out a silent prayer of thanks. Maybe the rest of the day would be good.
Rick adjusted his tie. He should have gone jogging. If he had, maybe the day would have gone better. It was lunchtime, and he was reduced to grabbing a sandwich at the cafeteria because he had to wait for an important call to his office. Internal Investigations’ email was very specific. There would be an update about status today.
Knowing them, they wouldn’t call him on his cell, and in all likelihood they would call the office at lunchtime to say someone was on the way and would arrive at oh-one-hundred hours. If he went to lunch, he wouldn’t be back in time, and his secretary would, of course, let any operative from I.I. do anything.
Rick Harden didn’t want to come back and see any EYES operatives, as they were called, playing around in his office. Not that there would be anything there to find, just that he didn’t trust the person wouldn’t “find” something anyway. So he sacrificed his martini and expensive lunch and grabbed takeout while Greta waited for his return. His secretary was one of the few remaining in Task Force Two who actually had some responsibilities left. The man waiting in line at the pay counter turned. Rick almost smiled at the shock on Cam’s face. After all, the younger man had been trying to avoid him all morning, and the cafeteria would be the last place to bump into Hard-On.
“Been busy all morning, Agent Candeloro?” he asked politely.
Cam cleared his throat. “Hi, sir. Fancy seeing you here.”
“Isn’t it?” The line moved forward a few feet. “I had my secretary page you but your pager was off.”
“It is?” Cam asked, surprise in his voice as he searched his
pockets, then pulled out and looked at the offending gadget. To his credit, he didn’t show a smidgen of guilt. “It is! I must have accidentally turned it off, sir. I apologize—it wasn’t an urgent matter, I hope, sir?”
Rick studied the other man’s face. He wondered, with mild irritation, if the whole of Task Force Two was this good at making work a lot harder than it seemed. After all, Gorman had picked every one of them for a reason. He knew his own weakness, his myopic view of how to run things. Agent Cameron Candeloro was just laid-back enough to not ask the right questions, and Gorman probably chose him for that.
“A late night, Agent Candeloro, doesn’t mean a late report,” Rick said. “I hope you’re bringing it to me sometime in the near future, maybe within the next twenty-four hours?”
“Today, sir, really,” Cam answered. “It’s almost done, it really is, but I’m not good with writing reports.”
“Why?”
“Too many long sentences, man, I mean, sir. I look at the blank page and after twenty minutes of typing, it’s only half filled.” Cam made a face. “I read the other stuff and mine is like…shit, sir. Besides, I didn’t know how much to take out about Steve and Marlena, and you did mention to be very specific but I also know that operation was far from kosher.”
Rick shook his head. “I’m asking for an account of what you saw and heard the night we caught Gorman. We have a tape of him incriminating himself. How hard is that? Leave out McMillan’s romance with Miss Maxwell, just tell how the hostage extraction was done, what happened, and where you were at each point. If that’s only half a page long, then it is.”
They reached the front of the line and the saleslady rang up what was on Cam’s tray. It was a long list. Rick raised his eyebrows but didn’t say anything. Cam had always amazed him with what he could stuff in that lean frame of his. Rick wasn’t fooled by all the excuses. Cam was trying to protect his friends from in-depth investigation, what with Steve hav
ing called in his own SEAL team to do the job without anyone’s permission. The absence of his own men would come into question. Another potential black mark to watch out for, Rick privately noted.
After he had paid, Cam stood close by as the saleslady rang up Rick’s lunch. “It doesn’t read like a report,” he explained, and his expression was comically mournful. “It reads like a comic book action essay.”
Rick frowned. He was Hard-On, not someone who would shoot the breeze with any operatives in the cafeteria. He needed to get back to his office and had no time to give a lecture about writing, but he couldn’t help but wonder how they were training operatives these days if they couldn’t even write a decent report. “Bring it,” he ordered curtly. “Let me read this comic book report.”
“Yes, sir. I’ll be at your office later, sir.” Cam went off with his tray, whistling.
Rick mentally shook his head. If there was a man who didn’t worry about anything, that would be Agent Cameron Candeloro. Tucking his lunch bag under his arm, he started to head out of the cafeteria.
“Mr. Harden, sir, can I have a minute with you?”
It was Agent Erik Jones. Wonderful, now it was someone who
liked
writing reports.
Internal Investigations Office
Nikki looked across the conference table at the man sitting there quietly reading. Everything in the room was big, meant to intimidate more than impress. Her leather chair was built for large men. The conference table was meant for a group meeting. The temperature in the room was set lower than necessary.
She had been kept waiting alone here for half an hour earlier but she didn’t bother to walk around. Let them watch and record. There was nothing to see. She had sat down where she was and just waited.
The man finally looked up. He tossed down the black plastic folder carelessly. “You’re wasting our time and money,” he said.
“I’m sorry you think so,” Nikki said quietly.
He paused, clearly expecting more than that from her but she just sat there. Leopards didn’t change their spots. It had been a while, but she could still play mind games.
“Is that it? You’re sorry? This report is useless. You haven’t even assessed any personnel of account. Why did they allow your idea of entering as a visitor when you could have just walked in and looked through everything you wanted?”
“Because that’s not what I have been contracted for.” Because that was what you would have done, she wanted to say.
The man’s expression hardened. “Miss Taylor, you know we don’t like outside resources handling our internal affairs. I have been forced to accept your ‘job’ because of Admiral Madison’s pressuring the president, but I don’t have to like anything you say or do.” He clasped his hands together on the table. “It’s nothing personal, you understand. To me, you are just an inconvenience that I have to put up with because some military brass not in the business of counterintelligence wants more pins on his uniform.”