articulate.
Why shouldn’t he have a dossier on her, if he’d been sent to find her? But why was the CIA suddenly interested in her when everyone else had hung her out to dry in China?
She began to feel small again. Afraid. And that horribly familiar panic began to nip at her brain.
“Hey?”
She jumped, whipped her eyes to him.
He stood drying his hair with a towel, wearing a white T-shirt and jeans faded in places she shouldn’t look. God, he was good-looking. In a rough and untamed way. He seemed too tough to have the sensitivity for those photographs. Yet there was something in the desolate gray of his eyes, the way the lines fanned softly out from them, that echoed the haunting vistas in the photos.
“You okay?” he said, stilling the towel as he studied her face.
“Yeah, I—I’m fine. Did…you take all of those?” she pointed to the wall.
“Yep.”
“They’re beautiful.”
“Thanks. You want to take a shower? Water’s hot.” He smiled and it reached into those wilderness eyes, giving her a thump of sensation in her stomach.
“I…” she became cognizant of the fact she probably stank of garbage and old liquor from that jacket he’d worn. “I guess I should, huh?”
He nodded. “Yep.”
“I don’t have any clean clothes,” she hesitated. “I guess I’m stating the obvious.” She felt awkward. Seeing those photographs made her feel as though she’d somehow seen him naked. It was a language she spoke, and when you came across someone who communicated in the same visceral way you did, the link was there whether you wanted it or not.
“I left some stuff for you in the bathroom,” he said. “It was the best I could do for now. We can pick up some things for you later. Coffee or tea?”
“I…coffee would be great, thanks.”
“Bathroom’s that way, down the hall.”
She began to walk, stopped. “You’re really casual about this,” she said. “You say it’s not your thing, but…you’ve done it a lot, haven’t you?”
“Picked up women and brought them home? Yeah, I do that a lot.” He said it with such a deadpan expression in his flat Australian tone she wasn’t sure whether he was joking or not.
“I mean…never mind.” She began to make her way to the bathroom.
“You mean killing a couple of gangsters, assaulting two cops and then coming home to make coffee?”
She stopped. “Yes, something like that.”
He tossed his towel over a chair at the table, opened a cupboard and took two mugs out. “Your accent is cute, you know that?” he said, plunking the mugs on the counter.
“And you know exactly what part of the U.K. it comes from, too. It’s all in that dossier on your computer, so please don’t play games with me, Stone.”
His eyes flicked between her and his computer and his features turned serious. He stood to his full height, facing her squarely. There was a latent aggression in his posture that made her nervous.
“You looked at my laptop?”
“I’d like to know what is going on and what happened to Giles in Shanghai.”
His eyes narrowed slowly. Then a ghost of a smile played at the corners of his strong mouth. “Fair enough,” he said, and he turned and reached for a box of green tea. “Take your shower and we’ll sit down and talk.”
Luke felt her eyes boring into his back. He ignored her as he poured boiling water over a tea bag.
He’d underestimated Jessica. He’d do well to remember she was once an aggressive and respected investigative journalist. Landing a gig as a foreign correspondent for the BBC needed a fair degree of global savvy.
He heard her leave the room, then heard the bathroom door bang shut.
He extracted the tea bag, squeezed it as he listened for the shower. She’d be busy for a few minutes. He positioned himself in front of his laptop, set his mug of tea down and punched Jacques Sauvage’s number into his satellite phone. Luke checked his watch as it rang. Dawn would be breaking soon.
“Stone, it’s about bloody time. Have you secured the principal?”
“Good morning to you, too, Sauvage. I have her. But we have a complication.” He proceeded to tell Jacques about his altercation with the police and the two gangsters.
Jacques was silent for a moment. “This is going to make any sort of cooperation with local law enforcement close to impossible.”
Luke shrugged, sipped his tea. “I made an executive decision. Those guys were out to kill her. My guess is they’re Dragon Heads, affiliated with Xiang-Li. They don’t want the photos getting out.”
“You manage to drop the tail?”
“Yep.” He sipped from his mug. “What can I tell her?”
“Everything. I’m liaising personally with CIA director Blake Weston on this and he’s given no instructions to hold anything back from her. All he wants is the woman, her film and her testimony. He’s setting up some form of witness protection for her.”
“When are you sending someone to pick her up?”
Jacques hesitated. “You’re going to have to hold on to her for a while, Stone, until—”
He slammed his mug down, sloshing hot tea onto his hand. “Wait a minute, Sauvage, we had a deal. You told me this woman would die if I refused this job. You said I was the only one who could get to her in the time frame. You also said you were going to take her off my hands ASAP!”
“I’m sorry. I’ve had to target all our spare resources elsewhere. You’re all I’ve got out there right now. You can handle one woman, Stone.”
Luke swore viciously. “Listen up, Sauvage, I’m not a goddamn babysitter. You’re in breach of my contract. I can walk from this—”
“Can you, Stone?” Jacques’s voice was cold.
Luke cursed again, dragged his hand over his hair.
“Look, I know what happened to your family in Australia. I know that’s why you wanted out. But you’re the best in the business and you’re all we’ve got. You can do this.”
“Why the hell should I?”
“You want to stay on FDS books, don’t you?”
Luke was quiet for a moment.
“If you turn her out onto the streets now, the woman dies. It’s simple. And it’s your call.”
Luke
