In Harm's Way (19 page)

“C'mon, boats are my thing,” she lied. She didn't know port from starboard. “And this is your
only
chance at that money. Think! We can be rich, Kick. Somers is dead. My husband's dead. Who's left to care about the accounts? Work with me here.”

She allowed a short laugh to escape. Actually it was a precursor to hysteria, but she thought maybe it sounded nonchalant enough to fool him. “I thought I had Mitch convinced to go after it, but he was just playing me. Planned to turn me in all along.”

The elevator stopped, the round light at the top blinked
L
for lobby. Robin still had her hand on the panel. She pressed the door-close button and held it.

“What do you say?” she asked. “There's close to eight million, only one of it mine. My price for the numbers is your clicking on that safety so I don't wind up dead if your finger twitches. I want to live to spend
my
million.”

His silence told her he was considering it.

“Show of faith, Kick. Click it on, and we're in business.”

“They'll be waiting when the door opens,” he argued, his voice breathless with fear, his every muscle taut against her and around her neck.

“They won't know the difference if it's on or not. I'll act terrified. We can pull this off if you don't wimp out.”

After a couple of seconds she heard a click. “Okay,” he said. “But you screw me, lady, and I'll blow you away.”

“Okay. Give me a second,” she said, her tone businesslike as she could make it. She could do this, she told herself.

Mitch expected her to do something and, by God, she meant to do it. “Let me take a deep breath first and flex my neck a bit, then we'll go for it.”

He moved his arm out well beyond her neck to allow it, but the gun still rested against her hairline. She prayed he actually had put on the safety.

Robin drew in the deep breath she'd requested, then spun within his grasp, surprising him, releasing the button on the panel as she dropped to her knees. She stabbed the syringe directly into his groin and mashed the plunger with her thumb.

His gun dropped to the floor as he grabbed himself with both hands, screaming and doubled over. Robin scrambled sideways and threw her body over the pistol to keep him from getting it.

She clutched the gun close to her chest and curled herself over it, rubbing her thumbs along the smooth metal while her fingers squeezed it in a death grip.

The doors slid open, and the elevator immediately filled
with cops. Robin clenched her eyes shut and curled into a ball. Someone stepped on her leg and stumbled. The noise level deafened her. Officers or guards shouted as the struggle ensued.

Kick alternately gagged, screamed and cried as they dragged him out of the elevator. She might have added a few groans to the melee herself. All she could think was that she had the gun. She had to hold on.

“M
s. Andrews?” Hands pried at her arms, trying to pull them away from her sides. Someone tugged at her ankles. She couldn't unfold. Her body felt rigid, every tendon locked in place. She shook silently, her breath huffed in and out in short unfulfilling gasps, and her eyes wouldn't open.

“It's all right now, ma'am,” a male voice assured her in almost that same deep drawl Mitch always used. “We have him secured.” The words registered somewhere inside her brain, but her muscles refused to respond.

“He's passed out, see?” the voice told her gently. “You can get up now. I'll help you. They're taking him away. He's cuffed and not even moving. Fainted, maybe.”

Dead, maybe.
Robin knew she should tell the officer that
Kick Taylor might be the victim of whatever lethal substance he would have used on Mitch. But she couldn't seem to form words.

It was over now. Mitch was safe. She had done it.

She heard the deep voice again, at a distance and not so gentle now, as it summoned someone outside the elevator. “Hey! Get a doctor over here. This lady's in shock!”

So I am,
Robin thought with a shudder. Shocked as hell to be still alive. It was ridiculous to lie here in a heap like a frightened child when Mitch was clinging to life by his fingernails up on the third floor.

Slowly, forcing herself to unwind and get to her knees, Robin checked the safety on the weapon she held. Sure enough, it was on. She very carefully laid it down on the floor of the elevator. Her prints were on that one, too, now. For someone who knew so little about guns, they certainly seemed to land in her hands often enough these days.

“Ma'am? Are you okay now?” said the man who had been trying to assist her. He was a heavyset guy in his late twenties—she would guess a beat cop.

She glanced at his name tag. “Yes, Officer Marks, I'm fine. You probably should see about that weapon there,” she said, pointing to the gun on the floor. “I'm going back up to the ICU.”

He scooped up the pistol and took her by the elbow. “I'm sorry, ma'am. You'll have to come with me.”

She couldn't break free. He had the gun now. She was fresh out of syringes and her muscles felt like Jell-O. Robin didn't even have the strength to protest verbally.

“Don't worry, Ms. Andrews,” he said gently. “I'm one of the good guys.”

Robin devoutly hoped so.

 

Mitch awoke with a start. The bullet holes had obviously been plugged with salt. He felt as if he'd been worked over by a wrecking ball. “Where's Robin?” he grunted.

“It's about time you came around. I swear you'd sleep through a tornado.” Susan leaned over him and stuck a straw in his mouth. “Drink some of this. Sorry it's not coffee.”

Mitch took time to drink the ice water, but only because his mouth was so dry he could hardly talk. The simple act of sucking on the straw exhausted him. His eyes kept closing, but he knew he had to fight that. He had to know about Robin.

“She's okay,” Susan said as if she'd read his mind. He hated when women did that, but in this case it was convenient.

“Where is she?” he rasped. “Is Kick—?”

“Kick's taken care of. Robin's safe. She's with the FBI.”

“God, no. Not the witness program?” He'd never find her.

Susan shook her head. “No, nothing like that. It's all Damien's fault, and don't think I didn't ream him out about it! Apparently Robin told him about the disk with the Cyrillic on it, and they're holding her for questioning. They think her husband was spying.”

“She's innocent,” he said, barely able to utter the words.

“Sure she is,” Susan agreed. “It'll be all right, Mitch.”

“She's alive,” he mumbled, a huge weight rolling off his chest. He hadn't lost her.

“She's alive,” Susan repeated. Mitch hung on to those words as morphine from the IV rushed through his veins.

When he fought his way out of the fog again, she still wasn't there. Damien was. “Where is she, Perry?” he demanded.

“New York.” One thing about Damien, he told it like it was. “A couple of the agents flew up with her to check out the rest of the contents of her safety deposit box. That's much faster
than going the usual route, getting a court order to open it. She agreed to do it.”

“Comin' back?”

“Of course,” Damien said. Maybe he wasn't telling it like it was.

“What day is it?”

“Tuesday.”

“What week?”

Damien laughed softly. “Same week, Mitch. You haven't been comatose, just under the influence. They eased off on the painkillers this morning.”

“No joke,” Mitch grumbled, wincing as he shifted, trying to find a more comfortable position in hell. “Tell me everything.”

Damien sat near the foot of the bed. “First off, Robin refused to cooperate in any way until the surgeon himself assured her that you would recover fully. She insisted on seeing you, and did, but you were totally sedated by then. It took three of us to subdue you once Kick Taylor took Robin out of the ICU. Remember?”

Mitch didn't. The last thing he recalled was pushing the syringe toward Robin and watching her grasp it, the only weapon he could offer her against a nine-millimeter. “Did she use it?”

“What? The syringe? Oh, yes.” Damien exhaled, brushing a hand over his face. “Kick's dead. Massive dose, pure uncut. She injected all of it. A fraction would have done the job.”

Mitch hated that Robin had been forced to take a life. Two, actually. The encounter at the Somers house came back to him full force. At least Robin would be safe now.

“She must have been glad to get out of Nashville,” he said more or less to himself.

Then he looked and saw Damien watching him with a worried frown. Mitch tried to smile, to alleviate that worry. “Knowing Robin, she would feel responsible for causing
everything, even my gettin' shot.” He couldn't really blame her for wanting to put it all behind her. “It's not as if we have much of a history to work with. Or anything in common. Just two people thrown together, dodging bullets.”

“And you neglected to duck,” Damien said, getting up from the bed. “I'm leaving now. Your parents will be here in a few minutes. Try not to look as though you're awaiting the coroner, will you?”

“Yeah. Thanks, Damien.”

He paused at the door. “Mitch? She really had no choice but to go.”

And Mitch had no choice but to go after her. First thing on his agenda once he got untangled from all these damned tubes.

 

Robin waited in the outer office of Special Agent Nick Olivetti. One of the junior agents kept her company. Actually, he guarded her to keep her from disappearing downstairs, out the door and into the crowded streets of New York. He chewed antacid tablets and pored over a magazine while she anticipated the next interrogation. No rubber hoses and blinding overhead lights for these guys. All very civil. “How was your husband connected to the Russians?”

There had been many questions, but they all seemed related to that one. Variations of it. Repetitions of it. On and on it went. Robin had no earthly idea James even knew a Russian. But then, she had known nothing of his background other than what he had chosen to tell her, until she found the information on the Internet. He could have been an international spy for all she knew. She would not have found that on the Web, even with her resources. How many times must she tell them she had no knowledge of his activities?

The door to Olivetti's office opened and he beckoned to her. “Ms. Andrews, we have a few more questions.”

Wearily she got up and went in. She plopped down in the chair he indicated, forsaking any attempt to remain aloof and impervious to his badgering. She threw up her hands. “Look, I simply can't give you what you're looking for. Arrest me, offer me deals, browbeat me until I collapse, but I cannot give you any more information about James Andrews.”

He tossed a paper onto the desk in front of her chair. “Do you read Russian, Ms. Andrews?”

“For the thousandth time,
no!
” she exclaimed, exasperated. “A bit of French, enough German to order food, two courses of Spanish to graduate college. That's it.”

“Look at it. There is what was on the disk you provided. Another page of it in the envelope with the copy of your husband's will that was in your deposit box. That envelope is addressed to you. Tell me what that means. Why would he leave you something written in Cyrillic if he knew you couldn't read it?”

A good question—she would grant him that. Robin pushed out of the chair and leaned over the desk until she was almost nose to nose with the creep. And he was a creep. He had short, slicked-back hair that reminded her of a 1930s gangster and beady, black eyes that drilled holes in her nerves. He even wore a pin-striped suit, for crying out loud. And a very ugly tie. After three days of this constant haranguing, she hated the sight of him.

If she had learned anything at all during her little adventure in Nashville, it was to stand up for herself. She was sick of being what everyone ordered her to be, arranged for her to be, expected her to be. Well, no more. She had stood up to killers and survived, hadn't she? The worst this legalized goon could do was arrest her, and he obviously didn't have enough proof against her to do that.

“Has it ever occurred to you to get a damned translator, Olivetti? Or is the Bureau so strapped it can't afford one?”

He didn't back down an inch, but she'd known he wouldn't.
He was a hardass if she'd ever met one. Robin doubted she'd tell him anything even if she did know something. Mitch Winton should give courses to these guys on how to interrogate people. They could use a little charm.

“We have
tried
to translate it, Ms. Andrews. It is in Cyrillic, but it's also in code. The words make no sense. You have to have the key to this. You
know
his code!” he insisted. “Now
look
at it.” He pushed it forward with a jab of his finger.

Robin sat back down. She took the page and did as instructed. No one had shown it to her before. Mitch had printed out what had been on the CD, but she'd never really studied it.

All she saw here was a pageful of characters totally unfamiliar to her. Strings of letters that meant nothing. Just strange characters in a peculiar font she'd never have recognized, unless someone told her it was Cyrillic, as Mitch had done.

Suddenly something clicked.
Font!
Maybe that was the key. She raised her gaze to Olivetti who was still glaring at her. “Get me a computer,” she ordered. “And the disk. I have an idea.”

He led her down the hall into an office equipped with a number of computers. In moments she had the disk, which she slipped into a CD drive. She opened the file with the page in question and paused. If this didn't work, she could be stuck here in New York forever going round after round with the FBI.

She selected the text and changed the font to Courier.

“Damn.”

“See? Still unreadable,” Olivetti commented.

Robin sat back in the chair, stared at the screen and then at the letter to her that had been left with James's will. They're not the same,” she commented.

“Yes, we
know
that,” he told her, his impatience growing.

Still unwilling to give up, Robin opened a blank document in the word processing program, changed the font to Cyrillic and hunted and pecked the initial line of it, the shortest line, until she had the right characters lined up.
. She highlighted and switched to the English Courier font.

The first letters read TSERAEDNIBOR, Robin Dearest, each word spelled backward, all caps, no spaces. Robin whooped and grabbed Olivetti's sleeve. “There it is! That's all he did! He reversed the words and ran them together. He changed the font. No punctuation, no spaces.”

Olivetti frowned, shaking his head in disbelief. “But…but that's
too
easy! Too simple.”

“Because he thought
I
was simple. You see, I work with fonts a lot since I do Web pages. He knew that and figured I'd try that first.” She got up from the chair and offered it to him. “Here, you do the grunt work and mail me a translation. I'm out of here.”

“No, you're not. We're not done,” he said. “If he implicates you in any way in anything, we have to—”

“All right, all right, don't waste your energy. I'll stay.” What could it take him, twenty minutes? An hour, to reverse the spellings and figure out where the spaces went? “I suppose I should see what it says. The one page is obviously personal.”

“Yes, I know, but I have to—”

“Relax, Olivetti. I know you have to translate and analyze it. Go ahead.” She couldn't resist the dig. “Now that I've broken the big bad
code
for you.”