An Affair of Vengeance (21 page)

“And that, my dear, is precisely what I like about the man. He knows how to conserve his energy while he waits for his prey to fall right into his lap.” Kral sent an approving nod in McCrea’s direction.

The summer sun had long set by the time the waiter served bowls of lavender gelato and glasses of sweet Czech straw wine. One of Kral’s henchmen entered the courtyard and walked briskly to his side. A whispered conversation ensued, during which Kral looked at McCrea and nodded. Kral wiped his mouth clean and stood.

“I must depart early this evening, but please stay and enjoy the wine.” He flashed his own brilliantly white smile. “There is no lifeguard on duty tonight, so do be careful by the pool. My friend, come with me.”

McCrea folded his napkin and placed it on his plate, but before he stood, he leaned close to Evangeline and nuzzled her ear. She held herself steady, trying to remind herself that such a touch should be no surprise to his lover. This was the act they needed to display, and she was glad he was continuing to play along.

It was a command performance, so convincing that the longer he nuzzled, the less she was able to keep her body from swelling with genuine heat.

Other guests looked away as McCrea bid her adieu, but Kral’s inhumanly arctic eyes remained locked on them.

“Stay,” McCrea whispered, barely more than a breath.

She understood why he’d gotten so close to her—he’d wanted to issue a command. Again. She was growing tired of his directives. What did he think she was? A dog? But she grinned playfully, as though he’d just whispered what he planned to do to her in bed later that night. Kral half-turned his head away from them, still watching. Still judging.

More theater was required, so before McCrea could stand, she whipped her head around and crushed her mouth to his. He braced at the contact, but she slid her tongue between his lips and inhaled his breath, perfumed with sweet wine, lavender, and under it all, the devastatingly erotic taste of him.

A throat cleared. She broke away, and Kral nodded with an indulgent smile. It was almost an approval, as though he endorsed the reaction she’d elicited from staid McCrea. Kral probably liked cataloging what he could use as leverage against those he worked with.

And hadn’t she just become his leverage? At least she was more than a plaything. She wasn’t under his radar, but then she’d never expected a man as ruthless and paranoid as Kral to let her be.

McCrea followed Kral out of the courtyard, and Evangeline tried to pretend nothing was amiss. The gelato was smooth and chilled, but as she let it slip down her throat it reminded her of the taste of lavender on her partner’s lips.

She pushed the dessert away. The last thing she was going to do was sit there and stew while McCrea was off discussing business with their host. He’d told her to stay put, but what he failed to understand was that if he was keeping Kral occupied, then she was free to prowl the grounds and search for evidence that would put a nail in Kral’s coffin.

Standing, she stretched her arms above her head. “I could use a sherry. Can anyone point me in the direction of a wine cellar?”

Adriana spoke first. “Down those stairs behind me. First door on the right.”

Evangeline smiled. “Great. Anybody need anything?”

Shrugs all around. She set off for the staircase and headed into its depths. The spiral steps spilled her out into a dank vestibule that served as the ninety-degree meeting point of two narrow, jagged-walled passageways, the ends of which faded into impenetrable shadows. Electric sconces emitted thin, yellow light every few feet along the stone walls.

She wrapped her arms around her waist and set off to her right, her shoes snapping like firecrackers against the uneven bedrock. Several paces down the passageway she came to a wooden door. Its icy brass knob turned easily in her hand. Inside the cavernous room, tall wooden racks marched in tight aisles. Thousands of bottles, most coated with gray dust, slept in diamond-shaped cubbies. Evangeline sneezed as she wandered through the racks, wiping grime off bottles at random but looking for something specific. A sherry, not an amontillado but a Manzanilla. She’d had enough of del Duque for a while.

She lifted a bottle out of a crate sitting on the floor. Unlike the other bottles she’d seen, its label was clear and new. Fresh delivery, probably, which was good for a Manzanilla sherry. She tucked it to her breast and headed out into the hallway, where she turned away from the stairs and headed deeper into the shadows. The wine cellar couldn’t be the only room underground, and she intended to find out what else hid along the dark passageway.

Another door appeared on her right. Evangeline gripped and turned the cold handle, but it didn’t budge. Locked, although the door itself looked brittle, like she could lean a shoulder through its planks without trouble. No light or sound penetrated from the room into the hallway, so she figured it was unoccupied.

She bit the rubber nub off a hairpin and used the sharp end to pick open the simple lock. Powdery particulates blew into her face as she stepped inside. The large room was about the same size as the suite she and McCrea had been given, illuminated only by moonlight glowing through a slot window at its far end. Shadows dissipated into blocky, immobile forms as her eyes adjusted to the low light. Her heart sank. Just a few pieces of office furniture scattered here and there. Judging from the thick coating of filth velveting every surface, nobody had touched anything here in months.

Metal filing cabinets lined one wall. Hope sprang. What if they weren’t empty?

She tugged open the top drawer of the closest cabinet.

Jackpot. Green hanging files stuffed the space. She pulled one out and held it up to the light. Labeled December of last year, it was stuffed with papers. She flipped through. Phone bills, payroll reports, and receipts for audiovisual equipment mingled with handwritten memos she couldn’t quite read and printouts of e-mail messages in very tiny fonts.

She’d stumbled upon Kral’s archives. The Agency would kill for this kind of information. She could barely make out words on the pages, though, and couldn’t know if any of it would incriminate Kral.

She tucked the folder back and opened the next drawer. Same setup, but from two years past. A peek into the third drawer held files from three years ago. The cabinets were neatly chronological, and her parents had been killed eight years ago. If he had records from that month in this room, something in them might point the finger of blame in Kral’s direction.

She knew what she had to do.

She stepped out of her platform sandal and kicked it up to her hand. After peeling away the rubber sole, she felt for a piece of fishing line she knew would be there. With the thin fiber held between her thumb and index finger, she tugged hard. A cylinder of cork popped free, and a digital camera the size of a roll of film dropped into her palm.

The device’s presence in her footwear was the reason she’d chosen those shoes over a more appropriate pair. The CIA-issued camera had one very powerful and very sneaky feature: a “dark flash” composed solely of infrared and ultraviolet light, invisible to the human eye but visible to the camera. With it, she could take perfect, if oddly green, pictures in a dark room without alerting anyone to her presence. Genius device. With just a faint gray shine from the moon brightening the room, she’d not get much of a look at what she photographed, but it couldn’t be helped.
The best she could hope for was that the pictures wouldn’t be too out of focus.

She released the second-to-last drawer of the next cabinet and removed the folder for December. Paperwork, just like the first file she’d opened, and she didn’t try to decipher any of it. Rather, she photographed every page as quickly as she could. She would sort it out later. Seconds passed, but she was fast. The feeling of finally getting evidence against her enemy made her bold. A peek at her watch told her she’d been at work for nine minutes—a vastly longer time than she’d intended to spend—but she neared the end of December’s information. Capturing the whole fateful month was a worthy goal. She was determined to achieve it.

The folder felt thick with pictures she couldn’t see but could feel sliding around as she flipped pages. She clicked her little camera faster, eager to get the entire file on record before she absolutely had to scram. She turned over an e-mail printout, exposing a big black-and-white image tacked to it.

Something on the page caught her eye. It made her breath hitch.

It couldn’t be.

She stared at the dark photograph, but damn it all, there was no light in the room! She shook her head, telling herself that she’d examine it later, when she was safely ensconced in some CIA facility. She snapped a picture and flipped over the photograph. She couldn’t have seen what she thought she’d seen, anyway. Kral couldn’t possibly be so stupid as to keep such visual evidence here, in an unsecured room.

But then she remembered his eyes at dinner, and she wondered if he thought himself untouchable here, protected by armed guards, ancient stone walls, and miles of patrolled countryside. He hadn’t bugged their room, or at least not that they could find. A man who thinks he’s untouchable makes mistakes. Maybe he
was so overconfident as to leave evidence of murder where she could so easily find it.

She took a second look at the curious picture. Leaning in, but not so close that moonlight turned to shadow, she saw that the photograph showed chaos in a crowded street market. The jagged remains of a small car were scattered around the center of the image. Bombed, from the looks of it. It had been a dark Renault four-door, exactly the sort of economical, reliable automobile owned by millions of people all across Europe.

And the very type of car her dad had been driving when he and her mother had been killed.

It was too much of a coincidence. There weren’t so many car bombings in the world that she could think this was anything other than what it appeared to be.

Her hand shook, fluttering the photograph like a flag in the wind.

She held a picture of her parents’ murder scene. She’d seen images of the aftermath before, of course. Reporters had arrived quickly after the explosion. International newspapers had been full of sensational photos for days afterward.

But Kral had his own file, and as far as she could imagine, no innocent, impartial businessman would have a picture of that horrific event sitting in his records. It wasn’t proof of his guilt, but it was the first solid link she had found since reading that cease-and-desist letter eight years ago.

Something thumped in the hallway.

Quickly, she slipped the photograph back into the folder, slid the folder into the drawer, and pushed the drawer shut. She ran behind a desk and crouched, camera in hand, waiting.

And heard nothing more from the hallway. She exhaled, relieved. After shoving the camera back into the heel of her sandal and replacing the rubber sole, she slipped the shoe back on her foot and started toward the door. She should have left minutes ago.

She reached out to grab the door handle but stopped short, her hand frozen as the knob began to turn on its own.

W
ITH NO TIME
to dive for better cover, Evangeline drew herself flush against the wall as the door swung open into her body. She absorbed the impact of the handle into her stomach without a sound.

A lanky silhouette entered the room. She recognized the figure’s perfect posture and smooth gait.

McCrea.

Relieved, intrigued, and annoyed all at once, she stepped out from her hiding place and fit her hands onto her hips. “What are you doing here?”

He spun around in a defensive stance, ready to fight. He dropped his fists when he saw her. “Me? What are
you
doing here? I told you to stay in the courtyard!”

“I’m not a dog.”

“Right. If you were a dog, you’d be able to follow simple commands.”

“I’m not under your command, remember? What are you looking for?”

“You
. You can’t just disappear like that.”

“You were gone. What else did you expect me to do?” she hissed.

“I expected you to do what you were told.” He reached for her arm. “We have to go. Everyone else’s gone to bed. We have no cover.”

She let herself be tugged to the doorway. He peered out into the blackened hallway. After a moment, he stepped out and signaled for her to follow. They turned left to make for the nearest staircase. Six quick, quiet steps later, a cackle of drunken laughter peeled out from the wine cellar’s open door.

Not everyone had gone to bed.

The wine room lay between them and the stairs. They couldn’t go past it without revealing that they’d been somewhere they didn’t belong. McCrea reacted first, grabbing her wrist and pulling her down the passageway, away from the laughter and around the corner into a corridor she hadn’t yet walked down. At the far end was another stairway leading up. They raced to it. At the bottom, they paused. McCrea’s eyes connected with hers. She nodded. His hand tensed around hers.

Now.

Together they scurried up the stairs and popped out onto the ground level behind a screen of potted palms. The moonlit square was bright, cool, and empty. Chlorine sharpened the breeze that whipped through the fortress, but it smelled like freedom to Evangeline. All they had to do now was get across the flagstones and up to their suite.