Dangerous to Know (25 page)

Breakfast!

The thought of food gave Maggie the impetus she needed to crawl out of her warm cocoon. Frigid air washed over her body, raising goose bumps on every patch of exposed skin. She shivered as the silk of her nightdress cooled and new bumps rose. Although she'd much admired this frothy confection of pale yellow silk and gossamer lace last night, Maggie now heartily wished the vice president's tastes ran to warm flannel pajamas. Pulling on the matching lemon robe, she glanced at the small gold carriage clock on the bedside table.

Five-twenty—a.m.

If she'd slept a full hour last night, she'd be surprised. The knot of tension caused by concentrating so fiercely on her role had taken forever to seep out of Maggie's system. The tension generated by a certain dark-haired special envoy had refused to seep, however. Instead, her inner agitation had coiled tighter and tighter every time she felt the weight of the ring on her finger. It was as though Adam were with her in the darkness. Which he was.

With every restless toss, she remembered the touch of his mouth on hers. Every turn brought back the scent of his expensive after-shave. And every time her stomach grumbled about its less-than-satisfied state, she snuck another chocolate from the foil-covered box.

As she hurried to the bathroom, Maggie smiled at the memory of those luscious vanilla creams and melt-in-your-mouth caramels. Somehow, that little box of candies symbolized more than anything else the subtle shift that had occurred last night in her relationship with Adam Ridgeway.

Over the past three years, they'd shared some desperate hours and days and weeks. They'd grown close, as only members of a small, tightly knit organization can. But until last night, they hadn't allowed themselves to step through the invisible wall that separated OMEGA's cool, authoritative director from his operatives. Maggie had always maintained her independence, and Adam had always kept his distance.

Right now, that wall didn't seem quite as high. Or as impenetrable. And after last night, the distance between them had
shortened considerably. Twisting the gold ring around on her finger, she smiled and turned on the taps full blast.

She returned to the bedroom a short while later dressed in blue metallic spandex thermal leggings, a matching long-sleeved top, and comfortable Reeboks. Lillian eyed her critically, then held up an oversize gold-and-blue UCLA sweatshirt.

“I found this in the closet. It should be long enough to disguise your hips.”

“Thanks,” Maggie said dryly.

“Remember, Mrs. Grant usually does ten minutes of warm-up exercises before her run. Leg bends, calf stretches and twists. Then it's twice around Observatory Circle and back through the grounds.”

As she tugged the sweatshirt over her head, Maggie did a rapid mental calculation of the circumference of the seventy-three acres that comprised the observatory grounds. She multiplied that by two, translated the distance into miles, and bit back a groan at the result.

Six miles. At least. Good grief!

Of necessity, OMEGA agents kept in top physical shape, but they had all developed their own individualized conditioning programs. Given a choice, Maggie would have far preferred her own regime of high-impact aerobics in a nice warm spa to slogging six miles in the icy, predawn air.

“By the way,” Lillian let drop as she headed for the door, “the agent who usually jogs with Mrs. Grant won the Boston Marathon a couple of years ago.”

This time Maggie didn't even try to hold back her groan.

Lillian's mouth softened into something suspiciously close to a smile.

“But that particular individual is in L.A.,” she continued, “working the advance for her—for your trip. The other agents drew straws to see who has to run with you this morning. The loser's waiting downstairs. He's a few pounds overweight, and very slow.”

Giving silent thanks for small blessings, Maggie made her way down the curving staircase. Okay, she told herself, it was
only six miles. She could do this. She could run six miles in the service of her country.

 

Four and a half miles later, she was seriously questioning both her sanity and her dedication to her country.

Frigid air lanced into her lungs with every labored breath. Her heart slammed painfully against her ribs. Her legs felt like over-cooked spaghetti and threatened to collapse with every step.

The slap of her sneakers against the wet pavement grew more and more erratic as Maggie struggled to pump her way up yet another damned incline. The rolling hills that had appeared so picturesque when she drove through the naval observatory complex yesterday afternoon now loomed in front of her like mountain peaks. Her only consolation was that the poor agent chugging along behind her couldn't hear the sound of her labored breath over his own heaving gasps.

At least the gloomy darkness had given way to a drizzly dawn. Headlights sliced through a soupy gray mist as military and civilian workers arrived for work at the various scientific facilities scattered around the extensive grounds. The civilians gave a cheerful wave, obviously used to seeing the vice president on her early-morning run. The military snapped to attention and saluted. Hoping her grimace would pass for a smile, Maggie returned their greetings.

When the two-story building that housed the nautical almanac office loomed out of the mist, Maggie sagged with relief. Thank God. Only a half circuit of the perimeter to go! Dragging in another lungful of cold air, she concentrated fiercely on placing one foot in front of the other once. Twice. Three times. Counting seemed to help, she discovered.

Sixty-two steps took her across the broad expanse of parking lot beside the almanac office.

Another thirty-seven brought her to the path that paralleled Massachusetts Avenue.

Five more paces, and she was shielded from the wind by the tall pines, thick on her right, thinner on her left, where the path
edged almost to the wrought-iron fence. Her lungs on fire, her calves cramping, Maggie following the curving asphalt trail.

At one hundred and three steps past the west gate, the distinctive conical turret of the vice president's mansion poked into view above the tops of the snow-laden pines. She almost sobbed in relief.

At exactly one hundred and twenty-six paces, the shot rang out.

With a startled “Umph,” Maggie hit the ground.

I
n a small room on the fourth floor of the British embassy, less than a half block away, Adam froze.

He tore his gaze from the bank of flickering monitors and stared down at the face of his watch, as if expecting an instant replay of the single sharp report—and of Maggie's surprised grunt. Then he exploded into action.

Racing for the door, he snarled an order at the stunned communications technician. “Call Jaguar! Tell him Chameleon's down.”

He ripped open the door and raced into the deserted hallway, cursing himself every step of the way. How could he have underestimated the threat? How could he have been so damned cold, so analytical, about the security on the grounds of the naval observatory? He shouldn't have trusted that abstract analysis. Not with Maggie.

His heart battering against his ribs, he crashed through the door to the stairs. The stairwell was empty, as Adam had known it would be. He'd pulled a few strings for this mission. Without a single question, the British ambassador had cleared the entire
fourth floor of the embassy for OMEGA's use. It had proven an ideal site for an observation post. Only the broad expanse of Massachusetts Avenue, a screen of pines and a rolling lawn separated it from the vice-presidential mansion and the surrounding grounds.

Even more to the point, the embassy was close enough for OMEGA to tap into the Secret Service's own surveillance system. Adam had tracked Maggie from the moment she emerged from her bedroom this morning. Infrared cameras so sensitive that they picked up even the trickle of sweat rolling down her cheek had recorded her jog through the predawn gloom. With the aid of the concealed transmitter in her ring, Adam had heard her every gasp—and every increasingly acerbic comment she muttered under her breath as she jogged up yet another hill.

As he barreled down the stairs, Adam replayed over and over in his mind those moments when she'd entered the home stretch. There, in those few yards where the pines branched over the path and obscured the camera's angle, she'd disappeared from view for a few seconds. Christ! A few seconds, and he—

“Get…off…me! Puh-leez!”

Maggie's voice jerked Adam to a halt. His chest heaving, he stared down at his watch.

“Are you…all right?”

He didn't recognize the panting male voice, but guessed immediately it was the agent who'd trailed Maggie during her run.

“I'm…fine.”

“Are…you…sure, ma'am?”

She sucked in a rasping breath. “I'm sure.”

“But you…went down!” The man was still huffing. “That bus, when it backfired…I thought it was a shot. And you went down.”

“I thought…it was a shot, too. That's why I went down.” Chagrin, and the faintest trace of rueful laughter, crept into her voice. “I guess I'm a little jumpy this morning.”

Alone in the empty stairwell, Adam closed his eyes. His throat was so damn tight he couldn't breathe, cold sweat was running down his back, and Maggie was laughing. Laughing! With great
physical effort, Adam unclenched his jaw and headed back to the control room.

Joe Samuels, OMEGA's senior communications technician, stood with one big hand fisted around a radio mike.

“She okay?”

“She's okay. It wasn't a gunshot. A bus backfired.”

The grim expression on Joe's face eased, and his brown eyes lost their fierce glitter. “A bus!”

“A bus.”

The black man shook his head as tension drained visibly from his big body. “Well, with Chameleon, you never know.”

“No, you don't,” Adam replied, an edge to his voice that he couldn't quite suppress.

Joe's brows lifted in surprise at the director's acid tone, but he refrained from commenting.

“Get Jaguar on the net, would you? I'll give him a quick update before I go upstairs to the heliport.”

Nodding, Joe reseated himself at the communications console. An acknowledged expert in satellite transmissions, he'd been actively recruited by half a dozen major corporations when he left military service a few years ago. He could have named his own salary, strolled into work wearing tailored suits and vests and jetted across continents in sleek corporate aircraft. Instead, he'd joined the OMEGA team at about the same time Maggie had.

Adam was well aware of the bond between them. During long, tense days and nights in the control center, the technician worked his electronic magic to keep her plugged into whichever field agent she was controlling at the time. When Chameleon was in the field, Joe always arranged the duty schedules so that he manned the control center himself.

Adam suspected that their friendship might have been tested a bit lately, however. To Joe's disgust, his twins had developed a passion for Maggie's repulsive house pet. The boys begged to keep the reptile whenever she left town. They delighted in Terence's unique repertoire of tricks, particularly his ability to take out a fly halfway across a room with his yard-long tongue. Joe
had been visibly relieved when Maggie informed him she'd drafted her father for iguana duty this time.

While he waited for Jaguar to come on-line, Adam forced himself to relax his rigid muscles. Gradually the tension gripping his gut eased. In its place came a different and even more unsettling sensation.

For the first time in a long, long time, he'd reacted without thinking. Sheer animal instinct had sent him crashing out into the hallway. The last time he reacted like that had been in a dark alley outside a Hong Kong hotel. Eight years ago. Just before the night had erupted in a blinding explosion, and he'd dived for cover.

When he'd heard Maggie's surpised cry a few moments ago, Adam had felt the same as he had when the world blew up all around him.

With a wry grimace, he acknowledged that her cry had irrevocably, irretrievably shattered the detachment he'd forced himself to maintain all these years as OMEGA's director. The distance he'd kept between himself and Maggie Sinclair had narrowed to a single heartbeat. To the sound of a bus backfiring.

Adam refused to deny the truth any longer. He wanted her. With a need so fierce, so raw, it consumed him.

Thirty minutes, he thought, dragging in a slow breath. Thirty minutes until he met her at Andrews Air Force Base for the flight to California. Thirty minutes, and Adam wouldn't have to watch her from a half block away over these damned monitors. When they met at the airport, he promised himself, the “relationship” between the vice president of the United States and the president's special envoy would enter a new and very intimate stage.

 

“Thirty minutes!”

Sweat-drenched, her lungs on fire and her legs wobbling like overstretched rubber bands, Maggie stared at Lillian in disbelief.

“I thought our plane wasn't scheduled to leave until nine!”

“The White House command post called a few moments ago. There's another snowstorm moving in. The pilot would like to
get off before the front hits, if you can make it. I told them you could.”

The dresser jerked her mop of frizzy gray curls toward the bathroom. “You have seven minutes to shower and do your makeup. Your breakfast tray and travel clothes will be waiting for you when you get out. We leave the house at exactly oh-seven-twenty.”

“Were you ever in the Marines, by any chance?” Maggie tossed over her shoulder as she forced her vociferously protesting legs to carry her toward the bathroom.

Lillian snorted. “Before I came to work for Mrs. Grant, I ran a preschool. I'd like to see any platoon of Marines handle that. You'd better get it in gear.”

Maggie got it in gear.

She sagged against the shower tiles for two precious minutes, letting the steaming-hot water soak into her aching muscles, then soaped and shampooed with record-breaking speed. Thankfully, the vice president's short, stylish shag took all of ninety seconds to blow-dry. A slather of concealing foundation, a quick application of mascara and mauve eye shadow, a slash of lipstick, and she was out of the bathroom.

The sight of the VP's breakfast tray, with its single granola bar on a gold-rimmed china plate and its crystal goblet filled with a greenish liquid, stopped Maggie in her tracks.

“What's in that glass?” she asked suspiciously.

“Guava juice,” Lillian replied, bustling forward with a creamy wool pantsuit over one arm.

“
Guava
juice?” Maggie groaned. “Why couldn't your boss be a grease-loving biscuits-and-gravy Texan instead of a California health nut?”

Her mouth pursing, the older woman laid the pantsuit on the bed. She lifted the Kevlar bodysuit and dangled it in one hand.

“Maybe if you drank more guava juice and ate fewer biscuits,” she said, with patently false sweetness, “you wouldn't need this.”

Grinning, Maggie acknowledged the hit. That would teach her
to criticize Mrs. Grant to Lillian Roth! Intelligence hadn't understated the bond of affection between the two women.

“Drink your juice,” Lillian instructed. “We have exactly fifteen minutes to get you suited up and out of here.”

 

Fourteen minutes later, Maggie and Lillian descended the curving central staircase. After a hurried last-minute update by a staffer on the short speech she was to give tonight in L.A., she said goodbye to the various members of the staff who drifted out to wish the vice president an enjoyable vacation.

A car waited under the portico to take her and her small party to the naval observatory helipad. Gray, drizzly mist closed around the vehicle, almost obscuring the grounds, as they drove the short distance. Like an impatient mosquito, a navy-and-white-painted helicopter squatted on its circular pad, its rotor blades whirring.

Maggie, Lillian and Denise Kowalski, who would accompany the vice president to California, had no sooner strapped themselves in than the chopper lifted off, banked sharply and headed east. Maggie had flown out of Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland, just across the Potomac from Washington, many times. She settled back against the padded seat to enjoy the short flight and grab the first few moments of relative calm since Lillian had rousted her out of bed two hours ago.

“Have you seen this morning's
Post?
” the sandy-haired agent asked, raising her voice to be heard over the thump of the rotor blades.

“No.”

Denise held out a folded section of Washington's leading newspaper. “They did a whole center spread on your appearance at last night's benefit.”

“Really?”

Just in time, Maggie bit back the observation that she'd never thought of herself as centerfold material.

“The special envoy looks rather distinguished in black and white, doesn't he?” the agent commented mildly.

He looked more than distinguished, Maggie thought. He
looked devastating. Her stomach gave a little lurch when she saw the enlarged close-up shot of her and Adam. Or rather Taylor Grant and Adam. The photographer had caught them just as she emerged from the limo. Adam was holding his out his hand to help her out. Her face was in profile, but his was captured in precise detail. If Maggie hadn't remembered just in time that he was playing a role, the expression in his eyes as he looked down at her, or at Taylor—whoever!—would have caused a total melt-down of her synthetic corset. She stared at the picture, mesmerized, for several long minutes before studying the accompanying article.

The reporter covering the glittering gala had evidently found the VP and her escort far more titillating than the event itself. The story included several more shots of Maggie/Taylor and Adam, as well as a gossipy little side note about the fact that the wealthy, sophisticated special envoy was accompanying the vice president to her private retreat for two weeks. Judging by the way his eyes devoured the lovely Mrs. Grant, the reporter oozed, it should be a most enjoyable vacation for all parties involved.

Maggie might have agreed with her, but for the fact that sometime during this supposed vacation she hoped to lure a killer into the open.

She spent the rest of the short trip leafing through the thick
Post,
although she couldn't help sneaking repeated glances at the folded section in her lap. As she studied the shot of them getting out of the limo, the curious niggle of resentment she'd felt when Adam first took her hand last night returned.

Her lips twisted as she identified the feeling for what it was. Jealousy. Weirdly enough, she was jealous of herself.

She'd wanted Adam to look at
her
like that, to touch
her,
for so long. Almost as much as she'd wanted to touch him. But he'd held himself back, just as she had. Neither of them had been ready to acknowledge the attraction that sizzled between them, as electric and charged as a sultry summer night just before a storm. Neither had wanted to upset the delicate balance between their professional responsibilities and their personal needs.

Now they hovered in some kind of in-between state. That shattering kiss in the snow-swept garden, not to mention those sinful chocolates, had destroyed that balance forever. When this mission was over, when they stopped playing these assigned roles, they'd have to find a new level, a new balance. What that balance would be, she had no idea, but for the first time since joining OMEGA she was more excited about concluding an operation than about conducting it.

 

Adam's helicopter landed at Andrews Air Force Base a few moments before the vice president's.

Home to the fleet of presidential aircraft and the crews who flew and maintained them, Andrews was well equipped to handle the entourages that normally traveled with their distinguished passengers. Although the various craft used by the chief executive and his deputy were always parked in a secure area a safe distance from the rest of the flight-line activity, a well-appointed VIP lounge was only a short drive away.

Yanking open the helo's door, a blue-suited crew chief gestured toward a waiting sedan. “There's hot coffee in the lounge, sir, if you'd like to wait there. The driver will take you over.”