Just Like a Man (20 page)

Hannah, too troubled and befuddled to dwell on the last part of his statement, fixed on the first part instead. "What other ones?"

"The ones that are stuck inside your telephone, to the back of your china cabinet, under one of the basement stairs, inside the pencil holder on your desk, on the side of your medicine cabinet, and under the kitchen table."

She shook her head again, more slowly this time, unable—or maybe just unwilling—to process what he was telling her. "I don't understand. Someone's been listening to me? Without my knowledge?"

"Yeah," he told her, his expression harsh. "Not just here, but at school, too. There are a couple of these in your office."

"But—"

"And that's not all," he interrupted before she could say more. "Because there's something else you should know about, too," he added, moving this time toward the sofa.

He reached toward the picture hanging above it, a large oil-on-canvas reproduction of a bouquet of flowers, and plucked out something that had been affixed to the dark center of the sunflower in the middle. It had been positioned in such a way that it had looked like part of the painting, a shadow at the base of a petal. But even after Michael brought it to Hannah and showed it to her, she had no idea what it was.

Her face must have illustrated her confusion, because Michael told her, "It's a camera."

She glanced back up at him, wide-eyed, a sick feeling roiling through the pit of her stomach. "A
camera?"
she gasped. "Someone's been
watching
me?"

"No," he said, swiftly and firmly enough that she almost believed him. Almost. "The camera was never activated," he assured her. "I swear to you, Hannah. No one ever watched you like that." He opened his mouth to say more, but hesitated, as if he were considering something very carefully. Then, having evidently made up his mind, he said, "There's one in your bedroom, too."

"Oh, my God," she whispered, the sick feeling now swirling into her chest. And then, almost too afraid to ask, but knowing she had to, she said, "How did you know about all those?"

He met her gaze levelly, grimly. "I'm the one who put them there."

She felt as if the floor suddenly tipped forward at a ninety-degree angle, and she fell forward with it, staggering over to collapse onto the sofa before her knees buckled completely beneath her. "When?" she asked, amazed she could even find her voice.

"While you were at work one day," he told her.

She looked up at him, but his expression now was hard, impenetrable. He looked nothing like the man who had kissed her Saturday. God, had that only been two nights ago? "You broke into my house while I was gone?"

He didn't flinch once. "Yeah. I did."

"You were here when I wasn't?"

"Look, I'm sorry, Hannah," he said. But she could detect nothing apologetic in his tone. What he sounded was angry. As if he were the one who had a right to feel that way. With a casually tossed-off shrug, he added, "That's not the worst of it."

"Oh, goody, there's more," she managed. She wrapped her arms around her midsection and pulled her knees up before herself, effectively curling herself into a ball.

He blew out an exasperated breath. "I'm the one who's been listening to you, too," he told her, his voice gentling some. "It's how I knew you'd be home right now. I heard you tell your secretary you were leaving. But even if I hadn't, I was sitting in a van parked a block away from the school, eavesdropping. I saw you leave. I followed you here. You never even noticed me."

And did he actually sound as if his feelings had been hurt by that? she wondered. Golly. She hated to think she'd
hurt his feelings.
Especially after all the nice things he'd done for her.

So much for thinking his arrival at the house just after hers had been preordained by kismet. So much for inviting him into her home and her life and her heart. So much for being ready. So much for not being able to resist him. So much for making love with him.

Oh, God…

"I don't believe this," she said. "I don't believe this is happening. People don't get their houses bugged. That only happens in spy books and spy movies. Next you'll be telling me that's what you are. A spy."

When he said nothing in reply to what she had intended as a joke—albeit a not especially amusing one—Hannah glanced up at him again. And again, he was wearing that strange expression, the one that made him look dangerous and sinister and coarse.

And then he said, "Well, actually, if you must know…"

She couldn't quite stop the bubble of nervous laughter that erupted inside her then, and she clapped a hand over her mouth when she heard it, fearing it might just be the beginning of complete hysteria. But she removed it long enough to ask, "You're a
spy?"

He nodded. "I work…" He halted for a moment, then shrugged, as if to say,
What the hell?
"I work for OPUS."

She narrowed her eyes at him and dropped her hand into her lap. "OPUS?" she echoed. "What's OPUS? I've never heard of it."

"You're not supposed to have heard of it," he said. "Very few people have. And of those who have, ninety-nine percent of them only know about it because they work for OPUS, too."

"What is it?"

He smiled, a clearly forced and very uncomfortable smile. "If I told you, I'd have to kill you."

She didn't smile back. "If this plays out the way I think it's going to play out, you're already killing me."

Michael's smile—what there was of it—fell. "I'm sorry, Hannah. I can't tell you any more than I already have. As it is, I've violated a direct order by coming here and showing you that you've been under surveillance. And violating a direct order is something you just don't do in OPUS."

"Oh, no, you don't," she said, feeling some righteous indignation moving in on the bruising sorrow. "You're not going to come in here and show me this stuff and then say it's none of my business. Whatever's going on, I'm in it, too. And it's not like I volunteered," she reminded him. "I think I have a right to know, Michael,
what the hell is going on."

For a moment, she didn't think he was going to tell her anything more. He only stood in front of her, towering over her, glaring down at her as if all of this were somehow
her
fault. His dark eyes were furious, his jaw was set ruthlessly, and his arms were crossed impatiently over his broad chest. Finally, though, he relented, relaxing his stance, and he dropped down onto the sofa to sit beside her. Without even thinking about what she was doing, Hannah pushed herself back up again, then moved to a Queen Anne chair on the opposite side of the room. He duly noted her movement and seemed resigned to it.

"I guess you do have a right to know," he said, sounding exhausted now. "Hell, who am I kidding?" he added. "I don't pledge any more allegiance to OPUS these days than I pledge to the Mickey Mouse Club." He sighed wearily. "All right, I'll tell you. But, Hannah, what I'm about to say to you goes no further than this room. If they find out you've said anything to anyone, they can make you disappear."

Gee, that sounded ominous. "Disappear?" she repeated.

He met her gaze unflaggingly. "Like you never even existed before."

She swallowed hard, but nodded. "I won't say a word."

Her vow was evidently good enough for him, because he told her, "OPUS stands for Office of Political Unity and Security. We're an intelligence branch of the OSS."

"Like the CIA?" she asked.

He shook his head. "Not exactly."

"Like the FBI?"

He shook his head again. "Not quite. But we've worked in concert with both of those organizations."

"Well, gosh, Mr. Secret Agent Man, that just makes it all crystal clear," she said sarcastically.

He sighed again, sounding very, very tired. "I wish I could tie it up in a simple package for you. But the fact is, even people who work for OPUS don't always know what we are. What
they
are," he quickly corrected himself. "I'm actually working for them now as sort of a consultant."

"Now?" she said, confused again. "So you're not really employed by them full-time?"

"Not anymore. But OPUS used to be my career. My calling," he told her. "There was a time when that was all I was. An operative for OPUS. I started off analyzing numbers and bank accounts and such, looking for anything that might suggest terrorist stockpiling of money or what have you. Then I worked very briefly in the field. After that, and for the biggest chunk of my employment, I worked for the part of the organization that analyzes the information gathered by other operatives. Operatives in OPUS work in partnerships. Two people to a team. One is a field agent, and the other mans the equipment. The computers, the files, the radios, the Internet, whatever's available. My partner would go wherever there was a threat, and he'd gather whatever information he could and feed it back to me. I'd take what he found and make the connections, find the patterns, fill in the blanks. I'd put the puzzle pieces together until they made a picture. Then I'd send that picture to the guys upstairs, and they'd decide what action to take, if any, and who would take it."

"And who were those guys?" Hannah asked, trying to digest everything he was telling her, but making sense of only bits of it.

"I can't tell you," Michael said. And before she could ask why not, he told her, "Because I don't know who they are. Nobody at my level did." Then he tilted his head to the side, a gesture of concession. "Okay, actually, that's not entirely true. One person at my level did find out who the big boys were. And then he blackmailed every last one of them for a boatload of money, said he'd reveal their identities and the identities of other operatives to the world unless he was paid outrageously well. So they paid him. And then he disappeared. For years. He resurfaced this past spring, and we've been watching him since then. He's done his best to look like a normal citizen, going to work every day, collecting a paycheck, buying a home, doing all the things regular people do. But this guy, Hannah, he's not regular. He's not normal. He's up to something."

"What's he up to?" she asked. "Can you at least tell me that?"

He shook his head. "Not because you're not entitled to know. Because
we
don't know. Not yet. That's why I'm here. They pulled me out of retirement because I know this guy better than anyone. We're reasonably certain that whatever he's up to, it has something to do with the presidential debates later this month. But we can't quite pin down what that something is."

"But what does this guy have to do with
me?"
she asked. "Why has my house been bugged?"

"Because you know him," Michael said. "And we needed to find out if you knew him in a way that was anything other than casual."

Okay, now she was
really
confused. "But how do I know him? I don't know anyone outside the Emerson Aca—" She halted right there, panic seizing her. "It's someone at school, isn't it?" she said, terrified to think that Emerson might be caught in the middle of something dangerous, something menacing. That her children and her coworkers might be at risk. That even Alex—

Oh, God, Alex, she remembered then. "That's why you enrolled Alex at Emerson, isn't it?" she asked. "It wasn't because he was a bad fit at his last school. It was because you… because this OPUS thing… needed some way to get into the school environment."

Two bright spots of red stained his cheeks at her supposition, and Hannah knew she was right.

"My God, Michael, you brought your own son into this? Put him at risk? He's only nine years old. You really are a ruthless sonofa—"

"Alex has
never
been at risk," he interrupted her angrily. "I would
never
do anything to put my son in danger."

Oh, sure, Hannah thought. Lots of fathers enrolled their kids in schools where they knew there was criminal activity. Specifically
because
there was criminal activity. And if Michael had used his own son to get at whoever this guy was, he sure as hell wouldn't have any qualms about using Hannah, too. Obviously he
wasn't
the kind of man she'd assumed him to be. He really was a ruthless sonofabitch.

And then another thought struck her. All those things Alex had said about his family, about his father being able to hack into all those computers, and his mother's disappearance… considering what Michael had just revealed, could Alex have actually been telling the
truth'!

She looked at Michael. "So if you used to be a spy," she backtracked for a minute, "then does that mean Alex's mother really
did
mysteriously disappear five years ago after being force-fed an untraceable toxin bioengineered by an arcane band of rogue spies in some Eastern European country that I was fairly certain didn't exist? Was she a spy, too? Is that why it happened?"

"Ah, actually," Michael said, "that was just a case of food poisoning brought on by some bad pate at the Russian embassy in Paris. But yeah, Tatiana did disappear into a Parisian hospital for a few days. She came back totally fine," he hastened to reassure her. "And, yes, she was a spy, too. Originally for her own country, but then she came to work for us at OPUS."

"Tatiana?" Hannah repeated. "That was really her name?"

Michael didn't seem to think it particularly significant. "Yeah. She was born in Russia."

Of course, Hannah thought. Where else would a glamorous spy wife be born? She developed a quick mental picture of flowing platinum hair that swept over one eye, wet red lipstick, and a long cigarette holder from which curls of wispy white smoke rose. Tatiana had probably dressed in black leather and been able to toss back enough vodka to send lesser men under the table. She'd probably always had a stiletto tucked into her spike-heeled boots.
Dahlink,
she'd probably called Michael.
My little babushka,
she'd probably murmured from the other side of the bed after they'd spent hours and hours steaming up the sheets upon their return from a dangerous assignment. Had to get rid of all that extra adrenaline somehow, right?

And why in God's name was she thinking about stuff like this?