Kiss Me While I sleep (36 page)

She shrugged out of the leather coat and went with him into the bathroom. She’d have liked a long soak in the tub, but was afraid she’d fall asleep, so she settled for a shower. Refreshed, she put on clean underwear and one of his shirts, and a pair of socks so her feet wouldn’t get cold. The room was untidy, with clothes scattered everywhere, but she wasn’t in the mood to pick them up, and other than hanging up his leather coat-he had to take care of that coat-evidently neither was he. Instead, after pulling on a pair of pants and nothing else, he opened the duffel bag and began testing the bars of Semtex.

The good bars went on one side of him, the bad ones on the other. After all the bars were out of the duffel, there were only five bars that were too old to be used. “We’re okay,” he said. “There’s enough of the good stuff. I allowed for some of it to be bad, just in case.” He began packing the good bars back into the duffel.

Lily nudged an old bar with her toe. “What are we going to do with these?”

“I guess putting them in the trash might not be too smart. The only way I know of to dispose of plastique is burn it or blow it up, so I guess we’ll have to take them with us to the laboratory, try to detonate them with the others. Even if they don’t blow, they’ll burn in the fire.” He had acquired a combination tool-knife, pliers, miniature saw, and she didn’t know what else, all in one handy-dandy implement that was banned on all airlines-and he used the blade to notch the old blocks so he wouldn’t get them confused with the others. Then he replaced them in the duffel, and stowed the duffel on the top shelf of the closet.

“I hope the hotel’s too classy to have nosy maids,” he said, then yawned. “I could use some sleep. How about you?”

Lily had gotten progressively sleepier since getting out of the shower, and his yawn triggered hers. “Fading fast. What’s our next step?”

“Detonators, radio controlled. We’ll have to be a safe distance away when I set off the charges, and running hundreds of yards of det cord all through the lab might make someone suspicious. Once we have the hardware, then we’ll work on the peripherals: the business cards and coveralls, the van. They won’t be that hard to get, and a magnetic sign on the side of the van will take care of the customization.”

“There’s nothing else we can do tonight, then.” She yawned again. “I definitely vote for bed.” Now that the adrenaline rush was gone and the bout of earthy sex had relaxed her, she felt as if her bones were turning rubbery. She turned toward the bed and left him to take care of the lights. She was so tired all she did was pull off her socks; then she fell into bed.

She was vaguely aware of him peeling her out of his shirt, then skimming her panties down and off. She could have slept comfortably in both, but liked being naked in his arms. She sighed as he got into bed and cuddled her close to him. Her hand drifted across his chest. “Love you,” she mumbled.

His arms tightened around her. “I love you, too.” She felt his lips brush her temple; then it was lights-out for her.

Swain lay awake for a long time that night, holding her close and staring into the dark.

On Saturday, D-day, Lily took her time in front of the makeup mirror. The disguise had to be as good as she could make it, or this wouldn’t work. If Dr. Giordano spotted her, all bets were off.

Her options had been either to cut her hair short and dye it or to buy another wig. She didn’t mind coloring her hair, but she didn’t want to cut it as short as a man’s unless there was nothing else to be done. Luckily, very good wigs were available in Paris. The one she bought was longish for a man, but not inordinately so. Nor had she wanted to duplicate the brown color she had used as Denise Morel, or her own blond color. That left black or red. She had opted for black, as it was a much more common color than red. In fact, most of the world’s population had black hair. Over the wig she wore a cap printed with the initials of the fictitious security company Swain had invented, Swain Security Contractors, SSC. He had gone with an American name, since there was no way he could convince anyone he was anything but American.

She had practiced with the latex of the sort used in movie makeup. She was nowhere near as good as a makeup artist, but she didn’t have the luxury of years of practice to perfect her technique. She could widen her jaw a tad, build up the bridge of her nose so she had a classic Roman profile instead of a near-beak-which was the only way she could think of to disguise her profile, which was every bit as distinctive as her eye color-darken her brows and lashes, and add the mustache to hide her full upper lip. She had decided against building up her brow ridge, because she never could get it right and al-ways looked Neanderthal. Dark brown contacts-darker than the hazel brown she had worn as Denise Morel-and wire-framed glasses completed the facial disguise. She had to be skillful with the base that colored the latex the same shade as her skin, because she didn’t want anyone to notice that she was wearing makeup.

She had even covered the tiny holes in her pierced earlobes with the latex. A man might have one ear pierced, might even wear an earring to work, but most men definitely did
not
have both ears pierced. She supposed some did, but she didn’t want anything about her to attract attention.

The cold spell that had ushered in December was still with them, which was a blessing. To hide her figure she had wound a wide elastic bandage around her breasts, and the dark blue coveralls she wore were loose enough to disguise the shape of her hips. The weather was cold enough that she added a lightweight fiber-fill vest over the coveralls, and that last touch completely hid her figure. Thick-soled work boots with lifts added three inches to her height.

Her hands were a problem. Her nails weren’t polished and she had clipped them very short, but her fingers were slender and undeniably feminine. Because of the weather she could wear gloves while she was outside, but what about inside? She couldn’t help Swain plant the charges and keep her hands in her pockets at the same time. The best she could do was use blue eye shadow to outline the veins on the backs of her hands and make them look more prominent and, as a crowning touch, add adhesive bandages to two of her fingers to give the impression that she sported the nicks and cuts of someone who did work with her-his-hands.

At least she wouldn’t have to talk much. Swain was the mouthpiece; she was the labor. She could pitch her voice into a lower register, but that was hard to maintain. To coarsen her voice for when she
did
have to talk, she had forced herself to cough enough to irritate her throat.

Swain, of course, thought her hoarse voice was sexy. She was beginning to think she could sneeze and he would find it sexy. As often as he’d made love to her over the past week and a half, she suspected he’d lied about his age and was really just twenty-two, with premature gray in his hair. Not that his attention wasn’t flattering; in fact, she soaked it up like a plant starved for rain.

However, it wasn’t as if they hadn’t been doing anything other than going at it like bunny rabbits. Either Swain had a talent for locating the sleazoids in the city, or he had some really questionable acquaintances. While Lily-always disguised-had handled the peripheral things they needed, such as locating a van that fit their requirements and having two magnetic signs made, getting the business cards printed up as well as forms with very official-looking technical checklists on them and “SSC” at the top, clipboards, a variety of tools, their coveralls and boots, Swain had been associating with some very rough characters in order to buy the detonators they needed.

He had wanted to build the remote control himself, something he said was easily done with the remote-control system from any radio-controlled toy-such as a car or an airplane, available in any good toy or electronics store-but decided that using a custom control would look more professional, so he had forked over the money required, and bitched about the cost for days.

Then, going by the information contained in the blueprints, he had set about determining where the charges should be placed, and how strong they should be. Lily had never really thought about demolitions from a mathematical standpoint, though she’d known Averill had taken pride in calculating the strength of his charges to exactly what was required to do the job, and nothing more. Swain had explained it all, reeling off numbers as if they were general knowledge: this much Semtex would do this much damage. He used the terms
plastique
and
Semtex
interchangeably, but when she asked, he acknowledged that they weren’t exactly the same. C-4, plastique, and Semtex were all in the same family of explosives, but
plastique
was the more widely known term and was used ail-inclusively, but incorrectly. Lily hated when details were wrong; too often her life had depended on getting the details right, so she insisted he say Semtex when he meant Semtex. He’d rolled his eyes, but humored her.

He’d spent hours showing her how and where to place a charge and set the detonator. The detonator was the easy part, but he was very particular about where the charges went. He had numbered the locations, then prepared the charges for each and labeled each charge with the number corresponding to where he wanted it to go. They had studied until they could reel off each location and its number without hesitation, memorized the blueprints, then driven out into the country, where he had marked off the distances to give them a better feel of the size of the complex and how long the job would take.

The good news was, they had a cover for being in the complex. The bad news was, depending on what they found when they got in there, placing all the charges could take a couple of hours or more. The longer they were in there, the better the chance of discovery. Swain was safe; Lily was not, especially if for some reason Rodrigo showed up. He would know from Damone that “security experts” were touring the facility, and he might be curious. If he did appear, Swain would handle the meet-and-greet while Lily busied herself elsewhere and hoped Rodrigo wouldn’t insist on meeting the other “expert.”

Dr. Giordano was the other danger, as far as recognizing Lily was concerned. Likewise, she would try not to attract his attention, though that would be more difficult. After all, the facility was his and his work was his pride and joy. He would be very interested in Swain’s opinion of the security measures in place. Since Swain was supposedly the owner of SSC, he would be more the focus of attention than Lily, but she couldn’t hope to escape completely.

Neither of them had forgotten that this was to be Dr. Giordano’s last day on earth. Lily remembered how kind he’d been to her when she’d been so ill, but at the same time she knew he was at the heart of an evil scheme. So long as Giordano was alive, the knowledge of how to mutate a virus so it would pass from human to human could be used to produce a pandemic. If not avian influenza, then it would be something else. Viruses were deadly enough without his help. The pandemic might occur anyway, at any time, but she’d be damned if she would let it be deliberately timed so someone would make a lot of money.

The plan was, after the charges were set, they would hold a mock bomb-threat drill, timing how fast the buildings could be emptied. When everyone was outside, Swain would detonate the charges and almost simultaneously Lily would execute Dr. Giordano. The percussion and fire from the explosions would certainly cause panic, perhaps some injuries. They themselves would slip in earplugs before detonation, and make certain they were standing behind something for shelter. In the confusion they would get into the van and drive away-they hoped. Nothing was taken for granted.

A luxury hotel wasn’t the best place they could have chosen to prepare explosive charges. Everything had to be tidied away every day before the arrival of the housekeeping service, and they didn’t want to put the charges in the van as they were completed, in case the van was broken into. The last thing in the world they wanted was some punk in possession of that much Semtex.

“Are you ready, Charles?” Swain asked.
Charles Fournier
was the name they had chosen for Lily. Swain got such a kick out of it he’d been calling her Charles even when they were alone.

“I think this is the best it’s going to get,” she said, getting up from the vanity and pirouetting for him as best she could in the heavy work boots. “Do I look okay?”

“Depends on your definition of ‘okay,’ ” he said. “I wouldn’t ask you out on a date, if that’s what you mean.”

“That’ll do,” she said, satisfied.

He grinned. “I don’t even want to kiss you. That mustache gives me the willies.” He had just finished packing the charges, some in the duffel bag and some in a box. The detonators were in a separate box, and as a precaution he’d taken the batteries out of the remote control.

He was dressed in coveralls that matched hers, with
SSC
embroidered on the left breast pocket, but underneath he wore a white dress shirt and a tie, to denote he was the boss and draw attention his way. The coveralls were unzipped enough to reveal the tie, and they were loose enough to hide the line of the shoulder holster he wore. She had opted for her familiar ankle holster, though with these boots, getting to her pistol was more difficult than usual. They weren’t entering a fast-draw competition, though; when the time came, if everything was working right, she’d have plenty of time to pull her weapon.

He carried the duffel bag and the box containing the charges, while she carried the box with the detonators. They had the elevator to themselves, but they didn’t indulge in any small talk, or go over the plan one more time. They each knew what they had to do.