No Hiding Behind the Potted Palms! A Dance with Danger Mystery #7 (23 page)

I set the pans and dishes on
the long expanse of quartz counter, trying to keep the utensils
from scattering. The paring knife fell to the floor, and as I bent
over to retrieve it, I heard a familiar voice call to
me.

“Kim, where are you?” It was
Tom -- the fake Tom, the man who supposedly died at the hands of
the head of the criminal gang. I ducked behind the kitchen island,
hoping to hide. With my fingers curled around the sheath of the
paring knife, I held it tightly, thinking I might be able to use it
to defend myself. “Come out, come out wherever you are! We have
some unfinished business, Kim.”

Tom came around the corner,
handgun gripped in his right hand. He smiled a mirthless smile when
he saw me cowering there.

“Perfect. Here we are, all
alone. Your boyfriend won’t be back in time to save
you.”

“What do you want?” I
managed to stutter.

“You were a very naughty
girl,” he announced. “You lied to me. You had that spice box the
whole time.”

I didn’t like the tone of
his voice. The hair on the back of my head was standing on end as I
crouched, and I knew he meant to harm me. The thought of meeting
the same fate as the Robacher family chilled me to the
bone.

“Get up,” he commanded. When
I hesitated, he tsk-tsked me. “The more trouble you cause me, the
worse things are going to go for your boyfriend.”

“I don’t have a boyfriend,”
I insisted. As he talked, I slipped the paring knife into my
pocket, grateful that I had the good sense to keep the sheath for
it.

“Oh, please! You think I
didn’t watch you two playing footsie at the Chateau de Mont
Beaulieu?” Tom’s eyes glinted as his silken voice let the words
hang in the air.

“Why?” I didn’t expect him
to answer the question, but I needed to ask it anyway. “Why are you
doing this?”

“Don’t play innocent with
me, Kim! You forget I know you!”

“What are you talking
about?” I was truly baffled. He took a couple steps closer to me
and snatched my wrist tightly with fingers that closed on it like a
vice.

“You ruined everything! It’s
your fault!”

“What are you talking
about?” I recoiled, terrified by the intensity of his anger. “What
did I ever do to you?”

He took a deep breath and
exhaled through his nose, clearly disgusted with me. His mouth was
grim as he spit out his words.

“Thanks to you, I lost five
million dollars!”

Chapter Eleven
--

“I don’t understand!” I
cried, feeling frantic as he twisted my arm higher and higher,
until it felt like it would pop out of its socket.

“I was going to sell that
damn technology to al Qaeda and you ruined it!” He shoved me across
the room, sending me into the wall. “All Robacher had to do was
give me the damn program!”

“What program?” I couldn’t
help myself, even though I knew it would only make him angrier.
“What are you talking about?”

“Vanguard Advanced developed
a classified program to help doctors and bomb technicians defuse
human bombs! Al Qaeda was planning a terror campaign and I was the
man who was going to help them succeed, and you ruined it! You had
to drag your boyfriend in. You had to get him involved!” Clearly
Tom was irrational. This was crazy talk. “Now everything is
ruined!”

I struggled to break free of
Tom’s hold and that’s when he struck me across the face. As I fell
backwards, I struggled to stay on my feet. That’s when Tom grabbed
my left wrist.

“What’s this,” he demanded,
“a gift from your new lover?”

I saw his eyes on the charm
bracelet Mac had given me and that’s when I realized he had gone
over the edge. The rage in his eyes blazed hard and I knew he would
stop at nothing to punish Mac for winning my heart. It mattered not
that Mac was in love with someone else. Tom was bent on revenge.
Any moment now, Mac would return. And when he did, he would be
walking into an ambush. I couldn’t let that happen. The imposter
gave me another hard shove, this time into the refrigerator. I felt
the impact of my bones against the cold, hard stainless steel
before I crumpled to the floor.

“I’m going to enjoy killing
the bastard!” Tom sneered. “I’m going to make you
watch!”

With a sudden burst of pure
fury and desire to protect the man I love, I rose to my full height
of five and a half feet, paring knife unsheathed. I lunged at Tom’s
right hand with the blade, catching his wrist with a downward
slicing motion. The handgun clattered against the limestone floor
tiles. I slashed at him again and again as he tried to fight me
off, and when I saw him tuck himself to avoid my knife, it was time
to get out of there. That’s when I took off running, desperate to
get away from the furious assassin.

“You bitch!” he screamed at
me. “I’ll kill you!”

I headed to the front of the
house. I turned the lock and threw open the front door, scurrying
down the six steps and racing to the street. Tom was close on my
heels when the Jeep pulled into the driveway. Mac threw the SUV
into park just as I stumbled and fell. Even as I hit the ground, I
heard three shots rang out in succession and then there was
silence. As I lay face down on the ground, hot, burning tears
filling my eyes, I gave myself up to my fate. With Mac dead, I
didn’t care if I lived or died. Feet crunched across the shell
driveway. I steeled myself for Tom’s vindictive blows.

“Kimmy!” It was Mac. He was
alive. “Thank God!”

Strong arms swept me up off
the ground and enfolded me in a tender, but firm bear hug. As our
eyes met, I saw the unspoken words in Mac’s eyes, and I suddenly
knew the spark between us was real. For a fleeting moment, I could
imagine Mac’s lips hard on mine, filled with desire and desperate
longing. But then the dream passed and we

“Oh, dear, sweet Kimmy! What
did that monster do to you? I’m so sorry! I should have never left
you here alone!”

“How could you know?” I
wondered. “How could any of us know what a monster like that was
capable of doing?”

Twenty minutes later, the
phony Tom’s body was covered with a sheet as we waited for the
responders to finish taking their measurements and to secure the
evidence. I waited in the living room, kept company once again by
Julie Amano. She was kind to me, offering to make me a cup of tea.
I wasn’t thirsty or hungry, so she sat with me.

“I’d tell you I know how you
feel,” she told me, “but I’ve never seen anything like this in the
six years I’ve been a government agent. It borders on the
bizarre.”

“Thanks for being honest,” I
replied. “I was starting to think this kind of thing was normal for
you people.”

“Honey, there was nothing
normal about this case!” she grimaced.

I thought about what she
said as I sat in a chair, staring out the window. It was true. What
made Tom so angry? Mac came back into my life. Mac got the
investigation rolling, asking questions and reaching out to his
friend. Somehow Tom had gotten wind of it.

Why did the phony Tom fake
his own death? Why was it so important for him to disappear? All
his talk about the real Tom Robacher and the battlefield simulation
training made no sense to me. What did Tom mean when he said al
Qaeda would launch human bombs, and what was the Vanguard Advanced
program to defuse these?

It sounded like crazy talk
until Mac explained the finer points to me. We were sitting in the
living room after everyone had packed up and left.

“Al Qaeda is always looking
for new ways to deliver suicide bombs. Vanguard Advanced was
developing strategies to counteract these efforts, looking at
potential uses of products and technologies that might be deployed
in a suicide bomb attack, in order to figure out ways to neutralize
them.

“That all sounds so very
James Bond to me,” I confessed. “Absurd and unreal.

“Let’s say that a suicide
bomber is given an explosive fuel in a container that can be
swallowed. If the container can be dissolved or they use something
like a wax plug, do they have the means to take two volatile
substances and put them together inside the human body? It might
mean people can board aircraft or enter public buildings without
detection and blow themselves up. Kimmy, consider the types of food
containers currently being made out of sugar cane. They break down
the same way garden waste does. Can the process be speeded up? Look
at how you clean your dishwasher. The cleaning liquid goes through
your dishwasher with a wax plug. When the hot water hits it, the
dishwasher gets clean. Are terrorists trying to use this
information to create a ‘smart bomb’ inside a human being? As long
as terror groups like al Qaeda are developing new ways to arm
suicide bombers, we have to consider the ways to prevent them from
being successful.”

“Do you think it’s even
possible?” I asked Mac, horrified at the thought.

“Honestly? There are a lot
of crazy people out there with some pretty crazy ideas. Yes, I do
think that terrorists would pay just about anything to be able to
succeed.”

“Five million dollars,” I
said.

“What? Mac’s eyes were on
me, searching me for information, so I shared Tom’s comment about
how I cost him a fortune. Mac shook his head, disgusted.

“We’re still trying to
identify him. So far, no luck. We don’t even have a nationality for
the guy. My best guess? Tom was a spy, maybe for the Russians, but
he went rogue on this one. Maybe he started out on a government
assignment, to obtain information on the Vanguard Advanced program,
but then he decided to share it with the highest bidder. He would
have known that al Qaeda or one of its offshoots would have paid
just about anything to know how to protect the suicide
bombers.”

“So, why not just get the
information, give it to the Russians, and then sell it to the
terrorists?” I wondered. “Why did he fake his own
death?”

“Maybe that’s exactly what
he planned to do, but the Russians got word of it. They would have
sent their people to stop him. He would have been hunted all over
the world. Giving us a body meant that he was able to disappear,
especially once he got his hands on that five million
dollars.”

Three days later, the
Russians identified the fake Tom as Arkady Romanoff, but only after
they confiscated the money in his Swiss bank account. It turned out
that he had previously leaked information to al Qaeda and other
terror organizations and was paid handsomely for it.

“Mac,” I asked him, after
hearing the explanation for it, “why did he use the spice box, the
charm bracelet, the doll, and the automaton? Why not just memorize
the account number? Or keep it in a special cloud account online?
Why give me those things as gifts, if they were marked with the
numbers?”

“It’s the kind of thing
professional spies do. They can’t keep the bank account number with
them, because they never know when they’re being watched. By
breaking it up, by not memorizing it, they can’t spill the beans if
they get caught.”

“But why did Tom give me the
gifts? Why not just keep them at his place?”

“The good guys and the bad
guys would have gone over his place with a fine-tooth comb. If they
found all four items, they would have spotted the
pattern.”

“I still don’t understand
why he picked me. He lived all those years while posing as the real
Tom Robacher. Why?”

“You really want to know? It
was all his cover. If things went south, things might get blamed on
the real Tom Robacher. Vanguard Advanced would just assume they had
a bad apple in the bushel. But as for you, he picked you for all
the right reasons. It’s because you’re a sweet, decent girl. He
counted on that. He expected you to hold onto those things out of
sentimental value, so they’d stay safe in your custody, and he
assumed that anytime he needed them, he could talk his way back
into your life. He figured he would always be able to get his hands
on those items. But you changed on him.”

“That’s why he was so angry
with me,” I sighed. “He kept calling you my new
boyfriend.”

“I was his competition,” Mac
agreed.

“I kept telling him that we
weren’t a couple, but he didn’t believe me.”

“We’re not a couple?” Mac’s
brown eyes narrowed. “Wow, that’s cold.”

“What?”

“I thought I mattered to
you,” Mac glared at me. “I thought you cared about me. Was it just
my imagination?”

“But you’re getting
married!” I cried. “You told me yourself!”

“To you!”

“To me?” I was
confused.

“Kimmy, why do you think I
bought this place? Why do you think I asked you to look after Mae
for a year? It was all part of my plan to convince you to marry me!
Mae was going to help me while I finished off my last assignment
for Interpol.”

“But you don’t even love
me!” I said accusingly. After all, he acted like my almost brother,
not a man in love. And he’d had those other wives, which I pointed
out in no uncertain terms.