Takedown (An Alexandra Poe Thriller) (9 page)

“You speak Farsi, too?”

“My mother was Iranian. She made sure to teach me.”

He studied her carefully. “Yes, I see it now. She must have been very beautiful.”

Alex wasn’t sure why his gaze made her uncomfortable, but it did, though not in a bad way.

“And did the FBI accept you?”

“Not even close. They rejected me outright.”

He frowned. “Why?”

She took out one of the butterfly bandages and ripped open the wrapper. “That’s another long and boring part,” she said, the edge creeping back into her voice, “and I’d rather not get into it, if you don’t mind.”

“We can stop talking altogether, if you prefer.” He gestured to the wound. “You have my life in your hands.”

She laughed and started applying the first bandage. “Trust me, this little thing isn’t even close to life threatening. You probably won’t even feel it in a day or two. I doubt it’ll leave a scar.”

He let her work for a moment, then said, “If you don’t mind my asking, how do you go from Legal Studies and Anthropology to working as a…fugitive retrieval specialist?”

“Simple. I met a guy at a party, we got to talking and hit it off.”

“A boyfriend?”

She laughed again. “No. Turned out he’d been doing trace work for a bondsman, but wanted to strike out on his own and needed a partner. With my background and training, he thought I might be a good fit.”

“I suppose in a profession like that, being a woman has its advantages.”

“Being a woman always has its advantages.” She finished up and patted his bare chest. “And it looks like my work here is done.”

Gathering the wrappers, washcloths, and first-aid kit, she got to her feet, but before she could take a step, Gérard grabbed hold of her wrist. It was a gentle enough move, but most men would have regretted making it.

“There’s no hurry,” he told her. “I’m too wired to sleep. Stay for a while. Talk.”

She looked around the bedroom. “In here?”

He gestured to the doorway. “We can go out to the sitting room if you like. I wouldn’t want you to get the wrong impression.”

He was smiling again. She thought for a moment, then set the washcloths and first-aid kit on the nightstand.

“No,” she said. “This is fine.”

Then, in a move that surprised
her
even more than it did Gérard, she climbed onto the bed and kissed him.

He didn’t seem to have any trouble kissing her back.

Now here she was, lying in the dark, still unsure what had possessed her to climb into his bed in the first place.

Maybe it was simple. Maybe at that moment she had needed to be close to someone. Maybe his charm and drunken attempt at gallantry and her own attempts at playing nursemaid had gotten all the right synapses firing and the rest was inevitable.

Whatever the case, it was done, and she needed to get the hell out of there. And when Gérard came back for more, assuming he would, she’d explain that everything from here on out was strictly business. She just wanted to make this deal and go home.

When it came down to it, he probably wanted the same thing.

After pushing the sheet aside, she carefully extricated herself from the bed and searched the floor for her clothes. She found her jeans and underwear lying on one side of the room, her T-shirt on the other, and didn’t remember removing any of them.

Jesus, Alex. What are you, an animal?

She heard Gérard stir and suddenly felt vulnerable standing there in the buff. She got dressed as quickly as possible, scooped up the mugger’s gun from the dresser, and tucked it in her waistband. Tiptoeing over to the nightstand, she kept her gaze on Gérard, then quietly slid open the drawer, and removed a pad and pen, both stamped with the Largo Inn logo.

She stood hunched over the pad, pen ready, trying to figure out what to write. She got as far as
Dear Thomas
and stopped, ripped off the sheet and crumpled it in disgust before returning the pad and pen to the drawer.

After checking to make sure she wasn’t leaving anything behind, she went to the door and let herself out.

When Alex was gone, the man who was calling himself Thomas Gérard opened his eyes and reached for his mobile phone on the nightstand. Punching in a speed-dial number, he climbed out of bed and went to the window overlooking the hotel’s front parking lot.

He waited through three rings before the line came to life and a voice said, “Yeah?”

“She’s leaving the hotel.”

“Why so early?” A hesitant pause. “You think we’re blown?”

Outside, Alex Poe emerged from the hotel entrance and crossed toward her car, her hair a clear victim of the night’s acrobatics.
 

“Judging by the way she climbed all over me, I highly doubt it.”

“Just be careful,” the voice said. “She’s a fierce little bitch.”

“In more ways than you’ll ever know, but she’s a lot more vulnerable than she lets on. And
she
isn’t the one who cut me.”

“Hey, you wanted it realistic, remember? A little blood goes a long way.”

Gérard touched the bandages on his rib cage and pushed out a dry, humorless laugh. “That’s easy to say when it isn’t your blood.”

A
LEX
HAD
TURNED
off her cell phone in Gérard’s hotel room, and now discovered she had five new messages waiting for her—two texts and three voice mails.
 

All from Jason McElroy.

Given that it was the middle of the night, she was tempted to call him right then and hang up once she knew she’d awakened him, but the prudent course was to continue ignoring him. Whatever the asshole was hot to talk about could wait until she was back in civilization.

She wasn’t being obstinate. Well, maybe she was, but when it came down to it, she got no joy from working for the guy. It was a relationship of convenience and little else, and after the mix-up in Istanbul, she wasn’t anxious to hear what he had to say.

Stonewell International was a large, highly respected, multinational security firm that, among other things, specialized in black ops fugitive retrieval. If you wanted someone found and wanted it done off the grid, Stonewell was first on your list. As long as you could afford the fee, of course.

Last year, McElroy had gone to great lengths to bring Alex into the fold. He had only succeeded because he’d had information she wanted: the identity and location of someone who’d had recent personal contact with her father. Someone who might know his whereabouts.

Nearly a dozen years ago, her dear old dad, Colonel Francis Edward Poe, had been branded a traitor by the US government for reasons that had never been clear. Most of his file was classified, and Alex’s attempts over the years to dig up the truth had resulted in a big fat zero. But she knew one thing for sure: her father was not
a traitor. She didn’t argue that he had changed after her mother’s death, but he had always been a good soldier, and betraying his country was simply not in his DNA.

Alex had all but given up trying to find him when McElroy approached her. His scheme was simple. He wanted Alex to bag a known terrorist who was temporarily being held under an assumed name at a woman’s prison in Crimea. All Alex had to do was pose as an inmate, gain the woman’s confidence, and break her out of the place—a task that had proven difficult but not impossible.

Unfortunately, the end result had not been a rendezvous with her father, as Alex had hoped, and the only thing that kept her working for Stonewell was McElroy’s promise that she had full use of the firm’s data network to aid her in correcting that result.

But Alex was no longer the naive eighteen-year-old who had joined the army in hopes of finding the old man. She knew Frank Poe was a considerable prize that someone like McElroy could use to help feather his cap, so she had no illusions about her and her boss’s relationship. He was exploiting it as much as she was, and would use whatever information she managed to uncover to find Frank Poe for himself.

All she had to do was beat him to it.

Shortly after three a.m., Alex pulled her rental car into the carport under the Shimmy Shack, still feeling the sting of her impulsiveness. She couldn’t deny the sex had been good, but her ability to fall into bed with a guy she’d known for less than three hours left her worried about her sense of self-preservation.

For all she knew Thomas Gérard was a serial killer.

As she climbed out of the car and started up the steps, she again thought about the treasure box and the website link and the wedding video and wondered if he’d had something to do with them. It didn’t seem likely, but what if she had been betrayed by his charm and good looks and her own damnably fragile psyche since she’d found that photograph?

She was halfway up the steps when all thoughts of Gérard abruptly vanished.

The Shack’s front door was ajar.

Though she’d been upset when she left, she knew she’d locked it, so this could only mean one thing: the intruder was back.

Son of a bitch.

Quietly reversing course, she returned to the car and retrieved the mugger’s gun from the glove box. There was sand on the weapon, but she brushed it off and tucked it into her waistband, then went around to the rear of the house to see if the sleeping bag was still on the ground.

It was.

Okay, so what did that mean? Had he not had a chance to retrieve it before he saw her pull in? Or, if he was still upstairs, had he even seen or heard the car at all? That was certainly a possibili—

A muffled crash from above.
 

There was no
if
about it. Someone was definitely up there, and she’d be damned if she’d let him get away.

She moved through the darkness to a set of wooden steps that led up to the patio—the same steps she and Danny had taken to the beach every day. Switching to stealth mode, she ascended them quickly and quietly, hoping the weather-punished wood wouldn’t creak under her weight. It did, but only faintly, and she doubted it could be heard inside the house.

When she reached the top of the stairs, she peered through the sliding glass and saw nothing but the silhouettes of the den sofa and chairs. She took out her keys and unlocked the door, slid it open just wide enough to fit through, then pulled the gun from her waistband and slipped inside.

Movement. She definitely heard movement. Coming from the front of the house.

She stepped into the hallway, pressed her back against the wall, and worked her way toward the living room. She was halfway there when she heard the sound of running water coming from the kitchen.

She paused long enough to pull her cell phone from her pocket and call up the flashlight app, but didn’t activate it. She edged her way down the rest of the hall and made the turn into the kitchen.
 

Raising the gun and phone simultaneously, she switched on the flashlight and said, “Move and you’re a dead man.”

There was a loud yelp and a guy in a suit stumbled back against the counter, a wet cloth in one hand, the right leg of his pants rolled up to reveal an almost hairless shin with a nasty red cut in the pasty white flesh.

“Jesus, Alex, it’s me! It’s me!”