Poison Evidence Read online

  He turned to his boss and his ultimate employer and shifted to covert operative mode. He had a mortgage and a reason to live now. These men were important to the goal of meeting the first obligation and enjoying the second.

  Cressida had coached him on how to greet guests. In his old life, he’d never had guests—at least, not in his real home. “Cream or sugar?” he asked.

  “No coffee for me,” Alec said.

  Keith took his coffee black. Ian poured himself a mug and settled at the kitchen table with his boss and his employer.

  They each sat on the edge of their chairs, bodies pitched forward. Ready to spring into action and easier to converse in low voices.

  “What’s going on with Ivy?” Ian asked.

  “This is a side job I’m offering you,” Alec said. “Not a Raptor mission. Paid for from my personal bank account.”

  To the best of Ian’s knowledge, Rav was a straight arrow. He’d backed out of Raptor as the law required and left management in Keith’s hands without batting an eye. Legal and ethical to a T. Ian couldn’t help but cock his head toward the man who funded his newfound homeownership and happiness and ask the direct question. “Why?”

  “Because it is personal. And this has nothing to do with government contracts. I ran it by Curt. He thinks I’m legally clear, and even if I’m not, I’m finding it hard to give a fuck. An assassin abducted my cousin. I want Ivy home.”

  Years of training to control body language couldn’t compete with Rav’s revelation. Ian’s spine shot to the upright position. “Parker Reeves is an assassin?”

  “Russian enforcer. Known as the Hammer. Heard of him?”

  Acid flooded Ian’s stomach. “Shit. The ball-peen guy?”

  Keith shot him a look.

  Ian ran a hand over his face, stopping himself from sharing gruesome details he’d learned when he’d been working a Russian informant years ago. He cleared his throat and grunted. “Yeah. I know of him.”

  Rav’s nostrils flared, giving Ian the impression his employer had already heard the rumors and more. “This is a private job,” he repeated. “You can say no. But if you say yes, you’ll be well paid. I’m renting a jet from Raptor.” He smiled at the notion of renting a jet from himself. “It’ll be ready to roll in two hours. First stop is Washington State to pick up Luke Sevick.”

  “Why me?” Ian couldn’t help but ask. Sevick was the one who knew Reeves. Ian was primarily acting as an analyst and interpreter these days, giving Keith his informed opinion on how to run ops in the Middle East, in addition to providing tradecraft training at the Virginia compound.

  “First, because we need someone who speaks Russian and Arabic—Hill’s people are involved,” Keith said. “And second because we figure the best way to catch a spy is with a spy.”

  Ian agreed. But Parker Reeves wasn’t just a spy, he was the Hammer, which changed everything. As an ally, he’d be an ace in the hole. But as an enemy? To the best of his knowledge, no one had ever faced the Hammer and lived to tell the tale.

  When it came to bringing the assassin in, all bets were off.

  “Sevick’s on board with this?” he asked.

  Keith nodded. “Luke is the one who called me with a plan to bring Reeves in.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  “When I isolate this layer”—Ivy keyed in the command, and the other map layers disappeared from the display—“you can see the mangrove swamp that edges the island, but nothing else. Perfect for calculating the disappearing habitat and monitoring the effects of global warming, but there are other applications as well.”

  Dimitri smiled. She was lit from within after hours at the computer, completely engrossed in her work. It was clear that for her, the images on the screen were as alive as if she were astral projecting herself into the swamp that edged an island two miles away.

  He was utterly fascinated with how she brought such passion to what was for most a cold, data-derived universe.

  How bizarre to be so utterly captivated by a person just days before what was sure to be his end. Was this love? He couldn’t rule it out, and could only assume that if it was, maybe he was open to the emotion now, knowing his time was limited, where he’d been closed off before.

  “Have you killed people?” Her question had left him cold, but it was his cop-out answer that filled him with shame.

  “Spy and assassin aren’t the same thing.”

  No. They weren’t. Yet he was both.

  Would Ivy take comfort knowing all his victims had been Bratva? Mafiosi who trafficked in guns, drugs, and people? He was an old-school enforcer. The Hammer. His boss just happened to be his government.

  He’d cry no tears over the men he’d killed—the world was better off without them. But still, without the benefit of judge or jury, he’d acted as executioner, and he had enough of a moral code to know that was wrong.

  Would it matter to Ivy that he’d become an assassin to stop his sister from being raped and tortured again? Or was it more worrisome that he’d been so damn good at it? After the first three, a cold mantle had settled over him, and he no longer felt remorse for the act. That should raise Ivy’s alarm bells if she wasn’t already repulsed by his second career.

  He’d selected only one victim himself. He’d taken out the man who’d made him into an assassin to begin with. It wasn’t wise to force a man to be a killer, because once stripped of that part of his humanity, it had been so easy to set his sights on his puppet master.

  He’d had to wait years for the opportunity. Sophia had contacted him in the usual manner and told him of the rape. But this time, the man was out of favor in the shadow organization. Unprotected. And so Dimitri had taken him out.

  It was the only kill he’d…enjoyed wasn’t the right word, but it was on the continuum. There’d been satisfaction.

  And now he’d killed for Ivy. There hadn’t been enjoyment in that either. Just necessity. No regrets.

  But the underlying fact was, he was a killer who operated outside the conventions of war or rule of law. He didn’t even have a 00 license to make it palatable to American and European audiences.

  Ivy MacLeod would be repulsed when she learned the truth, which meant he needed to keep her from that knowledge for as long as possible. They had to work together to find the AUUV so she could get her life back and he could save his family.

  And he was wasting time lusting after her and acknowledging that just once in his short life, he wanted something real, to have a soul-deep connection before he left this earth.

  “Have you killed people?”

  And all he could do was give a chicken-shit answer. “Spy and assassin aren’t the same thing.”

  In deflecting her question, he’d made it impossible. There could be no soul-deep connection without her knowing exactly what he was. But she could never give herself over to an assassin.

  So instead, he sat next to her as she worked her magic, flying the drone in the dead of night, collecting data. Her cheeks flushed with the thrill of seeing her life’s work performing optimally. His hard-on a perpetual, dull ache as everything she did turned him on.

  “Can you isolate other plants?” he asked.

  “Yes, as long as I can extract the infrared signature of the flora, as I did with mangroves in this climate and the different grapes in the drought study. The infrared camera captures the temperature and emissivity—the thermal radiation—and other data points that make up the signature. Once I have the infrared signature for a plant in a certain climate and setting, it’s just a matter of training CAM on what to recognize, which is part of the calibration process.”

  She clicked a few buttons, and a different layer appeared. He recognized it as the first data she’d collected after launching RON hours before. The screen showed a scale 3D map of the chamber they were in. The lower chamber, with the pool and underwater tunnel, were also shown, but in less detail. “It’s easy to strip off the trees to find the rock,” she said, “and the void, where this chamber i
s, was easy for the Lidar to spot. It gets harder with the lower chamber, because the limestone is thicker. But this cave can be used calibrate CAM to recognize others like this one—where the rock is thick and the cave drops deep and flows under the water. Once CAM learns this, just like he can learn the thermal radiation of mangroves or grapevines, then when CAM comes across another area that reads like this one, he can extrapolate that he’s identified a cave.”

  “He. You slip between ‘it’ and ‘he’ with CAM.”

  Her flush deepened. “I can’t help but anthropomorphize him. It. Whatever.”

  “To me, CAM would be a woman. Because CAM is you.”

  “No. Not me.” She gave a hard laugh. “But maybe, sometimes, who I’d like to be.” She frowned. “I suppose that sounds nutty.”

  He shrugged. “Who wouldn’t want to fly and see through walls?”

  “Put that way, it sounds like CAM is Superman. I should have named it Kal-El.”

  He laughed.

  She tapped the power meter for the drone on the computer screen. “Time to bring RON back.”

  “In the morning, I’ll set up the solar panels. There’s a place at the top of the island where they’ll catch the sun, but there’s enough cover to disguise them if there’s a flyover searching for us.”

  She nodded even as she yawned. “I collected enough tonight to be able to calibrate for our search. Tomorrow, we’ll grid out the areas that are the most promising and start there.”

  Our search. He was such a fucking sap to find pleasure in hearing her say that.

  If Ivy could forget the events leading up to her current situation, she’d feel like she was living a fantasy. She was stranded on a deserted island in the tropics with a hot man, and the project she’d poured her heart into over the last five years was working better than she’d ever imagined.

  CAM and RON worked. Together, her software program and her hardware drone collected and processed data seamlessly. What would have once taken months—or even years—now took only a few hours to produce maps that should be impossible.

  If only she had a printer. Then she could hold the end result in her hands and lick it. She cast a glance sideways at Dimitri and considered licking him instead.

  Yeah, he was more fun to lick than paper. Well, most things were more fun to lick than paper. But it wouldn’t be just any paper, it would be a seamless land/sea map created by CAM.

  But on the Dimitri side of the equation, licking him would be simple fun. Maybe it was wrong, but at this point, she knew at his core, he was protecting her. Without him, she’d either be dead or hostage to a terrorist group.

  Maybe she should feel ashamed of the attraction, but she was tired of the world telling her how she should feel. She’d had enough judgment from total strangers when Patrick was arrested.

  It didn’t help that all she had to do was close her eyes and she remembered how Dimitri had felt inside her. He’d awoken her libido, and now she craved him like a drug.

  She’d start with his neck and work her way down. His pecs and abs would garner special attention, but they would just be stopovers on the way to his cock.

  She wondered if he’d submit to scan by RON. Dimitri’s body would be her pièce de résistance. The ultimate merge of art and chart.

  And oh, how she would study his contours. The peaks and valleys of muscles and their attachment points, the rise of his broad nose, the cleft in his chin, the hollows under his cheekbones. The scar that bisected his brow. Each slope and mark told a story, just like her beloved maps.

  Most noticeable was what wasn’t there, that sad lack of lines around his eyes and mouth. She loved making him laugh, because she wanted to believe he had enough time left to put humor lines on his face.

  He fascinated her as much as the images on her computer screen.

  Maybe even more so.

  Which made her wonder who she’d become that this man who’d abducted her felt more an ally than the fine folks at the DIA who’d set her up for a nightmare without so much as a heads-up. A simple “Hey, you might run into some terrorists who are after the same thing we haven’t told you we’re sending you to find” would have sufficed.

  Getting to hear a terrorist describe how he planned to rape and torture her had been a special treat.

  Really, it was no wonder Dimitri felt like her only safe option. He’d at least set up a secure place for her to work and had seen to her comfort in his thoughtful provisioning of the cave.

  She rolled her shoulders. She’d been sitting at the screen for too long, tweaking the data layers as only a human could. CAM was good, but she still needed to teach him how to zero in on the different plant species.

  “I need to go out. Walk around a bit. Get some sunlight,” she said. “I may as well check the solar panels.”

  “I’ll go with you.”

  “I’d like to go alone.” Here was his chance to prove she wasn’t a prisoner.

  He frowned at her, then gave a sharp nod. “Take a gun, then. Just in case.”

  Yeah, if only the DIA had said that, she might trust the bastards to get her out of this mess. As it was, she had no intention of letting Dimitri keep the AUUV once they found it, but she at least trusted him to protect her until that moment.

  Then of course, all bets were off.

  She donned a holster to carry the gun at the small of her back and grabbed a water bottle before setting out. She crawled through the tunnel and stepped into the dappled sunlight. The salt breeze just reached her through the canopy.

  She took a deep breath and turned her face toward the sun. She’d been on this island for over twenty-four hours now. If she could just forget the circumstances that brought her here, this would feel like paradise. But watching a man’s brains get blown out before he became shark food had a way of sticking with her.

  Would she ever know that man’s name or how he was aligned with the other factions? Was he with Patrick’s cell, or had he represented Russian interests?

  Was Dimitri—even unknowingly—working for the same man the dead man had been working for?

  She’d known spies and assassins weren’t the same thing, having become well versed in spy terminology over the last several months as she tried to understand what Patrick had done and why. Most spies were informants, people who were recruited by agencies like the CIA to collect and pass on information about their governments. Dimitri had described his role as Parker Reeves, which had been more in the vein of the sleeper spies deployed by the old Soviet Union, but with modern technology keeping him in touch with his Russian handlers.

  He’d made his life sound tame until all hell broke loose last fall.

  But somehow she found it hard to believe Dimitri could settle for tame.

  Ivy brushed aside branches and vines and made her way to the small clearing where the solar panels for CAM and RON were set up. After checking the power meter, she flopped on the ground and closed her eyes. If Dimitri was right about the size of the search grid, it would take three to five days—or rather nights—for RON to fly over and collect data.

  Their schedule was simple: gather data until one or two in the morning. Sleep six to eight hours, crunch data for four to five, then send out RON again two hours after sunset.

  It was possible this would all be over in five days. Sooner if they got lucky.

  She didn’t want to think about what would happen then. Much as she wanted out of this situation, the actual ending of it scared the hell out of her.

  Dimitri believed he would die. He was certainly facing prison in the US. But what would Russia do to him if he went back there?

  He’d killed a Russian to protect Ivy. Sure, the man had been actively shooting at him at the time, but still. What if they were ostensibly on the same side?

  She glanced around the clearing. Covered by trees on all sides, only aircraft could find her here, and it would be impossible for Dimitri to approach without her hearing.

  She pulled out the satellite phone she’d
managed to grab and tuck in the holster with the gun. Her fingers hovered over the keypad. Should she call Curt and give him a full update?

  Dimitri had told her everything he knew about finding the AUUV. She no longer needed him. Except for protection.

  They’d be here for a few days at least. All she had to do was call Curt, give him their GPS coordinates, and a team of SEALs would come to her rescue.

  But what would happen to Dimitri?

  She knew in her gut he’d never survive the confrontation. Not that the SEALs would gun for him, but because he might have a death wish.

  She needed to know more about his situation, more about who he was protecting and why. Without that information, it was too soon to call Curt.

  Later, maybe she could call Alec. He could send a team of Raptor operatives who could help her bring Dimitri in alive.

  He’d known she’d take the phone. Hell, it was what any sane person would do. He could have stopped her, but she wasn’t his prisoner anymore, and he wanted her to know that.

  So here he was, stuck in the cave, giving Ivy the freedom to destroy him and trying to decide if he should be packing up CAM to flee to another island.

  He should have asked her to track down Luke’s phone number. It was time for a direct conversation.

  He paced in the lower part of the cave, antsy. He was usually so good at reading people, but he was at a loss for what to expect from Ivy. But then, she’d surprised him at every turn.

  He’d expected her to be smart but also cold. Calculating. Potentially in league with her ex. But she’d been charming and engaging and innocent.

  Then he’d expected her to collapse in the mangrove swamp in hysterics. Instead, she’d gone after CAM with a coolheaded understanding of her dangerous situation.

  Then she blew his mind by begging him to take her in the shower.

  The twists of the funhouse ride kept coming at her, but each time, Ivy MacLeod met it and demonstrated a different kind of strength than he expected from her in that moment, whether she was pulling a gun on him or taking charge and shutting down the transmitter.