She had paid penance for the last five years and lived alone with memories that no one else shared. She might whisper Dallas's name in her thoughts, or sometimes when she was alone the grief would well up and she would say his name aloud, an aching, unanswered cry, but she hadn't been able to talk about him with anyone.
But Medina had known him, had been there. He would understand. He was, of all people, the only one who would fully understand.
She hadn't resisted letting him drive her home; her guilt wasn't his fault. Maybe she needed to talk to him, to put this part of the past behind her. She might have already done it, had she known how to contact him, but after they reached Paris he had vanished.
Lacing her hands in her lap, she stared out the windshield as the dark streets wound by. She wondered if Dallas would love her now, if he would even recognize the woman she had become. He had fallen in love with a gutsy young woman who'd had a taste for adventure. Those days were over, though. She was through taking risks.
"I never thanked you," she murmured. "For what you did."
His eyebrows lifted in surprise, and he slanted a quick look at her. "Thank me?"
She got the impression he wasn't just surprised, but astounded. "For getting me out of Iran," she explained and wondered why she needed to. "I know I was a liability coming out." Basket case was actually a better description. Long patches of those days were lost from her memory; she couldn't remember leaving the hut at all. She did remember walking through the cold, dark mountains, her emotional misery so intense that she hadn't felt any physical pain.
"I promised Dallas."
The words were simple, and ironclad.
It hurt to hear Dallas's name spoken aloud. In five years, not a day had gone by that she hadn't thought about her husband. The terrible pain was gone, replaced sometimes by an ache, a loneliness, but mostly she remembered the good times she'd had with him. She regretted that they hadn't had more time together, that they hadn't had the chance to learn all the little things about each other. Hearing his name brought back the ache, but it was softened now, gentled into something bearable, and she could hear the regret in Medina's voice. What time hadn't softened was her own guilt, the knowledge that Dallas wouldn't have been on that job if she hadn't wanted to take it.
And perhaps she wasn't the only one who felt guilty. Medina, under whatever guise, struck her as a man who would do what was expedient and then forget about it, but he hadn't. He had taken care of her, just as he had promised Dallas, when leaving her to freeze to death in the mountains would have been much easier. She couldn't imagine what had motivated him, but she was deeply grateful all the same. "Do you think I blamed you?"' she asked softly. "No. I never did."
Again she had surprised him. Looking at him, she saw the way his jaw tightened. "Maybe you should have," he replied.
"Why? What could you have done?" She had relived that night a thousand times on the hard journey to accepting reality. "We never could have gotten him out of the plant alive, much less out of Iran. You knew it. He knew it too. He chose to complete the mission and chose a quick death over a slow, terrible one." She managed a crooked smile. "Like you with your cyanide pill."
"I'm the one who told him to push the button."
"He would have done it no matter what you said. He was my husband, and I knew when I married him that he was a damn hero." She had known the type of man Dallas was, known that he would feel he had to complete the job at all costs, and that cost had included his life.
Medina fell silent, concentrating on his driving. She gave him directions on the next turn; she lived in McLean, on the same side of the river as Langley, so the commute was easy.
Once before she had sat beside him as he drove through the night, and he had been silent then, too. It was after Hadi had "liberated" a 1968 Ford Fairlane from the Iranian village, and they had driven into Tehran together. Then Hadi had split off, and she and Medina had gone on alone. She had been feverish and aching, battered by grief and guilt, barely functional.
Medina had taken care of her. When the nail wound in her arm became infected, from somewhere he procured a vial of antibiotic and gave her an injection. He made certain she ate and slept, and he got her across the border into Turkey. He had been there during the first awful paroxysm of grief and hadn't tried to comfort her, knowing that weeping was better than holding it in.
All in all, she owed this man her life.
Blaming Medina would have been easy, much easier than blaming herself. But the inner steel that had attracted Dallas to her in the first place made it impossible, after his death, for her to do anything but face the truth: When Medina approached her and Dallas about the job, Dallas wanted to decline. She was the one who wanted to take it. She could tell herself that the job had been important, and it had been, but there had been others Medina could have recruited if she and Dallas had turned him down.
Yes, Dallas had been very good at explosives. She was very good with electronics, whether it was putting together a functional radio or detonator or bugging a phone line. But other people were also good at those things, and they would have done the job just as well. She had wanted to go, not because she was indispensable, but because she craved the adventure.
As a child she had always been the one to climb highest in the tree, to tie bed sheets together and use them to slide down from a second-story window. She loved roller coasters and white-water rafting and had even toyed with the idea, during high school, of working on a bomb squad. To her parents' relief she had instead begun studying electronics and languages, only to find that her expertise took her farther away from home and into more danger than she ever would have gone with the local bomb squad.
Niema knew her own nature. She loved the thrill, the adrenaline rush, of danger. She had been seeking that thrill, though in pursuit of a legitimate goal, and she had gotten Dallas killed. If not for her, they would have been looking for a home on the North Carolina coast, as Dallas had wanted.
If not for her, Dallas would still be alive.
So she had given it up, that high-voltage life she had so loved. The cost was too high. Dallas's last thought had been for her, and that knowledge meant too much for her to carelessly put her life in jeopardy again.
Medina pulled up to the curb just past her driveway, then reversed into it so the car was heading out. House key in hand, she got out of the car. Dallas had also parked so the car was heading out, too, a simple precaution that allowed for faster movement and made it more difficult to be blocked in.
Funny how she hadn't thought about that in years; she simply pulled into the garage, as millions of other people did. But Medina's method of parking brought so many things back to her in a rush: the sudden alertness, the clarity of her senses, the quickened pulse. She found herself looking around, examining shadows and searching with her peripheral vision for movement.
Medina had done the same thing, his surveillance much faster and routine.
"Damn it," Niema said irritably and marched up the sidewalk to the curved archway that sheltered her front door.
" 'Damn it,' what?" He was beside her, moving silently, positioning himself so that he reached the archway first. No assailants lurked there, not that she had expected any. She just wished she hadn't noticed what he was doing.
"Damn it, I spend half an hour with you and already I'm looking for assassins in the bushes."
"There's nothing wrong with being alert and aware of your surroundings."
"Not if I were Secret Service, or even a cop, but I'm not. I just fiddle with gadgets. The only thing likely to be lurking in my bushes is a cat."
He started to reach for her house key, but she stopped him with a look. "You're making me paranoid. Is there any reason for all this?" she asked as she unlocked the door herself and opened it. Nothing sinister happened; there were no shots, no explosions.
"Sorry. It's just a habit." She had left a couple of lights on and he looked inside, his expression interested.
"Would you like to come in? We didn't get around to drinking any of the coffee at Vinay's house." Until she heard the words, she hadn't known she was going to invite him in. They weren't exactly on easy terms, though to tell the truth she was surprised at how easy it had been to talk to him. Still, he was John Medina, not a steady, reliable, respectable bureaucrat who had just taken her out to dinner.
He stepped inside, his head up and alert, his gaze moving around, absorbing details, watching as she opened the hall closet door and disarmed the security system. She had the sudden impression that he could describe everything he had seen in that brief sweep, and perhaps even tell her the security code.
She started to close the closet door and he said, "Humor me. Reset the alarm."
Because he had good reason to be acutely security conscious, she did.
Niema had bought the house three years before, when a hefty raise had given her the means to buy instead of rent, even with the outrageous property values around D.C. It was too big for one person, with three bedrooms and two-and-a-half baths, but she had justified the size by telling herself she would have space for her family to come visit, though they never had, and that the three bedrooms would make it easier to sell if she ever decided she wanted something else.
The house was vaguely Spanish in style, with arched doors and windows. She had painted the interior walls herself, choosing a soft peach for most of the house while her furnishings were dark green and turquoise. The carpet was an undistinguished beige, but it had been in good shape, so instead of replacing it she had covered it with a large rug in a geometric pattern of greens, blues, and peaches. The effect was cool and welcoming, feminine without being fussy.
"Nice," he said, and she wondered what conclusions he had drawn about her by seeing the way she had furnished her house.
"The kitchen is this way." She led the way, turning on the overhead light. She loved her kitchen. The room was long, with a bank of windows on the right wall. A long, narrow island topped with a mosaic of blue and terra-cotta tiles provided a wonderful work area for any cooking project, no matter how ambitious. Small pots of herbs grew on the window sills, lending their fragrance to the air. The far end of the room was a cozy breakfast nook, the small table and two chairs flanked by lush ferns.
She began making coffee, while Medina went to the windows and closed all the blinds. "Doesn't it get old?" she asked. "Having to always be on guard?"
"I don't even think about it now, I've done it for so long. And you should close the blinds anyway." Hands in his pockets, he strolled around the kitchen. Pausing in front of the block of oak that held her knife set, he pulled out the chef's knife and tested its edge on his thumb, then returned it to its slot. His next stop was the back door, the top half of which was glass; he closed the blinds there too and checked the lock.
"I usually do. I don't believe in inviting trouble." As soon as the words were out, she realized her own lie. Trouble didn't come any bigger than John Medina, and inviting him in was exactly what she had done.
"You need a stronger lock here," he said absently. "In fact, you need a new door. All anyone has to do is pop out one of these panes of glass, reach in, and unlock the door."
"I'll see to it first thing in the morning."
The dryness of her tone must have reached him, because he looked over at her and grinned. "Sorry. You already know all that, right?"
"Right." She took down two cups from the cabinets. "The crime rate in this neighborhood is low, and I do have the security system. I figure if anyone wanted in, they could break any number of windows and get in through them, not just the ones in the door."
He pulled one of the tall stools away from the island and propped one hip on it. He looked relaxed, she thought, though she wondered if he ever truly was, given who he was and what he did. She poured the coffee and set one cup in front of him, then faced him across the tiled island top. "Okay, now tell me why you drove me home, and don't say it was for old time's sake."
"Then I won't." He seemed to be lost in thought for a moment as he sipped his coffee, but whatever distracted him was quickly gone. "How undetectable is this new bug you've developed? Tell me about it."
She made a face. "Nothing is totally undetectable, you know. But it doesn't cause a fluctuation in voltage, so an oscilloscope can't pick it up. If anyone swept with a metal detector, though, that's a different story."
"Frank seemed excited about it."
Niema was immediately wary. "It isn't that big a deal, because like I said, it's good only in certain situations. If you know how someone routinely sweeps for surveillance devices, then you can tailor the bug to fit. Why would he even mention it to you?" The bug had useful applications, but it was far from being an earth-shattering discovery that was going to change the face of intelligence gathering. Why would the deputy director of operations even know about it, much less call her to a meeting at his private residence?
"I asked how you were doing. He told me what you've been working on."
Her wariness turned into outright suspicion. Okay, it was feasible that Medina would ask about her, but that didn't explain why Vinay would know anything at all about her, much less anything about her current project.
"Why would the DDO know anything about me? We work in totally different departments." The vast majority of CIA employees were not the glamorous operatives of Hollywood fame; they were clerks and analysts and techno nerds. Until Iran, Niema had craved the thrill of fieldwork, but not now. Now she was content to work on the electronics side of intelligence gathering and come home to her own house every night.
"Because I asked him to keep tabs on you."
The bald admission astonished her. "Why would you do that?" She didn't like the idea of someone constantly checking up on her.
"I wanted to know if you were all right, plus I never lose track of someone whose expertise I might want to use again."
A chill ran up her spine. Now she knew why he'd driven her home; he wanted to draw her back into that world she had walked away from when Dallas died. He was going to figuratively wave a shot of whiskey under an alcoholic's nose, lure her away from the straight and narrow. He couldn't do it unless she still had the old urge to find that adrenaline rush, she thought in growing panic. If she had truly changed, nothing he could say would entice her away from the safe life she had built.
She thought she had changed. She thought the hunger for excitement was gone. Why, then, did she feel so panicky, as if the smell of adventure was going to make her fall off the wagon?
"Don't you dare ask-" she began.
"I need you, Niema."
Chapter Seven.
Damn it, why hadn't she remarried? John thought savagely. Or at least gotten herself safely involved with some steady, nine-to-five bureaucrat?
He had stayed away from her for a lot of very good reasons. His job wasn't conducive to relationships. He had brief affairs, and nothing resembling an emotional attachment. He was away for months at a time, with no communication during those times. His life expectancy sucked.
Moreover, he had thought he would be the last person on earth she'd ever want to see. He was staggered to realize she didn't blame him for Dallas's death, had never blamed him. Even though she had never trusted him, she didn't lay that at his door. It took a person of excruciating fairness to absolve him of all blame as she had done.
He had learned not to agonize over the choices he had to make. Some of them were hard decisions, and every one of them had left their mark on his soul, or what was left of it. But other people seldom saw things the same way, and that, too, he'd learned to shrug off. As his father's old friend Jess McPherson once said, he was hell on people. He used them, exploited them, and then either betrayed them or simply disappeared from their lives. The very nature of his job demanded that he not let anyone get dose enough to touch him emotionally. He had forgotten that once and let a woman get close to him; hell, he had even married her. Venetia had been a disaster, both professionally and personally, and in the fourteen years since he had been strictly solo.
Several times during the past five years he had been relieved that Niema Burdock probably hated his guts. That put her safely out of his range and killed the occasional temptation to get in touch with her. It was better that way. He would just check on her now and then, make certain she was all right-after all, he'd promised Dallas he would take care of her-and that would be that.
He had expected her to find someone else. She was young, only twenty-five when she was widowed, and both smart and pretty. He had wanted her to find someone else, because that would put her forever out of reach. But she hadn't, and he was through with being noble.
He wasn't giving her any more chances.
But she would run like hell if he simply asked her out. He would have to play her gently, like taking a world-record trout on gossamer line, never letting her feel the hook that was reeling her in until it was too late for escape. On his side was her own nature, the adventurousness she seemed determined to bury, and a very real situation that needed to be finessed. Weighed against him was the fact that, despite the uneasy bond forged between them in Iran, she didn't trust him; he'd always known she was smart.
Frank had asked her to his house on a bogus excuse, in a well-meant but awkward attempt to do a little matchmaking. Well, maybe it had worked. And maybe the excuse wasn't so bogus after all. John's mind raced, weighing risks and benefits. He decided to go for it.
"Delta Flight 183 was sabotaged. The FBI labs have turned up traces of explosive, but no detonator. The stuff seems to be a new, self-detonating compound, probably based on RDX and developed in Europe."
She put her hands over her ears. "I don't want to hear this."
John moved around the island and took her hands down, holding her with his fingers wrapped around her slender wrists. "Anything in Europe goes through an arms dealer named Louis Ronsard. He lives in the south of France."
"No," she said.
"I need you to help me get into his files and find out where the stuff is made and who has already gotten a shipment of it."
"No," she said again, but with a touch of desperation in her voice. She didn't try to pull away from him.
"Ronsard is susceptible to a pretty face-"
"Good God, you want me to whore for you?" she asked incredulously, dark eyes narrowing in dangerous warning.
"Of course not," he snapped. No way in hell would he let Ronsard, or anyone else, have her. "I want you to get an invitation to his villa so you can put a bug in his office."
"There are probably a thousand people in this city alone who could do that. You don't need me."
"I need you. Of those thousand people who could do the work, how many of them are women, because I can guarantee you no guy is going to catch Ronsard's interest and get invited to his villa. How many? Twenty, maybe? Say a hundred. Ronsard is thirty-five; how many women out of that hundred are roughly his age? And out of that number, how many of them are as attractive as you?"
She jerked on her wrists. John merely tightened his hold, while taking care not to hurt her. She was so close he could see the velvety texture of her skin. "You speak French-"
"I'm rusty."
"You'd pick it up again in no time. I need someone who's young, pretty, speaks the language, and has the skill. You meet all the qualifications."
"Get someone else!" she said furiously. "Don't try to tell me you couldn't find a contract agent who met all your criteria, someone who wouldn't know your real name. You make it sound like I'm some Mata Hari, but I've never done any undercover work at all. I'd probably get us both killed-"
"No you wouldn't. You've been on other ops-"
"Five years ago. And I just did technical stuff, not any role-playing." She added coldly, "That's your forte."
He let the slam roll off his back. After all, she was right. "I need you," he repeated. "Just this once."
"This once until something else comes up and you decide you 'need' me again."
"Niema..." He rubbed his thumbs over the insides of her wrists in a subtle caress, then released her and stepped away to pick up his coffee cup. He had pushed her enough physically; now was the time to back off and give her back control of herself, so she wouldn't feel as threatened. "I've seen you work. You're fast, you're good, and you can build a transmitter from pieces of junk. You're perfect for the job."
"I went to pieces on the last job."
"You had just heard your husband die." He didn't mince words and saw her flinch. "You're allowed to be a little shell-shocked. And you kept up anyway, we didn't have to carry you."