Cindy Dees - Hot Intent

Alex supposed he ought to be grateful for the man’s honesty. In return, he took a deep breath and did a difficult thing. He extended tentative trust to his boss. “Peter indicated that he already has a mole inside Doctors Unlimited. Besides me.”

André leaned forward hard, staring. “Who?”

“No idea. But he’ll vet any information I pass him against this other mole’s intel.”

“Sonofabitch.”

The two men stared at each other in grim silence. Eventually Alex asked, “Have you picked up any new employees recently?”

“You mean besides you and Katie?”

“Could it be someone in the wider government umbrella?” Which was a delicate way of asking if D.U.’s handlers at the CIA were infiltrated. Doctors Unlimited, technically a nongovernment aid organization, covertly reported to the CIA what its staff observed overseas.

“Possibly. I picked everyone for this outfit by hand. It’s my operation.”

Alex frowned. “Has someone done deep background checks on your staff recently?” He added lightly, “Someone impartial?”

André swore under his breath. “Who do I pick for the job? What if I pick the mole?”

Alex understood the man’s dilemma. The hardest thing to do as a spy was to find someone, anyone, to trust. It was a world built upon lies within lies within lies.

“Will you do it?” André asked abruptly.

“You have no way of knowing if I’m a mole or not at this point. For all you know, I am working for my father.”

“You’re a known risk. Everyone else here is now officially an unknown.”

Alex blinked, startled. André had just put him on notice not to trust anyone else at D.U. “How do you want to handle the list for my father?”

“Give me a day to review where everyone is placed right now. Based on where our assets are at the moment, we might be able to hand over a snapshot list.”

Alex nodded. “Let me know when you’re ready, and I’ll hack into your system and pull a copy of it.”

“Our computer security’s pretty tight around here.”

Alex just smiled gently.

“Has anyone ever told you you’re a scary bastard?” André blurted.

“Once or twice.” His first week in prison at the ripe old age of twenty-four, he’d all but killed three Russian-mob strongmen to make the point to the rest of the inmates that he was not to be messed with. For the remaining four years of his DUI incarceration—and more to the point, avoiding recruitment into the FSB by his father—not another soul had laid a finger on him. His father had been a proponent of shock-and-awe since long before it was an official strategy of war. Yes, indeed. Peter had taught his son well how to instill fear in those around him.

Except for Katie. None of his tactics had ever worked on her. For some inexplicable reason, she insisted on loving him in spite of all his worst behavior. God, he hoped that never changed.

It went without saying that his investigation of Doctors Unlimited would be entirely off-book. Which meant he needed to head home to begin his work. He collected Dawn and left, already planning his approach.

When he opened the condo’s front door, loud, off-key singing emanated from the kitchen. He smiled indulgently. Katie had a lot of wonderful qualities, but perfect pitch was not one of them. “We’re home!” he called out.

Katie rushed into the living room, most of her shirt dusted in flour. She planted a light kiss on Dawn’s cheek and a rather more carnal one on his mouth. “You’re just in time to taste-test the first edible batch of cookies. C’mon. I need your opinion. More chips or not?”

“Ahh. So that’s the slightly burned smell coming from my kitchen.”

“Be nice. Your oven runs hot and I had to figure out how to set the oven on the first pan of cookies.”

Suppressing a burst of what he would label amusement if he allowed himself to feel such things, he trailed after her as she hurried back to the kitchen, all energy and laughter and golden hair. He took the proffered cookie, which turned out to be as warm and sweet and gooey as its creator.

“I see what all the fuss is about. That’s tasty,” he admitted.

“Have you never had a warm chocolate chip cookie fresh out of the oven before?” she demanded.

“Never. My father and I didn’t cook.”

“You poor, deprived man!”

She stood on tiptoe to plant a chocolate-flavored kiss on his mouth. She smelled of vanilla and joy. What must it have been like to grow up in her family? A blade of jealousy sliced into his heart for an instant. “I have some work to do. If you could take the baby...”

“Of course.” She scooped Dawn out of his arms. “What kind of work?”

“The kind I can’t talk about.”

Her bright blue eyes clouded over, but to her credit, she didn’t pry. He’d explained to her that he was accustomed to secrecy and that she couldn’t expect him to share every aspect of his life with her all the time. But he felt bad as he retreated to his office. What the hell was she doing to him? Since when did he want to spill every detail of his existence with anyone?

Furthermore, since when did he have feelings toward any other human being? His father had taught him well that feelings were the greatest weakness any spy could fall prey to. God knew, the past year of CIA training had only reinforced that message.

He’d thought he’d purged all deep feelings from his heart in that CIA training facility. But apparently not. Dammit. He had to find a way to isolate and contain these warm feelings he was having toward Katie.

Setting aside the problem of Katie McCloud, he locked himself in his office and got to work.

Mentally shaking his head, he broke into D.U.’s personnel files with a few casual keystrokes. Actually, it wasn’t that easy. He’d worked for months in jail developing and perfecting the decryption algorithm he used today.

He printed a hard copy of the entire employee roster of Doctors Unlimited and went to work. Financials were the easiest place to spot a turned spy. Mounting debt, illicit spending on a personal vice, an illness in the family—all the symptoms of a spy vulnerable to bribery or coercion—showed up most readily on bank statements. So, that was where he concentrated his search. He figured André would have done a thorough job vetting his people’s distant past and extended families, so he skipped looking at personal histories for now.

But after an entire afternoon of work and nearly a dozen of Katie’s irresistible cookies, nobody was leaping out at him as a candidate to be his father’s mole. Frowning, he went for a stroll around the terrace garden that had been his father’s pride and joy. He had to admit, Peter had a good eye for texture and color. The contrast of the stark cacti with softer, greener plant material was striking.

Contrast.

Maybe he’d been looking for the wrong thing. He’d been looking for a big change in someone’s spending habits. Instead, maybe he ought to be looking for a long-term pattern of expenditures that, in comparison to other D.U. employees, contrasted with the other people’s in the organization.

He went back to his computer to run a position-by-position spending comparison on D.U.’s staff. But that, too, turned up nothing.

Katie brought him a salad at some point and he ate it absently. Food had been optional often in the past year and was not something that held his attention anymore.

It grew dark outside, and he continued to poke and prod at the D.U. staff. But no matter how he examined them, nobody stood out as a mole. Which meant one of two things. Either there was no mole and his father was bluffing, or the mole was very, very good. He strongly suspected the latter was the case.

He leaned back frowning. If he were infiltrating Doctors Unlimited, how would he go about it? The aid organization placed physicians and nurses around the world in dangerous hot spots where regular aid organizations refused to send their people. The staff of D.U. was dedicated, passionate and a little crazy. Money wouldn’t be high on their personal priority lists. Ideals would be, though.