Linda Howard - Kiss Me While I Sleep

He pulled up outside the door. There was no place to park the car without blocking the street, so there was no question of him coming upstairs with her. She leaned over and pressed a quick kiss to his cheek, then his mouth. “Thank you for today. It’s been fun.”

“It was my pleasure. Tomorrow?”

She hesitated, then said, “Call me. We’ll see.” Perhaps his friend would come through with the information they needed about the lab’s security. Swain was just as likely to come up with yet another impractical invitation that would for some reason appeal to her, though she thought they’d be safer if she drove instead of him—and her driving skills were sadly rusty.

He watched until she was inside the building, then lightly tapped the horn before driving away. Lily climbed the stairs, taking them slower than she once would have, pleased that she was only a little out of breath when she reached her little apartment on the third floor. She let herself in and locked the door behind her, then heaved a big sigh.

Damn him. He was getting inside her defenses and they both knew it.

As soon as Swain picked his way out of the maze that was Montmartre and could pay attention to something other than where he was, he turned on his cell phone to check for messages. There weren’t any, so he called Langley as he drove, and asked for Director Vinay’s office; maybe his assistant was still at her desk, though the time there was pushing five o’clock. When he recognized her voice, he was relieved. “This is Lucas Swain. Can you tell me the director’s condition?” Then he held his breath, praying that Frank was still alive.

“He’s still in critical condition,” she said. She sounded shaken. “He doesn’t have any immediate family, just two nieces and a nephew who live in Oregon. I contacted them, but I don’t know if any of them will be able to come.”

“Do you know the prognosis?”

“The doctors are saying that if he makes it through twenty-four hours, his odds get better.”

“Will you mind if I call you again for an update?”

“Of course not. I don’t have to tell you that this is being kept very quiet, do I?”

“No, ma’am.”

He thanked her and hung up, then breathed a combined thank-you and prayer. He had succeeded in distracting both himself and Lily today, but the knowledge that Frank could die had stayed in the back of his mind, gnawing at him. He didn’t know what he might have done, if it hadn’t been for Lily. Just being with her, devoting himself to making her laugh, had given him something to focus on other than his worries.

It broke his heart to think of her as an eighteen-year-old, just the age his son Sam was now, being recruited to kill someone in cold blood. God, whoever had done that should be taken out and shot. That man had robbed her of a normal life when she was still too young to realize how high the cost would be to herself. He could see how she would have been the perfect weapon, young and fresh and largely innocent, but that didn’t make it right. If he ever got the man’s name from her—assuming she’d been given his correct name and not an alias—he’d make it a point to hunt the bastard down.

His cell phone rang. He frowned, the bottom dropping out of his stomach. Surely to God, Frank’s assistant wasn’t calling him to say that Frank had just died—

He grabbed the phone and glanced at the number showing in the window. It was a French number, and he wondered who in hell could be calling, because it wasn’t Lily—she’d have used her own cell phone—and no one else here had his number.

He flipped it open and cradled it between his jaw and shoulder as he pushed in the clutch and downshifted for a turn. “Yeah.”

A man said in a quiet, even tone, “There is a mole in your CIA headquarters feeding information to Rodrigo Nervi. I thought you should know.”

“Who is this?” Swain asked, stunned, but there was no answer. The call had been disconnected.

Swearing, he closed the phone and slipped it back into his pocket. A mole? Shit! He couldn’t doubt it, though, because otherwise how had the Frenchman gotten this number? And the caller had definitely been a Frenchman; he’d spoken in English, but the accent was French. Not Parisian, though; Swain’d picked up on the Parisian accent within a day.

A chill ran down his spine. Had everything he’d requested been fed straight to Rodrigo Nervi? If so, any action he and Lily took could be taking them straight into a trap.

21

Swain paced back and forth in his hotel room, his usual good-humored expression replaced by one that was cold and hard. No matter how he looked at it, he was literally on his own. The mole at Langley could be anyone: Frank’s assistant; Patrick Washington, whom Swain had liked so much that one time he’d talked to him; any of the analysts; the case officers—hell, even the DDO, Garvin Reed. The only person there Swain totally trusted was Frank Vinay, who was in critical condition and might not live. With this revelation from his mysterious caller, Swain had to consider that Frank’s automobile accident might not have been accidental, after all.

But if he had thought of that, then probably several thousand others at Langley had thought the same thing. What if the mole was conveniently placed to divert suspicion from the accident?

The thing was, though, auto accidents were tricky, definitely not the most reliable method of eliminating someone; people had been known to walk away from accidents that totaled their cars. On the other hand, if you killed someone and didn’t want anyone to know it was deliberate, you staged events to make it look like an accident. How well it was staged depended on the reliability of the parties involved, and the amount of money behind it.

But how could anyone stage an auto accident that would take out the DO? Logically, predicting where someone would be at any given moment in the D.C. traffic was impossible, what with the fender benders, mechanical troubles, and flat tires all over the city that delayed and diverted traffic to other routes. Add in the human factor, such as oversleeping, stopping for a latte—he didn’t see how it could be done, how anyone could time things so perfectly.

At any rate, surely to God, Frank’s driver hadn’t taken the same route to work every day. That was basic. Frank wouldn’t have allowed it.

So—logically, the accident had to be just what it seemed: an accident.

The result was the same. Whether or not Frank lived, he was out of commission, unreachable. Swain had been a field officer for a long time, but he’d been in the field, working with various insurgents and military groups in South America; he hadn’t actually spent much time in CIA headquarters. He didn’t know very many people there, and they didn’t know him. He’d always considered it a bonus that he was seldom at headquarters, but now that put him in a bind, because he had no one he knew well enough to trust.

So there would be no more help from Langley, no more requests for information. He tried to work the angles on what this meant to his particular situation. The way he saw it, he had two options: he could pull the plug on Lily right now and complete his stated mission, then hope to God that Frank lived so he could root out this damned mole—or he could stay here, work with Lily in cracking the Nervis’ security, and try to find out from this end who the mole was. Of the two, he preferred staying here. For one thing, he was already here, and no matter how good the security was at the Nervi complex, it wouldn’t be anything compared to the security at Langley.

Then there was Lily. She touched him and amused him and turned him on way more than he’d expected. Yeah, he’d found her attractive from the get-go, but the more time he spent with her, the better he knew her, the more intense the attraction became. He was getting in deeper with her than he’d ever planned, but it still wasn’t deep enough. He wanted more.