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It took a solid hour of both of them digging to make a trench big and deep enough to lay the two bodies in. Alex searched the dead men briefly. He showed her their wallets, neither of which contained any kind of military I.D.

Okay, fine. So his belt theory had turned out to be accurate. Still, it was a hell of a flimsy excuse for killing a man.

He tossed the wallets on top of the corpses but kept a pocketknife, the shotgun one of them had been carrying, and a pouch full of shotgun shells. He started to shovel earth over the corpses.

She murmured a brief prayer for the dead men’s souls and picked up her spade. Covering the bodies went fast. They tamped down the dirt and Alex spread dead grass and debris ontop of the spot. By the time he was done, nobody would ever guess two men were buried there.

“Satisfied?” she asked grimly.

He nodded and said briskly, “Let’s see if we can find the Zacara factory and figure out what the hell’s going on around here.”

Alex wished they’d been able to take the mo-ped as they walked through the iron gate and turned onto the main road headed north. But stealth was called for over speed in approaching the factory. And if his map was accurate, the Zacara plant was only about a mile away.

He shouldered the backpack, registering with shock a faint tremor in his hands. He was a surgeon, for Christ’s sake. His hands were steady under the worst of stressful conditions.

It wasn’t like he’d never killed before. The CIA had taken care of that in his advanced training. But waking up to see a terrified Katie wielding a pistol…that glimpse of an armed man approaching her…that had scared the living hell out of him.

He swore mentally. It was an experience he could do without repeating again. Ever.

The idea of killing bad guys didn’t faze him anymore. He’d long ago accepted that he was a tool. If he didn’t kill a target he’d been sent to eliminate, someone else would be sent to do the job. The decision of whether a person lived or died was not his. It was, literally, above his pay grade.

If he ever attained enough rank to give kill orders, then he could wrestle with his conscience to his heart’s content. But not now. The CIA went to great lengths to make its wet ops people understand this distinction. To drive home the mantra,No guilt. Make the kill and move on.

His orders were clear. Stay alive. Find out what was going on. Get proof. Get out. And in his best judgment, staying alive had required shooting those two men.

Was he relieved to find no military ID’s in their wallets? Hell, yes. But would he still have shot them even if they’d actually been soldiers? Absolutely. They posed a threat to the mission—and, furthermore, to Katie—therefore, they must be eliminated.

Katie had accused him of not reacting to shooting the looters. She was right that he’d felt nothing much about the actual act. What she was missing was the cold, hard terror that provoked him to kill in the first place. For her. Without thought, without hesitation.

What was this willingness to do anything for another person? Was it love? The idea exploded inside his head, filling his entire brain with disbelief.

If so, it was a hell of a way to find out he loved her. Somehow, he doubted Katie would be thrilled.Oh, baby, I love you so much I’ll kill you for. Nope. Not her idea of Prince Charming and happily ever after.

It damned well rocked his world, though. Had his father felt this for his mother? For him or his brothers? Had the boy Alex been too young and too naïve to realize that, in his own way, Roman had loved him fiercely?

Katie hiked beside him for a few minutes in silence. He was interested to hear what she was chewing on so hard.

She finally blurted, “Tell me again why we zoomed off to Baracoa with Oscar?”

Ahh. Dammit. Sometimes he forgot how smart and perceptive she was. She had a real talent for connecting seemingly unrelated dots.

Meanwhile, his mental defenses went on full alert. He had to evade this line of questioning. He answered casually, “The boy needed someone to take care of him. I know you. Had wenot delivered him to his grandmother, you would’ve insisted on hauling him around with us.”

“And?”

He winced. Of course, she’d realized there was more to it than that. He added reluctantly, “And we needed supplies for properly collecting and storing clean samples. The evidence we collect might come under intense international scrutiny at some point. We have to do it right.”

“What kind of supplies did you get?”

“Sterile test tubes, sample bags, and seals that must be destroyed to open the samples.”

“If there’s something like Sarin in the samples, the United States is going to go crazy,” she commented.

“Exactly.”

“Why else?”

He pretended to concentrate on scanning the deserted countryside in hopes that she would get distracted and move on.