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Devastated at how easily she’d apparently disengaged from the overwhelming emotional power of their lovemaking, he pulled out his laptop and read up some more on the drug he’d been given.

So much about the end of his Cuba mission made sense now. The fog of terror, the extreme measures he’d taken to hide and to escape Katie—he’d been flailing in an artificially induced paranoid state. He hadn’t been losing his mind, after all.

Small comfort, that.

Thing was, the CCRE was well clear of his system by now. Any paranoia or suspicion he was currently experiencing was wholly his own. His doubts about Katie were not drug induced. None of it was drug induced.

Absently, he fiddled with the flash drive he’d brought out of Cuba. The one holding all the evidence of the chemical weapons secretly stored in Cuba.

“Oh my God!” Katie exclaimed without warning. “Is that what I think it is?”

He jammed the drive back in his pocket. “Depends on what you think it is.”

“Is that your pictures from Cuba? Did you mange to run the samples we got from that bunker? Are the results on that drive, too?”

“It’s nothing,” he lied. “Just some personal information I’ll need to set up a new identity.”

“Bull,” she retorted bluntly. “That’s the evidence of the Sarin.”

He didn’t bother denying it. She knew him too well for him to successfully lie to her.

She demanded, “Why do you still have it? Weren’t you supposed to hand that over to André?

” She paused, but then continued in a breathless rush, “Are you using that as insurance to make your escape?” She didn’t even stop for him to answer.

“How could you? We were supposed to give that to André. It’s vitally important to America’s national security that he get it! ”

“Are you done?” he snapped.

“No, I’m not. No wonder everyone and their uncle is running around trying to catch or kill us.

You need to send that to André immediately.

He can clear up this whole mess if you let him.

Do your job. Show you’re a good agent and can be relied upon.

I’m sure that’s all it will take for the dogs to be called off. ”

“Hah,” he retorted. “For all we know, the only reason the dogs haven’t already killed us is because of this flash drive. If I hand it over, they may blow us to smithereens.”

“You told André you’d get him the proof,” she accused.

“No, you told him that.”

She opened her mouth, but shut it again as it obviously dawned on her that he was right.

“There’s actually a good argument to be made for destroying this evidence,” he said thoughtfully.

“That sounds like your father talking.”

“I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again.

My father is not always wrong. If what’s on this drive were to come to light, a massive international crisis on the scale of the Cuban Missile Crisis would likely follow.

Do you have absolute faith your government to do the reasonable thing and save the world this time around? ”

She got a stubborn look on her face.

He added, “Even if you do trust your own government, do you trust the Russian government to get it right? Do you see the current regime backing down meekly and removing the chemicals from Cuba?”

That made her wince.

“My point, exactly. I think the best thing to do is destroy the drive.”

She tilted her head questioningly. “Then why haven’t you already destroyed it? I think part of you does want to hand it over to the Americans. I think you do want to prove to the CIA that they can trust you and that you’ll be a good operative for them.”

“Bah!” he scoffed.

“You accuse me of lying to you, but don’t lie to yourself, Alex. I know you.”

Damn her, she did.

She pressed her own point home. “If you truly were the rogue agent you claim to be, you would’ve let me bleed to death on that sidewalk.

Even if you did have feelings for me, and even if you are first and foremost a doctor, you would’ve looked out for yourself, first. But you didn’t.

You’re not a bad person, no matter what you try to tell yourself. ”

“Lord, you’re such a goody-two-shoes.”

“Yup, and I wear rose-colored glasses, too,” she replied cheerfully. “I’m not apologetic for having a positive outlook on life. You could use a little more of that, by the way.”

He rolled his eyes and didn’t deign to answer. She seemed to think she’d gotten the last word and buried her nose in her book, once more.

Irritated, he stared down at his computer screen.

Thanks to Blondie, who’d given her life to get this algorithm to him, he had the means to get into the CIA’s mainframe.

And thanks to Katie and whatever political games her uncle was playing, he now he had both a name and an operation to investigate.

His father said Claudia Kane was running Operation Cold Intent. What in the hell was she doing with it?

Did he dare break into the CIA’s secure servers to search for an answer?

Was it worth risking his life—and Katie’s, he conceded reluctantly—to learn more about his mother?

Maybe he ought to wait until Roman and the FSB finished poking around to see what they found.

Although, if the information were that easy to access, Roman would have already had it.

Alex put his hands on the keyboard. He would have to move fast. He might have two, maybe three minutes once he got in. Better to stick with a two-minute time limit. He set up a stopwatch on his cell phone and started typing.

Blondie’s algorithm was subtle. It didn’t take a sledgehammer approach to getting past the CIA’s firewalls.

Rather it wormed its way in through tiny code gaps and by taking a massively circuitous, randomized route into the mainframe.

Each time the hacking program was used, it would take a different route to its target, which meant it would be nearly impossible to create countermeasures to stop it.

This was a re-usable algorithm, in other words.

Brilliant, Blondie .

The algorithm ran for nearly a half-hour, but his patience was rewarded when a CIA search screen popped up. He started the timer and typed in his mother’s name and the Cold Intent name.

A minute passed.

A minute-and-a-half. Crap. The information was buried too deep. He would never find it in the limited amount of time he could afford to stick around waiting.

All of a sudden, his screen lit up. A list of file names associated with the search parameters, “Cold Intent and Claudia Kane,” scrolled down his screen.

Startled, he typed as fast as he could, attempting to download them, wholesale. No go. They were write-protected. It would take a whole other decryption algorithm to bust the protections preventing them from being copied.

In desperation, he clicked on the most recently dated file.

It opened to reveal an innocuous-looking document. He scanned it fast. An intel report on…his jaw dropped.

…On Roman Koronov and his father’s odds of becoming the next Director of the FSB.

The analysis deemed Roman far too effective a spy and charismatic a leader to be allowed into the position.

The report speculated that, under his capable direction, the FSB could be rejuvenated into a formidable intelligence apparatus.

His phone beeped that his two minutes were up.

He swore and clicked to the end of the report quickly.

The conclusion was too damned wordy to read in its entirety, but he scanned it fast. The report concluded with verbiage having to do with agreeing with the director on the optimal plan for taking Koronov out of the running for the post of FSB chief.

His computer beeped an incoming query warning, and he slammed the escape key. He powered the computer completely off and unplugged it from the wall.

Operation Cold Intent was an op to take down his father? He could see his mother being involved with that. It certainly answered the question of how Mommie Dearest had felt about his father.

Why would a working group with that goal go after Katie, then?

What key piece to the puzzle was he missing?

How did Katie fit into all of this? He’d seen her reflex reactions in life-threatening situations before; he knew without a shadow of a doubt that Katie was not a trained field operative. A sparrow, maybe. But not a spy.

He turned over possibilities in his head for some time. He eventually noticed her nodding off in her chair and muttered, “Go to bed.”

She jolted upright. “That’s okay. I’ll stay up.”

It hit him suddenly what she was doing. Terrified he was going to sneak out and leave her again, was she? Katie was trying to stay awake and keep an eagle eye on him. It would be cute if he could trust her even a little.

“I’m not going to leave until I figure out why the Cold Intent team is trying to kill you, Katie.”

She stared at him long and hard. “Promise?”

“I give you my word of honor.” She sagged abruptly in the chair, and he smiled sardonically. “Go to bed. I’ll be here when you wake up. Or, if I’ve stepped out, I’ll be back momentarily.”

She stood up, but instead of climbing into bed, she came over to stand in front of him. “You do know I would never betray you, right?”

He stared up at her. He might accept that the drug they’d fed him had messed with his head, but his heart was another matter.

He’d been betrayed so badly in his past it was hard for him to trust anyone the way she was asking him to.

It was as if the cannabis extract had flipped on a paranoia switch in his brain, and he had no idea how to turn it off.

Maybe the paranoia had been there all along. And now that it was exposed to his conscious mind, he couldn’t put it back in the unconscious box it had come from.

Paranoia or not, his gut was telling him to stay in spy mode. Not to let her seduce him out of that cold, detached place in his mind where life and death were merely two decisions among many.

She sighed. “I’ll find a way to prove to you that I wouldn’t turn on you, Alex. That’s my promise to you.”

He had no frame of reference to know how to answer a statement like that. Everybody turned on everyone else eventually. It was why relationships were so dangerous.

He picked up the pad of notebook paper lying on the room’s desk and started writing notes and drawing lines between them, looking for connections he’d missed before. And when he gave up for the night, he burned the entire pad and flushed the ashes down the toilet.

One thing he knew for sure. He was being used by somebody. And whether it was Katie or his parents or someone else altogether, he didn’t like it. He was not going to play ball and be a good little spy. Not by a long shot.