Page 45

The train stopped somewhere in northern New Jersey, and Alex startled Katie by murmuring, “Let’s go.”

“We’re not going into New York City?” she asked.

He shook his head. “Way too much surveillance and security, there. We’re more anonymous, here.”

Alarmed, she slid out of her seat and followed him off the train. In short order, he’d obtained a crappy motel room for them. She noted that he’d used a fake I.D. and its matching credit card.

When he’d inspected their room and declared it free of surveillance, he announced, “I need to find a computer. Do you want to stay here or come with me?”

“You seriously have to ask?” she retorted.

He smiled a little, sardonically. “I’m not going to disappear until I figure this out. I don’t want it pursuing me into my new life.”

His new life. The exclusion of her from that future hurt bad enough to steal her breath away.

What had happened to him? He’d acknowledged that he’d been drugged into chemically induced paranoia and that she hadn’t betrayed him like her originally thought.

Why was he still thinking in terms of leaving her behind?

“You do know I would never force myself upon you, don’t you?”

“I beg your pardon?” He stared at her blankly.

“And you do know that no matter how much I hate you, I still love you, right?”

“How am I supposed to respond to that?”

Crud. He’d completely withdrawn from her emotionally. He was firmly entrenched in being the cold, analytical spy in his fantasy, high-threat scenario.

Oh, she definitely accepted that they were in danger.

After all, the wound in her shoulder was entirely real, as was the shootout back at the motel.

But she was equally convinced it was all a big misunderstanding of some kind.

If Alex would just hand over that flash drive and the evidence of chemical weapons in Cuba, the CIA would calm down and leave them alone.

She’d planned to tell him that she loved him enough to place his happiness before hers and that she would seriously consider his implied offer to go with him.

But he was obviously in no mood to hear anything she had to say right now.

She sighed. “Now what?” she asked in resignation.

“Where will you find a computer? Or do you plan to steal one of those, too?”

“I’m going to the nearest public library. Are you coming?”

“Sure. Why not?” Maybe she could check out a book on abnormal psychology and gain some tiny insight into Alex and his thoroughly screwed up head.

The anonymous, slightly decaying urban landscape around her was oddly comforting.

She was rapidly picking up Alex’s aversion to being noticeable.

The local library was a dingy beige building, most deserted inside.

Alex sat down at a carrel with a computer in it, and she pulled up a chair beside him to watch him work his magic.

“What are you going to do?” she asked curiously.

“I’m going back in for more information on Cold Intent.”

“Are you crazy?” she exclaimed under her breath.

“Do you have any better ideas?”

“We could talk to Uncle Charlie.”

“He told you to stay away from it. He knows what the operation is all about, and somehow the two of us pose a threat to it.”

“Is there any way you can figure out who gave the order to have you—“ she dropped her voice to a whisper, “—drugged?”

“I gave the MP’s in Gitmo André’s phone number. The order had to have come through that chain of command.”

Katie frowned. “At first, the soldiers were nice to you, right? They gave you the samples from me and let you go to the hospital on your own.”

He leaned back to stare at her. “Follow that train of thought.”

“After they let you go, they called André. He told them something that made them go to the hospital, arrest you, interrogate you, and drug you. And that same something made them detain me and not let me join you.”

“Go on.”

“André likes you. He’s always had your back in the past. That tells me he must have called his CIA boss and told him where we were and what we brought with us.

I’ll bet he only relayed the boss’s orders to the folks down here.

So, why did the CIA want the cops to go after you?

You had information the CIA desperately wanted.

Why not bring you in with all possible speed? ”

Alex stared at her, his gaze dark.

She continued, “André must have told them I wasn’t a physical threat, but you were. He also must have told them the two of us were to be separated.”

“Which would weaken me,” he commented.

“Really? Why?” she blurted.

“If I don’t know what they might do to you, I’ll behave myself and not cause trouble they might take out on you.”

He cared about that, did he? Should she take that as evidence that he did have feelings for her, after all?

“Continue,” he prompted.

She picked up her previous train of thought.

“Presumably, I knew as much as you did about what we found in Cuba, so I was as big a threat as you to reveal that we found chemical weapons.” She frowned.

“But since they didn’t formally detain me, I have to rule out the information about the chemical weapons as the cause of your arrest.”

Alex looked startled at that.

Shock. She’d actually outthought the genius for once?

She continued more enthusiastically, “Also, why separate us, specifically? Sure, it might make you more controllable. But this is an army base?—"

“Naval base,” he corrected.

“Full of soldiers. If they can’t keep you in line, nobody can.”

He smiled faintly at that.

She finished with, “What’s the big deal about the two of us being together?”

Alex frowned. “My impression is the CIA thinks you keep me stable. That I won’t go off the reservation if you’re around.”

Her? Influence him to be anything? As if.

“While that’s hilariously wrong, if that’s the case, why would they take me away from you?”

A nasty connection dropped into place in her mind.

She spoke slowly, feeling her way through the logic.

“Alex. Not only did they take me away from you, but they gave you drugs to make you paranoid. What if they were trying to destabilize you? Could they have been trying to make you suspicious of me, intentionally?”

He tilted his head, considering. “Seems like a bit of a stretch, but it is certainly plausible.”

“What do I bring to you besides, umm, stability?” she asked.

“That’s easy. Predictability. Control.”

“You’re always in control of yourself.” She added under her breath, “Sometimes too much.”

“I meant external control of me by my handlers. I’m known to have feelings for you and Dawn. Threaten the two of you, and I’m forced to limit my choices. Stay inside the box.”

She was dismayed that he thought she was such a big vulnerability. “I’m sorry. I never meant to be a vulnerability to you.”

He shrugged. “It was my choice to get involved with you. My fault.”

Fault? She was a fault in his life? Apparently, she’d been a mistake for him right from the beginning. He’d tried to warn her, but she’d ignored him and thrust a relationship and even a daughter on him whether he liked it or not.

The two of them would never make it as a couple if all he saw when he looked at her was a potentially lethal error in judgment. The last thing she wanted to be to him was a fatal weak spot.

Oh, God. He was right to leave her.

A sob escaped her, and she bit back its sibling as it bubbled up in her chest.

“As soon as this is over, Alex, I’ll let you go. I get it, now. If my being with you puts you at so much risk, we can’t ever be together. I’ll walk away and never look back. I love you too much to be the cause of your injury or death.”

For an instant, his gaze went turbulent with an unnamed emotion. As quickly as it had come, all expression drained from his eyes. His face went smooth and still, completely unreadable. Lord, she wished she knew how to do that, too.

Her vision swam in tears and she looked away from him hastily. The computer screen was the only nearby target for her unseeing stare.

She collected herself and said fiercely, “Let’s finish this. The sooner the better. Every day we’re together puts you at more risk.”

He made a sound that might be a laugh half-formed, or maybe something else…like pain. Either way, he placed his hands on the keyboard and started to type.

He played the machine like a virtuoso, and she couldn’t begin to understand the lines of code that flashed across the screen almost too fast to read. But she did recognize the Central Intelligence Agency seal when it briefly flashed up on the monitor.

“Pull up the stopwatch app on your phone. When I tell you, start counting the time,” he muttered as he plugged a flash drive into a port in the side of the monitor.

“Okay.” She pulled out her cell phone and set it up.

“Go,” he murmured. She started the counter.

A list of files came up on the screen quickly. He didn’t mess with them, though. Instead, he pulled up a window and commenced running a program of some kind.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“Trying to break the write protection on these files so I can download them.”

He typed frantically for another few seconds and then stopped. “Okay. That’s it. Now we have to let the program run and see if the algorithm can break through the copy protection protocols on those files before we’re kicked out of the mainframe.”

They were hacking the CIA? Whoa.

“Time?” he asked tersely.

“Two minutes elapsed,” she murmured.

They stared at the monitor in silence as his decryption program did its work.

“Three minutes,” she announced.

The fine muscles around his eyes looked tense, stressed even, but he didn’t acknowledge her minute-by-minute count in any other way.

“When will you give up?” she asked.

“As long as their security protocols don’t kick me out, I’ll let the algorithm run. I’ve got nothing to lose by trying. They already want you, and possibly me, dead.”