Buch lesen: «Deep Blue»

Deep Blue
Suzanne McMinn

www.millsandboon.co.uk

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Epilogue

Chapter 1

Cade Brock lowered the binoculars he had trained on the house down the street, his grip tightening on the cell phone at his ear as his pulse froze. “What did you say?”

The PAX League chief, Harrison Beck, let a beat draw out. “It’s Adal Chaba. I wanted to tell you myself.”

“Keep going.” Cade continued to watch the target location from the parked car he’d positioned down the block even as his jaw clenched and something dark banded his chest.

“We nailed Kerbasi,” Beck told him. “We got the data off his hard drive that links him to Chaba. I’m taking you off the case.”

“No.” The word burst tightly out of Cade’s mouth. His fingers moved of their own accord to the rigid slice of a scar not four weeks old on the side of his throat. A parting gift from Harmon Kerbasi. If he hadn’t wanted this case for revenge already, knowing Kerbasi was linked to the terrorist kingpin Chaba clinched it.

“You sound like hell,” Beck said. “As much as we need you on this case, it’s too soon. This is too personal already, and now—”

“No.” He knew he sounded like hell. He felt like hell. But he had people to put in hell. And yeah, it was personal. “You need me.”

“You need some R&R.”

“I had enough R&R.” The last month, in the hospital then recovering at home on enforced leave, had been more R&R than he’d ever wanted or intended to suffer again. He needed a case to work on. Downtime was nothing but an invitation to nightmares of guilt and loss so deep he didn’t want to relive them. And yet he did. Every time he closed his eyes. And sometimes when they were open.

“You need to come in for more testing.”

He was sick and tired of testing. And he knew the PAX chief didn’t just mean the endless scientific probing he’d endured for most of his life. Beck meant psychological testing. He knew what they thought of him. They called him “The Machine” as if he weren’t even human. And maybe he gave that impression. Good enough. He didn’t have buddies in the League. He worked alone, no other agents at his side. He liked it that way. If they thought that made him an emotionless machine, so be it. He was respected but not befriended. He kept his emotional distance. It was better for everyone that way. Especially him.

Changing any of that wasn’t on his agenda.

“I’m not coming in for more testing. I’m not going back on R&R. And you can take me off the case, but I’m not taking myself off.” He had a slippery relationship with the League. Technically, he was their agent. They’d raised him from age six, and some people would say that made them his family. But they’d never owned him, and the last thing they were going to do when it came to Chaba was control him. “Now tell me about Chaba.”

Another moment passed in which he was certain Beck was considering the ten different ways he wanted to throttle him. The PAX chief respected him, though, and he knew what getting Chaba meant to Cade.

“The hard drive didn’t have much on it,” Beck said finally. “Kerbasi’d been ditching his laptop regularly. Chaba’s careful. He would have insisted on that. Unless Kerbasi starts talking, all we’ve got are a few e-mails that link him up the chain of command. We need the woman. She’s the key.”

A red compact car slid down the street toward the house and stopped. Tall and leggy, the woman stepped out of the car then turned to scan the quiet, palm-lined Key Mango street. Cade lifted the binoculars again.

“And I’ve got her,” he said.

He punched the phone off, leaving the PAX chief without the time, or the connection, to change one damn thing that was about to happen. Cade watched the target stand, rooted, for a few moments in the driveway of the house.

It was almost too convenient. Not even a challenge. It couldn’t have been easier if she’d tied a ribbon around her slim, pretty neck and handed herself to him.

He waited, adrenaline burning, in the nondescript sedan he’d rented, parked several houses down and across the street from the two-story house. There was an apartment on bottom, another on top. Nothing was this easy, and he wasn’t taking any chances. He’d tangled with Tabitha Donovan before, and she’d nearly cost him his life when she’d left him to Kerbasi. There would be no repeats of that scenario.

She stood there, as if she were waiting for someone, too, as he’d been waiting for her. Or did she fear someone was after her? For a second, he thought she was going to get back in the car and drive away. If someone was after her—someone besides him—well, he might have a chance to kill two birds with one stone, because the people she was dealing with were even more elusive than Tabitha Donovan—or whatever she was calling herself today. And they were definitely a hell of a lot more dangerous.

Cade knew from personal experience that mass murder was Chaba’s stock in trade.

“Run, baby. Run!”

His mother’s wild eyes seared him as he wobbled, panicked, on the fiery beach.

“Take care of your brother. You’re a big boy.”

“No, Mama.” He clung to her arm even as she pushed him away.

“I have to find your father, baby. Take your brother. Run!”

She shook him off, and turned….

Fire, then blackness and screaming, so much screaming—

Cade squeezed his eyes shut for a horrific beat. For the millionth time, he couldn’t stop the screaming, couldn’t go back and make it different, couldn’t change the lives that had been lost, couldn’t bury the memories and anger deep enough. Even blowing Chaba to hell wouldn’t do that. But it would be a start.

He opened his eyes and focused on the present, the woman, the link to the evil that had haunted him all his life.

Even from a distance in the clouded twilight, she was the most gorgeous terrorist he’d ever seen. She wore hip-hugging pink cropped pants and a white camisole top that clung to curvy breasts and a trim waist. Blond hair fell free to her shoulders, and even in the soggy Florida Keys heat, she looked fresh as the proverbial daisy.

He tipped the binoculars to his eyes—the better to see her deceptively lovely oval face in the scant light, slender with intriguing hollows that made her look delicate…when she was anything but.

She nibbled her lip as she hesitated in front of the building. Did she see him, even from this distance, through the tinted windows and murky shadows of the oncoming night and a brewing storm?

A breeze whipped the lush palm fronds up and down the street and the first plops of the storm front hanging gray in the sky above hit his windshield. She turned to retrieve an overnight bag from the rear of the vehicle. She hadn’t seen him. She didn’t have a clue.

She was about to get one.

He lowered the binoculars, satisfied. She’d be spending the rest of her life in a government lockup if what the PAX League believed about her was true. And considering the evidence he had already, he didn’t have any doubts. In the meantime, they needed her.

Alive, not dead, and with the dangerous double-crossing game she was playing, she was on borrowed time already. She didn’t know it, but he was about to save her sorry life.

Getting to the truth, and to her secrets, including her real identity, was his job, and unfortunately, that meant keeping her alive. He watched as she swayed her wickedly sexy hips, crossing to the wooden outside steps leading up to the second-story apartment, overnight bag in hand. The small island community of Key Mango that she’d apparently chosen for her home base was hardly exclusive housing. The tiny key was made up primarily of locals, shrimp trawling seamen and dive fanatics, with a sprinkling of Bahamian rental homes and run-down duplex apartments that attracted tourists going for economical over trendy. Not that anything came cheap down here. Even a one-bedroom weather-beaten studio on the least fashionable island in the coral keys would cost a pretty penny this close to the water.

Tabitha Donovan had plenty of pretty pennies tucked in her secret Swiss bank account, no doubt courtesy of Chaba, but she wasn’t showing them off, not with the used car she was driving and not with the less than stellar housing she’d used a credit card in her made-up name to lease. It was how PAX had tracked her here. Mistakes. Criminals always made them, even the beautiful ones.

The street lay quiet in the early evening, nothing but the beat of palm fronds in the wind and the rush of gathering rain hitting the steaming street. This late in the summer, the vacation renters were heading out and more than half the homes and apartments were empty, their distant owners putting months at a time on sale to attract off-season travelers who would be arriving in the coming weeks. The cute blonde wasn’t planning to leave, though. She’d booked her rental through the fall. The better to search for the ancient secret she was planning to sell out at the cost of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of lives.

But her plans were about to change. Whether he liked it or not—and he didn’t—she was going with him, and going alive. She was a pawn on his way to the top, and now that he knew that top was Chaba, he’d do anything to get there. Even put up with the woman who’d set him up to die.

Shiny hair tucked behind one ear, she pushed the key in the lock of the upstairs apartment. He debated his options. Was the lower level of the building occupied? There were no lights, no signs of life from the first floor residence, but a van was parked on the street in front of the building. He’d been watching for nearly an hour. He didn’t want any hassles with nosy neighbors interfering if she started screaming bloody murder. No way was he letting her, possessor of the deadly secrets of the Santa Josefa and his link to Chaba, slip away, and no way would she go with him easily.

She thought he was Cade Brock, renegade treasure hunter, playboy, wastrel, only interested in the lost Spanish shipwreck for his own gain. It was a role he played well. Just as well as she played Tabitha Donovan. He absently fingered the scar at his throat. He wasn’t interested in money at all, though he had an amazing knack for acquiring it. He wanted justice. And oh yeah, revenge. He was a PAX agent, but no matter what his fellow agents thought of him, he was also a man, human despite the physiological mutations that made him of unique value to the League.

Through the uncurtained upper-story window, he watched the woman walk into the apartment, shut the door and shove something—the car key?—into her back pocket and then…A shadow moved from behind the door as she shut it. A shadow that reached for her throat and yanked her back into his arms.

Cade’s pulse slammed and he keyed the ignition. He wasn’t the only one who’d been waiting for Tabitha Donovan. And this had just stopped being easy.

She tasted panic and pain as a hard arm appeared out of nowhere, slamming her back against an even harder body. Her overnight bag thunked to the floor. A scream strangled in her throat as the pressure of the hand over her face left her desperate for air.

Spots swam in her vision. The shadows of the apartment faded toward black.

Adrenaline surged past the shock and fear. The attacker’s hand moved slightly. She could breathe through her nose and her vision cleared. The chilling butt of a gun pressed against her temple.

Was this what had happened to Sabrina? Or did he think she was Sabrina?

Sabrina with her strange disappearances, her mysterious plans, the charts in her apartment—Not that she’d wanted to believe any of that. Not that Sienna had wanted to believe her twin sister was doing what she thought she was doing.

Sabrina had also mentioned she was involved with a man, a man who frightened her, and now…Desperate, Sienna twisted her head, managed to break free of the hand over her mouth for a second.

“This isn’t what you think,” she said quickly, her voice thin, unrecognizable. “I’m not Sa—”

The hand brutally retook her mouth and she couldn’t breathe again.

“Shut up and pick that bag back up then open the door,” a rough voice ordered in her ear. “Walk outside. Slowly.”

She had to get away. She’d open the door, and then she’d make a break for it. She’d run. She’d scream. But for now, she could barely feel her shaking hand as she picked up the bag then reached for the knob with her other hand, pulling open the door of her sister’s shadowed apartment.

Fear left her swimming in a disembodied, surreal state in which she just knew this couldn’t be happening to her. This happened to women she heard about on the news. Choppy, disjointed sound bites of women abducted and murdered staggered wildly through her mind.

The rain-laced breeze struck her as the man pushed her onto the small landing. He was right behind her.

“Move,” the attacker demanded, and she did.

She twisted in his arms, shot her knee into his groin and, in the split instant when he roared, she ripped away from him, still gasping for breath, stumbling blindly down the steps.

Pain exploded as he grabbed her back and slammed the gun against the side of her head, choking her scream. Her bag thunked down the stairs, rolling to a stop.

The blow brought tears stinging to her eyes and then she forgot pain, forgot everything except the deadly coldness of the eyes she saw as the man ripped her to her feet and jerked her tightly against him again. She was aware of hollowed features, dark clothes, iron strength. Rain dashed against his cheeks, sliding down as if off a slab of marble.

“Don’t do that again.” He jerked her around, pushing her down the rest of the stairs ahead of him.

Horror gripped her as she realized the van parked on the street in front of the apartment must be his. He pushed her toward it. He was going to take her away from here and do God knows what to her next. All she knew about crimes against women told her that if she got in that van, she was going to die.

Another man pushed out of the rear passenger sliding door of the van suddenly. Another man with another gun. He dashed forward, grabbed her bag and threw it in the van before turning back. Why were they taking it? Her mind reeled. There was still the rental car. When Sabrina got here, she’d find it, know she’d been here…But it would be too late.

“Get in the van,” the attacker snarled, releasing her to propel her forward toward the other man, and she caught the tip of her sandal in a break in the cement walk.

She fell to the wet concrete, hitting her knees, the impact robbing her of breath or she’d be screaming. She lifted her eyes as the man grabbed her by her hair and a dark movement flashed into her consciousness even as new pain seared her head.

“You’re lucky he doesn’t want you dead,” he snarled. “Yet.”

He? Who was he?

A screech of tires broke the wind-whipped air. Rain splattered down, harder now, as a dark sedan swung to a halt in the middle of the street. A man reared from the car, leaning over the hood, a dark object glinting in his hand. Police?

Her heart thudded against her ribs. No. Like the men abducting her, he was dressed in civilian clothes, a black T-shirt stretched over powerful shoulders. Clipped brown hair, lean-planed features, chilling eyes.

And a gun.

Rain instantly plastered his hair to his head as the drops turned into a downpour.

“Let her go,” he shouted.

The hand holding her shoved her sideways and she was back on her knees as the sound of gunfire exploded. She heard the distant sound of a door opening down the street, a startled scream, then a slam.

She realized one of the men was down, the man who’d jumped out of the van. Blood.

Her pulse boomed in her ears. She scrambled on her hands and knees for the red compact car she’d rented at the airport in Key West, pulling the door open and banging inside, desperate breaths biting her lungs. She felt the humid warmth of the leather seat, her clothes and hair dripping onto it.

Adrenaline burned her veins and she could barely think. The key.

She twisted awkwardly, shoving her hand into her back pocket. Was it there or had she dropped it in the apartment when he’d grabbed her?

Heart thumping into her throat, her fingers closed with numbed panic over the cold outline of the rental car key.

Whipping her head to the window, she could barely see the outline of the man who’d grabbed her in the apartment. He’d made it to cover behind his van and another shot boomed through the pounding rain as he aimed at the man crouched behind the sedan.

Surely the police would be on the way. But how long would it take them to get here? Did tiny Key Mango even have full-time emergency personnel?

One of the two men left was going to kill the other, and then they’d come for her. And the idea that at least one of them had sworn he didn’t want her dead, yet, wasn’t a comfort.

And as for the other one…

He looked every ounce as dangerous as the abductor and he’d just shot a man dead. They were fighting over her—or fighting over Sabrina, if that’s who they thought she was. Why? Where was Sabrina?

Panic roared through her bloodstream. She slammed the key in the ignition and sobbed when the car leaped to life. She screeched backward, plowing past the man by the sedan, striking the fender. A flash of hot blue eyes seared her as he reared back out of her way.

She braked, spun, and in the stormy blur of the rearview mirror as she floored it, she saw the abductor from the apartment seize the moment of distraction to make it around his car and leap into the van. He was coming after her!

Town. She had to head back to town. Find people. Key Mango didn’t have much, but she’d driven past a commercial strip of businesses, restaurants, small neighborhoods and a church, before reaching the touristy outskirts of beach rentals. She gulped in panicked breaths, roaring at blinding speed through the tearing rain.

And she didn’t have the slightest idea where she was going. Had she missed the turn back toward the town?

All she could see on either side of the road were jungle-thick mangroves. She’d gone into the interior of the island, but this wasn’t the road to town. Desperation clawed at her stomach. She crossed a bridge fanning over a lagoon. She must have gone the wrong way from the beginning.

Headlights broke the storm-dark behind her. She caught a sign whizzing past: Key Mango Bird Sanctuary. Ahead, through the rain, she saw a chain-link fence, the gate padlocked shut. Dead end.

The car spun, sliding sideways, tires losing traction on the wet road. She regained control and headed back, whipping past the van as it, too, spun around.

As she hit the bridge again, she saw the sedan coming straight at her. She jerked the wheel to swerve around it. She should never have left North Carolina. This was a nightmare. This couldn’t be happening. She was a university librarian. She never did anything more risky than exceed the daily recommended fat intake for a woman of her height and weight.

That was the last thought she had before she realized the car was hydroplaning. She felt the bizarre sensation of spinning over the blacktop road, then the shocking crash of breaking through the guardrail.

Dark water slammed up at her—oh, God, water!—and she struck the windshield.

Chapter 2

Cade hit the brakes, hanging on to the wheel as the sedan threatened to twist into a dangerous spin, stopping only when he crashed into the van that ground to a stop just short of following the woman’s car through the wiped-out guard rail. The impact thunked him forward hard, then back, his seat belt holding him in place.

He jumped out, tearing through the howling wind and slashing rain. The driver of the van lay against the steering wheel, blood pouring out of the side of his head.

The man moved, mumbled, his eyes flashing open. Cade landed his fist into the man’s face and he slammed back, dead to the world again.

Cade raced from the van to the edge of the bridge and dove straight in. No way was he losing his target—and the lagoon was about to swallow her whole. The passenger compartment was taking in water fast. Already, the car was more than halfway to a watery grave. His body, skin made up of microdermal ridges invisible to the naked eye, streamed into the dark water like another liquid.

He’d been six years old when his adoptive parents had found him at the bottom of the family swimming pool. They’d thought he was dead. He was just napping, and the fact that everyone didn’t nap underwater was news to him.

The PAX League had already discovered that a shocking number of the children who’d survived the Valuatu Island bombing several years earlier had returned home with strange aftereffects. Biological mutations. And thus, the PAX League, once an organization dedicated purely to the philosophical pursuit of global peace through human rights missions, environmental campaigns and charitable projects such as the Valuatu Island hunger delegation, had transformed into something more.

Beginning with those children, the new and secret underlayer of Paranormal Allied Experts had spent years researching the mystical, telepathic and transformational sciences. Its goal was not only to protect the work of the League’s outer humanitarian organization, but to prevent terror worldwide as it molded those original children into agents and created even more through its own experimentation.

And Cade had lost his family—again.

He surged back up to the surface beside the car, not for air—he didn’t need it. But she did. The woman’s head slumped against the window, water rising to her neck. He saw tangled wet hair, blood. Bracing his feet against the side of the vehicle, he yanked at the door.

The water reached her mouth and nose and he slipped beneath the surface now to pull at the door. He saw the woman gasp and jerk back as the lack of oxygen stabbed her into consciousness.

With corneas and lenses shaped to see light through water, he had the visibility to see her eyes bulge as she first jerked up to take in air, then reached for the door handle. She shoved uselessly, then screamed, taking in water again, and pushed up to the interior roof of the car, coughing and gagging, struggling for the last few inches of air.

Then she slid her head sideways, panic in her gaze as she met his through the water. She was in emotional shock, had been even before the crash, and the physical shock was going to set in fast. The lagoon wasn’t cold, but without the specialized thermoregulatory system that kept him warm, she was probably losing body temperature already and at the rate the car was sinking, she’d be out of air in less than a minute if he didn’t get the door open.

Still underwater, he motioned in efficient movements for her to shove as he pulled. Her gaze flicked down then back to his face as the water crept higher.

Fear and survival warred in her eyes.

No two ways about it, she was scared of anyone who would have leaped off that bridge after her.

He grabbed the handle, yanked hard. The pressure of water inside and outside the car held it firm. He felt his muscles bunching as he heaved on the handle again.

The water completely covered the car now and it was sinking at accelerated speed. He could see her holding one last breath of air, anxiously pushing outward against the door even as he pulled. The lagoon wasn’t deep, twenty or thirty feet, he estimated, and the car tumbled heavily now to the bottom, sand clouding upward from the disturbed bottom. He didn’t need more air, but she did, and soon.

One more heaving pull, and the car door suddenly thrust outward. Reaching blindly through the muddied water, he felt her soft, drenched body.

He pushed hard with his feet against the sand of the lagoon floor and streamed upward toward the clear surface and the light of the storm. She felt like nothing in his arms. He gave a last powerful kick, popping up to the surface. He shifted to grip her tightly against his heat with one arm as he swam.

Pulling her up on the damp, sandy shore, he felt her react, coughing and gagging as she had in the car. He set her down and she rolled over, retching.

Rain lashed down. He was stunned for a second by how glad he was that she was alive. The helpless panic in her eyes when the car filled with water…The memory of it streaked into him. In the dim light he watched her shoulders tremble, and she turned, lifting her pale, shocked gaze to his.

For a long moment the storm seemed to almost recede around them, and then she pushed herself up on her elbows. In spite of himself, he felt something strange and unallowable. Sympathy.

He shoved it back. She didn’t deserve it.

He’d been tricked by her once, and he wouldn’t be tricked again.

He stood over her, water streaming down his sides. “You’re coming with me.”

“No,” she gasped, barely audible over the pounding rain. “No.”

She scrambled away. He tore up the bank, twisting her and pinning her on her back where she fell against the soggy ground.

“Stop!” he ordered.

“No!” she screamed. “Let me go!”

Her eyes were huge, shocked, radiating cold fear. He could feel the trembling of her body, see the confusion in her wild eyes. He held on, even as she struggled. She felt different than he expected.

Lighter, softer somehow.

Raindrops slid down his face and onto hers. Her breaths came in panting gasps. The storm blew around them.

“Not this time,” he grated, his voice whipped away in the wind. He jerked her to her feet. “You’re not getting away this time.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about!”

“You know exactly what I’m talking about, Tabitha.”

“I’m not Tabitha!” she shouted at him. “I’m Sienna!” Inches away, her eyes were lost and scared, and her words knocked him off balance enough that she was able to tear free again and run, slipping and sliding, up the bank.

He made chase, and she didn’t have a chance. Together they slammed into the drenched, sandy bank.

A shocked breath escaped her, then she was fighting him again, shoving against him with her hands. He grabbed both arms and pinned them to her sides, covering her body with his.

“My name is Sienna!” she cried. “Whoever you want, I’m not her! That was my sister’s apartment. My twin sister. Sabrina. I don’t know who Tabitha is!”

He felt something icy prick at the back of his neck. He sensed the shaking desperation of her body, knew the piercing confusion of her gaze.

She was a liar. She had lied to him before. She’d lie to him again. It was all he could do not to shake the truth out of her right there and then on the bank of the storm-tossed lagoon, but—

“Nobody said anything about a sister.” He gripped her arms tighter when she tried to get away. She contorted her body as she struggled to free herself. He could feel her heart pounding against him as she turned her wild gaze back to him.

“Well, I’m saying something about it! I’m not Sabrina,” she cried. “Or Tabitha! I don’t know who those men were at the apartment. I don’t know who you are! I’m telling you the truth.”

“You wouldn’t know the truth if it bit you in the ass,” he ground back at her. “Sabrina. Tabitha. Whatever you’re calling yourself today.” Fury rose up again.

“Sienna. My name is Sienna!”

A sound pricked his hearing through the wind and the rain. He lifted his head. Someone was coming up the road. Headlights swayed through the storm above them on the bridge. A car door slammed.

She pushed against him again. “Police—”

He cut his gaze back to the woman beneath him, let go of one of her arms and wrapped his hand over her mouth. Before she could try anything else, with his other arm, he forcibly rolled her over him, down the bank, his body thunking against the ground, against her, once, twice, till they were up against the foot of the bridge.

Voices sounded above them, the words carried away by the wind. Then a gunshot exploded, and seconds later a body flew darkly past them, over the bridge and into the water.

Whoever the hell was up on that bridge, it wasn’t the police. Whoever it was had just executed the man from the van and dumped his body right in front of them.

Close against his chest, the woman’s gaze spun, locked with his. She was so close, he could feel every panicked beat of her heart.

Then, more voices, shouts, and they were coming closer, down off the bridge.

They were coming to see if there was anyone left alive down here. He could see the understanding streak across the woman’s shocked eyes. He could see the battle as she decided who was more dangerous—them or him.

“I’m going to take my hand off your mouth,” he said quietly, quickly. “And you’re going to get back in the water.”

“I can’t.” Her voice was thin, begging. She wasn’t fighting him now. She wasn’t moving, period. He yanked her to her feet.

“You can.” He slipped to the bank, pulled her with him. They had no more than seconds before they’d be seen. “Or they’ll kill you.”

“And you won’t?”

Vengeance twisted, sharp in his gut. Kill her? God, he’d like to. “No.”

“I can’t swim!” she shrieked, and in the same second he shoved her in, he realized he had no idea who the hell she was.

Because she wasn’t lying. She couldn’t swim. She wasn’t Tabitha Donovan.