Page 7 of Heart of Danger
Mac opened the door of their meeting room and ushered her over the threshold. Jon would have already seeded the room with vidcams, tiny ones she wouldn’t be able to detect. Jon and Nick would be watching from the next room.
The woman stood quietly just inside the door. She didn’t pester him to let her go, didn’t ask where they were. He found that interesting. It showed self-discipline. Was she an operator?
Only one way to find out.
He pulled off his balaclava, tapped his wrist unit twice unlocking the restraints and whipped off her hood.
She blinked in the light and looked around her.
Mac watched her carefully. People see different things. Operators are always ‘on’. They’re hardwired that way and then trained to take it further. They would walk into a baby’s nursery, check the exits and the kid’s hands in his crib. Just in case.
Operators don’t sign up by chance. They’re born that way, hard-wired for trouble, then drift to where someone can train them and hone their gifts.
So if she was here on an infiltration mission, she’d check his hands, check the door to see what kind of locking mechanism it had, check all the walls for windows and see what could possibly be used as a weapon. She’d do it fast and in about a second and a half she could list in detail every single item in the room.
Mac could do it, Jon and Nick could do it. They’d been taught by the best, by Lucius Ward.
At the thought of his former commanding office, Mac’s heart gave a small pump of rage. He repressed the thought ruthlessly. Now wasn’t the time. It wouldn’t ever be the time. And anyway, the fucker was living it up in Rio.
The woman wasn’t an operator. She didn’t size up the room at all. She sized him up. Her gaze rested thoughtfully on his face, without even a flicker of attention to his hands. Even though his hands hovered over his Beretta 92 and the black carbon combat knife in its sheath.
The knife was three hundred times stronger than steel and honed to razor sharpness. He could not just slit her throat but he could decapitate her without any effort at all.
An operator would have understood all that, instinctively. Would have upped the vigilance level, started dancing on the balls of her feet in anticipation of action.
Nothing like that. She simply stood before him, looking him in the eyes. Breathing regular, muscles relaxed, hands loose.
And Christ, she was beautiful. Right now, that was the only factor in favor of her being an operator. Services throughout the world were scrambling to recruit beautiful, athletic women, sometimes training them from high school on. Honey pots they were called—and they were spectacularly effective.
Ghost Ops had had two such women available, in training to make it up to the big leagues. Women so beautiful any straight man would let them get near because biology tripped them up. Conquest by genes. The men the women preyed on never felt the knife that slipped between the ribs or the garotte around the neck or the microbullet between the eyes.
But Francesca and Melanie had had a look about them that was unmistakable. They could hide the fact that they were soldiers under fashionable clothes and makeup but they couldn’t hide the fact that they were dangerous. If a man had eyes to see, they gave off danger vibes like beautiful rattlesnakes.
Nothing like the aura around this woman. She was too soft, too sad. This woman wasn’t a predator. She looked vulnerable and tired.
Fuck this.
“Sit down,” he rapped.
She looked around and took one of his easy chairs at the table they used for one-on-ones, ignoring the long table they used for meetings. He sat down across from her. If he shifted his knees, he’d be touching her.
He sank into the softness of his chair, making sure he didn’t touch her. Wishing he didn’t have to do this, wishing he didn’t have to be here, interrogating this woman, knowing he’d have to make some hard choices if her story wasn’t convincing.
Because he was the protector of his little outlaw band and if he had to get rid of her to keep them all safe, he’d do it. He wouldn’t like it, but he’d do it.
By default, he’d been appointed king of his little kingdom. And though he’d rather be anywhere else, here he was, in his comfy easy chair. As a soldier, he’d never have allowed easy chairs in his office. Nothing easy about being a soldier, the harder the life, the faster you learned. He had a PhD in hardship.
But here, goddamned if people didn’t come to him with their problems. They were fucking civilians. Much as he’d like to, he couldn’t order them to stand to attention and give a sitrep. The civilian world didn’t work like that. So he’d learned to offer his people a comfortable chair and even a goddamned cup of coffee—he drew the line at tea—waiting for them to get to the point.
She sat there, not relaxed against the back of the chair but not tensely poised on the edge of her seat, either. She simply looked at him, as if waiting.
Okay, so he’d start the dance.
“Who the fuck are you and why are you looking for this guy—what the hell was his name?”
She never blinked. “Tom McEnroe. I’m looking for Tom McEnroe.”
Mac had been trained to lie, by the best. His eyes gave absolutely nothing away. “Never heard of him,” he said. “And who are you? I’m not going to ask a third time, lady.”
