Serious Risks
Serious Risks
Rachel Lee
Computer programmer Jessica Kilmer's life changed the moment she realized classified documents had been stolen from her safe. She knew contacting the FBI would turn her life upside down, but she never expected what would happen when she met special agent Arlen Coulter.For even as Arlen assured her that he would keep her safe, his quiet intensity awakened her heart to another danger altogether….It seemed to Arlen that the greatest risk in this case was the effect Jessica had on him. She aroused feelings he'd long believed dead–and preferred to keep buried. But the danger that Jessica faced was real–could Arlen get her out before it was too late?
Serious Risks
Rachel Lee
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
RACHEL LEE
wrote her first play in the third grade for a school assembly, and by the age of twelve she was hooked on writing. She’s lived all over the United States and now resides in Florida. Having held jobs as a security officer, real-estate agent and optician, she uses these experiences, as well as her natural flair for creativity, to write stories that are undeniably romantic. Rachel Lee has garnered numerous industry awards, including an RT Book Reviews award for Best Series Romance and Reviewer’s Choice Award for Best Romantic Suspense, as well as landing a Romance Writers of America RITA
Award nomination.
For
Markey—who believed
Gil—who is my hero
Bob—who shored me up when I got scared
Aaron—who is my biggest fan
Heather—who shares my excitement
And
All the men and women who perform the thankless task
of protecting the nation’s security.
I feel privileged to have worked with you.
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 1
“Somebody stole a classified document from my safe last night.”
The breathless, nervous claim over the telephone brought Special Agent Arlen Coulter upright in his chair and banished every other thought from his head. A perfectly routine afternoon of reviewing case reports from his agents lost the last vestige of ordinariness. Swiftly reaching across his desk, he pulled over a legal pad and a pen.
“What’s your name?” he asked the woman. “And where are you calling from?”
“My name is Jessica Kilmer, and I’m calling from a pay phone on the interstate.”
“Give me the number in case we get disconnected.” He made her recite it twice to be sure he got it right. In the background he could hear the whiz and roar of the late-afternoon traffic. “Okay, Ms. Kilmer,” he said. “Tell me about it.”
There was a shuddery breath from the other end of the phone. “I work for MTI—Military Technologies, Inc. We do a lot of defense work.”
“I’m familiar with MTI,” Arlen said. Indeed he was. MTI ranked as the area’s second-largest defense contractor. “Go on, ma’am.”
“Someone took a classified document from my safe during the night,” she repeated unsteadily, as if she couldn’t quite believe her own words. “I’m the only one who has the combination, except for the copy that security keeps in their vault.”
Arlen leaned forward tensely. Possibilities were already flitting through his head, not the least of them that this was a crank call. In the past he had worked in counterintelligence in the Washington, D.C., area, so he knew just how common espionage was. Nevertheless, this was the first hint of it that he had gotten during his entire six years in Austin, Texas. Still, the woman knew things that only someone engaged in classified work would know, such as the fact that security would have the only other combination to a classified safe. “You’re sure the document is missing?”
“Oh, yes.” She expelled the words on another unsteady breath. “I went through every folder in the safe, in case it was misfiled.”
“It couldn’t have been left out by accident?” Arlen kept his voice calm, nonaccusatory. Once a witness was put on the defensive, you could forget any hope of getting a straight story.
“No. I haven’t had it out of the safe in several weeks. It was there last night when I filed the document that comes just before it. I know it was there!”
The rising tone of her voice conveyed her frustration and concern as no words could have. Arlen felt a small twinge of sympathy for her, but he put it firmly aside. He couldn’t afford to allow his mind or his judgment to be clouded by sympathy.
“I believe you, Ms. Kilmer,” he said soothingly. “Have you told anyone else about the theft?”
“I reported it to security,” she answered, and now her tone was indignant. “They’re insisting I must have mislaid it or misfiled it or loaned it to someone, because I’m the only one with the combination to the safe. That’s the whole point, and they’re missing it. That’s why I’m calling you! The point is, someone opened that safe last night. Someone else has the combination!”
Arlen didn’t need to have the ramifications of that statement spelled out. If someone else had the combination, there was no telling how often that person had gained access to Jessica Kilmer’s safe. There was no way to know how many other safes at MTI this supposed spy might have combinations for, or how often he might have invaded them. Or how many classified documents he might have stolen, photographed, copied—the list of potential abuses was catastrophic.
Arlen addressed Jessica Kilmer. “Are you going back to work?”
She gave a shaky, mirthless laugh. “Hardly. By the time they got through grilling me and insinuating that I have the IQ of an insect, I had a splitting headache. I’m going home.”
“Just a few more questions, Ms. Kilmer, if you’re up to it.”
“Yes, of course.”
“Does anyone know you’re calling the FBI? The security people at your company, perhaps?”
“No, no one knows.” Jessica Kilmer sighed heavily. Even over the phone, her weariness and frustration were apparent to Arlen. “The security people aren’t planning to tell anyone about this just yet. They’re evidently convinced that the report will show up and that they’ll be able to explain the whole thing in some fashion that won’t reflect badly on them or the company.”
“And you don’t believe that.”
“How can I? I know that document was there when I locked my safe last night, and I know it was gone when I opened it this morning. There’s no way that can be explained as carelessness or an accident.”
No, indeed, Arlen thought. He glanced at his watch and noted that it was nearly five. “Ms. Kilmer, we need to discuss this in more detail. Can we get together somewhere this evening, say a restaurant?”
There was a brief, hesitant silence. “Wouldn’t it be more convenient for you if I came to your office?”
Arlen couldn’t suppress a smile, and he was sure she must be able to hear it in his voice. “There’s no question it would be more convenient, Ms. Kilmer, but until we get some idea of the size of this mess and who might be involved, I don’t want anyone to know you’ve contacted the Bureau. Our offices are in the busiest part of downtown, and there’s always the unwelcome possibility that someone who knows you might see you come in here.”
“Meeting at a restaurant just seems a little irregular, I guess.”
He understood her trepidation and tried to tease her out of it. “Believe me, Ms. Kilmer, I’ve questioned people in places that are a lot more irregular than any restaurant could ever be.”
There was another very brief silence, and then Jessica Kilmer laughed, a genuinely amused sound. When he heard that, Arlen knew he’d taken the first step to establishing a rapport with the lady, a rapport that would be absolutely essential if it should turn out that they had to work together. And if she was right about this document, they would unquestionably wind up spending a lot of time together.
“Actually, ma’am, we’re not so very different from your local police force. When you call to report something, we generally visit you to get the information. It would be just as easy for me to come to your home, if that would be more convenient for you. My only requirement is that we meet in a place where I can question you without interruption. It’s very important that you don’t get distracted and forget to tell me something.”
“All right, all right,” Jessica said with a laugh. “Let me give you my address.” She rattled off a street and number, then added, “I just moved in a couple of weeks ago, so I’m still neck-deep in packing boxes.”
“Don’t worry about it,” he said. “I’ll never notice.”
“What time should I expect you?”
“Say around seven, if that’s okay by you.”
“That’s just fine.”
“And, Ms. Kilmer? Don’t tell anyone at all that you called the FBI. I realize that sounds cloak-and-daggerish, but secrecy is essential. You wouldn’t want word of this conversation to get back to the wrong person.”
How could she possibly tell anyone what she couldn’t quite believe herself? Jessica wondered as she climbed back into her car. She’d actually called the FBI! Her stomach, which had been sinking all day anyway, sank further at the significance of that realization. She forced herself to ignore the sensation, just as she had all day long. Other than dread and worry, the only other feeling she’d had today had been indignation.
And frustration. She had always believed the facility security officer to be a reasonably intelligent man, but now she seriously wondered. Was she the only person with the wit to understand the gravity of what she’d been saying all day: that someone else had the combination to her safe?
Mr. Coulter had apparently understood, she reminded herself, and felt reassured that her decision to call the FBI was correct. Correct? Of course it was correct! The company’s own Security Practice Procedures Manual said that the FBI should be informed if espionage was suspected, preferably from a pay phone off-site so there was no chance of being overheard. And Jessica most definitely suspected espionage.
By the time she arrived at home, however, she was remembering the suspicion with which her every statement had been heard by the security officer. Barron obviously thought Jessica was making everything up to conceal her own negligence. What if Coulter suspected the same thing?
Usually when Jessica stepped into the antique elegance of her two-story Victorian house she experienced the pride of her new ownership, the thrill of at last having a real home of her own. Tonight, however, all she felt was the weight of the mortgage, reminding her that she couldn’t afford job trouble. Not now. Not as long as she owed that payment every month. Not as long as most of her hard-earned savings, accumulated by scrimping for five long years, were tied up in the house.
What if Barron managed to hang the missing document on her?
As seven o’clock drew closer, Jessica grew edgier. She’d never been questioned by the FBI before—or any policeman, for that matter—and she found herself wondering why she hadn’t just let MTI security handle it. They couldn’t prove she had taken the document, no matter how much they might want to believe it. What if this FBI agent wanted to believe the same thing? What if he thought her call to him was all a smoke screen?
What if he got rough?
“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Jessica!” she said disgustedly to her reflection in the bathroom mirror as she finished brushing her teeth. “He’s an FBI agent! They don’t get rough except with criminals.” And spies?
“I am not a spy!”
She knew it, and so did the small, pale face staring back at her from the mirror. Pushing her eyeglasses up her nose, Jessica gazed into her own wide, worried brown eyes and thought she looked exactly, exactly, like a small brown mouse pinned by an eagle’s eye.
A few strands of dark hair had escaped from the confines of her chignon, and she smoothed them back into place. Outwardly, at least, there was no nonsense about Jessica Kilmer. She might have the world’s most inventive, overactive imagination, but no one would ever guess it by looking at her.
On the other hand, she thought with a sigh, she wasn’t quite passing as her usual businesslike self, not with worry stamped all over her face. “Mouse” was the kindest description she could give herself.
The front doorbell sounded, and Jessica’s stomach plunged instantly in response. Oh, God, the FBI is here!
A real, honest-to-gosh FBI agent.
“Cut it out,” she told her reflection with more conviction than she really felt. “He puts his pants on one leg at a time, just like anybody else.”
She headed downstairs, drew a deep breath, expelled it and opened the door.
And looked into the grayest eyes she’d ever seen. Not the pallid color that might be blue or green depending on the light, but gray like flannel, and fringed in thick, dark lashes. His hair was a rich, very dark brown, threaded with silver, and a little longer than she’d expected. Evidently FBI agents didn’t have to wear military-style haircuts anymore.
He was tall, over six feet to her five foot two, broad shouldered, narrow hipped. Elegant-looking, especially in a gray suit, white shirt and dark tie. He wasn’t, thank goodness, handsome. Handsome would have been too much to handle. No, he was simply attractive. His face was at best pleasant, regular featured.
But nothing in her life prepared her for this man’s total impact. The term sex appeal took on a whole new meaning for her in that instant, an understanding that might have frightened her except that there was nothing wolfish in his expression or posture. In fact, he was giving her a very pleasant smile and holding out his hand.
“Ms. Kilmer? I’m Arlen Coulter.”
Jessica felt her hand swallowed in his firm, warm grip and heard herself say something courteous in response, and tried not to notice the very acute and observant way his gaze measured her.
Arlen recognized her nervousness, but it hardly surprised him. Most people were nervous at the prospect of dealing with the FBI. He saw past the nervousness, though, past the no-nonsense hairstyle and the high-collared white blouse and neatly pressed gray slacks. Behind the armor there was waiflike vulnerability. It peeped uncertainly out at him from the depths of astonishingly bright brown eyes, and, to him at least, it would have been much less obvious had she not gone to such great lengths to hide it.
“A pleasure, Ms. Kilmer,” he said, releasing her hand. In order to seem less threatening, he plunged his hands into the front pockets of his slacks and waited for her invitation to enter. She continued to look uncertainly up at him, and then color rose from the neck of her blouse to meet the roots of her hair. Where did that blush start? he wondered, and felt an unexpected stirring of his body.
Jessica licked her dry lips, unaware that the small, nervous gesture had an electric effect on the tall man who stood so casually before her in a conservative gray suit. “I, um, I don’t mean to be offensive, but can I see your badge, or whatever?”
Arlen’s smile broadened a shade, and he reached into the inside breast pocket of his suit jacket. Handing her the slim leather wallet, he said, “I’m not offended. The whole reason I have ID is so people can ask to see it. All you’ve done is show me you’re not gullible, Ms. Kilmer.”
Jessica, who wouldn’t have recognized a valid FBI identity card or badge if it had stood up and bitten her, stared at the contents of the wallet and registered the words Arlen V. Coulter, Special Agent, Federal Bureau of Investigation. Her blush deepening, she passed the wallet back.
“Please come in, Mr. Coulter. Or do I call you Agent Coulter?”
“If you insist,” he said with a smile as he followed her through the gleaming entry hall and into a living room where packing boxes still occupied quite a bit of space. “I’d prefer it if you’d just call me Arlen. We’re probably going to be seeing quite a bit of one another.”
Jessica smiled shyly as she offered him a seat. “You can call me Jessica. Would you like some coffee?”
“Not just now, thanks. Maybe later.”
Jessica settled onto the couch, facing the armchair where she’d seated Arlen, and watched as he pulled a pad and pen out of his breast pocket. He had blunt-fingered, large hands, competent, capable-looking hands. Their movements were calm, controlled. As was he, she realized. Everything about him was controlled, even his smile.
“I’ll probably need to get an official statement from you later, but for the moment, why don’t we just go over what happened?” He offered what he hoped was a reassuring smile. “The questions may get a little repetitious, but I need to be sure you aren’t inadvertently overlooking something. All right?”
Jessica nodded and clasped her hands tightly, wondering why the living room suddenly seemed small. She’d considered it a pleasantly large room until Arlen Coulter entered it, but he seemed to fill it completely.
And there was a wedding ring on his left hand. She noticed the gold band with an unexpected stab of disappointment and wondered why it should matter.
Arlen spoke. “Jessica, why don’t you tell me a little bit about your job and the kind of classified information you work with.”
“I’m a programmer,” she explained. “I work on software for Department of Defense applications. Right now I’m designing a package that’s intended to be able to pick out planes and incoming missiles from all the electronic countermeasures that are available to confuse radar.”
Arlen was impressed. “Can it?”
“It’s too soon to tell yet, but in theory it should work.”
“How long have you been working on defense applications?”
“Six years.”
In answer to his prompting, she described some of the other programs she’d worked on over the years. Listening to her, watching her, Arlen realized a couple of things. This lady was very bright, and she loved her work. As she spoke, she grew animated, using her hands and smiling, and her eyes sparkled with enthusiasm. At this new glimpse of the woman behind the uptight, severe facade, Arlen wondered what had happened to her to make her want to hide her vitality. Not that it mattered, he reminded himself. He was here as an agent to do a job, not to wonder about a woman who was young enough to be his daughter.
Eventually he brought her back to the events of the past day. Her animation faded, to be replaced by the nervous worry he’d seen when he first arrived.
“At the end of the day,” Jessica explained, “I lock up everything I work with—my files, my hard drive from the computer, any paper I’ve scribbled on or written on. I don’t bother sorting at night, because I’m tired and might make a mistake. In the morning I’ll decide which stuff needs to be burned, but in the evening I just lump it all into an envelope and file it in my safe.”
“What kind of safe do you have?”
“It’s a GSA-approved four-drawer cabinet.” All safes used for the storage of classified information had to be approved by the General Services Administration, or GSA, an indication that the safe met certain standards.
Arlen nodded. “What level material do you keep in it?”
“Just Secret and Confidential. If I need to use Top Secret or special-access information, like Secret Compartmented Information, I check them out of the vault downstairs and return them at the end of the day.”
“And last night you followed your usual procedure.”
Jessica nodded, clasping her hands together so tightly that Arlen saw her knuckles turn white.
“Why don’t you run through it again for me? Just so I can be sure I have it right.”
Jessica nodded again. “I take my hard disk out—”
“Just a second,” Arlen interrupted. “You take your computer apart every night?”
Jessica shook her head. “I have an external, removable hard disk. It’s designed for this kind of thing. I can take it off my system in just a minute, and I always store it in the top drawer of my safe, unless for some reason there’s material of a higher classification on it. Then I take it to the vault.”
“Okay. You put your hard disk in the top drawer. Then what?”
“Then I pick up any documents I’ve pulled, and I file them in their proper folders in the other drawers. When that’s done, I pick up whatever scraps of paper there are that I’ve scribbled on, doodled on or whatever, put them in a manila envelope and file them in the suspense folder I keep at the front of the second drawer.” Seeing the question form on his lips, she hastened to explain. “The suspense file just means the stuff in it is suspended, set aside to deal with later.”
He nodded. “And that’s how you know the missing document was there last night?”
“That’s right.” Realizing suddenly that her fingers were aching from the tight way she had folded her hands, Jessica unlaced them and wiggled them to relax them. “I always put the suspense file right in front of it.”
Arlen watched her wiggle her fingers, pursing his lips thoughtfully. “And you’re sure it was there?”
Jessica’s eyes snapped to his face. “Yes.” She said it with conviction.
Arlen’s gray eyes lifted from her hands to her eyes, and they no longer held any of the warmth and friendliness she’d seen in them earlier. “I have to ask these questions, Jessica. They’re not intended to be offensive. How is it you’re sure the document was there? Usually when we do things in certain ways they become so habitual that we don’t really notice. Did you really see that document last night, or do you just think you saw it?”
Her hands knotted into fists on her lap. “I saw it,” she said flatly. “The folder it was in is red, and the three folders behind it are blue. If that folder was gone, I’d have noticed it instantly, the way I noticed it was missing this morning.”
Arlen nodded and wrote in his notebook. “Okay,” he said pleasantly. “I believe you. The folder was there last night. You filed the suspense file in front of it?”
“Yes.”
“And then?”
“I closed the drawer and locked the safe.”
“How did you lock the safe?”
Jessica sighed. “I turned the dial four full rotations and tested the lever. It was locked.”
“And it was still locked when you came to work this morning?”
Jessica opened her mouth to respond, and then hesitated, her brown eyes widening. “I don’t know,” she said after a moment. “I always turn the dial four times before I start to work the combination. And I never try the lever before I enter the combination.”
“So it could have been closed but unlocked this morning.”
She nodded. “But I don’t see—”
“Don’t you find it odd that the entire folder was missing?” Arlen asked her.
Jessica’s reply was tart. “To tell you the truth, I haven’t been allowed any time today to think about anything, least of all whether what happened was odd. Of course it was odd. It was odd that anything disappeared overnight. I still don’t see.”
“Well, if you were going to steal classified information, would you leave such an obvious footprint? Wouldn’t it make more sense to photograph the document and put it back? Or photocopy it and replace it?”
“Well, yes, of course,” Jessica agreed. “But if you didn’t have time—” Her eyes widened. “Oh!” she said on a breath. “Oh!”
“Exactly.” Arlen smiled faintly. “Did you come to work early this morning, by any chance?”
The expression on her face answered the question even before she spoke. “I was a half hour early because I wanted to check out something I thought of last night.”
Arlen spread his hands, as if to say, “See?” “Could I take you up on that coffee now, Jessica?”
“Yes, of course.” She went to the kitchen to get it, impressed with how quickly Arlen Coulter had picked up on something she’d entirely missed, something even the security officer, Dave Barron, had entirely missed, in spite of all the questioning she’d endured today.
She was also uncomfortably impressed with a few other things, like how good Arlen Coulter looked. Few men her own age and younger looked half as good as Arlen did, and he must be somewhere over forty. He also made her uncomfortably aware of him. And of herself. She was most definitely not accustomed to such feelings, and she supposed she should be grateful that he was a married man and therefore could be no more than a passing and temporary ripple in her tranquility. She would get used to how good he looked, and that would be that.
An expression of determination on her face, she marched back into the living room with a tray bearing two cups of coffee, the sugar bowl and creamer. Setting the tray on the cherry coffee table between them, she asked, “Cream or sugar?”
“Black, thank you.” Arlen looked at the dainty china cups and saucers with their delicate pattern of roses and wondered when was the last time he had seen anyone serve coffee in anything but a mug. Aunt Celeste, he remembered. His wife’s great-aunt had always served coffee in bone china teacups. It wasn’t until Andrew was born that Celeste had astonished Arlen one day by handing him a large mug with his name painted on its side. “You’ve accommodated to our family customs a great deal, my boy,” she’d said in her stentorian voice, “and I thought it was high time we accommodated to one of yours.” Until she died at the age of ninety, Celeste had made sure that Arlen’s coffee was always served in a mug whenever he visited any of his wife’s relatives. Damn, he still missed the warm, wonderful, tough old lady.
“These are lovely cups,” he said now to Jessica, compelled by his memory of the elderly woman. Celeste had taught him whatever drawing-room manners he could claim, and Lord knew there were few enough.
Jessica smiled with pleasure. “Thank you. I found them in an antique shop a few months ago. The entire set, in fact, without a chip or a missing piece.” They’d cost dearly, but they were an essential part of the home she was trying to create.
“They remind me of some dishes my wife’s aunt used to have,” Arlen remarked. “I’ve been terrified of breaking the darn things ever since the first time I ate dinner at Aunt Celeste’s.” He gave Jessica a rueful smile. “She was a wonderful old lady, but her blasted dishes have haunted my entire adult life. They must be a hundred years old, and every time they get passed on to a new generation, they just take on more sentimental value. Aunt Celeste got them as a wedding gift from her husband. Then, when she passed on, they went to my wife, and now my daughter has them.”
His daughter had them? Jessica felt she had missed something somewhere. “Your daughter has them?” she repeated questioningly.
Arlen looked up from the cup, his gray eyes unfocused. “I’m afraid my wife is gone.”
“Gone?”
Jessica’s eyes strayed to his ring, and Arlen followed the direction of her gaze.
“I haven’t been able to bring myself to take it off,” he admitted. “She died over three years ago.”
Jessica hardly knew how to respond to that. “I’m sorry,” she said hesitantly.
Arlen shook his head, giving her another rueful smile. “My fault for wearing the ring.” Lifting one of the delicate cups, he took a sip of coffee. “The coffee is delicious, Jessica.”
“Thank you.” A widower who still wore his wedding ring after three years was as safe as a married man, she figured. Maybe safer. And probably a whole lot safer when he was an FBI agent.
“Okay.” Arlen picked up his pad again and made a quick note. “Let’s get back to this morning, Jessica. What exactly did you do when you arrived at MTI? Start in the parking lot.”
So she took him step-by-step through a day that had grown more frustrating with each passing minute. From the parking lot she had entered the building through the main entrance. Most mornings security waved her through on sight because the day shift recognized her well after six years. This morning, however, she’d arrived before the shift change and had had to stop to display her identification. It had been a small, routine matter, and she had taken the opportunity to clip her badge on her collar, where it would have to stay the rest of the day anyhow.
The empty elevator had carried her up to the second-floor corridor, and a brief walk had brought her to the locked door of the controlled area that held her office, along with a dozen others. There she had keyed in her code on the alphanumeric keypad beside the door, and the door had unlocked for her.
Once in her office, she had opened her safe to remove the items she needed for work: first the hard disk, which she installed in the drive case attached to the side of her computer. Then she had pulled out the second drawer of the safe, and it was as she was removing the suspense envelope that she noted the conspicuous absence of the red folder that contained a Secret NATO document.
Her first thought, of course, was that she was mistaken, that somehow the hanging file folder had come off the tracks and slipped down between the other folders to the bottom of the drawer. Item by item she had examined the contents of the drawer, checking every red folder twice, finally examining each and every one of the blue folders and their Confidential documents, as well.
“And that’s when you called security?” Arlen asked.
“No.” Jessica flushed faintly. “I decided I must have been mistaken about where the folder was last night. So I looked through the bottom drawers, too. Document by document. That’s when I called security.”
Arlen’s pen made faint noises as it moved quickly across a fresh page in his notebook. “You said you were sure the document was there last night.”
“I was. I am. It’s just that when I couldn’t find it this morning, the last thought that occurred to me was that somebody had gotten into my safe overnight. It was easier to believe I was mistaken.”
He looked up, and his expression was reassuring. “I know. But I have to ask.”
And he kept on asking. At some point or other, Jessica started to feel immune to the implications of some of the questions and found herself more aware of Arlen. The longer she was with him, the more she became cognizant of his magnetism.
“Jessica?”
Her gaze focused on Arlen, and a painful blush crept into her face.
“You’re tired,” he said kindly. “Just a few more questions, if you think you can stand it.”
Her cheeks felt as if they were on fire, and she had to remind herself that Arlen Coulter couldn’t read her mind. “Sure,” she managed to say. “I’m not all that tired.”
“Did you change the combination on your safe today?”
Jessica shook her head. “I don’t know how to do it. Security always does that, and since they don’t believe that somebody got into my safe last night, I don’t think they’re going to change it.”
Arlen slapped his notebook closed and hooked his pen onto the cover. “I’ll tell you what I think is going to happen tomorrow. I may be wrong, but if I’m right, I want you prepared to carry it off.”
Jessica leaned forward a little, fixing her gaze attentively on his face. There was a faint, jagged scar under his lower lip, running diagonally from the corner of his mouth to the center of his chin. That must be what gave his smile that interesting lopsidedness.
“I think,” Arlen said slowly, watching her from intent gray eyes, “the missing document will turn up sometime tomorrow.”
Jessica’s eyes widened behind her glasses, and her lips parted on a breath. “Why?”
Did she, Arlen wondered, have the least idea what that expression did to a man, even one as old and abused as he was? Probably not, he decided. If she had, she would have saved it for someone worth spending it on.
“Because,” he replied, forcing his attention back to business, “the only way to minimize the damage that was caused by your discovery of the document’s disappearance is to put it back in a way that makes it look as if you mislaid it.”
Jessica blinked and straightened with indignation. “Frame me, you mean!”
“I figured that would be your reaction,” Arlen said soothingly. “Just listen for a moment.”
Jessica’s eyes were snapping, but she sat back, compressed her lips and gave him a short nod.
Arlen managed to smother a smile. “Okay,” he said. “The document will turn up, and it’ll be pinned on you as carelessness or forgetfulness. Security will believe it, because they can get out of this with a decision that nothing’s been compromised, and a reprimand to you will close the entire matter. They’ll write their letter to the Defense Investigative Service explaining the events and the actions taken, and the worst that will happen is that DIS will pull an unannounced inspection to ensure that MTI’s security is up to snuff.”
“And I’ll have a written security reprimand in my personnel file,” Jessica reminded him sharply.
“Only temporarily,” Arlen said. “Only until we get this mess settled. I promise you I’ll personally see to clearing your record with the company. In the meantime, Jessica, how would you like to work with the FBI?”
“But I have a job.” At least for now, she added to herself.
“And you’ll keep it. No, I want you to work with me on this case. You’ll be my inside contact at MTI. For the moment, I don’t want anyone over there to know you’ve called the Bureau, but I still need to know what’s happening. Can you do that for me?”
Her chin sank a little, but her eyes lifted to his with a kind of wondering shyness and pleasure that gave him some inkling of how little she thought of herself. “You mean you think I can help you?”
“Absolutely,” he said firmly. “Not only that, but I don’t think I’ll get very far without your help. Until I get a better idea of who’s who and who makes a good suspect, I can’t risk trusting anyone else at MTI. Will you help?”
“Of course I will.”
Arlen smiled. “Good. The first thing is that when that document turns up tomorrow, and I’m positive it will, you can’t argue too hard with the idea that you mislaid it. I’m not saying you should be thrilled with the possibility, but you should be just as relieved as everyone else when it shows up, and only a little more reluctant to believe that you were responsible.”
Jessica wasn’t happy with that, but she nodded her agreement. “I get the idea.”
“I know it hurts,” Arlen said sympathetically, “but try to look at it from another perspective. This uproar has undoubtedly scared somebody, and if he stays scared, we’ll never get our hands on him. It’s essential that we catch him, so we can stop him, so we can find out how long and how much he’s been compromising us, and who he’s working for.”
He came around the coffee table to stand right beside Jessica, and touched her shoulder lightly with his fingers. “Maybe it’ll help if you think of yourself as an agent working undercover. That’s what you’ll be, you know. In a very real sense.”
Jessica tilted her head, looking dubiously up at him. “Just by pretending to believe I mislaid that document?”
“That’s part of it.” Arlen squatted, resting his elbows on his knees, bringing his face level with Jessica’s. “I also want you to start paying close attention to the people around you. Notice whether any of them seem to be seriously troubled, or disgruntled with MTI. Notice if any of them seem to be living too well, or drinking too much—anything that might indicate they’re not entirely trustworthy.”
That idea didn’t sit well with her, Arlen could tell. Most people didn’t like the idea of spying on their coworkers or friends.
“Jessica, I’m not asking you to spy on people. I’m just asking you to pay attention to your impressions of people. See if anyone’s attitude makes you genuinely uneasy about what they might do. You have to remember what’s at stake here.”
He was right, of course, Jessica thought. They were talking about national security. If she had evidence that would convict a murderer, would she withhold it? Of course not. This was a crime, too, potentially as serious as murder to soldiers who might someday depend on the efficacy of MTI-supplied equipment and software to protect them in the field.
Turning, Jessica looked Arlen right in the eye. “I’ll do it,” she said firmly. “What about you? What will you be doing?”
“Well,” he said, standing up, “I’ll start by calling DIS—Defense Investigative Service—and getting a complete report on the security arrangements at MTI. For example, I imagine the vault you referred to is patrolled by armed guards round the clock.”
“Well, yes, I think so. Guards are necessary for the protection of Top Secret information. That’s why I can’t keep it in my safe.”
“Exactly. DIS can give me a complete rundown. They had to approve all the arrangements to begin with, and I imagine they inspect things pretty thoroughly every few months.”
Jessica nodded. When the DIS inspectors came in they usually managed to spend a few minutes talking to each and every one of the employees who were cleared for access to classified information.
“And tomorrow,” Arlen continued, “I’ll initiate background checks on all the people who have access to your controlled area. Maybe we can find someone who’s in financial trouble, or who’s vulnerable to blackmail. Maybe we can close this out quickly.”
Looking down at her, he shrugged and gave her a crooked, rueful smile. “But don’t hold your breath. I used to work in the Foreign Counterintelligence Division of the Bureau in the Washington area. It can take months to gather enough evidence to prosecute.”
Jessica sighed and looked down at her hands. “So it’ll probably drag on.”
“Probably. But look at the bright side.”
“Is there one?” She gave him a doubtful smile.
“Sure. We get to become acquainted. Really well acquainted. In fact, I guarantee you’ll be sick of the sight of me before this is over.”
Jessica shook her head, laughing. “I can’t imagine that,” she said, the words slipping out before she knew they were coming.
Arlen watched the brilliant color flood her face, saw the dawning of her shocked embarrassment. Her reaction gave more weight to her words than he would otherwise have assigned them. If she hadn’t blushed, he would have thought she was teasing. Because she’d blushed, he knew she wasn’t.
And he was astonished how good that little slip of the tongue made him feel. Not since Lucy’s death had anyone said anything that made him feel good. Angry, maybe. Irritated, yes. But not good. Good feelings seemed to have left his life along with Lucy. And, to be quite honest, he wasn’t sure he wanted them back. Those feelings had a price, and he’d paid it once.
So, knowing she wasn’t teasing, he acted as if she was. “You think you won’t only because you haven’t had to look at me every day for a week or a month,” he said, chuckling and turning away as if he hadn’t seen her blush.
“I’ll let you get some rest now, Jessica,” he continued, heading for the door. “Call me if you have any questions.”
He paused suddenly and turned back, patting his pockets. “I must have my card here somewhere. Although maybe it’s better if you don’t carry it around with you.”
“I can reach you at the FBI office, can’t I?” she asked, her embarrassment fading as he seemed to notice nothing remarkable about her comment. “I don’t really need your card.”
“You can reach me at home, too,” he told her. “And I really don’t mind if you call. The number’s in the book. And if I need to get hold of you, what’s your office number?”
He pulled the pen and pad from his pocket, but Jessica forestalled him with her business card. Arlen’s gray eyes twinkled down at her.
“You’re better prepared than I am,” he confessed. “If something comes up, I’ll call.”
He took his leave almost with a sense of relief. Damn it, Arlen, he thought, the lady’s young enough to be your daughter, and you’re too damn old and wise to get tangled up with her.
And maybe, he thought a few minutes later, she wasn’t as young as she looked. Maybe he was going to start feeling again whether he wanted to or not. Three years was a long time. Maybe even dead feelings came back to life after enough time passed. Maybe, no matter how much you wanted them to stay gone, they just came back anyhow.
Chapter 2
Arlen arrived at the Bureau offices in the morning to find things in an uproar. One of the agents, Ted Wilson, was cooperating with the Secret Service in a sting operation, and overnight they’d rounded up five major drug dealers who were selling crack and coke for food stamps. The Drug Enforcement Administration had gotten involved somewhere along the way, and as near as Arlen could tell they had U.S. marshals, DEA agents, Secret Service agents and even, unless he was mistaken, a Customs agent, in the hallways and offices of the Bureau. They lacked only a U.S. Attorney, and it wasn’t more than a couple of minutes before one showed up. Carolyn Granger came downstairs with a tape recorder, warning everyone that unless somebody gave her some good reasons to use with the judge, the dealers would be out on bail in a couple of hours.
Arlen paused at Ted Wilson’s office door and leaned in to congratulate the young agent. Wilson, looking tired and rumpled in jeans and an FBI windbreaker, grinned up at him. “Thanks, Chief. It feels pretty good.”
“What’s all the congregation for?”
“Well, they’re painting all the Treasury offices, which means the Secret Service guys and the Customs guys are grabbing any excuse to stay out of there. I think DEA’s just curious.”
“Arlen?” The voice of his secretary, Donna, rose above the din and reached him down the length of the hall.
“Yo!” Twisting his head and leaning backward into the hall, he could just see her.
“It’s someone named Jessica on the phone.”
“Tell her I’ll be there in just a minute.” He looked back at Ted. “We do have some other work to accomplish here today.”
“Sure thing, boss.” Ted’s grin broadened. “I think it’ll calm down pretty quick. These guys were supposed to be at their desks ten minutes ago, anyway.”
It was impossible not to grin back. This was Ted’s first bust, and Arlen had no trouble remembering the exhilaration he’d felt his own first time. Walking down the hall, he edged around similarly jubilant men and escaped into the quiet of his own office.
Three of the lines on his phone were lit, so he buzzed Donna and found out that Jessica was on two.
“Jessica,” he said pleasantly into the phone, swiveling his chair to look up at the gray sky that promised rain before the morning was out. For years he’d worked in an office without a window, and the nicest part of his current assignment, he sometimes thought, was the window, with its view of the sky. “Are you calling from work?”
“Yes, I—”
He interrupted her quickly, but kept his tone casual. “Don’t tell me you’re canceling our lunch date.”
At the other end of the line, Jessica drew a total blank. Lunch date? She didn’t remember making a lunch date with Arlen. “I was just going to—”
“I can change the time if that’ll make it easier for you to meet me,” he said smoothly. “Noon instead of one o’clock? Would that be better?”
“I—I guess.” Flabbergasted, she didn’t know what else to say.
“Good! I’ll pick you up out front at noon, then. I’m sorry I can’t talk, but you know how it is at work. I’m already late for a meeting. See you at noon.”
At her own desk on the other side of town, Jessica listened to the hum of the empty phone line as she looked down into the safe drawer. The document was back, all right, stuffed down beneath the other folders so that it lay on the bottom of the drawer. If Arlen hadn’t predicted it, she would probably be thinking she was losing her mind. There was no way she could have missed it in her search yesterday, and yet she would have wondered anyway.
And for some reason Arlen didn’t want to discuss the matter over the phone while she was at work. At least, that was the only conclusion she could draw from their crazy conversation. But she’d wanted to ask him what to do, because it had occurred to her that the red folder or the pages of the document might have fingerprints on them. If she called security first, they would probably send someone up to check things out and ruin all the prints. If there were any.
Troubled, she closed the safe and sat back in her chair. Well, she could wait until after lunch to tell security she had the document. It would make her look even dippier, but what the heck. There was evidently no way she was going to come out of this looking good.
In the meantime, she had a great deal of work still to accomplish on her design for this new software project.
And someone had been in her safe again last night. The idea sent chills racing up and down her spine. In that safe were highly classified details about the Western world’s electronic countermeasures systems. There were threat estimates and survivability estimates, all of which would be very useful to America’s enemies.
In defense work, there were three main levels of classification. Confidential, the lowest, was given to information that could cause serious damage to national security if it fell into the wrong hands. Secret, the next highest, was given to information that could cause grave damage. Those were the levels in her safe. Quite a serious problem, to have someone rummaging around in those documents.
But what if that someone also had access to the guarded vault downstairs? That was where the Top Secret documents were kept, documents that by definition could cause exceptionally grave damage to national security, or even provoke war. It was downright scary even to think about.
And whoever had the combination to her safe probably did have access to the vault, because that was where copies of the combinations for every safe in the building were kept. Somehow this person must have gotten to that copy. And that meant everything in the building was open to him.
It was not yet nine in the morning, but Jessica found herself rubbing her temples to ease a growing throb. Take some aspirin and forget it, Jess, she told herself. Just focus your mind on work.
“Hey, Jessica.” Bob Harrow stood in her office door, looking his usual seedy self, with his hair standing up wildly and a stain of some kind on the front of his T-shirt. “Did you finish your part of the design yet?” As project director, Bob had the unenviable task of trying to keep the team on track.
“Not yet, Bob. Sorry. Yesterday blew me out of the water.”
Bob looked sympathetic. “You don’t look any too great this morning, kiddo. Don’t beat yourself over the head about it, Jessica. You won’t be the first programmer up here who’s spaced something out and found it two days later. Why do you think they put the digital locks on the door? I keep waiting for them to come up with retina identification equipment so they don’t have to worry about one of us scribbling the door code on our pant leg or something.”
But Jessica’s mind caught on something he said. “You mean other people have mislaid things up here? When did that happen?”
“It happens all the time.” Bob shrugged. “Well, not every day, but it was…oh, maybe a month ago that Jerry couldn’t find some report or other on some NATO test. It turned up under a stack of papers on his desk the next day. If you ask me, the only mistake you made was telling security about it. Those guys are completely useless. Did they find it for you? Nope. They just drove you crazy, and yet they’re perfectly convinced it’ll turn up today or tomorrow under some papers somewhere. And it will, Jessica. Believe me. Quit worrying about it.”
Jessica summoned a smile. “You wouldn’t really write the door code on your jeans leg, would you?”
“Well, I wouldn’t, but it wouldn’t surprise me if Mike or Carl did something stupid like that. I swear, neither one of them can think except in assembly language. Well, don’t let me keep you from working. And, Jessica, if this has still got you upset, don’t worry about the design. We’ve got a little slack and can wait a little longer.”
Alone again, Jessica took two aspirin and forced her attention to her work. Work, she’d discovered a long time ago, was solace.
Arlen pulled his car up under the overhang in front of MTI’s main entrance to wait for Jessica. He left the engine running and the defroster blowing to keep the windows clear. The day had turned unexpectedly cold and miserably wet. He was glad he had an old umbrella in the backseat, because he suspected Jessica had probably misjudged the weather this morning just as he had.
Jessica. He’d been thinking about her a little too often for his own peace of mind. Such a severe little mouse of a woman, he told himself, and then remembered the unusual brilliance of her brown eyes and the soft shell-pink of her full lips. Or the fact that her loosely cut gray slacks and high-necked white blouse had hinted at a figure that was better than average.
Well, better than average if you liked women with some meat on them, Arlen thought wryly. He guessed he did, to judge by his reaction to the lady. It hadn’t been something he’d really thought about before.
He’d dated Lucy all the way through high school, over her family’s ceaseless objections, and married her a week after graduation. Then had come an eighteen-month separation while he went to Desert Storm with the marines. He’d returned from the Middle East with a couple of medals to rejoin his bride and meet his eleven-month-old daughter, Melanie. And nine months after that, Andrew had been born. Two years later, he was out of the marines and in college on the GI Bill, both him and Lucy working to support the kids. The hard times had paid off in a big way when he fulfilled his life’s dream of joining the FBI.
Sighing, he looked back with a kind of nostalgic sadness. How young and invulnerable he and Lucy had been then, both of them sure that the hard times were over. Life had a hell of a way of grinding out the smugness of youth.
Exiting the building through the electronically controlled glass doors, Jessica caught sight of Arlen just moments before he spied her. In that instant she thought he looked sad. Alone. The way she felt inside all too often. Did she look like that to others?
But he smiled as he climbed out of the car and came around to open the door for her. That lopsided smile of his was infectious, she realized as she felt her own lips stretch and lift in response. Today he wore another, darker, gray wool suit, and he once again looked very much like the FBI agents of her imaginings. Very neat, very correct. Very tall and very imposing. Strange, nervous little tickles danced through her stomach.
But Arlen didn’t act like her image of an agent. As she slipped past him to get into the car, he bent without warning and kissed her lightly on the cheek. When she looked up at him in astonishment, he further confounded her by laughing and dropping a kiss on the tip of her nose.
“Climb in, honey. It’s cold out here.” Still smiling, he urged her into the car.
Honey? Surely he couldn’t be one of those awful men who called every woman honey. Awful as that thought was, she was even more astounded to realize that some fugitive part of her wished he really meant it. She couldn’t help thinking that it must be really nice to have someone in your life who called you “honey” and surprised you with kisses.
But a very long time ago Jessica had decided it was wisest to avoid men. The boys in high school had scorned her because she was too poor, too plump, too smart and wore glasses. She was one of the very few girls who didn’t go to her senior prom.
Things like that had hurt, of course, but nothing had prepared her for the anguish she discovered in college. Prince Charming had arrived in her freshman year in the guise of a premed student. To this day Jessica considered herself fortunate to have discovered that he was more interested in having her do his programming assignments than he was in her love, and that wooing her had been just a way of buying her brains.
And to this day she could still writhe with embarrassment when she recalled her own eager stupidity and readiness to believe in magic. Lord, the whole world had turned bright and shining for her in those two short months. She had believed the sun rose and set on Chuck Meyers, had done any and everything he had asked her to, and all because he took her out to a couple of movies and spent his evenings in her dorm room. Making her believe he liked being with her. Teasing her with little kisses and then laughing at her blushes.
Fool that she was, she had thought he was laughing because he thought she was cute. And then he would hand her his math book or his computer science assignments and say, “Hey, Jess, I don’t exactly understand this. Help me, huh?” And she would do his whole damn assignment because he gave her those little kisses and made her feel like a million dollars.
Stupid, stupid sixteen-year-old Jessica. How crushed she had been the day after she finished his final program, the one that had guaranteed him an A for the course. How stupid and crushed and humiliated when she learned that Chuck thought they’d had a fair trade. “You had your fantasy, and I got my A,” he had said bluntly. “What’s the big deal, Jess? It isn’t like I even slept with you.” He hadn’t even had the moral decency to understand what the big deal was. She’d been a fool, all right, and she had plumbed the true meaning of despair. She’d also learned what it meant to be used, and while she might risk the heartbreak, she would never again risk the humiliation and the sense of worthlessness that went with knowing you had been taken advantage of.
Sitting next to Arlen as he pulled out of the MTI parking lot, Jessica realized she wasn’t as immune as she’d believed these past years. For the first time in a very long time she found herself acutely, femininely aware of a man. She found herself noticing the way his thigh muscles flexed as he drove. The easy competence with which his large, lean hands held the wheel. The faint shadow of the morning’s beard growth on his cheeks and chin. The muted scent of a man, just barely noticeable in the closed confines of the car. The things that make men different, and that make them attractive to women.
And she found herself wondering what it would be like to lean over and rest her cheek against the wool that covered his shoulder. What would it be like to have his arm close around her shoulders and hold her? Just hold her. Dear heaven, was it possible to ache just to be held? Startled by a need she had never recognized before, she simply stared at him.
Arlen glanced her way as he eased into the heavy noon-hour traffic and caught her staring at him. Before Jessica’s blush became visible, he’d once again fixed his eyes on the road.
“I guess I owe you a whole pack of apologies, Jessica,” he said. “You probably think I’ve gone off the deep end. But the simple fact is, if somebody notices us together, whether it’s someone who recognizes me or someone who recognizes you, I’ll be a whole lot more comfortable if they assume we have some kind of personal relationship.”
“Why?” And then it dawned on her. Her scalp prickled as she realized that Arlen actually thought someone might be watching her.
“After your report to security yesterday,” he continued, “somebody might be interested in your actions for the next couple of days. It’s better all around if they don’t get wind that you’ve talked to the FBI.”
“Is that why you wouldn’t let me talk on the phone this morning?”
He nodded and glanced at her. “You never know who might be listening. It’s just a precaution. Why did you call?”
“Because you were right. The missing document was back in my safe this morning, tucked at the bottom of the drawer as if it had slipped down. I wanted to ask you how to handle it, because it occurred to me there might be fingerprints on it.”
Arlen steered the car into the parking lot of a popular restaurant. Only when he’d pulled into a slot and switched off the ignition did he speak. Turning a little on the seat, he faced her.
“Well, now,” he said, “that’s a good question. I sure as hell can’t come up there to lift the prints, and you sure as hell can’t bring the document out to me.”
“Are you so sure security wouldn’t be helpful if you talked to them?” Jessica asked. It bothered her that he seemed so determined to circumvent the company’s security.
“I’m sure they’d be real helpful. The problem is, I can’t be sure one of them isn’t involved. When somebody is able to access classified stuff, you have to suspect everybody who can get the necessary combinations. That means your facility security officer and all his people.”
Jessica nodded slowly and looked out at the drizzly day. A soft, small sigh escaped her. “Bob Harrow—he’s my project chief—mentioned this morning that my document isn’t the first one to turn up missing temporarily.”
Beside her, Arlen stiffened. “Really.”
Jessica looked at him. “It shook me. And he mentioned it so casually! Like it’s just the dumb kind of thing you expect a programmer to do—mislay classified documents overnight. I mean, I couldn’t believe it, but I could see Bob’s point, too. They always turn up, there’s always an explanation for how they got to be where they are, and besides, there’s a digital combination lock on the door to the whole section, so the documents are as good as locked in a safe even when they’re left on a desk.”
She looked down at her hands. “Except, of course, that the cleaning people come in during the night, and they shouldn’t be able to get their hands on the material. And security comes through at five for the burn bags, and while they’re cleared to take out the classified trash, they have no need to see anything else. And that’s the whole basis of the protection program, isn’t it? That clearance alone isn’t enough to gain access. A person has to have a verified need to know, as well.”
“You have a better understanding of security than most people,” Arlen remarked. “Most people don’t begin to understand the concept of ‘need to know.’”
“Well, it makes sense to me,” Jessica said. “And I’ll tell you what’s really got me so upset this morning. Someone was in my safe again last night. I don’t know how to change the combination, and I don’t know how I can convince security to change it. So all that information is essentially unprotected. Mine and probably everybody else’s. There’s got to be some way to put a stop to this, Arlen!”
It was refreshing, he found himself thinking, to meet someone these days who actually cared. So many people were cynical, or at least pretended to be.
“Actually, Jess,” he said, “the plug is going to be pulled this afternoon.”
Her bright brown eyes widened behind her glasses, and Arlen spared a moment to wonder just how bad her vision was. “The Defense Investigative Service is going to pull an unannounced inspection at your plant this afternoon. One way or another, they’re going to ensure that information is protected.”
“But how?”
Arlen shrugged. “They’re going in looking for an opportunity, and they won’t quit until they find it. They’ll make your folks change all the combinations. They understand the situation as well as anyone, Jessica. That information won’t go unprotected another night.”
“But you said it’s as important to find out what has been compromised as it is to prevent further compromises. If they change all the combinations, won’t that prevent the spy from doing anything? How will you find him?”
Arlen shook his head. “For a novice, you’re good at thinking these things out, Jessica, but you’re not considering motivation here. This person isn’t stealing these documents because it’s easy. He’s motivated by something. The most common motivation is greed, even though it’s a fact that spies generally don’t make huge sums of money. Still, if someone is motivated to steal defense secrets in order to get money, he’s not likely to stop just because there’s a setback. Same goes with other motivations, from revenge to blackmail. Whatever is driving this character, he’s likely to lie low for a couple of days or weeks, then try to get his hands on the new combinations.”
Jessica’s slow nod indicated her understanding. “And you’ll be ready.”
“Believe it.” He smiled, then utterly deprived her of breath by the simple expedient of reaching out and running the tip of his index finger along her cheek.
In that instant Arlen experienced an overload of sensations. All at once he was aware of the satin texture of Jessica’s skin beneath his finger, of the way her breath caught and held, of her faint feminine fragrance. He saw, too, the way her eyes darkened and her lips parted, just a little, an unconscious betrayal of her reaction to his touch. His own body clenched in response, a sharp, hungry stab of wanting.
Abruptly, he drew his hand back. “I promised you lunch,” he said briskly. “We’d better get inside before your break is over.”
Feeling slightly dazed, Jessica didn’t move until he opened her car door. She wasn’t used to such courtesy, and as often as she’d gone out with men for lunch, this was the first time in her life one actually tucked her arm through his, holding it snugly to his side as he guided her around puddles and held an umbrella over her with gentlemanly concern. Being unaccustomed to it, she wasn’t sure whether she liked it, but it certainly made her feel ladylike.
It also made her aware of two other things: how large he was beside her, and that he was wearing a gun. The first unsettled her, but the second unnerved her, causing her to miss her step. Arlen steadied her immediately, looking down with quick concern.
“Are you all right?”
Feeling foolishly naive—of course an FBI agent wore a gun—she responded tartly to cover her embarrassment. “I’m just not accustomed to rubbing elbows with a gun.”
Gray eyes looked down at her steadily for an interminable moment. When he spoke, his voice was absolutely level. “Does it bother you?”
Jessica had the inexplicable feeling that she was being tested in some way, though she had no idea what kind of response he wanted. She could only tell the truth. “Actually,” she said, and felt her blush rising again, “it caught me by surprise. I wasn’t expecting it, that’s all. And I wish I could learn to stop blushing!”
Arlen looked startled, and then he chuckled, asking, “How old are you, anyway?”
Her color deepened even more. “I’m twenty-six. Are you laughing at me?”
“Not at all.” He shook his head solemnly, but his eyes were dancing. He urged her toward the restaurant door. “Twenty-six? And you’ve been with MTI for six years, you said? You must have graduated from college young.” Twenty-six was no child, he found himself thinking, and then wondered why that relieved him.
“I was a little accelerated,” she admitted, reluctant to discuss this. People, especially men, seemed to be put off when they learned that she’d graduated from high school at sixteen and completed her undergraduate work and her masters by the age of twenty.
“I was your age when I graduated,” Arlen volunteered. He collapsed the umbrella and opened the door for her. “The marines slowed me down.”
The restaurant was less crowded than usual at that hour, probably because the weather had dampened a few appetites. Jessica ordered the crab salad that was her favorite lunch, and Arlen ordered the vegetarian plate.
“I’m not a vegetarian,” he remarked as he handed the menus to the waitress, “but on my job I wind up eating a lot of greasy fast food. Every so often I throw a sop to my conscience.”
Jessica laughed.
“I think,” he said, returning to business, “I’d like to hear from you tonight about the DIS inspection this afternoon.”
“I won’t know much about what’s going on,” Jessica told him. “When they’ve come other times, they spent a couple of minutes asking me whether I have any problems or questions, or whether I’ve had any unusual or suspicious contacts, but that’s the extent of my involvement.”
He nodded and leaned back to allow the waitress to serve them. “But you might pick up on people’s reactions to what’s happening. This is going to be a different inspection from most, Jessica. It’s going to be harder, tougher and longer. This time DIS isn’t going in with the assumption that everything’s on the up-and-up. This time they know something’s seriously wrong, and they’re going to dig for any sign or symptom of it. It’s certainly apt to irritate people, and it should make anyone with a guilty conscience just a little uneasy. People get incautious when they’re worried, and you just might pick up on something.” He shrugged and lifted his fork. “I just want you to be alert and then share your impressions with me. Maybe you’ll get something, maybe you won’t.”
“Well, I can do that much,” Jessica readily promised, and then laughed. “I have to admit, though, when they ask me if I’ve had any suspicious contacts, you’re definitely going to be the picture that pops into my mind.”
Arlen laughed, too. “Just try not to look guilty.”
“Did you bring one of your cards for me today?” Jessica asked. “It doesn’t really matter, but last night I realized that I never knew FBI agents carried business cards. And then I got to wondering what it looks like.”
“Just a regular card. No bells or whistles or anything fancy.” He patted his pockets until he found the one holding his card case. “I don’t know why it is,” he said, “but I can never remember where I keep these damn things. Here you go. But I’d really be a lot happier if you didn’t carry this around with you.”
“I’ll give it right back, then.” She accepted the white card, studying it with an interest she didn’t bother to hide. Embossed in gold with an FBI badge in one corner, it identified Arlen as Special Agent in Charge of the local field office.
“Special Agent in Charge?” she read questioningly.
“We call it SAIC. It means I get to do a lot of extra paperwork and stand on the firing line for a lot of extra flak.”
She handed the card back and smiled at him. “You’re just being modest.”
“I’m never modest. It’s the plain truth. I also get to work twice as many hours as anyone else when we have multiple operations going.”
At that moment his pocket beeper tweeted at him. Looking rueful, he switched it off and spread his hands apologetically. “It also means I can’t enjoy an uninterrupted lunch with a lady. Will you excuse me?”
He crossed the room to the pay phone near the exit, weaving among tables with a grace that could only come from peak physical conditioning. A gun and a pocket pager. Shaking her head ruefully, Jessica lifted a forkful of crabmeat to her mouth. No sane woman would be attracted to a man who wore a gun under his coat on one side and a pager in the pocket on the other side. Neither object promised a tranquil existence, and that kind of excitement was not what she wanted.
But he hinted at other kinds of excitement, too, she found herself thinking wistfully. Excitement of a kind she’d never thought she might experience—and in all honesty still didn’t think she ever would.
With a sigh, she forced her thoughts back to the safer area of espionage. That was Arlen Coulter’s sole interest in her, and she would do well to remember it.
And then, like the proverbial bolt out of the blue, she remembered something that had happened just the week before last. No, maybe it had been a little longer ago than that. Closing her eyes, she tried to remember exactly when it had happened.
“Sorry I was gone so long,” Arlen said, sliding into his chair. And then he noticed her frown of concentration. “Jessica? Are you all right?”
“I’m fine. I just remembered something.” She looked at him, eyes troubled behind her lenses. “I suddenly remembered something that happened a couple of weeks ago. Someone I met. I was just trying to remember exactly when.”
Arlen leaned toward her intently. “You had a suspicious contact?”
“I don’t know. It wasn’t any big deal. It’s just that something didn’t feel right about it, and I was trying to pinpoint it. I don’t know how familiar you are with MTI, but a lot of us graduated from the local university, and many of us still have social and professional contacts there. I keep in touch with a lot of the professors from the computer science and engineering departments, and sometimes I brainstorm with them.”
Arlen nodded encouragingly. “Go on.”
“Well, on one of those visits Professor Kostermeyer in engineering introduced me to a couple of his graduate students. One of them was Chinese.”
“From Taiwan or the People’s Republic?”
“I don’t know. It never occurred to me to wonder.”
Arlen nodded again. “What happened?”
“Nothing, really, but even just thinking about it bothers me. I was in the supermarket two weeks ago, the one near my house.”
He nodded. “I know the one. Corbett’s.”
“Right. An awful long way from the university. And I ran into the Chinese grad student Kostermeyer introduced me to. The thing is, I really didn’t remember him until he reminded me, and then it struck me as really odd that he would remember me well enough to recognize me and call me by name several months later.” She watched him, half hoping he would reassure her somehow, maybe tell her that it wasn’t odd at all.
The back of Arlen’s neck was prickling overtime, a sure sign that this was important. It was an instinct that had never failed him yet. “Well, some people do have really amazing memories for faces and names. They’re also about as rare as ice at the equator. It’s exactly the kind of contact you’re supposed to report to your security officer. This is a classic type of recruitment approach. What exactly happened?”
“Well, he suggested we have lunch together, and I said I was busy. Then he suggested we do it another time, but I managed to keep it vague and left. It was just now, sitting here, that I really started thinking about it.” She shrugged. “Maybe I’m just getting paranoid because of this other stuff?”
“Did he by any chance offer to pick up the tab when he made the suggestion?” Students were usually too tight on money to do more than pick up their own tabs, especially foreign students, who were often living on very restricted stipends. If this fellow had offered to buy lunch, the contact would be even more suspicious.
She looked down, trying to remember exactly how the invitation had been worded. “I’m not sure about that, either. I just wasn’t paying enough attention, Arlen.” She raised eyes that asked for his understanding. “The whole thing seemed more like a slightly uncomfortable nuisance, if you want the truth. I figured he wanted some help getting a job at MTI. And I was vaguely worried that he might be persistent about it.”
“That may be all he wants,” Arlen agreed. “I’ve seen recruitments start out exactly like this, though.” Reaching out, he startled her once again by briefly covering her hand with his. Almost as soon as she registered the dry warmth of his skin, he withdrew his touch.
“Let me tell you a story, Jessica.”
She nodded, pushing her salad aside and giving him her full attention.
“A number of years ago, a university student knocked on his neighbor’s door and complained that the volume of the man’s stereo was disturbing his studying. The neighbor, a Bulgarian student, apologized and promptly turned his stereo down. A few days later, the Bulgarian invited the American over for a drink, and the American accepted to show there were no hard feelings. With me so far?”
Jessica nodded. “Is this true?”
“Absolutely. Anyhow, while he was having a drink with the Bulgarian, the American was introduced to a friend of the Bulgarian’s, a man who was identified as a cultural attaché at the Bulgarian embassy. The attaché talked to the American for a while, ascertained that the student, like most students, could use some extra money, and offered to hire him to do some economic research.”
“I think I can guess the rest,” Jessica said.
Arlen shook his head. “I doubt it. This student happened to see a program about espionage on a local public television station right about that time and, wonder of wonders, he called the local FBI field office. The Bulgarian attaché turned out to be an officer in the KGB, and we successfully ran the American student for two years as a double agent.” Arlen smiled faintly. “The student had a yen to be James Bond. He loved every minute of it. And we got five or six very important arrests out of it, not to mention all the disinformation we passed to the Soviets.”
“So my student might have been making an approach.” Jessica watched him, hoping he would deny it.
“He might have been. The thing a lot of people don’t understand about students from some less-than-friendly nations is that they’re not spies exactly, but they’re expected to report back to their embassies about every person they meet. So say this student reported his brief meeting with you, as he’s reported a hundred others, but this one caught the eye of somebody in intelligence. So he was told to make a further contact with you. If he can manage to become just slightly acquainted with you, then he can introduce someone else to you without arousing your suspicions.”
Jessica nodded unhappily. “Then if it really wasn’t an accidental meeting, I can expect to run into him again sometime.”
“Absolutely. And if you do, I want you to go along with his suggestions.”
Jessica’s eyes widened, and she drew a sharp, disbelieving breath. “You’re kidding! Tell me you’re kidding!” But from the expression on his face she knew he wasn’t. The unease she’d felt over the missing document was nothing compared to the nervous fluttering in her stomach right now. “Arlen, I don’t have the nerves for this!”
“No nerves are required,” he said calmly. “The man asks you to lunch, and you go. He may or may not introduce you to someone else. At each stage, you’re always free to continue or bow out. Nothing commits you for the long haul, Jessica.”
“But—but—” How could she adequately express the terror she felt? “I’d be too scared to do it.”
“There’s nothing to be scared of. Nobody who’s been a double agent for us has ever, ever, been harmed. In fact, a few have found the KGB protects them as carefully from the FBI as we try to protect our double agents from them.”
“We’re not talking about the KGB here, Arlen.”
“It doesn’t matter. I’ll look after you. The whole damn Bureau will look after you. And if the opposition tumbles to the fact that you’re a double agent, all they’ll do is skedaddle so fast your head’ll spin. They would have absolutely nothing to gain by harming you, and everything to lose.”
Jessica shook her head, frantically trying to find an objection that would convince him.
“Look.” Reaching out, he caught one of her hands in each of his and stilled their nervous motions. “Just think about it, Jessica. You don’t have to answer right now. Just think about it and how important it is.”
He saw the fear in her bright brown eyes and felt guilty for what he was doing. He was positive she wouldn’t be hurt in any way, or he wouldn’t be suggesting it. It was important that she do this, damn it, but not important enough to put her life at risk. The problem was, people’s heads were full of Hollywood notions of espionage, notions that had little to do with reality, particularly the reality of domestic espionage. In fact, Hollywood aside, foreign intelligence operations had more to lose than they could ever gain if they even once harmed an American citizen who was working for either them or the FBI.
Her fingers felt so small and fragile within the confines of his large hands, and her skin was so smooth and satiny. Her wrists were small and delicate, certainly less than half the size of his. She would be small and soft and satiny, hot and tight and—
He abruptly released her hands, schooling his thoughts to less inflammatory paths. What a damnable time for his libido to resurrect itself!
“Just think about it,” he said, relieved to find he sounded natural. “I promise I won’t pressure you.”
That was fair, Jessica thought with relief. She understood the importance of what he’d asked her to do, but she seriously doubted she had steady enough nerves for anything of the sort. In many ways, she was simply a mouse. Still, she thought wistfully, she might almost consider it—if he would hold her hands again. She had known so little caring physical contact in her life.
“I’d better be getting you back,” Arlen said, signaling the waitress. “I’ll come by this evening, unless that will interfere with your plans.”
“To ask me about what happens this afternoon?”
He nodded and gave her a reassuring smile. “And that’s all, I promise. Unless you want to talk about something more.”
“All right.” She tried to look indifferent. “I’ll just be trying to straighten up the place. Someday I hope to have all those boxes emptied.”
When they were driving back toward MTI through the steady rain, Jessica thought to ask, “What do you want me to do about that document?”
Arlen braked for a stoplight and rubbed his chin before glancing at her. “Leave it undiscovered until tomorrow,” he said after a moment. “Tonight I’ll give you a crash course in how to lift a fingerprint. I’m willing to bet, though, that the prints will be wiped off. Anyone with half a brain would have thought of that once the hue and cry was raised over that document.”
“But if I find one?”
“It may be yours. Whatever you find, you can bring it out to me tomorrow. Why don’t I meet you for lunch again?”
Jessica looked sideways at him. “Is your expense account up to this?”
He chuckled. “When it starts complaining, I’ll let you know.”
When he pulled up before MTI’s main entrance, he set the car in Park and turned to her. “Take care, Jess,” he said and bent forward, giving her the lightest, gentlest kiss on her lips. “See you tonight,” he added in a husky murmur.
It was all for show, but it didn’t feel like playacting, not to Jessica. Her heart stopped in her throat, and electric sparks shot out from that brief, light caress, dazing her.
Somehow she climbed out of the car. It was only as she was stepping into the lobby that she realized someone had been watching. Bob Harrow, her project chief, stood just inside the doors, grinning like the Cheshire cat.
“Something wrong, Bob?” she asked him, feeling annoyed that he’d seen the gesture. That in fact he’d probably precipitated it.
“Not a thing,” he said, suddenly all innocence. “Not a thing, Jessica.” But there was a knowing glint in his eye as he rode the elevator upstairs with her.
Chapter 3
Bob Harrow hadn’t been the only one to notice Jessica’s lunch date. Frank Winkowski, another of the project’s programmers, had seen her departure and Arlen’s kiss on her cheek. Before the afternoon was over she had endured some merciless teasing, and naturally she made it worse by insisting that Arlen was just a good friend.
She wasn’t entirely comfortable with teasing. She’d been an only child, raised by a mother and grandmother who’d had little use for her. Since coming to work at MTI, she’d seen a lot of teasing among her coworkers, and on occasion she’d been the gentle butt of some of it. It was easier to handle now, but she couldn’t take it as casually as others did.
The teasing, however, had taken her mind off other things, and she got through the entire afternoon with only occasional thoughts of the document in her drawer or the security inspection that surely had begun somewhere in the building.
Unannounced inspections were permitted by the terms of the security agreement a defense contractor had with the government, so the Defense Investigative Service needed to give no excuse for showing up. No one knew that this inspection was a direct result of Jessica’s report to the FBI, and Arlen had assured her that DIS would be careful not to draw any attention to her. She would be treated exactly like everyone else, and since these inspections always took at least three days, she didn’t really expect to see an inspector for another day or so.
When she got home she changed into jeans and a sweatshirt, ate a quick salad for dinner and dug into the packing boxes that still waited all over the house. She’d accumulated quite a few possessions over the years since she left college. Most of them had been bought by chance when she stumbled on some item that she knew would be perfect for the home she dreamed of owning someday. Now she owned the home, and she was a little surprised to find how much of the furnishings and bric-a-brac she’d already acquired.
She had just dragged the last of a series of boxes to the foot of the stairs to be carried up when the doorbell rang. Arlen. This time she didn’t imagine herself slinking away. This time a swift image flashed across her mind that left her aching. Giving herself a mental scolding, she dusted her hands against her jeans and went to open the door.
If she’d been jolted by his charisma last night, tonight she came close to being stunned. Tonight he wore snug, faded jeans and a black sweater that awoke swashbuckling images in Jessica’s hyperactive imagination. She wouldn’t have thought that a man who could look so elegant and conservative in banker’s gray could look like an outlaw in a pair of jeans.
“Hello, Jessica.” He smiled, deepening the creases at the corners of his eyes. Unaware of the effect that expression had on her pulse rate, he scanned her from head to foot. Her jeans, unlike last night’s slacks, were worn from many washings and were a closer fit. Her sweatshirt, also worn thin from many washings, hugged her breasts with more familiarity than he suspected she realized. This lady was womanly. She would fill a man’s hands and arms; she would cradle him in softness and surround him in heated satin. And he sure as hell shouldn’t be thinking about things like that when he was supposed to be working.
Jessica stepped back, achieving a smile despite her heart’s hammering—the way he’d looked at her!—and invited him in.
“This isn’t a bad time, is it?” he asked as he stepped into her foyer. Immediately he noticed the boxes lined up at the foot of the stairs. “Do you need those carried up? Let me do that for you.”
“Oh, I couldn’t really—”
Turning, he smiled down at her. “Sure you can. You’re helping me, and I’d like to do something in return.”
Jessica’s knees rubberized instantly. That crooked, warmly intimate smile did things to her insides, tweaking, pulling, tingling. Before she could gather her wits to respond, he squatted and hefted the first box. His sweater pulled up in the back, exposing a band of smooth skin and the fact that he wore no belt on his jeans. Why did the absence of a belt cause a deep, slow pulsing inside her?
“Where upstairs?” Arlen asked as he began climbing.
“First room on the right.” Was that really her voice, sounding so husky?
Arlen set the box out of the way against the wall in the designated room. As he straightened, he knew with sudden, deep certainty that this was Jessica’s room. It was, he supposed, prying, but nevertheless he looked around him with interest, noting the ruffled dotted swiss curtains on the tall windows, the white satin comforter and white dust ruffle on the maple four-poster. Embroidered linen doilies decorated the top of her maple dresser, and dotted swiss skirted a dressing table with a matching mirror. The only colors in the room were the bright area rugs scattered around the polished wood floor.
Virginal, he thought. The room of a sixteen-year-old. He started to turn away, wondering what had arrested Jessica’s development, when he suddenly had the most erotic image of bare skin on white satin and dark hair that tumbled to her waist. How long was her hair? he wondered, then shook himself and headed downstairs for the next box. Damn it, Coulter, this is business!
Five boxes later, he’d seen the other two bedrooms, one of which held a desk, bookcase and personal computer with all the necessary peripherals. And he was still as randy as the old goat he was beginning to feel like. Bare skin on white satin. He cursed the randomly firing brain cell that had brought that image to mind.
Jessica awaited him at the foot of the stairs. “Coffee’s ready,” she said brightly.
“Great.” He descended the last few stairs wondering what she would do if he pulled her into his arms and kissed her. By the time he reached the bottom she’d started to move into the living room, unwittingly giving him a view of her gently swaying rear that only compounded his problem.
Once again she served coffee in the delicately patterned china cups. Seated in an armchair, Arlen gave himself a few minutes to savor her really excellent coffee and to bank some of his unwanted urges.
“How’d it go at work this afternoon?” he asked finally.
“Like always.” She flushed. “Well, not exactly. It seems you were right that we might be observed. Two of the guys I work with saw us, and I got teased about it.”
One corner of his mouth lifted. “But I bet they didn’t ask who I was.”
“Of course not. They had that all figured out.” Her voice was tart, and then she laughed softly. “You were right. Once they saw you kiss me, they filled in all the blanks. Nobody even asked your name.”
“It’s an old magician’s technique. Misdirect the attention of the audience. Works every time.” His smile broadened. “What about the inspection?”
“It never got anywhere near our section today. The grapevine didn’t even get the word to us until almost quitting time. The only thing different that I noticed was that the security stations were performing random briefcase checks for the first time in an age.”
Arlen nodded. “I expected that. Just like I expect that tomorrow you’ll have to show your ID to get past the front desk, even if it’s a security crew that knows you.”
He sipped coffee and let his head rest against the chair back. “This chair is too comfortable, Jess. You may never get rid of me.” Heavy lidded, his eyes watched her lazily. “I’ve got the fingerprint kit out in my car. I suppose I should get it.”
“There’s no rush,” she said. “I’m not going anywhere.”
They sat for a while in companionable silence, and he began to feel more relaxed than he could remember feeling in quite a while.
“Arlen?”
“Hmm?”
“How can I carry fingerprints out of the building tomorrow if they’re doing briefcase checks?”
He rolled his head a fraction so that he could look at her. “There’s no law that says you can’t carry fingerprints around with you.”
“But what if they ask?” Her small face was worried.
“Tell them your boyfriend’s a cop, and they’re his. Or tell them you’re taking a night school course in criminology. Relax, Jess. They probably won’t even look in your briefcase tomorrow, but if they do, they’ll know better than to bother you about things that are none of their business. They don’t want any trouble with their bosses.”
He spoke lazily, his eyelids still drooping, and Jessica’s wild imagination suddenly presented her with the image of a panther lazing in the sun, deceptively sleepy but very much alert.
“Where are you from originally?” she asked him abruptly.
Arlen heard the shortness of her tone and wondered if he’d said something to disturb her. No, he was sure he hadn’t. And then coiling through him like liquid heat was the memory of the way her lips had parted at his touch earlier in the day. Could she be bothered by the same impulses that were troubling him? Turning his head a little more, he looked at her fully.
“I hate to admit this,” he said, “but I’m a damn Yankee from New York.”
Jessica’s lips curved. “New York? Do you miss it?”
“Hardly. One of the Bureau’s rules is that you can’t be stationed anywhere too close to home. I knew when I signed on that I’d never go back.”
“How long have you been here?”
“Long enough to know you Texans have the same opinion about Yankees in general and New Yorkers in particular that the rest of the country has about Texans.”
Jessica laughed. “So you’re a big-city boy?”
“Oh, I’m not from the city,” he said. “I’m from a sleepy little dairy-farming community upstate. What about you? Did you grow up right here?”
She shook her head. “No, I’m a hayseed, too. From a little town in West Texas where we had a lot more dust storms than we had rainstorms. Let me get some more coffee.”
At the door she paused and looked back. “Are you hungry? I think I have some coffee cake in the freezer. It’d take only a minute to zap it in the microwave.” Actually, she more than thought the coffee cake was there. She had bought it on the way home this afternoon just so she could offer it to him.
“Sounds good,” he admitted. He’d stayed late at work tonight, and by the time he got away he’d decided on fast food so he wouldn’t arrive at Jessica’s too late. The food had been tasteless, though, so he’d ditched his dinner, stopped by his apartment just long enough to change, then dashed over here. Coffee cake sounded very good. In fact, relaxing sounded very good. It was Thursday evening, and so far he’d worked every night this week, not to mention last Sunday, when he’d had to help one of the agents iron out some wrinkles in a bribery investigation.
“Do you work all the time?”
The soft question caused him to look up at Jessica. She was standing beside him, holding out a plate with one hand and his freshly filled cup with the other.
“Thank you.” Smiling, he took both from her and set them on the coffee table.
“Do you?” she asked as she resumed her seat on the couch.
“Do I what?”
“Work all the time.”
He shrugged. “Sometimes it seems that way. Aren’t you having any cake?” His plate held a large piece. She had no plate at all.
“I can’t afford the calories. Don’t worry about me.”
She said it as if she’d been saying it for a very long time and had come to accept it, and somehow Arlen found that utterly intolerable. “Are you trying to lose weight?”
“Of course.” She smiled faintly. “All the time.”
“Why?”
She gaped at him. “Why?” she repeated stupidly. “Why?” Anybody could see that just by looking at her.
“Yes. Why?” And somewhere between images of pink satin skin on a white satin bed and the understanding that he was being driven out of his mind by the sexual appeal of a woman who believed she didn’t have any, Arlen lost the first iron layer of his self-control. Having been, for more than four years, unable to hold and love a woman probably added considerably to the stress of the moment. Since Lucy had become too ill to love, he hadn’t wanted to love. Not until this plump little partridge entered his life. And here she was trying to waste away the very charms that were driving him wild.
“You have no idea,” he said flatly, “just how beautiful your healthiness is. How attractive you are—just the way you are.”
Jessica’s hand fluttered to her throat, and she stared at him disbelievingly. “I, um, th-that’s very kind of you to say,” she squeaked. Her heart was hammering so hard there was no room in her chest for air. He was just being nice, she told herself. But, oh, how she wished…
The wish was plain on her face, and Arlen was just tired enough, just pushed enough, just frustrated enough, to forget he was an agent on a case. Rising, he walked with a deliberate tread around the coffee table and just as deliberately sat beside Jessica on the sofa. Her head had turned as her eyes followed him, and now she looked at him with wide, wondering brown eyes. Bright eyes, he noticed, that were far more hopeful than fearful.
“I’m going to kiss you, Jessie,” he said huskily as he reached up and removed her glasses, setting them aside on the table. She blinked uncertainly at him while he noticed that her eyes were even larger without the lenses in front of them. And her lashes were long and silky.
Gently, he cupped her face between his hands. “I’m going to kiss you because I’ve been wanting to for the last half hour,” he told her, stroking her cheeks lightly with his thumbs. “I’m going to kiss you because you’re so damn sexy, and because those soft pink lips of yours are just begging for it.”
She seemed to have stopped breathing, but now she drew a shaky breath and her eyelids fluttered down. Arlen smiled as he saw her consent. The hunger in him was strong, but gentleness tempered it. This woman needed gentleness as surely as she needed to be desired.
Bowing his head, he brushed his lips lightly against hers, gently questing like a bee seeking nectar, again and again, the lightest brush of lips against lips, his breath as much a caress as his touch. It had been so long since he’d kissed a woman for the first time that he wasn’t really sure he remembered how. He was coaxing because she seemed to be as uncertain as he was. His tongue touched her upper lip, stroking its length enticingly. Next her lower lip, a sweep to incite.
Arlen heard her swift intake of breath, felt her lips part beneath his. And then, so good, her arms wound around his back and reached upward to cling to him, to embrace him. Ah, God, it had been so long!
To Jessica the moment was a miracle. She simply didn’t know what pleased her more, the strength of his muscular back beneath her hands or the sinuous, sinful enticements of his tongue as he plundered the depths of her mouth. She’d never dreamed there were so many sensitive nerve endings there, nerves that were mysteriously linked to other parts of her. Her entire body felt as if it were being kissed. This was what she had believed she could live without?
Arlen lifted his head a fraction, looking down into her hazy eyes. His voice was a husky whisper. “More, Jessie?”
She nodded, dazed by the sensations he was evoking in her. “Please,” she whispered.
Her head had fallen back, bespeaking her surrender to the moment. He moved, cradling the back of her head in one hand, wrapping the other arm around her back as he lowered her to the sofa cushions and stretched out beside her.
“More, Jess,” he said roughly, a statement this time.
And this time, when he took her mouth in a kiss, he took it deeply, with a rhythm so primitive that her very cells responded to it. She opened her mouth wider to receive the bold thrusts of his tongue and responded in kind with a need she didn’t even know how to name.
Her hand somehow found its way to his hair and combed into the dark silk, finding the warmth of his scalp. His mouth slanted to a new angle over hers, giving her a chance to catch her breath a little, giving her a moment to feel her whole body pulse in time to his kiss. Giving her a moment to feel his pelvis rock against her hip. Giving her a moment to feel the evidence of his desire.
A new thrill trickled through her, the thrill of being wanted, but the trickle was accompanied by a stronger thrill of fear. She’d met this man only last night. A chill clamped over the throbbing ache in her body, cleared the fog from her brain. What was she doing?
Sensing her mood change even through the hazy red layers of his hunger, Arlen clamped down on his needs and began, by gentle stages, to withdraw himself without causing embarrassment. Damn! he thought. He’d been celibate for too long if he could lose control like this.
Before long Jessica sensed his intent, and her fear dissipated, leaving her with a dissatisfied ache and a dawning sense of wonder. He had wanted her! She’d felt the proof of it.
Arlen raised them both to a sitting position and cradled Jessica’s cheek against his shoulder, his arm around her. It was exactly the embrace she’d fantasized about on the way to lunch that day, and it was so much better than her imaginings. His shoulder was firm beneath her cheek, his distantly sensed heartbeat a steady, somehow reassuring thud. Even the faint scratchiness of his sweater was somehow stimulating. And the weight of his arm around her shoulders—there just weren’t words to adequately describe how good it felt.
“Are you all right, Jessie?” he asked presently, touching her cheek with gentle fingertips.
“Yes.” The word sounded lost and breathless against his shoulder.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I shouldn’t have done that.”
A long moment passed before she could find her voice. “Why not?”
“Any number of reasons.” His voice had returned to normal, and his heart rate was coming into line. “In the first place, it wasn’t very professional. I don’t think there’s a specific rule against it, since you’re not a suspect, but I still don’t think an agent is supposed to be kissing someone who’s involved in his case.”
“I won’t tell,” Jessica murmured, still too swamped by emotions to speak cautiously.
Arlen smiled and tightened his arm around her just a little. “And I won’t do it again, Jessica.”
It was on the tip of her tongue to protest, but her mind was swinging into action again, and she caught the words before she could speak them. She didn’t know this man, and if she were to think about it she would probably be shocked that she had fallen into his arms so easily after an acquaintance of a mere day. After all, she’d never before fallen into anyone’s arms.
Jessica tilted her head back and looked up at him. He was close enough at the moment that she could see him clearly without her glasses. “How old are you, Arlen?”
“Forty-two.”
His smile, she thought, looked a little sad somehow. “That’s part of the problem, isn’t it?” She didn’t mention the wedding ring he still wore, which she suspected was the biggest part of the problem.
He didn’t ask what she meant. He knew. “I have a daughter who’s nearly your age, Jessie. She’s twenty-three and expecting her first child. My first grandchild. And I have a son who’s twenty-one.”
“You started young.” It wasn’t a question.
“I was eighteen when Lucy and I married. Right out of high school and right over everyone’s objections.”
“Were you right, or were they?”
He closed his eyes, and his smile broadened just a shade. “We were,” he said. And he brought his other arm around Jessica, giving her a little hug. “I had a good marriage, Jessie. A very good marriage. Once in a lifetime is all anyone has a right to expect.”
Eventually, because their embrace was still too intimate both for their respective roles and for his conscience, Arlen stirred. Releasing Jessica, he handed her back her spectacles.
“I’ll go get that fingerprint kit,” he said, rising from the sofa.
She slipped her glasses onto her nose and looked up at him. “Okay,” she managed to say brightly. “I think I’ll make some more coffee. Do you want any?”
He looked down with a smile that didn’t reach his gray eyes. “I’ll pass, thanks. I need to get some sleep tonight.”
So did she, thought Jessica, but she seriously doubted she was going to get it, coffee or no coffee.
It was a night for memories, Arlen thought. It was late, and his apartment seemed emptier than usual, though not as empty as the house he’d shared with Lucy had seemed after her death. The only keepsakes he hadn’t put into storage were an eight-by-ten photo of Lucy and a slew of photographs of the children. Everything else had been put away, because a man his age had no choice but to move on.
But sometimes he remembered, and tonight, with a glass of bourbon to keep him company, he held Lucy’s photo and looked back.
He hadn’t been kidding. It had been a good marriage. Not a perfect marriage, but a good one. A comfortable one. A hell of a lot better by far than most marriages he knew about. Part of him had died with Lucy, had expired with her last breath as he held her in his arms that one final time. Afterward, he had figured he would go on as father, friend and government agent, but never again as lover or spouse. That part was gone.
Evidently, he found himself thinking as he looked down at Lucy’s smiling face, he’d been a little naive in his expectations. The feelings hadn’t died but had merely gone into hibernation. That created a whole mess of interesting problems he wasn’t sure he cared to deal with at this stage in his life.
First of all, he was about to become a grandfather. He had certain images of that role that didn’t jibe with the memory he had of himself and Jessica on her couch this evening. It also meant he was too damn old to be rolling around with a girl her age. His children were grown, and she was the right age to be having children. Damn, Jessica was only a few years older than his daughter! That realization kept drawing him up short and hard, like a yanked rein.
Setting Lucy’s picture aside, he carried his drink into the kitchen and dumped it down the sink. He’d never been much for alcohol, and at a time like this he wanted his head to be perfectly clear.
Except how clear could it be when he kept imagining pink skin and white satin, and remembering just how right a certain young woman had felt in his arms? How perfectly she’d fitted against him and how passionately she’d responded to his kiss?
And what damn difference did it make? He was an agent on a case and had to remain professional. Whatever had gotten into him tonight had better not get into him again. That was the beginning, middle and end of it right there.
She was too young for him, Jessica thought as she lay in the middle of her four-poster bed and stared up at the patterns made by the moonlight on her ceiling. Of course he would think so. How could he not? She and men had spent her entire life avoiding one another, so how could she possibly know the right things to say and do to make it clear that she didn’t feel young? It had probably been that very inexperience that had caused him to draw back from her tonight. She didn’t know how to kiss, how to please, how to entice. Discovering that, he’d naturally lost interest.
But, of course, it was all for the best. He still wore his wedding ring. Whether she felt young or not, Jessica definitely didn’t feel up to dealing with the ghost of Arlen’s wife. She had a very healthy respect for the power of ghosts. Hadn’t she watched her mother languish and drink herself to an early grave over the death of Jessica’s father? And, oh, what a slow death that had been, finally leaving the mother dependent on the daughter who was still only a child.
Arlen seemed to be holding up a lot better than her mother had, Jessica thought, but she knew too well what it meant to be invisible to grieving eyes.
Turning over onto her side, she looked out the window at the moon through the lacy tracery of tree branches. He had been in this room tonight. What had he thought of it? Did he think it childish? Probably. She knew as well as anyone just how childish it was. It was the room she had dreamed of having someday, a dream she could trace all the way back to the age of seven. That was the year after her father’s death. That was when she’d finally realized there was no way to go back home.
And so she’d begun to dream of a home in the future. A lot of that dream had matured to more realistic proportions that could be embodied in this house she now owned. Tonight, however, it was strikingly obvious to her that she’d forgotten to include the most important part of any home: family.
Sighing heavily, her throat suddenly and inexplicably tight, she wrapped her arms around a pillow and hugged it. She’d been lonely for so long she’d ceased to be aware of it. Until tonight.
Damn Arlen Coulter for making her conscious of it.
Chapter 4
Dressed in her favorite dove-gray suit and black silk blouse, Jessica arrived at work forty-five minutes early the next morning. The extra time was essential if she was to try to lift fingerprints from the document. It wasn’t so much that the process was complicated, because it wasn’t, but she wanted ample time so she could move slowly and avoid errors.
Security, mindful of DIS inspectors, checked her identification thoroughly before waving her through. When she arrived in her own section she walked down the hall, assuring herself that all the other offices were empty. Only then did she return to her own office, close the door and start to open her safe.
“Talk about acting suspicious,” she muttered to herself as she spun the dial first left, then right, then left and then right again. She felt the dial resist as she reached the last number and knew she’d worked the combination correctly. Pressing down the lever, she grabbed the drawer handle and pulled it open.
The document was still on the bottom of the drawer, apparently untouched since she’d found it there yesterday. When she’d emptied enough of the other documents to give herself unobstructed access to the red folder, she used the plastic gloves Arlen had given her to lift it out.
“It’s not that your fingerprints will get you into trouble,” he’d told her last night. “You just don’t want your prints to destroy a good print by overlaying it.”
Only, there were no good prints. She knew that with certainty twenty minutes later, having dusted the entire folder and the document with dark powder. The powder adhered to nothing except some vague, blurry streaks. The spy had wiped the prints, just as Arlen had suspected.
Disappointed, she cleaned up the mess with exaggerated care and then went down the hall to wash her hands. Frank Winkowski was just entering the section when she came back down the hall from the restroom. He looked surprised to see her, then smiled.
“You’re early, too,” he said. “Brainstorm?” He was a pleasant-looking man with a round face and a tendency to softness around his waist.
Jessica shook her head. “Not really. I just woke up early this morning, and there didn’t seem to be any point in hanging around the house. Besides, after all that uproar with security the other day, I need to do some catching up.”
Frank nodded. “We’ll all have to do some catching up, I think. From what I hear, this security inspection is turning into a real bear. Stan Watson—do you know him?”
“He’s the guy heading up the Big Whistle project, isn’t he?”
“Yeah.” Frank shifted his briefcase from one hand to the other, as if it were heavy. “He said a team of two inspectors are shutting themselves up in a private office with each of his team members for an hour at a stretch.”
“Oh, boy.” Jessica managed to sound surprised. “What’s going on? What’re they asking?”
Frank shrugged. “Dunno. The guys they questioned yesterday afternoon say they can’t talk about it. Maybe there’s been a leak from the project.”
Jessica shook her head. “I can’t imagine that. What does Stan think about it?”
“I think he’s just plain furious. He also said that they’re inspecting everyone’s desk.”
“I heard they can do that, but I never saw them inspect one.”
“Me, either.” Frank shook his head. “I guess if you’ve got any embarrassing love letters in your desk from that guy you were with yesterday, you’d better dump ’em.”
She saw the twinkle in his eye and decided not to let the comment bother her. “Thanks, Frank. If I ever get him to write an embarrassing love letter, you’ll be the last to know.”
“Thought so!” Laughing, he moved down the hall to his own office.
Back at her desk, Jessica installed her hard drive, booted up and resumed her work. She thought she was doing pretty well, too, until an hour later when Arlen called.
“Lunch at twelve?” he asked without preamble.
She sank back in her chair and pulled off her glasses, realizing suddenly that she had a tension headache. Rubbing impatiently at her forehead, she sighed. Arlen heard it.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
“Not a damn thing,” she said, more sharply than she meant to. “What could possibly be wrong?” Other than espionage and an FBI agent who’d awakened her to things she was better off not knowing about. An FBI agent who called her, cool as you please, his tone the politely casual tone people used with strangers. His silence suggested to her that he was evaluating her response. Suddenly disturbed that he might draw conclusions, she said, “Sorry, Arlen. I’ve got a king-size headache.”
“Have you taken aspirin?” It was the politely concerned question of an acquaintance.
Damn it, Jessica thought. Damn it. Back to business as usual. Well, girl, are you going to let him get away with it? The question drew her up short, creating as it did a whole new passel of questions she wasn’t going to be able to answer without a lot of soul-searching.
“Jess?” His tone had lost a little of its distance.
“I’m here. Sorry. Noon is fine for lunch. I’ll be waiting out front.” If she didn’t get swallowed up in the internal earthquake she felt herself verging on. “I don’t have anything for you, though.” As soon as she said it, she wanted to kick herself. He might cancel lunch.
But he didn’t. “I figured you wouldn’t. I’ve got a few things to talk to you about, anyway. Noon, then.”
She took the aspirin, but it didn’t answer the questions nor did it help her concentrate on her work. She found herself pacing her office, a not very large space that allowed her to take only three steps in one direction before forcing her to turn. Here it was, only the middle of the morning, and it looked as if she was done working for the day. Well, she could call security and tell them she’d found the document. If she wasn’t going to work, anyway, there was no point in postponing it any longer.
But first she was going to think about that surprising question she’d asked herself. Was she going to let Arlen get away with this? On the other hand, how could she prevent him? She was no femme fatale to crook a finger and bring a man to his knees. In fact, the mere notion made her want to laugh.
Arlen had a lot of good reasons for wanting to keep matters between them on an impersonal footing, she thought. He was acting in a professional capacity when he was with her, and she supposed it wouldn’t look very good to his superiors if they heard he was fooling around on the job. And if that wasn’t enough, there was the biggest problem of all: the wedding band on his left hand.
On the other hand, there she was. She’d never felt anything approaching the feelings he’d stirred in her with a few kisses. All the rational arguments she could muster, either for herself or for him, meant absolutely nothing against the soul-deep yearning he’d unleashed.
So what was she going to do about it? Could she do anything about it? She had no feminine wiles that she was aware of, and even if she could have manufactured one, she would have been terrified of using it. Ten years later she could still hear the laughter of the premed student who had used her to do his homework. The scar was deep, and still very tender. Her lack of confidence in such matters had become an integral part of her nature.
Arlen had wanted her last night, but that could have arisen from any number of circumstances that had nothing to do with her, and she was painfully aware of it. She might not have a great deal of direct experience with human sexuality, but she prided herself on being well-read. A woman was wisest not to assume a man’s response was a reaction to her in particular. Arlen might have been reacting more to protracted celibacy than to her.
It would have been almost possible to feel pleased with the objective way she was reviewing the situation, but the bottom line wasn’t objective. She wanted—very much—to find herself in Arlen’s arms again. In fact, someplace deep inside, she wanted to weep with the longing she felt to be there again.
Standing in the middle of her office, she wrapped her arms tightly around herself and closed her eyes, remembering what it had felt like for those few short minutes to be enveloped in a man’s strong arms.
No, she thought, she wasn’t going to let him get away with this. But what could she possibly do to beguile him?
There was no answer to that question. Feeling a sudden need to do something, anything, productive, she picked up the phone and dialed Security to tell them she had found the missing document. Dave Barron, the Facility Security Officer, was not in, however, and his assistant, Vicki Grier, was busy with the DIS inspectors. Having no idea who else she could discuss the matter with, Jessica decided to wait again. What was the rush, after all? This was almost like closing the barn door after the horse has gotten out.
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Rachel Lee
Computer programmer Jessica Kilmer's life changed the moment she realized classified documents had been stolen from her safe. She knew contacting the FBI would turn her life upside down, but she never expected what would happen when she met special agent Arlen Coulter.For even as Arlen assured her that he would keep her safe, his quiet intensity awakened her heart to another danger altogether….It seemed to Arlen that the greatest risk in this case was the effect Jessica had on him. She aroused feelings he'd long believed dead–and preferred to keep buried. But the danger that Jessica faced was real–could Arlen get her out before it was too late?
Serious Risks
Rachel Lee
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
RACHEL LEE
wrote her first play in the third grade for a school assembly, and by the age of twelve she was hooked on writing. She’s lived all over the United States and now resides in Florida. Having held jobs as a security officer, real-estate agent and optician, she uses these experiences, as well as her natural flair for creativity, to write stories that are undeniably romantic. Rachel Lee has garnered numerous industry awards, including an RT Book Reviews award for Best Series Romance and Reviewer’s Choice Award for Best Romantic Suspense, as well as landing a Romance Writers of America RITA
Award nomination.
For
Markey—who believed
Gil—who is my hero
Bob—who shored me up when I got scared
Aaron—who is my biggest fan
Heather—who shares my excitement
And
All the men and women who perform the thankless task
of protecting the nation’s security.
I feel privileged to have worked with you.
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 1
“Somebody stole a classified document from my safe last night.”
The breathless, nervous claim over the telephone brought Special Agent Arlen Coulter upright in his chair and banished every other thought from his head. A perfectly routine afternoon of reviewing case reports from his agents lost the last vestige of ordinariness. Swiftly reaching across his desk, he pulled over a legal pad and a pen.
“What’s your name?” he asked the woman. “And where are you calling from?”
“My name is Jessica Kilmer, and I’m calling from a pay phone on the interstate.”
“Give me the number in case we get disconnected.” He made her recite it twice to be sure he got it right. In the background he could hear the whiz and roar of the late-afternoon traffic. “Okay, Ms. Kilmer,” he said. “Tell me about it.”
There was a shuddery breath from the other end of the phone. “I work for MTI—Military Technologies, Inc. We do a lot of defense work.”
“I’m familiar with MTI,” Arlen said. Indeed he was. MTI ranked as the area’s second-largest defense contractor. “Go on, ma’am.”
“Someone took a classified document from my safe during the night,” she repeated unsteadily, as if she couldn’t quite believe her own words. “I’m the only one who has the combination, except for the copy that security keeps in their vault.”
Arlen leaned forward tensely. Possibilities were already flitting through his head, not the least of them that this was a crank call. In the past he had worked in counterintelligence in the Washington, D.C., area, so he knew just how common espionage was. Nevertheless, this was the first hint of it that he had gotten during his entire six years in Austin, Texas. Still, the woman knew things that only someone engaged in classified work would know, such as the fact that security would have the only other combination to a classified safe. “You’re sure the document is missing?”
“Oh, yes.” She expelled the words on another unsteady breath. “I went through every folder in the safe, in case it was misfiled.”
“It couldn’t have been left out by accident?” Arlen kept his voice calm, nonaccusatory. Once a witness was put on the defensive, you could forget any hope of getting a straight story.
“No. I haven’t had it out of the safe in several weeks. It was there last night when I filed the document that comes just before it. I know it was there!”
The rising tone of her voice conveyed her frustration and concern as no words could have. Arlen felt a small twinge of sympathy for her, but he put it firmly aside. He couldn’t afford to allow his mind or his judgment to be clouded by sympathy.
“I believe you, Ms. Kilmer,” he said soothingly. “Have you told anyone else about the theft?”
“I reported it to security,” she answered, and now her tone was indignant. “They’re insisting I must have mislaid it or misfiled it or loaned it to someone, because I’m the only one with the combination to the safe. That’s the whole point, and they’re missing it. That’s why I’m calling you! The point is, someone opened that safe last night. Someone else has the combination!”
Arlen didn’t need to have the ramifications of that statement spelled out. If someone else had the combination, there was no telling how often that person had gained access to Jessica Kilmer’s safe. There was no way to know how many other safes at MTI this supposed spy might have combinations for, or how often he might have invaded them. Or how many classified documents he might have stolen, photographed, copied—the list of potential abuses was catastrophic.
Arlen addressed Jessica Kilmer. “Are you going back to work?”
She gave a shaky, mirthless laugh. “Hardly. By the time they got through grilling me and insinuating that I have the IQ of an insect, I had a splitting headache. I’m going home.”
“Just a few more questions, Ms. Kilmer, if you’re up to it.”
“Yes, of course.”
“Does anyone know you’re calling the FBI? The security people at your company, perhaps?”
“No, no one knows.” Jessica Kilmer sighed heavily. Even over the phone, her weariness and frustration were apparent to Arlen. “The security people aren’t planning to tell anyone about this just yet. They’re evidently convinced that the report will show up and that they’ll be able to explain the whole thing in some fashion that won’t reflect badly on them or the company.”
“And you don’t believe that.”
“How can I? I know that document was there when I locked my safe last night, and I know it was gone when I opened it this morning. There’s no way that can be explained as carelessness or an accident.”
No, indeed, Arlen thought. He glanced at his watch and noted that it was nearly five. “Ms. Kilmer, we need to discuss this in more detail. Can we get together somewhere this evening, say a restaurant?”
There was a brief, hesitant silence. “Wouldn’t it be more convenient for you if I came to your office?”
Arlen couldn’t suppress a smile, and he was sure she must be able to hear it in his voice. “There’s no question it would be more convenient, Ms. Kilmer, but until we get some idea of the size of this mess and who might be involved, I don’t want anyone to know you’ve contacted the Bureau. Our offices are in the busiest part of downtown, and there’s always the unwelcome possibility that someone who knows you might see you come in here.”
“Meeting at a restaurant just seems a little irregular, I guess.”
He understood her trepidation and tried to tease her out of it. “Believe me, Ms. Kilmer, I’ve questioned people in places that are a lot more irregular than any restaurant could ever be.”
There was another very brief silence, and then Jessica Kilmer laughed, a genuinely amused sound. When he heard that, Arlen knew he’d taken the first step to establishing a rapport with the lady, a rapport that would be absolutely essential if it should turn out that they had to work together. And if she was right about this document, they would unquestionably wind up spending a lot of time together.
“Actually, ma’am, we’re not so very different from your local police force. When you call to report something, we generally visit you to get the information. It would be just as easy for me to come to your home, if that would be more convenient for you. My only requirement is that we meet in a place where I can question you without interruption. It’s very important that you don’t get distracted and forget to tell me something.”
“All right, all right,” Jessica said with a laugh. “Let me give you my address.” She rattled off a street and number, then added, “I just moved in a couple of weeks ago, so I’m still neck-deep in packing boxes.”
“Don’t worry about it,” he said. “I’ll never notice.”
“What time should I expect you?”
“Say around seven, if that’s okay by you.”
“That’s just fine.”
“And, Ms. Kilmer? Don’t tell anyone at all that you called the FBI. I realize that sounds cloak-and-daggerish, but secrecy is essential. You wouldn’t want word of this conversation to get back to the wrong person.”
How could she possibly tell anyone what she couldn’t quite believe herself? Jessica wondered as she climbed back into her car. She’d actually called the FBI! Her stomach, which had been sinking all day anyway, sank further at the significance of that realization. She forced herself to ignore the sensation, just as she had all day long. Other than dread and worry, the only other feeling she’d had today had been indignation.
And frustration. She had always believed the facility security officer to be a reasonably intelligent man, but now she seriously wondered. Was she the only person with the wit to understand the gravity of what she’d been saying all day: that someone else had the combination to her safe?
Mr. Coulter had apparently understood, she reminded herself, and felt reassured that her decision to call the FBI was correct. Correct? Of course it was correct! The company’s own Security Practice Procedures Manual said that the FBI should be informed if espionage was suspected, preferably from a pay phone off-site so there was no chance of being overheard. And Jessica most definitely suspected espionage.
By the time she arrived at home, however, she was remembering the suspicion with which her every statement had been heard by the security officer. Barron obviously thought Jessica was making everything up to conceal her own negligence. What if Coulter suspected the same thing?
Usually when Jessica stepped into the antique elegance of her two-story Victorian house she experienced the pride of her new ownership, the thrill of at last having a real home of her own. Tonight, however, all she felt was the weight of the mortgage, reminding her that she couldn’t afford job trouble. Not now. Not as long as she owed that payment every month. Not as long as most of her hard-earned savings, accumulated by scrimping for five long years, were tied up in the house.
What if Barron managed to hang the missing document on her?
As seven o’clock drew closer, Jessica grew edgier. She’d never been questioned by the FBI before—or any policeman, for that matter—and she found herself wondering why she hadn’t just let MTI security handle it. They couldn’t prove she had taken the document, no matter how much they might want to believe it. What if this FBI agent wanted to believe the same thing? What if he thought her call to him was all a smoke screen?
What if he got rough?
“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Jessica!” she said disgustedly to her reflection in the bathroom mirror as she finished brushing her teeth. “He’s an FBI agent! They don’t get rough except with criminals.” And spies?
“I am not a spy!”
She knew it, and so did the small, pale face staring back at her from the mirror. Pushing her eyeglasses up her nose, Jessica gazed into her own wide, worried brown eyes and thought she looked exactly, exactly, like a small brown mouse pinned by an eagle’s eye.
A few strands of dark hair had escaped from the confines of her chignon, and she smoothed them back into place. Outwardly, at least, there was no nonsense about Jessica Kilmer. She might have the world’s most inventive, overactive imagination, but no one would ever guess it by looking at her.
On the other hand, she thought with a sigh, she wasn’t quite passing as her usual businesslike self, not with worry stamped all over her face. “Mouse” was the kindest description she could give herself.
The front doorbell sounded, and Jessica’s stomach plunged instantly in response. Oh, God, the FBI is here!
A real, honest-to-gosh FBI agent.
“Cut it out,” she told her reflection with more conviction than she really felt. “He puts his pants on one leg at a time, just like anybody else.”
She headed downstairs, drew a deep breath, expelled it and opened the door.
And looked into the grayest eyes she’d ever seen. Not the pallid color that might be blue or green depending on the light, but gray like flannel, and fringed in thick, dark lashes. His hair was a rich, very dark brown, threaded with silver, and a little longer than she’d expected. Evidently FBI agents didn’t have to wear military-style haircuts anymore.
He was tall, over six feet to her five foot two, broad shouldered, narrow hipped. Elegant-looking, especially in a gray suit, white shirt and dark tie. He wasn’t, thank goodness, handsome. Handsome would have been too much to handle. No, he was simply attractive. His face was at best pleasant, regular featured.
But nothing in her life prepared her for this man’s total impact. The term sex appeal took on a whole new meaning for her in that instant, an understanding that might have frightened her except that there was nothing wolfish in his expression or posture. In fact, he was giving her a very pleasant smile and holding out his hand.
“Ms. Kilmer? I’m Arlen Coulter.”
Jessica felt her hand swallowed in his firm, warm grip and heard herself say something courteous in response, and tried not to notice the very acute and observant way his gaze measured her.
Arlen recognized her nervousness, but it hardly surprised him. Most people were nervous at the prospect of dealing with the FBI. He saw past the nervousness, though, past the no-nonsense hairstyle and the high-collared white blouse and neatly pressed gray slacks. Behind the armor there was waiflike vulnerability. It peeped uncertainly out at him from the depths of astonishingly bright brown eyes, and, to him at least, it would have been much less obvious had she not gone to such great lengths to hide it.
“A pleasure, Ms. Kilmer,” he said, releasing her hand. In order to seem less threatening, he plunged his hands into the front pockets of his slacks and waited for her invitation to enter. She continued to look uncertainly up at him, and then color rose from the neck of her blouse to meet the roots of her hair. Where did that blush start? he wondered, and felt an unexpected stirring of his body.
Jessica licked her dry lips, unaware that the small, nervous gesture had an electric effect on the tall man who stood so casually before her in a conservative gray suit. “I, um, I don’t mean to be offensive, but can I see your badge, or whatever?”
Arlen’s smile broadened a shade, and he reached into the inside breast pocket of his suit jacket. Handing her the slim leather wallet, he said, “I’m not offended. The whole reason I have ID is so people can ask to see it. All you’ve done is show me you’re not gullible, Ms. Kilmer.”
Jessica, who wouldn’t have recognized a valid FBI identity card or badge if it had stood up and bitten her, stared at the contents of the wallet and registered the words Arlen V. Coulter, Special Agent, Federal Bureau of Investigation. Her blush deepening, she passed the wallet back.
“Please come in, Mr. Coulter. Or do I call you Agent Coulter?”
“If you insist,” he said with a smile as he followed her through the gleaming entry hall and into a living room where packing boxes still occupied quite a bit of space. “I’d prefer it if you’d just call me Arlen. We’re probably going to be seeing quite a bit of one another.”
Jessica smiled shyly as she offered him a seat. “You can call me Jessica. Would you like some coffee?”
“Not just now, thanks. Maybe later.”
Jessica settled onto the couch, facing the armchair where she’d seated Arlen, and watched as he pulled a pad and pen out of his breast pocket. He had blunt-fingered, large hands, competent, capable-looking hands. Their movements were calm, controlled. As was he, she realized. Everything about him was controlled, even his smile.
“I’ll probably need to get an official statement from you later, but for the moment, why don’t we just go over what happened?” He offered what he hoped was a reassuring smile. “The questions may get a little repetitious, but I need to be sure you aren’t inadvertently overlooking something. All right?”
Jessica nodded and clasped her hands tightly, wondering why the living room suddenly seemed small. She’d considered it a pleasantly large room until Arlen Coulter entered it, but he seemed to fill it completely.
And there was a wedding ring on his left hand. She noticed the gold band with an unexpected stab of disappointment and wondered why it should matter.
Arlen spoke. “Jessica, why don’t you tell me a little bit about your job and the kind of classified information you work with.”
“I’m a programmer,” she explained. “I work on software for Department of Defense applications. Right now I’m designing a package that’s intended to be able to pick out planes and incoming missiles from all the electronic countermeasures that are available to confuse radar.”
Arlen was impressed. “Can it?”
“It’s too soon to tell yet, but in theory it should work.”
“How long have you been working on defense applications?”
“Six years.”
In answer to his prompting, she described some of the other programs she’d worked on over the years. Listening to her, watching her, Arlen realized a couple of things. This lady was very bright, and she loved her work. As she spoke, she grew animated, using her hands and smiling, and her eyes sparkled with enthusiasm. At this new glimpse of the woman behind the uptight, severe facade, Arlen wondered what had happened to her to make her want to hide her vitality. Not that it mattered, he reminded himself. He was here as an agent to do a job, not to wonder about a woman who was young enough to be his daughter.
Eventually he brought her back to the events of the past day. Her animation faded, to be replaced by the nervous worry he’d seen when he first arrived.
“At the end of the day,” Jessica explained, “I lock up everything I work with—my files, my hard drive from the computer, any paper I’ve scribbled on or written on. I don’t bother sorting at night, because I’m tired and might make a mistake. In the morning I’ll decide which stuff needs to be burned, but in the evening I just lump it all into an envelope and file it in my safe.”
“What kind of safe do you have?”
“It’s a GSA-approved four-drawer cabinet.” All safes used for the storage of classified information had to be approved by the General Services Administration, or GSA, an indication that the safe met certain standards.
Arlen nodded. “What level material do you keep in it?”
“Just Secret and Confidential. If I need to use Top Secret or special-access information, like Secret Compartmented Information, I check them out of the vault downstairs and return them at the end of the day.”
“And last night you followed your usual procedure.”
Jessica nodded, clasping her hands together so tightly that Arlen saw her knuckles turn white.
“Why don’t you run through it again for me? Just so I can be sure I have it right.”
Jessica nodded again. “I take my hard disk out—”
“Just a second,” Arlen interrupted. “You take your computer apart every night?”
Jessica shook her head. “I have an external, removable hard disk. It’s designed for this kind of thing. I can take it off my system in just a minute, and I always store it in the top drawer of my safe, unless for some reason there’s material of a higher classification on it. Then I take it to the vault.”
“Okay. You put your hard disk in the top drawer. Then what?”
“Then I pick up any documents I’ve pulled, and I file them in their proper folders in the other drawers. When that’s done, I pick up whatever scraps of paper there are that I’ve scribbled on, doodled on or whatever, put them in a manila envelope and file them in the suspense folder I keep at the front of the second drawer.” Seeing the question form on his lips, she hastened to explain. “The suspense file just means the stuff in it is suspended, set aside to deal with later.”
He nodded. “And that’s how you know the missing document was there last night?”
“That’s right.” Realizing suddenly that her fingers were aching from the tight way she had folded her hands, Jessica unlaced them and wiggled them to relax them. “I always put the suspense file right in front of it.”
Arlen watched her wiggle her fingers, pursing his lips thoughtfully. “And you’re sure it was there?”
Jessica’s eyes snapped to his face. “Yes.” She said it with conviction.
Arlen’s gray eyes lifted from her hands to her eyes, and they no longer held any of the warmth and friendliness she’d seen in them earlier. “I have to ask these questions, Jessica. They’re not intended to be offensive. How is it you’re sure the document was there? Usually when we do things in certain ways they become so habitual that we don’t really notice. Did you really see that document last night, or do you just think you saw it?”
Her hands knotted into fists on her lap. “I saw it,” she said flatly. “The folder it was in is red, and the three folders behind it are blue. If that folder was gone, I’d have noticed it instantly, the way I noticed it was missing this morning.”
Arlen nodded and wrote in his notebook. “Okay,” he said pleasantly. “I believe you. The folder was there last night. You filed the suspense file in front of it?”
“Yes.”
“And then?”
“I closed the drawer and locked the safe.”
“How did you lock the safe?”
Jessica sighed. “I turned the dial four full rotations and tested the lever. It was locked.”
“And it was still locked when you came to work this morning?”
Jessica opened her mouth to respond, and then hesitated, her brown eyes widening. “I don’t know,” she said after a moment. “I always turn the dial four times before I start to work the combination. And I never try the lever before I enter the combination.”
“So it could have been closed but unlocked this morning.”
She nodded. “But I don’t see—”
“Don’t you find it odd that the entire folder was missing?” Arlen asked her.
Jessica’s reply was tart. “To tell you the truth, I haven’t been allowed any time today to think about anything, least of all whether what happened was odd. Of course it was odd. It was odd that anything disappeared overnight. I still don’t see.”
“Well, if you were going to steal classified information, would you leave such an obvious footprint? Wouldn’t it make more sense to photograph the document and put it back? Or photocopy it and replace it?”
“Well, yes, of course,” Jessica agreed. “But if you didn’t have time—” Her eyes widened. “Oh!” she said on a breath. “Oh!”
“Exactly.” Arlen smiled faintly. “Did you come to work early this morning, by any chance?”
The expression on her face answered the question even before she spoke. “I was a half hour early because I wanted to check out something I thought of last night.”
Arlen spread his hands, as if to say, “See?” “Could I take you up on that coffee now, Jessica?”
“Yes, of course.” She went to the kitchen to get it, impressed with how quickly Arlen Coulter had picked up on something she’d entirely missed, something even the security officer, Dave Barron, had entirely missed, in spite of all the questioning she’d endured today.
She was also uncomfortably impressed with a few other things, like how good Arlen Coulter looked. Few men her own age and younger looked half as good as Arlen did, and he must be somewhere over forty. He also made her uncomfortably aware of him. And of herself. She was most definitely not accustomed to such feelings, and she supposed she should be grateful that he was a married man and therefore could be no more than a passing and temporary ripple in her tranquility. She would get used to how good he looked, and that would be that.
An expression of determination on her face, she marched back into the living room with a tray bearing two cups of coffee, the sugar bowl and creamer. Setting the tray on the cherry coffee table between them, she asked, “Cream or sugar?”
“Black, thank you.” Arlen looked at the dainty china cups and saucers with their delicate pattern of roses and wondered when was the last time he had seen anyone serve coffee in anything but a mug. Aunt Celeste, he remembered. His wife’s great-aunt had always served coffee in bone china teacups. It wasn’t until Andrew was born that Celeste had astonished Arlen one day by handing him a large mug with his name painted on its side. “You’ve accommodated to our family customs a great deal, my boy,” she’d said in her stentorian voice, “and I thought it was high time we accommodated to one of yours.” Until she died at the age of ninety, Celeste had made sure that Arlen’s coffee was always served in a mug whenever he visited any of his wife’s relatives. Damn, he still missed the warm, wonderful, tough old lady.
“These are lovely cups,” he said now to Jessica, compelled by his memory of the elderly woman. Celeste had taught him whatever drawing-room manners he could claim, and Lord knew there were few enough.
Jessica smiled with pleasure. “Thank you. I found them in an antique shop a few months ago. The entire set, in fact, without a chip or a missing piece.” They’d cost dearly, but they were an essential part of the home she was trying to create.
“They remind me of some dishes my wife’s aunt used to have,” Arlen remarked. “I’ve been terrified of breaking the darn things ever since the first time I ate dinner at Aunt Celeste’s.” He gave Jessica a rueful smile. “She was a wonderful old lady, but her blasted dishes have haunted my entire adult life. They must be a hundred years old, and every time they get passed on to a new generation, they just take on more sentimental value. Aunt Celeste got them as a wedding gift from her husband. Then, when she passed on, they went to my wife, and now my daughter has them.”
His daughter had them? Jessica felt she had missed something somewhere. “Your daughter has them?” she repeated questioningly.
Arlen looked up from the cup, his gray eyes unfocused. “I’m afraid my wife is gone.”
“Gone?”
Jessica’s eyes strayed to his ring, and Arlen followed the direction of her gaze.
“I haven’t been able to bring myself to take it off,” he admitted. “She died over three years ago.”
Jessica hardly knew how to respond to that. “I’m sorry,” she said hesitantly.
Arlen shook his head, giving her another rueful smile. “My fault for wearing the ring.” Lifting one of the delicate cups, he took a sip of coffee. “The coffee is delicious, Jessica.”
“Thank you.” A widower who still wore his wedding ring after three years was as safe as a married man, she figured. Maybe safer. And probably a whole lot safer when he was an FBI agent.
“Okay.” Arlen picked up his pad again and made a quick note. “Let’s get back to this morning, Jessica. What exactly did you do when you arrived at MTI? Start in the parking lot.”
So she took him step-by-step through a day that had grown more frustrating with each passing minute. From the parking lot she had entered the building through the main entrance. Most mornings security waved her through on sight because the day shift recognized her well after six years. This morning, however, she’d arrived before the shift change and had had to stop to display her identification. It had been a small, routine matter, and she had taken the opportunity to clip her badge on her collar, where it would have to stay the rest of the day anyhow.
The empty elevator had carried her up to the second-floor corridor, and a brief walk had brought her to the locked door of the controlled area that held her office, along with a dozen others. There she had keyed in her code on the alphanumeric keypad beside the door, and the door had unlocked for her.
Once in her office, she had opened her safe to remove the items she needed for work: first the hard disk, which she installed in the drive case attached to the side of her computer. Then she had pulled out the second drawer of the safe, and it was as she was removing the suspense envelope that she noted the conspicuous absence of the red folder that contained a Secret NATO document.
Her first thought, of course, was that she was mistaken, that somehow the hanging file folder had come off the tracks and slipped down between the other folders to the bottom of the drawer. Item by item she had examined the contents of the drawer, checking every red folder twice, finally examining each and every one of the blue folders and their Confidential documents, as well.
“And that’s when you called security?” Arlen asked.
“No.” Jessica flushed faintly. “I decided I must have been mistaken about where the folder was last night. So I looked through the bottom drawers, too. Document by document. That’s when I called security.”
Arlen’s pen made faint noises as it moved quickly across a fresh page in his notebook. “You said you were sure the document was there last night.”
“I was. I am. It’s just that when I couldn’t find it this morning, the last thought that occurred to me was that somebody had gotten into my safe overnight. It was easier to believe I was mistaken.”
He looked up, and his expression was reassuring. “I know. But I have to ask.”
And he kept on asking. At some point or other, Jessica started to feel immune to the implications of some of the questions and found herself more aware of Arlen. The longer she was with him, the more she became cognizant of his magnetism.
“Jessica?”
Her gaze focused on Arlen, and a painful blush crept into her face.
“You’re tired,” he said kindly. “Just a few more questions, if you think you can stand it.”
Her cheeks felt as if they were on fire, and she had to remind herself that Arlen Coulter couldn’t read her mind. “Sure,” she managed to say. “I’m not all that tired.”
“Did you change the combination on your safe today?”
Jessica shook her head. “I don’t know how to do it. Security always does that, and since they don’t believe that somebody got into my safe last night, I don’t think they’re going to change it.”
Arlen slapped his notebook closed and hooked his pen onto the cover. “I’ll tell you what I think is going to happen tomorrow. I may be wrong, but if I’m right, I want you prepared to carry it off.”
Jessica leaned forward a little, fixing her gaze attentively on his face. There was a faint, jagged scar under his lower lip, running diagonally from the corner of his mouth to the center of his chin. That must be what gave his smile that interesting lopsidedness.
“I think,” Arlen said slowly, watching her from intent gray eyes, “the missing document will turn up sometime tomorrow.”
Jessica’s eyes widened behind her glasses, and her lips parted on a breath. “Why?”
Did she, Arlen wondered, have the least idea what that expression did to a man, even one as old and abused as he was? Probably not, he decided. If she had, she would have saved it for someone worth spending it on.
“Because,” he replied, forcing his attention back to business, “the only way to minimize the damage that was caused by your discovery of the document’s disappearance is to put it back in a way that makes it look as if you mislaid it.”
Jessica blinked and straightened with indignation. “Frame me, you mean!”
“I figured that would be your reaction,” Arlen said soothingly. “Just listen for a moment.”
Jessica’s eyes were snapping, but she sat back, compressed her lips and gave him a short nod.
Arlen managed to smother a smile. “Okay,” he said. “The document will turn up, and it’ll be pinned on you as carelessness or forgetfulness. Security will believe it, because they can get out of this with a decision that nothing’s been compromised, and a reprimand to you will close the entire matter. They’ll write their letter to the Defense Investigative Service explaining the events and the actions taken, and the worst that will happen is that DIS will pull an unannounced inspection to ensure that MTI’s security is up to snuff.”
“And I’ll have a written security reprimand in my personnel file,” Jessica reminded him sharply.
“Only temporarily,” Arlen said. “Only until we get this mess settled. I promise you I’ll personally see to clearing your record with the company. In the meantime, Jessica, how would you like to work with the FBI?”
“But I have a job.” At least for now, she added to herself.
“And you’ll keep it. No, I want you to work with me on this case. You’ll be my inside contact at MTI. For the moment, I don’t want anyone over there to know you’ve called the Bureau, but I still need to know what’s happening. Can you do that for me?”
Her chin sank a little, but her eyes lifted to his with a kind of wondering shyness and pleasure that gave him some inkling of how little she thought of herself. “You mean you think I can help you?”
“Absolutely,” he said firmly. “Not only that, but I don’t think I’ll get very far without your help. Until I get a better idea of who’s who and who makes a good suspect, I can’t risk trusting anyone else at MTI. Will you help?”
“Of course I will.”
Arlen smiled. “Good. The first thing is that when that document turns up tomorrow, and I’m positive it will, you can’t argue too hard with the idea that you mislaid it. I’m not saying you should be thrilled with the possibility, but you should be just as relieved as everyone else when it shows up, and only a little more reluctant to believe that you were responsible.”
Jessica wasn’t happy with that, but she nodded her agreement. “I get the idea.”
“I know it hurts,” Arlen said sympathetically, “but try to look at it from another perspective. This uproar has undoubtedly scared somebody, and if he stays scared, we’ll never get our hands on him. It’s essential that we catch him, so we can stop him, so we can find out how long and how much he’s been compromising us, and who he’s working for.”
He came around the coffee table to stand right beside Jessica, and touched her shoulder lightly with his fingers. “Maybe it’ll help if you think of yourself as an agent working undercover. That’s what you’ll be, you know. In a very real sense.”
Jessica tilted her head, looking dubiously up at him. “Just by pretending to believe I mislaid that document?”
“That’s part of it.” Arlen squatted, resting his elbows on his knees, bringing his face level with Jessica’s. “I also want you to start paying close attention to the people around you. Notice whether any of them seem to be seriously troubled, or disgruntled with MTI. Notice if any of them seem to be living too well, or drinking too much—anything that might indicate they’re not entirely trustworthy.”
That idea didn’t sit well with her, Arlen could tell. Most people didn’t like the idea of spying on their coworkers or friends.
“Jessica, I’m not asking you to spy on people. I’m just asking you to pay attention to your impressions of people. See if anyone’s attitude makes you genuinely uneasy about what they might do. You have to remember what’s at stake here.”
He was right, of course, Jessica thought. They were talking about national security. If she had evidence that would convict a murderer, would she withhold it? Of course not. This was a crime, too, potentially as serious as murder to soldiers who might someday depend on the efficacy of MTI-supplied equipment and software to protect them in the field.
Turning, Jessica looked Arlen right in the eye. “I’ll do it,” she said firmly. “What about you? What will you be doing?”
“Well,” he said, standing up, “I’ll start by calling DIS—Defense Investigative Service—and getting a complete report on the security arrangements at MTI. For example, I imagine the vault you referred to is patrolled by armed guards round the clock.”
“Well, yes, I think so. Guards are necessary for the protection of Top Secret information. That’s why I can’t keep it in my safe.”
“Exactly. DIS can give me a complete rundown. They had to approve all the arrangements to begin with, and I imagine they inspect things pretty thoroughly every few months.”
Jessica nodded. When the DIS inspectors came in they usually managed to spend a few minutes talking to each and every one of the employees who were cleared for access to classified information.
“And tomorrow,” Arlen continued, “I’ll initiate background checks on all the people who have access to your controlled area. Maybe we can find someone who’s in financial trouble, or who’s vulnerable to blackmail. Maybe we can close this out quickly.”
Looking down at her, he shrugged and gave her a crooked, rueful smile. “But don’t hold your breath. I used to work in the Foreign Counterintelligence Division of the Bureau in the Washington area. It can take months to gather enough evidence to prosecute.”
Jessica sighed and looked down at her hands. “So it’ll probably drag on.”
“Probably. But look at the bright side.”
“Is there one?” She gave him a doubtful smile.
“Sure. We get to become acquainted. Really well acquainted. In fact, I guarantee you’ll be sick of the sight of me before this is over.”
Jessica shook her head, laughing. “I can’t imagine that,” she said, the words slipping out before she knew they were coming.
Arlen watched the brilliant color flood her face, saw the dawning of her shocked embarrassment. Her reaction gave more weight to her words than he would otherwise have assigned them. If she hadn’t blushed, he would have thought she was teasing. Because she’d blushed, he knew she wasn’t.
And he was astonished how good that little slip of the tongue made him feel. Not since Lucy’s death had anyone said anything that made him feel good. Angry, maybe. Irritated, yes. But not good. Good feelings seemed to have left his life along with Lucy. And, to be quite honest, he wasn’t sure he wanted them back. Those feelings had a price, and he’d paid it once.
So, knowing she wasn’t teasing, he acted as if she was. “You think you won’t only because you haven’t had to look at me every day for a week or a month,” he said, chuckling and turning away as if he hadn’t seen her blush.
“I’ll let you get some rest now, Jessica,” he continued, heading for the door. “Call me if you have any questions.”
He paused suddenly and turned back, patting his pockets. “I must have my card here somewhere. Although maybe it’s better if you don’t carry it around with you.”
“I can reach you at the FBI office, can’t I?” she asked, her embarrassment fading as he seemed to notice nothing remarkable about her comment. “I don’t really need your card.”
“You can reach me at home, too,” he told her. “And I really don’t mind if you call. The number’s in the book. And if I need to get hold of you, what’s your office number?”
He pulled the pen and pad from his pocket, but Jessica forestalled him with her business card. Arlen’s gray eyes twinkled down at her.
“You’re better prepared than I am,” he confessed. “If something comes up, I’ll call.”
He took his leave almost with a sense of relief. Damn it, Arlen, he thought, the lady’s young enough to be your daughter, and you’re too damn old and wise to get tangled up with her.
And maybe, he thought a few minutes later, she wasn’t as young as she looked. Maybe he was going to start feeling again whether he wanted to or not. Three years was a long time. Maybe even dead feelings came back to life after enough time passed. Maybe, no matter how much you wanted them to stay gone, they just came back anyhow.
Chapter 2
Arlen arrived at the Bureau offices in the morning to find things in an uproar. One of the agents, Ted Wilson, was cooperating with the Secret Service in a sting operation, and overnight they’d rounded up five major drug dealers who were selling crack and coke for food stamps. The Drug Enforcement Administration had gotten involved somewhere along the way, and as near as Arlen could tell they had U.S. marshals, DEA agents, Secret Service agents and even, unless he was mistaken, a Customs agent, in the hallways and offices of the Bureau. They lacked only a U.S. Attorney, and it wasn’t more than a couple of minutes before one showed up. Carolyn Granger came downstairs with a tape recorder, warning everyone that unless somebody gave her some good reasons to use with the judge, the dealers would be out on bail in a couple of hours.
Arlen paused at Ted Wilson’s office door and leaned in to congratulate the young agent. Wilson, looking tired and rumpled in jeans and an FBI windbreaker, grinned up at him. “Thanks, Chief. It feels pretty good.”
“What’s all the congregation for?”
“Well, they’re painting all the Treasury offices, which means the Secret Service guys and the Customs guys are grabbing any excuse to stay out of there. I think DEA’s just curious.”
“Arlen?” The voice of his secretary, Donna, rose above the din and reached him down the length of the hall.
“Yo!” Twisting his head and leaning backward into the hall, he could just see her.
“It’s someone named Jessica on the phone.”
“Tell her I’ll be there in just a minute.” He looked back at Ted. “We do have some other work to accomplish here today.”
“Sure thing, boss.” Ted’s grin broadened. “I think it’ll calm down pretty quick. These guys were supposed to be at their desks ten minutes ago, anyway.”
It was impossible not to grin back. This was Ted’s first bust, and Arlen had no trouble remembering the exhilaration he’d felt his own first time. Walking down the hall, he edged around similarly jubilant men and escaped into the quiet of his own office.
Three of the lines on his phone were lit, so he buzzed Donna and found out that Jessica was on two.
“Jessica,” he said pleasantly into the phone, swiveling his chair to look up at the gray sky that promised rain before the morning was out. For years he’d worked in an office without a window, and the nicest part of his current assignment, he sometimes thought, was the window, with its view of the sky. “Are you calling from work?”
“Yes, I—”
He interrupted her quickly, but kept his tone casual. “Don’t tell me you’re canceling our lunch date.”
At the other end of the line, Jessica drew a total blank. Lunch date? She didn’t remember making a lunch date with Arlen. “I was just going to—”
“I can change the time if that’ll make it easier for you to meet me,” he said smoothly. “Noon instead of one o’clock? Would that be better?”
“I—I guess.” Flabbergasted, she didn’t know what else to say.
“Good! I’ll pick you up out front at noon, then. I’m sorry I can’t talk, but you know how it is at work. I’m already late for a meeting. See you at noon.”
At her own desk on the other side of town, Jessica listened to the hum of the empty phone line as she looked down into the safe drawer. The document was back, all right, stuffed down beneath the other folders so that it lay on the bottom of the drawer. If Arlen hadn’t predicted it, she would probably be thinking she was losing her mind. There was no way she could have missed it in her search yesterday, and yet she would have wondered anyway.
And for some reason Arlen didn’t want to discuss the matter over the phone while she was at work. At least, that was the only conclusion she could draw from their crazy conversation. But she’d wanted to ask him what to do, because it had occurred to her that the red folder or the pages of the document might have fingerprints on them. If she called security first, they would probably send someone up to check things out and ruin all the prints. If there were any.
Troubled, she closed the safe and sat back in her chair. Well, she could wait until after lunch to tell security she had the document. It would make her look even dippier, but what the heck. There was evidently no way she was going to come out of this looking good.
In the meantime, she had a great deal of work still to accomplish on her design for this new software project.
And someone had been in her safe again last night. The idea sent chills racing up and down her spine. In that safe were highly classified details about the Western world’s electronic countermeasures systems. There were threat estimates and survivability estimates, all of which would be very useful to America’s enemies.
In defense work, there were three main levels of classification. Confidential, the lowest, was given to information that could cause serious damage to national security if it fell into the wrong hands. Secret, the next highest, was given to information that could cause grave damage. Those were the levels in her safe. Quite a serious problem, to have someone rummaging around in those documents.
But what if that someone also had access to the guarded vault downstairs? That was where the Top Secret documents were kept, documents that by definition could cause exceptionally grave damage to national security, or even provoke war. It was downright scary even to think about.
And whoever had the combination to her safe probably did have access to the vault, because that was where copies of the combinations for every safe in the building were kept. Somehow this person must have gotten to that copy. And that meant everything in the building was open to him.
It was not yet nine in the morning, but Jessica found herself rubbing her temples to ease a growing throb. Take some aspirin and forget it, Jess, she told herself. Just focus your mind on work.
“Hey, Jessica.” Bob Harrow stood in her office door, looking his usual seedy self, with his hair standing up wildly and a stain of some kind on the front of his T-shirt. “Did you finish your part of the design yet?” As project director, Bob had the unenviable task of trying to keep the team on track.
“Not yet, Bob. Sorry. Yesterday blew me out of the water.”
Bob looked sympathetic. “You don’t look any too great this morning, kiddo. Don’t beat yourself over the head about it, Jessica. You won’t be the first programmer up here who’s spaced something out and found it two days later. Why do you think they put the digital locks on the door? I keep waiting for them to come up with retina identification equipment so they don’t have to worry about one of us scribbling the door code on our pant leg or something.”
But Jessica’s mind caught on something he said. “You mean other people have mislaid things up here? When did that happen?”
“It happens all the time.” Bob shrugged. “Well, not every day, but it was…oh, maybe a month ago that Jerry couldn’t find some report or other on some NATO test. It turned up under a stack of papers on his desk the next day. If you ask me, the only mistake you made was telling security about it. Those guys are completely useless. Did they find it for you? Nope. They just drove you crazy, and yet they’re perfectly convinced it’ll turn up today or tomorrow under some papers somewhere. And it will, Jessica. Believe me. Quit worrying about it.”
Jessica summoned a smile. “You wouldn’t really write the door code on your jeans leg, would you?”
“Well, I wouldn’t, but it wouldn’t surprise me if Mike or Carl did something stupid like that. I swear, neither one of them can think except in assembly language. Well, don’t let me keep you from working. And, Jessica, if this has still got you upset, don’t worry about the design. We’ve got a little slack and can wait a little longer.”
Alone again, Jessica took two aspirin and forced her attention to her work. Work, she’d discovered a long time ago, was solace.
Arlen pulled his car up under the overhang in front of MTI’s main entrance to wait for Jessica. He left the engine running and the defroster blowing to keep the windows clear. The day had turned unexpectedly cold and miserably wet. He was glad he had an old umbrella in the backseat, because he suspected Jessica had probably misjudged the weather this morning just as he had.
Jessica. He’d been thinking about her a little too often for his own peace of mind. Such a severe little mouse of a woman, he told himself, and then remembered the unusual brilliance of her brown eyes and the soft shell-pink of her full lips. Or the fact that her loosely cut gray slacks and high-necked white blouse had hinted at a figure that was better than average.
Well, better than average if you liked women with some meat on them, Arlen thought wryly. He guessed he did, to judge by his reaction to the lady. It hadn’t been something he’d really thought about before.
He’d dated Lucy all the way through high school, over her family’s ceaseless objections, and married her a week after graduation. Then had come an eighteen-month separation while he went to Desert Storm with the marines. He’d returned from the Middle East with a couple of medals to rejoin his bride and meet his eleven-month-old daughter, Melanie. And nine months after that, Andrew had been born. Two years later, he was out of the marines and in college on the GI Bill, both him and Lucy working to support the kids. The hard times had paid off in a big way when he fulfilled his life’s dream of joining the FBI.
Sighing, he looked back with a kind of nostalgic sadness. How young and invulnerable he and Lucy had been then, both of them sure that the hard times were over. Life had a hell of a way of grinding out the smugness of youth.
Exiting the building through the electronically controlled glass doors, Jessica caught sight of Arlen just moments before he spied her. In that instant she thought he looked sad. Alone. The way she felt inside all too often. Did she look like that to others?
But he smiled as he climbed out of the car and came around to open the door for her. That lopsided smile of his was infectious, she realized as she felt her own lips stretch and lift in response. Today he wore another, darker, gray wool suit, and he once again looked very much like the FBI agents of her imaginings. Very neat, very correct. Very tall and very imposing. Strange, nervous little tickles danced through her stomach.
But Arlen didn’t act like her image of an agent. As she slipped past him to get into the car, he bent without warning and kissed her lightly on the cheek. When she looked up at him in astonishment, he further confounded her by laughing and dropping a kiss on the tip of her nose.
“Climb in, honey. It’s cold out here.” Still smiling, he urged her into the car.
Honey? Surely he couldn’t be one of those awful men who called every woman honey. Awful as that thought was, she was even more astounded to realize that some fugitive part of her wished he really meant it. She couldn’t help thinking that it must be really nice to have someone in your life who called you “honey” and surprised you with kisses.
But a very long time ago Jessica had decided it was wisest to avoid men. The boys in high school had scorned her because she was too poor, too plump, too smart and wore glasses. She was one of the very few girls who didn’t go to her senior prom.
Things like that had hurt, of course, but nothing had prepared her for the anguish she discovered in college. Prince Charming had arrived in her freshman year in the guise of a premed student. To this day Jessica considered herself fortunate to have discovered that he was more interested in having her do his programming assignments than he was in her love, and that wooing her had been just a way of buying her brains.
And to this day she could still writhe with embarrassment when she recalled her own eager stupidity and readiness to believe in magic. Lord, the whole world had turned bright and shining for her in those two short months. She had believed the sun rose and set on Chuck Meyers, had done any and everything he had asked her to, and all because he took her out to a couple of movies and spent his evenings in her dorm room. Making her believe he liked being with her. Teasing her with little kisses and then laughing at her blushes.
Fool that she was, she had thought he was laughing because he thought she was cute. And then he would hand her his math book or his computer science assignments and say, “Hey, Jess, I don’t exactly understand this. Help me, huh?” And she would do his whole damn assignment because he gave her those little kisses and made her feel like a million dollars.
Stupid, stupid sixteen-year-old Jessica. How crushed she had been the day after she finished his final program, the one that had guaranteed him an A for the course. How stupid and crushed and humiliated when she learned that Chuck thought they’d had a fair trade. “You had your fantasy, and I got my A,” he had said bluntly. “What’s the big deal, Jess? It isn’t like I even slept with you.” He hadn’t even had the moral decency to understand what the big deal was. She’d been a fool, all right, and she had plumbed the true meaning of despair. She’d also learned what it meant to be used, and while she might risk the heartbreak, she would never again risk the humiliation and the sense of worthlessness that went with knowing you had been taken advantage of.
Sitting next to Arlen as he pulled out of the MTI parking lot, Jessica realized she wasn’t as immune as she’d believed these past years. For the first time in a very long time she found herself acutely, femininely aware of a man. She found herself noticing the way his thigh muscles flexed as he drove. The easy competence with which his large, lean hands held the wheel. The faint shadow of the morning’s beard growth on his cheeks and chin. The muted scent of a man, just barely noticeable in the closed confines of the car. The things that make men different, and that make them attractive to women.
And she found herself wondering what it would be like to lean over and rest her cheek against the wool that covered his shoulder. What would it be like to have his arm close around her shoulders and hold her? Just hold her. Dear heaven, was it possible to ache just to be held? Startled by a need she had never recognized before, she simply stared at him.
Arlen glanced her way as he eased into the heavy noon-hour traffic and caught her staring at him. Before Jessica’s blush became visible, he’d once again fixed his eyes on the road.
“I guess I owe you a whole pack of apologies, Jessica,” he said. “You probably think I’ve gone off the deep end. But the simple fact is, if somebody notices us together, whether it’s someone who recognizes me or someone who recognizes you, I’ll be a whole lot more comfortable if they assume we have some kind of personal relationship.”
“Why?” And then it dawned on her. Her scalp prickled as she realized that Arlen actually thought someone might be watching her.
“After your report to security yesterday,” he continued, “somebody might be interested in your actions for the next couple of days. It’s better all around if they don’t get wind that you’ve talked to the FBI.”
“Is that why you wouldn’t let me talk on the phone this morning?”
He nodded and glanced at her. “You never know who might be listening. It’s just a precaution. Why did you call?”
“Because you were right. The missing document was back in my safe this morning, tucked at the bottom of the drawer as if it had slipped down. I wanted to ask you how to handle it, because it occurred to me there might be fingerprints on it.”
Arlen steered the car into the parking lot of a popular restaurant. Only when he’d pulled into a slot and switched off the ignition did he speak. Turning a little on the seat, he faced her.
“Well, now,” he said, “that’s a good question. I sure as hell can’t come up there to lift the prints, and you sure as hell can’t bring the document out to me.”
“Are you so sure security wouldn’t be helpful if you talked to them?” Jessica asked. It bothered her that he seemed so determined to circumvent the company’s security.
“I’m sure they’d be real helpful. The problem is, I can’t be sure one of them isn’t involved. When somebody is able to access classified stuff, you have to suspect everybody who can get the necessary combinations. That means your facility security officer and all his people.”
Jessica nodded slowly and looked out at the drizzly day. A soft, small sigh escaped her. “Bob Harrow—he’s my project chief—mentioned this morning that my document isn’t the first one to turn up missing temporarily.”
Beside her, Arlen stiffened. “Really.”
Jessica looked at him. “It shook me. And he mentioned it so casually! Like it’s just the dumb kind of thing you expect a programmer to do—mislay classified documents overnight. I mean, I couldn’t believe it, but I could see Bob’s point, too. They always turn up, there’s always an explanation for how they got to be where they are, and besides, there’s a digital combination lock on the door to the whole section, so the documents are as good as locked in a safe even when they’re left on a desk.”
She looked down at her hands. “Except, of course, that the cleaning people come in during the night, and they shouldn’t be able to get their hands on the material. And security comes through at five for the burn bags, and while they’re cleared to take out the classified trash, they have no need to see anything else. And that’s the whole basis of the protection program, isn’t it? That clearance alone isn’t enough to gain access. A person has to have a verified need to know, as well.”
“You have a better understanding of security than most people,” Arlen remarked. “Most people don’t begin to understand the concept of ‘need to know.’”
“Well, it makes sense to me,” Jessica said. “And I’ll tell you what’s really got me so upset this morning. Someone was in my safe again last night. I don’t know how to change the combination, and I don’t know how I can convince security to change it. So all that information is essentially unprotected. Mine and probably everybody else’s. There’s got to be some way to put a stop to this, Arlen!”
It was refreshing, he found himself thinking, to meet someone these days who actually cared. So many people were cynical, or at least pretended to be.
“Actually, Jess,” he said, “the plug is going to be pulled this afternoon.”
Her bright brown eyes widened behind her glasses, and Arlen spared a moment to wonder just how bad her vision was. “The Defense Investigative Service is going to pull an unannounced inspection at your plant this afternoon. One way or another, they’re going to ensure that information is protected.”
“But how?”
Arlen shrugged. “They’re going in looking for an opportunity, and they won’t quit until they find it. They’ll make your folks change all the combinations. They understand the situation as well as anyone, Jessica. That information won’t go unprotected another night.”
“But you said it’s as important to find out what has been compromised as it is to prevent further compromises. If they change all the combinations, won’t that prevent the spy from doing anything? How will you find him?”
Arlen shook his head. “For a novice, you’re good at thinking these things out, Jessica, but you’re not considering motivation here. This person isn’t stealing these documents because it’s easy. He’s motivated by something. The most common motivation is greed, even though it’s a fact that spies generally don’t make huge sums of money. Still, if someone is motivated to steal defense secrets in order to get money, he’s not likely to stop just because there’s a setback. Same goes with other motivations, from revenge to blackmail. Whatever is driving this character, he’s likely to lie low for a couple of days or weeks, then try to get his hands on the new combinations.”
Jessica’s slow nod indicated her understanding. “And you’ll be ready.”
“Believe it.” He smiled, then utterly deprived her of breath by the simple expedient of reaching out and running the tip of his index finger along her cheek.
In that instant Arlen experienced an overload of sensations. All at once he was aware of the satin texture of Jessica’s skin beneath his finger, of the way her breath caught and held, of her faint feminine fragrance. He saw, too, the way her eyes darkened and her lips parted, just a little, an unconscious betrayal of her reaction to his touch. His own body clenched in response, a sharp, hungry stab of wanting.
Abruptly, he drew his hand back. “I promised you lunch,” he said briskly. “We’d better get inside before your break is over.”
Feeling slightly dazed, Jessica didn’t move until he opened her car door. She wasn’t used to such courtesy, and as often as she’d gone out with men for lunch, this was the first time in her life one actually tucked her arm through his, holding it snugly to his side as he guided her around puddles and held an umbrella over her with gentlemanly concern. Being unaccustomed to it, she wasn’t sure whether she liked it, but it certainly made her feel ladylike.
It also made her aware of two other things: how large he was beside her, and that he was wearing a gun. The first unsettled her, but the second unnerved her, causing her to miss her step. Arlen steadied her immediately, looking down with quick concern.
“Are you all right?”
Feeling foolishly naive—of course an FBI agent wore a gun—she responded tartly to cover her embarrassment. “I’m just not accustomed to rubbing elbows with a gun.”
Gray eyes looked down at her steadily for an interminable moment. When he spoke, his voice was absolutely level. “Does it bother you?”
Jessica had the inexplicable feeling that she was being tested in some way, though she had no idea what kind of response he wanted. She could only tell the truth. “Actually,” she said, and felt her blush rising again, “it caught me by surprise. I wasn’t expecting it, that’s all. And I wish I could learn to stop blushing!”
Arlen looked startled, and then he chuckled, asking, “How old are you, anyway?”
Her color deepened even more. “I’m twenty-six. Are you laughing at me?”
“Not at all.” He shook his head solemnly, but his eyes were dancing. He urged her toward the restaurant door. “Twenty-six? And you’ve been with MTI for six years, you said? You must have graduated from college young.” Twenty-six was no child, he found himself thinking, and then wondered why that relieved him.
“I was a little accelerated,” she admitted, reluctant to discuss this. People, especially men, seemed to be put off when they learned that she’d graduated from high school at sixteen and completed her undergraduate work and her masters by the age of twenty.
“I was your age when I graduated,” Arlen volunteered. He collapsed the umbrella and opened the door for her. “The marines slowed me down.”
The restaurant was less crowded than usual at that hour, probably because the weather had dampened a few appetites. Jessica ordered the crab salad that was her favorite lunch, and Arlen ordered the vegetarian plate.
“I’m not a vegetarian,” he remarked as he handed the menus to the waitress, “but on my job I wind up eating a lot of greasy fast food. Every so often I throw a sop to my conscience.”
Jessica laughed.
“I think,” he said, returning to business, “I’d like to hear from you tonight about the DIS inspection this afternoon.”
“I won’t know much about what’s going on,” Jessica told him. “When they’ve come other times, they spent a couple of minutes asking me whether I have any problems or questions, or whether I’ve had any unusual or suspicious contacts, but that’s the extent of my involvement.”
He nodded and leaned back to allow the waitress to serve them. “But you might pick up on people’s reactions to what’s happening. This is going to be a different inspection from most, Jessica. It’s going to be harder, tougher and longer. This time DIS isn’t going in with the assumption that everything’s on the up-and-up. This time they know something’s seriously wrong, and they’re going to dig for any sign or symptom of it. It’s certainly apt to irritate people, and it should make anyone with a guilty conscience just a little uneasy. People get incautious when they’re worried, and you just might pick up on something.” He shrugged and lifted his fork. “I just want you to be alert and then share your impressions with me. Maybe you’ll get something, maybe you won’t.”
“Well, I can do that much,” Jessica readily promised, and then laughed. “I have to admit, though, when they ask me if I’ve had any suspicious contacts, you’re definitely going to be the picture that pops into my mind.”
Arlen laughed, too. “Just try not to look guilty.”
“Did you bring one of your cards for me today?” Jessica asked. “It doesn’t really matter, but last night I realized that I never knew FBI agents carried business cards. And then I got to wondering what it looks like.”
“Just a regular card. No bells or whistles or anything fancy.” He patted his pockets until he found the one holding his card case. “I don’t know why it is,” he said, “but I can never remember where I keep these damn things. Here you go. But I’d really be a lot happier if you didn’t carry this around with you.”
“I’ll give it right back, then.” She accepted the white card, studying it with an interest she didn’t bother to hide. Embossed in gold with an FBI badge in one corner, it identified Arlen as Special Agent in Charge of the local field office.
“Special Agent in Charge?” she read questioningly.
“We call it SAIC. It means I get to do a lot of extra paperwork and stand on the firing line for a lot of extra flak.”
She handed the card back and smiled at him. “You’re just being modest.”
“I’m never modest. It’s the plain truth. I also get to work twice as many hours as anyone else when we have multiple operations going.”
At that moment his pocket beeper tweeted at him. Looking rueful, he switched it off and spread his hands apologetically. “It also means I can’t enjoy an uninterrupted lunch with a lady. Will you excuse me?”
He crossed the room to the pay phone near the exit, weaving among tables with a grace that could only come from peak physical conditioning. A gun and a pocket pager. Shaking her head ruefully, Jessica lifted a forkful of crabmeat to her mouth. No sane woman would be attracted to a man who wore a gun under his coat on one side and a pager in the pocket on the other side. Neither object promised a tranquil existence, and that kind of excitement was not what she wanted.
But he hinted at other kinds of excitement, too, she found herself thinking wistfully. Excitement of a kind she’d never thought she might experience—and in all honesty still didn’t think she ever would.
With a sigh, she forced her thoughts back to the safer area of espionage. That was Arlen Coulter’s sole interest in her, and she would do well to remember it.
And then, like the proverbial bolt out of the blue, she remembered something that had happened just the week before last. No, maybe it had been a little longer ago than that. Closing her eyes, she tried to remember exactly when it had happened.
“Sorry I was gone so long,” Arlen said, sliding into his chair. And then he noticed her frown of concentration. “Jessica? Are you all right?”
“I’m fine. I just remembered something.” She looked at him, eyes troubled behind her lenses. “I suddenly remembered something that happened a couple of weeks ago. Someone I met. I was just trying to remember exactly when.”
Arlen leaned toward her intently. “You had a suspicious contact?”
“I don’t know. It wasn’t any big deal. It’s just that something didn’t feel right about it, and I was trying to pinpoint it. I don’t know how familiar you are with MTI, but a lot of us graduated from the local university, and many of us still have social and professional contacts there. I keep in touch with a lot of the professors from the computer science and engineering departments, and sometimes I brainstorm with them.”
Arlen nodded encouragingly. “Go on.”
“Well, on one of those visits Professor Kostermeyer in engineering introduced me to a couple of his graduate students. One of them was Chinese.”
“From Taiwan or the People’s Republic?”
“I don’t know. It never occurred to me to wonder.”
Arlen nodded again. “What happened?”
“Nothing, really, but even just thinking about it bothers me. I was in the supermarket two weeks ago, the one near my house.”
He nodded. “I know the one. Corbett’s.”
“Right. An awful long way from the university. And I ran into the Chinese grad student Kostermeyer introduced me to. The thing is, I really didn’t remember him until he reminded me, and then it struck me as really odd that he would remember me well enough to recognize me and call me by name several months later.” She watched him, half hoping he would reassure her somehow, maybe tell her that it wasn’t odd at all.
The back of Arlen’s neck was prickling overtime, a sure sign that this was important. It was an instinct that had never failed him yet. “Well, some people do have really amazing memories for faces and names. They’re also about as rare as ice at the equator. It’s exactly the kind of contact you’re supposed to report to your security officer. This is a classic type of recruitment approach. What exactly happened?”
“Well, he suggested we have lunch together, and I said I was busy. Then he suggested we do it another time, but I managed to keep it vague and left. It was just now, sitting here, that I really started thinking about it.” She shrugged. “Maybe I’m just getting paranoid because of this other stuff?”
“Did he by any chance offer to pick up the tab when he made the suggestion?” Students were usually too tight on money to do more than pick up their own tabs, especially foreign students, who were often living on very restricted stipends. If this fellow had offered to buy lunch, the contact would be even more suspicious.
She looked down, trying to remember exactly how the invitation had been worded. “I’m not sure about that, either. I just wasn’t paying enough attention, Arlen.” She raised eyes that asked for his understanding. “The whole thing seemed more like a slightly uncomfortable nuisance, if you want the truth. I figured he wanted some help getting a job at MTI. And I was vaguely worried that he might be persistent about it.”
“That may be all he wants,” Arlen agreed. “I’ve seen recruitments start out exactly like this, though.” Reaching out, he startled her once again by briefly covering her hand with his. Almost as soon as she registered the dry warmth of his skin, he withdrew his touch.
“Let me tell you a story, Jessica.”
She nodded, pushing her salad aside and giving him her full attention.
“A number of years ago, a university student knocked on his neighbor’s door and complained that the volume of the man’s stereo was disturbing his studying. The neighbor, a Bulgarian student, apologized and promptly turned his stereo down. A few days later, the Bulgarian invited the American over for a drink, and the American accepted to show there were no hard feelings. With me so far?”
Jessica nodded. “Is this true?”
“Absolutely. Anyhow, while he was having a drink with the Bulgarian, the American was introduced to a friend of the Bulgarian’s, a man who was identified as a cultural attaché at the Bulgarian embassy. The attaché talked to the American for a while, ascertained that the student, like most students, could use some extra money, and offered to hire him to do some economic research.”
“I think I can guess the rest,” Jessica said.
Arlen shook his head. “I doubt it. This student happened to see a program about espionage on a local public television station right about that time and, wonder of wonders, he called the local FBI field office. The Bulgarian attaché turned out to be an officer in the KGB, and we successfully ran the American student for two years as a double agent.” Arlen smiled faintly. “The student had a yen to be James Bond. He loved every minute of it. And we got five or six very important arrests out of it, not to mention all the disinformation we passed to the Soviets.”
“So my student might have been making an approach.” Jessica watched him, hoping he would deny it.
“He might have been. The thing a lot of people don’t understand about students from some less-than-friendly nations is that they’re not spies exactly, but they’re expected to report back to their embassies about every person they meet. So say this student reported his brief meeting with you, as he’s reported a hundred others, but this one caught the eye of somebody in intelligence. So he was told to make a further contact with you. If he can manage to become just slightly acquainted with you, then he can introduce someone else to you without arousing your suspicions.”
Jessica nodded unhappily. “Then if it really wasn’t an accidental meeting, I can expect to run into him again sometime.”
“Absolutely. And if you do, I want you to go along with his suggestions.”
Jessica’s eyes widened, and she drew a sharp, disbelieving breath. “You’re kidding! Tell me you’re kidding!” But from the expression on his face she knew he wasn’t. The unease she’d felt over the missing document was nothing compared to the nervous fluttering in her stomach right now. “Arlen, I don’t have the nerves for this!”
“No nerves are required,” he said calmly. “The man asks you to lunch, and you go. He may or may not introduce you to someone else. At each stage, you’re always free to continue or bow out. Nothing commits you for the long haul, Jessica.”
“But—but—” How could she adequately express the terror she felt? “I’d be too scared to do it.”
“There’s nothing to be scared of. Nobody who’s been a double agent for us has ever, ever, been harmed. In fact, a few have found the KGB protects them as carefully from the FBI as we try to protect our double agents from them.”
“We’re not talking about the KGB here, Arlen.”
“It doesn’t matter. I’ll look after you. The whole damn Bureau will look after you. And if the opposition tumbles to the fact that you’re a double agent, all they’ll do is skedaddle so fast your head’ll spin. They would have absolutely nothing to gain by harming you, and everything to lose.”
Jessica shook her head, frantically trying to find an objection that would convince him.
“Look.” Reaching out, he caught one of her hands in each of his and stilled their nervous motions. “Just think about it, Jessica. You don’t have to answer right now. Just think about it and how important it is.”
He saw the fear in her bright brown eyes and felt guilty for what he was doing. He was positive she wouldn’t be hurt in any way, or he wouldn’t be suggesting it. It was important that she do this, damn it, but not important enough to put her life at risk. The problem was, people’s heads were full of Hollywood notions of espionage, notions that had little to do with reality, particularly the reality of domestic espionage. In fact, Hollywood aside, foreign intelligence operations had more to lose than they could ever gain if they even once harmed an American citizen who was working for either them or the FBI.
Her fingers felt so small and fragile within the confines of his large hands, and her skin was so smooth and satiny. Her wrists were small and delicate, certainly less than half the size of his. She would be small and soft and satiny, hot and tight and—
He abruptly released her hands, schooling his thoughts to less inflammatory paths. What a damnable time for his libido to resurrect itself!
“Just think about it,” he said, relieved to find he sounded natural. “I promise I won’t pressure you.”
That was fair, Jessica thought with relief. She understood the importance of what he’d asked her to do, but she seriously doubted she had steady enough nerves for anything of the sort. In many ways, she was simply a mouse. Still, she thought wistfully, she might almost consider it—if he would hold her hands again. She had known so little caring physical contact in her life.
“I’d better be getting you back,” Arlen said, signaling the waitress. “I’ll come by this evening, unless that will interfere with your plans.”
“To ask me about what happens this afternoon?”
He nodded and gave her a reassuring smile. “And that’s all, I promise. Unless you want to talk about something more.”
“All right.” She tried to look indifferent. “I’ll just be trying to straighten up the place. Someday I hope to have all those boxes emptied.”
When they were driving back toward MTI through the steady rain, Jessica thought to ask, “What do you want me to do about that document?”
Arlen braked for a stoplight and rubbed his chin before glancing at her. “Leave it undiscovered until tomorrow,” he said after a moment. “Tonight I’ll give you a crash course in how to lift a fingerprint. I’m willing to bet, though, that the prints will be wiped off. Anyone with half a brain would have thought of that once the hue and cry was raised over that document.”
“But if I find one?”
“It may be yours. Whatever you find, you can bring it out to me tomorrow. Why don’t I meet you for lunch again?”
Jessica looked sideways at him. “Is your expense account up to this?”
He chuckled. “When it starts complaining, I’ll let you know.”
When he pulled up before MTI’s main entrance, he set the car in Park and turned to her. “Take care, Jess,” he said and bent forward, giving her the lightest, gentlest kiss on her lips. “See you tonight,” he added in a husky murmur.
It was all for show, but it didn’t feel like playacting, not to Jessica. Her heart stopped in her throat, and electric sparks shot out from that brief, light caress, dazing her.
Somehow she climbed out of the car. It was only as she was stepping into the lobby that she realized someone had been watching. Bob Harrow, her project chief, stood just inside the doors, grinning like the Cheshire cat.
“Something wrong, Bob?” she asked him, feeling annoyed that he’d seen the gesture. That in fact he’d probably precipitated it.
“Not a thing,” he said, suddenly all innocence. “Not a thing, Jessica.” But there was a knowing glint in his eye as he rode the elevator upstairs with her.
Chapter 3
Bob Harrow hadn’t been the only one to notice Jessica’s lunch date. Frank Winkowski, another of the project’s programmers, had seen her departure and Arlen’s kiss on her cheek. Before the afternoon was over she had endured some merciless teasing, and naturally she made it worse by insisting that Arlen was just a good friend.
She wasn’t entirely comfortable with teasing. She’d been an only child, raised by a mother and grandmother who’d had little use for her. Since coming to work at MTI, she’d seen a lot of teasing among her coworkers, and on occasion she’d been the gentle butt of some of it. It was easier to handle now, but she couldn’t take it as casually as others did.
The teasing, however, had taken her mind off other things, and she got through the entire afternoon with only occasional thoughts of the document in her drawer or the security inspection that surely had begun somewhere in the building.
Unannounced inspections were permitted by the terms of the security agreement a defense contractor had with the government, so the Defense Investigative Service needed to give no excuse for showing up. No one knew that this inspection was a direct result of Jessica’s report to the FBI, and Arlen had assured her that DIS would be careful not to draw any attention to her. She would be treated exactly like everyone else, and since these inspections always took at least three days, she didn’t really expect to see an inspector for another day or so.
When she got home she changed into jeans and a sweatshirt, ate a quick salad for dinner and dug into the packing boxes that still waited all over the house. She’d accumulated quite a few possessions over the years since she left college. Most of them had been bought by chance when she stumbled on some item that she knew would be perfect for the home she dreamed of owning someday. Now she owned the home, and she was a little surprised to find how much of the furnishings and bric-a-brac she’d already acquired.
She had just dragged the last of a series of boxes to the foot of the stairs to be carried up when the doorbell rang. Arlen. This time she didn’t imagine herself slinking away. This time a swift image flashed across her mind that left her aching. Giving herself a mental scolding, she dusted her hands against her jeans and went to open the door.
If she’d been jolted by his charisma last night, tonight she came close to being stunned. Tonight he wore snug, faded jeans and a black sweater that awoke swashbuckling images in Jessica’s hyperactive imagination. She wouldn’t have thought that a man who could look so elegant and conservative in banker’s gray could look like an outlaw in a pair of jeans.
“Hello, Jessica.” He smiled, deepening the creases at the corners of his eyes. Unaware of the effect that expression had on her pulse rate, he scanned her from head to foot. Her jeans, unlike last night’s slacks, were worn from many washings and were a closer fit. Her sweatshirt, also worn thin from many washings, hugged her breasts with more familiarity than he suspected she realized. This lady was womanly. She would fill a man’s hands and arms; she would cradle him in softness and surround him in heated satin. And he sure as hell shouldn’t be thinking about things like that when he was supposed to be working.
Jessica stepped back, achieving a smile despite her heart’s hammering—the way he’d looked at her!—and invited him in.
“This isn’t a bad time, is it?” he asked as he stepped into her foyer. Immediately he noticed the boxes lined up at the foot of the stairs. “Do you need those carried up? Let me do that for you.”
“Oh, I couldn’t really—”
Turning, he smiled down at her. “Sure you can. You’re helping me, and I’d like to do something in return.”
Jessica’s knees rubberized instantly. That crooked, warmly intimate smile did things to her insides, tweaking, pulling, tingling. Before she could gather her wits to respond, he squatted and hefted the first box. His sweater pulled up in the back, exposing a band of smooth skin and the fact that he wore no belt on his jeans. Why did the absence of a belt cause a deep, slow pulsing inside her?
“Where upstairs?” Arlen asked as he began climbing.
“First room on the right.” Was that really her voice, sounding so husky?
Arlen set the box out of the way against the wall in the designated room. As he straightened, he knew with sudden, deep certainty that this was Jessica’s room. It was, he supposed, prying, but nevertheless he looked around him with interest, noting the ruffled dotted swiss curtains on the tall windows, the white satin comforter and white dust ruffle on the maple four-poster. Embroidered linen doilies decorated the top of her maple dresser, and dotted swiss skirted a dressing table with a matching mirror. The only colors in the room were the bright area rugs scattered around the polished wood floor.
Virginal, he thought. The room of a sixteen-year-old. He started to turn away, wondering what had arrested Jessica’s development, when he suddenly had the most erotic image of bare skin on white satin and dark hair that tumbled to her waist. How long was her hair? he wondered, then shook himself and headed downstairs for the next box. Damn it, Coulter, this is business!
Five boxes later, he’d seen the other two bedrooms, one of which held a desk, bookcase and personal computer with all the necessary peripherals. And he was still as randy as the old goat he was beginning to feel like. Bare skin on white satin. He cursed the randomly firing brain cell that had brought that image to mind.
Jessica awaited him at the foot of the stairs. “Coffee’s ready,” she said brightly.
“Great.” He descended the last few stairs wondering what she would do if he pulled her into his arms and kissed her. By the time he reached the bottom she’d started to move into the living room, unwittingly giving him a view of her gently swaying rear that only compounded his problem.
Once again she served coffee in the delicately patterned china cups. Seated in an armchair, Arlen gave himself a few minutes to savor her really excellent coffee and to bank some of his unwanted urges.
“How’d it go at work this afternoon?” he asked finally.
“Like always.” She flushed. “Well, not exactly. It seems you were right that we might be observed. Two of the guys I work with saw us, and I got teased about it.”
One corner of his mouth lifted. “But I bet they didn’t ask who I was.”
“Of course not. They had that all figured out.” Her voice was tart, and then she laughed softly. “You were right. Once they saw you kiss me, they filled in all the blanks. Nobody even asked your name.”
“It’s an old magician’s technique. Misdirect the attention of the audience. Works every time.” His smile broadened. “What about the inspection?”
“It never got anywhere near our section today. The grapevine didn’t even get the word to us until almost quitting time. The only thing different that I noticed was that the security stations were performing random briefcase checks for the first time in an age.”
Arlen nodded. “I expected that. Just like I expect that tomorrow you’ll have to show your ID to get past the front desk, even if it’s a security crew that knows you.”
He sipped coffee and let his head rest against the chair back. “This chair is too comfortable, Jess. You may never get rid of me.” Heavy lidded, his eyes watched her lazily. “I’ve got the fingerprint kit out in my car. I suppose I should get it.”
“There’s no rush,” she said. “I’m not going anywhere.”
They sat for a while in companionable silence, and he began to feel more relaxed than he could remember feeling in quite a while.
“Arlen?”
“Hmm?”
“How can I carry fingerprints out of the building tomorrow if they’re doing briefcase checks?”
He rolled his head a fraction so that he could look at her. “There’s no law that says you can’t carry fingerprints around with you.”
“But what if they ask?” Her small face was worried.
“Tell them your boyfriend’s a cop, and they’re his. Or tell them you’re taking a night school course in criminology. Relax, Jess. They probably won’t even look in your briefcase tomorrow, but if they do, they’ll know better than to bother you about things that are none of their business. They don’t want any trouble with their bosses.”
He spoke lazily, his eyelids still drooping, and Jessica’s wild imagination suddenly presented her with the image of a panther lazing in the sun, deceptively sleepy but very much alert.
“Where are you from originally?” she asked him abruptly.
Arlen heard the shortness of her tone and wondered if he’d said something to disturb her. No, he was sure he hadn’t. And then coiling through him like liquid heat was the memory of the way her lips had parted at his touch earlier in the day. Could she be bothered by the same impulses that were troubling him? Turning his head a little more, he looked at her fully.
“I hate to admit this,” he said, “but I’m a damn Yankee from New York.”
Jessica’s lips curved. “New York? Do you miss it?”
“Hardly. One of the Bureau’s rules is that you can’t be stationed anywhere too close to home. I knew when I signed on that I’d never go back.”
“How long have you been here?”
“Long enough to know you Texans have the same opinion about Yankees in general and New Yorkers in particular that the rest of the country has about Texans.”
Jessica laughed. “So you’re a big-city boy?”
“Oh, I’m not from the city,” he said. “I’m from a sleepy little dairy-farming community upstate. What about you? Did you grow up right here?”
She shook her head. “No, I’m a hayseed, too. From a little town in West Texas where we had a lot more dust storms than we had rainstorms. Let me get some more coffee.”
At the door she paused and looked back. “Are you hungry? I think I have some coffee cake in the freezer. It’d take only a minute to zap it in the microwave.” Actually, she more than thought the coffee cake was there. She had bought it on the way home this afternoon just so she could offer it to him.
“Sounds good,” he admitted. He’d stayed late at work tonight, and by the time he got away he’d decided on fast food so he wouldn’t arrive at Jessica’s too late. The food had been tasteless, though, so he’d ditched his dinner, stopped by his apartment just long enough to change, then dashed over here. Coffee cake sounded very good. In fact, relaxing sounded very good. It was Thursday evening, and so far he’d worked every night this week, not to mention last Sunday, when he’d had to help one of the agents iron out some wrinkles in a bribery investigation.
“Do you work all the time?”
The soft question caused him to look up at Jessica. She was standing beside him, holding out a plate with one hand and his freshly filled cup with the other.
“Thank you.” Smiling, he took both from her and set them on the coffee table.
“Do you?” she asked as she resumed her seat on the couch.
“Do I what?”
“Work all the time.”
He shrugged. “Sometimes it seems that way. Aren’t you having any cake?” His plate held a large piece. She had no plate at all.
“I can’t afford the calories. Don’t worry about me.”
She said it as if she’d been saying it for a very long time and had come to accept it, and somehow Arlen found that utterly intolerable. “Are you trying to lose weight?”
“Of course.” She smiled faintly. “All the time.”
“Why?”
She gaped at him. “Why?” she repeated stupidly. “Why?” Anybody could see that just by looking at her.
“Yes. Why?” And somewhere between images of pink satin skin on a white satin bed and the understanding that he was being driven out of his mind by the sexual appeal of a woman who believed she didn’t have any, Arlen lost the first iron layer of his self-control. Having been, for more than four years, unable to hold and love a woman probably added considerably to the stress of the moment. Since Lucy had become too ill to love, he hadn’t wanted to love. Not until this plump little partridge entered his life. And here she was trying to waste away the very charms that were driving him wild.
“You have no idea,” he said flatly, “just how beautiful your healthiness is. How attractive you are—just the way you are.”
Jessica’s hand fluttered to her throat, and she stared at him disbelievingly. “I, um, th-that’s very kind of you to say,” she squeaked. Her heart was hammering so hard there was no room in her chest for air. He was just being nice, she told herself. But, oh, how she wished…
The wish was plain on her face, and Arlen was just tired enough, just pushed enough, just frustrated enough, to forget he was an agent on a case. Rising, he walked with a deliberate tread around the coffee table and just as deliberately sat beside Jessica on the sofa. Her head had turned as her eyes followed him, and now she looked at him with wide, wondering brown eyes. Bright eyes, he noticed, that were far more hopeful than fearful.
“I’m going to kiss you, Jessie,” he said huskily as he reached up and removed her glasses, setting them aside on the table. She blinked uncertainly at him while he noticed that her eyes were even larger without the lenses in front of them. And her lashes were long and silky.
Gently, he cupped her face between his hands. “I’m going to kiss you because I’ve been wanting to for the last half hour,” he told her, stroking her cheeks lightly with his thumbs. “I’m going to kiss you because you’re so damn sexy, and because those soft pink lips of yours are just begging for it.”
She seemed to have stopped breathing, but now she drew a shaky breath and her eyelids fluttered down. Arlen smiled as he saw her consent. The hunger in him was strong, but gentleness tempered it. This woman needed gentleness as surely as she needed to be desired.
Bowing his head, he brushed his lips lightly against hers, gently questing like a bee seeking nectar, again and again, the lightest brush of lips against lips, his breath as much a caress as his touch. It had been so long since he’d kissed a woman for the first time that he wasn’t really sure he remembered how. He was coaxing because she seemed to be as uncertain as he was. His tongue touched her upper lip, stroking its length enticingly. Next her lower lip, a sweep to incite.
Arlen heard her swift intake of breath, felt her lips part beneath his. And then, so good, her arms wound around his back and reached upward to cling to him, to embrace him. Ah, God, it had been so long!
To Jessica the moment was a miracle. She simply didn’t know what pleased her more, the strength of his muscular back beneath her hands or the sinuous, sinful enticements of his tongue as he plundered the depths of her mouth. She’d never dreamed there were so many sensitive nerve endings there, nerves that were mysteriously linked to other parts of her. Her entire body felt as if it were being kissed. This was what she had believed she could live without?
Arlen lifted his head a fraction, looking down into her hazy eyes. His voice was a husky whisper. “More, Jessie?”
She nodded, dazed by the sensations he was evoking in her. “Please,” she whispered.
Her head had fallen back, bespeaking her surrender to the moment. He moved, cradling the back of her head in one hand, wrapping the other arm around her back as he lowered her to the sofa cushions and stretched out beside her.
“More, Jess,” he said roughly, a statement this time.
And this time, when he took her mouth in a kiss, he took it deeply, with a rhythm so primitive that her very cells responded to it. She opened her mouth wider to receive the bold thrusts of his tongue and responded in kind with a need she didn’t even know how to name.
Her hand somehow found its way to his hair and combed into the dark silk, finding the warmth of his scalp. His mouth slanted to a new angle over hers, giving her a chance to catch her breath a little, giving her a moment to feel her whole body pulse in time to his kiss. Giving her a moment to feel his pelvis rock against her hip. Giving her a moment to feel the evidence of his desire.
A new thrill trickled through her, the thrill of being wanted, but the trickle was accompanied by a stronger thrill of fear. She’d met this man only last night. A chill clamped over the throbbing ache in her body, cleared the fog from her brain. What was she doing?
Sensing her mood change even through the hazy red layers of his hunger, Arlen clamped down on his needs and began, by gentle stages, to withdraw himself without causing embarrassment. Damn! he thought. He’d been celibate for too long if he could lose control like this.
Before long Jessica sensed his intent, and her fear dissipated, leaving her with a dissatisfied ache and a dawning sense of wonder. He had wanted her! She’d felt the proof of it.
Arlen raised them both to a sitting position and cradled Jessica’s cheek against his shoulder, his arm around her. It was exactly the embrace she’d fantasized about on the way to lunch that day, and it was so much better than her imaginings. His shoulder was firm beneath her cheek, his distantly sensed heartbeat a steady, somehow reassuring thud. Even the faint scratchiness of his sweater was somehow stimulating. And the weight of his arm around her shoulders—there just weren’t words to adequately describe how good it felt.
“Are you all right, Jessie?” he asked presently, touching her cheek with gentle fingertips.
“Yes.” The word sounded lost and breathless against his shoulder.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I shouldn’t have done that.”
A long moment passed before she could find her voice. “Why not?”
“Any number of reasons.” His voice had returned to normal, and his heart rate was coming into line. “In the first place, it wasn’t very professional. I don’t think there’s a specific rule against it, since you’re not a suspect, but I still don’t think an agent is supposed to be kissing someone who’s involved in his case.”
“I won’t tell,” Jessica murmured, still too swamped by emotions to speak cautiously.
Arlen smiled and tightened his arm around her just a little. “And I won’t do it again, Jessica.”
It was on the tip of her tongue to protest, but her mind was swinging into action again, and she caught the words before she could speak them. She didn’t know this man, and if she were to think about it she would probably be shocked that she had fallen into his arms so easily after an acquaintance of a mere day. After all, she’d never before fallen into anyone’s arms.
Jessica tilted her head back and looked up at him. He was close enough at the moment that she could see him clearly without her glasses. “How old are you, Arlen?”
“Forty-two.”
His smile, she thought, looked a little sad somehow. “That’s part of the problem, isn’t it?” She didn’t mention the wedding ring he still wore, which she suspected was the biggest part of the problem.
He didn’t ask what she meant. He knew. “I have a daughter who’s nearly your age, Jessie. She’s twenty-three and expecting her first child. My first grandchild. And I have a son who’s twenty-one.”
“You started young.” It wasn’t a question.
“I was eighteen when Lucy and I married. Right out of high school and right over everyone’s objections.”
“Were you right, or were they?”
He closed his eyes, and his smile broadened just a shade. “We were,” he said. And he brought his other arm around Jessica, giving her a little hug. “I had a good marriage, Jessie. A very good marriage. Once in a lifetime is all anyone has a right to expect.”
Eventually, because their embrace was still too intimate both for their respective roles and for his conscience, Arlen stirred. Releasing Jessica, he handed her back her spectacles.
“I’ll go get that fingerprint kit,” he said, rising from the sofa.
She slipped her glasses onto her nose and looked up at him. “Okay,” she managed to say brightly. “I think I’ll make some more coffee. Do you want any?”
He looked down with a smile that didn’t reach his gray eyes. “I’ll pass, thanks. I need to get some sleep tonight.”
So did she, thought Jessica, but she seriously doubted she was going to get it, coffee or no coffee.
It was a night for memories, Arlen thought. It was late, and his apartment seemed emptier than usual, though not as empty as the house he’d shared with Lucy had seemed after her death. The only keepsakes he hadn’t put into storage were an eight-by-ten photo of Lucy and a slew of photographs of the children. Everything else had been put away, because a man his age had no choice but to move on.
But sometimes he remembered, and tonight, with a glass of bourbon to keep him company, he held Lucy’s photo and looked back.
He hadn’t been kidding. It had been a good marriage. Not a perfect marriage, but a good one. A comfortable one. A hell of a lot better by far than most marriages he knew about. Part of him had died with Lucy, had expired with her last breath as he held her in his arms that one final time. Afterward, he had figured he would go on as father, friend and government agent, but never again as lover or spouse. That part was gone.
Evidently, he found himself thinking as he looked down at Lucy’s smiling face, he’d been a little naive in his expectations. The feelings hadn’t died but had merely gone into hibernation. That created a whole mess of interesting problems he wasn’t sure he cared to deal with at this stage in his life.
First of all, he was about to become a grandfather. He had certain images of that role that didn’t jibe with the memory he had of himself and Jessica on her couch this evening. It also meant he was too damn old to be rolling around with a girl her age. His children were grown, and she was the right age to be having children. Damn, Jessica was only a few years older than his daughter! That realization kept drawing him up short and hard, like a yanked rein.
Setting Lucy’s picture aside, he carried his drink into the kitchen and dumped it down the sink. He’d never been much for alcohol, and at a time like this he wanted his head to be perfectly clear.
Except how clear could it be when he kept imagining pink skin and white satin, and remembering just how right a certain young woman had felt in his arms? How perfectly she’d fitted against him and how passionately she’d responded to his kiss?
And what damn difference did it make? He was an agent on a case and had to remain professional. Whatever had gotten into him tonight had better not get into him again. That was the beginning, middle and end of it right there.
She was too young for him, Jessica thought as she lay in the middle of her four-poster bed and stared up at the patterns made by the moonlight on her ceiling. Of course he would think so. How could he not? She and men had spent her entire life avoiding one another, so how could she possibly know the right things to say and do to make it clear that she didn’t feel young? It had probably been that very inexperience that had caused him to draw back from her tonight. She didn’t know how to kiss, how to please, how to entice. Discovering that, he’d naturally lost interest.
But, of course, it was all for the best. He still wore his wedding ring. Whether she felt young or not, Jessica definitely didn’t feel up to dealing with the ghost of Arlen’s wife. She had a very healthy respect for the power of ghosts. Hadn’t she watched her mother languish and drink herself to an early grave over the death of Jessica’s father? And, oh, what a slow death that had been, finally leaving the mother dependent on the daughter who was still only a child.
Arlen seemed to be holding up a lot better than her mother had, Jessica thought, but she knew too well what it meant to be invisible to grieving eyes.
Turning over onto her side, she looked out the window at the moon through the lacy tracery of tree branches. He had been in this room tonight. What had he thought of it? Did he think it childish? Probably. She knew as well as anyone just how childish it was. It was the room she had dreamed of having someday, a dream she could trace all the way back to the age of seven. That was the year after her father’s death. That was when she’d finally realized there was no way to go back home.
And so she’d begun to dream of a home in the future. A lot of that dream had matured to more realistic proportions that could be embodied in this house she now owned. Tonight, however, it was strikingly obvious to her that she’d forgotten to include the most important part of any home: family.
Sighing heavily, her throat suddenly and inexplicably tight, she wrapped her arms around a pillow and hugged it. She’d been lonely for so long she’d ceased to be aware of it. Until tonight.
Damn Arlen Coulter for making her conscious of it.
Chapter 4
Dressed in her favorite dove-gray suit and black silk blouse, Jessica arrived at work forty-five minutes early the next morning. The extra time was essential if she was to try to lift fingerprints from the document. It wasn’t so much that the process was complicated, because it wasn’t, but she wanted ample time so she could move slowly and avoid errors.
Security, mindful of DIS inspectors, checked her identification thoroughly before waving her through. When she arrived in her own section she walked down the hall, assuring herself that all the other offices were empty. Only then did she return to her own office, close the door and start to open her safe.
“Talk about acting suspicious,” she muttered to herself as she spun the dial first left, then right, then left and then right again. She felt the dial resist as she reached the last number and knew she’d worked the combination correctly. Pressing down the lever, she grabbed the drawer handle and pulled it open.
The document was still on the bottom of the drawer, apparently untouched since she’d found it there yesterday. When she’d emptied enough of the other documents to give herself unobstructed access to the red folder, she used the plastic gloves Arlen had given her to lift it out.
“It’s not that your fingerprints will get you into trouble,” he’d told her last night. “You just don’t want your prints to destroy a good print by overlaying it.”
Only, there were no good prints. She knew that with certainty twenty minutes later, having dusted the entire folder and the document with dark powder. The powder adhered to nothing except some vague, blurry streaks. The spy had wiped the prints, just as Arlen had suspected.
Disappointed, she cleaned up the mess with exaggerated care and then went down the hall to wash her hands. Frank Winkowski was just entering the section when she came back down the hall from the restroom. He looked surprised to see her, then smiled.
“You’re early, too,” he said. “Brainstorm?” He was a pleasant-looking man with a round face and a tendency to softness around his waist.
Jessica shook her head. “Not really. I just woke up early this morning, and there didn’t seem to be any point in hanging around the house. Besides, after all that uproar with security the other day, I need to do some catching up.”
Frank nodded. “We’ll all have to do some catching up, I think. From what I hear, this security inspection is turning into a real bear. Stan Watson—do you know him?”
“He’s the guy heading up the Big Whistle project, isn’t he?”
“Yeah.” Frank shifted his briefcase from one hand to the other, as if it were heavy. “He said a team of two inspectors are shutting themselves up in a private office with each of his team members for an hour at a stretch.”
“Oh, boy.” Jessica managed to sound surprised. “What’s going on? What’re they asking?”
Frank shrugged. “Dunno. The guys they questioned yesterday afternoon say they can’t talk about it. Maybe there’s been a leak from the project.”
Jessica shook her head. “I can’t imagine that. What does Stan think about it?”
“I think he’s just plain furious. He also said that they’re inspecting everyone’s desk.”
“I heard they can do that, but I never saw them inspect one.”
“Me, either.” Frank shook his head. “I guess if you’ve got any embarrassing love letters in your desk from that guy you were with yesterday, you’d better dump ’em.”
She saw the twinkle in his eye and decided not to let the comment bother her. “Thanks, Frank. If I ever get him to write an embarrassing love letter, you’ll be the last to know.”
“Thought so!” Laughing, he moved down the hall to his own office.
Back at her desk, Jessica installed her hard drive, booted up and resumed her work. She thought she was doing pretty well, too, until an hour later when Arlen called.
“Lunch at twelve?” he asked without preamble.
She sank back in her chair and pulled off her glasses, realizing suddenly that she had a tension headache. Rubbing impatiently at her forehead, she sighed. Arlen heard it.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
“Not a damn thing,” she said, more sharply than she meant to. “What could possibly be wrong?” Other than espionage and an FBI agent who’d awakened her to things she was better off not knowing about. An FBI agent who called her, cool as you please, his tone the politely casual tone people used with strangers. His silence suggested to her that he was evaluating her response. Suddenly disturbed that he might draw conclusions, she said, “Sorry, Arlen. I’ve got a king-size headache.”
“Have you taken aspirin?” It was the politely concerned question of an acquaintance.
Damn it, Jessica thought. Damn it. Back to business as usual. Well, girl, are you going to let him get away with it? The question drew her up short, creating as it did a whole new passel of questions she wasn’t going to be able to answer without a lot of soul-searching.
“Jess?” His tone had lost a little of its distance.
“I’m here. Sorry. Noon is fine for lunch. I’ll be waiting out front.” If she didn’t get swallowed up in the internal earthquake she felt herself verging on. “I don’t have anything for you, though.” As soon as she said it, she wanted to kick herself. He might cancel lunch.
But he didn’t. “I figured you wouldn’t. I’ve got a few things to talk to you about, anyway. Noon, then.”
She took the aspirin, but it didn’t answer the questions nor did it help her concentrate on her work. She found herself pacing her office, a not very large space that allowed her to take only three steps in one direction before forcing her to turn. Here it was, only the middle of the morning, and it looked as if she was done working for the day. Well, she could call security and tell them she’d found the document. If she wasn’t going to work, anyway, there was no point in postponing it any longer.
But first she was going to think about that surprising question she’d asked herself. Was she going to let Arlen get away with this? On the other hand, how could she prevent him? She was no femme fatale to crook a finger and bring a man to his knees. In fact, the mere notion made her want to laugh.
Arlen had a lot of good reasons for wanting to keep matters between them on an impersonal footing, she thought. He was acting in a professional capacity when he was with her, and she supposed it wouldn’t look very good to his superiors if they heard he was fooling around on the job. And if that wasn’t enough, there was the biggest problem of all: the wedding band on his left hand.
On the other hand, there she was. She’d never felt anything approaching the feelings he’d stirred in her with a few kisses. All the rational arguments she could muster, either for herself or for him, meant absolutely nothing against the soul-deep yearning he’d unleashed.
So what was she going to do about it? Could she do anything about it? She had no feminine wiles that she was aware of, and even if she could have manufactured one, she would have been terrified of using it. Ten years later she could still hear the laughter of the premed student who had used her to do his homework. The scar was deep, and still very tender. Her lack of confidence in such matters had become an integral part of her nature.
Arlen had wanted her last night, but that could have arisen from any number of circumstances that had nothing to do with her, and she was painfully aware of it. She might not have a great deal of direct experience with human sexuality, but she prided herself on being well-read. A woman was wisest not to assume a man’s response was a reaction to her in particular. Arlen might have been reacting more to protracted celibacy than to her.
It would have been almost possible to feel pleased with the objective way she was reviewing the situation, but the bottom line wasn’t objective. She wanted—very much—to find herself in Arlen’s arms again. In fact, someplace deep inside, she wanted to weep with the longing she felt to be there again.
Standing in the middle of her office, she wrapped her arms tightly around herself and closed her eyes, remembering what it had felt like for those few short minutes to be enveloped in a man’s strong arms.
No, she thought, she wasn’t going to let him get away with this. But what could she possibly do to beguile him?
There was no answer to that question. Feeling a sudden need to do something, anything, productive, she picked up the phone and dialed Security to tell them she had found the missing document. Dave Barron, the Facility Security Officer, was not in, however, and his assistant, Vicki Grier, was busy with the DIS inspectors. Having no idea who else she could discuss the matter with, Jessica decided to wait again. What was the rush, after all? This was almost like closing the barn door after the horse has gotten out.
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Rachel Lee
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современные любовные романы
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: Computer programmer Jessica Kilmer′s life changed the moment she realized classified documents had been stolen from her safe. She knew contacting the FBI would turn her life upside down, but she never expected what would happen when she met special agent Arlen Coulter.For even as Arlen assured her that he would keep her safe, his quiet intensity awakened her heart to another danger altogether….It seemed to Arlen that the greatest risk in this case was the effect Jessica had on him. She aroused feelings he′d long believed dead–and preferred to keep buried. But the danger that Jessica faced was real–could Arlen get her out before it was too late?