Hush: A Thriller Part 11

For the briefest of moments, she allowed herself to lean against the door. Her head spun. Her knees felt weak. She felt like every last bit of strength she had remaining to her had just been spent. But she'd done what she needed to do. Now anyone else out there who thought there might be some kind of answer on Jeff's phone would know that, whether that was true or not, she no longer had it. She'd just made herself and Margaret and Emma at least a little bit safer.

"You talked to the media," Bill said in a dumbstruck tone as Riley pushed off from the door, took the few steps needed to reach the dark brown, floral couch and sank bonelessly down on it.

Since their lives had come crashing down around them, one of the things Bill had told all of them so often that they were sick of hearing it was, "Don't talk to the media."

"I had to." Feeling inordinately tired, Riley fought to clear her head. There was a fine line to walk here, between what to tell and what not to tell, and at the moment her thinking wasn't the sharpest it had ever been. She needed to be careful. "I wanted to get the word out that I don't have Jeff's cell phone. That's what the man who was in my apartment was after. The sooner everybody knows it's in the hands of the FBI, the better off we'll all be."

"Why would someone attack you for Jeff's phone?" Bill asked. He stood in the middle of the living room frowning at her. "What in the world could be on it?"

Riley shook her head wearily. "I don't know. I guess the FBI will find out. I think-"

She was interrupted by the ringing of the doorbell.

Bill turned and s.n.a.t.c.hed open the door before anyone else could make a move, snapped at whoever was on the other side of it, "I'm Mrs. Cowan's lawyer. You're on private property. If you don't leave immediately I'll have you arrested for trespa.s.sing," and banged the door shut again.

As he locked it, he sent a reproachful look at Riley, which she ignored. Whatever Bill thought about what she'd just done, she knew that getting the news that she no longer had Jeff's phone out there in the public arena was the smartest thing she could do.

"Tell us what happened," Margaret ordered. She perched on the edge of the tan corduroy recliner beside the couch, her hands clasped tightly in her lap.

Emma, meanwhile, had flung herself down on the cushions next to Riley and was looking at her wide-eyed. She said, "Those bruises on your neck-did he, like, try to choke you or something?"

Riley gingerly touched the tender area. The last thing in the world she wanted to do was give Emma more disturbing images to carry around in her head. But there was no denying the already-purpling bruises.

"He grabbed me by the neck," Riley replied, ignoring the shiver that ran down her spine at the memory. Then, downplaying everything she could for Emma's sake, she gave them a judiciously edited version of the attack, fudging such details as the fact that she had run for her life while naked-in her revised version she'd managed to s.n.a.t.c.h up a towel-and almost everything about the time she'd spent with Finn, with the exception of the fact that she'd broken down in tears, or the kiss that she now shied away from even thinking about.

"Dear G.o.d," Margaret said when she was finished. "I shudder to think what might have happened if you hadn't gotten away, or those FBI agents hadn't been there."

"He would have shot her." Emma's tone was stark. She huddled in a corner of the couch with her knees drawn up tightly beside her. The ends of her long blond hair swung over her shoulder, almost brushing her pink-manicured toenails. "You have to face it, Mom. We're all at risk."

"No," Margaret protested as her eyes met Riley's. At the expression on Emma's and Margaret's faces, Riley felt her insides contract. Both, in their different ways, looked afraid.

The worst thing about it was, they were right to be afraid. She was right to be afraid.

"I can try to get some private security-" Bill began, only to be interrupted by another peal of the doorbell.

Muttering something under his breath, Bill strode to the door and yanked it open.

The bristling belligerence of his stance changed almost instantly.

"What can I do for you, officers?"

Officers?

Alarmed, the women looked at each other and then toward the door, but the way they were situated precluded them from seeing whoever was on the porch. Tensing in instinctive antic.i.p.ation of more bad news, too exhausted to get up and check out what was going on for herself, Riley could hear a man's voice, although not distinctly enough to make out the words. Bill listened, nodded, then stepped back. As he closed the door, Riley saw that he held a white plastic grocery-type bag in his hand.

"What-?" Margaret began, her hands pressed to her heart, speaking for all of them.

"There'll be a patrol car with two officers in it parked out in your driveway every night starting now until they tell us otherwise," Bill said, sounding as relieved as he did surprised. "That will certainly make us all feel better, won't it?" His gaze took in Emma as well as Margaret, then shifted to Riley. "The officer also said he was told to give you this."

He handed her the bag. Mystified, Riley looked inside.

The two pints of ice cream were clearly labeled: one was strawberry; the other was chocolate peanut b.u.t.ter crunch.

- CHAPTER -

ELEVEN.

"The problem's been taken care of." That was how the conversation started. No greeting, no self-identification from the speaker. But Finn knew who it was, and what he was talking about. Because Riley's attacker had seen Finn and could potentially-with sufficient digging and the right facial recognition software-identify him, he'd been eliminated before he could escape the country.

"It's looking like the surviving family members are in the clear." Finn spoke into the pay phone that in this world of ubiquitous electronic eavesdropping was, ironically, the most secure means of communication with his superior. His words were as to-the-point as the other man's. "I'm going to move on."

What he was moving on to were the chairmen of the investment firms that had been most heavily involved with George Cowan's company, referring clients to him, funneling a substantial amount of dollars from their own investment funds for him to manage along with those of his own clients. Two of those men, both longtime close a.s.sociates and personal friends of George Cowan, were currently at the top of Finn's getting-to-know-you list. With all the high-tech searching that was going on in every possible money repository throughout the world still drawing a blank, human intelligence was looking like their best shot at finding the missing money.

Human intelligence, in this case, meaning Finn.

Always a.s.suming, of course, that the money was there to be found. And people way above his pay grade were convinced it was.

"We're getting down to the wire on this thing," Eagle warned.

Eagle was not, of course, his real name. Having worked for him for twelve years, since being recruited right out of college until he'd "retired" not quite three years before, and having almost died protecting him in the giant screwup that had led to his leaving the life supposedly forever, Finn was well aware of Eagle's true ident.i.ty: CIA a.s.sistant Director William Loring. But security dictated that operatives be referred to at all times by their code names, and like the rest of them, Finn subscribed to that. Finn referred to Loring as Eagle just as Loring referred to him as Kestrel. The cell of operatives, of which Finn was one of a number of loosely connected parts, also used code names Falcon, Hawk, Harrier, Osprey, Shrike, and the big dog, the director himself, was code-named Condor. The code name for the suite of offices in D.C. that was their unit's headquarters? The nest.

Never let it be said that the CIA was not cute.

Highly elite, highly compartmentalized, his unit was the Agency's troubleshooters: they went wherever the Agency needed them to go, and did whatever the Agency needed them to do, no questions asked. Only the highest echelon of Agency leadership even knew that they existed, which added to the ease with which they could be cut loose if an operation went south. Finn had no illusions as to why he had been tapped for this particular job: aside from his long a.s.sociation with Eagle, during which he had earned as much of the man's trust as anyone ever did, he no longer had any affiliation with the government, and if the s.h.i.t hit the fan he'd be easy to disavow.

Or worse.

Unlike the Marines, the Agency left men behind as was deemed necessary. Every operative knew that going in.

Finn was outside at the moment, leaning a shoulder against the brick wall of a nondescript building on the edge of downtown Houston after having been picked up by Bax at the Cowans' house. The building had once housed medical offices and a pharmacy. Now its lowest level was a payday loan operation, currently closed for the night. But it had one of the few surviving pay phones in the area still affixed to the wall, and that plus its location made it ideal for Finn's purpose of checking in with Eagle and updating him on his progress so far. The time was just past 11 p.m., dark except for the dim glow of security lights in a parking garage a couple of buildings down the block. The only other people he could see were a homeless man pushing a rattling grocery cart in the opposite direction and a guy in a sport jacket heading toward his pickup, which was parked curbside across the street. Finn kept an eye on both of them-he didn't expect any problems, but experience had taught him to be wary and that wariness was more natural to him than breathing now.

"I'm aware of the time constraints," Finn answered. "If it's anywhere to be found, I'll find it."

It referring to the money, of course.

"Make sure you get to it before our friends do," Eagle said, and disconnected.

Listening to the sudden buzz of dead air in his ear, Finn frowned. The friends Eagle had referred to were other countries plus all the non-government-sanctioned players in the game, all of which were hunting the missing money with as much zeal as his own government. Technically, the money belonged in the custody of the United States, to deal with as it saw fit; realistically, it was finders keepers. Whoever got there first got the money, and if it was anyone besides the United States they were going to make that money disappear.

It was sort of like The Amazing Race, only with billions of dollars as a prize and every single contestant prepared to kill or die or do whatever it took to win. Finn included.

That was how he served his country. Bring on the bra.s.s band.

The thing was, over the last few years he'd gotten a taste of how good a normal life could be. Waking up in the same place every day, working hard at something with a future, talking to people when their paths crossed in town or in a store, having neighbors. He'd even made a few tentative steps toward starting a relationship with a woman that was more than a night or two of no-strings-attached s.e.x. He'd taken the female vet who'd come out to treat one of his steers to dinner, he'd gone to the movies with a pretty hostess from the local IHOP, he'd been to a party with an elementary school teacher who'd b.u.mped his car in traffic.

Sure, none of those dates had developed into anything more, but the point was he was trying. Trying, after a dozen years spent serving his country in secret, to a.s.similate back into the world he'd left behind at twenty-two.

Nothing big, nothing earthshaking. But even those small steps added up to something so different from the life he'd been used to as a clandestine operative that it was like stepping into the noonday sun after a decade and a half spent skulking in the dark.

Hanging up the phone, Finn scanned the area reflexively. The homeless man was almost out of sight. The other guy was in his truck pulling away from the curb. Other than that, the block was dead.

He turned and started walking.

The building he was heading for looked as dark and deserted as every other office building in the area.

It wasn't.

Inside the shabby brick building, the FBI kept offices that no one officially knew about. The offices were used by agents who were on special a.s.signments that for one reason or another were off the record-in this case, it was the FBI wanting to keep an eye on the CIA in this under-the-radar government search for Cowan's missing billions.

The people in the building didn't know each other, didn't interact, just got their jobs done and stayed out of each other's way. Since Finn was not an FBI agent-the FBI and the CIA were about as friendly as a snake and a mongoose-and he preferred to remain as anonymous as possible, he had elected to remain outside while Bax went in to do his thing. As he'd told Bax, it gave him a chance to stretch his legs. What he hadn't mentioned was that it also gave him a chance to check in with Eagle without worrying about what Bax or anyone else might overhear.

Meanwhile, his absence gave Bax a chance to file his report-the second one in the not-quite-two weeks he and Finn had been together-without worrying about what Finn might overhear.

A win-win for both of them.

The reason the building appeared empty at this hour when it was really fully staffed and operational was that the interior s.p.a.ce had been configured so that there were offices within offices, and the real offices had no windows. The windows looking out onto the street opened into sh.e.l.l offices of a supposed oil drilling company, the lights of which went on and off at appropriate open-of-business and close-of-business hours.

At the moment, Bax was inside one of those secret offices, filing his report on major developments in his a.s.signment that had to be dropped into his supervisor's email inbox as soon as possible after they occurred. Finn wasn't supposed to know the contents of the reports, but he did-despite the encrypted computer setup Bax was using. Why? Because he'd put the same kind of bug in Bax's phone that he'd placed in Riley's. It tracked Bax, captured his conversations, and in a happy little bonus, since Bax relied on a dictation program loaded into the computer to place his reports, captured those, as well. (Finn was confident the Agency was also monitoring them, but he liked getting information that affected him firsthand.) It amused Finn to think that the tech-savvy numbers nerd he'd been saddled with hadn't thought to check his own phone for a bug, but Bax hadn't, and Finn had gotten some enjoyment out of hearing himself described as "not much of a talker," "stone cold," and, his favorite, "dude's f.u.c.king scary, man!"

None of which gave Finn a problem with Bax. The reports themselves had been factual. That was what he was interested in, and as far as he could tell Bax was playing it straight and wasn't engaging in any kind of double-dealing. Not that Finn trusted him, or the FBI, but then again he no longer really trusted anyone-including members of his own crew.

Words to not die by: everybody lies.

Finn wondered if Bax had any real idea what the Bureau had gotten him into. He doubted it, but that was not his problem.

He was there to do his job and get the h.e.l.l out.

Putting in the earwig that he'd taken out when he'd placed the call to Eagle, Finn was in time to catch the end of Bax's report.

"-then drove to Margaret Cowan's house, where I picked up Bradley. Together we proceeded to drive to this location. We made one stop on the way, to an ice cream store, where Bradley purchased two pints of ice cream. The ice cream was sent to Margaret Cowan's house via a patrol officer whose unit was being dispatched to provide security for Margaret, Emma, and Riley Cowan at night from this date until an indefinite end date as a result of the previously described attempt on Riley Cowan's life. The purpose of the ice cream is unknown. Bradley's future line of investigation is unknown."

Bax kept on talking, but Finn listened without really registering what was being said. He found himself instead mentally following the ice cream to its destination. Riley would have known it was from him, just like she would have known the squad car stationed in her driveway was from him.

What she wouldn't know was that the ice cream was his way of saying he was sorry about the kiss, which he absolutely should not have engaged in. She also wouldn't know that the kiss had been his way of saying good-bye. Her fessing up to finding Jeff's body and taking his phone, coupled with her explanation for why she'd disabled it and the fact that she had voluntarily handed it over, had moved her down enough notches on his. .h.i.t parade that he was turning his focus elsewhere. He was only interested in pursuing people who could take him where he wanted to go. Unless something new came up, he wouldn't see her again.

The realization that that didn't sit well with him told him it was an intelligent decision.

Letting his attraction to a subject he was investigating get out of hand like he had done tonight was something that had never happened to him before. It was unprofessional, and he regretted it.

The problem was, the way she had looked running toward him naked seemed burned into his brain. He was human, after all, and she was beautiful. No amount of training could counteract that.

No amount of training could counteract the memory of how her full, firm b.r.e.a.s.t.s with their hard little nipples had felt pressed up against his chest, or the slender, supple, unmistakably feminine shape of her as she clung to him. No amount of training could counteract the effect of the silken warmth of her skin beneath his hands, or how s.e.xy she'd felt in his arms, or the sight of her bare, truly world-cla.s.s a.s.s. No amount of training could- Keep him from getting a b.o.n.e.r the size of a Louisville Slugger every time he remembered, he concluded wryly.

Obvious solution: don't remember. But he was having a h.e.l.l of a time getting her-the look of her, the feel of her, the smell of her, and most of all the pa.s.sionate way she had kissed him back-out of his head.

She'd known he wanted her. From just before she'd finished, in her words, crying all over him, the evidence had been right there in front of her. She hadn't missed it. He'd seen the moment the knowledge had dawned on her in her eyes.

Her only reaction had been to step out of his arms.

A cool customer.

Same conclusion he'd reached about her before.

Until he kissed her. Then she'd caught fire in the blink of an eye.

And he'd been consumed with the urge to take her to bed.

He was still consumed with the urge to take her to bed.

That was what was bothering him the most.

That, plus the fact that taking her to bed just wasn't going to happen.

Almost as bothersome was the knowledge that he hadn't liked seeing her cry.

Years in the field had hardened him so that he rarely felt emotion. But he'd felt-what? A twinge of an unfamiliar kind of unease when the moonlight had hit Riley Cowan's face and he'd seen that it was streaked with tears.

He hoped it wasn't a sign that he was getting soft.

Softness could be exploited. Softness could get you killed.

Whether he liked it or not, she'd slid way down the hit parade. He wouldn't see her again.

It was for the best.

Finn was just reaching the car when Bax walked out the building's side door into the parking lot.

Perfect timing.

Bax was driving, so Finn got in beside him and said, "You get your report filed?"

"I did," Bax replied. He was pulling out into the street, heading toward the nondescript hotel where Finn and he, in his role as Finn's babysitter, had side-by-side rooms, when Bax added, "I also got a message from the lab about Jeff's phone while I was in there. They're not going to be able to get anything off it."

"Water fry it that bad?" Finn was mildly surprised. He'd figured the FBI techies could get data off anything.

"Turned out it didn't matter. The SIM card was missing. The Ukrainian must've taken it."

Finn didn't stiffen. He never gave that much away. But his gut tightened.

"Yeah," he said, and that was all. Bax's interpretation was certainly possible. But call him suspicious: he had a whole nother possibility in mind.

- CHAPTER -