the woman who huddled miserably on the deck. The drowned-rat factor did little to hide her high, angular cheekbones or delicately tipped-up nose, or the exotic tilt to her chocolate-brown eyes.
She was, in a word, gorgeous.
He had no clue whether she’d been Tiberius’s prisoner or a coconspirator gone bad, but her looks alone made him lean in the latter direction, because he’d seen the file photos of the bastard’s previous women and she certainly fit the type.
Still, there was no need to head straight for “bad cop” interrogation techniques. For now, he’d let her see him as the rescuer, willing to play along with whatever game she had in mind. With Tiberius and his people it was all about the game, John knew. Move and countermove. A living chess match, played out on a continent-size board, with living people as the pieces and national security the stakes.
Not yet sure whether she was a pawn or a queen or somewhere in between, he held out a hand to help her up. “Come on. I don’t know about you, but I could use some coffee, a few towels and some dry clothes.”
She stared at him, her lovely brown eyes stark in her pale face. Her hand trembled when she reached for his, making him think either she was a damn good actress sent to put him off his game, or else she’d truly been running for her life. Maybe she’d double-crossed Tiberius, John mused, or maybe he’d simply grown tired of her and didn’t want any loose ends returning to the mainland.
Those thoughts died quickly, though, because the moment he and the woman linked hands and he pulled her to her feet, she burst into tears.
“Oh, hell,” he said. “Please don’t cry.” He didn’t do tears.
Instead of stopping, she buried her face in her free hand and sobbed harder, her shoulders—her whole body, for that matter—shaking with reaction…or a good approximation of it.
Reminding himself he was supposed to be playing along with the illusion of a damsel in distress, John grimaced and put an arm around her in a stiff offer of comfort. He patted her shoulder. “You’re safe. It’s over.”
She turned into him, wrapped her arms around his waist and hung on as though she never meant to let go. “Thank you,” she whispered against his neck, her skin warming against his despite the chill. “Thank you.”
Electricity jolted through him in a surge of reaction that was so unexpected, it literally took his breath away. Heat flared and his heart did a thumpity-thump number that set up a clamor of warning bells.
Damn, she was good. Lucky for him, he’d had practice with this sort of thing, and he’d learned his lesson the hard way.
Besides, they didn’t call him Iceman because he was warm and fuzzy.
“It’s okay,” he said, trying to disengage without making it into a wrestling match. He fleetingly wished he’d brought Grace Mears along on this run, or sharpshooter Michael Pelotti, both of whom were way better than he at comforting victims and witnesses—and suspects—while making it seem natural. Hell, pretty much anyone on his team had him beat at this sort of thing.
He looked at the coast guarders. “Can one of you help me out here?”
Dick and Doug Renfrew, the boat handlers he’d borrowed for the night’s surveillance, shook their heads in unison. “Not unless you want to hang around and wait for the chopper to make another pass,” Doug said. He was the talker of the two.
“Good point,” John said, glancing at the gray-black sky. “You should probably get us the hell out of here.”
Granted, Tiberius’s helicopter had peeled off into the fog when it saw the U.S.C.G. ship approaching the scene of the explosion, and he’d heard the other motorboats cut and head back to the island, but they could swing back around for a second look at any moment.
Tiberius and his crew had probably assumed the Valiant was fully manned and ready to act, but the reality was that the cutter was carrying its minimum crew of two, along with one senior FBI agent—John—who was acting on a hunch that hadn’t even been strong enough to justify bringing along the rest of his team.
His gut told him Tiberius was gearing up for something big, something that was focused on his private island off the New England coast. Based on that, he’d called in a few favors and gone on a semiofficial fishing expedition off the fertile ledges of George’s Bank.
The good news was that he’d caught something. The bad news was that he wasn’t sure exactly what he’d caught.
Tiberius was smart enough—and devious enough—to have seen the Valiant on his surveillance systems, identified it through its transponder code and sent one of his people out to get herself “captured” as a diversion. It would be just like him to feed the FBI a decoy intended to distract them away from his main intent.
The question was: had he?
John looked down at the woman, who was quieting some, though she stayed leaning against him as though she found the contact as comforting as he found it disturbing.
“Come on,” he said, voice unaccountably rough. “Let’s get you warmed up, Ms…” He let the sentence trail off in a prompt.
“Sydney,” she said against his chest. “Just Sydney.” Which could either mean she figured they should be on a first-name basis after what they’d just been through together, or that she didn’t intend to voluntarily give him enough to figure out who she was for real.
He didn’t recognize her name or face from the extensive files Grace and Jimmy Oliverra—the two computer jocks on his team—had amassed on Tiberius and his dealings, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t part of his world. Just that she hadn’t said “cheese” yet and gotten her picture taken for the FBI’s scrapbook.
“Okay, just Sydney,” he said, playing the game. “Let’s get you belowdecks, out of this wind.” He disengaged and gestured her across the rain-slicked deck to the ladder that led to the cramped galley and sitting area downstairs.
She fumbled slightly when the boat sliced deeper into the storm and the chop increased. But she looked steady enough overall, as if she wasn’t going to collapse again. Was it part of an act or was it reality?
John didn’t know, but he sure as hell intended to find out, ASAP.
“You can go straight on through,” he said when she paused in a short hallway. “The head is to your right. There’s no shower, but if you want to get out of those wet clothes and towel yourself off, I’ll scrounge something for you to wear. There’s a first-aid kit under the sink. When you’re changed, I’ll meet you in the galley. I’ll fix us some coffee.” With a side of interrogation.
She was pretty out of it, between shock and the gash on her forehead, but he didn’t feel the slightest bit of remorse about questioning her. Experience had taught him that the things people in her condition said were usually more truthful than what came out of their mouths after they’d had a chance to think about their answers. And if that made him the cold, cynical SOB his teammates claimed, then so be it. His suspicious nature had kept him alive when plenty of others around him—good men and women—had died in their efforts to take down the kingpins of modern organized crime.
These days, the major crimes unit wasn’t about territories or ethnicity, it was all about technology. The modern godfathers controlled pieces of science and sold them to the highest bidders…and Tiberius was king among the black market tech dealers.
Tiberius didn’t have a last name that any intelligence service worldwide had been able to find, never mind a history prior to ten years ago, when he’d appeared on the scene almost overnight. He was the worst among the worst, dealing almost exclusively in microscopic weaponry of the germ warfare variety. He’d been variously blamed for bioweapons attacks on five of the seven continents, including targeted viral assassinations in Europe and the U.S., and a series of flulike epidemic outbreaks along the conflict fronts in the Middle East.
Tiberius was bad news, there was