Hart's Last Stand

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“I didn’t tell Clyde what hotel I was going to be staying in.”

Hart instantly shoved out of his seat and darted across the restaurant in the direction Salvatore DeBraggo had gone. His gaze swept over the other patrons, but there was no sign of the Spaniard anywhere.

Hart lay on his bed and stared into the darkness, running everything that had happened that evening through his mind again. Right after leaving Suzanne he’d called Private Roubechard about the background checks he’d requested, but there was some problem with getting the files downloaded and transferred from the Armed Security Agency, so they weren’t going to be available until morning.

He mulled over the incident at dinner again. Had the whole thing with DeBraggo been a setup? Something the man and Suzanne had staged just for him? Maybe so she could gain a little more of Hart’s trust? Look a bit more innocent, a bit more vulnerable, so that he’d believe and help her?

He threw back the sheet and swung his feet to the floor, annoyed by his inability to turn off his thoughts and go to sleep. That wasn’t usually a problem. He’d slept in everything from a sagging feather bed to a foxhole to a leaf-filled muddy crevice in the Peruvian jungle. He’d slept through artillery fire, bombing raids and silence so deep it was deafening.

He glanced at the clock on his nightstand. Almost 3:00 a.m. If he wasn’t going to sleep, the least he could do was think. Rationally.

Why had she really come back?

Frustrated and annoyed by the traitorous bent of his thoughts, Hart settled down at the desk in his bedroom and flipped on the computer. If his libido and sudden bent for nostalgia kept getting in the way, he was most certainly going to end up either behind bars or dead. Especially if the woman heating his libido and stirring that nostalgia had come to him with a lie and treachery in mind.

He typed a series of codes into his laptop and tried accessing ASA, but whatever was wrong on their end was still wrong.

Maybe he could do a search for DeBraggo and Suzanne on the Web. He zipped through several search engines before deciding which one to use.

Within five minutes he had pulled up several sites that had something to do with the name DeBraggo. One advertised financial assistance, another was a travel agency in Texas, another a tax attorney in New Mexico and yet another an import/export-business Web site.

None seemed suspicious, but he knew that guilt sometimes had a way of hiding behind a facade of angelic innocence.

He opened the first one, and his brows rose in interest. Their headquarters were based in Los Angeles, California.

A little much for coincidence.

The sound of screeching tires, followed by a crash, suddenly shattered the stillness of the night and Hart’s concentration. He ran to the window of his apartment. Two cars were at the corner, the front end of a sporty red foreign job embedded in the passenger door of a sleek black Lincoln twice its size. A cloud of steam rose from the sports car’s crushed hood as the two drivers started throwing their arms and hands about, obviously arguing.

Hart stared down at the wreck glistening in the glow of the moon. The steaming sports car reminded him of dancing waves of fire.

Rick’s chopper had burst into flames.

Memories assaulted Hart and before he could stop it, time spun backward…

The team had split into pairs, partnering off to circle their enemy, surround them and move in stealthily for the attack. Rick and Hart had been approaching from the rear, flying low over the Raumsean Woods, several miles inside of Iran’s border.

The experimental weapons-detection systems installed in their Cobras warned them of an antiaircraft missile installation hidden within the dense growth of trees below. With that warning they both should have been able to easily avoid any attack and take out their would-be assailant before he even knew they were there.

“Tracker, we got one below,” Hart radioed. “You see it?”

“Got it in my sights, Ice,” Rick answered, using the name the close-knit group of men in the corps had given Hart not only because of his coolness under pressure, but because each of them, in one way or another, had discovered that he kept his innermost emotions on ice; out of reach or touch.

Hart watched him descend toward his target.

Suddenly a missile shot from the trees.

“Tracker, evade!” Hart ordered. “Evade!”

Rick’s Cobra exploded in a burst of flames.

Stunned, unable to believe what he’d just seen, Hart froze. For the briefest of moments he stopped living, as he watched what was left of the burning chopper spiral from the sky, crash into the dense woods and explode again.

Another missile burst from the foliage below.

The instinct for survival rushed in on Hart, and he jerked back on the throttle…

Hart was pulled back to the present by the sound of a police siren. He realized that his only hope of finding out who was trying to destroy him was to turn the tables on them—just as he’d done during that mission. For the briefest of moments that day a year ago he’d stopped being the hunter and had become the prey—a move that had nearly gotten him killed.

It wasn’t going to happen again.

He shrugged aside the past and forced himself to concentrate on the here and now, on what he knew about Suzanne Cassidy.

It wasn’t much.

He snatched the telephone receiver from the hook. The night before Rick’s last mission, she had done the one thing that no pilot could ever forgive. If she was innocent she would have known better.

The thought had nagged at him for the past year. Rick would have trusted her, might even have confided in her—told her things about the corps, about their missions, that he shouldn’t have. Things that she might have, in the end, used against him.

Hart punched out the number for her hotel, but the moment the operator came on the line, he hung up. No. Not this way. He needed to look into her eyes when he asked her that question.

A week ago he would have labeled the mere idea of her stealing secret military plans and setting Rick up to be killed ridiculous, the suspicion ugly and totally unwarranted. Now he couldn’t discount it, because now he knew all too well that she could have come back to do the same thing to him.

Or was she merely someone’s pawn? A total innocent who was being used?

His mind was a jumbled maze of unanswered questions, each filling him with frustration, slicing away at his patience and leaving him too keyed up to even contemplate another attempt at sleep.

He dressed and left the apartment, carrying a brown paper bag in which he’d placed the water glass Suzanne had used at dinner and which he’d managed to slip out of the dining room under his jacket without anyone noticing.

The lab guys at the base weren’t going to like being woken up in the middle of the night, but he didn’t care. If he was going to find out the truth, this was as good a time as any, and he couldn’t think of a better place to start than running her prints and finding out who or what Suzanne Cassidy really was.

All he knew about her was that she’d been Rick’s wife, a schoolteacher and had once said she’d grown up in Virginia. But he had to know what else there was. It might be all innocent; then again, it might not.

It was a fact that the Soviets had always had spies in the United States, families who were devout Russian Communists, but who had lived in the U.S. for years, maybe were even born here. They obtained government jobs and top-secret classifications, became scientists, doctors and teachers, and were usually not caught until they’d managed to pass back secrets to the Russians.

And they weren’t usually caught until it was too late.

On impulse he stopped by Suzanne’s hotel on the way to the base. If she wasn’t in her room, he’d take the opportunity to search it. If she was, he’d apologize for his brusqueness earlier, say it had kept him awake and, in spite of the late hour, ask her downstairs for coffee.

As he entered the lobby he heard the chime of the elevator to his left and glanced toward it.

Suzanne stepped forward as the wood-paneled doors silently slid open.

Salvatore DeBraggo was beside her.

Chapter 4

It was almost noon when Suzanne pulled her rental car alongside the building that housed Hart’s office. She’d meant to arrive earlier, but after he’d left her last night, she’d known she would have a hard if not impossible time getting to sleep, so she’d run down to the hotel lobby to get a book from the gift shop.

The sight of Salvatore DeBraggo standing in the small shop, flipping idly through a magazine, had rattled her, and she’d been about to turn and hurry away when he’d looked up, spotted her and spoken.

“Mrs. Cassidy.” His thick accent turned her name to a series of deep, musical rolls.

“Mr. DeBraggo, hello.” She felt a tiny bit of relief to realize there were several other people in the gift store. She wasn’t alone with him.

“Please, let me apologize again for interrupting your dinner earlier,” he said, smiling.

Anger and a bit of bravado melded with her fear, and she instantly decided to confront his lie. She’d never been one to skirt an issue. “I didn’t tell my associate in L.A. where I’d be staying, Mr. DeBraggo.”

He nodded. “Ah, my late wife used to tell me I wasn’t very good at white lies.” He smiled. “I should stop trying.”

Suzanne didn’t return the smile.

“Yes, well, the truth is, I recognized you from your picture in the New York Times—the article they did on your gallery when you purchased the Mastroniani painting from the Brenroget estate last month. I’m afraid when I saw you in the hotel restaurant, impulse overrode my normally good manners.” He shrugged. “Again, I apologize.”

It had been a coincidence, and Suzanne had chided herself for the dark suspicions she’d harbored about him. Assassin, FBI agent, foreign spy, even privateer and terrorist.

She turned the car ignition off and grabbed her bag. Before leaving for Hart’s office she’d made several long-distance calls in regard to the jewelry Mr. DeBraggo wanted to sell. She wasn’t certain but something still didn’t ring true about him. And she could swear she’d seen one of the pieces before—in a museum.

She’d also placed a call to Clyde, who had suggested she move into a place owned by a friend of his. He’d also badgered her mercilessly for almost fifteen minutes for details about whom she’d gone to dinner with.

The fact that Hart could still stir feelings in her she didn’t want stirred had taken her aback yesterday, but she had gathered her wits about her now. It was merely a physical attraction. That was all it had ever been, and she could handle that.

She stepped from her car and entered the building. She made her way to his office and found his aide standing at the file cabinet just outside. Hart’s office door was closed, but she knew he was in there. She’d seen him through the window when she’d climbed out of her car.

She had to be careful.

The aide turned from the cabinet, and Suzanne asked to see Hart.

Even though Hart could hear her voice through his closed door, he’d known the moment she stepped into his aide’s office, had been acutely aware of her presence since he’d seen her car pull up outside. Anger and yearning churned within him. He had half hoped that she had left Three Hills and was out of his life forever, and he had feared that was exactly what she would do and he would never seen her again. His feelings didn’t make sense, but he was too smart to examine them.

Doubting oneself, examining feelings and trusting women were the three things that turned a man into a fool.

He looked down at the lab report on the drinking glass he’d taken from the hotel dining room. They’d come up with nothing out of the ordinary. According to the fingerprints from DMV and when she’d worked as a clerk in the army before her marriage, Suzanne Cassidy was Suzanne Cassidy. Maiden name Ramsey, middle name Julynne. Her parents had divorced by the time she was eight, father ex-military, mother an artist who’d been married six times.

The preliminary background check Hart’s aide had handed him earlier on Suzanne hadn’t told him anything different. It was far from complete, and he didn’t need to read through it again to know what it said. He’d already gone over it a half-dozen times.

According to it, Suzanne was clean. But Teresa Calderone’s record had been clean, too, or so said the feds, and believing that, and them, had nearly gotten Hart and several other members of the Cobra Corps killed.

A little over two years or so ago, the daughter of Peru’s staunchest antidrug advocate had been abducted by a member of the drug cartel, and the CIA spooks pulling duty there had requested the corps’s help in getting her back. It had been a simple plan: go in, grab her, get out.

The CIA’s main contact for information in Peru had been Teresa. Unfortunately, the spooks’ background check on her failed to discern that her fiancé had been murdered by a member of the cartel.

Teresa hadn’t really cared about rescuing the hostage or aiding the war on drugs. She hadn’t even cared about living. All she’d cared about was getting revenge—killing the man who’d ordered the death of her fiancé—and helping the CIA and the Cobra Corps put her in a position to do just that.

But Teresa hadn’t done nearly as good a job of seducing the cartel’s leader, Guilermo Ortega, as she’d thought, and when she tried to kill him, he’d been ready for her. It was only by sheer luck that Hart had been nearby and heard the struggle. A well-placed fist to the jaw had rendered the older man unconscious, and Hart had gotten Teresa away.