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“Good. Keep focused out there. Here’s your tech contact. You’ve got ninety seconds. I won’t risk detection.”
“Copy, sir.”
Static crackled. “You’ve got a possible lung compression there? Give me the vitals,” Izzy Teague said briskly.
When Max finished his report, Izzy was silent. Paper rustled, then Foxfire’s techno wizard cleared his throat. “There’s good news and there’s bad news. Your man there is in bad shape, but he appears stable. That could change fast, of course. For now, just keep him warm and hydrated, and watch for signs of infection. Keep me updated, if possible.”
“Will do.” Max watched the sweep hand on his luminous watch. “Time’s up.”
“Give ’em hell. Oh—give your friend a nice scratch from me.” Izzy was careful not to mention Truman by name in case the message was picked up. He was chuckling when he cut the connection.
Quickly, Max stripped down the phone and hid it in a false compartment inside the ship. Then he sealed extra medicine inside his watertight kit for the swim back. His watch vibrated, signaling that it was time to leave, and Max knew he was cutting things close if he hoped to miss first light.
With his swim fins over one arm, he climbed the rusted companionway of the old gunboat, wondering what tales the walls could tell of Japanese sailors sent out to this remote island to watch for enemy activity. The ship’s log indicated that a storm had run the ship onto this reef and put it out of operation. The captain had committed suicide, shamed by his carelessness.
Shadows moved along the companionway as Max made his way to the middeck. He understood the weight of duty and self-sacrifice. There were worse ways to go out than falling on your sword.
But Max wasn’t about to let his own mission run aground.
As he slipped on his mask and breathing gear, he focused on the woman. Maybe she was the pilot’s daughter. The age difference was about right, and she seemed genuinely concerned—assuming this wasn’t one more part of an elaborate act.
He smiled as he went backward into the water. If she was lying, he’d know soon enough.
There weren’t many ways to keep secrets from him.
WHEN MAX REACHED THE beach, Truman was waiting. The dog looked up, wagging his tail but holding his down position above the well-hidden bunker.
There were no signs of footprints or boat draglines along the sand, and Truman would have signaled any visitors. With the perimeter secure and full light due any second, Max opened the trap door and headed underground.
The pilot was breathing fitfully, and the woman was curled up on Max’s cot, her Hawaiian shirt tugged around her shoulders and her arm propped against the wall of the little room. Every time the pilot made a noise, she gave a jump, then sank back into deep sleep.
Max checked the pilot’s vitals as Izzy had specified, frowning at his low temperature. Silently, he covered the man with another blanket. Pulse and heart rate were in acceptable limits, which was good news.
Time for work. The kind of work that the Foxfire team did best. He studied the sleeping woman, considering his best avenue of approach.
Not the hands. After too long in the water the skin usually became risky to read due to contamination. Not the legs or chest, since he didn’t want to risk waking her yet, and moving her clothes would almost certainly wake her. That left the face and neck. Swimmers always tried to keep both above water, which would help him pull a better impression.
Silently he pulled the soft leather glove from his right hand. Breathing deeply, he rested his fingers at the nape of her neck. He made a preliminary scan, checking for the most reliable scent and steroid markers.
With each biochemical marker, his senses tightened, drawing him deeper. His eyes narrowed and his breathing slowed as he focused. The tactile scan wasn’t magic and it wasn’t superhuman, but it might have appeared that way to an uninitiated observer. What he did was the result of medical enhancements and a third-generation sensory biochip, courtesy of the crew of eggheads that Lloyd Ryker kept on tap at the Foxfire lab. Max had trained hard to master a huge range of human steroids, hormones and man-made chemicals. When carefully recorded, they presented a picture of the subject’s recent activities, where they took place and the emotions that were present at the time.
To a civilian it would look like witchcraft, images pulled from thin air. But every scan had its price, demanding absolute focus as well as psychological risk. Like Truman, Max’s amped-up senses were vulnerable to every stray chemical, whether human-based or manufactured. For his own protection, gloves were required gear, keeping his senses clear for mission work. At the beginning he had missed casual skin contact; now it was his normal mode.
He felt the hairs stiffen at the back of his neck as cool air brushed his palm. It felt odd to have his hands free. It also felt damnably sensual.
Frowning, Max shoved that thought from his mind. Skin was skin and a woman was a woman. There was no big deal about either.
Through his sensitized fingers he picked up the faint sweetness of her spilled perfume and the tang of sweat, some of it his own. Even without touching her, he knew he’d find a welter of female hormones layering her skin. If somewhere in those tangled scent layers he found Cruz’s markers, something Max had been keenly trained for weeks to pick out…
In that case, he was under orders to extract all possible information via any means necessary. No questions would be asked later, as long as he succeeded in his mission. Ryker had made that clear.
And Max was committed to success. This was his first mission since the incident in Malaysia that had taken his jump partner’s life and left Max in a surgical ward for eighteen hours. This time, failure was not an option. He had too many debts to repay—and too many demons to silence after the harrowing, predawn raid that had taken seven lives.
In the darkness the pilot shifted as if he was in pain. When his blanket fell, Max straightened it, careful to use his covered hand. In the narrow space every movement seemed loud, each rustle of fabric sharp. Even breathing seemed intimate.
It was strange how often you came to feel a physical connection with your subject, Max thought. When the hormones came into focus, you picked up fragments of over-the-counter sleeping pills or antihistamines, hair dye and sunscreen. In a wave that seemed to come out of nowhere, you knew your subject better than you knew your own friends or family. People thought your smile was just a sign of polite interest or concealed boredom. They didn’t suspect that you were picking up their medical history, reading their whole life in a simple handshake.
In the Middle Ages this sort of thing would have gotten you burned at the stake. In the Navy, it earned you a medal—even if it happened to be a medal that no one saw, because the whole program was code-restricted to a handful of outsiders.
Frowning, Max focused on the woman’s face. Even in sleep she was in motion, her eyes fluttering, her hands moving back and forth across the wrinkled shirt with the outrageous red flowers and pink parrots. When her hands curved, he had the feeling she was dreaming about holding something. A camera? She’d had enough equipment in that big leather bag he’d found drifting in the water.
She muttered a name—Vance or Lance? Her mouth thinned and she shoved at the wall, banging her elbow. Max saw his moment and took it, curving his palm over the skin just behind her ear and under her hair.
Information washed over him, swift details of disparate chemical nuances. Hair spray. Wax, probably from an expensive candle, judging by the high amount of distilled perfume oil. She’d touched coconut oil recently, the food-grade kind, thick and unhydrogenated, without perfume additives. Below that was a layer of some kind of silicone.
Max frowned. Expensive mascara. Also some kind of high-quality hair dye. He didn’t move, settling down into a spiral of hexones and fragrance oils as he picked up the threads of her life. There was some kind of personal-use lubricant, scented and very thick.
His lips twitched as he searched his memorized catalogue of ingredients. Was it regular moisturizer or the kind of lubricant you bought for a rough and wild Saturday night with your latest lover? His hand tightened and he forced his gaze away almost instantly. You never second guessed the layers. You kept the sensory flow straight and clear, chemicals and hormones only, no counting on outside cues from clothes, complexion, age or anything else.
Clean and simple. That was rule number one.
Max figured that the rule applied to a whole lot more than his Foxfire observations. In life, clean and simple was the only thing that made sense. It was too bad more people didn’t seem to know that.
But there was more to feel and he needed to work fast before she awoke. He moved his hand inside the curve of her ear, gentle as a whisper of air, searching for any chemical signature that would connect her with Cruz. The rogue Foxfire operative hadn’t known that one of his last chips was a scent marker designed to convey information unnoticed by the human nose but registered clearly by a trained government animal like Truman.
Or by a special forces agent trained and enhanced the way Max was.
He traced her ear gently, finding the small curves where wax clung, the places most likely to hold other scent clues. He found a hint of cigar smoke, the coconut oil again, more of that damned expensive perfume she seemed to love. Sunscreen. A little bit of very dry champagne, as if someone had sprayed her recently.
A wild midnight party?
But there was nothing else. Not a hint of Cruz’s marker. Nothing that suggested the special lubricants used in the stolen inertial guidance system. Nothing even remotely close to what Ryker was looking for.
Max wasn’t sure whether to be irritated or relieved as he knelt beside her on the ground, watching her hair fan across her cheek and the faint trace of veins beneath her eyes.
Feeling her skin, feeling her pulse. 98.4—she was probably in deep theta, given her heart rate. She’d had dental surgery within the last month. One or two fillings, since he could pick up the faint but acrid hint of mercury on her skin. That was one of the first ingredients he’d been taught to identify.
She sighed and turned onto her side. Her hair spilled over his wrist, warm and soft, the sudden contact like a fist slammed into his chest. He picked up the hormone array of a vital woman in childbearing years. He read estrogen and cortisol, from stress and physical exertion, but he figured she was also a coffee drinker because he picked up kona notes, too.
What would it be like to drink in those layers, to feed her chocolate and a fine roast coffee, letting the taste hum right down through her senses into his? Through her, lifted from her mouth and skin—
He cut through the image, disturbed at his primal male reaction to her. When had his thinking turned personal? His Foxfire training had eliminated the concept of personal from his physical contacts.
Or so he’d thought.
Something pricked at the back of his neck. He was trying to figure out the source of that sharp sensation when she turned and flung up her arm, hitting him in the shoulder. The breath whooshed out of his lungs as he was caught in blurred impressions. Sea water and sunscreen. More of that damned Chanel No. 5, but still nothing that connected her to Cruz.
He stood up quickly, catching his breath, distinctly disoriented.
She reached out, this time her arm slamming against the cool earth wall. The impact made her breath catch and Max heard her gasp. Her eyes fluttered.
He leaned down to check the man she’d called Dutch so she wouldn’t realize that he’d been touching her neck.
She came fully awake and frowned at him. Anger blazed over her face. “What are you doing to him?”
“Be quiet,” he said tightly.
“Why do you keep saying—”
“Do it.” Cold. Leaving her no doubt that he was deadly serious.
She glared at him, then lifted her shoulders in an irritated shrug. Even this she did expressively.
And bravely. She had no clue to his identity, no certainty of the risks before her, yet she faced him squarely and demanded answers. She’d make a damned good solider, Max thought. She prioritized in an emergency, handling what she could control rather than spinning her wheels over what was unchangeable.
He realized that in the faint light of his Mini-mag with its narrow blue field she was striking. Not beautiful, but unusual. Probably a lot of men had told her that. Probably hearing it had gone to her head. With wild blonde hair and cheekbones like that, he figured she knew all about manipulating men with a single glance, a teasing smile and the lure of that rich body.
Not that it mattered to him.
She crouched beside him. Bending closer, she whispered in his ear. “How is he doing?”
“Stable.”
“Then why do we have to whisper?”
“I don’t want to take chances.”
“Chances on what?”
“Keep quiet.”
She moved back to the nearby cot, looking irritated. “He needs a doctor. A real doctor,” she snapped.
“He’s going to be fine.”
She continued to stare at Dutch. “What happens if he gets worse?” Her voice had turned uncertain.
Max didn’t answer. He knew she wouldn’t want the truth, and tactically it was best not to lie any more than you had to.
She looked down suddenly, rubbing her arm. “What did you do to me?”
“Nothing.” His voice was a whisper. “You were lurching around in your sleep and you hit the wall.”
Her eyes said yeah, right.
Max figured it was time to ask his own questions. “I don’t know your name.”
She stared at him. “That’s right, you don’t. Yours first.”
“Max.”
“Max what?”
“Massey.” He lied without hesitation.
A frown worked down her forehead. Probably she was surprised by the quick answer and after that she was trying to figure out if he was telling her the truth.
“My name’s Jones. Ella…Jones.”
“Sure it is. I’ll just call you Blondie.”
That seemed to irritate her. “No blonde jokes or it won’t be pretty.”
Max shrugged. He wasn’t up on current entertainment due to months of medical recuperation, followed by round-the-clock training at the Foxfire facility. “So where are you from, Blondie?”
“Detroit.” She sat up slowly and rubbed her elbow. “Dad was a cop. Mom was a school nurse. Dinner conversation got pretty raw sometimes, what with sucking chest wounds and infectious impetigo.” She pulled the shirt around her shoulders, her eyes locked on his face. “What are you doing here?”
The question was casual, Max thought. Like she had no particular interest. If she was working for Cruz, she was damned good.
Of course Cruz would insist upon that skill in an operative.
“I do chemical work.” Max used his arranged cover, every detail well rehearsed. “Microscope and chemical assay for hire, world wide.”
“What kind of chemical work?”
“Oil fields, that kind of thing.”
“I guess that’s important.” Her eyes moved over the room and its small crates of stored equipment, and Max could see her putting the pieces together. “Why did you tie me up at first?”
“Lady, you came down in a plane right at the epicenter of my exploration zone. I’m taking no chances. I’ve been alerted that two other oil companies may be sending in unlicensed investigators, and that could cost my employer millions. Money aside, freelancers don’t always have scruples about how they get the job done. It’s the Wild West every day, everywhere when you’re talking about oil. We have a closed contract for exploration here for another two months, and no one is getting in here before that.”
“People do that kind of thing? I mean, they steal corporate information in a deserted place like this?”
Max thought she sounded surprised. Either she was very naïve about how business worked, or she was one very smart woman putting on a great act.
He shrugged. “Where money’s at stake, people will do anything.”
“You’re probably right.” She studied his Mini-mag. “So you’re here doing x-rays, things like that?”
“More or less. Since it’s proprietary, I can’t really discuss it.” Max pulled his canteen out of his vest and held it out for her to drink. “You should rehydrate.”
She took the canteen eagerly, then gave the opening a quick scrub with the hem of her shirt. “Nothing personal, but I don’t know you from Adam.”
“Always smart to be cautious.” He watched her drink. There was something fascinating about the way her muscles rippled. Her hair was wild, a dozen different shades of blonde. Beads of water trailed from her mouth, over her chin.
What would they taste like, mixed with her unique scent blend?
Enough. You know she’s probably connected to Cruz. There are damned few coincidences in this line of work.
