Release

“Fine. When do we leave?”

She checked her watch. “Be ready in forty minutes. I’m making breakfast. If you come up in ten, there’ll be food for you.”

“I’m not hungry.”

“Tough. You’re going to need your strength. Deal with it.”

As she headed for the stairs, she heard him curse her under his breath. She didn’t say anything, though. Maybe she was a cold bitch. Hard times called for hard measures.

2

THE FREE CLINIC WAS in a run-down part of Boyle Heights, a sad suburb of Los Angeles where the median income was right at the poverty level, and the people who showed up on the doorstep were a damn sad bunch. They were mostly meth addicts, but there were still the unwanted pregnancies, the search for birth control pills, the folks with the flu and the cough and the red itch “down there.” No one came to the clinic if they had somewhere else, anyone else.

All Seth could think about when he walked in the doors was that he’d seen it before. Maybe not this color and maybe there were different posters on the walls, but the poor people all over the world always ended up in rooms like these. With overworked doctors and nurses with sore feet.

If he had to get a job in the outside world, then he supposed this was the safest place to do it. What were the odds that someone here would recognize him? He looked nothing like the man they’d flashed on television or the Wanted picture in the post office. His hair was the longest it had ever been, and the posters didn’t mention the missing hand, but that wasn’t even it. Since Kosovo, he’d changed. He had lines in his face, around his eyes. He looked tired all the time, and his skin was sallow and pasty. He felt like an old man despite his daily workout.

Now that he was dressed in hospital scrubs, with an old Dodgers baseball cap on his head, no one would pick him out as a soldier or a traitor. He looked at himself in the clinic’s bathroom mirror and pulled his cap down a little farther.

He finally understood what Kate had meant when she’d said she’d been invisible as the room-service lackey at the downtown L.A. hotel.

She’d been a forensic accountant for the UN in Kosovo and she’d been the one who’d gotten the Delta Force team involved. She and Nate had been an item, and when Kate had discovered that something fishy was going on, she’d talked it over with him. She hadn’t known it at the time, but she’d found the first proof that a faction of the CIA, calling themselves Omicron, had created a mighty nasty chemical agent and they were planning to sell it to the highest bidders, who would then use it to kill whomever they chose—mostly civilians. To add to Omicron’s crimes, they’d recruited a Delta Force team, his team—one of the best in the world—to do the dirty work of wiping the evidence off the earth. Their original mission was to go to a secret laboratory in Serbia, collect all the files, kill the scientists working there and destroy the lab. What they hadn’t mentioned was that the scientists in that particular lab weren’t working on the nerve gas—they were developing the antidote.

Some of the team had escaped—Nate, Boone, Cade and himself. They’d convinced Kate and Harper to come along because they clearly knew too much. The one scientist to make it out alive had been Tamara. She’d come back to the States, and Nate had found her a safe place to do her research. She’d had to distill all the notes from her colleagues to try and recover their progress and then she had to make sure the antidote not only worked but could be dispersed to save whole villages.

Last Seth had heard, Nate was trying to get some money together for more of her tests. He did security work, real high-tech stuff, state-of-the-art, for which he charged a pretty penny. No one complained, as his customers were as shady as they come. A lot of bookies, some conspiracy nuts, an arms dealer or two. But ever since his picture had shown up on Wanted posters across the country, Nate couldn’t afford to be picky.

The work had been easier when there’d been two of them. When Seth had been there to cover Nate’s back.

Pounding on the bathroom door made him reach for a weapon he wasn’t carrying. He closed his eyes and tried to chill, but it wasn’t easy.

“You gonna stay in there all day?” It was Harper, of course. “Other people need to use that john.”

He gave himself another look in the mirror, then his gaze moved down to the plastic masquerading as his hand. He had to focus to open and close the thing. None of it felt natural or intuitive. But he couldn’t hide forever.

He opened the door in time to catch Harper walk into the cubbyhole she called her office. After he grabbed his regular clothes, he followed her, the scent of cleaning fluid and rubbing alcohol as bright and intrusive as the overhead fluorescent lights.

Her head was bent over an open file as she sat on the edge of a very messy desk. One foot was up on the seat of a plastic chair, and in addition to the stethoscope around her neck, she had a pencil stuck behind her right ear. The pencil looked as if it’d been used as a teething ring.

He wondered again what it was that made him want her. She took every opportunity to bust his balls, and now this. He’d done his fair share of KP, but dammit, a janitor?

She looked up at him for a moment, giving him a quick smile, which surprised him, then she went back to flipping pages with her long, slim fingers. But the smile lingered in his mind’s eye. She didn’t do it often, at least not when she was with him. But when she did, it made an impact. Maybe it was that one crooked tooth. Everything else about her seemed so perfect, her startling blue eyes, her pale skin and, dammit, even that stupid hair of hers that was not quite blond, too short and always a mess. It all came together to make him want to—

“Seth?”

She was looking at him again. Shit. “Yeah.”

“I talked to Noah. He’s going to be here in about twenty minutes, so why don’t you just lay low until he comes. When he’s done, you won’t have to worry about being recognized.”

“Why not?”

“He’s not your ordinary prosthetist. He used to be with the CIA, disguising agents in the field.”

Seth felt all his muscles tighten. “You do realize that Omicron is CIA.”

“I do. But you don’t have to worry about Noah. There’s a reason he’s not with them anymore.”

“So you want me to wear a disguise to work here?”

She nodded. “It’s going to be subtle, so don’t sweat it.”

“Don’t sweat it,” he said, not understanding her cavalier attitude. “It’s not a costume party, Harper. It’s my life on the line.”

She looked at him with her best doctor-in-charge expression. “I get that. It’s my life, too. So stop worrying about it. I’m trying to keep you safe.”

He believed she was, but he also believed that she had no idea who she was up against. Omicron would kill every person in her precious clinic if that’s what it took.

“Besides,” she said, “no one expects you to have only one hand.”

He swore under his breath, knowing she was trying to bait him.

She closed her file and stood. As she passed him she touched his shoulder, making him flinch. He didn’t think she saw.

“You can do something good here, Seth. You can be useful and get friendly with your new body. Don’t screw it up.”

He started to tell her exactly what she could screw, but what good would it do? Harper was Harper. “Fine. I’m assuming someone will tell me what my actual job is at some point?”

“Get through your session with Noah, then find me. I’ll point you in the right direction.”

He nodded, but she was already out the door, heading down the hall, her sneakers squeaking every third step on the stained linoleum.

He thought about waiting for Noah right there, but Harper might come back. So he headed out, looking for another safe place to hide. He hated being without a weapon. Without his left hand. The vulnerability never left these days, and he wondered if it ever would.

The blue hallway led past four different exam rooms, three of which were occupied, the doors closed. The fourth was empty and Seth walked in. There was one poster about STDs and another about HIV, both with stern warnings about always using a condom. Seth’s hand went automatically to his back pocket where he kept his handy Trojans, two at the ready no matter what. The moment of optimism fizzled as he moved his left arm, the weight of the prosthetic reminding him again that his days as a chick magnet were over. Not that he’d actually been one, but the uniform, when he’d worn one, had helped. Being with Nate helped even more. There were always women around Nate who needed comfort after being passed over.

He looked at the plastic again—five fingers, fingernails, little hairs on the knuckles, veins. No matter how masterfully the plastic was molded, it was still fake. Like a mannequin’s hand, like a G.I. Joe. He fought the urge to smash the damn thing into the wall.

“What can I help you with today?”

Seth spun at the feminine voice to find a doctor standing in the doorway. She was reading an open file and chewing on the end of a pencil. She looked young, as if she’d just gotten out of medical school and her long, curly brown hair was pulled back in a messy ponytail. When she looked up at him, he looked down, giving her a good view of his baseball cap but not his face.

“I’m not a patient,” he said, darting a quick glance. She was pretty. Especially her eyes.

Her gaze went right to his fake arm. “No?”

He flushed hotly. “I’m new here. I’m an aide.”

“That’s great,” she said. She put the file back in a pocket on the inside of the door. “I’m Karen. Dr. Eckhardt. I was the new kid, until you.”