Undercover Mistress

With a frustrated whimper and one last wild look at the blanket mound on the bed, Celia headed for the kitchen, where, like the character she’d played for so long on one of the world’s most popular daytime soaps, she proceeded to follow the doctor’s orders. “Nurse Suzanne, another unit of O-neg—STAT!”

And, she fervently reflected as she filled a mug with hot water, dropped in a couple of bouillon cubes and set it in the microwave, she’d give just about anything right now for a few of those units of O-neg, not to mention the actual skills and training to know what to do with them.

Back in the den, she placed the mug of steaming broth on the nightstand, then took a deep breath and sat down gingerly on the edge of the bed. The mound of blankets beside her remained still as a corpse, and when she touched it, felt cold as one, too. Oh, God…I don’t want to do this!

Okay—she’d asked for this. It had been her idea to bring the guy here, right?

She hitched herself around until she was braced by the pillows piled against the headboard—carved mahogany, hand-carved in someplace exotic, India, maybe, she’d forgotten exactly where—that had been her mother’s. With a considerable amount of wriggling around, she managed to get herself wedged behind the unconscious man’s shoulders so that his head was propped on her chest.

His head…on her chest. Cold, damp, sand-crusted hair pressed against her bare skin…her bra…her breasts.

Suppressing a shudder and closing off that part of her mind, she stretched out her arm, groped for and found the mug. Carefully, she lifted it—and nearly let it slip from her fingers when she felt a moan vibrate through the man’s body. It seemed to penetrate through his skin and straight into hers.

She froze, quivering inside. She could feel her heart hammering against the cold, muscular back, feel the weight of that back pressing sand grit into her skin. His head rolled on her shoulder, sending new shock waves through her. She heard the faintest of whispers and, bending her head close to his lips, once again felt that stirring of air across her cheek.

“It’s all right,” she managed to say in a broken, gasping voice. “You’re safe now.”

“Max…”

“Yes, yes…it’s okay,” she murmured, soothing him while her mind was shrieking, Who the hell is Max? “Don’t try to talk—”

“Max…Max!” She could feel powerful muscles tense as he struggled to lift his head. A terrible shudder racked his body. Words like ground gravel strained to escape from jaws gone rigid as stone. “It’s…boats, Max. Could kill…millions. Don’t tell anyone. They can’t know!”

Fear rushed through Celia like a blast of cold wind.

Chapter 2

One month earlier:

“Boats…” Roy Starr dropped the word like a lead weight into the silence as he stared across the vastness of the city that slumbered beneath an indigo blanket bejeweled with a billion points of light. Out there where the lights ended lay the Port of Los Angeles, one of the largest, busiest seaports in the world. Every year, millions of tons of cargo moved in and out of the harbor, on uncounted thousands of ships.

The man beside him, shorter by half a head and slighter by fifty pounds, aimed his gaze in the same direction and nodded. “According to the chatter, that’s where the next attack’s gonna come from. Not by air this time. By boat. What’s that line from…whoever it was—‘One if by land…two if by sea…’”

“Longfellow—‘Paul Revere’s Ride,’” Roy said absently. He’d been raised by a Georgia schoolteacher, so he knew those kinds of things. He glanced at his handler, the man he knew only as Max, and frowned. “They been able to narrow the target any?”

There was the hiss of an exhalation as Max pivoted and leaned his backside against the fender of his car. “Most likely west coast. That’s all they’ll say at the moment. Likely timed for the Christmas or New Year’s holiday, for maximum impact. We’ve stepped up security on the main ports of entry—Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles—checking all container ships from point of departure on, screening for radiation, and so on. We feel we’ve got the big ones covered pretty well.”

“Then…”

“It’s not the big ones we’re worried about.” Max paused. “You saw that segment on 60 Minutes a while back?”

Roy nodded, his lips twisting in a smile without much humor to it. “Yeah, I wish they’d quit giving the terrorists ideas.”

Max snorted. “I doubt there’s anything they could come up with Al-Qaeda hasn’t already thought of. This one, though…” He paused again, and Roy wondered whether it had been his imagination or whether a shiver had just passed through the man’s body. “Think about it—how many small-boat harbors do you suppose there are between San Diego and Santa Barbara? How many private fishing boats…yachts…sailboats? Wouldn’t take a very big one to carry a biological or chemical agent into a marina. With the right wind conditions…” His voice trailed off.

Roy nodded, fighting a wave of nausea. In Los Angeles, unless there was a storm moving down from the Gulf of Alaska, or the Santa Anas were blowing, the prevailing breeze blew from the west, straight in off the Pacific. It wouldn’t take much of one to carry a killing cloud into the basin, where eight million innocent souls lived and worked…and slept. “Jeez,” he said.

After a long, cold silence, he took a breath. “You must have a lead, or you wouldn’t have called me.”

Max straightened up and nodded. “Not sure you’d call it a lead. One name keeps popping up more often than it should. Abdul Abbas al-Fayad—know him?”

Roy frowned. “Sounds sort of familiar. Where’ve I—”

“He’s been on the watch list for a while, but you’d probably know him from the tabloids. Made the news a few years back when he bought a mansion in Bel Air from some old-time famous movie star, then proceeded to annoy the hell out of his neighbors when he turned the place into a cross between the Playboy mansion and something out of the Arabian Nights.”

“Oh, hell yeah, I remember—painted all the naked statues so they were anatomically correct, didn’t he? Something like that?”

Max nodded, his lips twitching in a smile without amusement. “Outraged his royal relatives back home, too—not exactly the accepted role model for an Arab crown prince, I guess. They disowned him—not that it slowed him down any. Abby—as he’s called—is a billionaire in his own right.”

Roy made a derisive sound. “The guy’s hardly a terrorist. He’s a playboy. And a nut.”

“A playboy…” said Max, and paused meaningfully before adding, “…with a boat.”

“Ah.”

“A helluva big boat. One of those megayachts—the Bibi Lilith, which I’m told translates as ‘Lady of the Night’—I swear to God. Do you suppose he knows what that means in English? Anyway, the damn thing looks like the Queen Mary. Over three hundred feet long and luxury all the way. Twenty guest cabins in addition to the main stateroom, and a crew of thirty.”

“Uh-huh,” said Roy, in a neutral tone.

Max gave him a sideways look. “Don’t you skipper a fishing boat? Something like that?”

“Yeah, I do,” Roy said, thinking, with a sudden sharp twist of longing, of his beach house on Florida’s Gulf Coast, and his boat, the Gulf Starr, which was currently in the capable hands of his best friend and business partner, Scott Cavanaugh. Scott had recently and unexpectedly become his brother-in-law, too, thanks to his recent marriage to Roy’s sister, Joy—something he was still having some trouble getting his mind around.

“What’d you do, get me on this boat’s crew?” He was thinking this assignment might have a definite upside, in spite of the grim nature of its purpose.

“Wish we could, believe me. Problem with that is, you’d have to infiltrate the guy’s inner circle, and they’re a close-knit, suspicious bunch—mostly related, and even that doesn’t mean they trust each other. Even if we could manage to pull it off, it would take time—a whole lot more than we’ve got.” Max was gazing at the distant harbor lights again. There was another pause, and then: “Your dad used to own a big rig, right?”

Wary, now, wondering what Max was getting around to asking of him, Roy nodded. “That’s right.”

Max let out a breath. “I hope to God he taught you your way around a diesel engine.”

“I’ve turned a wrench or two in my time,” Roy said. He didn’t mention the fact that his father had died too soon to have taught him much of anything, and that what he knew about diesels he’d mostly learned from his brother, Jimmy Joe. That, and trial and error.

Except, there wasn’t going to be any room for error here. In his current line of work, an error most likely meant people—a lot of people—were going to die.

“So, you’re thinking about…what, sabotaging an engine?”

Max’s teeth flashed bluish white in the artificial light. “Can you think of a better way to get you on board? They call for a mechanic—”

Roy shook his head. “Tough to jimmy up a diesel—at least, bad enough to need a technician to fix it.”

Max gave him a long look. “I know you’ll think of something,” he said as he turned back to the vista.

There was a long silence. Then Roy asked, in a voice so careful it could have been mistaken for indifference, “Any plans to raise the alert level?”

Max’s reply was a puff of air too muted to be called a snort. “Again? Unless we have something specific to tell ’em, who’s gonna pay attention?” He turned abruptly and tapped Roy’s chest with an index finger. “We need surveillance on that boat. We need something specific. If Abby…” His voice trailed off. He shook his head, once more scanning the sea of lights.

“Even if we knew for certain, what good would it do to tell them? Look at ’em down there. Ten million people. What do you think they’d do if they knew a cloud of death was heading their way? Can you imagine it? Jeez…”