Safe Passage

She stopped, spun suddenly back to face him. “By the way, how’d you hurt your leg?”

Images shot through his brain. The bullet smashing his knee. The terrorist group in the Thar. The suspicious disease he’d been investigating. Scorching heat. Pain. The hospital in Mumbai. His old life gone.

“Skiing accident,” he said. “Torqued my knee.”

“Oh.” She ran those exotic eyes over him slowly. “Well, you’ve got an exquisite cane. Don’t think I’ve seen wood like that before.”

“Picked it up in Africa years ago. It’s mukwa wood, a gift from a Venda chief. Never thought I’d end up needing it in this way, though.”

“I’m sorry.” She turned to go, hesitated, turned back. “Would you like to join us for the reception Saturday? We’re having the caterers set something small and simple up at my house for after the church ceremony. I really didn’t want anything fancy.”

There was something about her demeanor that made him ask, “Why not?”

She shrugged. “Jozsef wanted to have the wedding brought forward for a number of reasons. This was the best option at such short notice.”

Scott’s curiosity piqued. “What short notice?”

She laughed. “Now who’s giving the third degree? Good night, Scott McIntyre.”

She slipped out into the dark and the house felt suddenly empty.

“Nice to meet you, Dr. Skye Van Rijn,” Scott whispered to the black night that had swallowed her.

Scott spent the rest of the night pouring over the dossier. Suddenly this mission wasn’t looking so lame. The bug doctor was not what she seemed. He sensed it in his gut. She was too quick with her reflexes, primed to react to physical threat in the way of no ordinary citizen.

And behind her smooth, smoky voice, her bold, unflinching gaze, she was guarded, hiding something. He knew it. Scott had spent years reading slight gestures, nuances of movement. He’d lived with tribes who communicated by tuning in to nature. He’d survived only because he was constantly poised for the slightest hint of danger, the mere intuition of imminent attack. Scott had lived the life of both hunter and prey. And there was something about this woman that made him feel she knew exactly what it was to be both. But which was she now?

And which was he?

He flipped over a page in the dossier, new energy humming softly through his system. And he told himself it had nothing at all to do with female curves that invited sin.

Skye pushed a button and her computer screen crackled softly to life. She scanned her e-mail before punching in her code and logging into the Kepplar lab system. She opened her work files, then rubbed the heels of her hands into her eyes. She couldn’t concentrate. Couldn’t sleep, either. An edginess zinged through her veins. Maybe it was wedding jitters. But deep down she knew it was more than that. It was the man next door. He’d unnerved her. She didn’t like the knife strapped to his ankle, his gut reaction to surprise.

She didn’t trust him.

There was something wild about him. Something she recognized. Something that had slipped past her guard and made her ask him to her wedding reception.

She stood, paced over to her window and stared out across her yard. The light was on in his kitchen.

His shadow moved momentarily against the shade.

She jerked back in reflex, told herself he couldn’t see her through his closed blinds. She edged forward, studied the shape of his silhouette as he moved around his kitchen.

Scott McIntyre. She tested the name in a whisper over her tongue, found she liked the feel of it.

He dressed like a writer in that knobbly wool sweater with leather patches at the elbows. His body, however, did not belong to a man who spent his life hunched in front of a computer terminal. She’d seen the way his jeans were faded in the most eye-catching places, how the worn fabric strained over the thick muscles of his thighs. She’d noted the power of his wrists, the latent strength in the shape of his broad shoulders, the arrogance in the line of his wide and defined jaw. A jaw that needed a shave. His face was rugged, rough, but with an air of intelligence, a hint of compassion.

And his lips. They hadn’t escaped her notice, either. Sculpted. Almost harsh.

She laughed at herself. Yeah, as if a writer had a certain kind of lips.

Yet, as she watched the hulk of his shadow in the kitchen next door, she couldn’t pull her thoughts away from the hot image branded into her mind. He certainly looked as though he’d traveled recently. His skin was sunned a rich brown that contrasted startlingly with the deep jewel-green of his eyes. And his hair, thick and mahogany-brown with sun-bleached tips, needed a trim. But she liked the look of it. She liked the look of him. Wild. Dangerous.

And there was something about his eyes that made her want to look into him. To find out more about him. Not only because she was intrigued, but because knowledge was strength.

It could mean life over death.

She yanked her drapes shut, turned to her computer, her mind ticking over. He said he was published. A futurist. She sat in front of her terminal. With a few quick clicks she logged into the Internet and pulled up a search engine.

She punched in the letters of his name and a few keywords.

Scott sipped his second mug of tea, flipped over another page in the dossier the Bellona Channel, the international nongovernment agency dedicated to researching and fighting bio crime and bio terrorism, had prepared on Dr. Skye Van Rijn.

According to the file, Bellona’s Canadian headquarters had received an anonymous tip that Dr. Van Rijn, research and development scientist with Kepplar Biological Control Systems, had recently traveled from Kenya to Mexico where she’d crossed the border into the United States. Within weeks of her visit the first cases of Rift Valley Fever were being reported in Texas cattle. Devastating news. International borders had shut instantly, killed the American beef industry. The stock market reeled.

And then came worse.

Human infection.

And panic.

So far all the deceased were employees who had contracted the disease via slaughtering livestock at a Texas abattoir. RVF occurs naturally in Africa and is spread by one of three ways: mosquitoes, physical contact with the blood or secretions of infected animals, or inhalation of the airborne virus.

But no one had yet managed to identify the source of the U.S. outbreak.

Scott whistled softly through his teeth, set down his mug. Apart from an episode in Saudi Arabia and Yemen two years ago, there had never been a documented outbreak of RVF outside of Africa. Could this RVF strain have been brought in accidentally through commerce? Or had it been purposefully introduced? And if so, how? By contaminated animal products? Insects?

His thoughts turned to Skye. Insects were her field. She certainly had the expertise. She had been in the area after a visit to Africa.

But it was all so circumstantial.

He stretched his leg out, removed his makeshift ice pack, massaged his knee gingerly. Honey stirred at his feet. He reached down, scratched absently behind her ear.

Agro-terrorism, thought Scott, was easy to execute, low risk and often almost impossible to trace. It could instil mass panic, especially if there were human deaths, yet not generate the kind of backlash a direct civilian hit would. It was the kind of terrorism that had the additional value of being a powerful blackmail and extortion tool.

It had the potential, he figured, for use by organized crime and terrorist groups to raise huge sums of money by manipulating the U.S. agriculture future commodities markets. An astute player could simply invest in competitor’s stock before carrying out an assault with pest or pathogen.

Scott made a mental note to ask Rex to check into recent stock market trades. Bellona may have already done so but there was nothing in the dossier.

Scott turned to the next page, his interest in Dr. Skye Van Rijn now thoroughly piqued—in more ways than one.

Bellona had combed through Skye’s background. Born in Amsterdam, she immigrated to Canada ten years ago at the age of twenty-two. The dossier contained copies of her immigration papers, birth certificate, social security number, driver’s license along with transcripts from the universities she’d attended and details of her scholarships.

She now worked for Kepplar, designing and developing biological control measures for the agricultural and horticultural industries. Rex and his boys had been pretty thorough. Everything had checked out.

She looked clean.

But Bellona still wanted to keep an eye on her. It was part of the organization’s mandate to do so. And Skye Van Rijn was on record as having expressed controversial views on American imperialism, globalization and blow-back.