Heron's Cove

“You got a toehold with them. It’s a start.” Yank sat on another white leather couch opposite Colin. “Are you sure you don’t need a hospital?”

“I have three brothers. I can take a punch.”

The senior agent’s dark eyes were steady, serious. He had been a legendary field agent, but he had never strayed too far from the book. He had never gone deep undercover to chase a transnational threat like Vladimir Bulgov and his complex arms pipeline.

“You do like to go it alone,” Yank said heavily.

“I didn’t have much choice this time.”

“Well, you’re no good to us dead.”

“That’s why I decided to jump off that boat, Yank. So I could be an FBI asset.”

“You know what I meant.” Yank drummed his fingers on his thigh. “Your luck saved you this time.”

“Not luck. Skill.”

Yank didn’t crack a smile.

Colin worked a tight muscle in his jaw. He thought he would be sleepy by now, but he wasn’t. He was wide-awake, thinking about how Yank had found him. “What Russians does Emma know?”

“Between her and her family, I imagine she knows quite a few.”

“Vladimir Bulgov’s Russian. Horner flew planes for him. His pals Boris and Yuri are Russian.”

“Emma’s contacts are one of the reasons she’s on my team,” Yank said, his tone cool, measured.

Colin leaned forward. “What else?”

“Nothing else. She’s every bit the asset I thought she’d be when I recruited her. That hasn’t changed in the past month.”

Colin watched a small boat cruise past the house on the picturesque waterway. “Any reason to think whoever tipped off Emma knows my real name?”

“She wouldn’t do anything to compromise you.”

“Not intentionally, maybe.”

“You’ve had a rough few weeks. You need a break. We’ll find these guys.”

“Their buyer? Whoever it is won’t like a delay. Horner knows that.”

Yank didn’t look as confident but nodded. “We’ll find Horner and the Russians and stop them from procuring more weapons. We’ll find their buyer. You laid the groundwork.”

“I knew a blown cover was a possibility going into this thing, turning up alive after three months. I told Horner myself that I was a federal agent.” Colin touched a bruise on his wrist. “But having one of your people get a tip about me isn’t sitting well.”

“One of my people?” Yank raised an eyebrow. “Emma got the tip about this place while she was sleeping in your bed in Maine.”

Colin pictured her honey hair, her green eyes, and sighed. “Hell, Yank.”

He draped an arm on the back of the couch and stretched out his long legs on the white-tile floor. “You two complicate my life.”

Colin didn’t argue. His relationship with Emma complicated his life, too. He had never expected to fall for a woman like Emma Sharpe, granddaughter of a renowned art detective, ex-nun and FBI art crimes expert, but he had. Thinking about her over the past few weeks had been both a comfort as well as a potentially dangerous distraction. Any contact with her—with his family, his real life, even Yank—had become too risky given the stakes and the scrutiny he was under.

“You’re nothing if not pragmatic, Yank,” Colin said. “It’s easier not to ask tough questions if Emma got this tip from a Sharpe source.”

“Let me worry about that.”

“You know who it is, don’t you?”

The dark eyes didn’t waver. “Informants are a tricky business. We have strict rules, but they include reasonable room to maneuver. Are you going back to Maine?”

“I always go back to Maine.” Colin drank some water from a bottle one of the agents had handed him. His lips were dry, burning from his salty swim in the canal. “Are you worried Emma got in over her head to find me?”

Yank got to his feet and stood by the French doors. “I don’t know yet. Maybe.”

“You’ve been known to hold back pertinent information,” Colin said. “For instance, you didn’t mention Emma had been a nun when you asked me to keep an eye on her in September. I had no idea that this pretty FBI agent used to be Sister Brigid of the Sisters of the Joyful Heart.”

“She’d just found a nun from her former convent murdered. I needed your fresh eyes on the situation. I wasn’t thinking you two would end up…you know. Together.”

Maybe so, but Colin wondered how he would have responded to Emma if he had known from the start she had once been a postulant and novice. “What are you not telling me now?”

“Her brother’s in Dublin with her grandfather.”

“Is that relevant to the tip she got on my whereabouts?”

“I don’t know.”

Colin shifted on the couch, the Florida sun burning through the haze and hitting him in the eye, as if to remind him he hadn’t had any sleep. “You’ve never met Vladimir Bulgov, have you?”

“Not in person, no.”

“He’s this likable, chain-smoking former Soviet helicopter pilot who cobbled together a small fleet of aging planes and made a fortune hauling cargo. Most of the cargo was legitimate, but he also had access to stockpiles of Soviet-era weapons, from Kalashnikov rifles to shoulder-fired missiles. He tucked them in with the legitimate cargo. No problem finding buyers.”

Yank turned from the French doors. “Your point?”

“Along the way, Bulgov developed a taste for modern art. Emma found out and we finally had him in the U.S. and arrested him. That’s the only tie I can see between him and the Sharpes. Peter Horner and his two Russian friends aren’t interested in art.” Colin noticed that Yank was all but pacing now. “If you asked Emma for her source, would she tell you?”

“I’m not asking.”

“Because you want to trust her?”

“I do trust her. She’s analytical, intelligent. She’s not a black-and-white thinker. She sees the shades of gray in a situation.”

“She’s not like anyone else on your team.”

“That’s not a negative.”

Colin stood, ignoring a twinge of pain in his lower back. A bruise had blossomed on his forearm, and when he had changed clothes, he had noticed a nick on his right temple. “What’s your best guess, Yank? Did Emma put herself in danger to find me?”