The clock was ticking, and he was getting more and more pissed off. Why the hell didn’t she at least call in? Who the hell did she think she was?
He tapped his government-issue black pen on his legal pad and gazed up at his next interviewee, Kim Valenti, who came in and sat across the mahogany laminate conference table. Like him, she wore a simply, nicely tailored black suit—in her case, with a skirt. Like Allison and him, she was a cryptanalyst, and one of the best at the agency, which why she was with Ozone. She and Allison were good friends; on many occasions, when Morgan had been in Allison’s office, IM’s had come in through the internal NSA net from Windtalker2, which was Valenti’s handle.
“She called you earlier today,” Morgan said to Kim Valenti. He knew that because he had downloaded and examined both women’s phone logs.
“Yes, she did,” Valenti said after a beat, as if weighing how much to say to him. His bullshit-ometer ratcheted up two notches. What was she hiding?
“What did you two talk about?”
“It was personal business,” she replied, crossing her legs at the knee and settling back, as if she had all the time in the world, and no cares at all. She was cool, she was steady.
Morgan knew her body language didn’t mean a thing. His colleagues at the NSA might think he was simply an extremely proficient codebreaker, but he’d run a few covert ops for his government strictly off-the-books. More than a few. He had done terrible things on behalf of the free world, risked his own life countless times, sent willing men to their deaths. No one suspected, of course. He made damn sure they didn’t. How did the saying go? The better the spy, the better the lie.
“You know she’s missing.”
“I know she’s not here,” Valenti countered.
“I can hook you up to a polygraph,” he reminded her. “I can hand you over for interrogation. Your head will spin.”
Valenti gazed at him steadily. “She had some personal business, just like I said.”
Morgan balled his fists, tamping down his irritation with her screw-you attitude, because that wouldn’t get him anywhere. Allison’s comings and goings had been worrying the agency for years. That concern had mushroomed in the last twelve months. He himself had moved from concerned, to highly suspicious, and finally to wondering what game she was running on her own. For all her unflappable demeanor, she was a loose cannon, and he knew more than most that a weapon with the safety off could be used against you in a heartbeat.
He had the scars to prove it.
Inside and out.
“Ms. Valenti, foreign nationals of unknown origin are plotting to blow up a significant target in your country in less than a month,” he said. “If that occurs, thousands of people will die. Until we resolve that, there is no such thing as personal business. We’re here to protect those people, and until they’re safe, we don’t belong to ourselves. So whatever, why ever, she’s wrong.”
Her eyelids flickered. He watched her struggle with a sharp retort, and he wondered if he’d gone too far.
“Standing down a little,” he informed her. “I actually do know we’re not living in Nazi Germany.”
It worked. She moved her shoulders and tapped her fingers twice on the desk. “Okay. She’s pregnant.”
Or maybe she had just been making him sweat a little, payback for trying to intimidate her. He did that. He intimidated and bullied. He threatened. He frightened. He used whatever weapon he had whenever he could. He was combative. He was driven. He did what he had to. And he had to find Allison.
“Oh, for God’s sake!” Morgan thundered, slamming his fists down on the conference room table. Valenti didn’t bat an eyelash. “You can’t think I’d believe that.”
But the truth was that the male part of him—the part that fantasized about Allison Gracelyn naked and in his bed, the part that drove him to cool down at the gym, take icy showers, pace sleeplessly in the middle of the night, that part—was shocked and angry. Almost as if Allison had betrayed him with another man—when he had no claim at all on her, of course.
“You are lying to me. She’s a consummate professional,” Morgan flung at Windtalker2. “That’s not her style. That’s soap opera crap.”
Valenti raised her chin. Her dark eyes flashed at him. “She’s pregnant, there’s a problem with the baby and she thinks she might be miscarrying.”
For one more instant, he believed her, because he remembered how gently Allison broached the subject of his missing mother when he’d been assigned to Project Ozone and she had to get him a higher-level clearance.
“You were twelve,” she observed. “That’s a rough time in life, even without something like that.”
“No one can buy me by promising me information on my mother,” he had replied bluntly, raising the barriers around his heart. Of course he’d been asked that before. And would be asked again. But it was the first time Allison and he had discussed anything about his personal life other than his sister—whom Allison knew, of course, since Katie had gone to Athena Academy.
Allison’s lips had parted slightly, and he saw for the first time how big her brown eyes were, and how beautiful, flecked with gold and heavily lashed. He was startled, and flustered. The men he worked with had an office pool going that the Ice Princess was a thirtyseven-year-old virgin. She’d never dated anyone. There were secretaries who refused to work for her, saying she was too demanding. Which earned her the title of Queen Bitch in the eyes of many. Sexism was still rampant in the workplace. He was probably more sensitized to it because he’d heard stories from Katie.
Morgan read Allison differently. It wasn’t so much that she was cold or unreasonable; it was just that she didn’t give much back, and she needed her people to work as hard as she did.
But that one time, discussing his mother, remembering that her own mother had been murdered, he had felt as if he’d seen a part of her she was in a habit of concealing. As if a mask had slipped. Maybe she had a guy who knew how to take that mask off. Maybe they were having a kid together, and that kid was in trouble.
Allison as a mother. It had a certain…resonance.
“Rush,” Bill McDonough said from the doorway. Sweaty and unpleasant, he had loosened his dark blue tie and he looked twenty years older than he had fifteen minutes ago. McDonough shot Kim Valenti a glare that might turn a lesser woman to stone and jerked his head toward the hallway.
Morgan gave Valenti another look—a chance to change her story—but it was obvious she was done. He followed McDonough out, masking his distaste for Allison’s boss of three months—his boss’s boss. McDonough was crude around his female staffers, and he stole credit from his people for their decryptions and analyses.
“How’d it go?” McDonough asked him.
“It’s all bullshit,” Morgan replied. “You?”
“Same here.” He made a face. “Here’s the sum total of what we know—someone’s got a nuclear device and wants to kill the Great Satan. You know, I always wanted to be an astronaut.” He slid a glance at Morgan. “Think it’s too late?”
Before his mother had gone missing, Morgan had wanted to be a cowboy. He figured he still had time.
“Nothing new?”
“The terrorists are waiting for one of two messages. One is the code word to hit us. The other is to abort the mission. We don’t know what either code word is. I suggested this.” He said the most offensive version possible of “I’m having sex with your mother” in Farsi.
“You think it’s coming out of Iran?” Morgan asked. “I was thinking of Berzhaan.”
McDonough grunted. “I don’t think so. The Berzhaanis are