72 Hours Read online

  “Yeah. Nice to know there are people making up poisons so they can have an antidote to it by the time somebody else makes it up.”

  “It’s a scary world out there,” Grace agreed. Just one more reason she had traded in her cat suit for an apron.

  “I wish you were still in the field with me, Grace. I’d feel a lot better if you had my back.”

  Not a chance. When the Devlin Group had poached her away from the FBI, she’d jumped at the chance to leave her small-town, white bread upbringing behind. Miss Most-Likely-to-Organize-Carpools was going to be an international super agent.

  It didn’t take long for the flash to fizzle. Fast cars, hard people, and too much adrenaline. Each mission left her more jaded and more tired. She could barely recognize the person in the mirror at the end of each day.

  Not until the doctor treating her for a gunshot wound told her she was pregnant did she have the strength to walk away.

  Being a civilian contractor for legit government agencies didn’t pay as well, but it let her be home with Danny. Her mission now was to be both mother and father to one hell of a great kid—the only mission that ever made her curl in her bed and cry in fear of failure.

  “You know I can’t raise Danny like that.”

  And she did know. Carmen Olivera was the only person connected to the Devlin Group, besides Sean himself, who knew about Danny. Her need to have an ear to bend had overcome her initial decision to never tell a soul. Nobody knew who his father was, though. She’d told them it was her doctor, and Carmen and Devlin—the only two people she’d kept in contact with—had no reason not to believe her.

  “Maybe when Danny’s all grown up, you can come out and play, huh?”

  Grace laughed again and shook her head. “Sure. I’ll just stock up on the Geritol.”

  They chatted for a few minutes, then she severed the digital connection to her former life and returned to Mommyworld.

  She was pouring milk into a plastic cup when the screen door slammed.

  “How was your—” She turned.

  Her throat closed. The clock ticked.

  Cold milk splashed over her bare toes.

  The man smiled.

  “Your son won’t be coming home, Ms. Nolan…for now.” He held up an 8x10 photo.

  Danny, with a large, tanned hand pressing against the backpack he still wore, ushering him onto a small plane. No markings were visible on the aircraft. No other faces in the picture. Only Danny’s. The camera captured him looking over his shoulder, his blue eyes under his Red Sox cap wide and liquid.

  “You bastard.”

  Inside, she shattered. Her chest hurt with the effort of inhaling and exhaling each breath. Please, God, don’t let them hurt my baby.

  Even as the maternal agony threatened to shut her down, the old training kicked in. Instincts she thought she’d lost reawakened, and the quickening of her senses—the burst of adrenaline—sharpened Grace’s mind.

  Let him underestimate her. This guy thinking she was incapacitated by grief was her best weapon.

  He’d said for now. She focused on those precious words while collapsing against the counter in a sign of distress she didn’t have to feign. Hanging her head in a gesture of defeat, she scanned the floor, noting the location of the spilled milk. She slid her hand a little to the left. Closer to the breadbox. Right now, the fact that she’d never totally let go of the constant fears of her former life was a very good thing.

  Process the situation, her training prompted. Soft-looking white male. Slavic bone structure. Five-ten or so. Big, but in a middle-aged way. Very expensive suit. Voice too carefully devoid of any trace of an accent. Grace looked him in the eye. A follower, not a leader. She could take him.

  “Where did you take my son?”

  “Little Danny’s safe. For now, as I said.” The man pulled out a chair and sat, crossing an ankle over his other knee. “Whether or not he stays that way is totally up to you.”

  “Who do you work for?”

  “That’s not important right now. What is important is Alex Rossi.”

  Alex? She flinched and cursed herself for letting the scumbag see her do it. Dammit, Devlin’s network was supposed to be secure. How had they connected her to him?

  “I’m retired,” she said in a low voice. There was no sense in trying to bluff her way out. If they knew where to find her—knew she had a son to use against her—they already knew too much.

  Images flipped through her mind. Faces and names ran through her subconscious until one clicked. “Peter Rustikov. I heard you were taken out in Greece a couple years back.”

  Rustikov smiled. “Those reports were greatly exaggerated, as you can see. Fortuitous, though, as I was in the act of changing employers.”

  “Which lowlife’s paying you now?”

  “As I said, that’s not important right now. Neither is your supposed retirement, which is a farce. People like you don’t retire. They die.”

  “What does your boss want with Alex Rossi?” Grace let herself slump more over the counter, bringing her right hand slightly across her body. Very slightly. Peter Rustikov didn’t play on her level, but he was no amateur.

  “Rossi has something my employer wants, but information on his whereabouts is hard to come by. The international grapevine says you’re close to him.”

  Grace forced a derisive laugh. “We blew off some steam in Brazil years ago. He didn’t take me home to his mother.”

  “Maybe if he had she’d have taught you how to cook.”

  He dropped his head to laugh at his own joke, and Grace moved. She spun, knocking the breadbox away from the wall with her left hand, and peeling the Sig .38 from the back with her right as she turned.

  The tearing of Velcro jerked Rustikov’s eyes back to her, but she was already there, taking his crossed ankle and jamming it up hard. His shin hit his nose with a crack and the chair fell backwards.

  Grace moved with him to floor, pinning his ankle to his shoulder with the left side of her body while she pressed the muzzle to his forehead.

  “Where’s my son, asshole?”

  Chapter Two

  Blood ran from his nostrils, but other than his breathing, he offered no reaction. Grace moved her knee to his thigh, unmindful of the tearing seam of her soccer-mom sundress, to put more pressure on his already overextended groin muscle.

  “Tell me where my son is and you might walk out of here.”

  “I’ll walk out of here,” Rustikov said in a hoarse voice now betraying his Russian origins. “Because if I don’t, the man sitting in the car out front is going to make a phone call.”

  For a second Grace considered shooting Rustikov, then hitting the man in the car, but she wasn’t stupid. If these two idiots didn’t check in, the game was over. And so was Danny’s life.

  “What’s the deal?”

  Rustikov took a deep breath, relief clear in his eyes. “You have seventy-two hours to deliver Rossi. We get him, you get your son. That’s all there is to it.”

  The toad had obviously never crossed paths with Alex. There was more to it than he could imagine. But the decision was out of her hands.

  She’d bring him in. The man who once upon a time she would have sacrificed everything for. The man who set her blood on fire in a way living on the edge of death never had. She would trade Alex’s life for Danny’s and never look back.

  Grace concentrated her weight on Rustikov’s thigh while she got to her feet. Sweat broke out at his hairline. She hauled him to his feet while he cursed, then stepped back out of his reach. Getting shot with your own gun taught you a lesson you never forgot.

  “Details,” she demanded.

  Rustikov used his sleeve to mop blood from his face before answering. “Seventy-two hours from now you deliver Rossi to a boat docked at the Last Stop Marina in Key West. The Intrepid. Then you’ll get the boy back.

  “Nobody but an advanced security team will be on the boat until the arranged time, so you can forget a rescue atte
mpt. It’s a big planet, and you won’t find Danny.”

  Her son’s name on this scumbag’s lips made her hand tremble, and Rustikov stared at the .38 without blinking.

  He cleared his throat and spoke again. “There’s only one stipulation. He wants Rossi alive and able to speak coherently. Other than that, there are no rules. You can put surveillance on the boat. Bring in whomever you want. At this point there’s nothing you can do. But anybody besides you and Rossi approaching the boat at deadline time will be shot. Are we finished?”

  Grace inhaled deeply, controlling her breathing and steadying her hand. “If my son is harmed, I will kill every one of you very, very slowly.”

  “I believe you,” Rustikov said and limped out the door.

  * * *

  Alex was cubing chicken for a salad when the phone rang.

  He knew by the tone it was the silver cell phone. The Bond phone. Or the Batphone, as Gallagher called it. His Devlin phone. He crossed from the suite kitchenette to the coffee table to grab it. The number on the screen wasn’t one he recognized, and Gallagher had already let him know he and Carmen were on their way to the island with the package.

  “Devlin,” he barked. The integrated voice chip altered his voice, but he also changed his speech pattern.

  “Sean?”

  He froze, not sure he’d heard correctly. “Grace? Is that you?”

  “Yeah. Are you okay, Sean? You sound a bit odd.”

  Maybe because every time he heard her voice his heart jumped up into his throat? “I wasn’t expecting you—different number on the caller ID.”

  She gave a quick, nervous sounding laugh. “I got a new cell phone.”

  The familiar frustration drove him to pace the floor in long strides. Alex hated knowing she didn’t hear him. On her end of the line she heard Sean Devlin, a figment of vengeance and technology.

  He wanted her to hear him. But Grace had refused to speak to Alex Rossi since the Escobar deal went sour in London. This long subterfuge was the only way he could speak to her at all.

  “How’s Danny?” he forced himself to ask. What kind of friend wouldn’t ask about her son?

  Even if he was the son of a no-good, morally bankrupt doctor who Alex hoped to kill with his bare hands some day. A physician willing to take advantage of a patient recovering from a gunshot wound didn’t deserve to breathe.

  Alex pulled his mind away from those thoughts like a man jerking his hand away from a hot stove—one he knew he wouldn’t be able to resist touching again.

  Then he realized she hadn’t answered. “Grace?”

  “Danny’s fine,” she replied too quickly. He wondered if she had a cold, or if she was upset. She sounded stuffy, and her voice was tight. “I need to see Alex Rossi, Sean.”

  The two facets of his life collided in one paralyzing thought. She wants to see me.

  He kept his mouth shut until he had some idea of what words would come out. After eight years of rigid, uncompromising silence, she wanted to see him. Why?

  “You know I can’t give out an agent’s location, Grace.”

  “Please, Sean,” she said, the pleading note in her voice making his chest ache. “For me.”

  “Why? You can’t ask this kind of favor from me without a damn good reason.”

  “It’s…personal. Unfinished business.”

  Alex stopped pacing and dropped into an overstuffed chair. His body wanted nothing more at that second than to get personal with Grace Nolan again.

  But the unfinished business made him nervous. He couldn’t let himself forget he’d shot this woman eight years ago. That was the kind of grudge that could fester in a person’s subconscious.

  “He’s in the Keys.”

  “My charter’s waiting on the tarmac, so I’ll call you in-flight for the particulars. I…thank you, Sean.”

  She disconnected before Alex had a chance to say anything else. Was she okay? Why the rush and the secrecy? And perhaps most importantly of all, why now? Why the hell, after eight years of silence, was she climbing aboard a chartered plane?

  His appetite gone, Alex repacked the salad fixings into the fridge while he waited for her to call back. A shower and a quick nap would put him back on top of his game. And that’s exactly where he needed to be with both Grace Nolan and a deadly biotoxin en route to his suite. Which one would prove more dangerous to him remained to be seen.

  * * *

  Alex awoke in a cold sweat with Grace’s name on his lips. He stared up at the hotel room ceiling, trying to control his breathing.

  It was a coincidence. Nothing more. Grace was coming here to Key West, and knowing that had triggered the nightmare. He’d been foolish to even attempt a powernap before her arrival.

  The chaos of that London hotel room still echoed through his mind. Angry shouts. The flicker of fire growing bigger and hotter by the second. Grace’s ragged, terrified breaths. He didn’t have to close his eyes to remember the knife. The look in Ricardo Escobar’s eyes. And he’d never forget the trembling in his own hand as he raised a gun—Grace’s own weapon—and made the hardest decision he had ever faced.

  Ricardo Escobar. Shit.

  He rose from the bed and pulled on the drawstring black silk pants balled at the end of the bed. Out of habit, he tucked his Glock into the back of the waistband before he walked out into the main room of the suite. The surveillance equipment was on a side table and he hit the play button.

  Remember. Timing is everything.

  Alex’s curses drown out the recording. Ricardo Escobar was dead. He’d shot the man himself, straight through the heart, then left him behind in a hotel room going up in flames.

  He shuddered, his body trying to shake off the last vestiges of the nightmare, but it did no good. Especially when he hit rewind, then listened again to that voice from the past.

  His watch beeped twice, sounding an alarm he no longer needed. She would be here soon, and he wasn’t quite ready to see her.

  Hell, he probably wouldn’t ever be ready to see her again. It was hard enough hearing her voice, knowing she didn’t hear his, but rather the voice-altered version which belonged to Sean Devlin. He didn’t want to play out the pretense in person.

  Alex lifted the silver cell phone from the table, switching it from ring to vibrate. It looked like any other phone, with the voice engineering program integrated in its circuits, but he couldn’t take the chance of it ringing if she should decide to call up Sean Devlin—a man who didn’t exist, but a man who could talk to her and comfort and support her in a way Alex Rossi couldn’t.

  When he’d started the Devlin Group eleven years ago, he’d chosen the identity for one reason—to bait the man who had killed his mother. Little did he know then Sean Devlin would also serve as his only link to the woman who should have been his future.

  The knock on the door froze him in place. He had no idea what the hell she wanted, or why she’d called Devlin looking for his location. But she was on the other side of that door. One quick glance through the peephole confirmed it.

  Alex watched her jump when he opened the door, her mouth opening in a quick exclamation of surprise.

  She looked the same, yet so different. Her mass of chestnut curls was pulled back in a loose clip, and she needed no makeup to enhance those big sapphire eyes.

  Her body had changed. Her breasts under the lightweight sweater were a little fuller, as were her hips. No doubt the changes lingered from giving birth to her son, but they didn’t stop the sudden, hot urge to feel her body under his.

  If anything, his want was intensified. The lean girl was gone, and in her place was a woman with a body to make a man want to come home at night.

  He stepped back, giving her room to enter and close the door. It was only then he realized she was watching him as well. In his pajamas, probably still coated with the sweat of his nightmare, he guessed he probably made an interesting picture.

  Alex watched Grace stare at his body, but he didn’t let it get to him. She wasn
’t here to play. And she looked like hell.

  “To what do I owe this pleasure, Grace?” he asked. He made sure the words were slow and lazy, but the back of his neck tingled in warning.

  That was fear in her eyes. The list of things that scared Grace Nolan was pretty damn short, and he sure as hell wasn’t on it. So what was?

  “What are you doing in Key West?” she asked. Stalling—gearing herself up for something.

  Instead of moving toward her, trying to intimidate her as he’d done in the past, he stepped back. He might need some room. For what, he didn’t know, but he had a feeling he was about to find out.