She certainly was gorgeous, no argument. But he shook his head. “No. No matter how great you are in bed, it would have been missing something.”
She lowered her hands and laughed. “What?”
“It was all a sham. You would only have done it to keep me from looking too closely at you. Fake. Bogus. Just like this beach.”
“You’re wrong. Maybe that’s how it started, but along the way, I got to like you. I would have enjoyed it. You would have, too. And you wanted me.”
“Yes. But that still wouldn’t have been enough,” he said.
“Oh, really?” Her voice was thick with sarcasm. “What else was missing?”
“Love. That’s something you can’t replace.”
She laughed. “Love is bullshit, Jay. My boyfriend said he loved me, but then he couldn’t wait for what I was going to give him anyway and he took me by force. My father said he loved me, but then he killed himself. ‘Love’ is just ‘sex’ prettied up, a fairy tale to keep the masses entertained. It doesn’t compare to a warm and willing body lying next to you, ready to do anything you want to make you feel good.”
He shook his head again. “I’m sorry for you, Rachel. Life handed you some hard hits, but what you did was wrong. You lied, cheated, stole, and you killed people. You shot your partner in the middle of the damned Mall, gunned him down like it was nothing. That’s cold.”
“Not admitting anything here, Jay, but this Carruth was a killer, right? He had a gun, didn’t he? He would have shot whoever killed him if he could, so whoever did it—they were just better than he was.”
“Whoever. Right,” he said.
“I’m not any worse than anybody else trying to make her way in the world.”
“Yeah, you are. You’re bright, talented, you could have risen to the top on your own merit, but you got bent. You could have gotten a job at a civilian company making three times what you do in the Army, been running the place in a couple years. You threw it all away. That’s worse than if you never had anything going in the first place.”
She laughed again. “You think?”
“Yeah, I think. I wanted to see you first, but you’re about to have visitors coming through your door. It’s all over, Captain.”
She gave him that angelic smile. “What makes you think I’m on the other side of any door that ‘visitors’ are about to kick open?”
Jay shook his head. The bad guys always thought they were going to get away.
“You know, you are always going to wonder about how it would have been with us. It will always be somewhere in the back of your mind, the road not taken, the field not plowed. You won’t ever be completely rid of me. When you are an old man, sitting in your rocking chair, you’ll remember me, and you’ll wonder if you made the right choice. I know you will.”
She lowered her arms. “Good-bye, Jay.”
She kept smiling. A second later, her scenario vanished.
Net Force HQ
Quantico, Virginia
Back in his office, Jay stripped off his gear. What a waste. So smart, so talented, so beautiful. And now going to prison for the rest of her life.
He looked up and saw Thorn standing in the doorway. “Boss?”
“The FBI and local police just raided Captain Lewis’s home. She wasn’t there. It appears she packed up and left.”
It took Jay a second to process that. “She got away?”
“For now, that’s what it looks like.”
Jay blinked. She was a user, a killer, she would have caused more death and destruction. She was dangerous, and she needed to be put where she couldn’t hurt anybody. He knew that. But, for just the briefest of moments, something in him wanted to smile.
She’d gotten away.
He was ashamed of the part of him that felt that. He had to try and make up for it.
He would have to catch her.
37
Washington, D.C.
Rachel knew her car would be spotted pretty quick, so she had used her computer skills to have a military vehicle checked out to somebody else; she was in that. By the time they missed it and figured out what had happened, she’d be far away. They’d be watching local airports and train and bus stations, so she needed to get out of the area before catching a ride elsewhere. Baltimore was a good place—she could head for New York, then transfer to a flight heading west. Carruth had that place in Montana he didn’t know she knew about. She could be his girlfriend, waiting for him to meet her there; that would be good for a few days.
She needed a place and some time—she had to see if she could still broker the deal for her stolen data. If she didn’t do it quick, though, it wasn’t going to fly—now that they knew who she was, they would take her system apart and eventually unravel it and shut everything down. It would take a while, even with the best hackers working it, but they’d crack it in the end. It hadn’t been designed for an all-out armored attack, but for stealth. That was gone now.
Her own best chance to come out of this with something was to contact her potential buyer, tell him there was a ticking clock, and offer a cut-rate deal. A couple million for a door that was going to be open for a few days? At least that was something an enterprising man could do something with.
She could still pull that off, maybe.
And if not? Well, at worst, she had still cost the Army a lot of grief and a lot of money. Certainly there had been plenty of payback in that even if she didn’t make a dime herself.
If she could stay out of their hands for a little while longer, she’d be okay. She was too smart for them. Even for Gridley, the stupid bastard. She still couldn’t believe he’d turned her down.
What an idiot.
Baltimore? As good a direction as any. They weren’t going to set up roadblocks looking for her. She knew how the Army thought. They were always training to fight the last war. She was going to get away. No question.
Probably what was the most disappointing was not getting it on with Jay. She’d really been looking forward to that.
Ah, well. His loss.
38
Midtown Grill
Washington, D.C.
Kent sipped at the wine, which was considerably better than the house red—he had called Gino and arranged for that, and also spoken to Maria for the other little surprise he had in mind.
Set it up well in advance.
Jen chatted about the handmade-guitar show she’d attended last weekend, with mini-concerts provided by the luthiers to showcase their new instruments.
“—amazing that brand-new spruce-top classical could sound that good after what the player said was forty-five minutes of playing time. In another four or five years, it will open up and probably sound so good you won’t be able to listen to it without crying.”
Kent nodded. Said, “Uh huh.”
“I asked one of the makers what the difference was between a guitar-maker and a luthier. ‘Luthier,’ by the way, comes from ‘lute,’ but has come to mean anybody who makes fretted instruments like guitars, lutes, ouds, and the like. He said that the difference was about two thousand dollars. . . .” She stopped and looked at Kent. “Where did you go?”
“Nowhere. I’m right here.”
“No, your mind isn’t. What’s up?”
He took a deep breath. He had once stutter-stepped across a field littered with bodies, charging a Colombian machine-gunner trying to chop him down; once, had crawled into a dark underground tunnel in which he knew an enemy soldier with a shotgun was waiting. As a first lieutenant, he had, once upon a time, told a bird colonel to go to hell, and what to do to himself when he got there. He wasn’t a coward when it came to risking his ass, and he had been living on borrowed time for years. He didn’t worry about a lot of stuff.