Hidden Steel (16 page)

He gave the pillow a blank look and tossed it aside. “Any plans for
getting
a clue?”

Her throat suddenly felt clogged. “Steve,” she said, “I’m so sorry. I never meant to get you involved in anything like this when I asked to stay. I had no idea—”

He gave a short laugh, bitter-edged. “That’s the whole problem, isn’t it? Doesn’t answer the question, though. Where do we go from here?”

She tipped her head at him, puzzled. “I thought I had. Just stay here a couple of days … by then they should be trying something else. I probably shouldn’t even stay the night, but I’m so tired … I’ll clear out tomorrow morning and keep poking around.”

“No,” he said, and his voice was as hard as she’d ever heard it. Suddenly he loomed over her again, and this time he meant every bit of it. This time he pulled her up by the arms, and pulled her close. Close enough so he could look straight in her eyes, showing her every bit of determination there. “You don’t get it. I’m past running away. It’s good for the moment … it’s good for the kids. But not for me. Not this time.”

As if he deserved to be dragged further into a mess she couldn’t even define—didn’t even know in which direction lay safety, or if he’d be on the side of good guys or bad guys. “Steve—”

“No,” he said, a word heavy with finality. “Now … where do we go from here?”

* * * * *

She didn’t have an answer for him. They’d gone to bed without such things, sleeping in the unfamiliar silences of the hotel room with mere feet separating the beds and an overwhelming and awkward awareness of each other’s presence. Mickey felt it; she heard it in his voice. But soon enough his breathing deepened, and the sound of it lulled her into a light sleep.

Not for long.

She woke straight into alertness, so alert that she felt for the knives she’d left on the bedside table. But moments of listening revealed nothing other than Steve’s deep breathing, his occasional soft snore. Moments of listening revealed that the noise was all in her head, panicked clamorings of responsibility and need.

A man was dead in her wake.

NaiaNaiaNaia …

She’d learned very little about Naia on the web. Stanford was close-mouthed about her, and wisely so—Irhaddan’s president wouldn’t allow his daughter to attend a school where she was easily exposed to examination and speculation. Stanford had already established its ability to keep high-profile students away from the limelight—various actors, another president’s daughter—they’d been vulnerable, too, and they’d been protected.

From basic news sources she only gathered that the girl had been home-schooled and yet passed her college prep tests with flying colors, that she returned to her country at every break, and that although she wasn’t worldly, she was plenty intelligent.

The perfect asset.

Mickey stiffened, her hands clenching around the covers. The perfect asset? What did that mean? What part of her had said that?

And thinking about it, as usual, made every trace of the memory flee into the inaccessible recesses of her mind.

She could have screamed.
Would
have screamed, if not for her sleeping companion—a man drawn into Mickey’s shifting world of too many dangers and too few answers.

She shoved the covers aside, baring her legs to the cool air-conditioned room. She wore her stretchy sport top, but had rinsed the bottoms out and devoutly hoped they would dry before morning. Because come morning … she had to do something.
Anything
. And for that she needed a hook … something that would help her answer Steve’s question of the night before.
Where do we go from here?

That’s how she found herself on his bed, a queen-size with plenty of room for her to ease beside him and sit cross-legged on top of the covers. On second thought she pulled a stray pillow onto her lap, and then she just sat there. Getting here had been so easy, so natural—but waking him up was another matter.

Finally, she whispered into the darkness. “Steve. Wake up.”

He slept on.

No wonder. Still recuperating from that beating, and she’d dragged him across town on foot. Quietly, she leaned over to rap a knuckle against the headboard, not far from his ear.

His hand flashed up to close around her wrist. Her startled gasp turned into a grin quickly enough. Steve, for all his caring save-the-world ways, underestimated himself when it came to his physical nature. “Shh,” she said, all too aware of what those first, disoriented moments of wakefulness could be like. “It’s Mickey.”

Slowly, he released her. “You’re on my bed
again
?”

“I am,” she confirmed.

“You woke me up
again
?”

“I totally did.”

Silence followed, into which he finally sighed.

“But this time you’re wearing something,” she pointed out, most helpfully. And then winced at the pained noise he made as he pushed himself up to sit beside her. The bed shifted beneath her and darned if it didn’t feel almost companionable.

“What’s up?” he said, and the words were muffled as he rubbed a hand down the side of his face and reached for the bedside light.

Mickey would have preferred the darkness. If she was hidden from herself, she should be able to hide from everyone. Too bad it wasn’t working out that way. She squinted as her eyes adjusted. “I can’t sleep.”

Yeah, that had come out well. “I mean …there’s just so much going on in my head, and I can’t reach it. If I go after it, it slides away. I thought … maybe if we talked …or maybe if we did word association.”

His reaction was more perceptive than she expected. “You remembered something else?”

“Something,” she admitted. “It just doesn’t make sense on its own. I was thinking of Naia—who she is, both as a figurehead and as a person.”
Huge dark eyes, fearful but trusting.
“And I thought that she’d be the perfect asset. And then I had no idea what I meant.”

His eyes narrowed, as though it meant something to him. “Irhaddan,” he said, making it a question. Word association.

“Big mean guys.” Nothing new there.

“Foreign.”

“Embassy.” Well, obvious enough to anyone who lived near San Francisco, which housed a number of embassies; the society pages were always listing one event or another … “Antiques,” she added slowly.

“Foreign antiques?” He shook his head, letting it pass. “Gun.”

“SIG P22 … 6.” Dismayed, she barely spoke the last number. She had a gun. She must have a gun.

He didn’t give her any time to think about it. “Antiques.”

That brightened her. “Champagne!”

He snorted. “You … you’re one of a kind, Mickey Finn.”

But her grin barely made it to her face, replaced by a big fat lump in her throat. “Alone,” she whispered, keeping up the game. “Champagne and silk and indescribably good food and … a cat.”

“Station.”

“Chief,” she said, and made a face at him. “What kind of sense …?”

He didn’t answer directly. “Dead.”

“Drop.”
Sturdy shelves divided into niches and half-finished pottery projects, brick wall looming high behind them, diffuse light of a cavernous room, carefree laughter …
“Pottery?” She let herself flop backward, legs still crossed, and barely missed the headboard. “This is pointless.”

“I’m not so sure.” And his words sounded so careful that Mickey raised her head to look at him and then tried to sit up, but the bed wasn’t firm enough and she only floundered.

Steve took her hand and pulled her upright, and there she was, ruffled and frustrated and knee to knee with him. He looked down at their hands and put hers on the bed, releasing it to give his own hand a puzzled kind of glance. And then he said, “I lived with a paranoid schizophrenic when I was growing up. I spent a lot of time hanging with him on the street … hanging with him in clinics and hospitals. There were your average number of tin foil hats, alien abduction concerns, and the governmentally persecuted. I did my share of reading … it was a kind of self-defense, you know?”

“Reading,” she repeated blankly.

“Sure. I figured if the topic of conversation was going to be government conspiracies, I’d damned well have something to talk about. It was a while ago, but not so long that your words don’t mean anything to me. Station chief. That’s CIA. Dead drop—standard spy stuff. Foreign embassies—your basic spy breeding grounds.”

Mickey groaned. “So not the innocent victim.” She flopped back again.

This time he didn’t hesitate; he pulled her upright, and didn’t let go of her hand. “That doesn’t mean you’re guilty, either. You really think you’re part of the problem? Why not that you’re trying to
solve
the problem?”

She pulled her hand free and covered her face—pure cowardly retreat. “Because,” she said, and her voice barely made it to the audible range, “it would be so awful if I was wrong.”

And again he captured her hands, pulling them away from her face to cup them in his as he leaned close. “Okay, then,” he said, startling her with his intensity. “I’ll just have to hope for the both of us.”

“But—”

“Just this once,” he told her, fiercely enough so she wondered which of them he was trying to convince. “Just
one more time
.”

* * * * *

Mickey woke in a strange arrangement of arms and bedcovers, pillow optional. She took a deep, slow breath, not surprised to find herself surrounded by the scent of a certain Greek self-defense instructor. On top of the covers, but he’d flipped the bedspread back over her so she both slept on it and slept under it. Under her cheek, his arm gave an involuntary twitch.

Sunlight streamed through the carelessly closed curtains; a squint at the hotel alarm clock told her they’d slept well into the morning. Through the room’s door, she heard the sound of a vacuum, a brusque knock on a nearby door. “Housekeeping!”

Oh, please. Just a few more moments. Not being chased, not trying to remember …not being alone. Just being with this intense, caring man who’d seen so many unhappy endings and yet who still thought he could carry her through this.

He had no idea what he’d gotten into. How could he? Mickey didn’t.

But she was beginning to suspect.

Just a few more moments …

Steve took a sudden deep breath, a waking breath. He stiffened—that moment of realization. Mickey smiled into his arm and said in a low voice, “Oh my God! I’ve woken up in a strange bed with some woman! I don’t even know her name!”

He relaxed, his laugh nothing more than a gust of warm air on her neck. “That’s okay,” he told her, his voice morning rough. “She doesn’t know it, either.”

She rolled away from him and off the bed, rueful to leave the nest he’d made for her. But this wasn’t a day she could wait for … this was a day she had to go out and chase down. “Dibs on the shower,” she said, stretching mightily. She turned, not surprised to find him watching, and affected great shock. “Good God,” she said. “All that beard
overnight
?”

He gathered his dignity. “Most of it was there last night. You just didn’t notice.”

“Mostly we were moving too fast,” she agreed. “You want the bathroom before I declare it off-limits, you’d better hurry.”

He took her seriously enough, and vacated the bed. She put the Do Not Disturb sign on the door and plunged into the bathroom as soon as he left the door open for her, peeling off her shirt and underwear and deciding to wash them right along with her. With luck, she could recover her things from hotel fleabag, but until then she’d get clean when she had the chance. A quick scrub with overly floral hotel soap and shampoo, and she dug out the toothpaste from the compact kit Steve had left in the bathroom, scrubbing it over her teeth with the corner of a washcloth. Putting her wet clothes back on rated right up there with puddles of dead worms after rain, but at least the pants were dry.

Steve knocked on the door even as she attempted to finger comb her straight hair into something styled; the image regarding her in the mirror wasn’t quite right. Cut-rate clothes, top-rate haircut.

Tendrils of hair against her neck, the slight tug of an up-do against her scalp, champagne sharp on her tongue …

“You have any scissors?” she asked, still staring at herself. Bright eyes… too bright. Too memorable. She needed shaded lenses or sunglasses.

“If you’re decent, open up. I got you a touristy t-shirt to put on. That outfit of yours is a little … eye-catching.”

Great minds think alike, she decided. Time to tone down the amnesiac so the amnesiac could go hunting. She opened the door. “Scissors?”

He handed her a heather grey shirt with a colorful sun logo and
San Jose
in a fanciful font. “Cuticle scissors, I think,” he said, his expression full of doubt.

“They’ll do,” Mickey told him.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Chapter 13

“I can’t believe you did that.” Steve looked at Mickey, looked at the mess of hair in the sink, looked back to the cuticle-scissor hack-job on Mickey’s caramel brown hair.

“Hey,” she said airily. “I left enough to trim into something decent when this is all done. And it’s not that bad. It’s just not what it was.”

“It’s not what it was,” he agreed, and had to grin at her. It wasn’t so bad at that … and he couldn’t help but appreciate that she’d simply done what needed to be done. “Suppose I should grow a beard?”

She snorted. “That’ll take what … another two days at most?” She pulled the T-shirt he’d brought right on over the obviously wet stretchy sports top, much to his relief.

With dignity, he said, “It takes at least three days.”

“Well, never mind then.” She rinsed out the sink and vacated the bathroom, gesturing that it was all his.

He closed the door, had a sudden thought, and popped back out again. She looked back at him in surprise, and he said, “Promise you won’t take off. Promise I won’t find myself alone in this room when I come back out.”

Only the faintest flicker of annoyance crossed her face. Yeah, she’d been thinking about it … but she wasn’t going to make a big deal of it. “I suppose if I don’t promise, then you’re not going to take a shower.”

He smiled most meaningfully.

She flopped back on her bed. The one she
hadn’t
slept in. He took it as surrender and returned to the bathroom.

Didn’t mean he didn’t make it quick. Or that he didn’t nick himself three times with the haste of his shaving. When he turned the water off he could tell the television was on, but didn’t find it reassuring. In a sudden surge of concern, he yanked the bathroom door open—

To the sight of Mickey dancing on the bed in cheerleader fashion, singing lyrics that included her own name. That old Hey Mickey song.

He sagged against the door in relief.