Hot Intent (Hqn) Read online

  Alex turned off the TV. Katie was still asleep, so he used the time to get on his laptop to see if any of the feelers he’d put out on Operation Cold Intent had come back to him yet.

  Bingo. An encrypted email from C¥berE¥e, perhaps the top hacker he’d ever seen operate and his anonymous mentor since his first attempts to start hacking.

  Alex ran their usual decryption protocol and got gibberish. He stared at the letters and symbols in surprise. He would suspect a failed message transmission were this not from C¥berE¥e. And then it hit him. He ran a secondary decryption protocol the hacker sometimes used.

  Sure enough, a short message resolved itself on his screen. He stared at it in dismay.

  Blondie and ThrεεWolvεs dead. Looks like murder. What the fuck did you get them into?

  He knew the forces behind Cold Intent had killed Blondie. But they’d killed her boyfriend, too? Jesus. Who was doing this? And what in the hell was Cold Intent? Why was someone killing to cover its tracks?

  He messaged C¥berE¥e back, asking if the guy had any idea what Blondie and her boyfriend were killed over. Hackers had lots of enemies if they were any good, right?

  The reply made him feel ill. It said that Blondie must have been looking into something within the past few days that had triggered the real-world attack. No matter how he tried to rationalize it away, Alex couldn’t escape arriving at the same conclusion C¥berE¥e had. He was responsible for the hackers’ deaths. He sent an email back.

  Any idea if someone got their files?

  The reply was immediate.

  An ABC agency was making a run at them. I snagged everything and wiped the drives before the Man could get in. Some interesting shit here. Who’s Cold Intent?

  Aww, crap. He didn’t need dead hackers all over the planet on his account. Alex typed hard, as if he could transmit his emphatic warning through the keys themselves.

  Be. Careful. They’ll kill you, too. And no, I don’t know who “they” are. You need to leave it alone.

  C¥yberE¥e’s reply was succinct.

  I’ll find ’em. You kill ’em.

  He stared at the message speculatively. He’d long suspected that C¥berE¥e was some sort of intelligence agent or at least a former one. More than once, the hacker had sent Alex timely warnings about various government agencies being close to catching up with him and some of his more adventurous online activities as a teen.

  What was fascinating about that short statement was that this guy seemed to think Alex was capable of killing someone. Hackers were criminals but rarely violent ones. Who was C¥berE¥e, really? Not that it mattered at the end of the day if the guy found Cold Intent for him. Slowly, one letter at a time, Alex typed his response.

  Done.

  “Whatcha doin?” Katie asked from right behind him.

  Alex jumped about a foot straight up in the air.

  “Wow. I managed to startle the great spy, Alex Peters?” she crowed. “I win!”

  He scowled at her as he stood up, sweeping her into his arms. “We’ll see about that.”

  She laughed as he carried her back to the bed. “You always have to win, don’t you?”

  “Yup.”

  For once, their lovemaking was simple and uncomplicated, just sex. No strings attached. No deep emotional conflicts. No struggles to push past emotional blocks or physical boundaries. It felt good to him, and he was fairly certain it felt good to her.

  It was nearly an hour later, and Katie had unequivocally declared him the winner in all things...loudly and passionately...before he finally collapsed to the mattress beside her. His soul felt lighter, somehow.

  And that was when fear came calling, deep in his gut. This time, she had blasted past his emotional defenses so easily and smoothly he hadn’t even realized she’d done it.

  How she managed to take him out of his head and into a place of pure feeling and emotion, he had no idea. But he had no power to resist whatever it was she did to him. God knew, he wanted to. He hated the loss of control. His entire life was based around the concept of supreme self-discipline. Success rested upon it. Hell, survival rested upon it.

  He died a little each time she broke through his mental defenses. But man, it was a good way to go. Seductive. Addictive as hell.

  Still. He would give just about anything for her not to be here with him, back in harm’s way. He couldn’t fight them all—André, Peter and Katie herself—but his gut yelled at him that taking her to Cuba with him was a giant mistake.

  “I’m hungry,” Katie announced.

  He had to smile. She sounded like a little kid who’d just come in from the playground, breathless and happy. “Shower, then food?” he suggested.

  She leaped out of bed, laughing over her shoulder. “Last one to the shower’s a rotten egg!”

  How could anyone be so damned innocent? Particularly given that she was highly intelligent and by no means naive. And getting less naive by the day around him. She told him once that happiness was a choice. Was innocence a choice, as well? If so, he’d chosen long ago to forsake it. He climbed out of bed more temperately and invaded her shower.

  He’d just finished dressing and she was still in the bathroom blow-drying her hair when his cell phone rang. André.

  “Hey, boss. What’s up?”

  “You’ve got a charter flight to Inagua in two hours. From there, a boat will take you to Baracoa. My contact will meet you at the rendezvous point on shore and take you to the base camp that’s being set up for you.”

  Baracoa. He swore under his breath. Peter had been right, after all. A sane man would tell André the Baracoa meet-up was compromised. But Alex was inclined to go ahead and show up where Peter expected him to. Maybe he could spot whatever was going on that had both the CIA and FSB so interested in Cuba all of a sudden.

  “Got it,” he replied to André’s more detailed instructions, which he memorized in lieu of writing them down to be found by anyone else.

  “Have a safe trip, Alex.”

  Yeah. Right. “Thanks.” He hung up before more sarcasm could leak into his voice.

  He looked up and spied Katie standing in the bathroom doorway. “Showtime?” she asked.

  An urge to lie nearly overcame him. To take her to the airport, put her on a plane and send her home. But not only had he promised never to lie to her, she could also sniff fibs a mile away. He sighed. “As soon as you’re ready to go, we’ll head out.”

  Into what, he had no damned idea. But one thing he knew for sure. They were headed into something.

  *

  KATIE WATCHED THE twin prop airplane that had been their ride lift off into the sunny blue sky, and then looked around at Great Inagua Island in dismay. She’d never seen a more barren place. It was nothing but windswept dirt and rocks. “I thought Caribbean islands were supposed to be tropical paradises.”

  “Not if all the tree cover is destroyed by settlers and the ecosystem collapses in response and desertifies. Then they look like this,” Alex replied.

  She shuddered. “It’s awful. Who lives here, anyway?”

  “Workers at the salt factory. About eight hundred of them.”

  “Are they okay after the storm?” she asked in quick concern.

  “They were evacuated by the salt company. We’re the only people back on the island.”

  “Wow. We’re really all alone on a desert island, then?”

  He smiled reluctantly. “Yes. We’ve got to make our way to the shore on foot to catch our ride. I hope you’re up for a hike.”

  The last time he’d asked her that, they’d been fleeing with an hour-old Dawn stuffed inside her coat and a war raging behind them. “Are you kidding? Piece of cake.” She just hoped no wars were about to break out around them. She had a sneaking suspicion one might, though, before this was all said and done.

  Alex took off across the pale dirt. The going was easy for about three minutes. And then they reached a patch of ruined vegetation, twisted and flattened by Hurricane Giselle
into a nearly impassable tangle of jagged wood, sharp-leaved foliage and hidden rocks waiting to turn the unwary ankle.

  Thank God she’d been working out like a maniac since he’d left. She was panting like a dog, but so was Alex. It took them something like an hour to cover a quarter mile.

  “How far do we have to go in this stuff?” she finally broke down and asked Alex.

  “Just over the ridge.”

  Awesome. They weren’t far from the crest now. Another fifteen minutes of carefully picking their way forward, and they topped the low rise.

  The ocean and a blond beach stretched away in front of them. And praise the Lord, this side of the ridge was bare of vegetation until the margin of the beach below. They made their way down the hillside relatively quickly with only sharp stones and treacherous slides of gravel to avoid.

  But then they got to a literal wall of destroyed scrub trees, bushes and random vegetative debris. It was easily eight feet tall and looked like a loofah sponge. “How on earth are we supposed to get through this?” she demanded. “Even if we had a machete, it would take hours to hack through all that.”

  “That, grasshopper, is why man conquered fire,” Alex answered.

  “Isn’t it too wet to burn?” she asked dubiously.

  “Only one way to find out,” he answered absently as he commenced laying a fire at the base of the pile. The wind was still brisk in the lee of the hurricane and the fledgling flame blew out twice before it finally caught and held.

  In seconds, though, it flared from the size of her hand to waist high, and from there to well over her head. Apparently, enough of the material had been dead long enough that a single day in the sun and wind, posthurricane, had dried it out. The pile went up in a firestorm that swept down the beach at shocking speed. No fire department on earth could put that out. She and Alex scrambled back from the intense heat as the debris burned with a roar of sound.

  “My God! What if there are houses down the beach?” she cried.

  “No house survived two-hundred-mile-per-hour winds for fourteen hours. And if one did, it was wrecked, anyway. A stone structure might survive the hurricane, but it won’t burn.” Alex shrugged, pragmatic. “Burning this stuff off is how a cleanup crew will get rid of it, anyway.”

  She watched the fire rip down the beach in front of the stiff wind with deep misgivings. The good news was the wind was headed out toward the ocean. If they were lucky, they hadn’t just set the entire island on fire. And the salt factory was on the other side of the island, well upwind of this conflagration. Still, the ease with which Alex had taken radical action without concern for peripheral damage sent up warning flags in her head.

  The debris burned hard for maybe thirty minutes. Where there were decent-size tree trunks and brush, the fire continued to burn. But here and there, where the pile had been mostly small brush and dead vegetation, the fire started to blow out.

  Katie spied a small shape well out on the water. “Is that a boat?”

  Alex pulled out binoculars to have a look. “That’s our ride,” he announced. “Time to head down to the water. Keep your feet moving and your shoes won’t burn as we cross over the embers.”

  She stared at the remnants of the fire in front of her, maybe fifteen feet wide. Whoa, whoa, whoa. “I don’t do the walking-across-beds-of-coals thing, Alex.”

  “Walk lightly and quickly on your entire foot. Don’t run. You’ll be fine.”

  She scowled ferociously at him, but he only shrugged back. “Follow me.”

  This was how life was always going to be with him, wasn’t it? He would blithely lead her into danger, and she’d follow along like a lamb for the slaughter. She sighed and walked fast across the coals, distributing her weight across her entire foot with each step.

  Vague heat registered around her, but before she knew it, she was on the other side of the glowing ember field. Her heart was racing like a runaway horse, and one spot on her leather hiking boots was smoldering a bit, but otherwise, she was intact. That hadn’t been so bad, after all, darn it. She hated it when he was right.

  A dark-skinned man angled a crappy little fishing boat toward them. It barely looked seaworthy and was in desperate need of a barnacle scraping and paint job. He stopped about a hundred feet shy of shore and gestured for them to come out to him.

  “How are we supposed to get out there?” Katie asked blankly from the edge of the beach.

  “Swim. Why else do you think I made you put your gear in a waterproof bag?”

  She scowled at him again. “I thought it was for rain.”

  “C’mon.” Alex was already stripping off his shirt, pants and shoes, and stowing them in his bag.

  “I don’t have a bathing suit!” she cried in sudden horror.

  “You have underwear. Same difference.”

  “Not the same, thank you very much.”

  “I’m sure Pedro won’t mind if you want to swim out there naked. God knows, I’ll enjoy the view.”

  Thinking terrible, murderous thoughts about him, she stripped down to her underwear and stuffed her clothes in her bag. “You’re such a jerk sometimes,” she muttered.

  “You knew what you were getting into when you insisted on coming with me,” he said stonily.

  He was right. But that didn’t make her any happier to be swimming out to a total stranger in lingerie, darn it. She was so getting even with Alex for this.

  To make matters worse, the water was freaking cold. Apparently, the hurricane had stirred the ocean, pulling shallow, warm water out to sea and cold, deep water up to the surface. Her teeth were chattering like a high-speed typewriter by the time she climbed the rickety ladder into the back of the boat.

  The driver’s gaze raked down her nearly naked body once and then, blessedly, the man turned away to face the wheel. The boat engine started with a cough. She took the scrap of terry cloth Alex passed her.

  Swear to God, the towel was covered with grease stains. But it was that or freeze to death before she got dry. She threw Alex a long-suffering look and used the disgusting towel. He was doing this on purpose, punishing her for not staying at home like he’d wanted her to.

  Tough. She might not like the whole idea of him going to Cuba one bit, but if he did insist on going, no way was she letting him go alone. He was her man, and she was protective.

  After a few minutes of letting the brisk breeze finish drying her skin, she shivered and shook her way back into her jeans and T-shirt. She added a sweatshirt from her bag and gradually began to feel her fingers and toes once more.

  The boat bumped along over waist-high waves that Pedro assured them were wonderfully calm seas after the recent storm. She failed to convince her stomach of that, however, and ended up barfing ignominiously off the back of the boat. She felt better afterward, but the whole experience sucked.

  Alex suggested she try to sleep and made her a nest in some piled fishing net, which stunk of raw fish. She was so miserable, though, that she curled up in it and managed to pass out for a couple of hours.

  Pedro said something about it being about seventy miles from Inagua to Baracoa, and Alex said something about the trip taking about four or five hours. She didn’t think she was ever going to get off that bobbing little boat and see solid land again. Clearly she was not Navy material like her brother, Mike.

  Finally, as a spectacular sunset stained the western sky in a dizzying display of color, a black hump took shape on the horizon below the sunset.

  “There it is,” Alex said. “Cuba.”

  “How come there aren’t any lights—” She broke off. Because of the hurricane. She supposed coming ashore right after the storm like this would make it a lot easier to sneak onto the island. At least, that was probably the idea.

  But as the shore drew near, she saw there would be nothing easy about this at all. Giant waves pounded the rocky crags and cliffs that formed the coastline, sending up massive geysers of white spray in the twilight. If she and Alex tried to swim ashore in that t
hey’d be torn to pieces on the rocks.

  “How on earth are we getting from here to there?” she asked him.

  “Wind blew us off course. The landing point’s a little farther north along the coast. Pedro says there’s a beach at our rendezvous point.”

  She sensed another swim in her near future. Fantabulous.

  The good news was they did, indeed, motor up the coast to a stretch of shoreline without the intimidating cliffs. The bad news was Pedro refused to pull in close to the shore. Apparently, the storm surge was still way up the shoreline and the man didn’t want to risk running aground on the remains of some sort of dock that had stood at this spot a few days ago.

  When she slid over the edge of the boat into the water, she was startled to discover that she was only standing in chest-high water. The boat pulled away into the darkness behind her as she started the long swim to shore behind Alex.

  It took forever to reach land. She was nearly as chilled as last time when they finally slogged through the wet sand to another thick wall of debris from the storm. This pile contained evidence of humans: sawed lumber, bricks and mangled sheets of rusty aluminum.

  “Now what?” she murmured below the sound of the surf behind them. “Are we going to set the coast on fire and send up the mother of all here-we-are beacons?”

  “Not hardly. Now we get dry, get warm and get clothed. And then we wait for our contact.”

  Perversely, it made her feel better to know he was cold and miserable, too. She reached for her bag of clothing, but Alex stopped her. “The fastest way for us to warm up is to share body heat. Skin to skin. Didn’t you learn that in scouting or from your brothers?”

  Crud. She did remember it now that he mentioned it. “I’m not thinking on all cylinders tonight.”

  “Symptom of encroaching hypothermia. Most people only associate it with winter cold exposure. They don’t realize hypothermia is a real problem even in a mild climate like this, particularly if a person is wet like we are now.”