Out-Foxxed

The woman and children started to wail and sob, Sabrina joining the cacophony.

The tall guy barged into the room. “What the hell is going on in here?” He spotted his pal, then aimed a suspicious glare at the women. “Shut up!” He leveled his weapon on Sabrina. “Move against the wall.”

Sabrina flattened against the wall next to the window behind her. She reached for the woman and ushered her back as well. A child clung to either side of her. All were sobbing hysterically.

“What happened?” the tall guy demanded, his question directed at Sabrina.

“I don’t know.” She forced her voice to quiver. “He came over here to get the boy and he just stopped, looked kind of strange and then crumpled to the floor.”

That she hadn’t reached for the downed man’s weapon would lend credence to her innocent bystander status.

Keeping an eye on her, the tall guy squatted down just far enough to touch his fallen comrade’s neck. He felt for a pulse, a frown overtaking his expression.

Speaking in that broken foreign tongue again, he called out to his pals in the other room.

The torturer in the other room stormed in next. “What is taking so long? I need the boy.” He drew up short when he saw Goon Number Two on the floor.

Sabrina held on to one of the woman’s arms and made small sounds of terror; the woman did the same. The children continued to whimper and sob, amping up the frustration level of the enemy.

Sabrina figured that this was as good as it was going to get. Only one, the boss, was left in the room with Stavi.

She pulled downward on the other woman’s arm. Their gazes locked. Sabrina nodded to the floor. The woman moved her head up and down in acknowledgement.

Her right hand easing down to the hem of her uniform, Sabrina watched the two men prepare to drag their friend away, probably to join the dead security detail in the en suite bath.

As soon as each man had crouched down and hooked an arm under the dead guy’s, she snatched her .32 out of its holster. Two rounds, one in the temple for the tall guy, one smack in the middle of the forehead for the torturer who turned to look up at her in surprise.

She was halfway across the room when the boss suddenly loomed in the open doorway, his weapon leveled on her. Two more shots, this time straight through the heart. She hit the floor and rolled just in time to avoid the round he managed to squeeze off before he dropped. Unlike the jarring blasts from her .32, a swift hiss and pop were the only sounds his silenced weapon made.

Back on her feet, she holstered her weapon and rushed to the corner where the woman and children huddled together near the floor.

“Everything’s all right,” Sabrina assured. “Come on, let’s check on your husband.”

Thank God the woman and children hadn’t been in the way of the single shot the bastard had managed. One of the lavish pillows on the bed hadn’t been so lucky.

The husband was already shrieking and making all kinds of noise. He kept calling a name—his wife’s, Sabrina presumed.

While the woman and children crowded around the injured man, Sabrina checked the two other hostages bound and still unconscious on the floor to ensure they were still breathing. Both were alive—drugged, she presumed.

Time for her to get out of here.

Other guests would no doubt have called the front desk by now to report the sound of gunshots.

Sabrina propped the door open and prepared to wheel her cart out of the room.

“Please wait.”

Sabrina hesitated, then turned to the woman who’d called out to her.

She hurried to where Sabrina stood poised to get the hell out of there. “Thank you.” The tears rolling down her cheeks and the quiver of her lips told Sabrina that she wanted to say much more but wasn’t sure how.

Sabrina smiled. “You’ll be fine now.”

She had to get out of there.

Pushing the cart with all her might, she hurried to the elevators and stabbed the call button. “Come on, come on,” she muttered.

The control team in the rooms on either side of 1012 would stay put until hotel security had arrived and called the local authorities. Once the Federal Bureau of Investigation was on site to take charge, the control team would withdraw.

No one would ever know that IT&PA had ever been there.

That was the way it worked.

Anticipation seared through her as she trekked the slow movement of the damned elevator on the digital readout above the closed doors. If security caught her up here, they would want to question her. She couldn’t let that happen. Abandoning the cart wasn’t doable since it was rigged. She had no choice but to ride this out.

One of the two elevators stopped on her floor and she held her breath as she waited for the doors to slide open and reveal the occupants, if any, of the car.

Empty.

Her arms weak with relief, she shoved the cart into the empty elevator and selected floor six. No sooner had the doors started to close when a ding announced the arrival of the second elevator.

Close. Too close.

Even as her car started to descend, she heard running steps pounding in the corridor beyond the elevator alcove she’d just vacated.

Hotel security had arrived.

Director Marx wouldn’t be happy that she’d had to take out all four of the perpetrators, but there hadn’t been any other option.

Those men would have killed her and the hostages had she not used deadly force. Wounding one of them in hopes of interrogating him later simply hadn’t been feasible.

Outside 608, she had just reached for her passkey when the door opened.

“He’s not happy,” Trainer said.

Angie had already grabbed the other end of the cart and was helping Sabrina guide it into the room.

“It was my call to make,” Sabrina countered, not the least bit intimidated or sorry she’d chosen the course of action she had. Stavi was alive. He surely knew what those men wanted with him. All the Bureau had to do was convince him to share the information. As far as Sabrina was concerned, that was their problem.

She’d done her job. All four hostages were rescued.

Angie, still sporting a maid’s uniform, rushed over to help Sabrina disrobe.

Trainer turned his back and focused on unrigging the cart. Big Hugh jumped into the fray and helped get the job done.

When all the equipment and disguises were packed in typical wheeled, upright luggage, each member of the recovery team left with at least one bag in tow.

All but Sabrina, who carried only her briefcase as she took the elevator down to the lobby and stopped by the front desk. “I’m leaving very early in the morning,” she told the clerk. “Can you clear me without my having to bother checking out?”

“Certainly, Miss Freeman. We’ll slip the final bill under your door by 3 a.m.”

“Excellent.”

Sabrina strode out of the hotel, her sneakers silent on the shiny marble floor. The same doorman who’d greeted her what felt like a lifetime ago, bid her a good evening. She gave him a smile of thanks and hurried off into the gloomy night.

The rain was gone, leaving the city she loved with a crisp bite in the air and smelling pretty damned clean for a place that teemed with no less than eight million people.

Once in a while, a taxi cruising for a fare rolled by on the street, the tires cutting through the water puddled there.

She didn’t bother hailing one. She would walk, at least for a while, to give herself time to unwind and to let the cold air remind her that she was still alive. That was the great part about her work. She came so close to death at times…close enough to appreciate living one more day. Not everyone understood how that felt. It was the most satisfying feeling she’d ever known. Maybe that made her a freak, if so, that was okay.

The scene back at the hotel would be one of chaos until the feds arrived to take control of the situation. The Stavi family would only know that a maid had saved their lives.

Sabrina hadn’t touched anything in the room so there wouldn’t be any prints left behind, not that it mattered. She didn’t exist in any of the traditional spy world databases. IT&PA wasn’t known in any capacity whatsoever by its sibling agencies.

All involved in the rescue would do exactly as Sabrina was doing now—disappear in the night…until next time.

CHAPTER THREE

THE HOT WATER slowly but surely warmed the winter chill that had seeped deep into her bones, relaxing her tense muscles. Sabrina had ended up walking the entire twenty blocks home.

Without the rain, it hadn’t been so bad. She’d needed the time to clear her head. To rid her lungs of the smell of death.

She studied her arms and the new bruises there. So far her cheek hadn’t swollen. There would be some discoloration from the slaps she’d taken but, if her luck held out, no noticeable swelling. Bruises could be covered, swelling could not. She was damned lucky things hadn’t been a hell of a lot worse.

Just part of the job. Pain and death were a constant in her line of work. She’d gotten used to it a long time ago.

At least that was what she told herself. Occasionally she’d let the kill-or-be-killed reality get to her, but then she would remind herself that what she had done had saved a man and his family. That was what really counted.

The only part that counted to Sabrina.

The first time she’d killed a man, Marx had walked her through the aftereffects.

Sabrina closed her eyes and tried to block the memory but it came anyway. The assignment had been in Ireland. The target had been an American traitor leading a terrorist cell who had recently obtained a military-grade nerve gas. Sabrina had gotten in, made the strike and gotten out in twenty-four hours. Eliminating that target had allowed local authorities to seize the highly lethal nerve gas before it could be used to take innocent lives.

She’d been fine until she returned home.

The reality of what she’d done had hit her then. Marx had known it would. He’d been waiting for her at her apartment door.

During the verbal exchange about how she was fine, she’d fallen apart. He’d talked her through the turmoil, helped her to see the greater good she had accomplished. His wise and calm reasoning had done the trick.

Sabrina blinked away the memory. Funny thing, she realized just then—her father had done that for her dozens of times growing up. He would talk her through a trying time. She supposed, in a way, Marx had stepped into his shoes.

“Way too deep, Sabrina,” she mumbled. She needed to relax and put work behind her.

She’d certainly created the right atmosphere for it. The candles flickered and glowed, filling the room with a cozy ambience. The scented ones oozed their subtle fragrance into the air, adding to the pleasant mood. She’d left the overhead lights off, allowing only the illumination of the dozens of candles. Just like she’d told Trainer she wanted to do.

She smiled and wondered if he’d managed to make his date. Big Hugh was likely out with his significant other, enjoying a quiet dinner for two at some ritzy restaurant off the beaten path. Angie would be at home with her husband of twenty years and their three kids, maybe watching a movie with a tub of buttered popcorn.

Sabrina couldn’t fathom how Angie managed it. Her husband couldn’t know about her work. He thought her employer was an international temps and personal assistants agency. An agency that provided support personnel for visiting dignitaries from other nations or provided support personnel for American businessmen traveling to foreign countries whose companies had no ongoing reason to keep one or more linguists on staff. And that was exactly what IT&PA did in addition to covert government operations.

It was the perfect cover. Movement in and out of a country was never seen as suspicious, and many times their targets were the ones doing the hiring. Now that was burrowing in deep. That was the ultimate cover, one the enemy didn’t suspect for a moment. The usual government agencies couldn’t hope to accomplish that depth of infiltration.

Not everyone employed at IT&PA were secret agents. Some were “exempt” employees, meaning they were exactly what they appeared to be—clerical personnel with additional skills such as multilingual abilities as well as in-depth knowledge of foreign countries. Oftentimes a job consisted of nothing more than serving as an official guide on a visit to another country. Anything a businessman or woman, American or otherwise, could need in the way of temporary assistance would be found at IT&PA.

The agency had been the brainchild of Anderson Marx, the director. Only the president himself, and the directors of the CIA, FBI and NSA were aware of IT&PA’s presence in the spy world. IT&PA was neither bound by borders nor inhibited by the usual rules. Sabrina and her colleagues could be assigned anywhere in the world at any time, and only in the situations where the usual means would not work or had failed. The latter was the reason the standard rules didn’t apply. IT&PA was only called in once there were no other alternatives.

Today’s mission could have been so much worse. She’d been lucky. The four men who’d taken the Stavi family hostage could have killed them all before she’d arrived. The fact that they hadn’t suggested two possibilities—the intelligence they’d hoped to obtain had been extremely valuable, or the men simply were inept.

Telling herself it wasn’t her problem now, she ducked her head under the water and banished all thoughts of the day’s mission. The big brown eyes of those children and their mother elbowed their way into her thoughts, interrupting her desperately needed relaxation. She’d saved them. Why the lingering feelings of uncertainty?

Because it could have so easily gone the other way.

She went through this every time children were involved in a mission. After seven years, one would think she would get over the after-the-fact apprehension. But she didn’t.

If she mentioned the feelings to her team, Angie would insist that it was nothing more than her biological clock screaming at her since those feelings were unfailingly related to missions involving children. Sabrina was thirty-two, after all, Angie would say.

Sabrina didn’t know how to tell Angie this, but she didn’t have a biological clock. It had given up hope and gone out of business years ago. She had no desire for those kinds of strings. No permanent attachments allowed her to accept any and all assignments without hesitation.

The trickle of denial that filtered through her ticked her off. She wasn’t about to let the past intrude on her present.

Not ever again.

Sabrina climbed out of the tub. Frothy bubbles slid down her skin and accumulated on the floor as she stepped onto the cool tile. She should eat. The wine and the bath had been very nice and very necessary, but she needed food. She’d learned from experience in the past couple of years that food could be an extremely reliable way to distract herself from things she didn’t want to think about. Her intense workouts allowed for that occasional indulgence.

Grabbing a couple of big fluffy towels, she wrapped her hair in one, turban-style, and swabbed her body with the other. As she did, she considered what frozen entrées she had in the fridge. There might be the makings of a salad if the expiration dates hadn’t passed too many days ago. She spent so many late nights at work she didn’t stock the refrigerator regularly and as soon as she did, she ended up throwing half of the food out a week or two later after returning from an unexpected mission.

The doorbell rang as she shuffled out of her room. A frown tugged at her brow. It was almost nine and she just wanted to vegetate for the rest of the evening. Why the heck would anyone be at her door now?

Then she remembered.

She stalled in the middle of her living room. No way was she going to answer that door.

This was the one downside to being single. Well-meaning friends. If her single friends were involved in ongoing relationships, they wanted everyone else to be as well. Not one, especially the one likely outside the door just now, could understand how Sabrina could be happy without a steady guy in her life. She couldn’t tell them that a steady relationship created unnecessary questions.

A new round of pounding on the door rattled the hinges. “Sabrina! I know you’re in there.”

Damn. This was a new low even for Veronica.

Veronica Call and Sabrina had started out at the UN together as substitute interpreters. They’d stayed friends after Sabrina was recruited by IT&PA.

“I’ll just keep banging until you open up!” Veronica warned. “Or your neighbors call the cops.”

Knowing she wasn’t kidding, Sabrina released both dead bolts, then wrenched the door open. “I was in the tub.” Not exactly a lie.

Veronica, hands pushed beneath a heavy fur coat and stationed on red silk clad hips, surveyed her skeptically. “You knew I was coming,” she accused. “We planned this evening days ago.”

“I forgot, okay?” Sabrina stepped back, allowing her furious friend to enter.

Once inside the door, Veronica pointed to Sabrina’s bedroom. “Go get dressed. You’re going out.”

For about five seconds, Sabrina considered telling her to forget it but then decided against it. Veronica was one pushy broad. If she didn’t get her way, she’d just stand here all night and argue her case. The woman must have been a trial lawyer in another life.

“Where are we going?” Sabrina asked, padding to her bedroom and leaving the door open so they could still talk.

“Blue Note. Wesley’s meeting me there.”

Wesley. Oh, yes. Sabrina remembered him. Tall, handsome, gorgeous golden eyes, sleek ebony skin.

“What I don’t understand,” she said loudly enough for her friend to hear, “is why you want me there. Isn’t Wesley enough for you?” Sabrina grinned as she rummaged for something to wear.

“Wesley has a friend.”

She should have seen that one coming. Dread pooled in Sabrina’s gut, and she glanced at the other woman who now leaned in the doorway, her arms crossed defiantly over her chest.

“That’s what I was afraid of.”

“Come on, Sabrina. David is nice. Really nice.”

Sabrina removed one of her favorite little black dresses from its padded hanger. “Nice?” She tossed her friend a skeptical look. She hated being set up.

“Nice and handsome and sexy as hell,” Veronica fired back, her temper flaring to match her hot red dress. “I know you’ll like him. You just have to give him a chance.”

Sabrina smoothed the tight sheath over her hips. “And you’ve met this David?”

“Well, no, but Wesley told me all about him.”

“Wesley told you he’s sexy?” Sabrina countered. “Now I’m worried about Wesley.”

“You’re impossible.”

Sabrina stepped into a pair of black stilettos and uncoiled the towel from her hair. “Gotta blow dry.”

Fifteen minutes later, dried, styled, and accessorized, Sabrina slipped into her coat and announced, “I’m ready.”

“’Bout time.” Veronica assessed her from head to toe and back. “You look fabulous. David should be very pleased.”

“My greatest aspiration,” Sabrina said wistfully as they exited her apartment. “To please a stranger.”

* * *

THE PREMIER JAZZ CLUB on 3rd and 131st was packed. As a close cousin of the owner, Wesley had reserved the best table in the house. The exciting, spirited atmosphere immediately lifted Sabrina’s mood. Even if David hadn’t shown. Or maybe she was simply enjoying Veronica’s discomfort over the fact that her scheming had failed so miserably. There was nothing more humiliating than masterminding a blind date only to have one half of the couple fail to show.

“I’m sure he’ll be here,” Wesley said again.

Sabrina wasn’t keeping an exact count, but she was pretty sure he’d made this same comment at least seven or eight times.

“Should we go ahead and order?” Veronica asked looking immensely uncomfortable.

Served her right. Maybe this would teach her a lesson.

Sabrina tried not to get too much glee from the circumstances but she just couldn’t help herself.

“Yes, let’s order.” Wesley looked even more appalled than his date.

The waiter arrived as if he’d sensed the shift of intentions at the table. He made his recommendations and then efficiently accepted their orders.

“You know,” Sabrina felt compelled to say considering the downtrodden expression worn by her good friends, “this really is okay.”

Wesley’s expression suddenly brightened. “There he is.”

Sabrina usually controlled her baser urges better than this but for some reason she totally blew it this time. Like Veronica, she almost broke her neck trying to get a glimpse of her incredibly late blind date.

Any oxygen in her lungs evaporated as instantaneously as a drop of water on a scorching desert rock.

David was gorgeous. Drop-dead gorgeous in fact.

Apparently noticing Sabrina’s stunned look, Veronica leaned close and whispered, “I told you. My Wesley has exceptional taste.”

Sabrina shot her a disdainful look. “The jury’s still out,” she muttered.

David paused at their table, apologizing profusely and then introductions were made.

It had been a very long time since anyone had waltzed into a room and blown Sabrina away like this guy did. Maybe she’d just been lonely for far too long. Whatever the case, the tide turned and the night suddenly had the makings of a great evening. She’d have to thank her friend later. Much later.

Dinner and dancing with expensive wine and intelligent conversation were enough to make any girl happy for a few hours. But by 1 a.m., Sabrina was ready to go. And her hurry had nothing to do with the food or the place or the time.

It was David.

She hadn’t been this determined to take a man home with her in far too long to recall.

Veronica and Wesley waved goodbye as they loaded into their taxi. David didn’t need to hail a cab because he had his own limo. He gave the driver Sabrina’s address before powering up the privacy shield.

At thirty-two, and well experienced in the ways of the world Sabrina was not usually this easily impressed. But she had to admit, this guy had pushed all the right buttons.

She wanted him.

“Would you like a nightcap?” He gestured to the minibar as the luxurious vehicle smoothly rolled away from the curb.

Sabrina moved her head slowly from side to side as she slid off first one shoe and then the other. There was only one thing she wanted right now.

As if he’d been waiting all night for that single cue, David loosened his tie and shouldered out of his jacket. He ushered Sabrina down onto the seat and spread open her heavy faux fur coat. He kissed her nose and then her eyes before placing his lips firmly over hers. The kiss was slow, thorough and incredibly sexy. The fire, by contrast, did not start out slow and easy, it blazed instantly and roared out of control, making her greedy for more.

He kissed his way down her throat and to the cleavage revealed by the low-cut dress. He smoothed his hands over her thighs and hips, and then he started to do things that drove her completely mad.

Within sixty seconds of his first kiss, he had her coming fast and furiously and he hadn’t even unzipped his trousers.

She came twice before they reached her building, David using nothing more than his skilled touch, his equally masterful kiss. He sent his driver home and they kissed some more as they entered her building. She didn’t remember how they managed the four flights to her floor, only the feel of his mouth and hands on her body. She couldn’t remember when she’d enjoyed kissing so much. There was something so enticing about his mouth.

Somehow they reached her apartment and she fumbled for the key. Once they were on the other side of that door, a desperate race to get naked started. By the time they fell onto the bed together, she was rushing toward climax yet again at the mere thought of finally having him inside her. She jerked open a drawer in her bedside table, fishing for a condom. He ripped open the package and slid on the protection sending her heart rate into triple digits just watching his hand slide over his hard, fully erect member.