The Heart of a Renegade

Why shouldn’t he have a dossier on her, if he’d been sent to find her? But why was the CIA suddenly interested in her when everyone else had hung her out to dry in China?

She began to feel small again. Afraid. And that horribly familiar panic began to nip at her brain.

“Hey?”

She jumped, whipped her eyes to him.

He stood drying his hair with a towel, wearing a white T-shirt and jeans faded in places she shouldn’t look. God, he was good-looking. In a rough and untamed way. He seemed too tough to have the sensitivity for those photographs. Yet there was something in the desolate gray of his eyes, the way the lines fanned softly out from them, that echoed the haunting vistas in the photos.

“You okay?” he said, stilling the towel as he studied her face.

“Yeah, I—I’m fine. Did…you take all of those?” she pointed to the wall.

“Yep.”

“They’re beautiful.”

“Thanks. You want to take a shower? Water’s hot.” He smiled and it reached into those wilderness eyes, giving her a thump of sensation in her stomach.

“I…” she became cognizant of the fact she probably stank of garbage and old liquor from that jacket he’d worn. “I guess I should, huh?”

He nodded. “Yep.”

“I don’t have any clean clothes,” she hesitated. “I guess I’m stating the obvious.” She felt awkward. Seeing those photographs made her feel as though she’d somehow seen him naked. It was a language she spoke, and when you came across someone who communicated in the same visceral way you did, the link was there whether you wanted it or not.

“I left some stuff for you in the bathroom,” he said. “It was the best I could do for now. We can pick up some things for you later. Coffee or tea?”

“I…coffee would be great, thanks.”

“Bathroom’s that way, down the hall.”

She began to walk, stopped. “You’re really casual about this,” she said. “You say it’s not your thing, but…you’ve done it a lot, haven’t you?”

“Picked up women and brought them home? Yeah, I do that a lot.” He said it with such a deadpan expression in his flat Australian tone she wasn’t sure whether he was joking or not.

“I mean…never mind.” She began to make her way to the bathroom.

“You mean killing a couple of gangsters, assaulting two cops and then coming home to make coffee?”

She stopped. “Yes, something like that.”

He tossed his towel over a chair at the table, opened a cupboard and took two mugs out. “Your accent is cute, you know that?” he said, plunking the mugs on the counter.

“And you know exactly what part of the U.K. it comes from, too. It’s all in that dossier on your computer, so please don’t play games with me, Stone.”

His eyes flicked between her and his computer and his features turned serious. He stood to his full height, facing her squarely. There was a latent aggression in his posture that made her nervous.

“You looked at my laptop?”

“I’d like to know what is going on and what happened to Giles in Shanghai.”

His eyes narrowed slowly. Then a ghost of a smile played at the corners of his strong mouth. “Fair enough,” he said, and he turned and reached for a box of green tea. “Take your shower and we’ll sit down and talk.”

Luke felt her eyes boring into his back. He ignored her as he poured boiling water over a tea bag.

He’d underestimated Jessica. He’d do well to remember she was once an aggressive and respected investigative journalist. Landing a gig as a foreign correspondent for the BBC needed a fair degree of global savvy.

He heard her leave the room, then heard the bathroom door bang shut.

He extracted the tea bag, squeezed it as he listened for the shower. She’d be busy for a few minutes. He positioned himself in front of his laptop, set his mug of tea down and punched Jacques Sauvage’s number into his satellite phone. Luke checked his watch as it rang. Dawn would be breaking soon.

“Stone, it’s about bloody time. Have you secured the principal?”

“Good morning to you, too, Sauvage. I have her. But we have a complication.” He proceeded to tell Jacques about his altercation with the police and the two gangsters.

Jacques was silent for a moment. “This is going to make any sort of cooperation with local law enforcement close to impossible.”

Luke shrugged, sipped his tea. “I made an executive decision. Those guys were out to kill her. My guess is they’re Dragon Heads, affiliated with Xiang-Li. They don’t want the photos getting out.”

“You manage to drop the tail?”

“Yep.” He sipped from his mug. “What can I tell her?”

“Everything. I’m liaising personally with CIA director Blake Weston on this and he’s given no instructions to hold anything back from her. All he wants is the woman, her film and her testimony. He’s setting up some form of witness protection for her.”

“When are you sending someone to pick her up?”

Jacques hesitated. “You’re going to have to hold on to her for a while, Stone, until—”

He slammed his mug down, sloshing hot tea onto his hand. “Wait a minute, Sauvage, we had a deal. You told me this woman would die if I refused this job. You said I was the only one who could get to her in the time frame. You also said you were going to take her off my hands ASAP!”

“I’m sorry. I’ve had to target all our spare resources elsewhere. You’re all I’ve got out there right now. You can handle one woman, Stone.”

Luke swore viciously. “Listen up, Sauvage, I’m not a goddamn babysitter. You’re in breach of my contract. I can walk from this—”

“Can you, Stone?” Jacques’s voice was cold.

Luke cursed again, dragged his hand over his hair.

“Look, I know what happened to your family in Australia. I know that’s why you wanted out. But you’re the best in the business and you’re all we’ve got. You can do this.”

“Why the hell should I?”

“You want to stay on FDS books, don’t you?”

Luke was quiet for a moment.

“If you turn her out onto the streets now, the woman dies. It’s simple. And it’s your call.”

Luke closed his eyes. He felt sick to his stomach. This was exactly what he didn’t want—sole responsibility for a woman’s life. Images of blood seared his brain. He could smell it. He could feel the warm body of his wife in his arms, dying. The blood from the baby. So much blood.

Luke had managed to take care of everyone, except the woman he loved. She’d died pregnant with his child because he’d been too damn busy protecting someone else. His family had been slaughtered because of him.

He hadn’t wanted to live after that. Almost chose not to. But he hadn’t quite found the guts to kill himself.

“Stone?”

Luke inhaled deeply. “Okay,” he said coolly, very quietly. “But if I fail, it’s on your head.” He wasn’t taking responsibility on this one. He couldn’t. Never again.

“You’re still the best at this, Stone,” Jacques said, just as quietly. “We both know you are.”

“You overestimate me, mate.”

“I believe in you. It’s why I hired you. It’s why I’m asking you to do this now.”

Silence.

“And…Stone, try and stay somewhat inside the law, would you? Cooperation with the Canadians is going to be tough enough down the road as it is, especially now that you’ve engaged the cops.”

“I’ll do what I can.” Luke hit a button and killed the call. He sat back in his chair, eyes closed.

“I’ll leave if you want me to.”

He jerked to his feet and spun to face Jessica. “Jesus! How long have you been standing there?”

“Long enough to know you want me ‘off your hands’….”

He forced air from his lungs with a puff of his cheeks and rubbed his brow hard. “And just where do you think you would you go?”

She shrugged and he noticed suddenly how feminine and vulnerable she looked in his oversized cargo pants, T-shirt and sweater. Her hair was wet and her skin scrubbed to an innocent glow. But it was her eyes and mouth that did him in. There was nothing vulnerable there. They were provocatively sexy as all get-out. He thought about all this woman had endured, what she’d once had in life and what had been taken from her by the Triad. And his heart squeezed sharp and fast. He—if anyone—should understand.

It was a Triad that had taken his wife and child in Australia.

He turned his back on her, stalked into the kitchen and poured a coffee. She accepted it with both hands and a slight bow of the head—a gesture he found both exotic and genuine, endearing.

“You want something to eat?”

She shook her head.

“Okay, then. Lets talk.” He pulled out a chair at the dining room table. “Sit.”

“I…I don’t want to be in your way if—”

He snorted. “If what? Look, I’m sorry you heard that, but understand this: I took the job. And I don’t quit something once I sign on.”

Only fail. I can still fail.

“Don’t worry, I won’t fail you, Jess.” He had no idea why he said it. But there it was. Some part of him was determined not to let this woman—or himself—down.

“Now sit.”

He scooped up the maps and seated himself opposite her.

“I’m going to bring you up to speed. But first priority is for you to tell me how those guys knew you were going to be at that pay phone. Who else knew you were going to call Giles Rehnquist from that booth, at that time?”

Jessica looked into his eyes. “Absolutely no one.”

“You must have told some—”

She set her mug down firmly. “I told no one.”

His brows lowered. “Could someone have overheard? Think. Maybe you—”

“Listen to me, Stone.” She couldn’t call him Luke, not now, not after what she’d overheard. “Whatever people might say, I am not crazy. I’m sick to death of all those knowing, sympathetic glances. I took those photos because I want my life back.” Her eyes burned with hot emotion. “And since you’re stuck with me now there is one thing you better know about me. Those men may have taken everything they possibly could have from me and they may want to kill me, but I will not run from them. I don’t run from anything. Ever.”

He pursed his lips, nodded slowly, something akin to admiration in his eyes. “Then you’re a better person than I, Jessica Chan,” he said very quietly.

“What?”

“Nothing. So you believe the only person who knew you were going to be there at that time was Giles?”

“Damn right.”

“Why did you call him?”

“Because he is—was—a friend, someone I could trust. Giles was the only person who truly believed in what happened to me in Hubei three years ago. He believed the man I call The Chemist exists and is a high-level assassin for a covert faction within the ruling party.” She paused, staring at her coffee. “Before my abduction, Giles had been helping me investigate collusion between the Dragon Heads crime syndicate and top officials in the Chinese Communist Party. We had a deal that he could use whatever information I had once I broke the story.” She lifted her eyes to his. “Giles knew the players. He understood the government and he knew the workings of the Triad intimately. I needed his advice. That’s why I called him. He said he’d find a way to help me and he told me to call back in two days, from that same phone at that time. He told me to find an ATM somewhere on the other side of town, withdraw whatever cash I could and use it to find a cheap hotel.”

Jessica took a sip of her coffee, welcoming the warmth that diffused through her chest. A distant part of her mind noted that while Luke had made coffee for her, his choice for himself was green tea.

“Is that what you did?”

She nodded. “I found a hotel in Gastown where a single woman renting a room by the night is not unusual. I paid cash upfront and I stayed in that room until it was time to make the call.”

“And no one followed you?”

“I don’t see how they could have. If they knew I was there they would have come for me earlier, right?”

Luke lowered his brows, studied her. “What about food?”

“I didn’t eat.”

He nodded slowly, a strange look sifting into his eyes. “You didn’t think it strange that Giles made you call back from the exact same phone?”

“I…I guess I did. But I knew he had to have his reasons. He had contacts and I was clean out of options.”

“He was CIA, Jess.”

She felt her jaw drop. Her whole world tilted and resettled slightly off axis.

“Are you sure?” she asked quietly.

“Dead sure. He wanted a fix on your location while he contacted Langley for direction. He wanted to be sure they could get to you.”

She dropped her face into her hands, rubbed her skin. Then looked up. “I…I don’t understand.”

He opened his mouth to say something, a strange expression in his features. Then he changed his mind, shut his laptop and surged to his feet. “Grab your camera bag, Jess.”

“Why?”

“Just do it.” He reached for a backpack. “If the conversation you had was exclusively between you and Giles and you’re one-hundred percent certain there is no way this information got out from your end, it leaves only one alternative—it got out on Giles’s end in Shanghai. And that means we need to move. Fast.”

He tossed her a down parka and thick woolen hat then shut his laptop and slid it into his pack along with his satellite phone. He crouched down, unscrewed a bolt under his kitchen table and lifted the top, revealing a large compartment under the surface. He scooped up what looked like different passports and ID’s, some license plates, a roll of duct tape, a radio, a scanner, technical field glasses, a knife and rounds of ammunition.

She stared blankly.

“Put the coat on,” he barked as he snagged his wallet off the counter.

“Why? Where are we going?”

He took her arm, helping her into the parka. “If Xiang’s men were tipped off about the rendezvous at the phone booth, they may also have been tipped off about me. They might know you’re here right now, in my house. Until we know what the hell is going on, and how that information got out from Shanghai, we need to go to ground.”

“Wait, I don’t understand! You’re saying Giles sold me out?”

“I’m saying there must have been a leak somewhere in the chain—an informant with a direct line to the Triad here in Vancouver.”

“But how?”

“I don’t know. It’s probably what got Giles killed and, until we find that leak, we’re sitting ducks, too.”

She stood dumbfounded as he grabbed his leather jacket.

“Now, Jess, move! They could be here any second.”

They shot out the door and fled into the darkness, Luke guiding Jessica over the thick snow that now covered the boardwalk.

Chapter 4

Halyards chinked against frozen masts as they raced down the dock. But just as they reached the stairs that would take them from sea level up to the parking lot, headlights cut round a building, illuminating falling snow. Luke jerked Jessica down into shadow behind a set of pilings.

A black SUV cruised slowly into the parking lot and cut the engine. Luke could hear a second vehicle approaching.

“Quick,” he whispered, “back that way.”

They ran back along the boardwalk, ducking below a wall just as the beams of a second vehicle swung over their position. They held dead still as the tires of the second vehicle scrunched through snow and came to a stop.

Silence grew deafening as tension pressed down on them and snow began to accumulate on their clothes.

What in hell were they waiting for?

Luke peered cautiously up over the wall, his snow-covered woolen hat providing camouflage. His vehicle was at the far end of the parking lot, behind the two black SUVs. He and Jessica would have to get past them somehow.

The passenger window in the first SUV was suddenly lowered. A match flashed, glowing orange. The scent of cigarette smoke reached him, pungent in the crisp air.

Then the driver’s door opened and boots squeaked onto snow. Luke heard snatches of what sounded like Chinese.

“It’s a dialect from the south,” Jessica whispered against his ear as she tried to peer over the edge and see what he was looking at.

He pushed her back down. “Stay low,” he hissed.

He reached into his pack, found his night scopes and trained them on the vehicles. He could make out six Asian men getting out of the cars, all packing serious automatic firepower.

Definitely triad. Somehow they’d gotten an ID on him. This bothered Luke. He rented the boathouse under a false name, paid for everything with credit cards backed by funds from FDS front companies and offshore numbered accounts.

Someone with inside information had to have fingered him directly.

And if the Dragon Heads knew exactly who he was, they had to know he’d taken Jessica and killed two of their men. A contract would be put out on him. Luke knew how these men worked.

Anger welled inside him. This pretty much ended his intellience-gathering gig in this city. Jesus, this was beginning to feel personal.

Jessica edged closer to him, and he could smell his shampoo on her wet hair. “What are they doing?” she whispered.

“Don’t know. Stay down,” he growled, suddenly—irrationally—angry with her.

He watched through his scopes as a third vehicle pulled into the parking lot and drew to a stop alongside the others. Four more men climbed out, assault rifles in hand, black coats fluttering in the cold wind.

Luke felt for his weapon. He had eight rounds in the magazine, one in the firing chamber, spare magazines in his pocket. Still, a 9-mm was no match against the kind of firepower those guys were packing. His best move was evasion, not engagement.

His muscles burned with tension as he watched the posse cross the parking lot and descend the stairs toward the boardwalk. One man remained guard at the base of the stairs and the other nine moved like black ghosts along the snowy boardwalk, making directly for Luke’s boathouse.

They would find his house empty within seconds and track their prints through the snow.

“Jess,” he whispered urgently. “We need to make a run for it. Now.”

She nodded.

He hauled her over the wall and they raced across the parking lot in a crouch, the sound of their footsteps swallowed by snow.

Gunshots suddenly peppered the air.

Luke lunged sideways, forcing Jessica down hard behind his SUV. He dragged her behind the wheel hub, covering her body with his own until he could identify the source of the shots. Another barrage of automatic fire rent the winter air. Luke winced. They were shooting up his place. They had to get out of here.

He reached up, quietly opened the passenger door to his SUV, motioned for her to get in. “The snow cover will shield you once you’re in,” he whispered.

He crept round to the driver’s side, dusted a small hole in the snow that had accumulated on the window, climbed into snow-covered cocoon, and eased the door closed. He watched through the small gap, aggression simmering inside him.

Luke didn’t like feeling this way. Taking a job personally was always a bad thing, it threatened the state of numbness he’d perfected over the last four years.

The booze had taken care of the first year after his wife’s death.

Then he’d quit drinking, clawing his way back out of moribund self-loathing, and beaten himself back into peak mental and physical shape with such sustained and brutal workouts that sleep had finally returned—the kind of sleep that came without booze. The kind of sleep that didn’t allow for thoughts or guilt. Or recurring nightmares.

Maybe in reaching this level of cold command over himself Luke had simply traded one coping mechanism for another, but what the hell—he was doing fine with it. It had saved his life. It had gotten him work with the FDS.

It had gotten him here, to Vancouver.

It had been a way to dull the pain that did not involve the bottom of a whiskey bottle and self-disgust. So why was he feeling things now?

He glanced at Jessica. It was her fault. She’d opened some damn Pandora’s box inside him.

She was shivering again, her frightened eyes fixed on him. She saw him as her last hope. He clenched his teeth and turned away. But before he could dwell on it, all nine men suddenly swarmed out of his boathouse and raced along the boardwalk toward the parking lot.

He tensed. “What the—”

An explosion whumped through air, then another, orange flames bursting out from his boathouse, spreading fast, fueled by some kind of accelerant. It took Luke a nanosecond to process what had just happened. His belongings, his photographs, his yacht, his home—every goddamn thing he owned—had just gone up in a giant ball of fire.

Rage erupted in his belly.

This was more than personal. These men had just declared war on him.

“Luke! What’s happening?” Jessica leaned over him, trying to see through his peephole. He shoved her away, opening his window wide. “Give me your camera.”

“What?”

“Just give it to me!”

He aimed the old Minolta out the window, focused on the fleeing men, clicked, zoomed in closer, clicked again and again, capturing their faces. He switched position and snapped the vehicles, zoomed closer, captured the plates.

He kept clicking as the three SUV’s fishtailed wildly out of the snowy parking lot and sped away. Fire alarms began to clang as flames crackled and popped. Another gut-hollowing whoosh sent shock waves through the air as the diesel fuel containers of his boat caught fire and blew.

Sirens began to scream. People raced out of the other boathouses, black silhouettes against white snow and hot raw flames, some diving into the frigid water to escape the blaze.

Staff and guests flocked from the nearby Granville Island Hotel. More alarms sounded as the fire spread quickly to the adjacent art school and another row of boats. More yachts exploded in balls of fire. Bedlam engulfed the island as Luke silently handed Jessica her camera and started the engine.

“Are you strapped in?” His voice was tight.

She fumbled with the buckle and once he saw she was secure, he flipped on the windshield wipers and hit the gas. He swerved out of the parking lot, racing away from the scene as an army of fire engines, ambulances and police vehicles converged on the pandemonium behind them.

Luke slowed his vehicle as they approached the bridge onramp. Snow was turning to slush and it would be light in a few hours. They needed to get out of the city before that happened.

“What now?” she asked in a thin voice.

He inhaled deeply, wishing he’d never met her. “Now,” he said flatly, “we really are in the same boat, Jess.”

“Where are we going?” He could hear despair in her voice and guilt stirred in him.

“Someplace out of the city,” he said. “Somewhere I can hand you over to the CIA before—” he cut it. Fell silent.

“Before I do any more damage. That’s what you were going to say, wasn’t it?”

“The damage is done, Jess. There’s no going back. Now we deal with the road ahead. Together.” Unfortunately.

And he was going to make sure he got it over with as quickly as possible, he thought as he cranked up the heater to warm her.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

His eyes cut sharply to hers and he saw the telltale glisten of tears. He looked away quickly. He really needed to get away from her soon. Before he let her down. Before he let himself down.

“Dry your hair,” he said curtly in an effort to distract her. “Turn up the fan on your side.”

He pulled off the road about twenty minutes later, just before they hit the notorious Sea to Sky Highway, and changed the license plates.

Jessica studied Luke’s profile as he fiddled with the car radio. The meteorologist was warning of three back-to-back storm fronts, the first of which would hit within the hour. It was almost seven in the morning, yet the sky was still an ominous black. Already a mounting wind was buffeting their vehicle as they negotiated the twisting road that hugged cliffs above a sheer drop to the ocean.