Undercover Wife

Her mother’s warning rang in her ears. But as quickly as the goosey feeling came, she shoved it aside. This was Mike Callahan. The man who’d cradled her against his chest, corrected her aim and taught her to put nine out of ten rounds dead center. He was big, certainly. Gruff, sometimes. Hot as hell, always. She refused to be afraid of a man she fully intended to bring to his knees.

Unaware of his fate, Hawk zeroed in on Lightning. “I want this mission.”

“You’ve got it.”

“I’ll fly out to California tomorrow, see what leads the locals have on Charlie’s death.”

“You might want to talk to the folks at the Centers for Disease Control here in D.C. first.”

“Will do.”

“I can help,” Jilly said. “I spent three years in Asia. I could…”

“No.”

Hawk rounded on her.

“Listen to me, Gillian-with-a-J. We’re talking a potentially lethal virus. Possibly radical religious nuts. A cold-blooded killer or killers. That’s enough for me to handle without worrying about you running around playing amateur secret agent.”

Heat rushed into Jilly’s cheeks and fire into her eyes. Before she could let fly, Hawk raked a hand through his short-cropped hair and offered a grudging compromise.

“I don’t like the idea of you getting into this game. You know that. But…Well, it looks like you’ve made up your mind. I’ll mentor you, Jilly. Teach you some of the tricks of the trade I’ve picked up over the years. After I get back from this mission. In the meantime, I need you to stay out of my way.”

Mentoring was the last thing she wanted from Mike Callahan. This was hardly the time to tell him so, however.

“I’ll stay out of your way,” she promised, masking her anger with icy politeness, “but at least let me work my contacts at the State Department. They have a special desk tracking religious splinter groups. One of the analysts might have something we can use.”

“All right, but let me know immediately if you find anything.”

His tone implied that he was highly doubtful, and Jilly had to subdue a thoroughly unprofessional impulse to flip him the bird. The gesture would have been wasted in any case. He’d already turned his attention back to Lightning.

Chapter 2

Jilly steamed all the way to Foggy Bottom.

None of the other passengers on the Metro would have guessed she was pissed. She smiled her thanks to the tattooed kid who moved aside to give her room. She apologized to the Navy lieutenant she bumped into when the train took off. And she had herself well in hand when she exited the Metro and took the soaring escalator at the Foggy Bottom–George Washington University stop.

Foggy Bottom got its name from the mist that swirled through the low-lying area between the Potomac River and Rock Creek. The Bottom was home to a host of well-known institutions, including George Washington University, the Kennedy Center and the infamous Watergate Hotel. Most Washington pundits, however, believed the “fog” emanated from the government agency that took up an entire block on C Street.

The headquarters of the U.S. Department of State was a monolithic square of concrete and glass. Jilly could still remember the thrill that had danced through her when she mounted the front steps for the first time as a very new and very junior Foreign Service Officer. She suspected her father’s considerable pull had something to do with her acceptance into the highly competitive Foreign Service. That, and acing the Foreign Service Officers’ exam. The fact that she’d inherited her mother’s flair for languages and had snagged a graduate Fulbright scholarship to study Mandarin at Peking University hadn’t hurt, either.

Her linguistic skills had led to her first assignment as a cultural affairs officer in Beijing. Those three years had been exciting as hell but convinced Jilly she wasn’t the stuff bureaucrats are made of. She’d loved the people she worked with and fully appreciated the positive effects of cultural exchanges but hated the paperwork.

She’d returned from Beijing undecided about a career with the State Department. The months she’d spent filling in for Elizabeth Wells had settled the matter. As an OMEGA operative, she could still travel to exotic locations, still engage with people of all nationalities and political persuasions. But she wouldn’t have to write a twenty-page report after every contact.

Since she’d handed in her State Department ID along with her resignation, she had to wait at the visitors’ entrance for an escort. He emerged from the inner sanctum moments later and greeted her in fluent Mandarin.

“Nee hao, Gillian. Ching shou, nee huey lai dao State!”

Laughing, she shook her head and answered in kind. “Sorry, Don. I’m not returning to the fold. I’m here as a civilian. And a supplicant.”

Don Ackerman huffed in disappointment. He was one of several senior Foreign Service Officers who staffed the China desk. He’d tried every stratagem in his considerable repertoire to keep Jilly in his sector, including outright bribes and her choice of assignments.

“What can I do for you?” he asked after he’d signed her in and she’d processed through security screening.

“Point me to whoever’s handling radical religious cults these days.”

“You’re kidding, right? You know very well two thirds of our antiterrorist division is working that threat.”

“This one doesn’t sound jihadist, unless they’ve gotten into animal sacrifice.”

“Animal sacrifice?” Don scratched his chin and led the way down a long corridor. “We’ve got several of those. The most visible is the Santeria sect in south Florida. But the Supreme Court decided their ritual sacrifice of chickens during ceremonies is an expression of religious freedom, so we don’t classify them as radical anymore.”

“How about monkeys? Or small apes?”

Ackerman’s lips pursed. He was a big man, going soft around the middle these days, but still possessed the encyclopedic knowledge of world cultures that had made him a legend at State.

“That sounds more like the Vhrana Sect.” He came to a full stop in the hallway. “They’re bad news, Gillian. What’s your interest in them?”

Although she suspected State had received the same urgent missive Lightning had, Jilly hadn’t been cleared to discuss it with anyone outside OMEGA. All she could tell Don was a basic version of the truth.

“I’m doing some research for the agency I now work for.”

His penetrating gray eyes drilled into her. “You’d better talk to Sandra Hathaway. She’s our Vhrana expert.”

Sandra Hathaway was a dark-haired, intense analyst. The kind, Jilly guessed, who doled out information sparingly to folks in the field. She hunched over her computer and made no effort to disguise her annoyance at the interruption. Her irritation morphed instantly into a closed, guarded expression when Don mentioned the Vhrana.

He overrode her bureaucratic caution with a blunt order. “Gillian was one of our own until she bailed. Despite that serious lapse of judgment, I’ll vouch for her. Give her whatever information you can about the sect.”

“Whatever” turned out to be scary as hell. The Vhrana, Jilly soon learned, were an even more dangerous splinter group of the religious fanatics who set off chemical bombs in a Tokyo subway some years back.

“The Vhrana believe the only true path to enlightenment is to cleanse the world of evil, as they see it,” Hathaway related. “They practice rites that derive from Buddhism and ancient forms of Hinduism, with a dash of Turkish Sufi thrown in. The more ‘advanced’ in the sect go into trances and spin around for hours.”

“Like whirling dervishes?”

“Precisely.”

“And they also practice animal sacrifice?”

“In ancient times, they sacrificed humans. Usually enemies captured after a battle. The Vhrana drank blood from the vanquished warriors’ skulls to imbibe their valor before devouring their hearts and livers.”

“Nice guys.”

“Don’t delude yourself. The women in the sect were—and still are—every bit as bloodthirsty. You don’t want to get crosswise of a Vhrana priestess. Nowadays, of course, human sacrifice has been outlawed. So has animal sacrifice, for that matter, but the Vhrana still practice it on holy days. They’re rumored to offer up a variety of animals, but their sacrifice of choice is a monkey or ape.”

The picture of the little gibbon flashed into Jilly’s mind.

“I thought most Hindus revere monkeys. In fact, I remember reading about the hordes of monkeys that now overrun New Delhi because the devout feed them peanuts and bananas.”

“The Vhrana have perverted that reverence. Or elevated it, I guess you could say. Since primates are the closest things to humans, they believe they’re honoring the animal by sacrificing them to their gods.”

“Do you have a fix on the Vhrana sects in the U.S.?”

“We’re tracking seven different branches. The largest is in California.”

Where the dead gibbon was found. A frisson of excitement jumped along Jilly’s nerves. She didn’t have the training or field experience of a seasoned agent, but every scrap of intuition she possessed told her she was on the right trail.

“The second-largest sect is right across the state line,” Hathaway continued, “in Baltimore. It draws most of its followers from the D.C. area.” Swinging around, she clicked a few keys on her computer. “Here’s a shot of the exterior of their temple.”

Jilly studied the windowless brick building. “It looks like a warehouse.”

“It is. We’ve ascertained that the owner has no idea what goes on in his building between the hours of midnight and dawn. His night manager takes over then.”

Another click brought up a shot of a handsome man in the turban of a Sikh. Next to him was a smiling, doe-eyed female in a turquoise sari and veil.

“That’s the night manager’s wife, the current high priestess. We’ve been told she wields the knife at the altar. We hope to verify that tonight.”

“Tonight?”

“It’s the first night of the second full moon since harvest. One of their holiest days.”

“Who’s going in?”

“Special Agent Nareesh. He was one of us until he transferred to the FBI.”

“Benjamin Nareesh?”

“Yes. You know him?”

“I do! We trained together as junior FSOs.”

Her pulse tripping, Jilly got Nareesh’s number from Sandra Hathaway.

The afternoon sun had warmed the air when she emerged from State. She stood for some moments on the wide front steps, debating her next step. She really, really wanted to follow this lead on her own. If it produced results, Hawk would have to eat his objections to her lack of training and experience. Common sense and the awareness that she was part of a team had her reaching for her cell phone.

Since she hadn’t yet been equipped with one of OMEGA’s handy-dandy, supersecure communications devices, she couldn’t directly access the Control Center or any of the operatives. Instead, she dialed the number for Lightning’s executive assistant.

“Offices of the Special Envoy. How may I help you?”

“Elizabeth, it’s Jilly. I need to speak to Uncle Nick.”

“He’s still in conference, dear.”

In conference was code for upstairs, doing duty as OMEGA’s director.

“I thought he might be. Ask him to call me on my cell when he’s free.”

Her cell phone pinged moments later.

“Where are you, Jilly?”

“Just leaving State. I may have something.”

Or not. The lead was pretty tenuous at this point.

“I want your okay to accompany a friend on a visit to a temple tonight.” She couldn’t go into more detail over an open line. “I’ll brief you after the visit.”

The silence on the other end was deafening.

“Are you sure you know what you’re doing?” Lightning finally asked.

“No, but my friend does. He’s with the Bureau. His boss might call you for confirmation that it’s okay for me to ride along. Will you give it?”

Another silence, longer this time.

“Uncle Nick? Am I good to go?”

“You’re good.”

She restrained her exultant whoop but couldn’t resist punching the air with her fist.

Hours later, she huddled beside a turbaned Ben Nareesh in his darkened car. Their intent gazes were fixed on the small screen in his handheld unit. It was fed by cameras the FBI had positioned to cover the brick warehouse. Figures had been slipping through the cloudy night and into the warehouse for the past half hour.

“I still can’t believe I let you talk me into this,” Nareesh muttered. “Or that my boss gave the green light. You must have some powerful contacts.”

Jilly merely smiled as Ben’s gaze swept over her, looking for a chink in her disguise.

He didn’t find one. She was draped in a silk sari she’d purchased in a downtown D.C. shop that catered to the city’s large Indian and Pakistani population. Tinted contacts darkened her eyes. Thankfully, her jet-black hair had needed no touching up. She’d parted it in the middle and fashioned an intricate series of braids that now tugged at her scalp.

“Just follow my lead,” he instructed. “And if we do find any sacrificial animals, we both stay the hell away from them.”

Ben hadn’t taken her warning about a potentially lethal virus lightly. In addition to his team of backups, he now had a crew encased in biohazard protective gear standing ready. All were prepared to move at his signal.

Jilly’s nerves were strung tight when Ben stowed his unit and shifted to face her.

“Ready?”

She hooked the silk veil across the lower half of her face, dragged in a deep breath and nodded.

“Ready.”

Hawk was huddled with a team of scientists at the Centers for Disease Control’s Washington office when a cell phone chimed.

“That’s mine.” Annoyed at the interruption, the woman opposite Hawk flipped open her phone. “Dr. Cook.”

He could tell the news was electrifying. The doc jolted upright in her chair and whipped a startled gaze his way before snapping the phone shut.

“The FBI just raided some kind of underground temple. One of the folks on the raid wanted to know if you’re still here.”

Hawk’s insides turned to ice. Jilly. That had to be Jilly.

“They found several animals being prepared for sacrifice. One of them is an extremely rare nomascus concolor. The team has the animals in isolation units. They’re delivering them to the containment lab as we speak.”

All three scientists were already out of their chairs. Hawk stayed right on their heels as they raced through a maze of darkened corridors, down three flights of stairs and through an underground tunnel to a brightly lit lab.

He’d had to accept that Lightning had given her the go-ahead to accompany this friend of hers. A thorough check of Special Agent Nareesh’s background and credentials had resolved some of Hawk’s misgivings. That, and the fact that she would just ride along. As an observer. Not a direct participant.

He was still nursing that mistaken notion when he picked up the wail of a siren.

“Stay in the observation booth,” Dr. Cook instructed as she zipped herself into biohazard protective gear. “It’s sealed off and safe.”

The booth’s glass wall gave Hawk a clear view of the team that entered the lab some moments later. Looking like space travelers in their hooded suits, the team carried plastic cages with controlled breathing units. One of the cages contained what looked like a small rhesus monkey, the other a slightly larger primate with white tufts of fur on its cheeks. The gibbon’s eyes were huge and frightened and seemed to lock on Hawk through the glass window.

“Poor babies.”

He recognized Jilly’s voice instantly but had to look twice to ID the woman who rushed into the booth, followed by a tall, slender man in a white turban.

Black mascara rimmed her eyes, which looked decidedly not blue from where he stood. A red caste mark decorated her forehead. To go with the pistachio green sari draped across one shoulder, he surmised, and sweet, cloying scent of incense that surrounded her like a cloud.

“Hawk! They told me you were still here. This is Special Agent Ben Nareesh. Ben, this is Mike Callahan.”

She paused, smiled and looked Hawk square in the eye and said, “Mike and I work together.”

Hawk got the message. In her own, inimitable way, Gillian-with-a-J had just thrown down the gauntlet. If he didn’t accept her as an equal, right here, right now, it would be war between them.

He knew he would come out the victor. He fought too dirty to be vanquished by a pampered, privileged country-club type. Except Gillian Ridgeway, for all her pampering and privilege, possessed some real smarts under that sleek, silky mane. And she had the guts to match. She’d proven that tonight.

With a wrench that took him back to a place he never wanted to go again, Hawk yielded the field and extended a hand to Nareesh. “Good to meet you.”

He couldn’t miss Jilly’s flash of triumph. It stayed on her face until she turned back to the observation window.

“They won’t hurt them, will they?”

After his session with the folks at the Center, Hawk had a pretty good idea what might happen to the primates. It wasn’t pretty.

“Depends on whether they show signs of infection.”

“If they don’t?”

“I don’t know. They might be used for testing or research. Or turned over to a zoo,” he added as Jilly’s brows snapped together.

“Poor babies,” she muttered again. “I wonder…”

Her lips pursed, and her expression turned thoughtful. Hawk had a sudden vision of Jilly showing up at the Ridgeway place with two hairy primates in tow. Maggie wouldn’t mind. He could only imagine Adam’s reaction.

“Ben, promise you’ll keep me posted on what happens to these little guys.”

Her request took the FBI agent by surprise. Obviously, he’d assumed his responsibility for the animals ended with the raid.

“I…uh…sure.”

The man was putty in Jilly’s hands.

Join the club, Hawk thought sardonically.

“Or,” Nareesh countered in an attempt to wiggle out of the charge, “you could probably get the folks here at the Center to advise you directly.”

“I could, if my partner and I weren’t leaving for Hong Kong as soon as we throw a few things in a bag.”

Enough was enough. Goaded, Hawk hooked her arm and swung her around. “Damn it, Gillian. How many surprises are you planning to pull tonight?”

“Sorry.”

Her contrite look didn’t fool him for a minute.

“I should have mentioned it right away. One of the worshippers arrested in the raid told us how the sacrificial animals were smuggled into the States.”

She paused, playing the info for all it was worth. Hawk had to concede she’d earned her moment of glory.

“They were hidden inside a shipping container packed with antiques exported from Hong Kong. The shipping agency is Wang and Company.”

Behind her tinted contacts, her eyes held only limpid innocence.

“Unless your Chinese is better than mine, Hawk, you might want to reconsider whether or not I’ll be in the way when you call on Mr. Wang.”

Chapter 3

Early the next morning, Hawk contacted the San Francisco detectives investigating Charlie Duncan’s murder. They had no witnesses, no suspects and no leads. Frustrated, he used the remaining hours before he and Jilly departed for Hong Kong to supervise her transition from one-time Foreign Service Officer and temporary executive assistant to full-fledged undercover operative.

Jilly discovered a new Mike Callahan during those hours. This one was impatient, demanding and absolutely relentless. He began in OMEGA’s training center with a crash course in down-and-dirty offensive and defensive maneuvers. Jilly was drenched with sweat and sporting several nasty bruises before she finally managed a takedown.

Hawk didn’t allow her time for so much as a smirk to celebrate. Rolling to his feet, he hustled her into the weapons facility. He’d taught her to shoot, knew she could handle the polymer-based Beretta Sub-Compact she’d carry on this mission. Still, he made her snap in a clip and shred several paper targets before he turned her over to OMEGA’s communications team.

Despite her grungy gray sweats and sweat-flattened hair, Jilly paid close attention while the team drilled her on communications procedures. Her only break came when Mackenzie Blair, Lightning’s wife and the guru of all things electronic for OMEGA and several other government agencies, marched in.

“Well, my sweet, you certainly didn’t waste any time snagging your first field op.”

“What can I say? Duty calls.”

Raking back her limp hair, Jilly grinned at the brunette she considered more of a big sister than an honorary aunt.

“How’s the baby?”

Mac rounded a hand over her prominent belly and made a face. “The little stinker sleeps all day and kicks all night. Want to see what I have for you?”

Both women instantly switched gears. Mac’s high-tech devices had made her a legend with the agencies she supplied. Jilly couldn’t wait to see what supercool, James Bondish gadget she’d come up with this time.

It didn’t look all that high-tech at first. The gold charm was pretty, though. It was in the shape of a Chinese character and embedded in a bezel of what looked like rare blue jade.

“Do you know this character?” Mac asked.

“Fu. It means good luck.” Jilly had to laugh. “Appropriate.”

“I thought so, too. This particular Fu, my sweet, just happens to conceal the world’s smallest and most sophisticated encrypted satellite communications system.”

With her belly nudging the table, Mac laid the charm in the palm of one hand and poked at it with the other.

“If you press on this little squiggle…”

“That squiggle is the character’s radical, or root symbol.”

After four years of Mandarin in college, two more in grad school and a three-year tour of duty in Beijing, Jilly spoke several Chinese dialects with a fluency rarely acquired by “foreign devils.”

Reading and writing were entirely different matters. By various counts, there were somewhere between forty and fifty thousand Chinese characters. Thankfully, each character contained one of only two hundred and fourteen roots. If you could figure out the root, you could count the character’s remaining strokes and—most of the time!—look up the word in a dictionary.

“The roots came down from ancient times,” she told Mac. “Originally they were pictographs representing basic elements like man, woman, fire, water, and so on.”

“If you say so. Press the root…radical…whatever…once to transmit, twice to receive. Go ahead, try a voice transmission.”

Jilly pressed once. “Mary had a little…Whoa!”

She jumped as the nursery rhyme boomed through the Control Center’s speakers.

“You’ll be in silent mode most of the time,” Mac advised, “but you’ll know when someone’s trying to contact you. Put it on, and I’ll give you a demo.”

The chain was long enough to loop easily over her head. The jade felt cool and smooth against her throat—until Mac signaled to one of her assistants. The next moment, the semiprecious stone warmed like toast.

“Nice,” Jilly murmured, palming the charm. “Very nice.”

“It’s also equipped with GPS, an electronic jammer and a direct link to Hawk’s comm unit.”

“Don’t tell me you decked him out in a gold chain and charm, too?”

“I wish! No, his comm is in his watch.” A wicked gleam lit Mac’s brown eyes. “But I did spiffy that up to go with your cover. You should have seen his face when I presented him with a solid gold Rolex.”

Also appropriate, Jilly thought. She and Hawk would hit Hong Kong in the guise of a wealthy couple on a Far East buying junket.

A married couple.

Sharing a hotel suite.

So Hawk could keep an eye on her.

She’d bristled at that last bit. Not for long, however, since adjoining bedrooms in a luxurious hotel suite dovetailed nicely with her non-mission-related objectives.