The Consummata

But what the hell, it was her room, and there was no trace of anything but affection in my voice, as I said, “You asleep, Gaita?”

“No, Morgan, I’m not asleep....”

But it wasn’t Gaita at all.

It was another lovely dark-haired woman, with a revolver leveled at my gut.

Kim Stacy.

My wife.

CHAPTER TEN

The gun in Kim’s hand lowered—maybe the little automatic was meant for anyone who came in Gaita’s secret door, and not me specifically.

Then a lush smile blossomed on that lovely oval with the violet almond-shaped eyes.

“Hello, husband.”

She’d been resting on top of that bed, waiting—for me?—and curled up with a panther-like poise, a luscious doll who made a simple short-sleeve pink blouse and short black shift skirt with no nylons into something wildly sensual. Yet the only real effort to look fetching at all came from the scarlet-red painted toenails showing in the open-toed sandals that matched the red of her full, moist lips.

“Hello, wife,” I said.

The gun tumbled from her hands onto the bed and she came off it and into my arms and our kiss was a devouring thing, the greeting of two starving creatures too long away from the table.

I held her to me with one arm around her waist and my other hand touching the dark tresses, cut shorter now, just to her chin, not her shoulders, and the sun streaks were gone. Her features were the same, perhaps some lines of worry around her eyes, for her husband, I hoped, and she was searching my face, studying it as one of her hands was splayed against my back and the other dug into my hair gripping, stroking, gripping, stroking.

I glanced meaningfully at the bed, and she drew away, still in my arms but shaking her head. “Not now, my love. Not here. Not in this place.”

I didn’t let go of her, said, “Who cares where?” and I kissed her again, and my tongue got insistent about it, and hers held its own, until the moment came when she pulled away, out of my arms now, and found her way to Gaita’s dressing table stool and sat here. Her eyes directed me to the bed, but only to sit there. Only to sit.

And perhaps that reminder of Gaita played a part in why I didn’t just throw her down on that bed—that this room and the nearby bathroom with shower stall marked the site of my sole failing in staying true to her, over these long months....

That, and the grave expression that had erased her look of love and pleasure at seeing me again.

So I sat on the edge of the bed across from where she perched at the dressing table, her back to its mirror.

“We may not have a lot of time,” she said. “I’m breaking every rule in the B-4 book just being here.”

She was with the CIA’s B-4 Intelligence, Section A.

“We have to talk, Morg. There’s so much you need to know. And you have things to tell me, too.”

I gave her half a smile. “Doll, you want to go the foreplay route, that’s fine with me.”

“Not foreplay, darling. Forewarning—you are in dangerous waters, even for you. This Halaquez inquiry...I’m breaking deep cover to warn you off of it. Let the pros handle it.”

I grinned at her. “Back together only a few minutes, and you’re already insulting me? Reminds me of when we first met. How’d you know to find me here?”

But she didn’t grin back or smile—her expression remained somber, and her forehead was creased with concern. “Never mind any of that now. Will you just listen? For these many months...almost a year, Morgan...I’ve been doing my own investigating within the agency. It’s risky and I’ve tossed protocol out the window. If what I’ve done is ever found out, I won’t just lose my pension, I may face treason charges.”

I stood, and I made a crooking finger at her. “Come over here. I won’t rape you—I promise. But I need to be close to you.”

She didn’t have to think about it. Just did trust me, however much a horny son of a bitch she knew me to be—she knew that more than anything, I loved her, and wouldn’t dishonor her.

We arranged ourselves on the bed, with pillows propped up on the headboard behind us, and with my arm around her, so that when she spoke to me, I could feel the warmth of her breath. Curled up against me like a kid. Now and then I would interrupt her to crush those cushiony lips in the gentlest, friendliest way, never pressing to where things might get away from us. She clearly didn’t want that.

“Let’s start,” she said, “with what you’ve been up to. I’ve tracked you, your every move. I could have been in touch with you any number of times—we were in the same city three times, once San Francisco, again in Boston, and then in New York.”

“Why didn’t you...?”

“I’m being watched. You must know I went to bat for you. I told my superiors I’d witnessed that old pal of yours confess to complicity in the robbery, heard with my own ears his claim to have taken possession of the entire forty-mil boodle.” Her mouth tightened bitterly. “But it was just like you warned me, in the plane, before you jumped.”

They figured that the in-name-only marriage vows Kim and I took had turned into the real thing, working undercover together. Under covers was their assumption, and though we never consummated our marriage, we had fallen in love, hadn’t we?

I said, “Your bosses figured that a wife would say or do anything for her husband. As simple as that.”

She sighed and nodded, nestled against me, one full breast mashed against my chest. She smelled great—no perfume, just a freshly scrubbed scent.

“It was all I could do,” she said, “all I could risk, to conduct an after-hours, off- the-books investigation. There are two things that I think will shock you. First, on the money-truck heist—”

“There was an inside man. A government traitor.”

The natural long lashes were tiny whips as she blinked at me. “What? How did you—”

“The route the armored car took from the Washington mint to New York was top secret. Standard operating procedure would be to have at least three such routes, and alternate in a shifting, unknowable pattern. Same goes for when the truck would leave and be scheduled for arrival. Also, the knowledge that this particular shipment would be forty million in common bills, nothing over a fifty. You don’t pull down a score like that without inside information.”

She was smiling, more admiration than love in it, and her head was shaking. “You are one smart bastard, Morgan. You’ve known this all along?”

“Oh, only since the day I heard they were after me. But for me, it’s a theory. You sound like you’re passing along a fact.”

The almond eyes narrowed. “I can’t say that it’s a fact of the kind that might hold up in court—not yet. And the people I talked to are unlikely to go on the record. But let me just say that you’re in the right city for us to be having this conversation.”

I frowned. “Sounds more likely to be a Washington D.C. conversation than a Miami one.”

“No, Miami all the way....Morg, I believe that forty mil was a very inside job. That it was a CIA black op.”

“What?”

Now she had surprised me.

“That money,” she said, “was earmarked for the Cuban freedom fighters’ cause. Just a few years ago, remember, the Company was funding and shaping the efforts to take Castro down, but it was strictly sub rosa—the White House starting with Vice President Nixon and on to both JFK and his attorney general brother knew all about it, from exploding cigars designed to kill Castro to the secret commando training camps in the Florida Everglades...all of it top secret.”

I was ahead of her now. “But then the Bay of Pigs came along, and the Cuban Missile Crisis, and—”

“And the president shot down in a Dallas street, and all of the plans to assassinate Castro and invade Cuba