Gabe replied dryly, his gaze still locked on hers, “Diana, allow me to introduce you to Owen Haas. He’s the agent-in-charge I told you about earlier.”
“Pleasure to meet you, Agent Haas,” she responded politely.
“Is that your belt buckle or your pistol digging into my side?”
The guy scowled and didn’t reply. Which was just as well. He needed to concentrate on his job at the moment. The guy was jammed up against her left side closely enough that she could hear the chatter coming over his earpiece. A team of Secret Service agents was clearing the offices across the street room by room. So far, no assassin.
Gabe smiled up at her and commented conversationally, “You know, I haven’t been this crushed since my last football game.”
“And were there cheerleaders in that pile, too?”
Ah, the delicious feel of a chuckle tantalizing her chest again. “No such luck.”
She retorted, “You wanna talk about luck? Lucky will be no paparazzi getting a picture of this. Can you imagine the headlines the tabloids would cook up for the five of us?”
Gabe opened his mouth to reply when Agent Haas interrupted. “Ma’am, Agent Willis, he’s the guy on top of you, is going to roll to your left and take over covering my position. I need you to stay on top of the President-elect for a little while longer. We’re going to bring out bulletproof shields before we let him get up. Got it?”
Oh, hurt her. Make her lie some more on top of the sexiest guy she’d met in nearly as long as she could remember. “Sure, Agent Haas. Consider me plastered to the boss.”
A phalanx of burly men rushed out onto the balcony, door-size riot shields in hand. They quickly formed a wall of polycarbonate resin and flesh between Gabe and that window across the street.
Owen Haas’s voice growled from above her, “You can get up now, ma’am.”
A strong hand on her upper arm lifted her to her feet. She looked up wryly at Agent Haas. “Aren’t you at least going to offer me a cigarette after that, Owen? I mean, it’s practically time to take you home to meet my parents.”
Coughs and snorts sounded all down the line of agents. The giant man scowled down at her, not amused. As Gabe climbed to his feet, Haas hustled his charge inside the hotel room. The agent’s shoulders sagged in relief when Gabe was safely behind closed curtains and bulletproof windows. She felt a flash of sympathy for the Secret Service man.
“Is the threat neutralized?” she asked Haas seriously.
“Yeah. It was a secretary emptying an ashtray out the window. Her boss came in to work unexpectedly and she didn’t want to get caught smoking in the office.”
Diana couldn’t help grinning at how shocked the poor woman must have been when an armed team of Secret Service agents burst into her office to arrest her for sneaking a lousy cigarette. She remarked dryly, “I bet she never smokes again in a Federal office building with that kind of response to it.”
The Secret Service agent’s smile disappeared as quickly as it appeared.
She looked up at Haas. “Hey, I’m really sorry if I gave you a fright.”
The guy’s gaze softened slightly, from granite to, oh, cement. “Don’t sweat it. I’d rather have you tackle the President-elect and be wrong than do nothing and me be out there right now scraping his brains off the windows.”
“You take care of him,” she said quietly. “Stay sharp today.”
The guy gave her a long, hard look. Finally, he answered, “I will, ma’am. Count on it.”
One of the other agents escorted her out of the suite. As she passed through the main room, she felt several pairs of eyes following her progress toward the exit with open antagonism. She glanced around casually. Yup. Wolfe was over in the corner, in a huddle with several men. As his gaze drilled into her, she looked away hastily from what appeared to be a strategy-planning powwow of some kind. Lord, she didn’t envy Gabe the backstabbing and political maneuvering that was going on inside his own administration. What a lousy way to have to enter office.
She sure hoped he had someone he could trust to watch his back.
9:00 A.M.
S he sat in her car and stared at nothing. Now what? She was supposed to save the President-elect’s life, but she didn’t have the foggiest idea what to do next. Dunst was missing. A Q-group cell was out there somewhere, getting ready to kill the amazing, wonderful man upstairs. How was she supposed to find either target in this city of millions? Her only connection to Q-group was the Internet, and it was a tenuous link at best. Anonymous e-mail addresses and a series of seemingly innocuous messages.
Unfortunately, it was all she had.
She started her car and headed back up to the street. She guided the vehicle west toward the funky chic of M Street in Georgetown and an Internet cafe located there where she had a standing expense account. Several of her best informants liked to hang out there and wreak havoc upon “The System.” Of course, at this time of day they’d be home in bed after surfing the Web all night, or they’d be at grindingly mundane day jobs that masked and financed their alternate lives.
She parked the car and glanced in her rearview mirror yet again. Still no sign of any tails. But then something else caught her attention in the mirror. Her own face. She couldn’t walk into the Chaosium Cafe looking like this! She’d wreck her reputation as an antiestablishment chick in two seconds flat. Fortunately, her clothes looked the part. Although, she could not believe she’d just seen the next President of the United States in sloppy jeans and a shabby sweater. It pushed even her sense of flaunting propriety.
She dug in her purse for a wet wipe and scrubbed all the classy makeup off her face. She layered on heavy black mascara and eyeliner, dark brown lip liner followed by a coat of maroon gloss and white powder over the rest of her face. In broad daylight like this with her fair skin, the vampire-wannabe look was particularly glaring.
She dug around in the bottom of her purse and came up with a small tin of gel hair paint. She dipped out a little of the red goop and smeared it through a strand of hair down the left side of her face. Then, she pulled the rest of her hair back into a severe ponytail, put on a pair of so-ugly-they had-to-be-cool horn-rimmed glasses, and her goth, cyberpunk look was complete.
Hard to believe she’d been sprawled all over the next president of the United States less than an hour ago. Harder still to believe that someone who looked like this might be responsible for saving the guy’s life today.
After what had happened to her mother, to her whole family, truth be told, a person would think she’d know better than to dive into deep waters full of big, hungry sharks. Her mother had tangled with bad guys who’d sabotaged her work and made it look as if her incompetence had resulted in a man’s death. She’d resigned from the military and suffered a mental breakdown, existing in a nearly catatonic state for twenty years. She supposed she ought to be grateful the bastards who’d drugged her mother hadn’t killed her outright, but living with the empty shell of her mother for so long had been worse in some ways than losing her completely.
It had torn apart her family. Josie had sided with their mother, Diana with their father in the first months after what they now knew to be sabotage to halt her mother’s research on stealth technologies for military aircraft. When their father finally sent the girls away to a boarding school, the destruction of the family had been complete. Although she loved her sister, she’d never been able to understand Josie’s fanatical loyalty to their clearly crazy mother. Maybe it was because Josie was older when The Incident happened, while she’d only been four. Josie had many more memories of their mother from before the drugs that she didn’t have. Practically her only recollections of her mother until last year were of a gaunt, ghostlike woman only tenuously in touch with reality.
At least at the Athena Academy she’d found a measure of acceptance. The girls and staff there were unanimously too bright to blame her and Josie for their mother’s problems and gave both girls a chance to find a place for themselves. Beautiful, outgoing, confident Josie had fit right in at the Academy. But, unlike her big sister, she’d struggled to find an identity that suited her.
She’d envied her older sister. Wanted to be just like her. But she never quite measured up to the standards Josie set. It didn’t take long for her to head in a completely opposite direction rather than compete with her and lose every time.
