Hidden Steel Read online

  He took long enough that she thought he wasn’t going to answer, but he eventually admitted, “The way you keep forgetting to breathe.”

  “Oh.” Breathing. Right.

  He shifted on the air mattress, crinkling. They had only the light survival blankets—impressively effective, especially in this mild climate, but also noisy. He said, “This was one night I didn’t expect to have trouble sleeping.”

  He’d been tired, she knew. And even if he wasn’t far away … she wished he was closer. An unfamiliar feeling built inside her—sad and bittersweet. Lonely. Not even memories to keep her company, only this unceasing need to fix things. Poor me, she told herself, but the sarcasm didn’t jar anything loose.

  Okay, so it really did suck to be stuck in the middle of life and death and spy games with no memories to turn to. No established resources. Just mugger harvesting and the unrelenting help of a man who had finally realized he had no idea what he’d gotten himself into. That for all his history of helping, all his work toward out-of-reach happy endings, Mickey had landed in his lap with a whole new world of problems.

  He sighed. “Still not breathing.”

  “I must be,” she protested. “I’d pass out if I wasn’t.” But she felt the tightness in her throat, the emptiness in her chest. She might be breathing, but she certainly wasn’t doing it on a regular basis.

  He crinkled again—enough to make her look. He’d sat up. “What’s wrong?”

  She didn’t think about it; she crawled right off her mattress and sat next to him on his, cross-legged on tubes of air and slightly unstable. He didn’t seem surprised. He opened his blanket and pulled her in, putting his arm around her. Their knees bumped.

  Something about that sad and bittersweet feeling quite abruptly faded. But it made way for other things, and quite abruptly—

  “Are you crying?” he asked, suspicion in his voice.

  “No!” she said, and her voice was unconvincingly thick. Didn’t even convince herself. “It’s just … that old man—”

  He stilled in surprise. “We talked about that. It was too risky to interfere, right? I thought you were okay with that.”

  Asperity replaced the unwelcome and unfamiliar heat of tears. “I had to be, didn’t I?” And then she hushed, for he didn’t deserve sharp words. But he gave her shoulders a little squeeze, and she sighed. “I just have this feeling … that I should have been able to protect him.”

  “Why?”

  “Because that’s what I’ve always done,” she said promptly … and then had to stop and consider her words. Consider what few memories she’d regained—and fall back into them. The darkness made it easy; his presence beside her made it easy. “Everything I’ve remembered—okay, everything but the cat—tells me it’s what I’ve always done. The slingshot …” She knew there had been a time when she hadn’t used one. She just couldn’t imagine it right now. “My mother—”

  “You remember your mother?”

  “I remember …” Mickey closed her eyes, even in the darkness. “I remember that she looked a little like me. And that she died when I wasn’t very old.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It was a long time ago,” she said, not thinking of layers of grief still buried somewhere in her mind. Thinking instead of how fiercely she’d protected her sister. “My sister—I have one of those, too, somewhere—didn’t deal with it well. She became the strange one. Every school has one, you know.”

  “There but for the grace of God,” Steve said, his voice distracted enough to let her know he’d gone back to his own memories. “I teetered on that path. Got too distracted by just trying to deal with Zander’s sidetrips.”

  “I didn’t hurt anyone. It’s just … they never knew if I was lurking. And they never knew what I’d put in that slingshot next. Rotten plums … I think those were my favorites.”

  “Nice,” Steve said, admiring. “You sound like a good sister.”

  “Oh, yes,” Mickey said. “A very good sister. Protective.”

  “Ah,” he said. “I get it. It’s what you’ve always done. Right.”

  “And there was this thing in school …” she said, letting it trail away as she hunted something more substantial than mere wisps of images.

  His hand moved from her shoulder to the back of her neck, stroking what was left of her hair. It’s not that bad, she told herself. And she’d stopped getting those surprised looks as people took in her state of dress versus her hairstyle. He said, “High school?”

  “College, I think. It feels small and private … lots of overseas students. I’d say it was outside of DC, but I can’t tell you why.”

  “So you’re a college girl.”

  “Not you? I mean—”

  He chuckled. “I get it. No, I never went. Too much else going on in my life. I took some business courses. They come in handy.”

  “Mm.” She tipped her head so he could reach the other side of her neck. Purr. He could just touch her like that all night long. “There was this … incident. I’d think it had been a dream—a nightmare—if I hadn’t been awake when it came to me. Actually, I guess I went looking.”

  “When?” he asked in surprise. Understandably … she hadn’t made a big deal of hunting her memories once she’d decided to follow her gut instinct.

  “The CapAd.Com building. When I broke in and didn’t come up with anything. End of my trail, y’know? So I gave it some thought.” She searched for some way to tell him of those memories, and then shook her head. “I wouldn’t believe …”

  “I’ve seen Tank Top Woman,” Steve said. He’d turned to look at her in the darkness; his breath was warm on her ear. “I guess I can believe anything.”

  She straightened just long enough to strike a superhero pose—from the waist up, anyway. But it didn’t last—not with those memories poking at her. “College,” she said. “Foreign students—exclusive ones. I guess someone was important enough to get nabbed or something. Whatever. It went wrong. I ended up in the middle of it … hostages, dead instructor …” Frightened faces, splattered blood, anger so thick it might smother her—

  Steve’s hand tightened on the back of her neck. “Breathe,” he said.

  She did, deep and long. “At the time I didn’t think it was a big deal,” she said. “I was just as scared as any of them.” Dried blood, a dead woman on the floor and partially covered with a lemon yellow raincoat, shoulder-length grey hair fanning across the plushly carpeted floor. “It’s just … there was no one else there. No one in charge. And someone had to—”

  “—Protect everyone,” Steve finished.

  “Something like that,” she said it wryly. “More like … stall. Calm things down. I just talked to them, that’s all. Convinced them that the college would do anything to make sure we were all right, and that they could get whatever they wanted. I don’t know what they thought I was … why they believed me.”

  Glass shattering, explosive light, tear gas and choking and more shrieking and there she was, a blur of motion and a shove and one of the gunmen went right out that second story window—

  “What happened? Do you know?” His hand on her neck had grown tense, waiting for the end to a story that might not have one.

  She shrugged and patted his knee, leaving her hand there. Reassuring him. “The FBI hostage rescue team took out one of them. The other, I think …” No, she knew. “There was tear gas … confusion. I pushed him out the window.”

  Steve thought about that a moment. “I get the feeling you weren’t on the first floor.”

  She shook her head. Definitely not the first floor. “That event feels pivotal to me. As though my childhood set me up for it, but it set me up for … whoever I am now.”

  “You know, we could follow up on that. A web search. College, DC, hostages…”

  She shook her head, but softened the negative reaction by squeezing his knee slightly. “It’s not about me right now, Steve. It’s about tracking down Naia. She’s in trouble … and sh
e wouldn’t be, not unless she had something to tell me.” She stopped, thought about the words that had just come out. “Yeah, I’ll stick with that. She’s got something to talk about. Otherwise they’d just keep an eye on her, make sure she wasn’t in a position to learn what she shouldn’t—at least until they knew one way or the other.”

  “I’ll buy that,” Steve murmured, but in a voice that indicated he knew he was totally over his head.

  Mickey buried her face in her hands, if only briefly. “What I don’t get,” she said, “is … if I have this need to take care of people … how the hell did I end up being who I am?”

  “We covered that,” Steve said. “I don’t think you’re giving yourself enough credit. There’s nothing you’ve done that didn’t have justice in it. Hard things, yes. But—”

  “Tell you what,” Mickey interrupted. “You just keep believing that. You believe in it for both of us. It’ll free me to do whatever needs to be done.” Whatever. She hadn’t killed anyone yet. But she had the feeling she could, if she needed to.

  “You know,” Steve said, and his hand moved from the her nape to stroke loose hair away from her face, “it seems to me that it’s only fair if someone protects you now and then. So that’s our story for the rest of the night, okay?”

  Mickey couldn’t let go that easily. “Even if it means protecting me from who I really am?”

  “Even if,” he breathed, and somehow he’d moved closer, and those words brushed warm air against her cheek. She turned to him, surprised, and knew she’d only managed to put herself within trembling distance of him—and when he spoke again, his lips barely brushed hers. “How about it?”

  She tensed. “You don’t know,” she said. “You can’t know—” And finally, in a whisper, “I just don’t want you to be sorry.”

  “Never that.”

  Then again … “It would be a shame,” she said, knowing his mouth was still right there, just close enough to tickle her lips as she spoke, “if we had all this swashbuckling adventure and the guy didn’t get to kiss the girl.”

  “Shut up,” he said, and kissed her.

  Not, as she might have thought, a sweepingly romantic kiss, a Han Solo and Princess Leia kiss. No, it was a Steve Spaneas kiss, full of all his compassion, deep and achingly sweet and apparently endless and yet not quite endless enough.

  “Oh,” she said, more like the gasp for air it was. “Right. Breathe.”

  He laughed, more than a little breathless himself. “Now. Come curl up beside me and let’s see what we can do about that sleep.”

  “But—”

  “Later,” he said. “Because I need to believe we’ll have one.”

  She touched her fingers to her lips. Achingly sweet. The kind of kiss that deserved a later. “Later,” she agreed, and tucked herself against him. Please, let there be a later.

  ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

  Chapter 16

  Steve wouldn’t have said the two of them could sleep through the night on that small air mattress—not and get any real sleep. He wouldn’t have said he could wake up in the morning, intensely aware of her body spooned up against his, and be satisfied just to have had the night, hoping for their chance at a later.

  Not that he failed to react to her; not that she failed to perceive it. He’d seen that sleepy smile.

  But she’d made it plain what she needed. And somewhere inside himself, those needs resonated. So he nuzzled her neck a few times, wallowed briefly in the feel of her as she stretched against him and then rolled away in a tangle of crinkly silver blankets.

  She’d brushed her teeth first thing—bottled water was their friend—changed clothes into a similar low-key, sporty outfit, shoved their gear out of sight, and been waiting for him at the stairwell by the time he managed his own morning ablutions. A quick slink down the stairs and they were out in the open.

  With his bike at hand they wasted no time getting the day started; he dropped her off at a sporting goods store and headed for the Internet café. The menu was limited, but orange juice and an egg muffin wannabe combo did the trick. He thought guiltily of Mickey, but she’d been happy enough with her granola bars.

  Mickey.

  No, it was Anna. Anna Hutchinson. Ahn-na, the pottery instructor had said, along with commentary on how well-liked she was.

  So Steve had been good. He spent a few moments to check the reporting on Anthony’s death and found nothing. At first he truly didn’t believe it—he looked for twenty minutes longer than he should have, certain he was missing something.

  And then his brother’s voice—a voice that hadn’t found its way into his thoughts for a startling number of years now—said quite practically, they cleaned up after themselves. It was the kind of statement Steve would have dismissed when his brother was alive—but right now it struck him as exactly right. They’d cleaned up so thoroughly that no one but those involved knew it had happened at all. And who would miss Anthony, or report him missing, aside from his homeless neighbors?

  He forced himself away from the subject—from even letting the bitter afterthought of it taint his progress—and delved into Naia and Irhaddan, hunting for any piece of information that would make it all make sense. He discovered a recent Times article about UN weapons inspections—that certain Mid-East countries had been declared weapons-free in spite of everyone’s belief that they had been manufacturing and acquiring them. Irhaddan was mentioned simply because it was one of the few countries never under any suspicion.

  Huh. Well, WMD was always worth some attention, but it didn’t seem as though it could be related to Naia’s situation.

  He couldn’t find any photos of Naia, not even old ones. He did find plenty of photos of her father, an older man with much dignity who seemed to do a decent job of keeping his country stable with massive instability all around them. He found photos of the man with his contemporaries, most of whom appeared more than once and some of whom always seemed to be on hand—mostly Mounir Farooqi, the man Mickey had known. He found a number of articles praising the president for his temperate ways, and more than one that praised his decision to send his daughter overseas, acknowledging the personal difficulties this created for the man.

  So Naia was clearly a figurehead. A private, protected figurehead.

  Steve’s brain felt like it was tied in knots. So Mickey and Naia were somehow involved in a spy game—one in which the agencies were still an unknown. None of it made sense—especially the encounter with the pair outside the CapAd.Com building. They’d used CIA terms … but the CIA didn’t work on native soil. Didn’t spy on its own. And Steve, for whatever research he’d done to deal with his brother’s street friends once upon a time, had no truly special insight into the various agencies. Who did what, where they did it, how publicly they did it … he knew enough to throw around a few terms. The end.

  And then there was Naia. Protected, private … she had somehow acquired importance in this game.

  What the hell could be so important in relation to Irhaddan? They were one of the few countries in that area not being a problem or a threat—not under close scrutiny with regard to WMD.

  Oh.

  Idiot.

  What would be important to a country with certain freedoms and reputations would be to keep those freedoms and that reputation. And the Irhaddanians—the ones who had killed Anthony, who had come for him and Mickey at the gym—they acted like men with a lot to lose.

  So the Irhaddanians had something they wanted kept quiet, and Naia knew it, and Naia was working with Mickey.

  He wanted to believe that this meant Mickey was working for U.S. interests. The Good Guys, not the Bad Guys. She could be FBI; she could be … well, something he didn’t even know about.

  No one who cares so much about protecting others would work against her own country.

  He believed that. He was even satisfied to leave it at that.

  Mickey wouldn’t be.

  Then let’s find out more about Mickey.

  Ste
ve went hunting for Anna Hutchinson. He threw in keywords like hostage and college, and it didn’t take him long. Ten years earlier the Internet hadn’t quite been the archival tool of its current incarnation, but an event like that …

  There were anniversaries. Memorials. Various ceremonies, lingering like aftershocks through the years.

  He found a few photos from that time—longer hair, same bright eyes, the rest of her looking young and shell-shocked. He found reference to her role in the incident. He learned that she’d been hurt. She hadn’t mentioned it; maybe she didn’t know. Otherwise, nothing new to be learned. Only what she’d said.

  Except he hadn’t realized it would be such a relief to find that confirmation. For her sake, and for his.

  He took the moment, breathed deeply a few times. His Mickey—right here in phosphor history. Lost her mother, protected her sister, took on gunmen … and danced with brooms and on beds.

  His Mickey.

  I am such an idiot. I know better than to believe in this.

  And still, on a whim, he did a People Search. No phone or address for Anna Hutchinson here in Northern California. But he went to the regular search engine and linked her name to Palo Alto, San Jose, San Francisco …

  Bingo.

  A simple one-page website, a simple one-screen front page. It looked like the online business card it was. Classy, simple, with just a hint of “if you have to ask, you don’t need to know.”

  Antiques. She sold antiques out of San Francisco. If he interpreted the display correctly, she was also an antique hunter—the person to go to with those special requests.

  He had to admire the beauty of it. It meant travel; it meant she had an excuse for being anywhere she needed to be. It meant that dropping out of sight wasn’t a problem—she need answer to no boss, and no set work schedule. It meant, from the exclusive look of the website, that she had clients in the very upper strata of San Francisco society—second only to DC when it came to the number of foreign embassies in residence.