Straight Through the Heart Read online

  “Stay in character. Always,” Eric said, his voice barely audible.

  “Do not forget you’re my Andorran wife.” He drew back, still holding her, and gave her a tight smile. Tension played between them like a high-voltage current.

  Dawn became more aware of his hands on her, the subtle catch in his breathing, the intoxicating sandalwood scent of him this close to her. His gaze prowled over her like a hungry lion.

  Suddenly he released her and left her there alone.

  Something had happened in that brief span of time and Dawn could not explain it. Sexual attraction peaking big-time, of course, but more than that. It was as if she had felt his thoughts, his worry, even a fear that he was getting too close to her and yet not close enough.

  Or maybe she was projecting her own thoughts….

  Dear Reader,

  The operatives who work behind the scenes, gathering and analyzing information and acting on it on behalf of our country, deserve much more praise than they get. We hear about their mistakes and failures but never do we learn much about the extent of their success. I would like to thank them here for their contributions to our security.

  My fascination for the various agencies grew out of a close association with individuals involved in the intelligence community. I witnessed firsthand how their jobs, frequent travel and the secrecy required of them impacted on the agents and on their families. I saw the courage of spouses who wait and the ones who go out, the camaraderie between those who watch each other’s backs in the field, and the personal and professional pride in a job well done even when they aren’t allowed to discuss it.

  Though the characters I write about in my SPECIAL OPS stories are strictly imaginary, they meet the same real-life problems, the hopes, disappointments and dreams that our friends in intelligence encounter. Life is lived on the edge. Love is precious, yet too easily lost by a shift in priorities. Trust in a partner, on the job or at home, is not only nice to have, it is crucial.

  So, that said, I hope you enjoy this tale set in the Greek Islands where the incredible sun-kissed beauty of the surroundings contrasts with the dark side of terror that brings Eric and Dawn to paradise on their mission.

  Here, have a little mystery and watch love ignite under pressure….

  Lyn Stone

  STRAIGHT THROUGH THE HEART

  Lyn Stone

  Books by Lyn Stone

  Silhouette Intimate Moments

  Beauty and the Badge #952

  Live-In Lover #1055

  A Royal Murder #1172

  *Down to the Wire #1281

  *Against the Wall #1295

  *Under the Gun #1330

  *Straight Through the Heart #1408

  Harlequin Historicals

  The Wicked Truth #358

  The Arrangement #389

  The Wilder Wedding #413

  The Knight’s Bride #445

  Bride of Trouville #467

  One Christmas Night #487

  “Ian’s Gift”

  My Lady’s Choice #511

  The Highland Wife #551

  The Quest #588

  Marrying Mischief #601

  Gifts of the Season #631

  “Christmas Charade”

  The Scot #643

  LYN STONE

  is a former artist who developed an avid interest in criminology while helping her husband study for his degree. His subsequent career in counterintelligence and contacts in the field provide a built-in source for research when writing suspense. Their long and happy marriage provides firsthand knowledge of happily-ever-afters.

  This book is dedicated to Karla and Dawn,

  two mischief makers who inspired me to write this one.

  Thanks for your enthusiasm and support!

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Epilogue

  Prologue

  Alexandria, Virginia

  Amazing what a paper clip bent into the right configuration could do to a lock. More amazing still, the fact that there was a paper clip in such a paperless environment.

  The desk drawer scraped as Dawn drew it out, the sound echoing in the darkness. She hissed in a breath and directed the beam of her penlight over a couple of unopened packages of snacks and onto the lone, small notepad in one corner.

  With gloved fingers, she turned it over. There were three eight-digit passwords scribbled on the back. She committed them to memory.

  She glanced at the computer, now dark and in rest mode. Did she dare take time to boot it up and see what she could get into? No, it was enough to know she could if she wanted to.

  What would Daddy think now of his helpless little princess if he could see her in action? His incessant coddling had nearly ruined her for doing anything useful with her life. Maybe her size or the way she moved gave men the impression she needed looking after. God knows, they all tried. But her size and sinuous dexterity made her perfect for this kind of work.

  Holding her breath, she gently pushed the drawer closed. It meshed with the front of the desk with only a slight squeak.

  Suddenly, calm deserted her and her senses went on high alert. Her skin tingled, her breathing grew shallow and her heart rate increased. Something was not right. The urge to hurry kicked in, threatening her concentration.

  She pressed a button on her wristwatch and the luminous numbers blinked on. It was nineteen minutes later than she had planned to wind this up. The outside guard patrol had thrown her off.

  No matter. She had what she’d come for. Now was the time to climb back up on the desk, disappear into the vent, replace that panel and get the hell out.

  Just as she secured the last screw in the vent’s panel and switched off her penlight, the office door opened. The lights clicked on and she heard voices, one of which she recognized immediately.

  Dawn froze, peering wide-eyed through the metal slots of the vent.

  At first she felt only anger that Paul Bergen hadn’t trusted her to do this. After all those instructions and careful coordinating, he had shown up to check on her? It was eight hours too soon for him to be presenting a vulnerability report, and this lab wouldn’t be the place for that anyway.

  Then she decided he must be working another angle, another assailable point of entry. She remained silent and still, watching, waiting for the two men to leave the lab so she could make her escape.

  Only when Bergen stabbed the technician did Dawn realize what was really going down.

  Chapter 1

  McLean, Virginia

  “So, she’s either the hero of the hour or she’s facing a rap for treason.” Eric Vinland pursed his lips and doodled a little hangman’s rope on his notepad next to the woman’s name. He was conditioning himself to make the call of guilty if it came to that.

  Damn, but he hated it when a woman got herself involved in something like this. Maybe the feeling harkened back to his early training that included looking after the “weaker sex,” seeing that none of them came to any harm. Feminists today would rip him apart if he ever admitted that out loud. They’d be right to do that, too. Eric knew from experience that women could be every bit as capable, but also as greedy, sadistic and treasonous as men. “Comes down to him or her,” he reminded himself.

  “By her own admission, she was there
at the scene so that about sums it up,” Jack Mercier, Eric’s supervisor and the agent in charge of the investigation, agreed. “Let’s go so you can determine if she was involved in the theft and establishing cover by killing Bergen, or if she’s playing straight with us. You’re a hell of a lot faster than a polygraph.”

  Eric scoffed. “You know as well as I do that she will have been trained to beat a lie detector.”

  Jack nodded. “Yes, but she won’t be prepared for your powers of detection, will she? I wish you’d arrived sooner. Internet sources indicate those plans for the radar shield are already on the block and we need to find out who’s doing the marketing. God help us if they decide to download the damned thing to a buyer. It’ll be like freeware before we know it.”

  “Too valuable to risk that happening. The seller will want to deliver and collect in person on this one.”

  Eric understood the need for urgency. He regretted his delayed flight from Seattle, but it couldn’t be helped. At least the investigation there had been successful even if it had run longer than expected.

  He followed the boss out of the borrowed office at FBI headquarters, down the corridor to the interrogation room.

  “You do the inquisition. I’ll observe,” Jack ordered. He ducked into the room adjacent to Interrogation that contained the viewing side of a one-way mirror.

  When Eric entered the next door, his fellow agent, Holly Griffin, stood propped against the table, speaking to the suspect. “Okay, let’s have it again. From the top, please.”

  Eric’s quiet entrance raised no reaction in either woman. Holly kept her eyes on the woman, Agent Moon, who had hers shut.

  He zoned in on the redhead seated on the far side of the table in the uncomfortable metal folding chair. He could read most people’s minds like the Sunday funnies, but not this kid’s. Not yet, anyway.

  Her exhaustion was evident. The incident had occurred around midnight, and it was nearly dawn now. Her defenses should be way down.

  She had her arms folded beneath her ample breasts, hands clutching her elbows so tightly her knuckles turned white.

  She gave a huge sigh as she rocked forward in her chair. “Not another word without a bathroom break. I swear I’ve told you everything I saw, all I know, all I suspect.”

  Eric saw no point in torture. He gave Holly a nod when she looked over at him, and she promptly escorted the subject out. Holly, Will and Jack had been questioning her for a couple of hours now. Several empty soft drink cans sat on the table close to where the subject had been sitting.

  Holly was the lone female agent in their group and married to Will Griffin, another of their number. Sextant was a tight unit of six, all with particular specialties. Holly’s was profiling, combined with an amazing talent for organizing and analyzing gathered data. Though she denied having any extrasensory abilities, she was exceptional at filling in the blanks and hearing the unspoken.

  Her husband, Will, was often blessed with remote viewing and occasional empathetic episodes. Joe Corda was psychic to some degree, though still identifying and learning to control what he could do. Clay Senate experienced visions of future occurrences, often hard to interpret, but always interesting to explore. Jack Mercier held it all together and made every attempt to develop scenarios utilizing whatever they were able to provide, however nebulous that input seemed.

  Eric’s powers had proved the strongest and most reliable so far. Telepathy was his thing, but he did have sporadic success in other areas.

  His fellow agents were thorough, but he had the edge they needed to grasp everything in her pretty head, thoughts she would never speak aloud.

  Since he could first remember, Eric had possessed that gift. He’d been hired for the elite Sextant team because of it. Made up of agents recruited from other government agencies, Sextant’s mission was to subvert terrorist activities. His academic and professional credentials were very good, but he knew that his ability to read minds had been the kicker when it had come to his being chosen for Sextant. Sometimes he thought Mercier depended a little too heavily on that aspect of him. Eric tried hard not to resent that his other talents were underused.

  “Anything yet?” Jack asked over the speaker.

  Eric glanced at the mirror. “I’m in the room thirty seconds and you want a conclusion? I haven’t even seen her eyes yet. Doesn’t take telepathy to sense her exhaustion and frustration, though. Could be she’s about to blow.”

  “Then ratchet up the pressure,” Jack said calmly.

  Eric nodded and sat down, resting his elbows on the tabletop, and waited, reviewing the little he knew about the subject thus far from her hastily retrieved files.

  Special Agent Dawn Moon, five years with National Security Agency, age twenty-eight. Earned a degree at twenty-three, double major in criminal justice and psychology, a master’s in the former, trilingual, but mathematically challenged. Eric smiled at the perfunctory, handwritten notation about that last subject.

  No outstanding debts, he noted, so she must be able to balance her checkbook. She drove a three-year-old Mazda and lived alone in a modest apartment in one of the less-desirable sections of Alexandria. She had been on her own since age eighteen; her only living relatives were her father, who lived in Charleston, and a male cousin who taught at Galludet College in D.C.

  Eric mentally added that she was really very pretty in a girl-next-door way. If the girl in question was into crawling around dirty attics and basements. No makeup. No nail polish. Strictly business, this one.

  She was dressed all in black, right down to her sneakers, and looked bedraggled after her wild adventure. Her hair was a mess, the curly red strands tousled and dusty, straggling out of the black scrunchie that held only half of it on top of her head.

  He could picture her yanking off a hood, not bothering to fix it. That indicated a low vanity score. High in self-confidence, though, from what he had observed. He liked that mix, and it was not one he saw very often.

  The only motive for a woman like Agent Moon to get embroiled in a treasonous act like this would be greed. That just didn’t fit.

  She returned a few minutes later, entering ahead of Holly. Without being ordered, Dawn Moon resumed her seat and immediately locked gazes with him.

  That’s when Eric first saw her eyes. They were probably the most arresting he had ever seen. Dark, fathomless and exotic. She really had the most amazing eyes. And a powerfully indignant glare.

  He finally looked away, punched on the recorder that Holly had been using and identified himself as the interrogator and Agent Dawn Elizabeth Moon as the subject. He added the date and time. Then he began the questions. “What happened on the night of June 15 in the R&D lab of Zelcon Technologies?”

  “I was concealed in the air-conditioning vent and I saw Agent Bergen do it,” she said in a clipped, determined voice, not frazzled as it had been before. She had collected herself pretty well and in short order.

  “Recap for me. I’m new,” Eric drawled, watching her sigh with resignation at having to repeat the entire incident yet again to yet another stranger.

  “At Bergen’s orders, I was to gain entry to the R&D lab, collect proof that I had been there and get out without being apprehended. I should have been off the property by the time he arrived, but I was delayed coming in.”

  “By what?”

  “A complication in getting past the patrol outside. I had to wait for one to stop, smoke a cigarette and carry on a cell-phone conversation before he resumed his rounds.”

  “When did you first see Agent Bergen that night?” Eric asked.

  “When I was replacing the last screw in the vent panel after I had completed my assignment, established the vulnerability in security that Zelcon had neglected to address since our official walk-through and study of the building plans evaluation six months ago.”

  “And did you participate in that evaluation?”

  “Yes.” She paused, then took a deep breath and continued, her patience growing thin wi
th all the repetition. “Anyway, I heard voices and I could see through the vent. A minute after the two men entered the lab, Agent Ben Bergen stabbed the tech with a hypo, woke up the computer, plugged one of those little attaché gizmos into a USB port, copied some information, put the thing in his pocket and walked out.” She firmed her lips as if holding in a curse.

  Eric remained silent for a full ten seconds, attempting to connect with what she was thinking. Her face gave away a lot, probably distracting him. Attracting him, too, oddly enough. Her face, figure and attitude combined to stir something in him he really didn’t want stirred at the moment. Certainly not by a potential suspect. He had to see past all that, get beneath her surface.

  When nothing came through on the mental front, he threw out more questions. “But you did nothing to prevent the theft of technology that could be critical to our nation’s safety? Isn’t that your job, Agent Moon, enforcing national security? That’s what you were there to assess, right?”

  She calmly placed her hands palms down on the tabletop as if she meant to rise, but she didn’t. Instead, she spoke calmly, deliberately and in a professional manner. “He had brought in at least one hypo containing an obvious knock-out drug or poison and might have had more, or maybe other weapons for all I knew. I remained concealed because I was unarmed.”

  Eric picked up sincerity, but he got that from her tone of voice and expression. Nothing from her mind. There were none of the telling mannerisms of a liar present. However, she would know what those were as well as he did. As agents, they would have had virtually the same training, probably by many of the same instructors.

  “Why unarmed?” he asked. “You were issued a weapon.”

  She sighed. “As I have stated at least a dozen times, the vents are a tight squeeze. Inches count, and anything I felt was not needed, I left off. It’s not as if I would have been shot if discovered. They would simply have held me until my reason for being there was verified. Please, will you tell me if that tech is dead?”