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  With a fractured groan he plunged deep inside her, setting a new, more intense rhythm. Harder. Faster. Deeper. Inner spasms converged into a spiral, and she writhed against him as her body demanded release. The pleasure built, coiling tighter and impossibly tighter, until his name was wrung from her, a plea. A demand.

  His hips hammered hers until he could go no deeper. Then he withdrew. Then thrust again. “Come for me, love,” he crooned, his voice thick with passion.

  “Yes. Oh, God, yes.” It was a desperate plea as her body kept gathering tighter and tighter. The pleasure was so sharp, so intense, tears started in her eyes. Mindlessly, she walked her heels farther up his back, opening herself to him even more, then dug her fingers into his sweat-dampened hair.

  “That’s it, sweetheart, let go for me.” He drove into her hard and fast, pushing the tightening spirals inside to an unbearable intensity until her cries became whimpers.

  He plunged impossibly deeper for the final, mindless strokes until, with a final violent thrust, she arched. Shaking uncontrollably, her climax came at her in a blinding rush of pure white light and sensation too sharp to name.

  Hunt’s face twisted in a grimace of sublime pleasure as his muscles tightened and his large body vibrated with his own powerful orgasm. Taylor, feeling the intimate pulses of his release deep inside her, convulsed again.

  He took her with him as he rolled to his side, taking his weight off her. Which was a good thing. She couldn’t catch her breath. After what seemed like an eternity, she spoke, her voice thick and slurred. “Pretty dangerous stuff.”

  She was grateful to hear that he wasn’t breathing too well yet either. “Sex?”

  “Making love with you.” She rolled up on her elbow to look down at him, then couldn’t resist running her fingers through the mat of hair on his chest. His skin was filmed with perspiration, his hair tangled about his face as he watched her.

  “I have no defenses against a man like you,” she told him, her chest tightening with the truth of it. “I’ve never had to. I’ve never met anyone like you.”

  “Jesus, Taylor—”

  Her hair brushed her back as she shook her head. “No, let me finish. I know I give the impression of being sophisticated and terribly experienced. But I—it’s mostly for show so I can blend with the people my job requires me to mix with. I’m twenty-seven years old, Hunt, and I’ve had two lovers. And even fewer relationships. This—you mean something to me.”

  She lay down, settling her cheek in the curve of his shoulder, her hand over the steady beat of his heart. She yawned, then gave his chest a light, secret kiss, breathing in the scent of his skin. “I just thought you should know that before you leave.”

  Thirty

  It was fully dark now, and windblown rain beat a restless tattoo on the black windows as Hunt walked through the darkened living room toward the kitchen and the sound of voices.

  He’d never had sex like that in his life, never known a woman who could meet him stroke for stroke. Could meet and match him physically in every way. Her soft cry seemed to be lodged in his brain. The sensation of her silky skin gliding across his own much rougher hide seemed to have somehow become a part of him.

  She had no defenses against him? He raked his hair back with his fingers. How could—why would—a woman leave herself that open and vulnerable to a man?

  Especially this woman, who had a defense for every situation. “I just thought you should know that before you leave,” he repeated through gritted teeth. “Bloody hell.”

  Hunt suspected that Taylor lived for her job, had few close friends and few, if any, outside interests. Which could account for the statement. It meant nothing, he assured himself, just something said in the aftermath of the heat of the moment. A “Thanks, you were great” kind of thing.

  Shaking his head, feeling vaguely disquieted by her announcement, he didn’t need to glance at his watch: forty-eight hours to the thirteenth at 3:33 deadline. Jesus, they were cutting it close.

  Pleased that he was mentally back on track, he walked into the brightly lit, crowded kitchen. More of his team had arrived. The four newcomers sat at the bar counter. Bishop and Aries sat at a small bistro table. Remains of pizza and empty soda cans indicated they’d finished eating.

  A space had been cleared on the black granite countertop, and the small computer was up and operational. The screen blank at the moment.

  “Wright’s about to transmit,” Max told him.

  “Good,” Hunt said in masterful understatement. And not a bloody moment too soon. “Austin . . . Escobar . . . Savage . . . Fisk,” he said, greeting them, pouring himself a cup of coffee and leaning against the counter to wait.

  “Have a nice kip?” Catherine Seymour, aka Savage, asked, her voice suggestive and husky, with a slight Liverpool undertone, as she implied his nap was anything but.

  The slow, catlike smile she gave him had at one time heated his blood. Now it left him cold. “Not nearly long enough,” he answered smoothly. He’d slept for less than an hour. It was enough. He felt refreshed, invigorated, and ready to roll. His phone rang. “St. John . . . Right. Excellent. Audio or live stream?” He clicked Wright onto speaker, then put the phone down beside the computer.

  “Wheels up in one hour, gentlemen,” Michael Wright instructed, his voice as clear as if he stood in the room with them. The computer screen blinked to life. “Destination: South Africa. Morales owns a mine. Depth 4,581 meters. The missile is there, people. Coordinates and satellite imagery uploading.”

  The computer screen filled with fast-moving images being downloaded to the hard drive.

  “We believe this facility will have characteristics of Morales’s beliefs,” Wright told them. “Think biblical. Apocalyptic. Our analysts are working on this as we speak. We should have an educated idea of what you can expect ASAP. I don’t have to be there to see all of you looking at your watches. We’re as aware of this ticking clock as you are.” Wright’s voice was tight and controlled.

  “Entry to the mine is said to be impenetrable without the information held on those disks,” he added. “Rumor has it, without them, not even Morales can get in.”

  “He’ll get in just fine if he was the one who took the damn disks from us,” Bishop pointed out grimly.

  “Maybe the Black Rose has them.” Savage picked up Bishop’s Coke can and drank.

  “Makes no difference who has them,” Hunt told them. “We’ll be waiting at the front and back doors to greet all arrivals. Navarro and Daklin?” The best T-FLAC had in missile and toxic chemicals.

  “Already dispatched,” Wright confirmed as Taylor walked into the kitchen. “They’ll be waiting on board. Their teams dispatched to Jo’burg airport with the—”

  “Hold a minute,” Hunt told Wright. “You can’t be in here right now, Taylor.”

  “I’ve been listening for the past ten minutes,” she kept coming, rounding the counter toward him, her expression serious and determined. “I have—”

  “We’ll be out of your hair in a few minutes,” he told her impatiently. Didn’t matter what the hell she wanted. She didn’t belong here. “Wait in your bedroom till we’re through.”

  “T minus forty-eight hours to get in and deactivate the missile, people,” Wright’s disembodied voice reminded them unnecessarily.

  Two feet from Hunt, Taylor took her hand out of the front pocket of her jeans. Between her slender, agile, thieving fingers were two flat powder-dusted minidisks. She extended them to Hunt. “I believe these will help.”

  Thirty-one

  “Christ almighty.” Hunt plucked the small disks from Taylor’s fingers. “She lifted two disks right from under our noses yesterday,” he told Wright.

  “And thank God she’s even better than we gave her credit for,” Wright said dryly over the speaker. “Transmit. Let’s see what we have.”

  Not looking at him, Savage offered her handheld unit to Hunt. “Here, use mine.”

  Hunt already had his own specially
modified PDA, out on the counter, and one of the minidisks inserted. He hit the transmit button. Encrypted. No surprise.

  “Transmit the second one,” Wright ordered. “Then stand down, I’ll get back to you ASAP.” The phone went dead.

  Taylor, leaning against the counter sipping his coffee, looked quite pleased with herself. “Am I good. Or am I good?”

  “You are, without a doubt, incredible,” Hunt said tightly. “It would have been nice to have a heads-up before this, however.”

  “If Taylor hadn’t taken them, we’d be screwed.” Max pointed out the obvious as Hunt plucked his cup—his empty cup—from her fingers.

  “Exactly,” Taylor said. “Thank you, Max. You should all be thanking me. Turns out you’re lucky I did take those disks.” She tilted her head to look up at Hunt. The piercing pure blue of her eyes was almost unnerving in their intensity. “He’s right and you know it. Without those disks you’d be—as Max so eloquently pointed out—screwed. The least you could do is—”

  Stepping away from the subtle lavender fragrance of her, Hunt cut her off to address his team. “Two out of five doesn’t necessarily mean we’re any less screwed,” he reminded them grimly. He ran a glass under the faucet, then drank the cold water as he marshaled his annoyance. Two steps forward, one step back.

  God only knew, he was grateful she’d palmed the bloody disks. But he was also furious that she’d managed to nip them right under his nose. And, he thought, ire rising, that she’d felt the need to steal them back at all. He brought himself up short, lifted the glass to his mouth and drank again, letting the cold water soothe his tight throat.

  He knew the two irritants were nothing more than his bruised ego talking. She’d outsmarted him, and she didn’t trust him. His ego would survive. The fact that they had two of the disks was all that counted. He gave her a hard look. “Well done.”

  She beamed. “You are quite welcome.”

  The phone vibrated on the granite countertop. Hunt snatched it up. “St. John.” He listened for several minutes, his blood slowly turning to ice. Everything in him went rigid as Michael Wright talked. This wasn’t going on the speaker. The others watched him in silence. He turned his back on Taylor and his team and walked out of the kitchen.

  “The answer to that,” he said flatly, crossing the darkened living room, “is an unequivocal no.”

  Wright kept talking as Hunt strode down the hallway, pushed open the door to Taylor’s bedroom, and slammed it shut after him. The room smelled of her. Lavender and sex. Promises and lies.

  Hunt trusted Michael Wright with his life. But in this case the man was wrong. Dead wrong. He interrupted Wright’s monologue again, this time to say through clenched teeth, “Yes, it was. And my prerogative to change it. Which I have. I said no bloody way. I won’t do it.”

  After Wright responded, he said, “Because my feelings about women in the field are well document— Yes,” he bit out. “I’m aware of that.”

  He didn’t give a continental damn about what happened to Savage. “She’s a specially trained operative and knows the risks . . . Yes, damn it. A.J. too. But not—”

  Hunt’s jaw ached because his teeth were clenched so tightly. “Yes,” he said, and sat down on the edge of the bed. “I realize this was the original . . . Maybe not. Fisk is here, he’s—”

  The door opened and Max walked in.

  Hunt shook his head.

  His friend plucked a broken drinking glass from Hunt’s hand, then pressed a cloth into his palm, forcibly closing Hunt’s fingers around it. Hunt gave his bleeding hand a mildly surprised glance, not realizing he’d broken the glass in his agitation. “That’s absolutely bullshit, Wright. Bullshit. Are you telling me, in the entire T-FLAC organization, we don’t have one fucking person skilled enough to get us through those seven levels? Not a one?”

  After listening a moment, he interrupted again. “Why in the bloody hell do we need to finesse our way in?” he said, hanging on to his temper by a fragile thread as he got up to pace. Max stepped out of his way but stayed in the room.

  “It would be more expedient to blast our way through those seven fucking levels than take the time to unravel all the gyrations built in to keep us out.”

  “Possible nuclear warhead?” Max mentioned dryly as Hunt passed him for the fifth time.

  Hunt stopped, looked at his friend, then closed his eyes. “Yeah,” he said flatly as Wright repeated the words. “Max just reminded me.”

  Thirty-two

  Filled with nervous energy, Taylor hadn’t been able to stand still and had busied herself making a fresh pot of coffee, and disposing of the take-out pizza paraphernalia.

  He’d been furious that she’d lifted the disks, and she understood why he was annoyed. But she wasn’t obligated to tell him that she hadn’t known at the time whether she could trust him. And if he’d been annoyed before, he was absolutely furious during the phone call. She didn’t know if that was a good thing or a bad thing.

  Neal Bishop introduced her to the others. Apparently, none of them had first names. Taylor did a lightning-fast assessment of Hunt’s group. These were the people who would be with Hunt when he did whatever it was he was going to do.

  She knew instinctively that Hunt would put his life on the line for them. Would they do the same for him?

  She studied each of them carefully as they were introduced.

  Austin: surfer type, sun-streaked hair, dangerous eyes, lazy smile. Escobar: cold black eyes, twitchy, filled with nervous energy, pacing as they waited. Savage: the only woman, strikingly beautiful, green-eyed redhead, controlled. Fisk: black guy, shorter by a good foot than the other men, slight, good hands, easy smile.

  If she imagined really hard, she could believe they were here for a party. As friends. Um, no. She wasn’t that good at self-delusion.

  She started another pot by the time Hunt, followed by Max, returned to the kitchen. Hunt’s expression was grim, his hand wrapped in a bloodstained towel. She wondered how that happened.

  “This is what we have,” he said, standing in the doorway. He was back to being the chilly man from Houston and the antagonist from San Cristóbal. He was also all business.

  He walked into the room and stood beside the flashy redhead. “HQ broke the encryptions,” he told them, his tone grim. “Morales appears to have replicated Dante’s seven levels of hell inside the abandoned mine. The missile, according to Satcom and infrared photos, is at the base.”

  Nobody said a word. Nobody moved.

  “Thanks to Taylor’s sticky fingers,” he went on, not looking at her as he spoke, “we are now in possession of the access codes for levels three and five. But even with these codes—and remember, it’s only two out of seven levels—it won’t be easy. Morales has had years to think this through. And the best, most creative minds in the world to help him.

  “Our analysis department and our think tank guys will work on variables and possible scenarios while we’re in transit. So far we know that scientists, mechanical engineers, and—God only knows what the hell this means—the movie industry, were involved in the ten-plus years it took to construct this place.”

  Hunt looked from one member of his team to the next, his eyes skimmed over Taylor without pausing. “According to our intel, sixteen hundred men gave their lives for this project. I believe that everything José Morales has worked and strived for since the inception of Mano del Dios is hidden inside that mine. Destroy what he has hidden, and we destroy Mano del Dios.”

  “Is that before or after we deactivate what could possibly be a nuclear warhead?” Daklin asked, grabbing his jacket as he slid off a bar stool.

  “After,” Hunt told him, ignoring Daklin’s sarcasm. “The plane’s engine is running. Wheels up, twenty minutes.”

  He hadn’t glanced at her once, and Taylor realized that he had no intention of taking her with them. “Why did you take ‘thousands of manpower hours’ to find me in San Cristóbal, Hunt?” she demanded as everyone hustled and bu
stled around them, preparing to leave.

  They stopped what they were doing. Silence fell on the room like a shroud.

  “Wasn’t it so that I could help you break into whatever facility it was that those codes were for?” she asked quietly. Her heart beat too fast and her palms were slick with nervous perspiration.

  He gave her the tundra look that made icicles form in Taylor’s veins. Gone was the lover. Here was the T-FLAC operative with a mission.

  “I only needed you to get into the safe,” he told her dismissively. “You’d already done that by the time I got to San Cristóbal. If you’d given me the disks at that time, we wouldn’t be here arguing right now. “

  Unfortunately, very true. Still, the idea of getting through a major terrorist’s version of Dante’s seven levels of hell intrigued her, and actually gave her all those lovely preheist anticipatory palpitations. “Your boss wanted me to go with you,” Taylor pushed. “Didn’t he?”

  “Michael Wright is not my boss,” he told her.

  He wasn’t saying no. “Didn’t he?” She hadn’t had a really exciting challenge in months. This would certainly be that. And probably more. Not to mention she’d have a valid reason for spending a little more time with Hunt.

  Hunt glanced around at his team, who weren’t even pretending not to be intrigued by the byplay between them. “Ready?” he asked them.

  “I’ll go. On one condition.”

  “Wrong answer,” Hunt told Taylor, his eyes so dark a charcoal they looked demonic as he glared at her. “And in case you’re not as smart as you look, the answer is no. Listen to yourself—it didn’t take you five seconds to come up with a damn condition.”

  “It’s important—”

  He walked over and grabbed her by the upper arm. “Come with me.”

  “What is this? You Tarzan, me Jane?” Taylor asked as he strong-armed her through the living room and down the hallway, and opened the first door he came to, her office.

  He pushed her inside and kicked the door shut with his foot, still holding her arm. He flicked on the overhead light and spun her around so they were face-to-face. “Morales is an insane son of a bitch and a dangerous psychopath. I’m smart. I’m wily, I’m experienced, and I’m determined, and it’s taken me six years to get this close to him.