LITMIR.BIZ

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      Be careful.

      Maybe until she found the reason for the attacks on her, Willy could help allay her fears.

      “You won’t have to wait.” Feeling her way, she stroked Willy’s broad back then planted a kiss on the top of his head. She could all but hear his tongue lolling in delight. “Like your new home, pal?” Casey lifted her sightless gaze in Graham’s direction. “I’m already in love. You rat…thank you.”

      “HOW DID SHE TAKE IT?”

      Slow to answer, Graham watched Jackie Miles lean back in her seat across from him and grin. He didn’t smile back. Even after chewing Jackie out about the training exercise yesterday, he still felt edgy. He could see Casey last night, looking pale, could feel her in his arms at the doctor’s building beforehand. He could see her melting over Willy earlier that day, yet trying to hide her fears.

      “How do you think?” he said.

      Her grin widened. “She kept him, though. Right?”

      “Right.”

      Jackie ran her fingers through her short red hair. “So why the frown, tough guy? Casey has a dog to help her. And Willy has a place to live—literally.”

      Graham lifted his eyebrows. In frustration, he tapped a pen against the edge of the table. They were alone in the booth of a small diner not far from Casey’s apartment, and were the only customers in the place, yet he could feel danger in the air.

      “Watch it,” Graham murmured. “Be careful what you say.”

      When her brown eyes cooled, he decided that he missed his original partner, Tom Dallas, who had gone back into the field about the time Graham and Casey split up.

      Then there was Casey herself.

      Graham kept his tone low.

      “Before I hooked her up with the dog, she was depending on the old man across the hall—a nice enough guy but he’s seventy-five if he’s a day. Not much protection there.” Graham sighed, then, in an even softer voice, told Jackie the little he knew about the man’s son, Rafe Valera. “I was a hair away from pulling this out—” he patted his coat over his Glock “—when the old guy showed up. If we’re right about her first ‘accident’ and the revolving-door episode, then she’s still at risk. I’m not always around to make sure nothing happens to her.”

      “You’re divorced, boy-o.”

      “So she keeps reminding me.”

      She laid a hand on his arm.

      “You’re not responsible for her any longer.”

      “So she told me.”

      When he pulled his arm free, Jackie swiveled away to reach for the sugar, as if he’d rejected her, and Graham changed the subject again. It wasn’t comfortable for him, either, admitting his marriage had gone belly-up.

      No sense jumping down Jackie’s throat again about Casey, when what she’d said was true. He needed Jackie to help him crack a difficult case, the reason they were sitting now in a diner several miles from the Hearthline complex to have a private conversation.

      Graham’s personal life might be a mess, but he couldn’t afford to screw up this latest assignment. Casey’s well-being was one thing—and important to him. National security was another, and Graham returned to the business he shared with Jackie. Cloak-and-dagger, he thought. They were even “hiding” in a corner so as not to be overheard.

      “Find anything new in those telephone logs or cell phone records?” He didn’t mention Hearthline by name.

      “De nada,” Jackie answered, still with her profile to him. “Our guy is a real closemouthed type.”

      “He’s careful, that’s for sure. I’ve been running the e-mail search myself.” The pen rapped the table edge again. “Nothing there, either. Hell, the breach has got to be someone in the agency.”

      Jackie faced him again. “True, but weird.” Hearthline’s motto was “The Bastion of National Security.” “Selling secrets to Al-Hassan or any other terrorist network must be highly profitable—and it makes our guy on the inside a traitor.”

      Graham frowned at his pen. Their mission hadn’t proved easy, not that he expected it to be. But locating the source of a major security leak before it triggered another terrorist attack on the U.S. was proving even more elusive than he’d thought.

      “He’s there all right. I can feel it.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “What we don’t know is who he is.”

      “I have a theory you might like,” Jackie murmured and Graham’s head shot up. She silently mouthed the name Eddie Lawton.

      “The IT guy?” He’d fixed Graham’s computer once. A small, scrawny kid with big glasses, a stubborn cowlick and a pen protector in his pocket.

      “He’s a techno geek, I know. That’s why he’s perfect. PC’s are his friends, better than people to him. He looks harmless, even cute—” Jackie shuddered “—but it would be first-grade easy for him to hack into the databases. Believe me.”

      “Maybe so, but I still think it’s someone higher up.” Graham had been making a list right before he suggested they go for coffee to discuss matters. Before he’d reamed Jackie about the training exercise. Before she’d brought up Casey. “Much higher,” he said.

      Jackie saw his point. “You mean, someone privy to real information as it comes in.”

      Like DeLucci. The thought of their boss soured Graham’s stomach.

      “Right, and with the alert at highest level—”

      “‘Rumor has it another disaster on a massive scale is all but imminent.’” She quoted their supervisor’s latest memo. “Thanks to whoever-the-hell-it-is we’re looking for. High or low.” She stirred the sugar into her coffee. “Whoever it is, we’ll find a slip or a name somewhere in those records—and then a face to go with it.”

      Graham set his cup aside. “We’d better get started.”

      “I have more cell phone calls to wade through before quitting time.” She leaned close to whisper, “And that’s our exciting life, 007. Sometimes I think the undercover drudgery at M-6 will kill me before a traitor’s bullet can.”

      Graham pushed back in his seat. Their true affiliation was not with Hearthline, but with C.A.T., a top-secret, elite counterterrorist team funded in part, it was said, by the CIA.

      “Listen.” He checked the narrow room again, finding no other patrons at the moment. “This diner is better than a ‘dedicated’ huddle room at the agency, but still, no exception. The walls could have ears, so watch it. Let’s go.”

      Graham slipped his pen into his jacket. He wouldn’t dwell on the fact that his marriage may have gone bust because of his job. That he’d lost Casey, who found it hard to trust in the first place, precisely because he had been lying to her about who he was and what he did.

      Yet one question had been teasing the edges of his mind ever since he’d gotten the call that Casey was hurt.

      Graham paid for their coffee, ushered Jackie outside then posed the question. “Here’s another thing to chew on. What do you suppose she was doing at my office that day?”

      And why had Casey been run down less than a block away, of all places in the nation’s capital?

      Walking beside him to his car, Jackie shrugged. “She wanted to see you, obviously.”

      Graham shook his head. “I had distinctly told her never to go there, but why in hell would someone want to hurt her?”

      “Or try to kill her,” Jackie murmured.

      Exactly. Graham’s blood chilled at the thought.

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