Cindy Dees – Captain's Call of Duty (страница 2)
“So do I. But that doesn’t mean either of us gets to do it.”
“I’m serious. I’ve been attached to this unit for a full year and I haven’t been out on a single field op.”
“You’ve been on tons of ops,” he retorted.
“Sitting in a van a hundred miles from the deployment and babysitting satellite feeds is not a
Jim’s expression hardened. “Not happening. You’re a rookie. You’re a female. And your dad would kill me if I let anything happen to you.”
She snapped, “Rookie techs go out in the field with the unit all the time. And you’ve sent a woman into a hot combat zone before—”
“Yeah, and look how that turned out.” His gaze strayed to the wall of photographs of fallen heroes under a banner declaring them never to be forgotten.
“—and as for my dad, I’m an adult and this is my job. He can get over it.”
“You’re inexperienced. I can’t risk my men’s lives with you. When you’ve got more field experience, maybe we’ll talk about it.”
He’d set up a neat catch-22 and snagged her squarely in its logic. She demanded, “And how, exactly, am I supposed to get more field experience if you won’t ever put me out there?”
Exasperation poured off the guy, but she, frankly, didn’t care. She was pretty darned exasperated herself.
“Do you have a report from Chandler’s office for me or not?” Jim asked implacably. He obviously thought the discussion about sending her to Africa was over.
“I’ll go over your head,” she threatened. “I can claim discrimination, you know.”
He leaned forward, palms pressed flat on his desk, and glared at her. “As long as you’re attached to this unit, you work for me. My decision. My call. I say you stay right where you are. It took my superiors a year to get someone into Senator Chandler’s office. And I’m not about to pull you out.”
Frustration and hurt warred for supremacy in her gut. She was really, really good at her job. Nobody was better with high-tech gadgetry than she was. She’d earned a chance to do her job for real in combat. He was just being pig-headed and chauvinistic. “If you don’t think I’m good enough at my job to let me do it, then why don’t you let me go back to my own battalion where my work will be appreciated?”
He momentarily looked stricken, but then he snarled, “If you do something intentional to make me fire you, you won’t be getting any jobs in tech ops again any time soon. I’ll see to it.”
She jumped to her feet and miraculously managed to get vertical without mishap. “How dare you threaten me!”
His jaw muscles worked angrily. “You threatened me first, Mendez, and I don’t take kindly to that.” His gaze speared into her coldly. “You have your orders. I expect you to stay put in Chandler’s office and keep watching for anything out of the ordinary. You’re going nowhere until you get the dirt on the guy. Is that understood?”
She was so furious she didn’t trust herself to speak aloud. She nodded stiffly before pivoting and marching to the door. At least she hoped it looked like marching. Disconcertingly, in the narrow skirt and heels, it felt more like mincing than marching. She gave his door a satisfyingly loud slam on the way out, though.
He wanted the dirt on Chet Chandler, did he? Oh, she’d give him dirt. In fact, she knew just how to get it. She glanced at her watch. Almost five o’clock. Senator Chandler had a dinner meeting tonight with some caucus group. And whenever he left the office, the rest of the staff usually checked out pretty soon thereafter. She’d give it a couple of hours and then she’d move in for the kill.
Her idea was risky. Arguably stupid. If she got caught she’d be fired from Chandler’s staff for sure, and then Jim would be
It had cost her hundreds of dollars’ worth of beers and countless hours of deadly, dull baseball talk with her “buddy” from the FBI cyber-crime unit to find out when the next sweep of the Congressional offices was scheduled. But it would all be worth it if she could show Jim Kelley just how good she really was at her job.
If he wouldn’t send her out on a real mission to get experience, she’d just create one for herself. Passive surveillance on one Senator Chet Chandler had just shifted into active pursuit mode.
Jim Kelley woke from a dead sleep to the sound of someone pounding on the front door of his stylish Georgetown town house. What time was it anyway? He lifted his head to look blearily at the alarm clock. Two in the morning? He swore under his breath as he rolled out of bed and pulled on sweat pants.
“I’m coming!” he yelled irritably at whoever was trying to bust down his door. He looked through the peephole and spied the distorted figure of a woman. A familiar one he emphatically didn’t want to see right now.
He threw the door open. “C’mon, Mendez. Do we have to get into this again? I said I’m not sending you to Africa. Get over it.”
“May I come in?” she ground out between clenched teeth.
“Are you drunk?”
“No!”
“Are you going to throw another tantrum at me?”
“God, that’s a sexist remark. Let me in. I got something on Chandler.”
Surprised, he stepped back. She brushed by him and he sucked in a sharp breath. She was wearing yoga pants and a muscle shirt that hugged her body quite informatively. It turned out that beneath the military uniforms and dull suits she normally wore, the girl had curves. And beneath the curves she was lean and fit. Who’d have guessed?
She glanced up at him sidelong and déjà vu slammed into him. Arturo used to look at him just like that. Same eyes. Same wry humor. It had been ten years since her older brother, his best friend, had died. Sometimes Alex was so much like Arturo it was spooky. And sometimes it was as though the accident had happened yesterday, the pain and guilt and loss as new and raw as ever.
“Nice place,” Alex blurted.
“Thanks.” Those stretchy pants cupped her derriere just right, and her T-shirt left bare a sexy little strip of golden flesh across her belly. Make that a flat, firm belly. And make that an intensely weird sensation to be noticing it.
“Must be nice not to have to live on army pay in this town.”
Couldn’t resist taking a pot shot at him, could she? Must still be pissed about this afternoon. He glanced around the chic living room and shrugged. It wasn’t his fault his mother was an heiress, or that he’d parlayed the trust fund he’d gotten when he turned eighteen into millions more by investing it wisely.
“It’s two in the morning, Mendez,” he said, hinting not so subtly for her to get to the point of this little visit.
She glared. “I’m well aware of that. I’ve been working all night while you caught up on your beauty sleep.”
Vague surprise registered. What work would keep her up so late? She was a junior flunky—little more than an errand girl—in Chandler’s office. Surely the guy didn’t give her work to do that kept her up this late at night. “Congratulations. You win the workaholic award,” he declared. “So what do you want?”
“Get dressed,” she ordered tersely. “There’s something I need to show you.”
His eyebrows shot up. Since when was she the one giving orders? He was the unit operations officer. She was the lowly support tech. Not to mention, why was she so tense? She’d come to his unit with a reputation for being cool as a cucumber under pressure. That and the girl was a wizard with anything that had wires. She would give James Bond’s tech support guy, Q, a run for his British money. Something must be up. Something big.
Frowning, he stood up. “I’ll be right back.”
“Wear something preppy!” she called after him.
When he came back to the living room, she was perched on the edge of his pearl-gray leather sofa warily eyeing his coffee table and the foot-tall crystal sculpture of a seagull in flight on it. The piece was one of a kind, but he restrained an urge to slide it out of her reach. He snorted at himself. Apparently, it was an ingrained habit not to insult a pretty woman at this time of night.
“What’s going on, Mendez?”
Her dark eyes flashed with something unnamed. He might call it fear if it wasn’t Mendez he was looking at. She didn’t have a fearful bone in her entire body.
She answered, “I found something on Senator Chandler’s computer. I could’ve brought you a copy of the file, but you wouldn’t have believed me if I did. I need you to see it for yourself on his computer, as big as life.”
If he hadn’t known her pretty much his whole life, he’d say she’d lost her marbles. But Alex never had been prone to hysteria and didn’t look as though she was about to start now. She looked … scared.