Smokescreen Read Online Free PDF Page B

I wouldn’t be here if this weren’t important to me, too. I expect to get something out of this encounter. I even think I want that particular payment up front.”
    She took a sharp breath, holding it for an instant before letting it out with enough force to reveal her exasperation. Then she took another, and seemed calmer. “Do you have any idea what happened here tonight?”
    “As near as I can tell,” he said dryly, “a van blew up and almost took me with it.”
    “That was a warning.” She shot the words back at him with anger. “Someone who doesn’t like what we’re doing. Someone who penetrated enough of our securityto leave a warning of that magnitude. We need to know what else he knows—how many of us are in danger. How many of our…clients…are in danger. And that means I need to know how you found your way here, so I can go back and check out your source.”
    He hesitated, taken by surprise at the ring of truth in those words. She’d put her cards on the table…he hadn’t expected it. Some bullying, perhaps, and lies and evasion. That’s what these people were good at. And still…he needed what he needed from her. “I’m looking for someone. I want to know where she’s gone.”
    Sam—if that was her name—snorted. “What makes you think I know? The whole system works to make sure I don’t. I do my little job and I don’t know anything or anyone else involved.”
    “Then you’ll have to find out.”
    This time he got a rude noise. “Do you have any idea what we risk to protect these women? If someone ran from you, she had a reason. I’m not going to betray her, and I’m not going to endanger everyone else in the system.”
    “Ran from me?” He repeated the words blankly. “What are you talking about, ran from me? Don’t you do your homework?”
    She crossed her arms, revealing a flash of pale skin behind a rip in her clingy black turtleneck. “I guess you haven’t been listening. My homework is to avoid doing homework. At least the kind you’re talking about.”
    “So you think I—” He stopped short on those words, took a hold of his temper and his gut-deep horror, and said as distinctly as possible, “I’m Lizbet’s brother. I came to help her—to keep her from ruining her life.”
    “Uh-huh.” She gave him a bored look. “I don’t think she’s the one who ruined her life, do you?”
    It took him a moment. A long moment, after which he was flatly speechless. No one in his life ever doubted his word, simply because everyone in his life knew better. “You don’t believe me. You think I’m the one she’s running from.”
    She shrugged. The rip in her turtleneck grew with the gesture, shrinking again as her shoulders settled into place. “Maybe.”
    He wasn’t used to it; helpless anger rushed through him, tightening every muscle. She must have seen it; her eyes narrowed. But she held her ground and after a moment he put a coherent thought or two together. “Then why ask me anything? I might make it all up on the spot.”
    “Sure,” she agreed. “I might go off and check into things and learn you were lying. But I know your name. I know the name of the woman you were looking for. It’s enough. I can find you if I need to.”
    He hesitated, hunting for rancor in her voice and face and finding none. Just matter-of-fact, as though this were simply the world she was used to, so different from his. He ran his thumb over the spot where his little finger used to reside. That misbegotten firecracker prank had happened so long ago that the scar tissue wasn’t even sensitive anymore. It could have been the finger that never was, instead of lost in the culmination of a series of mean childhood tricks and fibs. Instead of being the thing that opened his eyes to how false words and careless action trapped even those who loved one another in layers of misery. His father and his affairs, his mother and her drinking.
    So Jethro had learned to tell the truth, to avoid the