Her eyes met his. He could see the stark horror that still lingered there. “He sent me a picture of him with my sister. It was taken back home at the place where she works a few hours a week.”
Even now, the panic in her voice was still almostvisceral. It was hard to remain unmoved. “Did you warn her to stay away from him?”
“Of course I did,” she snapped. “But you don’t know Lana. She doesn’t understand. She’s sweet and innocent, and she can’t protect herself.”
He knew there was something she wasn’t saying so he waited. The label was almost completely peeled off by now. “She’s special, okay. Something happened to her in the orphanage, and she will never be able to live a normal life.”
Natalie wasn’t looking at him as she said it, but from her reticence he sensed that it was true.
Crap. He hadn’t been expecting that. He felt a wave of compassion but forced it back and steeled his emotions. Maybe he could understand her protectiveness of her family, but that didn’t make what she’d done okay.
He had to think about her betrayal.
“At first they didn’t ask for that much,” she continued. “I think they just wanted me in place and were waiting.”
“Waiting for what?”
“I don’t know. Relations to worsen with Russia? Me to be in a position of authority?” She looked at him. “You.”
“They had you target me in the bar?”
It made him sick to think about. Christ, how many guys had she gone back to hotel rooms with to get information?
Her brows jumped together. “What? No. Our meeting was an accident. What happened wasn’t planned—any of it. I had no idea who you were until I walked into that mission brief at the Pentagon and saw you. Much to my horror, since I knew what it would mean if Mick learned about it. I tried to break it off with you, but somehow Mick found out about you and sent me back to your hotel room. I don’t know how he did it, but it seemed as if he was always one step ahead of me.”
Scott remembered their argument after the meetingand how adamant she’d been about not seeing him again—and how scared.
“That’s when everything got worse,” she said.
He gave her a look, and she blushed. “I didn’t mean in the hotel room, I meant the pressure got worse. It was about the time that Russia shot down our fighter plane and people were screaming for retaliation and war. I tried to string Mick along with insignificant information, but he wanted to know about your missions. He wasn’t happy when you wouldn’t tell me anything. I tried to hide it, but I think Mick guessed how I felt about you and thought I was holding back so he gave me incentive not to lie to him.”
Scott wasn’t sure he wanted to hear this, but he asked anyway. “What did he do?”
“He had my father’s insulin switched at the pharmacy with something that would have killed him had he not warned me ahead of time.”
“So it’s my fault for not telling you anything? That’s your excuse for doing what you did?”
She gave him a look of pure frustration. “Of course not! I’m just trying to explain to you how it was and how I felt as if I didn’t have any choice. I knew only too well from personal experience that Mick had the morals of an adder, and he showed me how easy it was for him to get to my family. But things were spinning out of control, and I wasn’t going to be able to hold on much longer. I think Mick sensed it, too. That was when he came to me with one last ‘request.’ He promised it was the last time. I was so relieved. I thought it was going to finally be over.”
Scott’s mouth tightened. “The Russia mission.”
It wasn’t a question but she nodded. “But as I said, I didn’t know about the specifics. Mick said that they’d heard rumors of something big going down. He wanted me to find out what it was, but my boss was keeping me out of the loop. All I was able to find out was that therewas a meeting coming up in the Tank”—a slang term for the Joint Chiefs of Staff’s Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility (SCIF) at the Pentagon—“which I typically had security clearance for. But this meeting was different and unusual in that no staff were being admitted.”
Without the beer bottle label to play with, she started to twist her hands. She was clearly anxious for him to believe her.
He didn’t know what to think. But he wanted to hear her out first. All of it.
“So how did you get admitted?” he asked.
“I didn’t. I was so relieved, thinking that would get me out of it, but I should have known better. Mick gave me a spyware program to download on the deputy secretary’s computer that would enable them to hear everything.” Before Scott could ask, she added, “He claimed it wouldn’t be able to be picked up by the countersurveillance technologies like Tempest that were in place.”
Scott’s mouth drew in a tight line. “Fine. So you didn’t tell them yourself; you just enabled them to find out. Big fucking difference, Natalya. Treason is treason, and my guys were killed because of it.”
He couldn’t believe he’d actually been listening to this sob story and feeling sorry for her.
She flushed angrily. “No. You didn’t let me finish. I loaded the program, but once Mick confirmed that it was working, I deleted it.”
“Then how did they find out? Maybe you screwed up and thought you removed it.”
