They stared at each other mutely, Sam not talking, Harry trying to crack him open but failing. Finally, Harry gave a big martyred sigh.
“Okay. This is what’s going to happen. Right now, you look like a dockworker who’s been scamming goods and you smell like one, too. No way in hell you’re gonna get lucky with that babe looking and smelling like that. So you’re going to get a shave and a haircut and take a long shower. Two of ’em, becauseman—” He waved the air in front of him as if someone had just let rip a massive fart. “You read me? And I’m going to go out with Mike for a beer and we’re gonna wait for your report tomorrow morning on your evening out with Ms. Luscious.”
“Out,” Sam growled, rolling his eyes. “Get out now before I break your bones all over again, and I’ll do a better job of it than some fucking Syrian RPG, trust me.”
Harry gimped his way out of the office, a half smile on his face. It had been almost worth it being teased, to see Harry smiling. Sam wasn’t much of a smiler himself, but Harry had been to hell and back. This was the first lighthearted exchange he’d had with Harry since he’d been blown up in Hasakah.
Maybe it was the Nicole Pearce Effect. God knows, she had an effect on him, a massive one. Harry said he’d been mooning over her, which was crazy. Sam didn’t moon. But he had been…interested. Real interested.
He’d timed his comings and goings to get a glimpse of her. Christ, just watching her walk down the hallway toward him had been enough to give him a boner he could use to hammer a nail into the wall.
He knew the basics about her, thanks to her website and Google. Daughter of an ambassador, grew up all over the world, attended the University of Geneva School of Translation, translated from French and Spanish, knew basic Russian and some Arabic.
That really impressed him. Language training was intense in SpecOps. Sam had aced just about everything in training except languages. He had a tin ear for languages, and it had been a real drawback. Still was, as he was starting to have foreign clients.
Though she was an ambassador’s daughter, Nicole Pearce didn’t live like a woman of privilege. She lived in a house that was worth about half the value of Sam’s condo on Coronado Shores. Her income was one twentieth of his. She had founded her company only a year earlier, when she had moved to San Diego to live in the house her maternal grandmother had left her, operating the business out of her home until she’d moved into his building a month ago.
Before opening her own business, she’d worked as a translator for the UN in Geneva.
When, out of curiosity, Sam had looked up the job description, there’d been the income for her UN civil service pay grade. He’d whistled. In Swiss francs, tax free. It was an enormous amount of money. Why had she quitthatto open a small business in San Diego, taking a huge cut in income?
She was single, which floored him. Never been married, either, which was even harder to believe. Actually, it seemed insane to him. Had she only lived in places where they put saltpeter in the water? What waswrongwith the men she came across? Because if he hadn’t first seen her in the middle of an op when he couldn’t break opsec, he’d have been on her tail the instant he caught sight of her moving in across the hallway.
Grew up abroad, owner of new business, single. Those were the facts he was able to find on her in public records. But what the facts on file didn’t say was how mind-blowingly beautiful she was. She was the kind of woman who should probably come with a warning sign—danger ahead.
The Googleable facts didn’t hint at just how fucking classy she was, either. The lady packed a double whammy Sam had never seen before. Throw-on-the-bed sexy and ice princess classy. Elegant, graceful, poised. He’d had to make a cage of his neck muscles not to swivel his head every time she walked by and had had to stop himself, through sheer will power, from sniffing after her like a dog, she smelled that good.
And shit, did she have the princess-to-peon thing down pat. One fulminating look out of those large, uptilted cobalt eyes with the ridiculously long dark lashes, and she could reduce any male to a whimpering mass of protoplasm. On days when he’d looked particularly reprehensible, he got looks that would have killed a lesser man.
But Sam was a tough guy. He liked challenges.
A corner of his mouth tilted upward.
Mostly because he always won.
Grand Port Maritime
Marseilles, France
June 28
Jean-Paul Simonet,an aging, lowly clerk in the back office of the Port of Marseilles, knew the shipping company Vega Maritime Transport well. It was a small one, running only three ships, if that’s what you could call the rust buckets flying Liberian flags that plied the seas in its name. The company’s ships were known among the port staff for cutting safety corners, sailing understaffed, even smuggling in crates of contraband goods. Cigarettes. Twice, arms shipments. Once, packets of white powder.
Which meant there was always money to get port authorities to look the other way.
The shipping company was owned by a consortium of shady dealers who would close the company down and disappear in a heartbeat if one of their rust buckets ever caused an accident.
Today, theMarie Clairewas in port. TheMarie Claire’s crew had changed numerous times over the years. It currently had a Turkish captain and crew from five different countries, and it was on its last legs. Somewhere, in some office in some third-world country, a group of men around a table had decided that they could wring some more profit out of these rickety single-hulled ships, reckoning that if they stopped paying for maintenance, they could run the ship until every last penny could be squeezed out of it, and when it was no longer seaworthy, it could be scuttled at night in the middle of the ocean, out of sight of surveillance satellites, and they could collect the insurance money.
Profit all around.
Simonet’s boss, thatmerdeBoisier, always looked the other way when Vega Maritime’s ships came into port.
Simonet had no loyalty to the Port Authority. He was underpaid, was a year from retirement, and was heart-broken over the loss of his family. He didn’t give a shit one way or the other.
He got the trickle-down effect from Boisier—ten cartons of Marlboros, a box of men’s sweaters made in China, once a dozen bottles of Glenfiddich. He knew it was nothing compared to what Boisier pulled in to look the other way, to not raise a fuss over any safety inadequacies and to expedite the shipping company’s passage through Marseilles. ThatconBoisier drove a brand-new Mercedes S class on a civil servant’s salary. Simonet drove a fifteen-year-old Citroen.
The way of the world was right there.
