He was smart enough not to try the hallway—there would be more surveillance out there, and dismantling it might be considered overkill. No, he’d use the balcony—if he kept to the wall he could avoid the camera. Chances were she couldn’t lock her doors either, at least not from the inside, and he was more than adept at picking any lock he’d come across so far.
He paid no attention to the cold tile beneath his bare feet. The noise of the air-conditioning would drown out any sound he might make, and Archer’s wife would be too doped up to hear him. He reached out and turned the handle on the door. Locked, but it only took a moment to fix that.
The door opened silently, and the still body in the bed didn’t move. Stepping inside, he closed the door behind him, plunging the room into darkness again. He could see the pinpricks of a blinking red light in the vase of fresh flowers, see another in one corner of the room, a third beside the huge television screen. At least Archer had given her that much to fill her empty days, though he hoped to hell he’d let Sophie choose what she wanted to watch rather than stick her with football highlights. Those cameras wouldn’t pick up his movement in the midnight-dark room—there hadn’t been a camera invented that would pick up on him, not with the jammer clipped onto his sleep pants. He moved closer to Sleeping Beauty, looking down at her.
No, she wasn’t conventionally pretty. Asleep, her muscles relaxed, her face scrubbed clean of makeup, she looked surprisingly ordinary, just a young American woman who was in the wrong place at the wrong time. She had shoulder-length brownish-blond hair in need of shaping, dark eyebrows, and he remembered her eyes as a deep chocolate brown. He looked for signs of pain marking her face, but it was smooth. Either Archer had paid for plastic surgery or Sophie was relatively pain-free.
In his experience Vicodin didn’t do shit, but he was usually bleeding to death from some attack or another before he tried it, and there wasn’t much that would help that. Someone half his weight would be much more susceptible—maybe her liberal use of the drug kept the pain at bay. If so, he couldn’t blame her. If she took it simply to forget she was married to Archer MacDonald, he wouldn’t blame her either. She’d screwed the pooch when she’d ditched the Committee for a psychopath. She even seemed to believe the man still loved her. Maybe she just zoned out because being bound to a wheelchair was too depressing.
Whatever the cause, it was his good luck, and he leaned over her, looking at her exposed arms for track marks. She looked in better shape than he would have thought, given her circumstances. Then again, she had to convey herself in a wheelchair—it would be logical for her arm muscles to start building. At this point she could give Michelle Obama a run for her money.
He reached for the covers, ready to pull them down and finish his inspection when he changed his mind. He could do that later—for now he needed to check out the lay of the land, look for an easy
escape. There was a phone beside her bed, but he was willing to bet it wouldn’t ring anywhere but on this island. At least it meant help was only a phone call away. So was disaster for him.
He stared at her closely, leaning down. She was breathing easily, deep and solid, and if she wasn’t sound asleep, then she was a better operative than he was, and that was a stone-cold impossibility. He stepped back, moving around the room, cataloging its contents. There wasn’t much that could end up helping him. Not that he’d expected she’d have a handgun beside the bed, and besides, he was well armed beneath that secret panel in his suitcase. She wasn’t going to provide any particular help for him during this job, but she probably wasn’t going to be a hindrance either. He’d get away with ignoring her just the way her husband did, unless the bastard came by for his occasional conjugal visit.
That bothered the hell out of him, and he wasn’t sure why. If she was still in love with Archer, she was probably pathetically grateful for any attention he gave her.
He backed away from her slowly, his eyes running over her. She looked just the slightest bit fragile, vulnerable, exactly the kind of woman he found annoying. He had no savior complex—he liked women who could take care of themselves and didn’t need rescuing.
Still, there was something about her, something sensual in her smooth, pain-free face, her soft, generous mouth, her tousled hair as it spread out over the pillow behind her, and for a moment he fantasized about having her beneath him, that tawny hair spread out on his pillow. And then he made an almost silent sound of disgust. What the hell was wrong with him? He never had sex when he was on assignment, not unless it was part of his cover, part of his job. Fucking Archer’s crippled wife was in no way part of the plan.
So why was he thinking about it? She certainly hadn’t been sending out signals—she’d seemed barely aware of him that night, all her attention focused on her husband. She was still just as deluded as she’d always been, which meant she was the enemy.
Not that he’d counted on her being an asset. He didn’t tend to work well with others. For now she could sleep the drugged sleep she deserved. He’d figure out what to do with her later.
Archer MacDonald stretched out on one of the lounges by the side of the pool, cradling a whiskey in one hand, and considered the day. His treacherous wife amused him—he knew women well enough to recognize that she still wanted him. She was probably smart enough to know he was behind the bullet that had crippled her, and she’d been smart enough to fool him in the first place. He’d been in such a rage when he found out the Committee had managed to infiltrate his life that without thinking he’d given the order to terminate her. First, though, he’d put a hit out on his lawyer, who’d taken so damned long to find out the truth about his doting wife. Then it was Sophie’s turn, but that idiot hadn’t managed a good shot—she’d moved at the last minute—and it had given him enough time to rethink the situation. She was in love with him; he’d never had the tiniest bit of doubt, and she took pleasure in anything he doled out to her. He loved that she was now entirely under his control. She’d had a powerful sexual appetite—that was one of the things he’d liked most about her, and of course he wasn’t going to fuck a cripple, but he’d enjoyed tempting her, bringing in good-looking men when she couldn’t do anything about it, couldn’t move, couldn’t feel anything. She hadn’t been interested—again, she was still too in love with him, he knew—and he’d given up on the idea. It was the advent of Malcolm Gunnison that had made him decide to drag her out, like an old, abandoned toy. Gunnison was a different sort of man—there was a chance he’d be more to Sophie’s tastes than the pretty boys he’d brought to the island. Throwing the two of them together could be vastly entertaining. Sophie would be wracked with guilt, and Gunnison would most likely do what Archer wanted him to.
Archer believed Gunnison’s story—he’d had him checked so thoroughly he even knew what the man liked in bed. Still, it didn’t hurt to test Malcolm, and videos of his wife having sex with another man could brighten a boring night. He could even make her watch them, long after Gunnison left.
In the end he never trusted anything or anyone, not even his own knowledge and his instincts. Malcolm Gunnison was a former Committee operative who’d left to become a middleman for a half dozen of the most notorious regimes in the world. He was here at the behest of an Eastern European despot, thinking he could work a deal for Archer’s newest creation. Pixiedust was his baby, the groundbreaking chemical that could wipe out one hundred thousand people in twenty-four hours, with an exponentially expanding death toll in the following days. Such a weapon was a little too dangerous even for Archer—he had no particular desire to see the majority of the earth’s population wiped out. There would be no challenge left. But that was what made Pixiedust so groundbreaking. There was an antidote for it, and a vaccine, which would make anyone exposed to it invulnerable. As long as the antidote was administered by vaccine within twelve hours of exposure, it would work, but it took weeks for the victims to get back on their feet.
That part suited him just fine. If one planned to subdue a rebellious population or conquer a neighboring country, having the majority of the survivors out of commission long enough to install a new infrastructure seemed an excellent plan.
There was a small glitch, but he had every confidence that Chekowsky would take care of it. A twenty-four-hour lead time would enable a man to solidify his power—twelve was a little rushed for effective extortion. Chekowsky could get around this—he was the genius who first invented the stuff, locked away in Archer’s underground laboratories in Texas, and Archer paid him what he was worth. It never did to cheap out when you demanded the best. He could easily have Chekowsky terminated once the Pixiedust formula was perfected, but there was the strong possibility that Chekowsky could come up with something even more valuable. With a mind like Chekowsky’s and the advantages of Archer’s money, there were simply no limits.
Archer had done his best to convince Malcolm Gunnison that he was negotiating with him alone, but it wouldn’t do to underestimate the man. Gunnison was ruthless, deadly, and he was no fool. He had to know Archer was considering other offers.
They would acknowledge that particular problem when they came to it. It was unreasonable to assume that it could be limited to one person, that if someone like Putin bought it in Russia, it couldn’t also be used in the Middle East or in some of the less stable countries of South America. There would be enough to go around for anyone willing to pay Archer’s price.
And a weapon like that could generate income for the buyer as well. Infect the people and then demand an astronomical sum from them for the antidote. Archer would hardly be fool enough to limit such an asset to one buyer, no matter how high the price.
But Archer was a patient man. He could use this delay with Chekowsky to his advantage. While his research and his instincts told him that Malcolm Gunnison was as mercenary and as soulless as he needed to be, Archer was too smart a man not to be aware that things could change.
And there were endless possibilities for amusement. Yes, his treacherous Sophie was still pining for him. But he saw the way she glanced at Malcolm, with dislike and unwilling fascination. He could have a very good time throwing the two of them together, watching the sparks fly. He had cameras everywhere.
No, he was willing to wait. Things happened when they were meant to. He could wait.
Chapter Five
Sophie heard the quiet click of the door as Malcolm Gunnison left her room, and she let out a deep breath. What the hell was that man up to? Didn’t he know Archer had every room bugged, and he’d have no trouble observing his guest prowling around his wife’s bedroom?
She was the only one who knew that. And Gunnison wouldn’t be seen. The inky darkness she’d insisted on made movement indiscernible, but there was always a chance Archer was using some kind of infrared technology, one that picked up on body heat. Not that he had any particular reason to bother with that kind of surveillance for his pathetic, crippled wife, but underestimating Archer was never a good idea.
Her unwanted guest hadn’t made a sound—in fact, she’d been lying there, awake after her series of exercises, and she hadn’t even heard him open the locked door, an impressive feat. There was nothing particularly suspicious about his ability to pick a lock—anyone who came out to Isla Mordita would come from the darker side of society. Mr. Gunnison, if that was even his name, was doubtless a liar, a thief, and a murderer. Archer wouldn’t care—in fact, he’d be more likely to trust him if he came with a suitably criminal pedigree. She wouldn’t put it past Archer to challenge Gunnison to break into her room and leave without waking her up. Of course, Archer thought she was strung out on Vicodin and slept like the dead, and she was happy to foster that impression. She didn’t need anyone to suspect she could get around just fine.
She lay without moving; listening, but she heard nothing, not the sound of his own balcony door closing, not the quiet sound of his movement in the room on the other side of the wall. That was no surprise—the walls were plaster, built for a time without air-conditioning or even electricity, and the thick whitewashed walls muffled everything. There was no way she could be certain he’d returned to his room, no way she could even know whether the opening and closing of the door was a trap.