Chapter Twelve
Thorn
Brussels, Belgium
Saturday, Fifteen Fifty Hours
W hen the blood stopped thrumming in Thorn’s ears and the sweat had evaporated from their skin, Brigitte turned to him, tangling her legs with his, keeping them pinned together.
He tugged off the condom, knotted the end and tossed it into the trash can beside the night table.
When he turned back to her, Brigitte brushed the back of her hand over his cheek. “Margot was so right about you,” she whispered.
Thorn had never slept with Margot, and even if he had, he couldn’t imagine Margot giving a blow-by-blow ? so to speak, so he was at a loss. “And what exactly are you agreeing with?”
“A woman could easily find herself taking up the challenge of trying to soften you and bring you under her control. But it would be wasted effort.” She slid her hand down his chest, over his stomach and let it rest on his cock. “You’re a hard man.”
Thorn’s dick stirred awake beneath the warmth ? appreciative of the attention.
She sent him a wicked smile, then laughed as she gave his dick, now fully awake and ready to go, a gentle squeeze. “And a hard man is good to find. He knows the real rules of the road.” She stroked him.
“Maybe we should go over those rules.” It was a little late to be gathering this information. But he couldn’t turn back time. He wouldn’t mind postponing this conversation for another roll, but he’d only brought the one condom. He pulled her hand away, reluctantly, kissed her fingers, and held her palm to his chest. “Tell me what your involvement was in the airport today. Is the DGSE working with Omega?”
Brigitte threw her head back and laughed. “Come now. All work and no play makes Thorn a dull boy.”
“Play time’s over,” he said.
“All right.” She sat up, pulling the sheet across her lap and crisscrossing her legs in front of her. “Omega? No. We work for ourselves and, in this case, our goals and Omega’s are antithetical.”
“What are Omega’s goals?”
“Omega’s client planned a father-daughter reunion on foreign soil. They have been monitoring Juliette DuBois as have we.”
“Juliette DuBois and not David DuBois?”
“Both but for different reasons. Juliette started reaching out to people here in France for information about her family. And then she made a plane reservation just yesterday, a one-way ticket.”
“Because?”
“She wants answers.”
“Okay. What are her questions? Do you have the answers she’s looking for?”
Brigitte shuffled around.
“Do you know who kidnapped her and her child?”
“She doesn’t have a child,” Brigitte said, sweeping her hair behind her ears and looking him in the eye.
“A witness said there was a child.”
She shrugged.
“You said a father-daughter reunion. I saw three sets of players ? you and your team, Omega’s team, our team.” He paused to watch her reaction. Her face didn’t change so he pushed on. “Our team just wanted to watch Dr. DuBois get safely on his plane back to the States. No contact. He wasn’t even supposed to know we were there. Obviously, things didn’t pan out that way. What did you want with him?”
“Dr. David DuBois and Juliette DuBois both find themselves in difficult situations.”
Thorn thought this was an odd statement since it was abundantly apparent in both instances. Juliette was a picture on a computer screen. He was to keep an eye out, intervene if he spotted her. His goal was David Dubois, Brigitte hadn’t illuminated her role. Interesting. Thorn had assumed that the daughter was taken to use for some goal as it pertained to David Dubois, but Brigitte, through her phrasing, seemed to be insinuating that wasn’t the case. Was Juliette a goal in and of herself?
“Do you know the time frame of these circumstances?” Brigitte asked.
Thorn sat still. He didn’t want to reveal just how in-the-dark he was here.
“Juliette Dubois got on a plane yesterday in Washington DC, flying to Paris, and then south to Toulouse, where she got a hotel room for the night. She took a taxi to her grandmother’s house this morning.”
Thorn nodded. He needed to turn on his app so Nutsbe could hear this. That move might break the warm post-coital bubble and might end the information gathering. Thorn started to mind-map the details, so he could recall them clearly later.
“David Dubois got to Toulouse this morning. One-way ticket. When David arrived at his mother’s house, the neighbor, who had videotaped Juliette’s abduction and called the police, met him outside and told him Juliette was kidnapped. David jumped back into his taxi and left before the police arrived. David made his reservations as he drove to the airport, first flight out of France was Brussels. The first opportunity to get back to America is tomorrow morning.”
It sounded like the timeline Titus gave them at their briefing was on target.
What kind of father would act that way? That wasn’t what DuBois said to them after they’d yanked him out of the airport. Thorn’s focus was razor sharp.
“You’ve got physical possession of David. You need to get him home immediately and safely where your intelligence community needs to sit on him. Hard.”
“We’re working on that.” Thorn liked to listen to Brigitte’s accent, the way she said David – Dah-veed . Though that pronunciation went with a poetic man, not the grizzly old guy in the rumpled suit Honey threw into the back of their car. “Who’s got Juliette?”
“We believe it’s Omega,” she said on an exhale.
“Why?”
“The why is classified.”
Thorn understood classified. He wouldn’t be able to wrangle that information from Brigitte. But maybe she could tell him… “Who contracted Omega?”
“The contract comes through a private entity, but if you follow the string, it leads back to Russia.”
“Omega is working with Russia?
“ Oui . Just not directly.”
Brigitte had called the information about Omega kidnapping Juliette classified. Maybe she’d share something about papa bear. “Why are you going after David DuBois? Why is Russia interested?”
“You first.” She shuffled a pillow into her lap.
“I told you. Our task was to shadow DuBois and provide necessary security from deplaning until he was headed back to the U.S., nothing more. It seems we landed in a minefield.” Thorn had been in that position for years – functioning as a small piece of a larger puzzle, necessary to the whole picture but never getting a chance to see that whole picture. He’d learned to put his head down, follow orders, and move on. Speculation only made him nuts.
She canted her head. “David’s brain holds many secrets.”
“Omega’s goal is to get those secrets, so they want to capture him. And you want to…”
“Make sure those secrets don’t become a liability.”
“Do you know where they took Juliette? Would you help us get her back? She’s an American citizen, we won’t let that go.” That had popped out of Thorn’s mouth as some kind of card he was willing to play. The truth was, Thorn didn’t have any information on Juliette. He had no idea of her citizenship status.
Brigitte was silent, studying him. She shook her head. “You either know that is the truth or you’re trying to play me.” She waggled her pointer finger at him.
Thorn memorized those words. Sure, English was a second language for her, but still. Thorn thought he’d picked up a clue. He switched to a different tack. “When we got our hands on DuBois at the airport, from my perspective, it looked like your team tried to shoot him while they could. I’m guessing you hadn’t identified us yet and didn’t know we were the good guys.”
“’Good guys’ is perspective. Everyone working for their own government thinks they’re the good guy.”
“Okay, we’re the allies, then,” Thorn amended. “Omega, working for someone in Russia, was shooting back at your team, trying to save DuBois, so they had another opportunity at the capture, possibly thinking DuBois would cooperate with them because of his daughter.” Thorn rubbed his index finger over his chin. “Was that your team that chased us out of the airport on motorcycles?”
“No, it was not. They are unknown subjects, unsubs as you like to call them.” She looked at him earnestly, the laughter that had been in her eyes a moment ago had dimmed. “You and your band of merry men have caused us a great big headache.”
“Brigitte,” Thorn held her chin between his fingers and kissed her, “we’re going to get DuBois back to the States, safe from Omega’s hands, we can provide him security there.”
She sighed as she pulled away from him, rolling onto her back. “We don’t have the same goals, I can promise you that.”
“Sure we do, we want to secure what this man knows. We can’t be going around killing the scientific community because they know science.”
She looked him in the eye for a long time as if she were trying to puzzle something through. “Is that what they told you?” she asked softly.
“No – it’s what I surmised. Am I reading this wrong? It sounds to me like you want him neutralized.”
Her fingers played with the sheet, looking very comfortable with their discussion. “I follow orders.”
Thorn scooted up to lean his back against the upholstered headboard. “A good soldier, doing what you’re told without a lot of rhyme or reason.”
“’Need to know,’ isn’t that how you Americans phrase it? In most cases, I probably never know. Sometimes, I’m glad. Sometimes, it haunts me. It’s part of the territory.” She pushed to the edge of the bed. She looked at him over her shoulder. “The answers are above my pay grade. It doesn’t matter, I tick this assignment off my list and then there’s another, and another, and another.” That thought seemed to fatigue her.
Thorn felt the worry lines deepen across his forehead. “It’s a choice. You can stop.”
“Isn’t that a little hypocritical? You left the battlefield and your brain, your muscles, your spirit all demand that you serve. Take out the bad guys.”
Thorn shook his head a slow no. “I’m not on a battlefield any more. I don’t kill unless I’m being attacked. I only apply the necessary force to accomplish my objective and get out. Iniquus doesn’t take contracts that require ‘taking someone out’ or imprisoning, or transferring people to those who do. That’s an Omega gig. It’s not who I am. I don’t think it’s who you are either.”
She’d climbed from the bed as he spoke. “You don’t know anything about me.” She stood, arms crossed beneath her naked breasts. Defiant.
“I know you moan when I lick your thighs.” His lips quirked into a lascivious smile.
Brigitte narrowed her eyes. She turned, and walked, naked and immodest, to the bathroom, throwing a “Fuck you,” over her shoulder.
“Okay,” he called after her. “But let me drink a glass of juice first.”
Water flowed in the shower. He listened to her moving about. He thought about her rubbing soap bubbles over her tight body and wanted to go in and give her a hand, but she’d thrown the bolt when she closed the door. There was a tap of the toilet seat hitting the back of the tank. The flow of water at the sink.
He lay on the bed, his hands laced behind his head, watching the bathroom door and trying to figure out what this scene was all about. There was some “get” from all this activity. Something beyond giving her affiliations so Panther Force wouldn’t shoot her by accident. Not that any of them had a weapon. And it wasn’t about the orgasm – orgasms. Something else…
The door popped open. Brigitte emerged with a cloud of steam. Her hair hung in a wet pony tail down her back. A towel encircled her waist like a hula skirt. Her breasts were bare, her nipples hard.
Thorn smiled and crooked a finger to encourage her back into his arms.
Brigitte ignored him as she fished up her clothes from the trail they’d left from door to bed. Stepping into the lace and ribbon panties, pulling the tank top over her head, and checking her weapon, Thorn watched the efficiency of her movements. He liked that they were allies but wished they were also playing on the same team with the same end goal. Of course, if that were the case, he wouldn’t have gotten to feel her writhing underneath him. It was that whole “keep your dick zipped” policy when it came to team mates and clients. Mess that one up, and it made for a short career.
“You could have shot me in the car, and you chose not to,” Thorn said, watching her tug on her sweater and adjust it down.
“It didn’t serve my purpose. You’re not my target.”
Okay. Why not go straight for the intel he needed? “Why are you here with me?”
She raised one perfectly arched brow. The suggestion of a smile twitched the corners of her lips, then she snagged up her pants from beside her foot. “Curiosity.”
“Come on, Brigitte, tell me the truth, why are you here.”
The phone in her jeans pocket buzzed, she pulled it out and read the text. “ Merde ,” she said under her breath. She slipped the phone back in her pocket, wriggled into the jeans, and slid her feet into her heels. Then she walked out the door. She didn’t turn her head. She didn’t say good-bye.
Unsettled, Thorn strode over to the door, flipped the lock on the door and headed to his own shower with his Dobb kit.
Thorn stood on the bathmat staring at the mirror. “Son of a gun.”