Twin Targets

She turned into him, wrapped her arms around his waist and hung on as though she never meant to let go. “Thank you,” she whispered against his neck, her skin warming against his despite the chill. “Thank you.”

Electricity jolted through him in a surge of reaction that was so unexpected, it literally took his breath away. Heat flared and his heart did a thumpity-thump number that set up a clamor of warning bells.

Damn, she was good. Lucky for him, he’d had practice with this sort of thing, and he’d learned his lesson the hard way.

Besides, they didn’t call him Iceman because he was warm and fuzzy.

“It’s okay,” he said, trying to disengage without making it into a wrestling match. He fleetingly wished he’d brought Grace Mears along on this run, or sharpshooter Michael Pelotti, both of whom were way better than he at comforting victims and witnesses—and suspects—while making it seem natural. Hell, pretty much anyone on his team had him beat at this sort of thing.

He looked at the coast guarders. “Can one of you help me out here?”

Dick and Doug Renfrew, the boat handlers he’d borrowed for the night’s surveillance, shook their heads in unison. “Not unless you want to hang around and wait for the chopper to make another pass,” Doug said. He was the talker of the two.

“Good point,” John said, glancing at the gray-black sky. “You should probably get us the hell out of here.”

Granted, Tiberius’s helicopter had peeled off into the fog when it saw the U.S.C.G. ship approaching the scene of the explosion, and he’d heard the other motorboats cut and head back to the island, but they could swing back around for a second look at any moment.

Tiberius and his crew had probably assumed the Valiant was fully manned and ready to act, but the reality was that the cutter was carrying its minimum crew of two, along with one senior FBI agent—John—who was acting on a hunch that hadn’t even been strong enough to justify bringing along the rest of his team.

His gut told him Tiberius was gearing up for something big, something that was focused on his private island off the New England coast. Based on that, he’d called in a few favors and gone on a semiofficial fishing expedition off the fertile ledges of George’s Bank.

The good news was that he’d caught something. The bad news was that he wasn’t sure exactly what he’d caught.

Tiberius was smart enough—and devious enough—to have seen the Valiant on his surveillance systems, identified it through its transponder code and sent one of his people out to get herself “captured” as a diversion. It would be just like him to feed the FBI a decoy intended to distract them away from his main intent.

The question was: had he?

John looked down at the woman, who was quieting some, though she stayed leaning against him as though she found the contact as comforting as he found it disturbing.

“Come on,” he said, voice unaccountably rough. “Let’s get you warmed up, Ms…” He let the sentence trail off in a prompt.

“Sydney,” she said against his chest. “Just Sydney.” Which could either mean she figured they should be on a first-name basis after what they’d just been through together, or that she didn’t intend to voluntarily give him enough to figure out who she was for real.

He didn’t recognize her name or face from the extensive files Grace and Jimmy Oliverra—the two computer jocks on his team—had amassed on Tiberius and his dealings, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t part of his world. Just that she hadn’t said “cheese” yet and gotten her picture taken for the FBI’s scrapbook.

“Okay, just Sydney,” he said, playing the game. “Let’s get you belowdecks, out of this wind.” He disengaged and gestured her across the rain-slicked deck to the ladder that led to the cramped galley and sitting area downstairs.

She fumbled slightly when the boat sliced deeper into the storm and the chop increased. But she looked steady enough overall, as if she wasn’t going to collapse again. Was it part of an act or was it reality?

John didn’t know, but he sure as hell intended to find out, ASAP.

“You can go straight on through,” he said when she paused in a short hallway. “The head is to your right. There’s no shower, but if you want to get out of those wet clothes and towel yourself off, I’ll scrounge something for you to wear. There’s a first-aid kit under the sink. When you’re changed, I’ll meet you in the galley. I’ll fix us some coffee.” With a side of interrogation.

She was pretty out of it, between shock and the gash on her forehead, but he didn’t feel the slightest bit of remorse about questioning her. Experience had taught him that the things people in her condition said were usually more truthful than what came out of their mouths after they’d had a chance to think about their answers. And if that made him the cold, cynical SOB his teammates claimed, then so be it. His suspicious nature had kept him alive when plenty of others around him—good men and women—had died in their efforts to take down the kingpins of modern organized crime.

These days, the major crimes unit wasn’t about territories or ethnicity, it was all about technology. The modern godfathers controlled pieces of science and sold them to the highest bidders…and Tiberius was king among the black market tech dealers.

Tiberius didn’t have a last name that any intelligence service worldwide had been able to find, never mind a history prior to ten years ago, when he’d appeared on the scene almost overnight. He was the worst among the worst, dealing almost exclusively in microscopic weaponry of the germ warfare variety. He’d been variously blamed for bioweapons attacks on five of the seven continents, including targeted viral assassinations in Europe and the U.S., and a series of flulike epidemic outbreaks along the conflict fronts in the Middle East.

Tiberius was bad news, there was no doubt about it. Unfortunately, he’d proved all but untouchable over the decade he’d been in business. There was no solid evidence connecting him directly to any crime and nobody would testify against him—at least not anyone who’d managed to stay alive long enough to take the witness stand. The calculating bastard lived sequestered on his private island off the Massachusetts coast when he could’ve been someplace warm and inviting and outside of U.S. soil. John was convinced he’d chosen Rocky Cliff Island for spite, so he could laugh at the agents who’d dedicated—and given—their lives in a series of unsuccessful efforts to put him behind bars.

Unsuccessful until now, that is, he thought as he dug through a spare clothes locker, changed into jeans, a U.S.C.G. sweatshirt and thick socks, and grabbed a slightly smaller set of the same for his mysterious guest.

Sydney—if that was really her name at all—might just be the answer to his prayers. Though his gut told him she’d probably been Tiberius’s lover, he’d just tried to kill her. That might be all the leverage John and his people would need to get inside information.

Then again, she could be a clever plant. The possibility meant he’d have to be very, very careful in what he said and did around her.

He knocked on the door to the head. “There’s a set of clothes for you outside the door. I’ll be in the galley when you’re ready.”

A couple of minutes later, right about when the small kitchen space had started to take on the aroma of hot coffee, the door to the washroom opened and Sydney stepped out.

Her towel-dried brunette hair stuck up in tufts here and there, suggesting it would curl later. The borrowed clothes hung off her slight frame, and she’d cuffed the jeans so they wouldn’t drag on the ground. She should’ve looked ridiculous in the too-large pants and sweatshirt. The fact that she didn’t, that she somehow looked as though a fashion designer had chosen the outfit and told her to make it work on the runway, had those warning buzzers going off again in the back of John’s brain, loud and clear.

He stared at her, seeing a drop-dead gorgeous woman beneath shock and saltwater, and thought, Were you his lover? A customer in a deal gone bad? Are you a victim, a perp, or somewhere in between?

As if he’d said the question aloud, she locked eyes with him. “So, Special Agent John Sharpe of the FBI…are you authorized to make a deal?”

SYDNEY SAW THE mental shields come crashing down. One minute he’d been looking at her as though trying to make up his mind about her, and in the next she’d made it for him, because innocent people don’t need deals.

His gorgeous blue eyes blanked and a small, sardonic smile touched the corners of his lips, which were bracketed with small creases that drew her eyes and made her wonder what he’d look like if he smiled—really smiled—at her.

“It depends on what you’re offering,” he said, expression giving away nothing.

She wanted to tell him that she intended to give him everything she knew, that she couldn’t live with herself if Tiberius got away with what he was planning. But she had to be realistic. All she knew about this guy was that he was an FBI agent—she figured she could believe that much, because she highly doubted the coast guard loaned their boats and crew to just anyone. Well, she also knew he’d dried off even handsomer than she’d expected. That wasn’t exactly relevant, but it was certainly a fact.

His hair was a rich, dark brown, thick and wavy. From his square-jawed features and the stress lines carved beside his mouth, she guessed he was in his mid-thirties, a few years older than she. Wearing a gray coast guard sweatshirt, borrowed jeans and thick socks—as she was—he should’ve looked casual. Instead, he exuded that same leadership she’d noticed out on the deck, that same “don’t mess with me” attitude.

On one level she found it comforting. On another, disturbing.

She’d known men like him before, men who would do—and say—anything necessary to achieve their goals if they thought the ends justified the means. Hell, she’d dated one of them—almost been engaged to him—and look where that had gotten her: unemployed and forced to seek an alternative source of funding that had turned out to be far less legitimate than she’d hoped.

Thankfully, this time forewarned is forearmed, she thought grimly.

No doubt Agent Sharpe figured that the end of bringing down a man like Tiberius would justify any means. She, on the other hand, needed to protect not only herself, but also Celeste. To do that, she had to maintain whatever leverage she could get her hands on.

Knowing it, steeling herself to negotiate when her conscience was crying for her to spill every last piece of information on the spot, she stayed silent, waiting for Sharpe to start the negotiations.

Instead, he handed her a cup of coffee and gestured her to the small dining area of the galley, where there was a booth-style table and bench seats.

She sat, blew across the surface of the steaming liquid and took a small sip, welcoming the burn of heat and the bite of caffeine.

He sat down opposite her, and the booth was so cramped that their knees bumped beneath the table while he got himself settled. She moved away, all too aware of his maleness, of the way his aura filled the small space and made her think of how long she’d gone without a man’s touch.

Swallowing through a suddenly tight throat and reminding herself that she needed to tread carefully, she lifted her coffee mug and said, “You’ll find me in the system as soon as you run the prints off this mug—presuming, of course, that’s your plan if I haven’t told you who I am before we reach the U.S.C.G. station at Gloucester.”

She expected the obvious question: why are your prints on file? Instead, he skipped right over that and said, “In other words, you needed government clearance at some point.”

She raised an eyebrow, then winced when the motion pulled at the cut she’d cleaned and bandaged in the bathroom. “You’re assuming I wasn’t arrested.”

Again, his smile held no humor. “Consider it a hunch, based on what I know of Tiberius’s women.”

“I wasn’t his lover.” There was little heat in the denial, though she was tempted to ask why that had been his first guess. She wondered how he saw her, what she looked like to him.

After almost a year of interacting solely with the guards and Tiberius’s people, it seemed suddenly strange to be speaking with a man—a tongue-draggingly handsome man—who wasn’t part of that world.

But that was the point, wasn’t it? He wasn’t entirely out of that world—he was simply on the other side. She wasn’t sure she could trust John Sharpe. She’d trusted Tiberius, and that hadn’t turned out well at all.

“But you’re right that I haven’t been arrested,” she conceded his point. “A few parking tickets and a stern warning for doing sixty in a thirty-five zone outside Bethesda, but that’s it. And yes, I needed government clearance.” She paused, trying to gauge how much to reveal, how much to hold back. Finally, she went with what she figured he could get from her prints and a quick background check. “My name is Sydney Westlake. I’m twenty-eight, my twin sister, Celeste, and I were raised together in foster care and we own a house together in Glen Hills, Maryland. Up until a year ago, I worked in the genetics department of the Advanced Institute of Science in Bethesda, investigating the causes and possible cures for a rare genetic disease called Singer’s syndrome.”

She paused when the boat’s engine note changed and their momentum slowed. There were no windows in the small galley, but she thought she heard the clang of a marker buoy, indicating that they were nearing land.

“What changed a year ago?” Sharpe prompted.

“As you might guess from the fact that I was swimming like hell to get away from Rocky Cliff Island,” she said drily, “I went to work for Tiberius. About a year ago my funding was cut, thanks to my lying rat-bastard of an ex-boyfriend. A few weeks after that happened, a representative of the Tiberius Corporation made me an offer I couldn’t refuse. I’ve been working in a private lab on the island ever since, the last three months of it under lock and key until tonight.”

He’d gone completely and utterly still as she spoke, making her think of a predator freezing the moment it sighted prey. His voice was inflectionless—and damning—when he said, “You developed bioweapons.”

She wanted to flinch from the condemnation, but didn’t because it was the truth. A far more complicated truth than he made it sound, but the truth nonetheless. “Not intentionally, and not willingly once I figured out what he actually wanted me to do…but yes, ultimately I developed a new DNA-based vector for Tiberius, and yes, under certain circumstances, it could be used for illegal purposes.”

She couldn’t quite bring herself to call it a bioweapon. It should’ve been a cure, a salvation. Instead, it was a direct threat to national security.

Sharpe set his coffee aside, very deliberately, and folded his hands on the table. “What is the target? How long do we have?”

Incongruously, she noticed that he wasn’t wearing a wedding ring. Even more unsettlingly, she found that she was glad.

It’s only because he’s the first male nonfelon you’ve seen in eleven-plus months, she told herself. That, and she appreciated how he’d stayed one jump ahead of her in their conversation. He didn’t repeat himself, and didn’t fill the air with useless questions and chatter. He was cool and calculating, yes, but she could already tell he was extremely intelligent.

Which could make him very dangerous. He was smart, he had an agenda and he had the law on his side. It was up to her to make sure she got what she needed without pushing so far that she got herself locked up, leaving Celeste unprotected when Tiberius came for her. Because he would come for her. There was no question of that.

Even now, the need to get to her ailing twin sister beat beneath Sydney’s skin, along with the fear that the time taken up with her rescue and the boat ride had been too long, that Tiberius would have already figured out what Sydney had done before she left.

If she were in his position she’d grab whatever her adversary held dear, demand the computer password in exchange and then disappear with the technology.

Since this was Tiberius they were talking about, he would probably do exactly that…and then once he had the password, he’d kill her and Celeste outright because she’d dared to cross him.

“Sydney, how long do we have until he sells whatever you developed?” Sharpe pressed.

“You have some time,” she answered. “I corrupted the lab reagents and jammed the computers on the way out. Without the password, it’ll take another scientist weeks, maybe months to re-create what I did. With the password…” She trailed off, trying not to consider that possibility but knowing she had to. “With the password, he could be up and running in a few days. Maybe less.”

He muttered a curse as the boat engines cut out and the craft drifted for a few seconds, then bumped up against the dock. Above decks, they could hear the sound of tramping footsteps and men’s shouts as coast guard crewmen fastened the lines and secured the cutter.

“And the target?” Sharpe asked.

Sydney kept her eyes on his, refusing to look away even though she wanted to hide her head and pretend it was all a nightmare, that she hadn’t really handed this sort of power to a man like Tiberius. “The eventual target is, indirectly, the entire United States legal system.”

“Go on.”

Telling herself this was the only way, Sydney said, “I built a viral vector that was intended to treat the effects of Singer’s syndrome. Under orders—threats, really—from Tiberius, I altered the vector so it mimics the twenty marker sequences currently used for a standard DNA fingerprinting profile.” She paused, saw from his dark expression that he got it, and nodded. “Exactly. Once someone has been infected with the viral vector, any samples coming from his or her body will yield incomprehensible blurs with standard forensic DNA analysis. The police labs will be completely unable to match his—or her—DNA to crime scene samples or DNA fingerprints already on file.”

He muttered a low, vicious oath. “In other words, you’ve single-handedly given one of the most ruthless criminal businessmen on the planet the power to render the CODIS DNA database—and a good chunk of modern forensic analysis—completely useless.”

Now she did look away. “It’s pointless to say how sorry I am. I thought the job was a legit front for his other dealings. I thought I could use his money—use him—to help people.” To help Celeste, and others like her who were often overlooked in favor of efforts to cure more common—and therefore more commercially lucrative—diseases.

“You’re smarter than that,” he said without inflection, and for some reason that stung more than all the names she’d called herself in the dark of night back on the island, when she’d realized exactly the same thing.

She wasn’t just smart enough to know better, she had known better and she’d taken the job anyway, because she’d been so desperate to find a way to help Celeste, so obsessed with the goal of prolonging her sister’s life and making up for the fact that the disease had struck one of them but not the other.

As Celeste had accused her on more than one occasion, she’d been so sure she was right, she’d bent the rules to get what she wanted.

Sharpe focused on her, his eyes gone dark with accusation, with condemnation. “Tell me more, and tell me fast. I’ll need you to reproduce whatever you can remember about the vector and your work so I can kick it over to the Centers for Disease Control and Homeland Security and get them started on a counter-agent. Then you’re going to sit down with me and the rest of my team, and we’re going to go over the past year of your life step by step. You’re going to tell me everything you can remember about the setup on the island.” He paused. “Basically, your butt is mine starting now, until I say otherwise. When it’s all over, if I’m satisfied that you’ve cooperated fully, then we’ll talk about your culpability and possible charges.”

Sydney was surprised and not a little dismayed to realize that the slap of scorn in his voice mattered to her, that his opinion mattered when it absolutely, positively shouldn’t. He was a means to an end, nothing more.

Still, she couldn’t help wishing they’d met under different circumstances, maybe even during different lifetimes. She thought she would’ve enjoyed getting to know John Sharpe a bit better, and figuring out what went on behind those cool blue eyes. Unfortunately, under these circumstances in this lifetime, they were destined to be at odds.

She cemented that by standing and taking the two steps needed to bring her into his personal space, then looking down at him. “I’m sorry, but that’s not how it’s going to work, Agent Sharpe.”

He narrowed his eyes. “Excuse me?”

Reminding herself not to back off, not to back away, she inhaled a breath that contained entirely too much of his energy, and said, “This is where the deal part comes in. I’ll tell you everything I know, but in exchange, I want guaranteed immunity from federal prosecution no matter what happens, and I want my sister and me placed in protective custody, effective immediately.” She faltered a little. “Tiberius is going to try to get to me through her. I can absolutely, positively promise that.”

Sharpe rose from the booth and looked down at her for a long moment, his eyes seeming to pierce deep inside her and see things she’d rather keep hidden. She expected more questions, and braced herself to remain mute until she had a lawyer and a signed agreement, and assurances that Celeste was safe.

She was surprised when he said only, “You disappoint me.”

Then he turned and strode from the small room, his angry strides far too big for the tiny space.

When he was gone, leaving his energy to vibrate into nothingness, Sydney remained staring after him. “Yeah,” she finally said, pressing a hand to her churning stomach. “I disappoint myself, too. The thing is, I’m doing my best to fix it.”

Unfortunately, she didn’t think he saw it that way, which made him dangerous. Watch yourself with that one, she told herself as she headed for the narrow ladder. He’s too smart, too sure of himself.

If she wasn’t careful, Special Agent John Sharpe could ruin everything.

Chapter Three

John knew he shouldn’t have been surprised by what Sydney had revealed. And he wasn’t really. What surprised him was the depth of his anger. She might not have been Tiberius’s lover, but what she had done was far worse.

He’d wanted her to be innocent, he realized as they disembarked and slogged their way toward the main building of the coast guard station. Despite the fact that he damn well knew better, he’d wanted her to be innocent, which she so incredibly wasn’t.

“Can I borrow your phone?” she said suddenly.

He handed it over. “Calling your lawyer?”

She sent him a look that he couldn’t interpret, but that touched his skin with a skitter of warning, of want. She said softly, “Do you blame me?”

She dialed a Maryland exchange, waking what sounded from her side of the conversation like the lawyer who’d been handling her affairs while she’d been on Rocky Cliff Island. He referred her to someone local and she made a second call.

Within fifteen minutes, a fifty-ish briefcase-toting blond woman in a mint-green skirt suit strode through the front door of the coast guard station, looking wide-awake even though it was nearly 3:00 a.m.

John watched her eyes skim the room and could practically see her thought process as she sorted through the coast guarders and himself before reaching Sydney: pilot, pilot, swimmer, cop, ah—client.

She made a beeline for Sydney, took up a protective position at her client’s side and then turned to John, having apparently—and erroneously, at least at the C.G. station—identified him as the guy in charge. “Is there somewhere private my client and I can speak?” the lawyer asked.