The Spy Who Loved Him

Chapter 3

Long afterward, Carlos would shudder every time he remembered the violence that suddenly erupted at the cave’s mouth.

One moment, he was feeling his way cautiously along the narrow path, searching for the entrance to the cave. The next, a burst of gunfire told him the squad he’d positioned to guard the approach to the steep track had engaged with a hostile force.

Then a dark fury exploded through vines straggling down the cliff face and catapulted into Carlos. Only the fact that he’d inched his way up the dangerous track with every sense on full alert kept him from being butted right off the path and over the sheer cliff.

In a purely self-protective move, Carlos grappled with his attacker and flung them both sideways, away from the edge of the precipice. Struggling furiously, they went down in a tangle of thrashing arms and legs. A vicious elbow dug into his windpipe. Choking, Carlos wrenched an arm free and pulled it back. His balled fist was in mid-swing when his attacker flung back a tangled mass of ebony hair and snarled a curse.

“Son of a motherless—!”

Violet eyes widened in shock. Just in time, Carlos pulled his punch. The blow slammed into her shoulder instead her jaw. With a small, helpless cry of agony, she crumpled onto his chest.

“Dios!”

Rolling them both away from the edge of the track, Carlos scrambled to his knees. His first instinct was to gather her writhing form into his arms and pour out a thousand apologies for the brutal blow, but the soldier in him needed to secure the area first.

Shaking his head to clear it, he performed a swift mental assessment of the situation. The stutter of guns behind and below them told him his men were engaged in a full-fledged firefight. He had no idea how many enemy were coming up the path and how many might already be in the cave. Given his vulnerable position on the narrow ledge, attack was his only defense.

With a warning to Margarita to stay low, he took a firm grip on his 9 mm Beretta, threw himself through the vines, and hit the floor rolling. An instant later, he was on his feet, sweeping the cave with savage eyes. Only after he was satisfied it held no immediate threat did he jam his pistol into its holster and rush outside. His throat closed when he saw the way Margarita had curled into a fetal ball against the cliff face.

“Rita! Sweetheart!” Gently, he rolled her over. “I’m so sorry! I didn’t know it was you.”

“Ob…viously.”

Biting down on her lower lip, she struggled to sit up. Tears streaked her dirt-smudged cheeks. Leaves and bits of debris clung to her tumbled hair and long-sleeved white shirt. When Carlos spotted the bright red blood staining her sleeves, his heart stopped.

“What did that bastard do to—”

Crack!

Rock splintered a mere six inches from his face. The shot was still reverberating when Carlos threw himself forward, shielding Margarita’s body with his own. A burst of fire followed the first bullet, each one sending vicious rock shards flying through the air.

It took less than a heartbeat for him to realize these shots came not from the path below, but from the direction of the waterfall he heard rumbling in the distance beyond the cave. In a lightning reflex, he banded an arm around Margarita’s waist and half dragged, half flung her around a bend in the path. A stone outcropping protected them from the shooter momentarily.

“It’s him!” she gasped. “The escaped prisoner! He’s got the submachine gun he took from the guard.”

On his own, Carlos wouldn’t have thought twice about tackling the man. But he wasn’t on his own, and the driving necessity right now was to remove Margarita from the line of fire.

His men were strung out along the path below, fighting a ferocious rearguard action from the sound of it. The dangerous fugitive was above and closing fast. They couldn’t stay in this exposed position. That left only one option.

“We’re going over the side.”

She shot a wide-eyed glance at the steep precipice, gulped and nodded. Whipping off his belt, Carlos slapped it around her waist and slid the tongue through the buckle. A quick tug yanked it tight.

“Grab the vines to break your slide,” he ordered, wrapping the loose end of the webbing around his fist. “I’ll do the same.”

Another burst of fire plowed into the rock less than a foot away. Carlos ducked, muttered an oath that was half curse, half prayer and dragged her with him over the edge.

Their plunging descent could only have lasted seconds, but to Margarita it seemed like a lifetime. Spongy vegetation shielded their bodies from the worst of the cliff face, and Carlos’s raw strength kept them from a disastrous free fall. Somehow, he managed to lock his fist around vines that stretched like elastic bands with their weight. Just as one vine reached the breaking point, he made a frantic grab for another.

Margarita heard him grunt with the strain of hanging onto both her tether and his precarious handholds while the two of them bumped and slithered down the slope. To her disgust, she could do little to help. Her right arm dangled uselessly, still numb from the combined effects of his savage blow and hours twisted behind her back. Her left arm had tangled in the belt anchoring her to Carlos.

At last the slope gentled enough for him to drag them both to a halt. They lay on their backs for a few seconds, panting. She couldn’t get her breath, could barely see for the sweat stinging her eyes. Twisting, she swiped her face on her sleeve and stared upward.

A multitude of green layers shielded them from observation. The thunder of the falls was the only sound that penetrated the dense stillness. His chest heaving, Carlos rolled to his feet and tugged Margarita up.

“Are you all right?”

“I will be.” She clawed at the belt cutting her in two. “Once I…can breathe…again.”

“Here, let me.”

His big hands fumbled with the buckle. When the tortuous constriction around her middle loosened, she gulped in long swallows of air.

His face grim, Carlos hitched the belt around his hips and swiped an arm across his face. For the first time, Margarita noticed he’d donned the mottled green and black of jungle fatigues. Over a similarly camouflaged long-sleeved shirt and black T-shirt, he wore a nylon vest with dozens of little pockets. Streaks of black and green face paint smudged to a muddy mask made him almost indistinguishable from the jungle around him.

No wonder she hadn’t recognized him when she dived headfirst through the vines! She’d seen him in his dress uniform dozens of times before he resigned his military commission to accept the deputy minister’s job, and in impeccable civilian attire ever since. But this was the first time she’d glimpsed the soldier in his element. He looked almost like a stranger.

Even his voice sounded different. Cold and flat, it lacked any hint of inflection. All traces of the teasing note he generally employed with her had completely disappeared. Belatedly, Margarita realized he was holding himself in rigid check.

How in God’s name did he do it? Every emotion from wild elation at having escaped to bitter self-disgust for not taking Simon down tumbled through her. Carlos apparently could mount a search-and-rescue effort, dodge a hail of bullets, plunge down a mountainside and still exercise a self-discipline that amazed and, perversely, irritated her no end.

“Stay here,” he ordered, reaching once more for a long, straggling vine. “I’m going back up to regroup my men. I’ll drop a rope down for you when we have the situation under control.”

Margarita’s eyes narrowed. If he thought she was going to sit here meekly and wait with hands folded, he’d better think again. She’d just opened her mouth to set him straight when a little splat sounded a few feet away. It was followed in the next instant by the distant crack of a rifle. Another series of splats set a feathery fern trembling just above her head.

“God!”

Releasing the vine, Carlos lunged for her. No dummy, Margarita was already diving for the shelter of a rotting log.

“There!” The echo of a shout came through the canopy. “I see a flash of white.”

Within the blink of an eye, a deadly hail of bullets tore through the dense canopy of leaves. The crumbling log provided no protection at all. Hauling Margarita upright by her wrist, Carlos took off. His grip was brutal on flesh already raw and bleeding from being scraped against sharp rock, but she was in no mind to protest as they broke into a desperate run.

Bullets ripped through leaves just above their heads. Twice more, they heard shouts. Once, a scream and what sounded like the thrashing fall of a body down the mountainside behind them. Then the jungle swallowed all sounds. Ferns the size of small trees whipped at Margarita’s face and arms. Dangling vines tried to trip her. Spiky pineapple plants and tank bromeliads tore at her blouse.

By the time they reached the lower slopes, a painful stitch stabbed into her side, her wrist was bleeding again, and every breath singed her lungs. Thankfully, the underbrush thinned out enough to make the going at this level a little easier. Instead of lush plants, the jungle floor consisted primarily of fallen tree trunks, leafy ferns and layers of rotting vegetation.

Margarita knew this lack of undergrowth was due to the giant strangler figs, which began life as seeds dropped by monkeys or birds in the branches of host trees. The stranglers then sprouted roots that dropped ropelike to the ground, forming a sort of cage around their host. Their trunks shot upward and spread dense green umbrellas of leaves. In the process, these monstrous kings of the rain forest starved their host trees of light. Eventually, all that was left beneath the canopy were the rotting remains of host trees covered with luminous green mosses, ferns and flashy flowers like the orchids that clung in great clumps to the tree trunks.

Margarita had no idea how far they traveled through this dim, green gloom before Carlos at last signaled a halt. He stood silent, head up, eyes narrowed, listening intently for sounds of pursuit. At that moment, Margarita couldn’t have heard an elephant crashing through the forest over her own wheezing breath. Bending at the waist, she planted her sweaty palms on thighs that quivered like over-stretched elastic and dragged air into her aching lungs.

“I think we’ve lost them.”

The hoarse timbre of his voice drew her upright. Slanting Carlos a quick glance, she saw that sweat had plastered his black hair to his head. His chest heaved under his fatigue shirt. He, too, sucked in long gulps of air. Unaccountably pleased that he was feeling the effects of that break-neck run as much as she was, Margarita summoned a shaky smile.

“The bullets started flying back there before I could thank you for coming after me.”

“Thank me?” His head snapped around. “Thank me!”

Her grin slipped, then disappeared completely as he rounded on her. As dangerous as a panther prodded from its den and twice as furious, he stalked across the spongy carpet of vegetation.

“I don’t want your thanks.”

The sparks shooting from his black eyes set Margarita’s back up. She’d been through too much in the past twelve hours to take that tone from him or anyone else.

“Fine! You don’t want my thanks. Then I suggest you use that radio attached to your belt to call your men and arrange a rendezvous.” She turned away, intending to find some water for her parched throat. “In the meantime, I’ll…”

He planted himself in front of her, blocking the way. “There are only two things I want from you at this moment. The first is an explanation. What the hell’s going on?” he demanded, his dark gaze drilling into her. “Why did you go to the prison last night?”

Unfortunately, she couldn’t give him an explanation even if she wanted to. Like all SPEAR agents, Margarita had sworn an oath of secrecy about her membership in the elite cadre. From the thunderous expression on Carlos’s face, she guessed she’d have to do some fast talking to get him to buy the cover story she’d fabricated for the captain of the guard at the castillo.

“It’s my job to analyze the impact of the illegal drug trade on our nation’s economy, remember? This fugitive is obviously a key figure in that trade. I thought he might let something slip that would give me a clearer picture of what we’re dealing with.”

She could see Carlos wasn’t buying it. Disbelief showed clearly under the streaks of black face paint still decorating his cheeks and chin.

“Do you expect me to believe you left a dress ball to speak with a prisoner you could have interviewed just as easily the next morning?”

She tipped her chin and looked him square in the eye. “There was nothing to keep me at the ball. I was bored and decided to leave.”

The barb hit home. His jaw clenched. A vein throbbed amid the taut cords of his neck. He stared at her with such glittering intensity that Margarita felt a flutter of something close to nervousness.

This was Carlos, she reminded herself. Always in control Carlos. Much as he probably wanted to throttle her at this particular moment, he’d rein in the emotions simmering behind his scowl.

To her secret disappointment, he did.

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