Seducing the Mercenary

www.millsandboon.co.uk

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

About the Author

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Epilogue

Copyright

Loreth Anne White was born and raised in southern Africa, but now lives in a ski resort in the moody British Columbian Coast Mountain range. It is a place of vast, wild and often dangerous mountains, larger-than-life characters, epic adventure and romance - the perfect place to escape reality. It’s no wonder it was here she was inspired to abandon a sixteen-year career as a journalist to escape into a world of romantic fiction filled with dangerous men and adventurous women.

When she’s not writing, you will find her long-distance running, biking or skiing on the trails, and generally trying to avoid the bears - albeit not very successfully. She calls this work, because it’s when the best ideas come. For a peek into her world visit her website at www.lorethannewhite.com.

“Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power.” - Abraham Lincoln, 16th American president (1809-65)

Prologue

15:00 Zulu. Friday, November 8. Ubasi Palace. West Coast of Africa

“The American embassy is being evacuated—all

U.S. citizens are being advised to leave the country at once.” The general paused. Silence permeated the room and hung heavy in the equatorial heat.

Jean-Charles Laroque nodded at his aide and walked slowly over the vast stone floor of his war room, toward the long arched windows cut into the walls of the palace he’d called home since he’d taken Ubasi by force just over a year ago. His leather boots squeaked softly, and his black dog, Shaka, moved like a shadow at his heels.

He clasped his hands behind his back and surveyed the dense jungle canopy that undulated for miles beyond the walls of his fortress, toward distant mountains shrouded in afternoon haze.

Four Americans had been killed in Ubasi, allegedly geologists with a Nigerian oil concern.

The killings had occurred simultaneously in different parts of Ubasi. The bodies had been gutted and strung from trees, left in the steaming sun for predators, exactly the same way his father used to exhibit his kills as warning to his foes.

Laroque’s mouth turned bone-dry.

This had clearly been a coordinated operation, and it had clearly been intended to frame him.

As hard as he’d tried to shed the stigma of being the son of infamous South African-born mercenary Peter Laroque, the notoriety of his late father proved impossible to shake. And it followed him now with this gruesome display of bodies.

He pursed his lips in concentration.

On the heels of these murders had come even more disturbing news. His rebel allies who controlled the northern reaches of the Ubasi jungles had crossed into neighboring Nigeria, where they had raided the barracks of a U.S. oil corporation security outfit and captured five employees. Laroque’s rebels maintained these captives were the killers of the Americans. They also maintained that the four dead geologists were in fact CIA agents who had been poking around Laroque’s oil concessions in the north.

Laroque had been given nothing to prove this, just the word of his rebel leader with whom he had now lost contact as the cadre had entered the dense jungle at the foothills of the Purple Mountains. When the rebels reached base camp in a few days, word would be sent to Laroque and he could go and interrogate the captives himself. But until then, he had nothing.

He cursed softly in his native African-French.

Ubasi had just been welcoming back tourists. The U.S. embassy had recently reopened with two officers offering basic emergency service. Foreign currency was trickling in again. Telecommunications were gradually being restored. Even the electrical supply was becoming slightly more reliable. The war-torn economy was actually picking up for the first time in fifty years.

Now those same tourists were being told to evacuate.

And if those dead Americans were indeed CIA operatives, and if Washington thought Laroque was personally responsible for their deaths, that he had killed them as some kind of warning to the superpower to stay out of “his” country, and away from “his” oil, then some major form of retaliation was certain.

Ubasi was set to blow.

Adrenaline hummed through Laroque’s blood as he turned to face the general, his dark mahogany skin gleaming in the equatorial heat. He touched Shaka’s fur as he spoke.

“Contact every single foreigner who obtained a visa from the immigration office within the past six months,” he commanded his general. “Order them all out. Shut the borders. I want as few innocent lives lost as possible.”

Innocent lives like his sister’s. Like her small children.

Bitterness filled his throat. It was always the innocent who suffered in this business of war. His business.

“There is also that science team sponsored by Geographic International—”

The image of the woman he’d seen in the street earlier that day once again took haunting shape in Laroque’s mind. She’d stood out like a siren among the crowds that had gathered to greet him. Something about her had unsettled Laroque deeply. It was the way her violet eyes had looked at him, right into him. Cool fingers of warning raked through him, indistinct like mist over a jungle swamp. He blew them off sharply.

Perhaps she was part of the science team, perhaps not. It didn’t matter. Either way she and every other foreigner would be out of his country by nightfall.

Laroque checked his watch. “The team should have landed in Ubasi nine hours ago. Turn them round, tell them they no longer have my sanction for their study.”

“If they refuse?”

“Anyone who has not left for the airport by curfew hour tonight is to be brought here to the castle. Tell them it’s for their own safety—Ubasi could turn into a war zone at any moment.”

Laroque watched the heavy doors swing shut behind his general, and he clenched his jaw.

Someone was trying to manipulate him into a violent confrontation with the United States. He needed to know who and why, and he needed to know ASAP. If anyone defied his orders to leave Ubasi, he wanted them in his palace and under his watch, because it might just give him a lead, some small clue as to what the hell was going down.

And God help anyone trying to undermine him. Laroque would sacrifice nothing for his dream of freedom now. Because he had nothing left to lose.

And that made him the most dangerous kind of man.

Chapter 1

Nine hours earlier. 06:02 Zulu. Friday, November 8. Ubasi airport. West Coast of Africa

Perspiration dampened Dr. Emily Carlin’s blouse as she neared one of two customs checkpoints.

There was no electricity in the cramped Ubasi arrivals room this morning. Fans hung motionless from the ceiling, the only light in the terminal coming from doors flung open to white-hot sunlight. Even at this early hour everyone was already dulled into slow motion by the rising temperatures and humidity.

The line of passengers shuffled slowly forward and Emily moved with it, people jostling her on all sides. She’d been informed Ubasi possessed no X-ray equipment and the additional lack of power made it even less likely they’d find the knife strapped to her ankle under her jeans.

It was small protection, but she didn’t expect much trouble. Her mission was simply to get into the beleaguered war-torn country wedged between Nigeria and Cameroon and assess the sociological situation. Most importantly, she was to compile a psychological profile of notorious mercenary Jean-Charles Laroque, known on this continent as Le Diable, a fierce and deadly guerrilla war expert, master military strategist, and now, a dictator.

She had exactly one week to do her job. Laroque’s life depended on her assessment.

Just over twelve months ago the Parisian-born Laroque had sailed into Ubasi on a Spanish boat with a scruffy black Alsatian at his side, a rough band of mercenaries under his command, and a cache of black market weapons in his hold. After putting up a weak fight, the beleaguered Ubasi army had surrendered to Laroque.

Xavier Souleyman—the despot who had overthrown Ubasi’s King Douala eight years previously and ruled the country with a bloody hand ever since—had escaped Laroque’s capture and fled the country with the aid of a small band of loyalists.

Laroque had wasted no time moving into the royal palace, installing himself as de facto leader, and after negotiating with the rebels who had seized control of the northern jungles of Ubasi during Souleyman’s reign, Laroque had assumed personal ownership of massive tracts of land where his geologists had proceeded to strike oil—enough to potentially rival production in both Nigeria and Equatorial Guinea combined.

That fact alone had catapulted the once-forgotten country and renegade warlord instantly onto the world stage.

In less than a year Laroque had managed to broker unheard-of treaties with disparate rebel factions over the border in Nigeria and Equatorial Guinea—radical militants who opposed their own corrupt governments’ financial ties with Western corporate interests in the Gulf of Guinea.

This placed Laroque in an exceedingly powerful anti-status-quo position. He now had the power to spark a major civil war in the region that could cut off oil supply to the rest of the world for decades to come—oil that had recently become critical to U.S. foreign policy, given the current tensions in the Gulf of Arabia.

On top of this, four deep cover CIA agents in Ubasi had just been slaughtered, their bodies displayed using the same gruesome signature technique once employed by Laroque’s mercenary father as he’d cut an increasingly bloody swath across the continent before meeting his own violent end two years ago.

Laroque seemed to be sending a message to the U.S.: Get out. Stay out. Or else.

And here Emily was going in.

She mopped her brow with a damp and tattered tissue as the queue inched forward again and heat pressed down.

Emily was a Manhattan-based expert in tyrannical pathology with a military background of her own. The minds of dictators, organized crime bosses, renegade warlords and murderous despots were both her passion and her professional specialty. Alpha Dogs, she called them.

She’d been contracted by the Force du Sable, a private military company based off the West Coast of Angola, to profile this particular Alpha Dog. The FDS in turn had been retained by a CIA-Pentagon task force in a clandestine bid to control the Laroque “situation.” His threat in the region was becoming too great for corporate and political comfort.

The U.S., however, could in no way be overtly involved in a bid to oust the new Ubasi tyrant. Nor could the CIA trust its own at the moment—the source of the intelligence leak that had resulted in the deaths of the four CIA agents represented a grave internal security breach, which was why the FDS had been brought in.

Emily’s assessment of Le Diable would be used by the FDS to formulate strategy. She needed to identify where the tyrant’s psychological weaknesses lay—and in her experience, they always lay somewhere—and she had to pinpoint what fired him. While much was known about Laroque’s military exploits in Africa, virtually nothing was known about the man himself.

No one knew what made him tick.

Emily’s job was to figure out what did.

She also needed to ascertain whether taking him captive would exacerbate an already volatile situation in the Gulf. To do this, she’d have to determine how his subjects viewed him—as evil despot, or charismatic leader. Tyrants wore both stripes, and the last thing the U.S. wanted was to make the man a martyr.

If taking Laroque prisoner was not an option in Emily’s opinion, the result would be death by assassination before midnight on Thursday, November 14.

Meanwhile, a team of FDS operatives was infiltrating Ubasi from the north. They would gauge the power of the exiled Souleyman faction, and start negotiations to back Souleyman in another coup to overthrow Ubasi. The FDS team on the ground would also get Emily out of Ubasi if she ran into trouble.

Emily didn’t like the idea of swapping one murderous tyrant for another, but the U.S. did. Souleyman was easy to control. Laroque wasn’t.

The oil business made strange bedfellows, she thought as she removed her water bottle from her bag, but politics was not her concern. Her sole interest was the Alpha Dog.

But while Alpha Dogs like Laroque were her intellectual thrill, they were also highly unstable—and dangerous. And she hadn’t been on a mission for a while.

A combination of anticipation and anxiety shimmered through her stomach as the queue inched closer to the customs checkpoint. She uncapped her water bottle and took a swig of the warm contents.

She could not afford to screw this one up.

She couldn’t afford to screw anything up. She’d left enough of a personal mess in Manhattan as it was. She needed this job. And she needed to do it right—for both professional and personal reasons.

Her nerves tightened as she glanced at the line of passengers on her left, the one with the rest of the Geographic International science crew—her cover. It was moving much faster.

She’d been separated from them by a soldier who called himself the “document man” and roughly shunted to the line on the right. Emily wondered if she’d have been assigned to the faster queue if she’d given the “document man” cash. But she was saving her two hundred dollars in bribe money for the big important-looking guy manning the customs booth ahead. She had another two hundred dollars U.S. stashed in her Australian-style bush boots as backup.

Perhaps she should have brought more.

She was uncharacteristically hot and edgy this morning, and it was not a sensation she enjoyed. Emily liked to stay cool and in control—always. She tried to shrug off her uneasiness, putting it down to the pathetic mess she’d left in New York. She was tired, emotionally drained, still reeling from her recent relationship fiasco.

The angry heat of humiliation once again flushed her cheeks. She’d been lured over the boundary between professional and personal, made to look like a fool. It had been a damn stupid mistake, and it would never, ever happen again.

She irritably swiped the sweat off her lip with the base of her thumb. This FDS contract could not have come at a better time. She wanted to put as much physical distance between herself and her ex—if she could even call him that—as humanly possible.

She needed to focus on someone else’s pathology, not her own.

Emily was almost at the customs booth now, and her pulse quickened. She shot a look at the other line, saw the last of the science team leaving the terminal, and cursed silently.

While FDS leader, Jacques Sauvage, had hastily cobbled together a deal with their sponsors that allowed her to tag on to the Geographic International team, the scientists themselves had no idea why Emily was actually here, and they were under no obligation to coddle her. In fact, they’d been instructed by their sponsor to ask no questions at all. She cursed herself again. She should have forked over the damn bribe.

The customs official motioned for her to approach.

“Passeport?” he commanded in heavy African bass.

She handed it over along with her currency declaration form.

He flipped open her passport, glanced at her photo, looked up and met her eyes.

Her mouth went dry.

He smiled, teeth bright against gleaming ebony skin. “And what have you got for me today, Dr. Sanford?” he asked in deeply accented English, using her alias.

She slid a hundred dollar bill across the counter, watching his face. He stared at the money, his smile fading.

She pushed another note slowly across the counter. “It’s all I have,” she said in English.

“Vous êtes Américaine?”

Her heart beat faster. It was patently obvious from her passport what her nationality was, and now he was refusing to speak English. “Oui, je suis Américaine.”

“Raison de visite?”

A ball of insecurity swelled suddenly in her throat. “I’m here with the Geographic International science team,” she said firmly, in English, wishing to hell the crew hadn’t left without her. She unfolded and handed him another piece of paper that had the Ubasi palace stamp on it. “See?” She pointed to the signature. “We have permission from the Laroque government.”

The official didn’t even pretend to look at the piece of paper. His eyes continued to hold hers. “Currency declaration form?”

“I gave it to you, with the passport.”

“Non—”

“I did! Look, it’s right there,” Emily said, pointing.

The man shook his head, raised his hand high above his head and clicked his fingers sharply. Two armed guards left their station at the exit doors and started making their way toward his booth. Emily’s heart pounded wildly against her rib cage. “What’s going on?” she demanded.

“There is a problem with your currency declaration,” the customs official said in French, before turning to the next person in line. “Passeport, s’il vous plaît?”

“No, there isn’t. Wait! You haven’t even looked at my form. You—”

The guards took her arms roughly. “Venez avec nous.”

Emily jerked back. “Why? Why must I go with you? Where to?”

But the guards hauled her briskly away.

“What about my luggage?” she snapped, dangerously close to losing her temper. “I haven’t collected my bags yet.”

But they remained mute as they forced her through a crushing crowd of people, all of whom studiously averted their eyes. The reaction of the crowd wasn’t lost on Emily. She saw it as a blatant sign of fear of government authority. These people were terrified of Laroque’s goons, she thought as the guards forced her into an interrogation room. She whirled round as they shut the door and locked it.

Stay calm. Breathe.

But no matter how Emily tried, she couldn’t. The room was airless. The temperature had to be more than 100 degrees, humidity making it worse. Her jeans clung to her legs, her hair stuck to her back, and rivulets of sweat trickled between her breasts. Emily shoved the damp strands of hair back off her face. She refused to let this man or his country get the better of her!

She refused to let any autocratic male make a fool of her.

The heat of humiliation burned into her cheeks again. Damn, she was displacing her anger and she knew it. She needed to focus on this tyrant, not her ex. That’s why she was here. She was a profiler for God’s sake. She could do this.

She clenched her jaw, forcing herself to take stock. She still had her knife, her traveler’s checks, her satellite phone, camera and, most important—her computer.

Anything she typed or downloaded into her laptop would be relayed via satellite to a monitor on the FDS base on São Diogo Island. It was state-of-the-art military communications technology, and it was how she would file her daily briefs, along with her final report on Laroque.

Just as she was thinking she’d be okay, the door banged open against the wall. Emily jerked in fright, heart pounding right back up into her throat.

The customs official loomed into the room. “I will see your checks and francs.” He held out his hand, palm up.

“I…beg your pardon?”

He didn’t budge.

Emily reluctantly opened the pouch strapped to her waist and forked over the wad of traveler’s checks and francs she’d had to declare on the form.

The man thumbed through the wad slowly, mouthing the amounts as he did. He looked up sharply. “There is a discrepancy. The amount here is not the same as you declared on the form.”

“It is. I—”

“This is illegal. You are smuggling currency. You will pay a fine of fifty thousand francs.”

“What! That’s ridiculous. That’s…almost ten thousand dollars. I don’t have that kind of money on me!”

“But you can get it, yes? You will have your passeport confiscated until you return to the aéroport with the francs for me personally, ça va?”

Emily looked at him, stunned. Without her passport she was a prisoner in Ubasi. And illegal. She wouldn’t be able to obtain the visa all tourists had to buy in Basaroutou within twenty-four hours of landing. This was pure corruption. She cursed viciously under her breath. These men had targeted her because she was American, female, separated from her crew, and because she possessed expensive equipment. She was, in their eyes, a perfect candidate for extortion. And who the hell could she complain to? Their dictator, Jean-Charles Laroque?

She cursed again as the customs official abruptly departed, leaving the door swinging open. A guard waited outside with her bags, which no doubt had been searched.

Emily grabbed them from him as the guard took her arm, marshaled her toward the exit doors, and dumped her and her belongings unceremoniously onto the dusty streets of Basaroutou.

A riot of colors and sounds slammed into her, and for a second she just stood blinking at the chaos. People jostled her on all sides, dressed in everything from swaths of brightly colored fabric to tattered western dress and stark white tunics. Women carrying baskets on their heads hawked the contents, and on crumbling sidewalks vendors peddled everything from exotic fruits and strangely shaped vegetables to mysterious oils in brown bottles and weird-looking shriveled animals.

Poverty was clearly evident, as was a mélange of cultures. But the faces Emily saw were not ones of milling discontent. Her first impression was an air of industry and purpose.

She hadn’t expected this, but then virtually nothing was known about Ubasi under Laroque’s rule.

She shaded her eyes, sun burning down hot on her dark hair. Most of the buildings were dun-colored and flanked by impossibly tall, dull-green palms that rustled in the hot wind. Cerise bougainvillea clambered up walls pockmarked by years of war and roads were dusty and cratered with disrepair.

Emily squinted into the light as she searched for something that vaguely resembled a roadworthy cab.

Thankfully she still had what was left of her bribe cash in her boots. Passport or not, she had a job to do. She’d contact the FDS from the hotel and see what she could do about getting her papers back.

But as soon as she tried to elbow her way through the people thronging the sidewalks, she sensed a shift in energy that made fine hairs at the base of her scalp stand on end. She stilled, suddenly acutely cognizant.