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.And yet, it did.Along with pain, she felt sorrow.Sorrow for the lost little boy, sorrow for the lonely, isolated man.Sorrow for what they could’ve had but which he’d thrown away.He’d completely withdrawn from her emotionally.He was firmly entrenched in being the icy, analytical spy in his fantasy high-threat scenario.Oh, sure, she accepted that they were in a certain amount of actual danger.After all, the wound in her shoulder was entirely real.But she was equally convinced it was all a big misunderstanding.If Alex would just hand over that flash drive and the evidence of chemical weapons in Cuba, the CIA would be happy and leave them alone.She’d planned to tell him that she loved him enough to place his happiness before hers and that she would seriously consider his implied offer to go with him.But he was obviously in no mood to hear anything she had to say right now.Instead, she sighed.“Now what?” she asked in resignation.“I’m going to the library.Are you coming?”“Sure.Why not?” Maybe she could check out a book on abnormal psychology and gain some tiny insight into Alex and his thoroughly screwed-up head.The anonymous, slightly decaying urban landscape around her was oddly comforting.She was rapidly picking up Alex’s aversion to being noticeable.The local library was a dingy beige building, mostly deserted inside.Alex sat down at a carrel with a computer in it, and she pulled up a chair beside him to watch him work his magic.“What are you going to do?” she asked curiously.“I’m going back in for more information on Cold Intent.”“Are you crazy?” she exclaimed under her breath.“Do you have any better ideas?”“We could talk to Uncle Charlie.”“He told you to stay away from it.He knows what the operation is all about, and somehow the two of us pose a threat to it.”“Is there any way you can figure out who gave the order to have you—” she dropped her voice to a whisper “—drugged?”“I gave the MPs in Gitmo André’s phone number.It came through that chain of command.”Katie frowned.“At first, the Marines were nice to you, right? They gave you the samples from me and let you go to the hospital on your own.”He leaned back to stare at her.“Follow that train of thought.See where it takes you.”“After they let you go, they called André.He told them something that made them go to the hospital, arrest you, interrogate you and drug you.And that something made them hold me and not let me join you.”“Go on.”“André likes you.He must have called his boss and was relaying the boss’s orders.So, why did the boss want the cops to go after you? You had information the CIA desperately wanted.Why not bring you in with all possible speed?”Alex stared at her, his gaze dark.She continued.“The boss had to have told them I was not a threat, but that you were.And the two of us were to be separated.I presumably knew as much as you did about what we found in Cuba, so I was as big a threat as you to whatever’s going on.Since they didn’t formally detain me, I have to rule out the information about the chemical weapons as the cause of your arrest.”Alex looked startled at that.Shock.She’d actually outthought the genius for once?She continued more enthusiastically.“Why separate us specifically? What’s the big deal about the two of us being together?”Alex frowned.“The CIA thinks you’re keeping me in line.That I won’t go off the reservation if you’re around.”“Then why would they take me away from you?” A nasty connection dropped into place.She spoke slowly, feeling her way through the logic.“Alex.Not only did they take me away from you, but they gave you drugs to make you paranoid.What if they made you suspicious of me intentionally?”He tilted his head, considering.“It’s a bit of a stretch, but it is plausible.”“What do I bring to you that you can’t do for yourself?” she asked.“That’s easy.Stability.Predictability.And control over my more dangerous impulses.”“How’s that?”“I am known to have feelings for you and Dawn.Threaten the two of you, and I’m forced to stay in line and behave myself.”She was dismayed that he thought she was such a big vulnerability.“I’m so sorry.”He shrugged.“It was my choice to get involved with you.My fault.”Fault? She was a fault in his life? She’d been a mistake for him right from the beginning.He’d tried to warn her, but she’d ignored him and thrust a relationship and even a daughter on him whether he liked it or not.The two of them could never make it as a couple if all he saw when he looked at her was a potentially lethal error in judgment.The last thing she wanted to be to him was a fatal vulnerability.He was right to leave her.A sob escaped her throat, and she bit back its sibling as it bubbled up in her chest.“As soon as this is over, Alex, I’ll let you go.I get it now.If my being with you puts you at so much risk, then we can’t ever be together.I’ll walk away and never look back.I love you too much to be the cause of your injury or death.”For just an instant, his gaze raged with some turbulent, unnamed emotion.And then, as usual, all expression drained from his eyes.His face went smooth and still, completely unreadable.Lord, she wished she knew how to do that, too.Her vision swam in tears and she looked away from him hastily.The computer screen was the only nearby target for her unseeing stare.“Let’s finish this,” she said fiercely.“The sooner, the better.Every day we’re together puts you at risk.”He made a tiny sound that might be a laugh half-formed, or maybe something else.like pain.Either way, he placed his hands on the keyboard and started to type.He played the machine like a virtuoso, and she couldn’t begin to understand the lines of code that flashed across the screen almost too fast to read.But she did recognize the Central Intelligence Agency seal when it briefly flashed up on the monitor.“When I tell you to, start counting the time,” he muttered as he plugged a flash drive into a port in the side of the monitor.“Okay.” She pulled out her cell phone and set up a stopwatch app.“Go,” he murmured.She started the counter.A list of files came up on the screen quickly enough.He didn’t mess with them, though.Instead, he pulled up another window and appeared to commence running another program.“What are you doing?” she asked.“Trying to break the write protection on those files so I can download them.”He typed frantically for another few seconds and then stopped.“Okay.That’s it.Now we have to let the program run and see if the algorithm can break through the copy protection protocols on those files before we’re kicked out of the mainframe.”“That’s two minutes elapsed,” she murmured.He nodded tersely.They stared at the monitor in silence as his decryption program did its work.“Three minutes.”His jaw muscles rippled like he was clenching his teeth, but he didn’t acknowledge her minute-by-minute count in any other way.“Are you going to give up?” she asked.He shrugged.“As long as their security guys don’t kick me out, I may as well sit tight and see if I can capture those files [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
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.And yet, it did.Along with pain, she felt sorrow.Sorrow for the lost little boy, sorrow for the lonely, isolated man.Sorrow for what they could’ve had but which he’d thrown away.He’d completely withdrawn from her emotionally.He was firmly entrenched in being the icy, analytical spy in his fantasy high-threat scenario.Oh, sure, she accepted that they were in a certain amount of actual danger.After all, the wound in her shoulder was entirely real.But she was equally convinced it was all a big misunderstanding.If Alex would just hand over that flash drive and the evidence of chemical weapons in Cuba, the CIA would be happy and leave them alone.She’d planned to tell him that she loved him enough to place his happiness before hers and that she would seriously consider his implied offer to go with him.But he was obviously in no mood to hear anything she had to say right now.Instead, she sighed.“Now what?” she asked in resignation.“I’m going to the library.Are you coming?”“Sure.Why not?” Maybe she could check out a book on abnormal psychology and gain some tiny insight into Alex and his thoroughly screwed-up head.The anonymous, slightly decaying urban landscape around her was oddly comforting.She was rapidly picking up Alex’s aversion to being noticeable.The local library was a dingy beige building, mostly deserted inside.Alex sat down at a carrel with a computer in it, and she pulled up a chair beside him to watch him work his magic.“What are you going to do?” she asked curiously.“I’m going back in for more information on Cold Intent.”“Are you crazy?” she exclaimed under her breath.“Do you have any better ideas?”“We could talk to Uncle Charlie.”“He told you to stay away from it.He knows what the operation is all about, and somehow the two of us pose a threat to it.”“Is there any way you can figure out who gave the order to have you—” she dropped her voice to a whisper “—drugged?”“I gave the MPs in Gitmo André’s phone number.It came through that chain of command.”Katie frowned.“At first, the Marines were nice to you, right? They gave you the samples from me and let you go to the hospital on your own.”He leaned back to stare at her.“Follow that train of thought.See where it takes you.”“After they let you go, they called André.He told them something that made them go to the hospital, arrest you, interrogate you and drug you.And that something made them hold me and not let me join you.”“Go on.”“André likes you.He must have called his boss and was relaying the boss’s orders.So, why did the boss want the cops to go after you? You had information the CIA desperately wanted.Why not bring you in with all possible speed?”Alex stared at her, his gaze dark.She continued.“The boss had to have told them I was not a threat, but that you were.And the two of us were to be separated.I presumably knew as much as you did about what we found in Cuba, so I was as big a threat as you to whatever’s going on.Since they didn’t formally detain me, I have to rule out the information about the chemical weapons as the cause of your arrest.”Alex looked startled at that.Shock.She’d actually outthought the genius for once?She continued more enthusiastically.“Why separate us specifically? What’s the big deal about the two of us being together?”Alex frowned.“The CIA thinks you’re keeping me in line.That I won’t go off the reservation if you’re around.”“Then why would they take me away from you?” A nasty connection dropped into place.She spoke slowly, feeling her way through the logic.“Alex.Not only did they take me away from you, but they gave you drugs to make you paranoid.What if they made you suspicious of me intentionally?”He tilted his head, considering.“It’s a bit of a stretch, but it is plausible.”“What do I bring to you that you can’t do for yourself?” she asked.“That’s easy.Stability.Predictability.And control over my more dangerous impulses.”“How’s that?”“I am known to have feelings for you and Dawn.Threaten the two of you, and I’m forced to stay in line and behave myself.”She was dismayed that he thought she was such a big vulnerability.“I’m so sorry.”He shrugged.“It was my choice to get involved with you.My fault.”Fault? She was a fault in his life? She’d been a mistake for him right from the beginning.He’d tried to warn her, but she’d ignored him and thrust a relationship and even a daughter on him whether he liked it or not.The two of them could never make it as a couple if all he saw when he looked at her was a potentially lethal error in judgment.The last thing she wanted to be to him was a fatal vulnerability.He was right to leave her.A sob escaped her throat, and she bit back its sibling as it bubbled up in her chest.“As soon as this is over, Alex, I’ll let you go.I get it now.If my being with you puts you at so much risk, then we can’t ever be together.I’ll walk away and never look back.I love you too much to be the cause of your injury or death.”For just an instant, his gaze raged with some turbulent, unnamed emotion.And then, as usual, all expression drained from his eyes.His face went smooth and still, completely unreadable.Lord, she wished she knew how to do that, too.Her vision swam in tears and she looked away from him hastily.The computer screen was the only nearby target for her unseeing stare.“Let’s finish this,” she said fiercely.“The sooner, the better.Every day we’re together puts you at risk.”He made a tiny sound that might be a laugh half-formed, or maybe something else.like pain.Either way, he placed his hands on the keyboard and started to type.He played the machine like a virtuoso, and she couldn’t begin to understand the lines of code that flashed across the screen almost too fast to read.But she did recognize the Central Intelligence Agency seal when it briefly flashed up on the monitor.“When I tell you to, start counting the time,” he muttered as he plugged a flash drive into a port in the side of the monitor.“Okay.” She pulled out her cell phone and set up a stopwatch app.“Go,” he murmured.She started the counter.A list of files came up on the screen quickly enough.He didn’t mess with them, though.Instead, he pulled up another window and appeared to commence running another program.“What are you doing?” she asked.“Trying to break the write protection on those files so I can download them.”He typed frantically for another few seconds and then stopped.“Okay.That’s it.Now we have to let the program run and see if the algorithm can break through the copy protection protocols on those files before we’re kicked out of the mainframe.”“That’s two minutes elapsed,” she murmured.He nodded tersely.They stared at the monitor in silence as his decryption program did its work.“Three minutes.”His jaw muscles rippled like he was clenching his teeth, but he didn’t acknowledge her minute-by-minute count in any other way.“Are you going to give up?” she asked.He shrugged.“As long as their security guys don’t kick me out, I may as well sit tight and see if I can capture those files [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]