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“You’re still alive.”
She stared at him. “Drink your coffee,” she said finally. “And then we’ll get to work.”
“Breakfast first.”
He was usually a good judge of how far he could push someone, and he knew Isobel far better than she would have wanted, but he might have gone overboard. And then she blinked, and like the shutters covering the windows in this small space, her emotions and reactions were shut down, blanketed. “You’d better be worth all this trouble,” she said. “Good men have died for you.”
“The truth is, many good men have died because of me,” he said. “I don’t let it bother me. If you were as cold as you want to be, it wouldn’t bother you, either.”
“If it didn’t bother me, I wouldn’t be in this line of work. I don’t like good people being killed. I don’t like bad people getting away with it.”
“So it really must gall you to have to keep me alive.”
“Believe me, it does.”
He moved closer, deliberately crowding her again in the limited space. She stood her ground, simply because she had no place to go, and he leaned down and breathed in her ear. “I promise you can be the one to kill me if it comes to it. Does that make you happy?”
“Deliriously,” she snapped.
She smelled like coffee and soap. She smelled like Isobel, and he wanted to take her up against the kitchen wall, no preliminaries, nothing but fast, hot sex. He let her see it in his eyes, and her own flared with sudden awareness. And then he stepped back, leaving her with the illusion of safety.
“I like my eggs scrambled,” he said. And he walked back into the living room, smiling when he heard her drop something. Chaos, lust, confusion. His job here was done.
The house in Golders Green was small, older, seemingly ordinary. The reinforced, lead-lined door looked as if it was made of wood; the windows were shatterproof and as close to bulletproof as technology could get. There was a highly developed sensor system around the perimeter that could pick up any trace of explosives, and there were three escape routes underneath. It was a fortress inside an ordinary white house, and as Peter passed at least three invisible security checkpoints he told himself Genevieve was safe. He wasn’t so sure about his own sorry ass. She was going to be majorly pissed off, and Genevieve Spenser was not someone you pissed off lightly.
It had been one hell of a night. Cleaning up the mess of Morrison’s murder left no time to mourn his old friend. The man known as Serafin was unconscious by the time he and Reno reached Isobel, but the child in the backseat was both unexpected and a pain in the ass. To Peter’s amazement, Reno had taken charge, subduing the brat just by the tone of his voice, while Isobel and Peter dragged Serafin’s unconscious body into the car they’d bought and drove back to the apartment.
By the time they reached Kensington, Reno and the kid—Mahmoud was his name—were in curious accord, probably due to the iPod Reno had handed over. Peter hated to think what sort of Yakuza gangsta rap Mahmoud was listening to, but at least it kept the boy quiet while they lugged Serafin up the camouflaged back staircase to the hidden apartment behind the offices of Spence-Pierce Financial Consultants, Ltd. As long as Mahmoud knew Serafin was on the floor below, he went along with Reno peacefully enough, up to the stripped-down apartment Reno had turned into his home with a flagrant disregard of property. When Peter left them, Reno had switched on the state-of-the-art video game system, and Mahmoud’s sullen eyes had lit up. At least that was one thing Peter didn’t need to worry about.
Isobel was more than capable of dealing with someone like Josef Serafin, no matter what their history. Peter had taken one look at her, the blank expression in her eyes, and knew she was almost at the end of her endurance. But then she’d pulled herself together, as she always did, taking the news of MacGowan’s disappearance with no more than a flinch.
Peter had tied Serafin to the small bed in the apartment, and hoped to God Isobel had the sense to leave him there until he could get back. He never would have thought it, but the indomitable Madame Lambert was vulnerable. Younger than he’d ever realized. And running out of reserves.
In the meantime, he had someone even more terrifying to face. His angry wife, who didn’t even know she was, finally, pregnant. The nurse who had checked out her stomach flu had worked for the Committee before, and knew better than to say anything to anybody—even the patient—until given permission.
Peter had no illusions that his wife was suddenly going to become docile and complacent. Genevieve was a warrior woman, and if she had a child to protect she could take on the Russian army.
He passed the fourth checkpoint, punched in the code on the keypad and pushed open the door to the house, entering a long, narrow hallway with a row of closed doors on either side. Then he froze.
Somewhere in the depths of the house, a baby was crying, and for a moment he thought he’d somehow walked into the wrong building, the wrong life.
One of the doors opened, and if Peter weren’t so disoriented, the man who stepped into the hallway would have already been dead.
“You’re getting slow in your old age, Madsen,” Bastien Toussaint murmured. “You’d better come in and explain a few things to your wife.”
Peter shoved his gun back in the shoulder holster. “What the hell are you doing here?”
The crying noise had stopped—clearly the angry infant had been given what it wanted. Peter imagined a future filled with such moments, and told himself he should be miserable, but he couldn’t summon up much of anything.
“Safest place to be,” Bastien said. “Come in and meet Swede.”
“Swede?” God, not another person crammed into the tiny house.
“The new baby. We’re all here, in one piece, and we’re going to stay that way while we find out what the hell is going on. Three men tried to get to us in the States.”
“And you couldn’t find out who sent them?”
“They died too quickly,” Bastien said with his impenetrable calm. “I decided not to wait around to see if someone else was going to show up. Where’s Madame Lambert?”
