Free Men of Intrgue A Trilogy by Doreen Owens Malek

standing here, correct?”
    “Yes.”
    “So. What’s with your clothes—your hair, for starters. You look like a Wall Street stockbroker out for Saturday lunch at the country club.”
    “Good,” he said with satisfaction. “That’s my disguise.”
    Disguise? she was about to reply when she had to jump out of the way as a mouse scurried by, followed by another in hot pursuit.
    “You’d better get a cat in here,” she advised him. “You’ve got mice roller skating all over the place.”
    “I don’t plan to stay,” he answered dryly.
    “No? Where are you going?”
    “Back home, I hope. That depends on what you do.” He held her light gaze with his darker one. “You helped me once, Helen, will you do so again?”
    “Tell me about it,” she said warily, “and I’ll let you know.”
    Matteo gestured for her to resume her seat, overturning an orange crate next to it. He arranged the box so that he would face her and sat down. “Ask, and I’ll answer,” he said.
    “Who are you?” she said.
    “I am Matteo Salazar de Montega,” he replied solemnly, humoring her, like a child reciting his lunchtime menu for his mother.
    “And where is your home?”
    “My country is Puerta Linda,” he replied, producing a map from his pocket and opening it for her. He had come prepared.
    “Here,” he added, pointing to the coastline of Central America. Helen followed his forefinger to a tiny state divided from its neighbors by a river on one side and a mountain range on another. She continued to look down at the map as he took off his tinted glasses in order to see better.
    Puerta Linda. The name struck a chord in Helen’s mind, and she remembered news reports of the turmoil in that country, the clips filled with shots of men in fatigues toting rifles and aerial views of verdant jungles.
    “The night we met I was buying guns for the revolution there, and your Coast Guard interrupted the sale,” Matteo went on evenly. “That’s why the federal government is in on it, too; they’re looking for me on illegal purchase of weapons charges.”
    Helen listened, absorbing each piece of information as it came. Puerta Linda was a world away, the current government a corrupt dictatorship threatened by bands of rebels who sought to overthrow it. Rebels like the man before her, who watched her calmly with obsidian eyes, waiting for her reaction.
    And now his name began to assume its full significance, and her mouth went dry. Montega. He was the leader of the revolution, a young turk who was trying to organize the various factions to make a disciplined assault on the sham democracy in power. He had been described as well spoken and American educated, a brilliant organizer with a keen mind and limitless personal courage. Matteo Montega was the most prominent figure in his country’s evolving history, and Helen had been hiding him in her father’s house for a week, feeding him erythrocin and Angel Bites. It was incredible.
    “What do you want me to do?” Helen asked quietly, subdued by the enormity of it.
    “Your government knows that I will try to get back to my country,” he answered. “Agents are watching the airports, monitoring all flights to Puerta Linda. There aren’t many, so it isn’t difficult to screen the passengers. I want to leave the country as part of a couple because they will expect me to be traveling alone. But I need someone, a real American who would not arouse suspicion, to pose as my wife.”
    “And that’s where I come in,” Helen whispered.
    “Yes. There is more involved here than just my breaking American law, although that is what they would use to imprison me. The current government in my country is allied with the United States, and the Puerta Lindan officials would like nothing better than for the American authorities to throw me in jail and let me rot there. I’d be out of the country and out of their hair, permanently.”
    Helen swallowed, realizing that he was right.
    “You must