Free Kiss Me While I sleep by Linda Howard Page A

she’d be building herself a tidy little hidey-hole, adding more and more layers to her camouflage. The delay was also giving her time to procure funds from some unknown bank account that he assumed she had. If he’d been in her line of work, he sure as hell would have had several numbered accounts. As it happened, he himself had a little liquid security deposited offshore. You just never knew when something like that might come in handy. And if it never needed to be used, well, it would make retirement a trifle more comfortable. He was all for a comfortable retirement.
    As promised, Charles Murray was waiting at the gate when Swain finally arrived at Heathrow. Murray was of medium height, trim, with short iron-gray hair and hazel eyes. His bearing said he was ex-military; his demeanor was always calm and capable. He’d been unofficially on Nervi’s payroll for seven years, and on the government’s for a lot longer than that. Over the years Swain had occasionally dealt with Murray, enough so that they were fairly informal with each other. That is, Swain was informal; Murray was a Brit.
    “This way,” said Murray after a brief handshake.
    “How are the wife and kids?” Swain asked, talking to Murray‘s back as he ambled along in the British wake.
    “Victoria is beautiful, as always. The children are teenagers.”
    “Enough said.”
    “Quite. And you?”
    “Chrissy is a junior in college now; Sam’s a freshman.
    They’re both great. Technically Sam’s still a teenager, but he’s out of the worst of it“ Actually, both of them had turned out pretty damned good, considering their parents had been divorced for a dozen years and their father was out of the country a lot. To a large degree that was because their mother, bless her heart, had steadfastly refused to make him the bad guy in their breakup. He and Amy had sat the kids down, told them the divorce was for a lot of reasons, including getting married way too young, blah blah blah. Which was all perfectly true. The bottom line, though, was that Amy was tired of having a husband who was mostly somewhere else, and she wanted to be free to look for someone else. Ironically, she hadn’t remarried, though she dated some. The kids’ lives hadn’t changed all that much from when he and Amy were still married: they lived in the same house, went to the same school, and saw their father just about as often as they had before.
    If he and Amy had been older and wiser when they married, they never would have had kids together, knowing how his work would affect their marriage, but unfortunately age and wisdom seem to increase at about the same rate and by the time they were old enough to know better, it was too late. Still, he couldn’t regret having his kids. He loved them with every cell in his body, even if he got to see them only a few times a year, and he accepted that he wasn’t nearly as important in their lives as their mother was.
    “One can only do one’s best, and pray the demon seed eventually morph back into human beings,” Murray observed as he turned down a short corridor. “Here we are.” He blocked the view of a keypad and punched in a code, then opened a plain steel door. Inside was a vast array of monitors and sharp-eyed personnel watching the ebb and flow of people inside the huge airport.
    From there they went into a smaller room, which also had several monitors, as well as equipment for reviewing what the numerous array of cameras caught on film. Murray seated himself in a blue chair on wheels and invited Swain to pull up another one just like it. He typed in a keyboard command and the monitor directly in front of them glowed to life. Frozen on it was a frame of Lily Mansfield getting off the plane from Paris that morning.
    Swain studied every detail, noting that she didn’t wear any jewelry at all, not even a wristwatch. Smart girl. Sometimes people would change everything except their wristwatch, and that one detail would trip them up.