Free Pushing the Limit by Emmy Curtis Page B

looked around the room. To the average person, it would look the same as he’d left it. To Matt, it was obvious someone had searched the room.
    He wasn’t entirely surprised. All through training, they’d always been told that as soon as they were in a foreign country, they were to assume someone was going through their things.
    But this was different. This wasn’t some provincial policeman curious about what a U.S. serviceman was here for. Or a hotel worker looking for valuables. This was a pro job.
    He opened the wardrobe. He’d hung up his uniform and three tan uniform t-shirts, and two uniform blues shirts. He’d hung them in a group of two, then one, then the four other items together. Now they were hanging in one pair and then five together. They’d been careful about the bag he’d placed on the floor but not how the clothes were positioned on the rail.
    He opened a drawer in the dresser. He always placed his socks in as if he’d dumped them straight in from the suitcase. A casual observer would assume he was messy. But he also always placed one pair of woolen socks, facing west. W for woolen, W for west. Now they were messed in with the rest of them.
    Everything except for those two things were perfect. He couldn’t tell if the bag had been touched, although seeing that the searcher was obviously professional, he had to assume so. Luckily he never traveled with anything that could be used against him, or the U.S.
    Slowly he turned around, looking at every item of his, and the hotel’s. His breath steadied as he surveyed the room. Windows were closed, the blinds were half-down where he’d left them, the bed was made, although God knew he was going to examine that carefully before he got in it. He was looking for one thing, one thing that might tell him exactly why his room had been searched. And then he found it.
    In the threadbare carpet there was a slight indentation where a foot of a chair had been. It was slightly to the right of where the chair was now. Clumsy for a pro, but maybe he’d been disturbed. Quietly, he got on his hands and knees and flipped onto his back so he could look under the chair. Somewhere in his fucked-up brain he half expected to see a pressure switch to a bomb, for no good reason except his brain had been messing with him since he’d landed here.
    It wasn’t a pressure switch, it was a bug. A quarter-sized round bug that looked like a watch battery, smooth and flat. Two tiny antennae poked out of it.
    He sighed as he looked at it, relaxing a little. You don’t booby-trap a room and bug it at the same time. It was usually one or the other. If his room was going to explode, no one would leave an additional piece of equipment like a bug. Too easy to trace signals.
    Sitting up, he wondered. No one knew he was even in country except immigration and his commander. And Nitro. But Nitro was there to guard him. Which reminded him to call him the next day to arrange to see him for a drink. If he was still here, that was.
    He leapt up. Shit. He should check on Harry’s room, too.
    As he let himself out of his room, he called himself out on his excuse to go see her. Who would professionally search the room of an archaeologist? Or bug it, come to that.
    By the time he knocked on her door, he’d persuaded himself that it was imperative that he search her room for a matching bug. Vital, even.
    The door wrenched open. Harry stood there in the same clothes that had entranced him yesterday. Tiny soft cotton shorts and a tight-fitting tank top. She scrubbed her eyes with her fists. Dammit. Was she freaking crazy? He could have been anyone.
    “What the fuck are you doing, opening the door in the middle of the night?” he stormed.
    “You knocked.” She yawned and stretched her arms over her head, showing off a luscious section of tanned belly. “That’s how it works. You knock. I answer.”
    “And if I’d been a crazed gunman with a grudge against Western women?” He slammed the door