Darkness before the Dawn by Anne Stuart Read Free Book Online Page B

hellish week, to remind herself. She should have cut Randall’s half of the picture off and thrown it away.
    She’d taken off for Eastern Europe with a sigh of relief. Margaret Mullen, off to meet her husband Jim, a representative for Carter Industries who was currently scouting the market for exported automobiles. It would be an easy job, Mike had promised, more a vacation than anything else. Mullenwould have done the hard part by the time she got there, and the detailed plans for several Eastern European missile bases would already be making their way back to Washington via another messenger. All she had to do was provide cover for Jim Mullen while they spent an innocent two days touring and then flew back to Washington.
    Of course, it hadn’t worked out that way. No one had been at the small, seedy airport outside of Gemansk. It had taken her three days to find Jim. He had been holed up in a caretaker’s shed in a cemetery that was gruesomely appropriate. His shoulder where the bullet was lodged had already begun to swell and redden.
    During those three days, she’d sent word back to Mike. She wasn’t supposed to rely on her own abilities—her orders had been exact. If there was a problem, she was to call them with the prearranged code and wait for further instructions. By the time she found Mullen, those instructions had come through:
Wait for rescue
. Someone would be coming.
    First aid had been limited during the thirty-six hours she hid out in the shed with the wounded agent. Mullen had been in and out of a mild coma. He had ordered her to leave him when he regained consciousness and had lain sweating and shivering when he was out. Maggie did her best to warm him, did her best to clean the wound that had spread raw, angry red streaks down his torso, and tried to ignore the smell of rotting flesh as she waited in the darkness with tears streaming down her face. She had waited for rescue, hating her own impotence.
    “Hey, Maggie.” It had been just before dawn, and Mullen was conscious again, if just barely so.
    “Yes, Mullen,” she had said, pulling herself together and moving back to his bedside. She’d known him only casually in Washington, but in the last thirty-six hours he’d become intensely important to her. Somehow, some way, she had to get him home safely. Her peace of mind, her faith in herself depended on it.
    “You gotta get out of here.”
    “We’ve spent the last day and half arguing about this. I’m staying.”
    “Look,” he said—and she could see the effort the words cost him—“even Vasili had the sense to get away after he brought you here. He can’t help the Resistance if he’s dead, and neither can you. You’re just going to go down the tubes with me—and for what? It’s too late for me; you know it and I know it. The only thing you can do for me is to get away from here safely.”
    Maggie mopped his pale, sweating brow—a useless gesture that soothed her more than it did him. “I’ve told you before. My orders are to wait here for rescue. Mike Jackson would have my skin if I disobeyed, and you know it.”
    He’d even managed a weak laugh. “He’s going to have mine, for screwing up so badly. Damn it, Maggie, you’ve got to leave.”
    “I’m not going anywhere.”
    “Yes, you are.” She hadn’t heard him enter. Some secret agent she was—someone could sneak up on her without her noticing. He stood in the doorway of the shed with the dawn sky lightening behind him; it cast his tall body in shadow. She didn’t need the light to tell her who it was. She’d known, with a sense of fatality, who it would be.
    He moved across the dirty little room and squatted down beside Mullen’s supine body. “How are you doing, Jim?”
    “Randall.” There was relief in his voice, relief and resignation. “It’s a code thirty-seven, I’m afraid.”
    “You sure?”
    “What’s a code thirty-seven?” Maggie had demanded, and Randall looked up at her from his position