The Eden Prophecy by Graham Brown Read Free Book Online Page A

degree of worry. She cared a great deal for Hawker. He had a way of bringing out the best and most honorable parts in her own personality. Parts she had lost in her initial climb up the ranks of the National Research Institute.
    Her job often required lying, stealing, and deceiving in the name of the greater good. She didn’t really have a problem with that. But a time had come when it all wenttoo far, when the NRI began hiring civilians, putting them at risk and lying about the dangers they would face.
    Two and a half years ago, on a mission like that, they’d also retained Hawker. He’d been little more than a hired gun at the time, but as the mission frayed at the edges and then blew itself apart, Hawker had been the one factor that kept the damage from becoming all-encompassing.
    The final tally was grave, with more than a dozen deaths and a barely contained scandal that led right back to the agency’s then director, Stuart Gibbs. He’d disappeared before Danielle and the team made it home, and the NRI itself had almost collapsed, maintaining its existence by the thinnest of margins.
    In the words of one critic, the mission had been “cataclysmic in the scope and magnitude of its failure,” but she and several others, mostly civilians, had survived, almost exclusively due to Hawker’s efforts.
    The experience had been so intense that it took Danielle a while to work out her feelings. Only later had she come to realize the irony of Hawker, the fugitive mercenary and pariah, showing her, the upstanding straight-A government agent, what mattered and what didn’t.
    It reminded her of deep-seated beliefs about honor and righteousness that she’d somehow buried or rationalized away as a hindrance to getting the job done. It had been the beginning of the way back to herself. And when the dust cleared, she found that she liked new her—the old her—better.
    Eventually she’d returned to the NRI with renewed purpose and strength, determined that she could do what was right and still do her job.
    Perhaps that was why her feelings for Hawker went deeper than the physical attraction they both felt. She was fairly certain that he’d touched her soul somehow.
    Someday, in some way, she hoped, they’d get a chance to see where things might go, but so far Hawker’s coverrequired him to live exactly as he had for the previous decade. He lived in the shadows as a target for Interpol and American agencies like the FBI that were purposefully kept in the dark as to his change in status, lest it leak out. He never spent more than a few weeks in one place. Not exactly the way to start a relationship.
    She’d hoped that after this mission to Croatia they might have some time to be by themselves, but Hawker’s message and the information she’d uncovered trying to help him meant there was little chance of that.
    As she waited and worried for him, it grieved her that she was here to deliver terrible news.
    On the screen she saw an expensive-looking white sedan slide through the gate at the edge of the taxiway. The car rolled across the apron and parked beside the Citation, stopping at the foot of the stairs. Her heart filled with relief when Hawker got out, handed the keys to another man, and then began to climb the stairs.
    He stepped through the door and looked directly toward her.
    She couldn’t help but smile.
    He grinned back at her, handsome and rugged.
    “I have to ask,” she said, playfully, “why are you driving a Jaguar?”
    “They didn’t have an Aston Martin,” he said.
    “That’s not what I meant.”
    As the stairs were rolled away, Hawker pulled the door shut, locked it into place, and came back to sit with her.
    Pressing an intercom button on her armrest, she spoke to the pilot. “We’re ready to go.”
    The pilot’s voice came over the intercom. “We’ve filed a flight plan to Hamburg. Do you want us to amend?”
    “I’ll let you know once we’re airborne,” she said, and then turned her