Night Magic Read online

  KAREN ROBARDS

  NIGHT MAGIC

  A Time Warner Company

  NIGHT MAGIC. Copyright © 1987 by Karen Robards. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

  For information address Warner Books, Hachette Book Group, 237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017.

  A Time Warner Company

  ISBN 978-0-7595-2121-6

  A mass market edition of this book was published in 1987 by Warner Books.

  The “Warner Books” name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  First eBook Edition: March 2001

  Visit our Web site at www.HachetteBookGroup.com

  Contents

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Chapter IX

  Chapter X

  Chapter XI

  Chapter XII

  Chapter XIII

  Chapter XIV

  Chapter XV

  Chapter XVI

  Chapter XVII

  Chapter XVIII

  Chapter XIX

  Chapter XX

  Chapter XXI

  Chapter XXII

  Chapter XXIII

  Chapter XXIV

  Chapter XXV

  Chapter XXVI

  Chapter XXVII

  Chapter XXVIII

  Chapter XXIX

  Chapter XXX

  Chapter XXXI

  Chapter XXXII

  Chapter XXXIII

  Chapter XXXIV

  Chapter XXXV

  Epilogue

  ♦

  DISCOVER WHY CRITICS—AND READERS—LOVE KAREN ROBARDS AND HER IRRESISTIBLE ROMANCES

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  “Ms. Robards [has] the marvelous talent to zero in on the heart of erotic fantasy. She seems to know instinctively our most secret thoughts and then dreams up the perfect scenario to give them free rein. . . . The result is pure magic.”

  —Romantic Times

  ♦

  “Karen Robards writes an absolutely splendid tale, and is among the best for giving the reader incomparable sexual tension. . . . She is certainly one of the few authors who successfully moves from historical to contemporary fiction and back again with gifted ease . . . [she writes] romantic adventure that will leave you breathless.”

  —Affaire de Coeur

  ♦

  [Ms. Robards writes] “spellbinding romance.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  Also by Karen Robards

  Amanda Rose

  Dark Torment

  Loving Julia

  To Love a Man

  Wild Orchids

  Published by

  WARNER BOOKS

  With love to the real “Puff”—my sister Lee Ann,

  who inspired this book.

  And, as always, to Doug and Peter

  I

  Friday, October 2, 8 P.M.

  He had maybe a minute to live.

  Jack McClain felt a rush of terror override the drug that was dulling his body’s responses. The accompanying adrenaline somewhat cleared his head, enough so that he could at least weigh his chances of avoiding being shot in the head at point-blank range. Conclusion: not good.

  The bozos dragging him from the trawler’s lantern lit cabin to the pitching, spray-wet darkness of the deck were the size of gorillas. Even at full strength, unarmed as he was he would have stood about as much chance of overpowering them as Texas Christian University’s Horned Frogs had of defeating Alabama’s Crimson Tide the year he had been the Frogs’ star quarterback. In other word’s, a snowball’s chance in hell.

  Which left his brains. He’d always prided himself on his brains. If only the squishy mass of gray matter were functioning normally. . . .

  The bow plunged into a trough left by a rolling wave and reared out again. His head swam. Nausea caused as much by the drug as the motion of the sea made his stomach churn. He staggered, nearly falling to his knees as his city shoes lost purchase on the slippery wood. The resulting yanks on his arms twisted behind him made him cry out.

  The gorillas reached the railing. Thrown hard against the iron bar, McClain stared groggily down at the dark, choppy waters of the Atlantic. How many miles out to sea were they? It had been maybe an hour before that they had passed beneath the Chesapeake Bay Bridge. Doing about seven knots, as they were, that meant they’d come . . . Hell, his brain wouldn’t perform even that simple calculation. Forcing himself to concentrate, he tried again.

  The trawler plunged again and his stomach plunged with it. God, he couldn’t think. At least the rush of the wind drowned out Yuropov’s blubbering. They’d crushed the knuckles of the Russian’s right hand, one by one, with a pair of pliers. The man had screamed until one of their captors had slammed a rifle butt into his face. After that they had heard only a sobbing punctuated by the bubbling of blood as Yuropov tried to breathe through the pulp of what had once been his nose and mouth. Which was probably a good thing, McClain had thought at the time. At least it kept the Soviet from spilling his guts about the microfilm concealed in a secret compartment in McClain’s belt. If Rostov had had any inkling of the existence of a microfilm, he would have tortured its whereabouts out of one of them, if a simple strip search hadn’t revealed it, which it probably would have. Rostov was a pro, after all. He was no stranger to secret hiding places, and the belt was a garden-variety money belt that didn’t work half the time with the muggers it was designed to circumvent.

  Yuropov’s life wasn’t worth a penny now that the Soviets had him back. Yuropov knew that as well as McClain did. Defectors weren’t exactly popular with the Central Committee, and defectors who happened to be former KGB officers with the information that Yuropov had told him could be assured of a very long, painful death while the KGB used its innumerable wiles to find out exactly what beans he had spilled.

  Behind him, out of the corner of his eye, McClain saw a white-soled deck shoe beneath the perfectly creased leg of a white canvas trouser. Colonel Andrei Rostov, KGB. A graduate of the Moscow State Institute for International Relations, and formally a diplomatic attaché at the Russian Embassy in Washington. Informally he was deputy to the Washington Rezident, or KGB chief. McClain had known Rostov, or at least known of him, for years. They were close to the same age, and for a while had been rising at about the same speed through the intelligence ranks on their respective sides. But Rostov had far outstripped him in the last few years.

  A sharp dresser, was Rostov, which was unusual for a Soviet, and a damned good agent. Intelligent, ruthless, efficient. McClain had been like that once, before the monumental screw up of Budapest. Now he was nothing more than a boozed up, burned-out shell.

  He couldn’t believe he’d been careless enough to let them be taken. That he’d been entrusted to debrief Yuropov, the agency’s prize catch, at all had come about through a combination of Yuropov’s own request (McClain had met Yuropov briefly when both had been posted to West Germany at the same time years before) and a personal vote of confidence on the part of Hammersmith. Tim Hammersmith had his own ass to cover as the newly appointed acting head of the foreign intelligence gathering arm of the Central Intelligence Agency, but he had stuck his neck out for McClain, who had worked for him before when both had had far more elite, deep-cover overseas assignments. Now Hammersmith was paunchy and balding, the flame that had driven him burned down into ordinariness just as McClain’s had. But he still retained his irreverent
sense of humor, dubbing his group the Redbusters and playing a tape of the theme to the movie Ghostbusters with “Redbusters” inserted at appropriate spots at the conclusion of every staff meeting. The secretaries were going ape, vowing to strike if they were subjected to the song one more time, but McClain thought it was funny. Gave the whole intelligence gathering bit, which tended to be deadly dull routine, and dry as dust, a little comic relief.

  “You can get more information out of him than anyone else I know, Jack. First, he seems to trust you. And people open up to you, for some reason I can’t begin to fathom. Must be that ugly mug of yours.” Hammersmith had grinned as he had told McClain of the plum assignment that, if carried out successfully, would restore some of McClain’s lost lustre in the intelligence service. McClain knew that Hammersmith had had to lobby hard to get the assignment for him, despite Yuropov’s request. It was symptomatic of Hammersmith’s basic softheartedness that he would do what he could to get his old friend and long-time subordinate back on the fast track. Burned-out agents were usually put out to pasture in some nice desk job; McClain himself had been stuck monitoring intercepts for the past three years. Rarely were they offered the chance of a come-back. But McClain knew he’d been an unusually effective operative. The agency was loathe to lose him to mediocrity unless there was no alternative. So it had come: his chance to work his way back to where he had been.

  Hammersmith had been right. Yuropov had opened up. He’d spilled lots of little secrets over the six weeks that McClain had been handling him. Tonight, over linguine with clam sauce at a pricey D.C. restaurant, he’d parted almost casually with the granddaddy of them all, a secret so big that McClain had called Hammersmith from the restaurant to tell him they had to see him immediately. Without revealing what it was that Yuropov had given up (even public telephones were not proof against interception, as McClain well knew), he had then bundled Yuropov into his beat up Chevy Nova and lit out for Hammersmith’s Gaithersburg home. Hammersmith wouldn’t believe this one unless he got it straight from the horse’s mouth.

  Only they hadn’t made it. A car running without lights had come hurtling out of nowhere on the dark twisty road. McClain had been driving the familiar route with only half his mind on the road. The other half he had given over to weighing the bombshell that Yuropov had dropped. The previous intelligence Yuropov had passed along had proven to be right on target, but even so it was nearly inconceivable that a deep cover Soviet mole had managed to worm his way into a high-level position deep within the CIA itself.

  The mole’s codename was Bigfoot. If what Yuropov had said was true the mole’s existence was a catastrophe of monstrous proportions. His identity was unknown to Yuropov, although the information Bigfoot had passed along was mind boggling in its scope, accuracy, and ability to compromise the entire U.S. intelligence apparatus. It had had to come from someone at the very top. Someone who had access to a broad range of secrets. Someone who was above the “need to know” basis for the dissemination of highly classified information. But even more urgent than the possibility of Bigfoot’s existence was the operation Yuropov swore the mole was even then in the process of carrying out: nothing less than the imminent assassination of the secretary of state.

  According to Yuropov, Bigfoot had passed the word to Moscow about a top secret summit to be held at an undisclosed location in the U.S. in two weeks time. The meeting was between Chinese and American leaders; its purpose was to execute a mutual defense treaty between the two superpowers. The Soviets perceived such a treaty as an extreme danger to themselves. The secretary of state, Franklin Conrad, was an archconservative known to be strongly in favor of it. Without his urging, it was felt, the waffling president would not agree to such a treaty. The solution, therefore, was obvious: eliminate the secretary of state. But Yuropov didn’t know the exact details of the plot. Only that while the assassination had been approved at the highest levels in Moscow, the plan itself was being activated by Bigfoot.

  McClain had been preoccupied with silently sifting through the possibilities when the car had overtaken them and crashed into the side of the Nova, slamming it into a ditch. McClain had put up a fight of course, but one of the thugs had stabbed a needle into his thigh, and that had been that. Now he and Yuropov were going to die, and there didn’t seem to be a thing he could do about it. He had blown it . . . God, had he blown it. And he was about to pay with his life for the monumental sin of a few moments of carelessness. The worst of it was that he hadn’t given Hammersmith a clue as to the nature of Yuropov’s bombshell. So what Yuropov had told him would die with him. And no one in Washington would ever know about the danger to national security. Bigfoot would live long and prosper, the secretary of state would die, and the American-Sino mutual defense pact would be no more than a Soviet nightmare once again.

  “Do svidaniya, Mr. Magic Dragon.” The mocking use of his old codename along with the Russian’s good-bye was barely audible over the sharp slap of a wave against the hull as the trawler heeled again. Rostov was directly behind him. McClain could see moonlight gleaming on the barrel of the pistol as Rostov raised it. It was now or never.

  Terror and rage combined to give him a burst of superhuman strength; another sharp yawning of the trawler didn’t hurt any, either. The gorillas’ attention had shifted to Rostov. They expected no further resistance from McClain. With a sudden, desperate jerk, he managed to break free and launch himself in a low, fast dive over the rail.

  “Nyet!” Rostov howled as McClain jack-knifed toward the frothy black water. A bright streak of light flashed across his peripheral vision. There was a muffled thwack! and the sensation of a baseball bat slamming into his skull behind his left ear. Momentarily he blacked out. The shock of icy water closing over his head brought him to his senses as he disappeared with a splash beneath the waves.

  He was not dead. That fact was born in on him as he sank deeper and deeper into the bone chilling turbulence of the sea. His eyes opened wide, trying vainly to see through the salty blackness that was as dense as oil. His head hurt like hell, ached and burned just behind his ear. He could neither see nor hear nor breathe, but he was not dead. Yet. To live, he had to fight his way out of the undertow that sent him tumbling head over heels through the ocean’s pitch dark middle. He must first have air; then he would take the business of surviving from there. He forced himself to touch the place behind his ear where the throbbing was centered. His exploring fingers found a shallow gash about three inches long that slanted sharply upward, slightly above and behind his ear. Rostov must have fired as he hurtled downward; the bullet had just creased his flesh. He’d done as much to himself shaving. Lucky. He’d been lucky.

  Lungs burning, he tried to swim. It was impossible. The ocean had him in its grasp, tossing and tumbling him as a child would toss a ball. Blind panic caused him to thrash wildly. He felt himself sinking further. With a tremendous effort of will he forced himself to calm down and try again to swim. A shoe went; the small loss lightened him. He kicked off the other one and felt immediately more buoyant. His arms and legs made weak paddling motions that affected his plight not at all. But at least they seemed to keep him from plummeting further toward the bottom of the sea. He paddled, holding his breath until he could hold it no longer and then holding it some more, praying all the while that the sea would spit him up before he drowned.

  A sudden upsurge caught him and he surfaced. Retching and gasping, he looked around. Not more than a hundred feet to his left the trawler chugged through the water; on its deck stood Rostov, scanning the waves with a flashlight. At each end of the boat his henchmen were doing likewise. They were looking for him, McClain realized. Taking a deep breath he dove down again, deep into the sea.

  When he was forced to surface, the trawler was much farther in the distance. It was barely moving through the water. As McClain watched, blinking against the sting of the saltwater in his eyes, he saw that it was moving around so that it would be between him and the shore. Of course, Rostov mu
st hope that the shot had killed him, or wounded him so much that he would drown, but he could hardly take that chance. He would have to find him if he was anywhere to be found. . . .

  A beam of light swung in his direction. McClain knew that it was too far away to find him, tiny speck that he was in a vast black ocean of pitching waves, but then he heard the faintest sound of a shout and seconds later the trawler seemed to be turning in his direction. It was only then that McClain realized his white face must stand out like a beacon against the inky water. Gulping a lungful of air, he prepared to dive. But before he could do so, a huge wave washed over him and sent him crashing down head over heels into the ocean’s depths to flail about as helplessly as a rag doll.

  Through the blackness all around him, he realized that he could see cylindrical shapes of an even denser blackness. Squinting against the searing sting of the saltwater, he tried to believe that his eyes were playing tricks on him. Even as his body tumbled, his eyes searched. Then the black shapes drew closer. McClain felt panic surge again. Sharks! Of course, the blood that must still be flowing from his head had attracted them. To be torn to pieces by these primitive feeding machines had been one of his secret nightmares since he had seen Jaws. He wanted to flail blindly, but he knew that if he did the motion would likely lure them to attack at once. He must not panic. Somewhere he had read that their noses were their vulnerable points. He would try to punch their noses with his fist, hoping to scare them off. As a defense, it was pitiable in its weakness, but it was all he could think of. Eyes straining to make out the shapes through the darkness, he clenched one hand into a fist, paddling with the other. Fear tasted sour on his tongue. . . .

  The undertow chose that moment to tumble him upwards. His head popped through the surface. For a moment McClain thought of nothing but filling his starving lungs as he sucked in great gulps of air. The lights that marked the trawler bobbed some three hundred feet away. Instead of cruising a straight line between where they had lost him and shore, or heading on out to sea where Yuropov would be handed over to a ship that would carry him back to Russia, the trawler seemed to be traveling in concentric circles. He was just to the north of its epicenter.