Bianchi had to have paid a fortune for it… or he"d acquired it in another style of business transaction altogether. “That is such a kind gesture, Signor Bianchi. But I can"t possibly—”

“Of course you can, and you will! I insist. We are here to enjoy ourselves and celebrate our acquaintance,” Bianchi said. The look in Bianchi"s eyes told Zane that Corbin Porter would never decline such an offer. The sinking feeling intensified as Zane mentally flailed for an exit. There had to be a gracious way to bow out, but as he looked at the other players, all smiling and appreciative, Zane knew there wasn"t.

A waiter arrived a few moments later with empty tumblers for all the players at the table. Bianchi filled the glasses generously, and when he personally held one out to Zane, Zane knew he was trapped. There was no way to avoid this, short blowing his cover—and Ty"s—over a glass of whiskey.

He gave Bianchi Corbin"s best full-of-shit grin and raised his glass for the toast to their health even as his stomach roiled.

Zane hadn"t had a drink, any drink, in almost ten months.

The first taste of the very expensive Chivas was, well, intoxicating.

TY SAT on the balcony of their suite staring out at the rolling ocean, feet twitching as he hummed a tune he was pretty sure was actually two or three different songs. He was bored. It was only the fourth day of cruising, but other than almost falling off the rock wall the morning before, nothing had happened, and Ty wasn"t in a position to make anything happen.

He"d spent almost the entire day doing nothing. He supposed that was what some considered a vacation, but it just made him twitchy and nervous.

He understood the necessity for following the itineraries, but he was really beginning to hate those damn things. After dinner last night, Zane had gone off to a high-stakes poker game with Bianchi, Armen, and several other high rollers, hoping to glean information that could prove useful. Ty wasn"t needed there, and his presence probably would have made the other men wonder. They"d decided it wasn"t worth the risk for him to tag along, and the same applied tonight. And even if they"d been able to contact them, none of the other AWOL team members could be there for backup, either, since it was a private game.

Which was another thing that made Ty restless as hell.

It sort of reminded him of his last float before he"d left the Corps.

Knowing there was action elsewhere but stuck in sick bay, useless, with a bullet hole in his shoulder. Then, at least, his chest hadn"t itched where all the hair had been ripped out by organic scented wax.

He knew it was a self-imposed boredom this time, of course.

They were on a cruise ship. It was, by definition, a floating fun house.

Only Ty wasn"t having fun, and he wasn"t willing to go too far where he couldn"t be found if there was trouble. The four-man support team that was supposedly out there somewhere wasn"t really a lot of help. Ty hadn"t seen hide or hair of any of them. He knew it was out of necessity; they were merely there as a fallback, a last-ditch emergency response team if everything went tits up. Still, Ty would have felt better if they"d been given some way to contact them other than going out on the deck and waving their arms, hoping one of them was watching.

None of that would have made him feel better anyway. He didn"t know any of the other agents, and he didn"t trust what he didn"t know.

He sat there for barely five more minutes before he lost the will to be bored. He hefted himself out of the lounger and turned to head back into the cabin, determined to find something to keep his mind busy that didn"t involve disaster scenarios.

He went to Del Porter"s leather satchel, opened it, and peered inside with a twinge of guilt. He didn"t like going through Del"s personal belongings any more than he liked being Del. Granted, they"d already made a cursory search of all the luggage, including this bag, but Ty had tried not to delve too deep.

Now, though, he was desperate.

Inside the satchel were a few Sudoku and crossword puzzle books, which shocked Ty, since the guy wasn"t exactly supposed to be the intellectual type. He reached in and pulled a few of the books out, flipping through them to find them almost entirely filled in.

He groaned in disappointment. That would have given him something to do, anyway. He"d been avoiding the ship"s fitness areas simply because he didn"t like the crowds, but he would do a few laps around the designated jogging track if all else failed. If he could find music, he"d be better off. He remembered seeing an MP3 player in one of these bags.

He set the books beside him on the bed and looked back into the satchel. There was a small, pale green iPod and a set of matching earphones, a stick of deodorant, a pair of reading glasses in a Gucci case, and not much else.

Ty picked up the iPod with a pleased smile. He plugged in the earphones and put one bud in his ear as he turned the device on to make sure it would work before he got ready for a run. He set it to shuffle and put it on his knee as he reached for the Gucci eyeglass case.

He opened the case out of curiosity, wondering if they really were reading glasses. He was almost surprised when he found they were, and he held the stylish frames up to look them over. They were rectangular wire frames with thick, flat legs. Not exactly what Ty would have chosen if he had to wear glasses, and they had probably cost more than he made in a month.

The most interesting thing about these reading glasses was that when he held them up and looked through them, they didn"t alter his vision at all. Ty frowned at them and slid them on as the iPod began to play a spoken word track in a language Ty wasn"t sure of.

The reading glasses were merely glass, and they were heavier than they should have been, slightly reminiscent of the sunglasses he"d been given to take pictures. He took them off and turned them over, bending the legs experimentally. He couldn"t concentrate with the foreign words in his ear, though, and he picked up the iPod to peer at the track name. He"d thought it was an audiobook track, but it was labeled as a song he"d never heard of. Ty huffed and thumbed over to the next song, but it, too, was a spoken word track that was labeled incorrectly.

Ty stared at it, listening to the words in his ear. He could catch certain words and phrases of the garbled recording, enough to pinpoint the language as Italian and enough to recognize it as a conversation, not a lecture or book being read. He also recognized that it wasn"t a studio recording. It sounded very much like the result of a bug placed close to a person speaking.

Ty"s body went cold as he realized what he"d found.

“Shit,” he drew out slowly. He stopped the track and pulled the ear bud out of his ear. These were wire taps. These were professional-grade wire taps on Del Porter"s iPod. How did the office miss this? He turned the glasses over in his hand again and snapped one of the legs off, not really surprised when he found a thin wire snaking through the plastic. He shook the hollow arm and a flat receiver roughly the size of a dime fell into his palm.

“Shit,” he said again.

He squinted at the mechanism. He didn"t recognize the model, which meant it wasn"t American, Russian, or British.

“Shit, shit, shit.”

Del Porter wasn"t who they thought he was. The Bureau had nabbed somebody else"s informant. And whoever was behind Del Porter"s spying probably knew Ty and Zane"s secret as well.

TY STEPPED into the ornate casino room and looked around quickly, searching out Zane or any of the other members of the team who might have been hanging around. Where the hell were all the nosy support personnel when they were needed? Ty still hadn"t spotted a single one of them.

He moved through the crowd slowly, seeking his partner amid the throng of gamblers, but he knew the poker game wouldn"t be out here.

The ship-run games and tables were a joke, so the high rollers who had come to play had claimed a private room for hosting their own evening

“tournaments.” Ty scanned the back walls over the gaming tables, finally seeing a door behind a strategically placed decorative screen. It was possibly a staff entrance, but more than likely it was the private room that played host to all the whales.

He made his way toward it, the little iPod held tightly in his hand, hidden inside his pocket. Zane had their only gun, and Ty hadn"t even grabbed a knife for fear of not being able to conceal the weapon well, and he felt naked as he moved through the crowd.

He stepped behind the screen to find an intimate, richly decorated room with a private bar and six draped tables. He stopped at the entrance, looking for Zane eagerly. If they could get what was on that iPod to someone who could speak the language, it might be enough for them to end this assignment tonight. Not only that, but the possibility that Del was an informant might be enough to make the FBI pull him and Zane completely off this goat rope. They could be screwing around in a foreign entity"s investigation, and the Bureau hated sticky political messes.

Most of all, though, Ty was concerned that whoever Del was reporting to might be on board with them and may have already made him and Zane as frauds.

He spotted Zane, sitting with his back to the entrance at one of the closer tables. Ty shook his head. Zane must have been the last one to arrive to settle for sitting there, facing the wall. Ty moved slowly, circling around a little so Zane would see him approach in his peripheral vision.

Zane was sitting back, relaxed in his chair, mostly sideways to the table, legs crossed primly as he"d taken to doing when acting as Corbin.

There was the faintest of cold smiles on his lips, but his dark eyes were hooded and blank. The look was intensified by his now standard all-black suit ensemble. He held a snifter of something that was a rich caramel color in the hand away from the table—the other men had glasses as well, and the bottle was there on the table. There was a decent amount of chips stacked in front of him. If he saw Ty, Zane gave no sign of it as he watched Vartan Armen, who was considering his own cards.

Ty slowed, looking around the table. He"d never had occasion to play poker with Zane, but he could imagine his partner was good at it.

He was a hard man to read and almost obsessively observant of small details. He continued to move closer, carefully coming up on Zane, hoping he looked suitably embarrassed to be interrupting.

He put a hand on Zane"s shoulder, letting it slide up to his neck as he bent next to him. Both Armen and Bianchi looked up at him, as did the two other men at the table, but Zane didn"t acknowledge him.

Ty waited a moment, watching the other players. Armen frowned a bit under Zane"s scrutiny and looked at the stacks of chips in the center of the table. Each chip was labeled as $1,000—and there were a lot of chips out there. Armen smiled, set down his cards, and added two more even stacks of chips to the pile.

Ty watched the game briefly. If it had been Zane"s money, he might have waited, but it wasn"t, and Ty"s hair was blond until they could get out of here. He put his mouth closer to Zane"s ear and whispered, “I need to talk to you.”

Zane"s attention had transferred to the next man around the table, who had just as much a poker face as Zane. “Not now, doll,” Zane drawled as he set down his glass in front of him.

Ty blinked at him in surprise. He looked down at the cards in his hand and then over at the other men at the table. He had a fair hand, but nothing worth writing home about. His eyes strayed to the glass on the table near Zane"s chips. It was nearly empty, and Zane certainly smelled of alcohol. Ty let his hand slide over the back of Zane"s neck, looking up at him as he put his other hand on Zane"s thigh and squeezed.

“It"s important,” he insisted, the accent feeling strange on his tongue as he tried to convey just how important this might be.

“I"m sure it"s not,” Zane replied easily, nodding as the man across the table folded. The next gentleman, an older man wearing a finely tailored smoking jacket, tapped his chips on the table idly as he considered his cards. Zane would be next, if he hadn"t started the betting.

Ty didn"t care about the game, though. He stared at Zane, willing him to look up. In his pocket was possibly their plane ticket home, or more probably a bull"s-eye painted on Ty"s back, and Zane wouldn"t even look at him? Ty fought not to grit his teeth as he dug his fingers harder into Zane"s thigh.

“Darling,” he said pointedly, hating the polite accent and the fact that even cursing made him sound like he was sitting at tea with the Queen.

Zane"s head tipped to one side, and he laid his cards on the table face down. “Excuse me, gentlemen. I"ll be right back,” he said pleasantly. And he was out of the chair, yanking Ty up by his upper arm and marching him the fifteen feet over to the door.

“Don"t tell me you"ve run across something you can"t handle,”

Zane growled, a clear note of annoyance in his voice.

“Not exactly, but—”

“Then go handle it. Armen, Bianchi, and I are talking business between rounds, and I won"t be distracted. I"ll deal with you later.”

With that, he gave Ty"s arm a slight shove, turned his back, straightened his jacket, and strolled back to the table, retaking his seat smoothly without a glance back. The men at his table similarly ignored Ty.

Ty watched his partner go, struck speechless by his careless dismissal. He thought briefly about following him back to the table and kicking his ass, or at least announcing the cards Zane held in his hand, but the urge passed as he convinced himself their cover was more important.

As he stared at the table, he saw Armen throw down his cards with a sniff and Zane rake in the chips, stacking them as he toasted the table with his glass before taking a drink. Bianchi laughed merrily, wagging his finger at Armen before lifting the bottle and starting to refill the glasses.

*** Copyright: Novel12.Com