Breaking point - By Tom Clancy & Steve Perry & Steve Pieczenik Page 0,23
be a pain in the butt.
Either way, her money would be depleted by the time her visa ran out, and she’d have to leave the country by the end of the summer.
She was sitting at the small table in the kitchen—a kitchenette, really—when the doorbell chimed. Who could that be? Save for Carl and her landlord, nobody knew she lived here. A salesman? Somebody come to the wrong address?
When she opened the door, the last person she expected to see stood there:
MI-6 agent Angela Cooper.
Toni was stunned. The bitch! How dare she come here?
Toni clamped a lid on the rush of anger that threatened to boil forth. Polite might be too much to ask for, but she kept her voice even: “What do you want?”
Cooper flashed a weak smile. She was a beautiful woman, no doubt of that. Toni could see the attraction. “I need to speak to you. May I come inside?”
“Why? We don’t have anything to talk about.”
“I think we do. Please.”
Toni offered as bored a shrug as she could. “Sure. Come in.”
Once inside, Cooper looked nervous. She sure as hell should be, Toni thought. She might be a trained secret agent, but Toni’s martial abilities were a lot sharper than what the Royal secret service would be passing on to its operatives. If push came to shove, she could take Cooper—even if she had James Fucking Bond backing her up. And she would enjoy whacking Cooper. A lot.
“What?”
“I won’t be here but a moment or two. Listen, I’ve wrestled with this and I can’t come up with any clever way to say it, so here it is, flat out: I didn’t sleep with Alex Michaels.”
“No, I expect you didn’t get much sleeping done.”
Cooper shook her head. “You have it wrong. We did not have sex—is that clearer? Not in any way, shape, or form, not even by Clinton definition. I wanted to, but he turned me down.”
It caught Toni flat-footed. “What?”
“Yes, I know I made it seem as if we had, but—it didn’t happen. I wanted to, believe it, and I tried my best, but he wouldn’t go for it.”
Toni waved at the table. This was astounding. “You want to sit down?” As it always did when she got flustered, her Bronx accent came back: Ya wanna siddown?
Was she telling the truth? Had Alex put her up to this?
Cooper read her mind: “In case you are wondering, no, Alex didn’t tell me to talk to you; I haven’t spoken to him since he left the country. I heard what happened between you two. I was going to let it pass. When he wouldn’t do me, I was, well, a bit put out, so I decided to sting you a little by letting on that he had. I suppose I wanted you to take him to task, make him squirm a bit. But despite his rejection, I did like Alex, and it isn’t really fair to make him suffer because he was doing right by you.”
“Alex didn’t deny it when I brought it up,” Toni said.
“I don’t understand why not. It had been a long day. We had supper in a pub. He had one beer too many, and I offered to give him a massage. But that was as far as it got. He was half-asleep facedown on the massage table when I stripped and tried to get him to have it off with me. I was ready—and it was obvious he was ready, too—but instead of his willie, he waved you in my face.”
She paused, took a deep breath, and went on. “I was furious. And I resented you for having him, so that’s why I did what I did. I’m sorry. That’s it.”
She turned and started for the door.
Toni had trouble finding her voice, barely made it before the woman got the door open. “Angela?”
“Yes?”
“Thank you for telling me. It couldn’t have been easy.”
Cooper smiled, more genuine this time. “I’d rather be having a bloody root canal. You’re lucky to have a man like that interested in you. Maybe you can patch things up.”
When she was gone, Toni sat at the table, staring at the wall. Why hadn’t he just told her? He knew she thought he’d slept with Cooper; all he had to do was deny it, she would have believed him. At least she thought she would have believed him. Why hadn’t he spoken up?
She replayed their last meeting, trying to remember exactly how it had gone. Had he ever actually said he’d