Deadly Sight by Cindy Dees Page A

on it and mounting twin antennas on the windshield before long. “Do you name all your cars?” he asked curiously.
    “Absolutely. It makes them feel loved. They run better that way.”
    “They’re machines,” he scoffed.
    “You watch. If you don’t show your Bronco some love and name it, it’ll turn on you,” she warned.
    “Hippie.”
    “Pig.”
    He blinked, and then laughed. “You’re going to fit in great around here. I bet you eat granola and can make your own yogurt, too.”
    “Yes to both,” she answered indignantly.
    “I’ll see you back at the house in a few hours?” he asked in good humor.
    “Deal. Love ya, babe.”
    His entire body went hot and cold. Sick to his stomach, he froze as she stood on tiptoe and laid a kiss on him that surely wasn’t legal in public. The woman practically had carnal knowledge of his lungs. As she sashayed around to the driver’s door of her Bug and swung her mile-long legs into the car, he caught sight of the car salesman gawking. Jealousy flared in his gut. His woman—
    Not his woman. He stumbled to his own vehicle and climbed in. He rested his head on the steering wheel and concentrated on slowing his breathing to something resembling human. They were just words. She didn’t mean them. Didn’t know what they meant to him. It wasn’t her fault.
    “Oh, God,” he groaned. A tear spilled onto his hands, hot and painful. What was he doing? He was being disloyal. Unfaithful. Traitorous.
    He had to get his head in the game. Finish this damned mission as fast as possible and get away from Sammie Jo Jessup before she tore him to pieces. To that end, he guided his Bronco toward the Shady Grove Naval Signals Intelligence facility. Somewhere along the way, he achieved a state of numb emptiness. That was good. He had lots of practice functioning in that particular vacuum.
    An armed guard waved him to a stop as he approached a heavily fortified gate and accompanying guard shack. “Can I help you, sir?”
    He handed over an ID badge he dug out of his wallet. The guard stepped into the shack and ran it through a magnetic scanner. “Welcome to Shady Grove, Agent Pierce.”

Chapter 6
    G ray nodded grimly at the guard, who he knew to be a marine in civilian clothes. “I need to use a secure phone and a computer.”
    “Roger, sir. Here’s your visitor badge. It needs to be in plain sight at all times. Head for the main entrance of that white building straight ahead and park in one of the visitor’s spaces. Check in with the front desk, and they’ll hook you up.”
    “Thanks.” Out of long habit, Gray glanced around, looking for the security cameras he knew would be recording his every move. In true NSA fashion they were so cleverly disguised that even he, a seasoned operative, couldn’t spot them. But then, security was particularly high at this facility. Although its existence was no big secret, its function—gathering every single electronic signal in all of North America and most of South America—was incredibly secret.
    Another guard, even beefier and more brusque than the gate guard, examined his credentials again just inside the building. After deeming him not a security risk, this guard pointed him to the first door on the left. No surprise, when Gray opened the door yet another guard met him. This one was reasonably friendly, however, and escorted him down two flights of stairs and into a nondescript hallway. The guy stopped in front of a door and opened it for Gray.
    He peered inside what turned out to be a small, no doubt electronically shielded room with a gray metal desk in the middle of it. Sitting on its surface were a black rotary telephone with a series of small, plastic lights mounted along its side, and a reasonably new-looking computer with a flat-screen monitor.
    “Take your time, Agent Pierce. Get your fill before you have to go back to the Stone Age out there, eh?”
    He grinned at the guard and nodded in commiseration. When the door had safely