She nodded. “That you are.” She shrugged. “But I told you I was a woman of many talents, remember?”

“Yeah,” Flynn said tightly, trying very hard not to summon up the mental image he’d created the last time she said that. Stuck in a hospital bed with twenty pounds of plaster immobilizing his arms was definitely not the right moment to imagine Laura Van Horn in a sexy outfit.

“Plus, I have some friends in high places,” she said as the door opened behind her. A thin, middle-aged man in a dark jacket and tie quietly entered. He had graying hair and pale eyes that peered out knowingly behind a pair of wire-rimmed glasses.

Flynn looked him over with a skeptical eye. “You don’t strike me as being a doctor. And you’re sure as hell not a nurse. Which makes you—”

“My boss,” Van Horn finished for him. “Mr. Fox.”

“Fox? Seriously?” Flynn said. “And now you’re going to tell me that Mr. Fox here heads up a civilian air freight company in Alaska? Flying people’s mail orders and gift boxes between there and Seattle?”

She had the grace to redden slightly. “That may not have been completely accurate.” She folded her arms. “Our range of operations is actually a little more . . . global.”

“I bet,” Flynn said, starting to feel a little angry at having been played for a sucker when they first met. “I guess what you really do is more like delivering weapons and explosives to a bunch of rebels or terrorists or freedom fighters in faraway, godforsaken places—depending on what they’re calling themselves on any particular day of the week.”

“Not at all, Captain Flynn,” the older man said with a dry laugh. “We leave idiocy along those lines to the amateurs, like the CIA.”

“So who are you?” Flynn challenged him. “Defense Intelligence Agency? Homeland Security? FBI?”

“None of those,” Fox said with some amusement. “I run a little outfit of my own.”

Flynn looked at him. “Called what?”

The older man shrugged. “Many different names, depending on the task in hand.” Casually, he seated himself in one of the chairs next to the bed. “What matters is that I’m always on the lookout for people who might be useful.”

Flynn glanced up at Laura Van Horn. “So, our whole dinner date? What was that, just an artfully managed job interview? Complete with a carefully arranged dud aircraft engine?”

Reddening a bit more, she shook her head.

“That, Captain Flynn,” Fox said calmly, “was serendipity.” He shrugged his narrow shoulders. “Oh, given time, I would have asked Laura here to find a way to talk to you . . . to size you up, one could say. You’ve been on my radar as a possible recruit to our little band of brothers and sisters for quite a while.”

Flynn stared at him. “Why me?”

“You have language skills, high intelligence, intuition, tenacity, and daring,” Fox told him frankly. He smiled. “Those aren’t common anywhere, and certainly not in our government’s more . . . established . . . intelligence bureaucracies.” Behind his lenses, his pale eyes gleamed. “Besides, you’ve demonstrated a remarkable talent for pissing off all the wrong people by doing exactly the right thing. A talent like that should be put to even wider use.”