Pushing away from the wall, Ashton headed into the bedroom area, fishing his cell phone from his pocket as he did so. It took him only seconds to scroll through his small address book and find Henry’s number, and as the phone rang, he started to pace slowly alongside the bed, eyeing the suitcase and the backpack on the bed. It would be so easy for him to look inside them, to find out more about the man who’d interfered with his assignment.
But no, that wouldn’t be a good idea. He wouldn’t like it if someone dug through his personal belongings; he wouldn’t do the same to a fellow agent. A possible fellow agent, he mentally corrected. There was no guarantee the man actually was in the employ of the Agency, despite him spouting off names that Ashton recognized.
His train of thought was interrupted when someone finally picked up on the other end of the line. “Henry Cage’s office,” a chirpy, accented female voice said. “How may I help you?”
“Hey, Vanessa, I need to speak to Henry,” Ashton said. “Tell him it’s Ash.”
Vanessa didn’t bother to say anything as she put him on hold. There was a click and two short rings, and then Ashton’s handler’s familiar voice filtered through the phone. “It’s about time you checked in,” he said, a smile in his voice. “I was beginning to wonder.”
“Beginning to wonder, what, if I was going to report in?” Ashton asked.
“More like beginning to wonder if you were dead,” Henry replied.
“It happens,” Ashton commented, thinking back on the few times in his career when he’d been declared dead because he hadn’t been able to report in at his scheduled times. He paused beside the bed and eyed the suitcase again as the shower in the bathroom turned on.
“Not to you, it doesn’t.” There was a pause between them, and Ashton found himself reaching for the zipper on the bag when Henry spoke again. “Did you complete your assignment?”
“I’ve got the thumb drive,” Ashton said, “though I don’t know if it’s the one you asked for. I suppose you’ll find that out soon. Also…” He paused again and frowned, glancing at the closed bathroom door. The water still ran, but he dropped his voice in an abundance of caution. “Look, Henry, do you know a man named Zachariah?”
“Why?” Henry asked. Ashton could hear a note of alarm in his voice.
“Because a man named Zachariah tried to kill me then accused me of encroaching on his assignment,” he explained. “When I busted him in his hotel, he claimed to work for the Agency. What I need to know is if that’s true or false.”
“Depends,” Henry said.
“On what?”
“On whether he reports in like he’s supposed to. Did he say what his last name was?”
Ashton’s fingers darted to the suitcase’s zipper, and he unzipped the bag before he let himself have any second thoughts. “Nope. Just said he was Zachariah. Do I need to get rid of him when he comes out of the bathroom?” He cast one more glance at the bathroom then flipped the suitcase’s lid open. There was a passport on the top of the contents. He snagged it and flipped it open as Henry answered.
“Who did he say his handler was?”
“Brandon Hall’s.”
“Fuck,” Henry muttered. The utterance was so uncharacteristic for him that Ashton raised an eyebrow in surprise. “Brandon isn’t here right now, so I can’t ask him. Just…what does your gut tell you?”
Ashton opened the passport. A small photo of Zachariah looked back at him, serious and unsmiling. Beside it, in the name fields, it said, “Lawrence, Zachariah James.” His birthdate put him at twenty-five years of age. “My gut tells me to hold off right now until I know more,” he admitted. The water in the bathroom cut off, and he flipped the passport closed, tossed it back onto the bag’s contents, and closed the bag again as he added, “Last name is Lawrence. See what you can find out for me. I’ve got to go.” He hung up without waiting for Henry’s answer.
Ashton was just tucking his phone back into his pocket when the bathroom door opened, and Zachariah emerged, a thick white towel wrapped around his waist as he toweled his long hair off with another. Ashton looked him over blatantly, scanning his eyes from the man’s tousled black hair to his bare feet. He swallowed hard and shifted his weight from one leg to the other, quickly averting his eyes.
Ashton consciously found men more attractive than women for the past ten years. It wasn’t really something he’d chosen; it just was. He’d been that way for as long as he could remember—which basically meant since the age of nineteen. He didn’t think he had a particular type that he found more attractive than any other, because he didn’t have time to ever really think about that sort of thing. But if he did have a type, he was sure that Zachariah would have fallen right into whatever that type was, no question about it. And he wasn’t even sure what it was about the man that he found so…intriguing. It was a puzzle, one he’d have to figure out before it consumed him and caused problems for him later.
Zachariah had a smirk on his face, like he could read Ashton’s mind and the thoughts stirring around in it, but he didn’t say anything about his blatant staring. Instead, he continued to dry his hair and asked, “Did I hear you talking to somebody in here?”
“Just my handler,” Ashton said, following the motion of Zachariah’s hand as he dropped the towel he’d been drying his hair with. He fleetingly wished the other towel would drop to the floor with it, then he mentally slapped himself for the thought. Can we say “inappropriate?” Grow up, man. “Had to check in with him, let him know I did what I was supposed to do.”
He watched as Zachariah crossed the room to his suitcase, almost holding his breath as the other man unzipped it, hoping he hadn’t left any sign that he’d snooped in the man’s belongings. Zachariah glanced at him as he flipped the suitcase open, but he didn’t seem to notice Ashton’s tenseness. He simply pulled out a change of clothes and draped them over his shoulder.
“I should probably do that, too, huh?” Zachariah said. “Brandon will think I went and got my fool self killed otherwise.” He retreated to the bathroom, leaving the door open. Ashton could hear the rustle of clothing as he dressed and then the lower murmur of Zachariah’s voice, pitched perfectly so Ashton couldn’t eavesdrop, much to his frustration. When he emerged several minutes later, he was still on the phone, the device pinned between his shoulder and ear as he buttoned his shirt. “My assignment?” he was saying, his eyes looking wide and unsure. He glanced up at Ashton, and after only a moment’s hesitation, Ashton nodded. “Yeah, I’ve got it. In the bag,” Zachariah said. The relief in his eyes was palpable. “What do you need me to do next?” There was a pause, then Zachariah said, “Okay, will do.” He hung up and set the phone on the bedside table. “You should be getting a call in a minute,” he informed Ashton as he pulled a fresh pair of socks free from his bag.
“I take it you mentioned me to Brandon,” Ashton said.
“Probably the same way you mentioned me to Henry,” Zachariah quipped.
Ashton’s phone rang then, and he answered it with barely a glance at the screen. “Yeah?”
“We need you to come in,” Henry said in his ear, dispensing with the formalities. “Both of you. There will be plane tickets waiting for you at the airport, as usual. Your flight is at six in the morning, Prague’s time.”
“Something going on?” Ashton asked, watching Zachariah as he sat to put his socks and boots back on.
“Maybe,” Henry said. “Possible double-booking. We’ll discuss it when you two get here, okay?”
Ashton turned away from Zachariah and dropped his voice, though he knew there wasn’t anywhere in the room he could go to get away from the man’s ears. “Did you get the chance to check on what I asked you about?”
“Yeah, I checked on it myself,” Henry said. Something creaked on the other end of the line, and Ashton imagined his handler leaning back in his leather chair and putting his feet up on the desk, like he did every time Ashton ever visited his office. “He’s clean. Definitely one of Brando
n’s judging by the ‘what did he do now’ that I got when I finally got in touch with him.”
Ashton tried not to laugh and glanced back at Zachariah. Somehow, the statement didn’t surprise him; Zachariah seemed like the type to haul off and do as he pleased whenever the mood suited him, Agency rules be damned. “You want us to come in together? Or should we be separating?”
“Stick together,” Henry instructed. “Your cover story is that you’re stepbrothers. You were in Prague on a business trip, and you brought him along for company.”
“Got it,” Ashton said. He hung up without another word, turning to face Zachariah. The other man was unpacking his backpack, tucking the supplies into his suitcase. “You’re going to have to check that bag at the airport, you know,” he warned, “especially if you’re putting guns into it.” Zachariah didn’t respond. He merely stuffed a rolled-up leather bundle into his suitcase, shoving clothes aside to make it fit.
“Why did you do it?” Zachariah asked, and Ashton blinked in confusion, trying to figure out at what point the conversation had shifted to a different topic. He started to take a step closer to the bed but thought better of it. Not until he knew what Zachariah was talking about. The man might have been ready to throw punches for all he knew.
“Why did I do what?” Ashton asked.
“Why’d you cover for me?” Zachariah clarified. “When Brandon asked me about the assignment, you indicated for me to tell him I did it. Why?”
Ashton shrugged and tucked both hands into his pockets. “I don’t know. No sense in you getting into trouble if there’s no need for it. Besides, does it really matter which of us killed Tesla so long as he ended up dead?”
“It’s a lot of money to throw away,” Zachariah said. “Two million dollars.”
Ashton shrugged. “That doesn’t matter to me. I don’t do this for the money.”
Zachariah’s eyebrows rose, and his eyes darted from his luggage to Ashton’s face. He looked incredulous over his statement. “If you don’t do it for the money, then why do you do it?”
Ashton didn’t look at him as he confessed, “Because it’s the only thing I’m good at.”
* * *
Damon felt like he’d spent the past several days doing nothing but pacing in his office at the Agency’s headquarters. His anxiety levels had crept higher and higher with each passing hour as he waited to hear something, anything, from the dual assignment in Prague that he and Tobias had engineered. Had his and his deputy director’s plan worked? Had they managed to get the accidental introduction they needed? Everything—literally everything—hinged on that meeting happening. If it hadn’t happened…
Well, if it hadn’t happened, he and Tobias were well and truly fucked.
Damon wished for the days where he and Tobias could just sit two agents in a room, make the introductions, and give them assignments to work on together. But people higher on the Agency’s food chain than him had decreed no more agents working together after the mess that had happened three years before. Then, several agents who had been partnered together had gotten too cozy with each other and had decided to pool their resources and stage a coup against the Agency’s leadership. It had, obviously, been unsuccessful, but Damon and Tobias both had nearly lost their lives, as had many of the agents’ handlers. That little insurrection had been quickly put down—there were far more agents loyal to their employer than there were that weren’t—and after the secret trials and bloodshed and promotions and awards that followed, word had dropped from on high to chuck agent partnerships.
Damon had high hopes for one between Zachariah Lawrence and Ashton Miller. If he could orchestrate a situation that put them working together, then he could use that to finally get rid of Nathan Chambers once and for all. One agent alone couldn’t handle it; they were almost guaranteed to get killed. But two? That at least had a chance of working.
And if it did work? Then he’d have something to put in front of his bosses to argue for reinstating agent partnerships on a limited basis.
His burning need to see Nathan Chambers lying in a pool of his own blood was just an added push to make all this happen. His only regret was that he and Tobias couldn’t do it themselves; it would be too risky for both the director and the deputy director to engage in field work they were not permitted to perform and typically had to do in secret.
The black phone on his desk rang, and he nearly tripped over the edge of his office’s rug in his haste to answer it. He took one ring’s worth of time to smooth his ruffled feathers then picked up the receiver and tried to play it cool.
“Hartley,” Damon said by way of greeting.
“Damon, it’s Toby,” his deputy director said on the other end of the line.
“Tell me you have good news for me,” Damon said.
“I have good news for you.”
“Throw it at me.”
“I just got word from Brandon and Henry,” Tobias started. “They have assured me that Zachariah and Ashton have had a run-in with each other. I don’t know all the details, but they’ve definitely met. The gambit appears to have worked.”
“Oh, thank God,” Damon murmured. He dropped into his desk chair with a sigh of relief.
“So what now?” Tobias asked.
“Now we put them in a position that will force them to maintain contact,” Damon replied. “Authorize the purchase of plane tickets for them. Make sure they’re on the same flight and are as close to side by side as you can get. If they make it off the plane without a desire to kill each other, I’ll consider this a success.”
“I’ll pass that along,” Tobias said. He paused then added, “I have a few reports on my desk that we can address in the meantime if you’re available. Otherwise, I’ll have to go deal with it with Brandon’s help, and you know how I feel about him having my back.”
“What sort of reports are they?” Damon asked. He figured he could use the opportunity to burn off steam with a little bit of blood and slaughter.
“The usual,” Tobias said. “We haven’t been out to deal with this shit in almost a week.”
“I’ll meet you in the lobby in ten,” Damon offered. He hung up and pondered his empty desktop for a long moment before pushing himself out of his chair. He crossed the room to a bookshelf, found a hidden button behind one of the books, and pressed it. The bookshelf swung out from the wall, revealing a massive safe built behind it; Damon pressed a code into the keypad and pulled its door open. The sight of multiple guns and rifles and boxes of ammunition greeted him, lined up neatly in their padded slots. Against the safe’s right wall, several sheathed machetes hung. Knives of assorted shapes and sizes lined a low shelf. Damon gave the safe’s interior a crooked grin then started pulling out weapons and hiding them on his person.
He needed to go out and blow off some steam.
Three
Once they got moving, things settled into place quickly, and it wasn’t long before Ashton found himself on an airplane, jetting back toward the States. The thumb drive was nestled in his front right pocket, and though the economy class seat was cramped and uncomfortable, he felt an enormous sense of accomplishment. He’d completed his assignment—though he’d ended up having to kill someone, a part of his job he rarely had to utilize anymore—and now he would have a little more pull to get the month off that he’d been trying to wrangle for for three weeks now.
He glanced across the aisle at the seat alongside his. Zachariah sat in his own seat, eyes closed and head tilted back in sleep. He looked relaxed and peaceful, despite the cramped quarters, his hands resting loosely against his stomach. A bruise had formed on his jaw, marring his otherwise flawless face, and Ashton remembered how he’d slugged him in the alley. He couldn’t say he truly regretted the strike, but he did wish that the man had come at him less aggressively, had maybe realized that they worked for the same team. Maybe then they wouldn’t have gotten off on the wrong foot. Maybe then Ashton wouldn’t have shot him in a rarely felt rage. And maybe…
<
br /> Ashton shook his head and turned away, back to the sketchbook he’d been idly drawing in since boarding the plane. There was no sense in letting his mind indulge in flights of fancy. His imagination could be incredibly vivid at times, and it almost always led him into trouble. He shouldn’t spend his time letting himself imagine something he couldn’t ever have.
He tightened his grip on his pencil and forced himself to add another line to the sketch before him. He drew it slowly, carefully, his eyes following the curve of the line, but his mind wasn’t focused on the task at hand. It was divided, split between the drawing he was working on, the assignment he’d just completed, and the man sitting an arm’s length away from him. Mostly on the man, though.
It’d been too long since he’d entertained thoughts of, well, anything beyond his job. Way, way too long, if he was focusing on something like this when he should have been paying attention to anything but. It wasn’t even remotely allowed. Hell, he didn’t even know if Zachariah’s tendencies even tilted that way—
A hand tapped against his forearm, interrupting his thoughts, and his pencil skittered across the page, marring his drawing. He cursed and set to work trying to erase the line that was out of place and repair the damage. He didn’t look at Zachariah as he snarled out, “What?”
“You look tense,” Zachariah said. “Are you okay?”
The man’s hand was still resting on his forearm, the fingers cool against his skin and just as calloused as he’d imagined. He glanced at it, and Zachariah pulled his hand away.
“I’m fine,” Ashton told him. He forced himself to set his pencil down and close his sketchbook. “I’m just tired, that’s all. Haven’t had enough sleep over the past few days.” That part was actually true, though he could have gone a day longer without it; his body was so used to running off of caffeine and adrenaline that it seemed to have adapted to accepting the rarity of his head hitting a pillow.
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