I took the opportunity to practice my subtle limp while we went into his office. There was nothing wrong with either of my legs, but you never knew when you needed to appear weak. It was very satisfying to kick someone in the face when they think you have trouble walking.
Stone’s office was almost as cramped and depressing as my cubicle. No photos of his family on the desk. At least I had my kitten calendar. He had a poster about the Heimlich maneuver on one wall and it looked like it could have been there for at least ten years.
He sat down behind his desk, and as soon as I sat in the visitor’s chair, he stood up again and started to pace.
“The ATF had a break-in,” he said.
Fuck.
“There was a cyber-attack last night. The Tombstone operation files were compromised.”
Awesome.
The chair creaked loudly as I leaned back, waiting for the punchline. If they somehow left my real name in the file, I was going to go nuclear. My name was linked to my family, and that above all else had to be protected.
“Your name wasn’t in them,” Stone said. “Just your handle. The attack was stopped in time.”
“But there are breadcrumbs,” I said. “Other ways of figuring out who I am.”
He nodded.
“They want to set up a trap,” he said.
Charming. I was going to be bait again.
“You need to be somewhere safe,” Stone went on. “I made arrangements for you to go into a safe house.”
I wrinkled my nose in distaste. A safe house was as bad as house arrest. Not to mention, arranging a safe house meant leaving a trace of requests and permissions. If they had access to our systems, they could follow it all the way to my door.
“You have another option,” Stone said.
A second option? They were spoiling me.
“There’s a conference in Langley next week,” he said. “Tom Byers was supposed to go, but you can do the presentation on Russian gangs as well as him.”
“Better,” I said before I could stop myself.
“Modest as ever, Walker,” Stone said. “I take it you want option B?”
“Sure,” I said.
“All right then. I’ll email you the guidelines. Go to your desk and start writing.”
Chapter 4. Nick – Quiet Obsession
Before today, I had always managed to be on my own at the various law enforcement conferences where Skye made appearances. I stayed quietly in the back of the anonymous conference rooms. When she was on stage, I watched her from afar. When the subject matter required for her to keep her anonymity, I listened to her electronically modified voice.
My clearance level allowed me to access her file. I knew every operation she’d been in and I always knew when she was allowed to show up in public, under a veil or without.
Larrabee, my wise supervisor, overlooked these hints of insanity. The Agency had checked me out thoroughly before hiring me. Half a dozen people must have had to sign off on me and they all knew about my relationship with Skye. It irked me that the people who vetted me knew about her. She was my secret.
This time however, Larrabee didn’t let me attend on my own. For the past few months, I got stuck with two permanent apprentices. Shania Clemens and Alan Pearson were two of the brightest and most perceptive among the dozens who took my classes. They worked on active cases, but the rest of the time, they showed up in my office. The kids started working with me on hypothetical models and simulations.
Kids. I called all of them kids although most people who took my classes were older than Skye.
Skye’s secondment to the Agency, thrilled my apprentices. Her work with the NYPD, OCD, FBI and ATF had made her a legend. They didn’t have the clearance level to go into the personal part of her file, but they knew her name and her reputation.
I considered not attending Skye’s presentation this time. I didn’t want them to figure out how much she meant to me. Shania’s gift for observing suppressed romantic or sexual attraction had me on guard. Her curious mind and lack of restraint in probing people’s intimate secrets would take her far. Alan had worked hard to keep his empathy in check. His ability to echo his subject’s emotions made him my best student.
No. I couldn’t miss seeing Skye. Besides, they’d be so excited to see her, they wouldn’t pay much attention to me. I sped up the pace to get to the conference room early. If Alan or Shania got there before me, they’d choose seats at the front.
This was an unusually large-scale conference for us. The hotel was full of agents from all regional divisions. That meant the Agency needed to disseminate certain information quickly. Something bad was probably brewing.
Something bad was always happening in the world. Looking at the small picture, I was relieved that a big conference meant a big room and a chance for me to attend Skye’s presentation without her noticing me.
I chose a seat at the back and to the side. It had to be far from the entry, so she wouldn’t pass by me. It would also be in a part of the room likely to be dark during the presentation. Soon more people filed into the room. Most of them chose the good seats, at the front.
Alan and Shania almost walked past me. They skidded to a halt when they noticed me.
“You’re already here,” Shania said, sounding disappointed.
The look on Alan’s face told me he wasn’t happy with my choice of seats either. The short, heavyset young man rarely displayed deep emotions either on his features or in his body language. He wanted me to know he was disappointed to sit so far back.
“You don’t have to sit with me,” I told them.
Alan raised an eyebrow and Shania pressed her lips flat. They sat down next to me, in the mistaken belief that I had a good reason to stay so far back.
“Will you talk to her?” Shania asked.
They both knew about the time Skye and I had worked together to catch a serial killer.
“Not during the presentation,” I said.
Shania pursed her lips again. The serious young woman didn’t like when I pretended not to understand.
“You can ask her to come to our classes,” Alan said.
“Yes,” Shania agreed immediately. “It was great practice for me with Michael, but imagine having her!”
Everyone in my course had a practice interrogation under my supervision. So far, we worked with our own undercover agents. Some of our subjects were retired or were recuperating from injuries and were not cleared for active duty. Michael Santi had done an excellent job during Shania’s course, but the thought of having Skye in my interrogation room appealed to me. During her mandatory down time, she would love to have crazy characters to play. If she wanted to work with me again, of course.
“I’ll talk to Larrabee,” I said, not fully intending to do it.
“Is she really only twenty-nine?” Alan asked. “Her file reads like she lived a dozen lives.”
“She was twenty-five when she was with Woods,” Shania said.
Twenty-five when she had to pretend to be my daughter. Twenty-six when she moved in with me. Twenty-seven when she left. Had only four years passed from the first time we met? It felt like it was a hundred years ago.
“How was she?” Shania asked.
Smart. Sweet. Stunning. Sexy. Submissive.
“A prodigy,” I said.
“You were the arresting officer when she came out of the Sleeping Beauty operation,” Alan said. “And you knew her before. Did you see any change?”
“We both watched the matches,” Shania added in a whisper.
My fists clenched momentarily at the memory of Skye’s underground MMA matches. No, not matches. Vicious cage fights. The hours I spent waiting for her to get out of the Operation Room after the last fight were the worst of my life. The anguish I felt then was only equaled by the pain of her leaving me.
“She changed,” I said. “But she recovered. They wouldn’t allow her to go back undercover if she wa
sn’t a hundred percent.”
They were too young to know this was a lie. If the mission was important enough, they, whoever they were, would send in someone damaged. Winning the game was more important than the health or the lives of individual pawns.
“She’s not even thirty though,” Alan said, shaking his head. “When I worked in deprogramming, I saw that even mature agents have trouble coming back sometimes after deep cover. The younger they are, the harder it is to clean up their minds.
“They don’t always send her in deep cover,” I said unwillingly, drawn into the conversation.
Her handlers had the sense to alternate deep cover missions with softer jobs. Alan was right to worry. When I went undercover during my stint in Narcotics, we got departmentally mandated therapy and that was about it.
I kept up with the new procedures each agency had for programming and deprogramming an asset to use what I could in my interrogation technique. Deprogramming has come a long way since then.
“Even so,” Alan said. “I’d love to have a chance to talk to her.”
“To assess her you mean,” Shania said.
“Like you wouldn’t like that,” Alan retorted.
“Hell yeah,” Shania agreed.
I was instantly aware when Skye entered the room. My breath caught in my throat, and I had to turn it into a silent cough. Alan and Shania noticed the room grew quiet and turned their heads from me to see why. By sheer force of will I kept my breathing even. She looked so much like the first time I ever saw her, it made my heart bleed. She wore her sandy blond hair in a high ponytail. She had the same tanned skin, lithe body, graceful movements. As if she had magically wiped away the years and she was again an explosion of blond energy and bright smiles.
“Good morning,” Skye said into the microphone.
Her voice slid into my chest. My heart kept bleeding while she caressed it without knowing.
“I am Detective Walker from LAPD Narcotics,” she went on. “For the past year I’ve been working for your illustrious agency. I’m here to share with you hard earned lessons from my undercover activity. Aside from my experience in the LA and NY police department, I was part of joint operations with OCD, FBI and ATF, most of them were one way or the other connected to the Russian mafia.”
She didn’t say anything new to a well-read stalker like me. I knew every available detail of her missions. The version she gave on stage lacked most of them. She delivered information about the structure of Russian gangs on US territory and conjectures about their future plans for spreading their influence. She peppered her talk with examples from her missions.
To my relief, Alan and Shania got caught in the presentation. I didn’t allow my features to soften, but there were probably hundreds of micro gestures which betrayed my emotions.
My chest tightened and I could feel adrenaline flooding my body as if I were in a dangerous situation. Choosing a seat far from the entrance made it impossible for me to leave the room without being noticed. I was forced to sit there, and fall in love all over again.
“What’s wrong?” Shania asked in a whisper.
“What?” I said stupidly.
She arched an eyebrow and looked down to my leg. I stopped bouncing my knee immediately.
“Don’t tell me you’re bored,” she said in a disapproving tone.
Alan looked at me surprised and a little annoyed at the interruption.
“It’s nothing,” I said. “I was thinking of something else.”
I looked back toward Skye, and they followed my example. Watching the beautiful woman on stage was sheer torture. I tried to focus on her words and that made it worse.
With every new story, my concerns about her safety gained new strength. What if her luck ran out? I couldn’t help fearing that one day accessing her file was going to bring me the news of her death.
I shook the thought angrily. Now she was here, in the flesh. She was brimming with life and optimism. Fear was a liar. Skye hadn’t survived this long because she was lucky. She might joke about being lucky, but she made her own luck.
I decided I was better off to ogle her and fantasize about her body. It was safer than going crazy with worry for her. There would be time enough for that when she would be on a mission again.
The rest of her presentation I allowed myself to imagine new games I could play with her. She would love to try them all. I was almost sorry when it ended.
“Come on,” Alan said. “Let’s have a drink.”
Damn the kid! I needed a few minutes of blending into the background until Skye left the room.
“You go ahead,” I said and took out my cell phone. “I have to make a call.”
He quirked his lips in amusement. Damn! The room was shielded, of course.
The moment I stood up, I saw out the corner of my eye that Skye looked my way. I went on talking to the kids to avoid turning my head to her.
“Don’t you have another presentation to go to?” I asked.
“Yes,” Shania answered immediately with a reproachful look to Alan. “We should attend the ICBM presentation in fifteen minutes.”
“Oh, come on,” Alan said. “It’s going to be all about guiding systems and silos. We can get all that from the briefing.”
“So it’s not Nesting Skye, we should still go.”
“Nesting Skye?” I asked.
“It’s our pet name for her,” Shania said.
“Like the doll,” Alan said. “She’s an expert in Russian culture, and she had all these identities.”
“Yeah, I got that,” I said. “Go to your thing. I’ll be at the hotel bar when you come out.”
Once upon a time, I made the same comparison between her many lives and the matryoshka dolls.
They scurried out and left me with no reason to avoid looking at her. When I faced the stage, Skye was still looking at me. My heart shrunk. I’d have to talk to her with all these people around. Before I took the first step toward her, an older man said something that snapped her out of the trance. She nodded to him and dashed out of the room.
Now that she knew I was there, we would run into each other again. Not by chance. I smiled to myself when I left the room. Skye made her own luck.
Chapter 5. New Skye
Nick
I went up to my room to change my clothes for no other reason than to postpone sitting in the bar, waiting for Skye. She would show up long before the ICBM presentation finished. I picked another bland shirt and another pair of dark grey trousers that matched the only jacket I brought with me.
The only people in the hotel bar were the agents skipping the ICBM presentation. I nodded to the ones I had met before, but didn’t join any of them. I picked a corner booth with a good line of sight to the entrance. The comfortable leather couch didn’t have a scratch on it. Neither did the dark wood tabletop. This hotel was owned by the Agency, and they didn’t spare any expenses in maintaining it.
The waiter came to take my order and brought my whiskey without talking unnecessarily. I didn’t stare at the door, but no matter where my thoughts roamed, I was aware of anyone coming in the bar.
Although I expected her to show up, my heart stopped when she did.
She hadn’t changed her clothes since the presentation. Her hair seemed hastily smoothed and her face was slightly flushed, as if she’d run there. She swept her gaze over the room until she found me. Her bright smile was a lie, but a good one.
She strode confidently to my table, holding my gaze. I strained to register the tension that accompanied the pleasure of seeing me again. Behind the smile, I saw the hunger in her eyes.
Probably she’d been better at resisting the need to check up on me. Unlike me, she hadn’t sat in the back rows of the courtrooms when I testified on some case. She didn’t hide in the background at conferences to watch me for half an hour giving a talk about something that had nothing to do with her job.
“Looking good, Woods,” she sa
id instead of hello.
I stood up but since she didn’t offer me her hand to shake, I took the cue that touching was not something we did.
“You, too,” I said.
She plunked on the couch across from me and her bright smile became a little more sincere. She had the gift of making herself at home in any space. I wondered if she was getting in character for a new mission. Curiosity had to take a backseat. When Alan and Shania showed up, they were not going to hold back their questions.
“I can’t believe you left Homicide,” she said. “I thought that was your calling.”
“It was,” I said. “Teaching isn’t bad either.”
She scoffed.
“No offense, but you were not much of a teacher when we were undercover. I expected some pointers to up my game, and I got nothing.”
Interesting that she should mention our mission straight off the bat. She was trying to map the context of our new situation, trying to get things to a time before we became… what we became.
“Maybe I was otherwise distracted,” I said softly.
I had forgotten how exhilarating it could be to do this dance of getting to know someone. Probing carefully to feel the edges, to discover the shape of a relationship. Not that I had ever had anything even close to my relationship with Skye with anyone else.
Her eyes twinkled and she licked her lips.
“Riiiiight,” she drawled. “Is that something you teach now? How to deal with unprofessional behavior while undercover?”
I leaned back in my seat and studied her before answering. Concealing my reactions was a core skill for my interrogation technique. I didn’t have to be undercover to know how to mask the fact that my heart was hammering against my ribcage. Or that I was getting uncomfortably hard at the memory of kissing her for the first time.
“It’s not part of the curriculum,” I said. “Do you think I should include it?”
She bit her lower lip and released it immediately. The little tell of discomfort released another wave of desire in me. My analytical mind tried to discern between genuine reactions and lies. The rest of me didn’t give a damn.
In Chaos (Undercover Book 3) Page 3
