“Nice to meet you, Suzanne. But I didn’t really do all that much for Lauren—”
Lauren shrugged. “Just saved my life. No big deal.” She reached out for a hug too. Felicity hugged her back. She’d hugged more people in the past three days than she’d done in the past three years. Not to mention, um, hugging Metal.
She turned bright red at the thought of how much she’d hugged Metal and he’d, um, hugged her. Thank God no one noticed.
“I understand you’re in some kind of trouble.” Suzanne shot her husband a hard look. “We’re going to help you. John and his company are going to help you, aren’t you, John?”
“Already there, darling,” he said, smiling.
“So, Felicity.” Suzanne turned to her with a soft smile. “As the guys would say, we have your back. You’ve got quite a team here on your side.”
“And me.” Metal put a heavy arm around her shoulder and squeezed so hard she was nearly pulled off her feet. “She’s got me.”
Suzanne’s eyes widened as she took in what Metal was saying. Lauren was beaming. Felicity was as red as Hellboy. Argh.
Just so no one was in doubt, Metal pulled her even closer and kissed her forehead.
And then, something weird happened. Something that was completely new to her. Instead of feeling awkward and embarrassed and the perpetual outsider, some kind of switch was thrown and she suddenly felt like an insider. Which was nuts because she’d only been in Portland for a few days and most of that time she’d been asleep. She and Metal had had sex or...whatever they’d had, once. But somehow that didn’t make any difference. She felt a part of something bigger than her for the first time in her life, and she liked it. It was an odd feeling, but not. Actually, it felt natural, as if she’d stepped into the natural world from her virtual world and things were slotting into place.
There was Lauren, definitely a friend. Their friendship had been forged in trouble and danger and it was real. Suzanne—her friendliness was genuine, the warmth in her eyes was real too. The guys—John and Douglas and Jacko—they were on her side and John had offered her a job and it hadn’t sounded like a fake offer at all.
And Metal. Wow. Metal. Metal was giving off definite vibes that they were together. Most of her fleeting sexual encounters had ended with both of them backing away as fast as possible. Metal wasn’t backing away. He had his arm around her in front of his friends, his teammates, and he wasn’t backward about it either.
She leaned against him, just a little. He was a man made to lean against. Even knowing nothing about her, he’d leaped to her aid immediately. She didn’t remember too much about when she’d landed on Lauren’s doorstep but she remembered that. Remembered this big, rough man rushing to her, catching her, easing her gently down. Remembered the incredible care, the instant acceptance of the fact that she couldn’t go to the hospital.
He was attracted to her but beyond that he was a genuinely kind man. Sort of like Al Goodkind. A good heart in a tough man.
And he was hers. For the moment, yeah. It could end tomorrow. But that was true for everything. Right now, this guy was hers and she was very lucky.
“Thanks, guys,” she said and to her horror her voice broke. Something happened to her chest and she couldn’t get words out. Something heavy and waterlogged was lodged in her throat.
Metal pulled her into a full frontal embrace and she found herself with her face against a thick warm neck and a big hand cupping the back of her head. She drew in a deep breath and smelled him, smelled Metal. That scent was now buried permanently in some deep part of her brain that was an unknown pleasure center that pinged to life when Metal was near, like a Pavlovian response. Sex and security, what a potent combination.
Being held by him steadied her. She’d had a weepy moment born of stress and maybe physical weakness, but it didn’t matter that she was still physically weak. She had Metal.
And the rest of the team.
And she felt much better.
“Okay?” Metal whispered in her ear. She nodded.
“Sorry.” She lifted her head from his shoulder. “Had a little moment there.”
“Had a few myself,” Suzanne said and put a steaming cup of tea beside her on the desktop. She touched Felicity’s shoulder gently. “Hot tea definitely helps.”
Suzanne seemed so magical that for a second Felicity thought she’d simply conjured a cup of tea out of thin air like a magic fairy, but no. There was a Thermos sitting on another desk.
But if there was anyone in the world who looked as if she could make a cup of hot tea instantly appear, it was Suzanne.
Felicity jumped at the sound of a soft beep and turned to the main monitor. They all stared at it, frowning.
NO MATCH FOUND.
“That’s not right,” she said.
“How big is the FBI’s database?” Metal asked.
“About seventy-two million faces. Maybe more.” Felicity couldn’t figure this out.
Four male frowns. “What? There are seventy-two million criminal suspects in the US?” John asked, looking appalled.
She shook her head. “No, it’s not like that. They start with mug shots, of course. From every level of law enforcement. But most of the faces in the database are noncriminals. A law was recently passed whereby anyone anywhere who applies for a job that requires a photo, that photo goes into the NGI database, together with your biographic data. When the database was set up, it included shots from what they called ‘civil images’ but those were never defined. There are other categories too that aren’t defined. There’s a ‘Special Population Cognizant’ category and a ‘New Repository’ category. Personally, I suspect they dip into Facebook too. Exclude kids under the age of fifteen and maybe seniors over the age of sixty and housewives and homeless people and illegals, and I suspect this database more or less covers everyone in the US.”
There was a stunned silence.
“Son of a bitch,” Jacko said. He turned to Lauren. “You’re wearing your special hat when you go outside. I don’t want you ending up in anyone’s database. I’ve been in the military so I’m there, but you...”
“Absolutely.” Lauren was looking shaken too. “Wow.” Suzanne was frowning and looking at her husband.
Metal rapped his knuckles on the desktop. “Whatever. This guy isn’t in the largest database of faceprints in the world, so we’re fucking nowhere.”
Felicity hesitated for a second. Because they could get somewhere, but it would be, um, illegal. Really illegal.
“Well, that’s not quite true.” She cleared her throat delicately. “There was this guy who gave a paper at the last Black Hat conference. It was a highly technical paper on collation of faceprint datapoints but if you knew how to understand the subtext you could tell that he’s hacked into every single facial recognition database in the world. Including North Korea. Of course that would be, um, technically illegal. But still, doable. But before I ask him to do that, and I’d have to promise him something in return like my cyber security system or my firstborn, let me try something else.”
In a few seconds she had a screen up.
Metal peered at the Cyrillic letters up top. “Is that Russian or Bulgarian?”
“Russian.” She was digging, digging. “The guy who attacked me spoke with what sounded like a slight Russian accent. I grew up with my mother who had that accent, only stronger. So he might be Russian or Ukrainian. But this database will pick up both.”
She pasted in the faceprint and started the system. “This might take a while and of course it’s probably a wild-goose chase, but—”
The computer beeped. They had a match!
Everyone leaned forward, including Suzanne who kept a hand on her shoulder. Without thinking about it, Felicity reached up and squeezed her hand. Suzanne squeezed back.
Up on the screen w
as the faceprint of her attacker and a couple of photos underneath.
“Gotcha,” Felicity whispered.
The first one was a shot of the guy in some kind of graduation ceremony. She peered more closely. There were four men in the shot, arms over each other’s shoulders. They looked happy. And drunk.
“INSEAD,” Metal read. “What’s INSEAD?’”
“An international business management school outside Paris. Our guy got himself an MBA in 2010. And his name is...” Felicity pulled up some more data. “Anatoli Lagoshin. Anatoli, what were you doing at the Portland Airport trying to kidnap me?”
“This other shot,” John said, pointing at the monitor. “Formal thumbnail portrait. I can’t read the writing but it looks like a business brochure to me. And the guy’s on the organization chart.”
“It is. A prospectus.” There was a tiny British flag on the upper right-hand side. She clicked on it and the entire prospectus switched to English. She scrolled to the top. “Oh my gosh! It’s Intergaz! One of the largest corporations in the world! It’s a Russian natural gas company and half of Europe gets its gas from it. It’s immensely powerful and rich. What on earth would one of its officers want with me?”
Metal’s finger hovered over the image of Lagoshin. “First thing we do is canvas all the hotels and motels in the area with a photograph of the prick.”
“I’ll get two of our men on that.” Midnight spoke quietly into the interoffice intercom.
“Now, let’s find out who runs it,” Metal said grimly. He used the wireless mouse and came to a stop at a single photograph, at the top of a series of photographs. Even without reading the text, from the look of the face this was the top dog. “Vladimir Borodin,” he read. He turned to her. “Name mean anything to you?”
“Vaguely, I guess. I mean I’ve heard it before. I read Russian but I don’t keep up with the news there or anything. Let’s see what his background is.” She read, clicking through, then froze. Metal had placed his hand on her other shoulder and he must have felt her tension.
“What, honey?” he said, his voice low.
A chill had invaded her, penetrated her very core. She was freezing. Her parents had warned her thousands of times about them.
“His name is Vladimir Borodin.” Her voice shook. “Former Colonel Vladimir Borodin of the Komitét Gosudàrstvennoj Bezopàsnosti. Under the Soviet Union.”
“The KGB,” Metal breathed.
She nodded miserably, looking up at him. “My father and mother risked their lives to escape from the KGB and now someone from the KGB is after me.”
Chapter Ten
In the SUV going back home, Metal went into warrior mode again. The smiling guy at ASI disappeared and super spy took his place. He was quiet as he drove quickly back to his house in the worsening weather. The snow had never really stopped all day but now there were flurries. He was a superb driver, though fast. With anyone else she’d be a little scared of this speed in icy conditions but the vehicle felt solid and safe under her at all times.
He only spoke when they were close to his house. Ordinarily she didn’t pay much attention to geography when someone else was driving but they passed that pretty park with the fountain and the statue—the fountain was frozen and the statue dusted with snow—and she knew they were near.
The trip was hazy, since she had so much to think about. It still seemed absurd, that a former colonel in the KGB could be after her, but for her parents it wouldn’t have been absurd. They’d been terrified all their lives, even after the KGB was disbanded. The KGB had been a historical artifact for her, dead before she was a year old. Given her parent’s penchant for talking around things elliptically instead of imparting information, she’d simply taken the letters as a stand-in for some mythical monster like the boogeyman.
She remembered Googling the initials when she was twelve and being surprised that the KGB had been an actual thing.
It had scared her that, though tossed on the dustheap of history, part of a country that didn’t exist anymore and was, in any event, on the other side of the world, the initials could still make her mother pale.
She didn’t have enough data to make any meaningful assessment of this and she wanted to avoid the fog of panic that had surrounded her parents. She was not her parents. She had spent her entire life not being her parents. Sometimes she thought she had immersed herself in the tech world, with its young geeks who thought the world began the year they were born and knew no history at all, so that she could escape her parent’s nebulous world of unspoken and unseen terrors, all from the past. Since she discovered computers at age seven she’d simply dived right in and disassociated herself from their world as much as possible.
They had anxieties she couldn’t understand and that had clearly wrecked their lives. She hadn’t wanted that for herself. Still didn’t want that for herself.
And anyway her attacker wasn’t KGB. He couldn’t have been much over thirty. He, too, had been a kid when the KGB had disbanded. He was an executive at Intergaz. Which could mean anything but didn’t necessarily entail the CEO knew anything about his extracurricular activities. Borodin hadn’t been an active member of any secret service for nearly a generation. That atavistic stab of terror had been a reflex, more her parents’ fear from beyond the grave than her own.
Anatoli Lagoshin was the man to be worried about, and he was an MBA, not a former member of Spetsnaz.
The farther away she got from the situation the crazier it was. Nothing made any sense at all.
It was easier to focus on a problem that she could meaningfully assess. John’s job offer. She could assess it, but she didn’t know how to think about it. As a principle, Felicity was really happy freelancing and being her own boss. She’d had a brief unhappy stint in a corporate job and had realized within the first month, when she’d been gently chided for not following the dress code, that it wasn’t for her.
She liked making her own hours and rising or falling on her own work ethic.
But...there’d been something really nice in the air at ASI. A sense of comradeship. Of close team work. They also had a really cool sort of no bullshit thing going on. Certainly there wasn’t a dress code. Coming out, Metal had greeted two guys who looked like they’d just been sprung from jail. He’d introduced them to her and the two guys had been super polite and so friendly she forgot immediately that they looked like they could slit her throat with no trouble. They listened to the same music she did, she discovered as they chatted.
Having John and Douglas as bosses didn’t seem like such a bad thing. Working in that office...well it beat working in her dusty little house. They did exciting stuff. And presumably they’d take care of billing and filling out the endless paperwork for taxes and business compliance she found so tedious and baffling, so she could concentrate on her work.
And living in Portland... It was cold here, so that was good. She didn’t think she could do Miami. She had Lauren here, who’d showed over and over that she was a true friend. And Suzanne very definitely could become a friend. Lauren talked often with warmth of Claire and Allegra. Two potential friends right there and she wouldn’t have to do anything but sit back and be liked.
Jacko...Jacko tolerated her, for Lauren’s sake. Though at times she thought she saw a smile lurking in his dark eyes when he talked to her.
And there was Metal. Yeah...
As if thoughts were tangible, he turned to her.
“So,” he said, his voice expressionless. “MIT, huh?” It was the first thing he’d said to her in the SUV.
He gave her nothing by which she could read his mood. Not his face, not his voice.
Only one answer.
“Yes.” Was this going to be a problem?
“Goddamn.” He shook his head. He was smiling now. “A brainiac. Do you know I never went to college? Enrolled in the navy
right out of high school.”
“In September, 2001,” Felicity said softly. “After your entire family died. Lauren told me. And I know you became a medic. She said Jacko said you know as much as any trauma surgeon.”
“Lauren talks too much. What was it like graduating from a place like MIT?” His voice was cautious.
“Okay,” she said. “It was okay.” Though to tell the truth, she’d barely noticed the campus and spent the entire time at MIT in the underground computer lab.
“So...I guess you’re smarter than me.”
“Probably.” She kept a poker face. “But you can shoot better than I can.”
“Damn straight.” A corner of his mouth turned up. “Cook better too. So I guess we’re even.”
She was smiling too. “Not quite. I’m still prettier than you are.”
“No contest. We’re home.” Metal turned and drove up the driveway. The garage door rolled up and rolled back down when they entered the garage. She barely had time to unbuckle herself before he was at her door, helping her down. She needed the help. Her side was sore but more than that, she was tired.
She had a sedentary job and didn’t go out much. Her only exercise was halfheartedly following yoga tutorials on YouTube and she wasn’t assiduous about it. At the end of the day she could be mentally tired but rarely physically tired.
Now she felt physically tired for the first time in years. Exhausted, actually.
Metal put an arm around her waist and as they walked into his house from the garage she was grateful for the support.
The house was warm and welcoming, and she smiled as she crossed the threshold. When she returned home after going out her own house felt stale, as if even the dust motes hadn’t moved in her absence. Metal’s house somehow felt alive, embracing them, saying—welcome back.
Which was insane, of course. She must be really tired if she thought Metal’s house was talking to her.
“How about we mix things up?” Metal asked. “Instead of tea how about I make you some hot milk with honey and then feed you dinner and you make it an early night?”
Midnight Promises (Midnight series) Page 18
