Tempted Into Danger

by Melissa Cutler

  Montgomery shot to his feet alongside Dreyer. “Our plan is to convince Crosby to work as an ICE insider in the bank. Get her to run the algorithm test without her boss’s knowledge and lay out her findings for us. You remember the Chiara brothers crime ring your crew chased in Honduras ten years ago?”

  How could he forget, when Ryan never let him? Leo, Nico and Enzo Chiara were scumbag Italian mercenaries who’d created a hell of a business as pawn brokers for the criminal elite, coordinating million-dollar sales of everything from small arms and tanks to nuclear devices. “Yeah, I remember.”

  “We believe there’s a connection between the bulk cash scam Crosby discovered and intel we received from an informant about a submarine sale the Chiara brothers are brokering next week. ICE has been tracking these bastards for years. This is our best chance at shutting them down. Thanks to Vanessa Crosby.”

  Diego glanced at Ryan, his brows raised in question. If anyone would have a hunch about the Chiaras using RioBank as a bulk cash laundering vehicle, it would be him. He’d been hunting them longer than anyone—for reasons he was irritatingly tight-lipped about—and had made it his number-one goal in life to dig for new intel on them every chance he got between missions.

  Ryan’s jaw grew tight. “It’s a viable lead, for sure. The Chiaras are here in Panama City. I can feel it.”

  Diego squelched an eye roll at his hoodoo logic. The man took the Chiara brothers chase way too personally. Diego was the opposite—he never took a mission to heart. Bring down one criminal and another took his place on the Wanted poster. Each was just another target for the business end of his Sig Sauer.

  “So you want me to convince Vanessa Crosby to work with ICE?” he asked.

  “God, no,” Dreyer said with a derisive chuckle. “You’d have her running in the opposite direction, screaming in terror.”

  The assessment was a stab to the gut. Here he was an elite black ops agent—the best of the best, with a service record that spoke for itself—and yet his bosses didn’t trust him to open his mouth around a potential informant. True, he wasn’t exactly qualified to match wits with a brainiac like Crosby, but it stuck in his craw that the stiffs thought so little of him in the smarts department.

  To hide his frustration, he slipped into easy sarcasm. “Aw, that hurts. And here I thought I had a way with the ladies.” He looked at Alicia to back him up on that. She’d been around him enough to know he could talk a good game when the situation demanded.

  She scrunched her face and gave a little head shake. “Sorry, you’re not exactly a smooth operator around women.”

  “Well, hell.” Life as a nomadic agent didn’t exactly allow him a whole lot of opportunity to hone his seduction skills. Wasn’t like he spent weekends trolling bars between missions—that was prime training time.

  He studied Crosby’s image on the projector screen. The dossier listed her marital status as single, but he didn’t doubt for a second that a pretty, successful woman like her had some rich bigwig banker wrapped around her little finger. “All right, so I keep my trap shut. What do you need me and my crew for?”

  “Your objective is to transport Vanessa Crosby to the ICE safe house without anyone finding out. Montgomery and I will be waiting there to talk to her. After we’ve brought her around to our way of thinking, you’ll return her to her apartment as discreetly.”

  Diego raised his eyebrows in disbelief. They wanted to use him as a taxi driver? “Let me get this straight. You want me and my team of world-class operatives to drive a woman across town. And then take her home again. You don’t want us to talk to her, gather intel off her home computer, rough up her boyfriend or shake down her boss? Just chauffeur her to and from the safe house?”

  “That’s affirmative.”

  Diego scrunched his eyes, wincing as a dozen curse words pinged around in his head. If he wasn’t careful, the feds would have him working as a letter courier before too long. Just fantastic. Seemed like more and more in his line of work, success came down to the little moves: poring over satellite imagery, sifting through secrets heard on the wind, coaxing witnesses. Keeping the terrorists of the world at bay felt less and less like combat and more like building a defensive wall one grain of sand at a time.

  Diego preferred the grand gestures. He wanted to blow something up or kick someone’s ass. His favorite assignments had him sneaking undetected into hostile deserts, or lying in wait for days in snake-infested trees, breaking kids out of human trafficking rings or stopping thousands of pounds of cocaine from crossing the U.S. border.

  He loved what ICE and the Department of Homeland Security stood for, but it was time for him to find a new employer. Maybe the CIA would take mercy on him. “I don’t mean to be a douche-wad, but are you freakin’ kidding me?”

  Montgomery beamed at him like an idiot. “Of course you mean to be a douche-wad, Santero. It’s who you are.”

  Dreyer strolled his way, folding his arms across his chest, drilling him with a look of challenge. “You think you’re too good for this assignment?”

  “Hell, yeah, I’m too good for this assignment.” He gestured to his crew. “We all are. This is insulting.”

  “Get over yourself. This woman’s important to ICE. And there are decent odds she’s already on the Chiaras’ radar. I won’t take a chance of jeopardizing a possible RioBank insider because she’s spotted in a car with known U.S. officials. This might not be running down terrorists in the Afghanistan desert, but the mission is as black ops as it gets.”

  Oh, please.

  Diego marched to the projector screen and poked Crosby’s image in the chin. “What makes you so sure she’ll agree to this? No woman in her right mind would volunteer for such a dangerous job when it means she’ll have to live out the rest of her days in WitSec once ICE is through with her. Not to mention that she’s an expatriate. What does Crosby care about the U.S.? Nothing, or else she’d still be living there.”

  “Leave that part to me,” Montgomery said, grinning smugly.

  According to Alicia, Montgomery was easy on the eyes, so he probably had a better chance than anyone of persuading Vanessa Crosby to work with the feds. But all Diego saw when he looked at the agent’s million-watt smile and perfectly coifed blond hair was a man whose keister Diego had saved in Mexico earlier that year when he and his girlfriend had gotten in a jam against a cartel. Not that he didn’t respect Montgomery, but it was tough to think of him as an equal.

  Whatever. This operation was Dreyer’s baby, so if he trusted Montgomery, then Diego’s opinion meant diddly-squat. And he knew Ryan would be up for the job if it might break the case on the Chiara brothers. One of these days, he’d have to pin Ryan down on the reason the Chiaras dug under his skin so deep. Maybe while they sat around outside the safe house waiting to chauffeur Crosby home.

  “All right. So my crew and I grab the broad, keep our mouths shut and leave the sweet-talkin’ to Pretty Boy Montgomery. That’s all?”

  “Affirmative. Have her to the safe house tonight at dusk.”

  Diego checked his watch. Dusk was nine hours away. Time to get to work.

  With a salute, he clutched Vanessa Crosby’s dossier and stalked from the room. His crew trailed behind on the stairwell, giving him the silence and space he needed to fume properly.

  They gathered in a circle in the first-floor hallway. The expressions on his crew’s faces mirrored Diego’s black mood. Nobody liked to get dumped on by their bosses.

  “All right, so we can start searching the classified ads for black ops job openings when we’re done with this mission,” Diego said. “Until then, let’s suck it up and do it right. Ryan, secure clean cars. Three’ll do it. Alicia, map the area around Crosby’s apartment and get a bug in there. ICE intelligence claims Crosby lives alone, but I find that hard to believe.”

  “She’s a looker,” John said, ad
miring her photographs in his copy of the dossier.

  That was a gross understatement, but Diego was all business now and so ignored the remark. “John and Rory, you’re sniper lookout. Stationary. And Rory, see if there’s anything along the route we can blow up. It’s been too damn long since I’ve gotten to blow anything up.”

  “Whatever you say, boss.”

  Diego tucked his dossier under his arm and cracked his knuckles. “If the feds want to foot the bill for a five-man black ops chauffeur squad, then we’re going to give ’em their money’s worth. This Vanessa Crosby broad ain’t gonna know what hit her.”

  * * *

  Once, when she was six, Vanessa stole a piece of candy from her dad’s private stash, simply for the thrill of trying to put one past him. But the pressure of keeping the secret was too much and within minutes of her dad’s return from work that night, she’d broken down in an unprovoked, sobbing confession.

  What she’d done today was far more significant than stealing candy.

  She navigated the crowds of business people returning home after work, striding toward the bus stop a block south of RioBank. She couldn’t wait to get inside her apartment. And not only because, after a day spent in her pleasantly air-conditioned office, she could barely tolerate the humidity and smog of the business district.

  Out of the corner of her eye, she caught the shadow of a man moving between two towering office buildings. With a gasp, she picked up her pace to the bus stop. Silly, to see danger where none existed. No one was out to get her in broad daylight on a busy street. No one knew the illegal and unethical act she was committing.

  She hitched her purse higher on her shoulder as she walked, the tiny zip drive inside feeling like it weighed ten pounds. That’s the way deceit always felt to her—heavy and unyielding in its pressure on her conscience. The zip drive contained a massive number of customers’ personal account files she wasn’t permitted to copy, much less remove from the bank. In doing so, she’d violated so many rules that if she were discovered, losing her job would be the least of her worries.

  But she had to get the data results from the algorithm straight in her head. Something in the numbers had put her instincts on high alert, and the way her mind worked, she wouldn’t be able to think of anything else until she solved the mystery.

  Mr. Tavares assured her in his most asinine, sexist tone that she wasn’t to worry her pretty little head over it because that wasn’t what he was paying her to do. He’d demanded she hand over the algorithm program so he could look into it, but her gut told her that he wouldn’t. And then she’d never know the answer, and that would eat her up inside. Not to mention that if RioBank was being unwittingly used as a money laundering vehicle, then her bosses deserved to know, too.

  The commuter bus rumbled onto the street, snorting black smoke through its muffler. Vanessa waited her turn to board, her skin pricking as though someone was staring at her. She scanned the street, searching for the man she’d glimpsed in the shadows, but saw no one suspicious.

  It shouldn’t have been a surprise that her imagination was getting the best of her. Horror movies had always been her thing. She loved the heart-pounding thrill of being scared—in the controlled environment of a movie theater or her living room.

  Growing up, she and her friends delighted in freaking themselves out by watching scary movies at night, then imagining that every creak or shadow was actually a ghost or boogeyman. More often than not, they’d keep up the game until, on some level, they believed in the possibility.

  Boarding the bus, she couldn’t shake the feeling that someone was following her, even after the doors closed and the bus continued on its route. Craning her neck, she took stock of the passengers. Only ordinary people. Mothers with cranky kids, businessmen and women in rumpled suits, a group of young teenage boys going who knew where, snickering while they watched something on a cell phone. No one was paying her the least bit of attention, much less following her.

  Nice going, Vanessa. Way to conjure up a healthy serving of paranoia with your guilt.

  Huffing with amusement at her anxiety, she dialed Jordan’s number. Her best friend since seventh-grade math class, Jordan was the reason Vanessa had ended up in Panama. Jordan had followed her college sweetheart here, and Vanessa had followed Jordan. Seven years later, Jordan and Carlos were married with two kids.

  In the years since Vanessa made the choice to leave the U.S., Jordan and Carlos and their kids had become her anchor—closer than her own family had ever been. She still talked to her dad occasionally and would always love him, but they were more like acquaintances.

  “Hey, Jordie. Are we still on for dinner tomorrow night?”

  “You bet. Hope it’s okay that Carlos invited some friends from work to join us.”

  She pictured a room full of cute, successful building engineers. “Single?” She cringed at the note of desperation in her voice, hoping that Jordan hadn’t noticed. Then again, Jordan was well aware that it’d been too long since Vanessa had met a man worth risking her heart on and that desperation was definitely becoming an issue.

  “No, sorry. But I made him swear he’ll keep his eyes open for hot boyfriend material.”

  “I don’t even need a hot boyfriend anymore. I’ve been so long without the company of a man who’s capable of sustaining a conversation, other than Carlos, of course, that I’d settle for someone old and unattractive, or maybe a gay bestie.”

  “Vanessa Marie Crosby, you will not settle for a gay bestie on my watch. You need a man you can talk to and fondle.”

  “You’re right. I do need that.” She groaned. “It’s hopeless anyway, because Panama has a serious lack of potential gay besties.”

  Jordan laughed. “Oh, sweetie, someday you’re going to find a smart, cute guy who’s great at conversations and who’ll love you like you deserve.”

  Vanessa dropped her voice to a whisper. “Okay, since we’re dreaming up a totally implausible fantasy boyfriend, we might as well make him good in bed, too.”

  “That goes without saying. A girl’s got to have standards.”

  The bus reached Vanessa’s stop, three blocks from her apartment building. Though less paranoid now that she’d connected with Jordan, she still took one last look over her shoulder before getting off. “You know how in horror movies, when a woman walks alone, it’s practically a given that something terrible is going to happen to her?”

  “Okay, random.”

  “Humor me,” Vanessa pressed, glancing side to side like she might see that man again. She rolled her eyes. Stupid. “Like in Halloween, every time Laurie walks down the street, there are flashes of Michael Myers looking out of a window and the shadow of someone lurking. And you know at any minute he’s going to jump out and grab her.”

  “Classic movie,” Jordan said. “Definitely one of my top fifty horror flicks of all time.”

  “Mine, too. Remember after we watched it the first time, we went on a walk around your neighborhood to freak ourselves out? We actually convinced ourselves we were being followed.”

  Jordan let loose with a belly laugh. “That was so much fun! We sprinted the whole way home. I didn’t feel safe until we’d snuck back into my room and closed the curtains.”

  Vanessa was smiling now, too. “Then I dared you to open the curtains again to check if anyone was out there watching us, but you wouldn’t take the dare.”

  “What goofballs we were. Why did you bring it up?”

  Vanessa opened her mouth to explain, but words caught in her throat as she thought better about it. There was no use worrying Jordan when the only ghoul haunting her was her guilty conscience. She eyed a white sedan with dark tinted windows cruising past her and the tingle on the back of her neck kicked up again. With a look over her shoulder, she quickened her step. Only two more blocks to her apartment.

 
“Hello, Vanessa? You still there?”

  “I’m here. Just thinking about how easy it is to make myself spooked when I want to.”

  “You like getting spooked.”

  “Normally, yeah.” Just not while she was engaging in illegal behavior at work and feeling pretty conflicted about it.

  The white sedan flipped a U-turn and headed toward her.

  “What’s up, Vee? You want to rent that movie tomorrow night? Might be fun. We could go on a midnight stroll through the neighborhood afterward, get ourselves scared all over again.”

  “Sounds great. Look, I’ve got to go. There’s some creep in a car cruising the street, and I don’t like the look of him. I’m going to hurry home.” With a promise to text Jordan the minute she got to her apartment, she stuffed the phone into her purse and kept her eyes on the car’s approach. She could dart into an alley or store, but then what? Eventually, she’d have to walk back onto the street to get home.

  And she was only one block away. That was two hundred and two meters. With her average stride of 0.67 meters, that only left her with two hundred and ninety-nine steps to the building. Better to stay the course and not give in to irrational fear.

  She felt stronger and calmer now that she had numbers to focus on. That’s what she loved about math. Its constancy soothed her like nothing else could.

  “Two ninety-eight, two ninety-seven,” she said aloud, counting her steps.

  The sedan grew close enough for her to study the driver through the glare of the afternoon sun. He wore dark sunglasses, and maybe it was because she’d seen one too many scary movies, but she would’ve sworn he was staring at her, the hint of an evil smile on his lips.

  Nice, Vanessa. Real special imagination you’ve got there, to turn your mundane life into your own personal slasher movie.

  As soon as she was home with the dead bolt locked on her front door, she’d have a good laugh about getting herself worked up over nothing. She’d traversed the same exact route to and from work for the past seven years without a single bad thing happening to her. Today was no different.