Secret Contract

by Dana Marton

  Chapter Eight

  Nick pushed away his laptop, glancing at the time display in the corner of the screen. Where were they? Carly, Anita and Gina had gone shopping to outfit themselves for their upcoming night mission.

  He half wished he had gone with them, although they had promised to be careful. They were all aware of the danger. They were armed. Gina was as good a bodyguard to Carly as he would have been, and Carly was pretty good herself. They needed times like this, working together, honing their skills, learning to depend on each other. He was their trainer, not their babysitter. He had to get them ready to operate on their own. He had to get them ready to work alone, without backup. They had to get used to him not being there to watch their backs. Once they got close to Tsernyakov they would have to go it alone, without help. Any connection to law enforcement would be detected and would put their lives in jeopardy.

  Sam was on another assignment altogether. She had plenty of black clothes already. In fact, that was pretty much all she had. He was concerned about her as well. A solo mission—the first for them so far.

  Maybe Carly had come home while he’d been in the shower earlier and was working on her laptop at the kitchen table already. He stood and walked into the bedroom, knocked on the “door” between their closets, calling out a loud “Hello.”

  He could hear nothing from the other side. He knocked again. The fact that there was no answer could just mean that Carly was lost to the world, her mind one hundred percent focused on her work. She got like that around computers.

  He opened the makeshift door and pushed aside some hangers, stepped between clothes that smelled like her—warm skin and soap—and out on the other side. Something snagged on his arm. He twisted free and pulled half her clothes off the rack in the process. He turned around to pick them up and hang them back one by one, tank tops for the most part and those little sweaters she wore at the office to counteract the air conditioner.

  A man could live for that moment when she stepped out of the office building and peeled off that sweater—a normal man for whom taking her out on a date would have been an option, who could think about spending some time with her, who could offer the possibility of some kind of future. Since he didn’t fall into that category, there was no point at all in noticing any of the hundred enticing things about her.

  So what if she looked good and smelled good and was frighteningly smart, always on to him? She was a hell of a woman. He wouldn’t have minded being around when her life was more settled and she started looking for a man. Not that she would have to look hard. He’d escorted her home from afar enough times to know how men reacted to her.

  They smiled and said hi, asked her directions he was sure were unnecessary. Thing was, she had no idea what they really wanted. She’d even remarked once how friendly people were on the island. Friendly, his eye. They all hoped she would return the smile with a hint of invitation in it. She never did. It wasn’t hard to understand. Her life didn’t need any complications right now.

  If she hooked up with someone, what could she tell the guy about herself? Not the truth about what she was doing here. She wouldn’t want to start something with a lie. He could relate to that, had spent most of the last six years doing undercover work and there seemed no end in sight.

  But when Carly was finished here and free with her life—The thought that he wouldn’t be around her by then dug sharper under his skin than he thought reasonable.

  He hung up the last hanger with enough noise to make sure he didn’t scare her when he popped out of the room.

  “I’m coming over,” he warned again then stopped walking when he suddenly realized he couldn’t hear the rapid clickety-click of the keyboard.

  He stepped out into the living room and looked around in the empty apartment. What on earth could take this long? He pulled his cell from his pocket and dialed hers. The tension in his chest eased a fraction when she picked up. “Where are you?

  “On the way home.”

  “Anyone heard from Sam?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Okay.” He would go down to the street, make sure nobody was hiding in some doorway waiting for her to get home and get out of the car. A headache scratched at the edges of his awareness. Caffeine would be good. He had no compunction about raiding her fridge.

  Since he’d moved in next door, her apartment was the logical spot for the team’s gatherings. In consideration, she always stocked up on soda and junk food. He glanced at his watch. Sam was due to report in. If all went well, she’d be bringing a contractor badge for Carly to replicate on the computer—with the women’s photos and his.

  Tomorrow they were going to repeat last night’s exercise of getting up on the roof of a building in the dark and entering the ventilation system, crawling to a predetermined point then back without being detected. They’d done this building the night before. For tomorrow, he was aiming for something more difficult, the youth hostel across the street where young people seemed to stay up until the wee hours of the morning. Carly, Anita, Gina and Sam were going to get the best damn training he was capable of giving.

  He grabbed a soda can and popped the tab, spotted something on the top of the fridge as he tilted his head to drink. He reached for it as he swallowed.

  A tattered notebook. He hesitated for a moment before opening it. A jumble of annotations covered the first page, complimenting a few lines of computer code. He paged through, finding more of the same, then other things as well. Names, dates, reminders.

  Carly’s diary?

  It sure looked like that. Not in the sense of “this is what I did today,” but things she’d been trying to figure out, notes she’d made in prison.

  Does she still write in it?

  He hadn’t seen the notebook there before. Part of his job was to make sure none of the women took off. If she was planning to give them the slip, would she put those plans in writing?

  Anita had nothing to gain by breaking their agreement. Gina, despite her tough and sometimes even antagonistic attitude, seemed one hundred percent on board. His instincts said Sam and Carly were the wild cards, although he could have sworn Carly had committed herself to their cause at one point. But since he hadn’t yet figured out the why of it, he didn’t necessarily trust that assessment.

  He turned the pages from the back this time, looking for the last entry. It was a list. The first dozen or so items were all computer related like getting a high-tech system and catching up on software. The last one, scribbled there as if an afterthought, said,

  —be passionately kissed.

  He snapped the notebook closed and slammed it back on top of the fridge. Carly’s list of what she wanted to do when she got out of prison. She wanted to be passionately kissed. Man, he did not need to know that.

  He walked out, used his copy of her key to lock the apartment behind him, took the stairs instead of the elevator. He needed to be moving to get the sudden, clear picture of Carly being passionately kissed out of his mind.

  The street was quiet when he stepped through the front door, hardly any cars, a few couples meandering through the night farther up by the intersection. Then Gina’s SUV.

  He walked up to meet it as the car stopped by the curb, and opened Carly’s door for her.

  “Everything went okay?”

  Carly nodded.

  His gaze strayed to her lips. He blinked and switched his attention to Gina. “All clear?”

  “Didn’t pick up on anything. If we were followed, he’s good,” she said.

  “Have you heard from Sam?” Anita was leaning forward in the passenger seat.

  “Not yet,” he told her.

  A throng of college kids poured out from the youth hostel across the road and headed toward the center of town as Gina drove off.

  He followed Carly inside and they took the elevator up. She let them in the apartment he’d locked behind him and tossed her bag on the couch on her way to the kitchen. He grabbed it then shook out the black slacks and
long-sleeved T-shirt inside. He’d done so without thinking, wanting to see if what she’d gotten was suitable. But once the pants were in his hands and Carly’s questioning gaze on him, it all felt weirdly strange and he dropped the clothes on the back of the couch. “It’s fine.”

  “Glad you approve.” Her tone carried a hint of sarcasm.

  He didn’t approve. He didn’t approve of the pants that were several notches sexier than the special-ops stuff he’d wanted to have Law send in before the women had talked him out of it. He didn’t approve of the way her lips closed over the metal edge of the can of soda she’d gotten out of the fridge. And he definitely didn’t approve his own train of thought.

  She wants to be passionately kissed.

  What if some jerk took advantage of her? She might be twenty-nine, but she’d spent most of her twenties in a restricted environment, away from the world. In terms of experience…

  He wasn’t going to go there.

  He glanced at his watch. “Sam should be here soon.”

  “What if we run into him? What if he’s working today?” she asked.

  She was talking about the guy who was after her.

  “I’ll take care of him. With no interference from anyone this time. Right?”

  “Fine with me.” She flashed an embarrassed smile. “So, how about tomorrow’s practice run? Same deal as yesterday?”

  “Try to go quieter.”

  They’d had a couple of hairy moments. At one point, the women had made enough noise to wake up an elderly couple. The wife had been screaming, “There are rats in the vents, Joe! Get them!”

  “How am I supposed to do that?”

  “Spray something in there. Not that!”

  Nick shook his head at the memory. He’d caught that perfume straight in the face, being last, bringing up the rear. He wondered how many showers it would take before he stopped smelling like patchouli.

  If they’d been at the bank, with professional security all around, they would have been caught. All in all, though, it wasn’t bad for a first attempt.

  “Anything on Alexeev?” she asked.

  He’d been working on that, again, after the women had left. And he was fast exhausting his resources.

  “No luck so far,” he said. “He seems to have disappeared along with his wife and daughter. Left his money in the bank. Didn’t buy any plane tickets anywhere as far as I can tell, unless it was under an assumed name.” Which was possible. And it was also possible that he had more money in other banks that they knew nothing about. But Nick’s instincts were decidedly prickling.

  “His businesses?”

  “Everything is still going, but nobody on his staff had heard from him in a while. I called as a business contact who needed to get in touch with him immediately. I got the same runaround everywhere.”

  “You think he knew he was being investigated and ran or something?”

  “Or something.” He had a bad feeling about Peter Alexeev.

  Somebody was knocking on the door. He went to get it. “Who is it?”

  “Sam.” He let her in.

  She was grinning as she handed over a Banca Internationale contractor badge.

  “Everything went okay?” Carly took the badge to her laptop and got to work on replicating it.

  “Piece of cake.” Sam meandered into the kitchen. “Got anything to eat? I’m starving.”

  “Chinese in the fridge,” Carly said without taking her eyes off what she was doing.

  “Nick?” Sam offered the paper box she’d pulled from the back.

  “No thanks. How long do we have?”

  “The guy is already in bed. He won’t be looking for this until morning.”

  He felt a stab of unease. Just how far had Sam gone to get the thing?

  He watched her, young and prickly and tough, so much tougher than she should have to be. She’d lived on the streets before she’d been picked up for grand theft auto that last time. The thought of what else she’d probably had to do to stay alive sat like a rock in the pit of his stomach.

  “You okay?” he asked.

  “I thought I’d be rusty, but it all came right back to me.” She was allowing a hint of a smile, something she rarely did. “I followed the guy around. He picked up some chick in a bar, took her home. Didn’t even lock the door behind him. I gave them a little time then peeked in to take a look. They’d gotten out of their clothes in the foyer. Like I said, it was a piece of cake.”

  The tightness in his chest relaxed. Sam was no longer just a convict they’d recruited for a dangerous mission. Sometimes he worried about her. Like he worried about the other women. He was supposed to make them into a team, work with them. He hadn’t expected to come to care for them on a deeper, more personal level.

  He’d trained hundreds of people when he’d been in the navy, then more in the SDDU. He remembered every one of them, kept track of them to this day as best he could, felt responsible.

  And Carly…He glanced at her. There was more there.

  He was prepared to ignore that.

  “Here.” She was returning the badge to Sam.

  “That’s it?”

  “I have it scanned. I don’t need it for the rest. Thanks.”

  “Okay. I’ll take it back then.”

  “Be careful.”

  “After what those two drank and the hour of high-impact shagging, I don’t think I need to worry. They give new meaning to dead to the world.”

  “Take care.” Nick opened the door for her. “Report in when you get home.”

  He turned the locks after she had left then he went back to Carly to watch her work. There was a certain beauty in competence, no matter what somebody was doing. He liked watching her slim fingers dance across the keyboard, the focused expression on her face.

  She wanted to be kissed. There was something heartbreakingly innocent in that, making him uncomfortably aware that his job was to get the women ready for a series of increasingly difficult missions. He and Law and the few others who were aware of the operation were gambling with these women’s lives. At odds that were incredibly long.

  PRACTICING BREAKING INTO a bank was not the same as breaking into a bank. Don’t look down. Carly pulled herself forward on the wire, halfway between the hotel and the roof of Banca Internationale, a three-hundred-foot drop below her—nothing but blacktop, the street deserted at three in the morning.

  Almost deserted. She froze as a car came around the corner. “Don’t look up. Don’t look up,” she was whispering and holding her breath alternately. The vehicle kept going without slowing down. Thank God.

  She reached out and pulled. Being last sucked. It had given her way too much time to anticipate. You’d think watching the others crossing the line without trouble would have reassured her. Not really, no. She slid forward. Almost there. She could see the rest of the team waiting.

  With parachuting, once you jumped, the die was cast; you were going to land one way or the other, no possibility of going back. Here she had plenty of time to freeze up.

  There were cameras around the perimeter of the bank’s roof, but they pointed down the sides of the building. When she got close enough, she pulled her legs up so they wouldn’t dangle in the camera’s view. Then she finally neared the ledge, and Nick reached for her and pulled her in.

  She stood there, relieved to be standing on solid ground, breathing hard, letting him unhook her, waiting for her knees to stop trembling.

  “That was good,” he said.

  Anita was next to her and put a hand on her arm. “Are you okay? You came through pretty fast.”

  Did she? To her it had seemed like a crawl. “I’m fine.” Better now that the fear part was gone but the adrenaline still going.

  Gina and Sam were at the vent that Sam had apparently opened already, according to plan. That one could pry the lid off anything.

  They slipped out of their shoes and Nick put them in his backpack, took out a small jammer and pushed the red button on top. It wo
uld disable any motion detectors that might be in the vents. He’d shown it to them the day before. He waited a few seconds then went in first, followed by Anita, Sam, then Carly, Gina bringing up the rear. They’d learned how to crawl without making noise, took their time. There was no sense in rushing.

  Carly put one hand in front of the other, her forehead beading with sweat as she inched forward in the vent. They’d done this before. It’d all been practiced. She tried not to think that this time there was security ahead—both electronic and human, the latter armed with real weapons and live ammo.

  She wasn’t particularly claustrophobic, but the small space had her breathing hard and feeling on the panicky side. She tried to focus on the one positive thing so far—they hadn’t been discovered yet.

  Sam turned to the left in front of her. They’d come to a four-way joint. Carly followed her. Sam slowed. As they progressed, Carly could hear voices ahead, coming from a vent.

  “…hates it when I’m here at night,” a man said. “She hates being home alone. You wouldn’t believe the grief I catch. Like I want to be here.”

  Carly inched forward, holding her breath.

  “Wouldn’t be so bad if at least we got paid for the extra hours,” another guy responded.

  “The contractors take home an extra grand, we put in the overtime for free. Messed-up system.”

  She passed far enough where she couldn’t hear the rest.

  Another nerve-racking five minutes later, Sam stopped in front of her. Carly heard the faint scraping of metal ahead. Then Sam moved again, lowered through a hole in the vent pipe. Carly could see Nick below as he reached up to help Sam down. She was next. She stuck her legs through, held her weight with her arms until she felt Nick’s hands on her legs, guiding her down. He supported her weight when she let go and slid her to the ground quietly, her body coming into full contact with the hard expanse of his chest. Think of the mission. Think of the mission. Think of the mission.

  She stepped away. Gina was next.

  They were in the office of the associate director of public relations. About half of the front wall was glass. They could see people farther down the hall where the lights were all on, and counted on blending into the shadows of the unlit office. The location was perfect, less than a hundred yards from the IT department.