by Alison Kent
"A Reuben and chips. That's what you wanted, right?"
"A beer would be good," Christian said, giving himself another ten seconds before sitting up to the sound of a bottle striking his desktop. "You're a good man, K.J. Don't believe anything Tripp says."
"What the hell are you talking about?" Across the room, Tripp Shaughnessey gave a hard shove against the foot of the workstation. His chair rolled to within five feet of where Christian sat. "Piece of shit. I swore oiling the wheels would help."
Leaning his backside against the edge of Christian's desk, Kelly John shook his head. "You need inline wheels if you're ever going to make it this far. Oh, wait. I said that last time. And the time before that."
"Yeah, yeah, shove it. And fork over the food."
Kelly John hefted a second sack to Tripp. "Smoked turkey, avocado, sprouts, and Dijon mustard. A wuss sandwich. Hell," he amended, chucking a bottle of Evian in the same direction. "A wuss lunch."
Tripp cackled. "Embarrassed you to order it, eh? Bet that red hot little Glory of mine teased you while she packed in the turkey."
A wide grin broke across Kelly John's face. "Glory wasn't in much of a teasing mood. And she knew the sandwich was for you. So she packed in a little something special."
Tripp stopped chewing and nearly choked. "Whaddaya mean, something special?"
"Stop talking with your mouth full and maybe I'll tell you."
"Stop acting like your mama and I might."
Christian looked from Kelly John's black Irish blue eyes to Tripp's surfer dude looks and shook his head. Out of the four SG-5 operatives who were also his four best friends, these two were the mouthiest, both as tall as he was, though Tripp was lanky while K.J. was built like a bull. They were also the two with the tightest bond.
He supposed that had a lot to do with the reason they rode each other as hard as they did, picked and bickered like two old women, took crap from one another they'd take from nobody else. Yet any time bad shit went down, times that mattered more than others, each had the other's back. Always.
A small part of him envied that bond. But the other part, the biggest part, the part responsible for his still being alive knew he was a hell of a lot better off on his own. Hank seemed to sense that as well, sending Christian on assignments requiring an operative to fly solo.
Assignments like the one he was fighting to get back under control even now.
Biting off enough sandwich to keep him chewing for awhile, he turned to his keyboard, punched in his security code, and watched his monitors come to life before spinning his chair back to Tripp. "Nothing new between Spectra and Bow?"
Swallowing a mouthful of water, Tripp shook his head. "Not a scratch or a peep. You weren't expecting anything, right?"
Another bite of sandwich before Christian answered. "Bow's contact was Deacon, so no. You shouldn't have picked up anything."
"But for some reason you thought I might have," Tripp stated, tucking into his sandwich again.
Christian thought for a moment, back to last night's drive in the Ferrari and their visit to Overlook Point, and Natasha's persistent questioning as to Deacon's reasons for being there. "Nothing at all from Bow's estate then? Not just from the doctor. From anyone. The staff. The lab."
"Trying to reach Spectra, you mean? Nope. With the real Peter Deacon gone underground"—Tripp chuckled at his own joke, which was pretty funny considering Deacon was being held in the vault beneath MaddyB's barn—"Spectra's channel's been dead as a corpse's dick."
"You're sick, man. You're twisted fucking sick." Kelly John planted a foot on Tripp's chair and with one hard shove sent him flying. Tripp yelped, scrambling to stay upright and salvage his sandwich as K.J. turned his attention to Christian. "What's going on, Bane?"
He glanced up at the big man's question. "Bow's goddaughter."
"She onto you?"
He shook his head. "No. It's not that. I'm beginning to think she's not onto Bow."
"Whoa. You're kidding." Tripp left his chair at his desk and returned, crossing the room under the power of his own two feet. "Intel said she was up to her eyebrows in his dealings."
"His legitimate university dealings, yeah. His consortium lectures and seminars. But not in whatever it is he's doing with data encryption." Christian grabbed his beer from his desk. "She has nothing to do with the lab. She doesn't even go underground unless running an errand for Bow."
"She doesn't have to know any of that encryption shit herself to be in on Jinks's kidnapping," Tripp said.
"I was thinking the same thing." Christian looked from one man to the other, the two standing side by side blocking the view of his monitor bank. "Until Jinks sat down to dinner with us the other night. And until she asked me the next morning why I—why Deacon—wouldn't have investigated Jinks as well as her and Bow before coming in."
Shaking his head as he polished off the rest of his sandwich, Kelly John wadded up the waxed paper wrapping with one fist and brought his knuckles down against the desktop. "That is seriously fucked up, man. Seriously. The dude know you're there to spring him?"
Christian dropped the second half of his sandwich back into the sack half eaten, tossed the sack to his desk. He leaned back in his chair, laced his hands behind his head. "I don't think the dude needs to be sprung."
"Then he's in on Bow's deal." Tripp crossed his arms over his chest, rocked back on his heels. "That's the only thing that makes sense."
"Yeah, but what's he gaining by helping to stage his own kidnapping?" K.J. asked.
Tripp pushed away from the desk, turned back. "The money, man. Those are serious dollars Spectra's handing Bow. Jinks has to be in on the take."
Christian scrubbed his hands down his face. "I want to think so, but I'm not so sure that's all of it. He started to show me something a couple of mornings ago. A transmission he was trying to capture. He lost the feed, never could get it back."
"No idea what it was?" K.J. asked.
Christian shook his head, shrugged. "I couldn't decipher a thing of the code on his screen."
"Well, we've got the tape with the money details, at least, so there's something going down," Tripp reminded him. "You heard Bow verifying the amount with Deacon. We're not talking Cracker Jacks here."
"Yeah, I know. But there's too much that doesn't make sense. This scenario's fucked worse than anything I've seen in a hell of a long time."
A tense moment passed; neither Tripp nor Kelly John said a word. They simply stared at Christian, each man's expression a mirror of the other's. A disbelief that with Christian's history he would be so gullible as to look for zebras instead of horses at the first hard strike of hooves.
He didn't blame them. He was having a hard time with his own rejection of the obvious. Especially when doing so was the first step down a short road to trouble.
Tripp took a deep breath, exhaled. "You're talking about the goddaughter again, aren't you?"
Thankful for the room's low lighting that hid the pulse pounding at his temple, Christian gave one quick nod. "She said I didn't know Bow very well if I thought anything he did was for money."
"And you believed her?" K.J. asked with a snort.
"At the time, no."
"But you do now that you've stuck it to her, right?"
Clenching his hands into fists, Christian said nothing in answer to Tripp's accusation, afraid the other man had hit too close to the truth.
"Christ, Bane. What's it going to take, man?" Tripp asked, his voice cracking with his concern. "Even I can see that it's Malena fucking you up all over again."
And so the story goes.
Christian hated that he'd ever told Tripp about Malena. Hated it because Tripp had told K.J. and neither of them would let it go. Hated it, too, because there had been so much alcohol involved that night, Christian couldn't remember half of what he'd said. Or if he'd really cried like a baby into the bottle of Crown he'd downed.
"Believe me. The comparison has not
slipped my mind." Except during the time Natasha had taken his body apart. Then there had been no doubt who it was sharing his bed. Malena had never loved with him like that. "And as similar as the situation seems, there's too much of Natasha in real time that doesn't jive with the intel."
Kelly John shoved hands to his waistband, hooked his thumbs through the belt loops of his jeans, and stared Christian down. "You're screwed, Bane. You are flat out screwed."
Elbows braced on his knees, Christian dropped his forehead against his stacked fists. His head ached for no reason but that he'd driven too many hours after too little sleep, spent too many hours staring at his computer monitor, and tossed way too few ice cubes in his scotch. Ached, as well, because these two dickheads were hammering him with the truth.
Only his dickhead was the cause of the real trouble here.
"Yeah. I know," he finally said. "And I've got ten hours max before I see her again. Ten hours to listen to hundreds worth of audio and find something to use to trip her. Now, you guys can stand here and keep beating me up, or you can help."
Ten
Natasha climbed from the cab and waved at Susan as the other woman hurried across the sidewalk, giving up her place in the line of mostly women waiting for ID checks at a separate roped-off entrance to the club.
Tonight, access to the Slick Velvet's second floor required a membership to Club Cake, a female-focused entertainment company allowing women to comfort-ably explore their sexual culture.
Natasha had a membership, as did Susan, Yvonne, and Elaine, though none of them seemed to find the time or coordinated nerve to attend the group's events together. Well, except for Elaine. She was all nerve, all of the time.
"God, Nat. I didn't think you were ever going to get here." Susan smoothed her short black skirt down her hips, her shoulder-length white blond hair swinging forward as she bent her head. "And I still can't believe I let you guys talk me into this. I would've been more than happy to go dancing at Show."
Natasha leaned in and paid the driver, straightening to give Susan a distracted smile while glancing around the crowd milling on the sidewalk. A quick scan of the queue for the second floor revealed a few male faces, but no Peter. Neither did she spot him in the even longer line waiting for entrance to the nightclub's main floor.
She'd told him what time to be here, told him that he couldn't get in without her. She wasn't going to deny her disappointment but refused to stand out here and wait when he'd never guaranteed that he'd show. Especially not when this was Susan's night to celebrate, not Natasha's night to get lucky.
"Hey, you. Remember me? The birthday girl?" Susan waved a hand in front of Natasha's preoccupied face.
Clutch in one hand, Natasha draped her free arm over her girlfriend's shoulders, bared in a silver lame bustier, and headed for the end of the rapidly moving line. "Sweetie, you are shaking like a leaf."
Susan gave in to a full-body shiver. "You've known me as long as you have and you expected anything less? I'm the one who thought Elaine's vibrator was a tampon case, remember? I belong here about as much as Elaine belongs in a nunnery."
Natasha adored Susan's dismay at her own innocence. "Well, consider this the first step toward the rest of your sexual life."
"It's kinda hard to think of it like that when I don't have a date," Susan leaned over to whisper.
"No, no, no. That's the entire point of this exercise. You need to relax and release your inner sensualist. No pressure to perform and impress. It's all about being yourself with trusted friends who won't judge you on the length of your legs or the size of your ass."
Susan held up one finger. "Or try to get me drunk."
"Or try to get you naked." Natasha held up another finger as they counted off the ways of men's evil.
"Oh, good grief, yes. None of that groping and grabbing and getting into my pants business."
"Exactly," Natasha said, guiding the other woman toward the doorman working the entrance for the private upstairs party. "So, no men. At least for you."
Susan glanced to the side from under lowered lashes as they left behind the noise of car horns, tires striking manhole covers, and sirens wailing in the distance for hard-driving house music and conversations shouted above the drums and the din.
"What's that supposed to mean, at least for me?"
Side by side, they climbed the carpeted stairs, the spinning disco ball above the downstairs dance floor sending shards of pink and red and orange light bouncing off Susan's bustier and into Natasha's eyes.
Funny, but all of a sudden she couldn't see Peter Deacon fitting in here at all. He was much too urbane, too refined, too . . . cosmopolitan for disco balls.
That didn't mean she wasn't rather depressed that he'd chosen not to come. She took a deep breath. "Obviously, he's not going to show, but I did invite a guy I met Wednesday night."
"Three days? That was fast."
"You have no idea," Natasha muttered under her breath.
"Ooh, details. I want to know everything." Susan fairly tittered.
And Natasha laughed. "See? I knew you had a voyeuristic streak. Now to get you upstairs so you can give it the exercise it deserves."
Susan wiggled both brows over her big baby blues. "Are you sure you don't want to wait for your new boyfriend?"
Boyfriend? Was that what Peter was? After knowing him but seventy-two hours and spending how many of those with her panties down? If she were to judge on appearances, she'd have to say no. He wasn't a boy, and nothing about him brought to mind the idea of holding hands and going steady.
What he brought to mind she wasn't able to articulate. She was only able to feel it, and feeling it here by herself, in a room of lowered inhibitions and scantily clad bodies, of throbbing music and alcohol buzzing through blood, made her itchy and frustrated, and yes, okay, she was edging toward becoming quite horny.
"Forget him," she shouted above the racket, knowing her body never would and her mind wouldn't have it much easier, but thankful that at least she hadn't been stupid enough to involve her emotions. "Let's dance."
"What?" Susan shouted back. "Who are we supposed to dance with?"
"Each other, silly."
"I thought we were going to hook up with Yvonne and Elaine."
Natasha grabbed Susan by the hand and hauled her out into the middle of the crush of hot, sweaty bodies. "That's what we're doing."
"Nat, wait. What!" Susan wobbled on her heels as Natasha swung her around and into Elaine, who had a martini in one hand, her other raised overhead while she ground her pelvis against Yvonne's butt.
Susan gasped, cackled. And then, as the two women caught her between their sexy bump and grind, covered her shock with a hand to her mouth. Her silent surprise only lasted another two seconds, turning into a screech when Elaine leaned forward to run her tongue down Susan's neck.
Laughing, Natasha wrapped the three of them in a huge bear hug, stole away and downed Elaine's martini, and swore not to think about Peter Deacon for the rest of the night.
She had her girlfriends, good booze, and good music; she needed nothing more, though she would hold tight to the memory of her time spent naked with Peter.
She'd hold tight and add it to her mental reminder file that smart women did not involve themselves with men who kept secrets.
Tripp Shaughnessey jerked his headphones from his head, tossed them to clatter across his desktop, stretched out in his chair, and sighed. The sound was loud enough to echo above the constant hum and buzz of computer fans and hard drives in the cavernous room, muffled only by his hands scrubbing over his face.
Christian, listening to his set of recordings with his headset held to one ear, paused the audio playback on his control panel and swiveled his chair to take in the other man's exaggerated exhaustion. The room's high, open ceiling allowed for the rise of heat from the high-tech equipment, yet provided minimal lighting.
Instead, low-hanging lamps suspended on cables spotlighted each
of the six desks in the circular workstation. The lack of viable windows inside the core of the server farm added to the cloistered feeling while providing one more necessary element of security.
The light was still enough to see the exhaustion wasn't exaggerated. Tripp didn't look so good.
They'd been listening now for eight hours to weeks of conversation from Bow's estate and university office—the lines having been tapped after the first contact with Spectra—as well as from Natasha's West Side apartment. None of the audio had been obtained legally and could never be used in court.
Then again, the Smithson Group wasn't about going to court. They were about doing what needed to be done, the good guys versus the bad guys, white hats sticking it to the black hats, the end justifying the means.
And, yeah. Once reaching that end, making sure to leave plenty of hard evidence laying around.
From the look on Tripp's face—or at least judging by his body language since his face was behind his hands—he wasn't having any more luck than Christian was finding evidence damning or even circumstantial enough to put Natasha away. It was a hell of a fucked-up situation, giving him cause to wonder a lot of things.
Such as, did he want to bust Natasha because Malena had so pulled the wool over his eyes. Or if he was looking for a legitimate reason to put a stop to what they'd started. Neither rationale would fly with Hank. Which meant Christian needed to get his act together and now.
"Tell me something, Bane."
"Shoot."
"How many years you been monitoring Spectra's communications?"
Too many. He should've wiped the bastards off the planet by now. "It's been seven years since . . . Thailand. Took a couple to get back up to speed. So"—he shrugged—"five at least."
Actually, it had been four years, eleven months, and seventeen days since Hank had handed him the assignment to dog Spectra's heels when the operative who'd been at the helm went down in the fiery ball of a sea plane in Prudhoe Bay.
