Black Tie: Book One of the Sparrow Archives

by Kieran Strange

  Ronnie quarter-smirked at him slyly. “You find that out last night?”

  “Yep. I was working too, y’know.”

  “If that’s the case then he’s definitely going on the board,” Faraj chimed back in, making a note in a fat, leather-bound book on his knee. “Other than our ten-dollar founding father, I’ve got a short list of names that have been granted access to the thirty-third floor in the past three months including Mr. Wright’s P.A. Ms. Bell, Mr. Dhawan of the security team, the company’s Vice President, a Miss. Knapp, Mr. Bell, Mr. Valentine, Miss. Flynn – who all turned out to be on the WrightTech board of directors – and, heh, you.” Faraj shrugged. “Plus about a dozen more names. That one guy who’s running to take President Dunn’s place as the Democratic candidate for next year’s election was here about a month ago, too.”

  “Espinoza? That doesn’t surprise me.” Cabe slurped his own coffee through the little fold-up tab. “Probably securing support for the primaries.”

  “I wonder if his stance on Anomaly rights was on the agenda,” Ronnie mused aloud.

  “I can tell you now, it would’ve been,” was Cabe’s two cents.

  “So, now we cross-reference our list of mole suspects with the list of guests we already know will be in attendance at the charity gala on Saturday,” Ronnie huffed out with a nod. “I think I’m gonna need some more java.”

  “Hypothetical situation,” said Faraj. “The Democratic opposition – or hell, even the R.N.C. – gets wind of this meeting with Espinoza, maybe they hear that it went really well. We all know Espinoza’s son is an Anomaly, so I can’t see him wanting to disagree with Wright and jeopardize both his kid and the support of WrightTech. So, they hire someone close to the company to infiltrate Mr. Wright’s office, maybe even gain access with permission, to dig up something that will damage his public image enough that his support of Espinoza won’t be as much of a problem come the summer?”

  Cabe’s eyebrow had been slowly working its way north. “Hypothetical situation, or pitch for a Hollywood blockbuster?”

  “Both, maybe. It’s hypothetical, but don’t you sit there in your two-hundred-dollar jeans and tell me it’s more far-fetched than anything else we’ve encountered on the job before.”

  “How do you know these jeans cost two hundred dollars?”

  Faraj half-lidded his eyes at Cabe and frowned. “Those jeans cost two hundred dollars.”

  “Sparrow, I still want you on Mr. Wright at all times,” said Flint, ignoring Faraj’s little snort at the accidental double-entendre they all noticed but only he decided to vocally react to. Though to be honest, the noise Faraj made sounded fairly involuntary. “There’s a chance Agent Dasilva’s tip was a breadcrumb trail and that the gala rendezvous is to distract us all from the real drop during the week.

  “As for the wonder twins, I’m going to have them spend the week running background checks on Agent Faraj’s list. We’ll cross-reference with the confirmed guest list for the gala, the local and state P.D. systems, the W.A.R.D. database, and also all of WrightTech’s stock options.” Flint paused to take a breath, sip his orange juice, and adjust his tie all in that order. “If the company’s on the brink of introducing some groundbreaking new area of biomedical tech, those with money invested have the most to lose or gain from its existence.”

  “Sounds like Agent Sparrow pulled the long end of the straw,” coughed Faraj as he stood up, collecting his coffee from the low table. Ronnie joined him, and the two agent handlers disappeared out into the hall, probably to reclaim their usual thrones of power down in the boardroom. Where the blinking lights and whirring external drives made them strong enough to feed off the weak.

  “Are you even listening to me?” Flint was saying.

  “Uh.” Cabe blinked. “Apparently not. Sorry. I am now.”

  His supervisor exhaled heavily in exasperation. “I was asking if I need to be worried about you, Cabe. About this... situation with Elliot Wright. About you finally flying off the rails like we’ve all been worried you’re going to since...” Flint cleared his throat. “Since everything that happened in Nevada.”

  “If you mean that whole thing where I was very deliberately re-partnered with the most experienced Field Agent in the entire North American Division, and that everybody at the office spends most of their time trying not to further break the egg shells all around me... yeah, I already figured that one out, James.” Cabe settled back further against the couch cushions, letting his tense chest fall a few inches. “I’m not as oblivious as you guys act like I am.”

  “Are you sure?” the S.S.A pressed on, without a single shred of wit or sarcasm anymore. “I most certainly don’t doubt your ability to perform exceptionally under any circumstances, but at the same time... well, you’ve been distracted this year. And if your track record is reliable, a one-night stand means you’re about T-minus one week from doing something unbelievably stupid and self-sabotaging.”

  Cabe winced. Anyone would find it difficult not to feel guilty when James Flint used his no-nonsense, fatherly tone. It was like the parent who told you he wasn’t angry, he was just disappointed, thus crushing your soul and sprinkling the remnants over a fire of your own young, naive, reckless tears. Jesus, his imagination was tripping balls this morning.

  “I’ve never judged you before, Cabe,” continued Flint. “For anything. And I’m not going to start now. So do me a solid, as Faraj would say, and just... make sure your eyes and ears are open. Think with your brain, not your Little Agent or your ego.”

  “Will do, boss.” Cabe nodded with genuine humility and appreciation. “Thanks for trusting my judgment on this one.”

  “Oh, I don’t trust your judgment at all. I trust your tenacity, and your sense of diligence.” Flint closed his laptop with the definite air of ending the conversation and rose to his feet. “Do your job, Agent Sparrow,” he said neutrally. “Don’t give me a reason to have to come down on you for this.”

  And then, with his cell phone affixed in the position it spent so much time in that Cabe sometimes thought he may as well just get it surgically grafted into his face for hands-free efficiency, Flint was gone, leaving him curled up on the couch with a burnt, cooling coffee in his hands and Elliot Wright’s two-hundred dollar jeans obscuring the fresh bruises all over his rear.

  Seventeen

  Black-tie.

  He hated black-tie.

  On any normal occasion, with friends from the office or even the boys back on the farm when he was younger and still visited home, fancy parties were an excuse to dress up like a prat, drink like a prat, and dance like a prat for a whole night while thinking and acting like you were the bomb.

  But just like how his version of business-casual and his client’s version of business-casual were apparently both (as he had feared) two extremely different things, there would be no instances of general prattery or merriment during this evening’s festivities. In the world of Elliot Wright and friends, black-tie was typically code for lavish drinks with funny garnishes and even funnier names, a whole lot of pretending to care about what other people’s dogs did for a living, and watching the women float around like goddesses draped in dresses of every cut, color, and composition under the sun, whilst all of the men in the room looked like grayscale carbon copies of one another. Not exactly Cabe’s idea of a riveting Saturday night in P.D.X.’s downtown core.

  “Honestly, Sparrow, I have never heard anyone gripe so much about attending a charity event.”

  “Really?” His own face not four inches from the porcelain skin of Elliot’s, Cabe quirked just one eyebrow. “Twelve years in the world of business and you can honestly say that?”

  Elliot frowned, mildly incensed. Other than exactly three creases between his eyebrows, his skin was flawless, pore-less, even from so close up. The young executive’s deft hands stilled at the taller man’s collar, leaving the tails of the white silk bowtie draped across the pleated bib of his bodyguard’s dress shirt.

  “Do y
ou believe anyone in big business is capable of good, or are you still staggering through some strange comic book dimension where we’re sucking up and hoarding the planet’s last sources of water while the rest of you fuck kangaroos?”

  “Do you ever worry that one day someone’s not gonna get your reference and you’re just gonna sound like a deranged crazy person?”

  “Don’t answer my question with a question, it’s a peeve of mine. You’ve been grumpy all afternoon.” Elliot slid his fingers through a few loose strands at the front his hair, which he’d told Cabe previously he deliberately left devoid of any product so that he always had a little something to play with, and went back to work. He was clad in almost identical elements to his bodyguard, their black, single-breasted, superfine herringbone dinner jackets hanging in garment bags above two pairs of patent leather Oxfords, one a size and a half larger than the other. Matching silk cummerbunds adorned their waists (“The pleats point up, Peaches,” Elliot had been forced to explain to him more than once), though while Cabe’s was a conservative pitch-black color to avoid drawing too much attention to him, Elliot’s was a stunning lavender shade chosen to do the exact opposite.

  “You see, Sparrow. Even a corn-fed guttersnipe such as yourself can be polished to perfection if you know exactly where you focus your energy.” Elliot’s slender fingers finished with bowtie, and Cabe had to admit, if he hadn’t been present for the process he would never have believed that Elliot had tied it himself. It looked like something from the window of a store he would never, ever have the stones to enter.

  “How can you feel so sour on the inside when you look so damn good on the outside?” the C.E.O. purred in his ear, and Cabe had to admit as he admired how sharp they both looked in the full-length mirror on the second level of Elliot’s penthouse condo, he had a point.

  “I’ll let you know when I figure it out, sir. I haven’t ever really looked this good before.”

  “Oh, my. A ‘sir’.” One of Elliot’s finely-manicured nails scratched at the edge of the other man’s bowtie, and he fussed with the way it sat a little. “I haven’t had one of those outta you in about a week.”

  Cabe scoffed, tilting his sharp, bristled jawline up to give Elliot more room. “Well, it’s been a long week. You’ve been busy.”

  “So... you’re punishing me?” It was so easy to be imbibed in the smaller man’s soft, slow, deliberately delicate tone, his low tenor barely above a whisper as he concentrated more on what he was doing than what he was saying. Cabe couldn’t count the varying shades of blue and gray and even perhaps a little green in C.E.O.’s eyes as they slit in focus, hovering intently about his collar. “Jesus, Cooper. It’s like having a wife.”

  “Cooper?”

  “Mm?”

  “You called me Cooper.”

  “I did.” Elliot shook his head and sighed, finishing with the other’s knot. “Apologies. I may be suffering from an acute anxiety attack over the fact that yet another person I believed was a close and trusted friend may be about to rob me tonight.”

  “Don’t suppose you’ve been lucky enough to have one of your, y’know...” Cabe scratched at his nape awkwardly, where his stiff collar was poking into the sore, not-fully-recovered-from-the-plane-crash muscles. “Fantastic but kinda freaky clairvoyant visions?”

  Elliot chuckled bitterly. “Regrettably not... but wouldn’t that have been fortuitous?”

  Cabe echoed his short and humorless laugh. “You know, when the team was first going over your case file together, I made a joke about how screwed we’d be if you foresaw why ‘Patriot’ had ‘really’ sent me over,” he said, complete with full finger air-quotes. “I can’t tell if everybody at the table thought I was stupid or brilliant.”

  “That’s the thing about brilliance, it often looks like stupidity to those without the gift,” said Elliot a little too poetically, and he smiled up coyly at the taller man.

  “Albert Einstein? Some time in the forties?”

  “No.” A pair of warm, soft lips barely brushed Cabe’s chin. “Elliot Wright, just now.”

  Like the first man to set foot on the moon, Cabe extended a limb in a massive leap for mankind and let the rough fingers of his dominant hand play at the waistband of Elliot’s flat-fronted trousers. Even with the cummerbund (which was in no way as bulky to wear as one might’ve thought it would be), the other man’s hips felt dangerously naked in the absence of a belt.

  “I reckon you think you’re some kinda genius.”

  “I’m not the one comparing me to Einstein, Agent Sparrow.”

  Cabe’s teeth tugged at his lip a little, wondering whether or not to release the question they had currently detained on its way out on suspicion of being a really fucking dumb idea. “So... out of curiosity... is there any way what might be about to go down tonight’s making you feel something else, too...?” His deep, chestnut eyes earnestly sought out the other man’s brighter ones. “Maybe something other than an anxiety attack...?”

  Elliot grinned and averted his gaze, but only for a second or two. “Peaches, if you’re trying to politely ask if I get off on being in imminent danger... it’s not the first time it’s happened, you’re not the first person to wonder, and it’s not the first time I’ve been asked. Lara used to make comments about making sure we didn’t have another Quinn until we knew the way things were going to roll out.”

  “I feel very privileged to have been a part of this chapter of your life, sir,” said Cabe dryly.

  “Well, thankfully, we don’t have that problem between the two of us, do we?”

  Motion was his enemy and his tongue was around his tonsils as, all of a sudden, his shoulder blades were anchored to the top of the solid dresser unit and his bowtie was a helluva lot tighter than it had been maybe three seconds ago. Breathing, something normally so natural to him, became a chore.

  “That’s nice.” Elliot was leering down at him, with more desire than despotism. His fingers were hooked in the very back of Cabe’s tie beneath his collar to effectively pin him to the chiffonier. “I like this a lot, actually. It’s almost like I have you collared.”

  “Lotta people tried that, sir –” replied Cabe, his voice thin and strained as he maintained his balance with his back deeply arched and his hips jutting out sharply and vulnerably in front of him. His thighs were trembling a little as one of Elliot’s nudged between them without much effort. “Thought you didn’t – do long-term contracts –?”

  “It’s not really in my nature.”

  “Hence the arranged offspring...?”

  Elliot smirked just a fraction of his normal smirk, and all for himself. “My father was forty-four and practically a geriatric by the time he finally thought to have me. I wanted to pass on my genius, but I wanted to do it at an age when I could actually enjoy being a dad.”

  “Didn’t wanna wait – for that contract?”

  The edge of the C.E.O.’s smirk hardened a tad. “I’m not really a contract sort of guy, Peaches,” he murmured, voice thick and sweet like honey as it drizzled down over where Cabe was bent backwards. “Not in my personal life, anyway. I’m not entirely sure my brain has the... emotional capacities necessary for that sort of an arrangement.”

  “Can – can we discuss this with me in a more upright position...?”

  “Why?” Elliot was ogling him again with that not-quite-sneer twisting his pretty, almost feminine features. “Is it in some way bothersome to be held down by your neckwear when you’re trying to breathe?” He gave the band of the tie a little sadistic tug with his fingers. “You should be grateful your pants aren’t also currently filling with wet snow.”

  “Are you really gonna hold that against me?” Cabe groaned, incredulous. It was hard not to be aroused in this position, with Elliot’s icy gaze spilling down over him. Regardless of whether or not his training gave him the skill and knowledge to get himself out of his position, there was something thrilling about how real the glint in those crystal-blue eyes made it all.
<
br />   “Do you have a compelling argument?”

  “Uh –” Cabe just to readjust his position so that the edge of the chiffonier wasn’t jabbing him quite so hard in the back of the ribs, but as he tried to shift Elliot tugged on the bowtie again, urging him still. “I took a bullet for you?”

  “You’ve used that already this week. Think of something better.”

  “Goddammit.” The lack of the sturdy, leather belt around his waist left him feeling so exposed with his body arched like this. “All right, fine – I wasn’t pissed that you asked the mother of your kid to pretend to be a bitchy, air-headed fangirl you’d just plowed in your condo – in order to vet me about my political views –”

  Elliot smirked, and then mercifully let him go. A flurry of oxygen rushed into his lungs as the C.E.O. retreated from the dresser. “Okay. That’s fair. Besides, I allow this to go any further and we’ll be late for my keynote. Which normally wouldn’t concern me, but this is for kids, so... I should probably be more responsible. Some of them have bedtimes.”

  Heaving his body up off the offending top of the unit, Cabe rubbed tenderly at his sore throat. “That’s not the only time you’ve tried to test or manipulate me, either. Considering last Friday’s protest was being advertised on A.R.M.’s Twitter hours before Patriot Security contacted you to make an appointment for me, I’m going to guess you wanted me to see it. Constantly badgering me with alcohol, whether it’s personally or via a venue’s bartender. All that initial flirting.”

  “And why do you think I was testing you?” asked Elliot, as he returned his attention to his own flawless reflection in the mirror, ensuring that his bowtie was still straight and his hair still impeccable.