Eraserbyte (byte series Book 7)

by Cat Connor

  I turned around in time to see Mitch walking towards me, hands shoved deep in his jacket pockets. A generous smile plastered his face when he reached me. His arm slipped around my waist. “Your chariot awaits, shall we?”

  “Yes, please,” I leaned close. “We have an audience. White car in the Gray parking area.”

  Mitch peered out the window.

  “Game time. On three, we wave,” he replied. “Smile. One, two, three.”

  We waved. Disappointingly, she didn’t wave back. Chances are she couldn’t see us behind the reflective glass on the fourth floor.

  Feeling a certain amount of relief as I got into the car, a yawn escaped. My head leaned back on the headrest. Wrong thing to do. I sat up straighter.

  “All right?”

  “Yeah, my head doesn’t like being leaned on right now.”

  “Fair enough.”

  I glanced toward the Gray parking area as we left the hospital grounds. Danni was still there.

  “Want me to pull some secret squirrel evasive driving technique?” Mitch asked.

  “Nah, don’t worry about it.”

  The whole thought of that made me feel sick. It did make me smile that he’d suggest it. I knew he’d taken a class in evasion and defensive driving. It was one of the mandatory training exercises for people dealing with big Government defense contracts. The point of it was to help people avoid taking unnecessary risks and to make it harder to abduct them by learning how to avoid being an easy target. In my view, everyone should take such practical classes and make my job easier.

  We had an uneventful drive to the hotel. Six cars back I saw Danni’s tailing us and wondered why but that’s as far as I took the thought. She wasn’t after me. She may well be after the same people I was though. That thought didn’t please me. I did not want someone swooping in at the last second and stealing my arrest from under my nose. American soil. My arrest.

  A gravelly voice in my head said, “Let’s not get too giggly too quick, we don’t know for sure she’s after the same person.” The voice sounded a lot like Sam Elliot. That was new and unexpected. Definitely not unpleasant, just surprising.

  I love my life.

  I lay down for half an hour but rest was elusive so I got up and sat at the small desk in our room. Mitch lay stretched out napping on the sofa. The temptation to crawl up next to him was high. I resisted. Catch the bomber first.

  I started going over the surveillance my phone had captured. The bugs I’d planted on Kennedy and the GPS tracking used on Danni.

  Did they intersect?

  Yes. Yes, they did.

  Where else was Danni? She was at the hospital a lot. She was near the field office when we were. I plotted her movements when surveillance was on her and when she was alone. She didn’t deviate. But the pattern was what interested me.

  She was where I was. I wrote it all down with time stamps. She at the private hospital when I was there. She was outside the field office at approximately the same time I was abducted.

  Danni Lane irked me. She was coming off as a stalker. I was stalking the stalker and it made me smile. What didn’t make me smile was her turning up everywhere I went. I checked the rest of the locations she was in with the times I knew I’d been in certain places. By the time I finished, I wished she’d been bugged a helluva lot sooner, like on entry to the USA. Yep, that soon. Her ability to be everywhere creeped me out. Knowing she was Interpol and that she was everywhere I was? Now that felt hinky. She wasn’t after me. It was starting to look like she knew from the outset what was going on. If so a warning would’ve been the polite thing.

  Maybe Danni and I need to chat about interagency cooperation?

  She wouldn’t be invited to O’Malley’s bar when this was over for my traditional LEO end-of-case-drinks. My shout. Not for her. Oh no. She can buy her own drinks.

  Lee burst in the door nearly knocking it off the hinges. I jumped. The door slammed behind him. Mitch woke with a start.

  “Jeez, Lee, the door okay?” I asked as he crossed the room to the desk.

  “Kennedy!” he said, thrusting his camera at me.

  “Kennedy?” I replied, taking the camera and removing the memory card. I plugged it into the slot on my laptop.

  “Yeah. Just saw him meet with someone we know.”

  I heard music. It took me a minute to realize it was in my head. I expected the person we knew to be Misha. Bon Jovi powered through with ‘Always.’ I just bet Danni was there somewhere. Something about ‘Always’ and the reference to pictures left behind spoke volumes. It didn’t mention erased pictures though, might have been handy if it had.

  “Misha?”

  “Yeah,” Lee replied. He didn’t bat an eyelid, well used to my odd ways of getting information. “Caught the meeting in the back of a coffee shop.”

  “Guess no one was supposed to see them,” I said.

  “That was what I thought too,” Lee agreed.

  Twenty new pictures popped up on my screen. Most of them from the bar, and five from the coffee shop.

  “You spotted them in a mirror?”

  “Yeah, super sleuth powers at work,” Lee said with a grin.

  “Way to go, Special Agent Ridiculously Good-looking.”

  I inspected the photographs. “Well, shit,” I exclaimed. Bon Jovi stopped singing. “Look at that!”

  The picture was of a woman sitting at a table in a coffee shop, staring intently at Seamus Kennedy and Misha Praskovya sitting a few tables over. There were two different pictures with the same intent look and she watched Kennedy and Praskovya in both.

  “Oh, no, that ain’t good, Chicky,” Lee drawled.

  “No, it ain’t.”

  “What the fuck is Danni doing watching Misha and Kennedy?” Lee asked. “If she’s part of what they’re doing here, then why isn’t she at the table with them?”

  “I don’t know. But she followed us to the hotel. She was waiting outside the hospital. And look at this …” I showed him the spreadsheet I’d been working on. Time and places, my movements versus Danni’s. I used verified sightings, information from the bug we planted on her phone and from Voxer. None of our surveillance measures lined up since the Newseum explosion. My ducks were all over the place like a mad woman’s knitting. Danni Lane was everywhere all at once and I couldn’t explain it. The only thing I felt I could trust were actual sightings of her but it would be foolish to discount the other information completely.

  “If she’s Interpol, then why the hell is she following you?”

  “I don’t know.” My skin crawled and a rush of cold shot up my spine.

  “I don’t like this, Chicky. Not one little bit. Especially that.” He pointed to the time stamp that was the helicopter crash and the time stamp that put Danni in the vicinity of the Mall according to our bug. “She could’ve shot that chopper down.”

  I hoped that wasn’t the case. Lee was right. It didn’t look good.

  Between Trudi, Susan, and Danni, none of it looked good. I needed to dig myself out of the ton of manure that had built up around this case.

  When the surveillance was on them, she still managed to be in places near me. Albeit not as close as without surveillance. I wondered if she knew Troy.

  Odd that I thought of him. I circled away from Troy.

  “If Danni Lane is Interpol …” I didn’t like where my thought was going but seemed powerless to stop myself voicing it. “Then getting her resourceful hands on a rocket launcher isn’t outside the realms of possibility.” Proving it might be though.

  “That’s what concerns me Chicky,” Lee said. “That, and if it was her – did she know you were on board or was that a lucky happenstance?”

  “It doesn’t feel lucky,” I said. “I have a horrible feeling she knew and she knows way more than we do.”

  “Me too.”

  “What irks me is that she was at that private hospital too, how hard would it have been for her to make a fucking call?” I grumbled. “Unless she was
there because she was the one who took me there?”

  Mitch and Lee froze. They looked at me like I’d grown horns. Nothing new there then.

  “I’m serious,” I said.

  “I know,” Mitch replied. “That’s what worries me.”

  “She’s Interpol. We’re supposed to be able to trust fellow LEOs,” Lee replied.

  “I know.” But it’s been my experience that there are bad and good people everywhere. Holding a badge doesn’t instantly make someone a good person. In a perfect world, it would. But this is our world and it’s far from perfect most of the time. “I think we should be ready for that possibility.”

  Lee nodded. “Not happy about it but I understand where you’re coming from. I can see the pattern in this spreadsheet.”

  “Good enough,” I replied.

  Until I wrote all that out, I’d had no idea how close she’d gotten to our operation or to me. The only people closer were Delta A and Mitch.

  “Nice that Misha is having coffee with his old friend, don’t you think?” I said, pointing at him and Kennedy deep in conversation.

  “Caine know anything about Misha being here?” Lee asked.

  “He knows something but didn’t elaborate.”

  No one was keen on talking. Really, communication was the key. If we all talked and shared information, we might have a shot at stopping whatever the hell is going on here. I could see the irony. Me grumbling about a lack of communication. Pots and kettles.

  “We need to call a pow-wow, and sit the hell down and get everyone talking,” Lee said.

  “Now that’s the best idea I’ve heard all week.”

  Great idea but it wasn’t going to happen. Everyone was running around like headless chickens.

  Lee nodded sagely. “There are some big questions here and we’re not getting to them fast enough.”

  “You didn’t go to the Hard Rock Café did you?” Would be weird if he had.

  He shook his head. “No.”

  “Well, it wasn’t the Café Danni supposedly worked at then,” I muttered and hauled my jacket off the back of the chair and headed for the door.

  “Whoa, where you headed, little lady?” Mitch said, crossing the room in four long strides.

  “I’ve got a stalker to see about stalking a spook.”

  “Not alone you ain’t,” Lee said, joining Mitch and me by the door.

  “I’m not alone. I have Mr. Glock 17 right here on my hip.”

  “Nah, not happening,” Mitch replied, his hand flat on the door. I didn’t have the strength to pull it open with him leaning on it. Not with fractured ribs and so forth. He knew that.

  I twisted the door handle and pulled. Nothing happened.

  “Really, Mitch?”

  “Yes. Really. You’ll hurt yourself trying to open the door. Just hear us out,” Mitch said. “We’ll come. You aren’t supposed to be alone. We aren’t supposed to be alone.”

  Lee agreed. “Plus, I don’t like the way you said stalker. You could be right. She could be a stalker.”

  “I was kinda joking, Lee. Stalker? Really? She’s Interpol and an author and works in a coffee shop and a New Zealander and an American, how on earth does she have time to be a stalker?”

  She was an enigma wrapped in a riddle and I didn’t like it one little bit.

  Lee nodded. “Still don’t like it. You go, we all go.”

  “Okay.”

  Mitch stood straighter and let the door go. I turned the handle and pulled, he caught the edge of the door with his fingers and pulled it open the full way.

  There outside the door with a tray of take-out coffee cups was Misha Praskovya.

  I looked over my shoulder at Lee and said, “I think you were snapped.”

  He poked his head around the door above mine.

  “Howdy, stranger,” I said to Misha. “What brings you down to my comfortable hotel room?”

  “I am wanting to talk with you.”

  What a coincidence. I am wanting the same thing. I noted he had four coffees. Disconcerting.

  “Come in, bring the coffee,” I said, going back inside. All four of us sat at the small square table. It amused me that the men all sat sideways; no one’s legs fitted under the table. Misha passed the cups around. He smiled at Mitch.

  “Mochachino for you?”

  “Yes, thanks.”

  “How did you know that?” I asked. I hate being watched and obviously we were, but by whom and why?

  “I have my ways,” Misha replied.

  “Misha, not cool. We should not be under surveillance.”

  “I am not sure I understand. I am just a friend bringing coffee.”

  “Nah, no, not buying the ‘my English isn’t very good’ line,” I said shaking my head ever so slightly. Not wanting to wake the dragon that slept in my skull. “I’ve known you too long for that.”

  Misha looked at Mitch. “He looks like a mochachino man.”

  “You talk so much crap, Misha, bet you have to wash your mouth out a lot.”

  Misha grinned. His bluer than blue eyes sparkled against his olive skin. He still looked like he should be on the cover of a Mills and Boon novel.

  I let the coffee thing go. I began: seemed fair, he was the one caught chatting with my target.

  “Caine told me ...” I considered that before saying it, and it was a warning, “…you were here on a case or regarding something that was nothing to do with me. I found you talking to someone who is a target of ours.”

  “Your target?” He seemed genuinely surprised.

  Imagine that.

  “Yes, my target.”

  “Who is this target?”

  Lee stood up and reached for the laptop. He passed it to me. I pulled a photo up on the screen and spun it to face Misha. “Who is she? The woman you’re talking to.”

  Without hesitation. “Danni Lane.”

  “And she is?”

  “A novelist. I love her books.”

  I bet.

  I pulled up the other photo of him and Kennedy.

  “And?”

  “I know Seamus many years. He is old friend. I see him purchasing coffee and stop to say hello.” Misha looked at me. “You know him. We are old friends. We are all old friends.” Misha flipped his index finger between himself and me.

  “Oh, I know Seamus. I’ve spoken to him. He sent you here? To dig around and find out how much we know about whatever the three musketeers are up to?”

  “Of course not. I came for coffee with old friends. I am in town, it is polite to look up old friends.”

  “Look, Misha. I love seeing you. And this is good coffee. But I need straight answers. I need to know what the hell is going on in Washington and why people keep trying to blow me the fuck up!” I leaned forward and glared at him. “I’m in a fucking hotel. Someone shot down my helicopter, and you knew what type of coffee Mitch drinks. I think we have a rogue agent. Something screwy is up with a senator. The Navy Yard, Newseum, and Hoover building fucking exploded.”

  Pausingfor a second to catch my breath, I said, “Kennedy, Holmes and Jones are in town along with you. We rescued a Czech woman from god knows who and someone inserted a fucking exploding tampon into her vagina and had her sent to the hospital I was in.”

  Anger came in waves now, almost impossible to control. “Someone called off my surveillance and forged my signature. I need to know what the hell Senator Robinson is involved in. And where Anastazia Dobrovolný is. And what the connection is between you, me and Robinson. Why did someone send the three of us exploding cards?” I stopped and made eye contact with Misha. “I’m really sorry about your assistant.”

  He nodded and opened his mouth to speak. I held up my hand.

  “I’m not done yet. Someone abducted me from outside the Washington field office to a private medical facility.”

  “I heard.”

  “How did you hear?”

  “Kennedy told me.”

  I had no idea how he knew. And if he knew wher
e I was, why didn’t he come in and get me?

  “Did you also know that someone inserted explosive tampons into me?”

  He shook his head.

  “Well, they fucking did. I don’t know what else was done. I was unconscious. I did kill two men, but we haven’t found their bodies yet.” I leaned back in my chair. “I’m looking for answers, Misha. I need answers.”

  I pulled up a picture of Danni Lane.

  “Talk to me about her?”

  He shook his head. “I cannot.”

  Lee spoke, “Good. Maybe this is a coincidence after all, all these things just happened to coincide with y’all being in town.”

  We both laughed. Coincidence wasn’t something either of us put any stock in.

  “Okay,” I said switching gears, becoming more jovial. “What did you want to see me about Misha?” I didn’t want to make it look like I was interrogating him.

  “The reason Kennedy is in town is none of your business.”

  “And yet?”

  “You have a connection.”

  “Well, I could have told you that. But I don’t know what the connection is. Do you?”

  He looked a little uncomfortable then took a long sip of his coffee. He set the cup down on the table, his fingers playing around the edge of the plastic lid.

  “Let me help,” I said, sipping my own coffee. “Delta found Alexandra. We were also expected to leave D.C. and go to New Zealand to help with a case involving heads.”

  Misha frowned and shook his head. “I don’t know this.”

  “Seems you don’t know everything then, do you?” I replied. “We were requested in Wellington. A box of heads showed up on a ship that arrived from Indonesia. They were American.”

  “What has this to do with Alexandra?”

  “That’s what we don’t know, but it has something to do with her. We were supposed to chase the heads. Plans changed. Agent Troy came to me with a surveillance video of three women. Danni was one of them. Lee and Sam went to New Zealand. Kurt and I stayed home.”