“I’m sure you did well,” Vanessa said confidently. She perched on the edge of his desk, propping a foot against the arm of his chair, giving him a spectacular view of her long legs. “You’re one of the best handlers the Agency’s got. They’d be fools to not promote you.” She smiled coyly and added, “You’d take me with you if you got the position, right? Wouldn’t be the same working for some of these other bozos.”
“Of course,” Henry said, as if it were obvious. It should have been; he’d fight tooth and nail to bring her along if he were promoted to Deputy Director. “You dig up the dirt that I had no idea even existed.”
“Doesn’t take much,” Vanessa said modestly. “The other little toothpicks don’t know how to keep their mouths shut. Except for Brandon’s girl. She’s almost as tight-lipped as I am.”
“So what have you got for me?”
“At the moment, not much,” Vanessa admitted. She shifted on the desk, trying to get more comfortable, as if settling in for a long conversation. “I’ve managed to gather a few names of agents and handlers who are after the Deputy Director position.” She tore a piece of paper off her notepad and handed it to him. “So far, there’s word of four, not including yourself.”
Henry scanned the list before tossing it onto the desk. None of the names on the list were a real threat to him; he knew that he would be a shoo-in for the position if that was all the competition had to offer. What concerned him more were the names that weren’t on the list. He knew that there would be names that they hadn’t found out yet. Vanessa was good, but she wasn’t that good. “What else?” he prompted.
Vanessa lifted her other leg and rested it against the arm of his chair, crossing both of her legs at the ankles. “Well, I’m still digging. Give me a day or two more and I might have some more names. Especially since, like I said, Brandon’s girl is really good at not talking.”
“Kind of like you, huh?” Henry said, smiling. Unable to resist any longer, he rested a hand against her leg, smoothing it up her silky skin to rest on her knee. She grinned at him, shrugging, even as she scooted along the desk a few inches to sit closer to him. With another fluid movement, she draped her legs across his lap so he could get to them better.
“I do my best.” She offered him the notepad. “This is a list of the phone calls you missed while you were out. Nothing life-threateningly important.”
“Heard from Scott?” Henry prompted as he took the notepad from her. He set it aside without looking at it.
“Not yet,” Vanessa said. “Considering what you said about his new assignment and being partnered up with Riley Walker, I expect an irate phone call within the next twenty-four hours.”
“I say forty-eight,” Henry countered.
Vanessa’s grin widened. “You’re on,” she agreed.
Henry smoothed his hand back down her leg to her ankle. “You have any plans for this evening?” he asked.
“Oh, I don’t know,” Vanessa said, leaning back against her hands, which she braced on the desktop. “I can think of a few things I could do this evening.”
“So can I,” Henry replied. “And they all involve you.”
“Funny, I was thinking of the paperwork.”
Henry laughed. “Ruin my dreams, why don’t you?” he said. He gently squeezed her ankle and then let go. “What do you say we go out and grab a bite of dinner, then get back here and deal with all of this?” He patted his hand against the stack at the edge of his desk.
“Sounds like Heaven,” Vanessa said with a facetious tone to her voice, “but first…” She dropped the envelope Brandon had given her onto the desk in front of him. “First, I want to know what in the world is in this envelope that had Brandon Hall so infuriated.”
Henry grinned and picked the envelope up, tearing open the flap as he said, “You just like the idea of Brandon being pissed off, because it means that something’s not going his way.”
“You have no idea,” Vanessa confirmed. “That man gives me the creeps. Just something about him…” She trailed off and let out a shudder.
Henry took her hand and gave it a comforting squeeze before finishing tearing the envelope open. He slid the single sheet inside free and unfolded it, looking it over before cursing. “Son of a bitch, I can’t believe this,” he snarled, tossing the paper onto the desk and shaking his head. “I can’t fucking believe this.”
Vanessa looked startled, shifting to lower her legs from the arm of his chair as he glared at the paper. Her surprise was probably warranted: Henry rarely had outbursts, and he rarely cursed. She quickly recovered from her surprise and reached for the paper he’d pulled out of the envelope. She too looked at it and bit back a curse of her own. “They’re kidding, right?” she said, waving the paper at Henry. “I mean, they’ve got to be kidding. There’s no way Scott would agree to this.”
“They’re not kidding,” Henry said, taking the paper from her and reading it over more carefully, looking past the words that had struck him first: “Scott Hunter,” “Internal Affairs,” “transfer.” Once he reached the bottom of the paper, he pointed out the signature to Vanessa. “This is definitely serious. These orders came directly from Damon Hartley.”
“Why would Hartley order Scott back into Internal Affairs?” Vanessa asked. “Do you think he knows about something going on that we don’t?”
“I can guarantee it,” Henry said. “It’s Hartley. He knows everything. If there was ever something that happened that he didn’t know about in advance, he’d probably be the first one to step down.” He shook his head slowly. “I just don’t understand why he’s doing this. He knows what happened with Scott and his wife. And now he wants to send him back into the viper’s nest? It doesn’t make sense.”
“Nothing that man does makes sense,” Vanessa muttered. She glanced at the paper on Henry’s desk before asking, “So what are we going to do?”
Henry sighed and sat back in his chair, propping his chin against the backs of his fingers and rubbing his bottom lip with his forefinger. “Well, we can certainly shelve the dinner plans,” he said. “And probably the activities that would have followed them. Call out and have us something delivered to security downstairs. I don’t care what you order. Your choice tonight.”
“And then?” Vanessa prompted, sliding off the desk. The action made her skirt hitch up a few inches, and she smoothed it back down, but not before Henry got an appreciative look at the extra skin it revealed. The woman had a way of getting a rise out of him, and not just in a physical way. After nearly fifteen years of dating, Henry was about as emotionally close to the woman as a man could get, short of actually proposing to and marrying her; he was well aware she felt the same. He just didn’t know if either of them felt ready to take the leap to the next level, not when they had the Agency to contend with.
“Then we’re going to weed through all this paperwork,” he said with a sigh, thinking of the ruined plans he’d started to make for the evening. “And while I get started on it, I need you to track down where Scott is and let me know as soon as you find out. I need to see him and explain what’s going on as soon as possible, before he gets wind of this from another source and things get ugly.”
Chapter Six
Riley lurked on the rooftop across from the building her partner had entered, an FR F2 sniper rifle gripped confidently and assuredly in her hands as she kept her eyes locked intently on the scope mounted on the top. There had been very little movement inside the apartment she watched since she took up position several hours before, and even less of it since Kevin Anderson had left her side to begin his own part of the assignment.
It was the worst part of all of the assignments she and Kevin had worked together: the waiting. Riley found the long stretches of time during which Kevin was out of her sight nerve-wracking, the inability to communicate with him during those times making it all worse. She’d spent hours arguing the point with him, pleading with him to let her infiltrate the apartment alongside him, but he’d put his
foot down and refused. Which was why she was on the roof across the street and not where she wanted to be: sneaking through the building with Kevin. He was her partner, and she was supposed to be backing him up, just like he always backed her up, and in her mind, that meant being right there with him, not across the street. But there was nothing she could do about that, not now that they’d already put their plans into motion.
Riley could see the target through his bedroom window, the large one that overlooked the Rue du Vieux Colombier. He was backlit by several lights, so all she could see was the silhouette of his figure at his desk. If it came to it, a silhouette was really all she needed.
Not that she could take the shot yet. They needed information more than they needed to take him out. The man’s known associates had kidnapped a sitting U.S. Senator’s daughter, and she and Kevin had been sent to find out the young woman’s location. The mission was formed on three very necessary steps that had to be taken in a very specific order: capture, interrogate, eliminate. Riley couldn’t just shoot Ivan Antonov if he hadn’t told Kevin where the girl was, no matter how much she burned to put a bullet in the foul man’s head. But killing him now would defeat the point of the assignment and, she was sure, earn her a serious reprimand from Brandon. The last thing she needed was another reprimand from Brandon, especially after how pissed he’d been when he’d found out about her and Kevin.
Riley slowly reached to the top of her rifle and adjusted the scope, focusing in more clearly on the man sitting at his desk beyond the window. He wasn’t moving, just staring down at the papers he’d been examining since he’d returned from the opera earlier that evening. His actions weren’t out of the ordinary. In the time they’d spent in surveillance over the prior two weeks alone, Antonov had done that exact same thing, nearly every evening. Neither of them had managed to discover what the papers were that Antonov studied so intently. Whatever they were, they must have been important; Kevin had said more than once he would obtain a copy of them if he could—or at least look at them long enough to determine what they were.
Riley tore her eyes away from the scope and window for a moment to scan the street below. Three men loitered near the apartment building’s main entrance, chatting and laughing boisterously beside a silver car. Riley hadn’t made up her mind about the men; she couldn’t decide if they were part of Antonov’s entourage or if they just happened to be three bystanders returning from a night of drinking and carousing. Judging by the snatches of conversation that had reached her ears, they were French, not Russian. Other than those three men, there wasn’t a single soul in sight. Just the way she liked it. If she found herself in the position of having to utilize her sniping skills, a potential witness was the last thing she needed. Three drunken men were less reliable than, say, a sober old woman walking her dog.
Riley tossed her long, dark ponytail back over her shoulder and flexed her fingers, trying to loosen them up in the chilly night air. She returned her focus to the scope. Her aim had drifted down as she’d examined the men below, and she adjusted the rifle to return the scope’s view to the window again. Something seemed subtly different, but Riley couldn’t put her finger on what it was. The silhouette of a slender female was lengthening behind Antonov, as if she’d been leaning over him while Riley wasn’t looking, and she was heading toward the bedroom door.
“Shit,” Riley hissed through her teeth. The woman was on a perfect path to intercept Kevin, and she could not allow that to happen. She quickly began to reposition herself, shifting her aim to the female figure, trusting Kevin to take care of Antonov. She didn’t know anything about the potential new threat; there wasn’t supposed to be anyone else even there with the mark. She slapped at the mic button on her earpiece and breathed out, “Raptor, abort the mission. I repeat, abort.” When Kevin didn’t respond right away, Riley added, “We have an unknown variable. You know the rules. We must abort the mission.” When he still didn’t respond, she grimaced. “Son of a bitch turned his radio off again,” she muttered, adjusting her grip on her rifle yet again and focusing in on where the woman’s silhouette was.
Had been. The woman was gone.
“Raptor,” Riley hissed again in her earpiece, just in case he’d decided to flip his radio back on. “Get the hell out of there.”
Riley hadn’t expected a response from Kevin, and she most certainly didn’t get one. Shaking her head in frustration, she considered abandoning her post and slipping into the building after Kevin. But before she could either reject the idea or act on it, the sharp, familiar snap of a rifle releasing a bullet broke the air, twice in rapid succession. Though the shots sounded suppressed, Riley would have known the sound anywhere. Instinctively, she ducked her head before rolling onto her back, pulling her rifle along with her. She lay there, breathing slowly and deeply through her nose, trying to keep her heartbeat steady as she used the short lip surrounding the edge of the rooftop as a shield. She clutched her rifle to her chest, listening intently for several long heartbeats. When she didn’t hear anything further, she forced herself to her knees again, keeping low as she slid up to peer over the edge of the building. She rested the rifle against the concrete and peered through the scope once more to assess the situation.
Kevin knelt on the carpet of Antonov’s apartment, clearly struggling to rise. Even from where she hid, Riley could see the blood staining his back from where the bullets had struck him. The two bullet holes in the window above the mark indicated there was another sniper present nearby. But where?
Even as she replayed the gunshots in her mind, Riley’s brain zeroed in on the building below her. Judging by the angle, the shots had most likely come from an apartment somewhere beneath her. Which meant…
Riley pressed the mic on her earpiece again and hissed to Kevin, hoping that he would get the message. “Raptor, it’s a set-up. We were set up. Get the hell out of there!”
But even as she uttered the words, Riley knew it was too late. The unknown female had returned, approaching Kevin’s kneeling form, her dark evening gown rippling as she moved. Riley couldn’t make out any further details; the light behind her did an effective job of shielding her features from view. Riley frantically tried to draw a bead on the woman, to take her down, but she wasn’t fast enough.
There was a horrific spray of blood, highlighted brightly by the lights in the room. Riley bit back a gasp of shock, shock that swiftly turned to confusion as the woman in the room bent and buried her face against Kevin’s neck. Riley growled low in her throat as irrational jealousy flashed through her, and she shifted her finger to the rifle’s trigger, leaning forward slightly and taking aim. She couldn’t shoot while the woman was occupied with whatever she was doing to Kevin—she didn’t have a clear shot without Kevin being caught in the crossfire—but the moment the woman lifted her head, she’d nail her right between the eyes.
But then the woman did lift her head, and blood dripped from her face, running down her chin. The sight was enough to make Riley freeze with the sheer unexpected horror of it, and when the woman turned and looked out the window, Riley reeled backward, avoiding the woman’s sight as if she could see her. She looked back through the scope in time to see the woman jerk her hand away from Kevin’s neck, sending a spray of blood arcing from his neck to splatter on the carpet. An involuntary cry escaped Riley’s throat at the sight of the blood—oh God, oh God, so much blood, so much fucking blood—and she dropped her rifle on the rooftop and scrambled for the fire escape ladder. Her heart was in her throat, and her hands shook violently, but all she could think of was getting to Kevin and helping him, stopping the horrendous flow of that blood. Her mind repeated over and over, Not Kevin, not Kevin, please not Kevin.
As she made her way down the fire escape, Riley glanced over her shoulder in time to see the woman in the apartment disappear, vanishing from her sight in the blink of an eye.
~*~
Riley was startled out of her nightmare, but she did so silently, sweat glistening on her face a
nd chest as her eyes flew open and sleep fled. Blinking rapidly, she struggled to focus her mind and remember where she was and when she was. As her eyes zeroed in on the white popcorn ceiling, barely visible in the dark, she remembered everything: the meeting with Brandon, the transfer to a new division, even the whole vampire crap.
And Scott Hunter. She definitely remembered Scott Hunter.
Thoughts of the man made her roll her eyes toward the right. He was still asleep, slouched in the lounge chair near the window, his breathing steady as he rested. His dark hair was disheveled and his navy blue t-shirt wrinkled, but his face was slack with sleep, and his head listed toward his right shoulder. He looked much younger in sleep, his unconsciousness wiping away the few lines of age he had on his face and putting him back in his mid-twenties in appearance. He didn’t look particularly comfortable, a thought that sent a twinge of guilt through Riley as she watched him. She slammed the guilt down, hard. It wasn’t like he could sleep in the bed with her. Besides, they had all had times where they slept in uncomfortable, almost impossible places. If he couldn’t manage to sleep in a cushy chair, then Riley had to wonder at just how effective he was as an agent.
She rolled over and grabbed for her phone, which rested on the mattress beside her pillow. She mashed a button to wake the screen up and check the time, and that was when she noticed she had received a text message. It was from a number she didn’t recognize.
“Be at my office ASAP. We need to talk. –BH.”
It was four in the morning. He’d sent the message only three minutes prior. It was probably her phone buzzing that had—blessedly—woken her up from her nightmare. She curled her fingers around the device and contemplated not going. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to see Brandon; he was her mentor and her handler, and hardly a month went by without her dropping in to see him or him stopping by to see her in whatever place she happened to be staying in during her downtime. She just didn’t know what he wanted her for, and that bothered her more than anything else.
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