Zachariah laughed softly at that, the sound rolling across the interior of the car and bringing a crooked smile to Ashton’s face. He promptly squashed it before Zachariah saw it and accused him of not taking him seriously. “Oh, that you will be,” the man said.
“Should I ask?”
“Probably, because I’m going to need your help on this one.” Zachariah made a right turn lazily and almost negligently, turning his signal on only at the last second.
“Well, I’m asking,” Ashton said.
“I know you aren’t a field agent anymore,” he started, and Ashton had a feeling he wasn’t going to like this, “but I need your help on something that’s sort of field related.”
Ashton sighed and shook his head. “Zach, what have you got up your sleeve?”
“Agree to help me, and I’ll tell you,” Zachariah said promptly.
“You’re kidding, right?”
“Does it look like I’m kidding?”
Ashton groaned and leaned forward, burying his face in his hands and scrubbing at it in exasperation. “You drive me nuts sometimes, you know that?”
“Yeah, it’s what I’m good at,” Zachariah said with a heavy dose of smugness, as if he were proud of his ability to drive him to distraction. “Are you going to help me or not?”
He lifted his head and dropped his hands to his thighs with an audible clap. “Sure. Why not?” he said. “God knows I’m going to end up trying to dig you out of a hole anyway, whether I agree to help or not.”
“I’m going to spend the next month trying to track down Chloe,” Zachariah said. “While I’m not exactly eager to run off and help vampires in any way, I promised Elise that I’d try to help Chloe, and I’m not going to deny the wishes of a woman—vampire or not—that died in order to spare my life.”
“I agree,” Ashton said. “I figured you were going to end up going after her as soon as you were able. So I’m thinking you have some idea of what you’re going to do?”
“Yeah. I’m going to find Brandon’s house and break in to see what I can find. And you are going to help me not only find it but get inside without us getting killed.”
Ashton raised an eyebrow. “You’re kidding, right, Zach? Do I need to remind you of what you just said? I’m not a field agent, not anymore. I mean, I’ve done what I can to stay in shape and keep my skills up, but I can only do so much, and I’m far from where my skills should be at to qualify for field.”
Zachariah pulled the Camaro into the parking garage attached to the apartment building he used when he was in town on shorter downtimes. Once he pulled into his assigned parking space, he turned the engine off and twisted in his seat, looking at Ashton with seriousness. “You don’t have to meet the Agency’s field operative requirements to help me. You just have to meet mine, and you are far and away past my minimums.”
Ashton gave his friend a small smile at the assessment of his skills, and he suddenly felt the urge to kiss him, so he leaned across the console between them to press his mouth against Zachariah’s. “Thank you for not putting me in the position of having to kill you,” he said as he pulled away. The smile Zachariah gave him hit him right in the chest.
“Not a problem,” he agreed. “Lord knows I didn’t want to put you through that.” He lifted his hips off the seat to cram his keys into his pocket; the move only fired every crumb of Ashton’s healthy imagination, which was vivid to the point of discomfort. “What do you say we get inside, get some food, and spend the first day or two of our downtime just…relaxing?”
“I have a feeling you have something in mind other than actual relaxation,” Ashton said, reaching for the door to begin the arduous task of getting his sore body out of the car.
“Oh, you better believe it.”
Chapter Two
Scott Hunter stared at the computer screen on his desk with the bleary-eyed look of a man who’d spent too many hours in front of it. Empty water bottles littered the desk, several protein bar wrappers scattered among them. His forehead was wrinkled into a frown as he re-read what he’d just written.
He’d been trying to write his after-action report of what had happened at The Unnaturals headquarters for almost six hours now, and he was no closer to being successful at it than he had been when he’d started. How was he supposed to explain the unexplainable? He’d never experienced anything like the events of the previous three days, and he wasn’t sure that his vocabulary was adequate enough to fully cover it. Kidnapping? Breaking and entering? Sure, he could handle that; he’d written reports covering those activities before. But vampires? Impossible. And then there was the issue of that strange weapon that Riley had used that seemed to have so drastically altered her, at least physically if not mentally.
He couldn’t say that his world wasn’t altered too.
Scott scowled at the computer screen and jabbed at the backspace key, erasing what little he’d already written. As he did so, his eyes drifted back toward the new smartphone that his handler, Henry Cage, had given him that morning to replace the one he’d broken. His thoughts slid back to the mass email that had been sent out to every agent in the Agency’s rosters a mere handful of hours after the events that had transpired the night before. Riley had been declared a rogue, and an Agency-sanctioned hit had been put out on her. It had been signed off on—and probably written by—the Agency’s deputy director, the very man who was already responsible for the deaths of twenty-seven agents and who seemed hell-bent on adding Riley to his tally. And, for that matter, him, Ashton, and Zachariah for good measure. Even as he tried to write his report, the lie that Riley was responsible for the murders of the agents was spreading like wildfire through the Agency, taken as gospel truth by government-employed assassins who didn’t have an independently thinking bone in their bodies.
“What the hell am I doing here?” Scott muttered, shoving an almost empty bottle of water away from him. He didn’t need to be in the Agency right now. He didn’t want anything to do with these people, not when they were probably having powwows with their handlers and planning how they were going to take out Riley. She was his partner. He needed to be out where she was, backing her up, because as little as he knew about her, he did know that her loyalties ran deep, and she’d do the same for him if he were the one who’d been listed as rogue.
Scott finished erasing what he’d been working on, closed the program down, and logged out. After dropping his trash into the can under the desk, he abandoned his attempts at filing his reports and headed for the exit. There was no real point in filing a report anyway, he decided. Nobody would believe it, and he’d end up in a psych ward somewhere. Besides, everybody who really needed to know what had happened had either caused it or had been there when it had happened. There was no sense in wasting time on foolishness and busywork.
Not with what he was beginning to plan.
Scott left the Internal Affairs department on the eighth floor and headed down to the fifth floor, where his handler’s office was. Knowing Henry, he’d either be at home or in his office, and between the two, Scott was more than willing to bet he was in the latter. Before he reached the office suite’s door, though, a figure several inches taller than him stepped into his path, and he looked up to find himself staring at Damon. The man stared back at him, a pair of wire-framed glasses on his face that Scott suspected were for show—the lenses were too thin to be corrective—and a take-out coffee cup in each hand. His suit was immaculate, and there wasn’t a hair out of place. He stared at Scott for a moment and then said, “Mr. Hunter?”
Scott nodded. “Director Hartley,” he managed, though he was still trying to recover from his surprise at his appearance. “Is there something I can do for you?”
“Are you busy?” Damon asked.
“I was just about to check in with my handler,” Scott said, opting to leave off what he needed to see Henry for.
“That can wait. Come with me.” Damon turned and began to walk back in the direction Scott had just come. Sc
ott hesitated for only a second before scrambling to follow. It wasn’t like he had much of a choice in the matter. When Damon Hartley gave a command to jump, it didn’t pay to stop long enough to ask how high before following the order.
The director led him down the hall and to the elevator, waiting patiently for him to board before pressing the button for the eleventh floor. The elevator doors slid shut, and Scott found himself trapped in the elevator with the highest-ranking boss he had. Though the silence was almost oppressive, he opted to keep his mouth shut—because what was he supposed to say to his boss’s boss anyway? So the silence remained, and when the doors slid open on the eleventh floor, Scott followed Damon out of the elevator, down several hallways, and into the Agency’s forensics labs. He raised an eyebrow as Damon handed the disposable coffee cups he held to one of the forensics technicians.
“There are DNA samples on both of these cups,” Damon said. “Pull them. Test them. Do not run them through the Agency database—or any database, for that matter. I already know who they belong to. I want to know everything else about them. Have the report on my desk in twenty-four hours.” Then, without waiting on a response from the technician, Damon turned on his heel, beckoned to Scott, and walked out of the lab.
“I have something I’d like for you to do for me, Mr. Hunter,” Damon said as they returned to the elevator. They boarded it again, and he pressed the button for the top floor of the Agency’s headquarters building—the penthouse suite, so to speak. As the elevator ascended to the top floor, Scott waited for Damon to continue, but he remained silent, hands in the pockets of his pants, waiting patiently for the elevator to reach its destination. When it did, the doors slid open onto a vestibule barely large enough for the both of them. The floor and walls were marble, similar to the lobby on the ground floor, but it was completely bare and undecorated, save for a large steel door directly across from the elevator and a panel set into the wall beside it.
Damon went to the panel and keyed in a series of numbers; after a beep, he slapped his palm down onto the glass beside the keypad. Another beep and then he said, “Damon Hartley, I.D. number 2297.” The sound of heavy locks disengaging echoed through the tiny foyer, and the large steel door swung open on nearly silent hinges.
“Come in,” Damon invited, and Scott stepped into an office suite that defined opulence. The walls matched the foyer, and the marble floors were covered in places by thick Persian rugs. Couches and chairs, thick and plush, littered the office, and a small, bare secretary’s desk sat to the right of the inner office’s door. Damon brushed past him and went to the desk, taking out a small wicker basket from one of the drawers and holding it out to Scott. “Put any electronics you have on you in this basket,” he instructed. “Cell phones, credit cards, any earpieces, whatever.” Scott frowned but obeyed, emptying his pockets into the basket. Damon returned it to the drawer and locked it, then went to the door behind the desk and unlocked it with a plain key on a key ring before he beckoned to him. “Step in here, please. I have something I’d like to talk to you about.”
Scott followed him into his office, performing the same sweep of the room that he’d done in the outer office. It was decorated very similarly to the outer one, the desk a large mahogany and completely bare, without even a computer gracing its desktop. To his right was a wet bar. The wall behind the wet bar seemed to be stocked with every high-end type of alcohol known to man. Damon had expensive tastes; Scott was sure that he recognized maybe three of the bottles’ labels, and those were definitely top shelf.
Damon closed the office door, locked it, and pressed a code into the keypad alongside it. The panel emitted two confirmation beeps, and he said, “There’s an EMP screen built into the walls. It kills any electronics brought in here, including bugs. So this is a completely sterile room.” He walked to the bar and took out two glass tumblers. “Let me get you something to drink,” he offered. “What’s your poison of choice?”
Scott knew better than to tell him no. He thought back on the last alcoholic drink he’d had, with Riley as they’d sat in their hotel room’s bathroom while he’d stitched up her wounded side, and he replied, “Bourbon, please, if you have it.”
“Of course.” There was a clink of glass against glass as Damon poured a generous helping of bourbon into both of the glasses, and he brought one to him. Scott took a cautious sip of the high-quality alcohol, and Damon added, “I’m sure by now that you’re wondering what I need to talk to you about.”
“Yes, sir,” he acknowledged, stepping forward to slide into one of the chairs that Damon indicated.
“What we’re about to discuss doesn’t leave this room,” Damon said. He moved to the opposite side of the mahogany desk and sat, taking a coaster out of his desk drawer and setting the glass of bourbon with precision onto it. “But I suppose that goes without saying.” He rocked back in his seat, staring at Scott with quiet contemplation; Scott shifted in his chair and took an impulsive drink of bourbon. The room was quiet enough to hear a pin drop, a silence that was only broken when the director asked, “What do you think of Riley Walker?”
Scott’s shoulders loosened and relaxed at Damon’s question. He hadn’t realized how tense he was until the other man had voiced it. He could do this, he thought and settled back in his chair. If all the man wanted was an eyewitness assessment of Riley’s skills, he could give him that, no problem. “She’s very talented,” he started. “She’s very skilled and driven, and she works hard to—”
“I don’t mean her work abilities,” Damon interrupted. “I meant personally. What do you think of her on a personal level?”
Oh, now that would be a hell of a lot harder to answer. Immediately, his mind flew back to the previous three days and the red-hot kisses they’d shared. He certainly couldn’t tell Damon what he thought about that. He pressed his lips together and shook his head. “Director, I’m not…sure where you’re going with this,” he admitted, stalling for time as he tried to figure out how to answer the man’s question.
“It’s not complicated, Mr. Hunter,” Damon said. His expression was shrewd, his almost-black eyes gleaming with deviousness. He looked so much like Riley in that moment that it was almost startling. “Do you like her?”
“I…ah…” There was no way he could easily dodge that question or give a vague non-answer. “Yes, I suppose I do.”
Damon’s expression remained as unchanged as a block of stone. “I assume you’ve seen the memo sent out by my esteemed deputy director,” he added. Scott detected a barely there hint of sarcasm in the man’s words. “Do you have any plans to attempt to collect?”
“No,” Scott answered, maybe a little too quickly.
Damon narrowed his eyes, and his devious expression slid away, replaced by thoughtfulness. “Five million dollars is a lot of money to turn your nose up at,” he mused.
“It is,” Scott agreed.
“So why are you not taking the Agency up on the opportunity?”
“I don’t need the money. I have all the money that I need.” He paused and then added, “Besides, she’s my partner. Using what she told me against her to capture her for monetary gain just seems…wrong.”
Damon leaned forward in his chair, looking satisfied with his answer. “Riley says hello.”
Scott sat up straight so fast that he nearly dumped the remains of his bourbon onto Damon’s expensive rug. “You’ve spoken to her?” he asked.
“I’ve seen her.”
“You have? Is she okay?”
“She’s fine, Mr. Hunter,” Damon assured him. “She’s on a special assignment right now.”
He raised an eyebrow. “An assignment?” he repeated. “But she’s been labeled rogue. She’s not allowed to take any assignments.” As soon as the words left his mouth, he wanted to slap himself. Questioning the director? What was he thinking?
But Damon seemed blessedly unperturbed by his statements. He merely sat back in his chair more comfortably and said, “It’s an assignment from m
e, not from the Agency. I’m paying her personally.” As Scott felt confusion come over him—an emotion he was sure was being mirrored on his face—the director continued. “That is, incidentally, what I wanted to talk to you about. I have an assignment for you, and I believe you’re one of the only three people here who I trust enough to do it.”
Scott sat up straight again, his bourbon forgotten. “Yes, sir?” he prompted.
“With Riley being on this special detail for me and with what will likely be every agent in the organization gunning for her, I need you to watch her back, protect her, and make sure no one gets ahold of her before she completes the assignment I’ve given her.”
“Yes, sir,” Scott said. “I can get started right away. Where is she?”
“I have no idea,” Damon said.
Scott raised his eyebrows again. “I thought you said you saw her this morning.”
“I did. I also gave her express orders to get the hell out of town,” Damon replied. “What I did not do is ask her where she planned to go. So you’ll have to spend a little time tracking her down. I’m sure, for a man of your capabilities and connections, it won’t be too difficult.” The way he said “connections” implied it was people Scott not only already knew but should have immediately thought of. Damon took a thick, bulging envelope out of his desk and slid it across the table to him. When he opened it, he found an obscene amount of cash inside. “Don’t tell anyone where you’re going,” he instructed. “Not even the venerable Mr. Cage. You are to take what I give you and get moving without a word to anyone in this building. You’re as deep under as you can get.”
Scott nodded his understanding. Damon wanted him black-ops style covert. He could most assuredly give him black-ops style covert. “Did she say anything that might give you any ideas of the direction she could have gone?”
“No, she didn’t,” Damon said. “She only agreed to do as I told her.” He slipped a hand into his suit jacket and withdrew a business card from his inner breast pocket. After scribbling something on the back of it, he passed the card to Scott. “My private cell phone number is printed on the front, and I wrote the number for the cell phone I gave Riley on the back. If you need any assistance, don’t hesitate to call me.”
The Unnaturals (The Unnaturals Series Book 1) Page 38
