by Brynn Kelly
“No. But then I saw you and then the weight, and somehow I pushed through it.”
A tinny voice sounded. Merde. Jamie held a finger to his lips, and located the goon’s phone on an office chair. Still on. He picked it up, settling his breath.
“Nah, I’m okay. I’m fine,” he shouted, in his best imitation of the guy’s accent, muffling his voice with his hand. “Just some fucking security guard. Knocked him out cold. Listen, there’s some paperwork sitting here, says I’m in the...” Jamie stared at a concrete courtyard. What was on the far side of the building? “The...gynecology outpatient clinic. Shit, someone’s coming. I gotta go. You better get here, quick.”
Jamie hung up. The goon groaned. Jamie retrieved his rucksack, and drew out a syringe and vial from his white box of goodies.
“What is that?” Samira said, grabbing her sunglasses from the floor beside her.
“A sedative. Keep him in a happy place a while longer.” The guy wouldn’t be able to give much of a description of Jamie, especially with a concussion, but the longer they kept him quiet, the better.
“Where did you get it?”
“Would you believe a prescription?”
“No.”
He laughed.
“Let me guess,” she said. “You have a contact?”
“Traditional weapons are a little harder to come by here and a few people owed me—”
“Favors. I’m beginning to see a pattern.”
Not that this favor had come cheaply. Andy had charged him top dollar. But at short notice, with limited access to real firepower, Jamie needed every advantage he could think of. And if there was one weapon he knew how to wield...
After injecting the guy, Jamie tucked him into a bed in a private room in the evacuated orthopedics ward next door. Samira relieved him of a clip of pounds in his pocket.
“I wish they’d shut off that fucking siren,” Jamie said as they left the room, closing the door. “We’d better get out of here before security arrives—or this guy’s buddies. I’m afraid we’ve lost your shoes, Cinderella. You might want to put your boots back on.”
“I have an idea how we can get away,” Samira said a minute later, as she zipped up the boots.
“All ears.”
She led him back to Occupational Therapy. “There,” she said, pointing to a display box fixed to a wall. Inside, two dozen keys hung on nails. A sign read OT Pool Cars. Sign the log BEFORE you take a key. Return with a FULL TANK. NO exceptions.
“Crumbs, Samira! Are you suggesting we steal a car?”
“Just...borrow.” She stepped back, abruptly. “You’re right. What am I thinking? It’s a terrible idea.”
He caught her shoulders. “It’s a great idea. You’re more easily corruptible than I’d thought.”
The box was locked but he found the key in a drawer. They tidied up the nurse’s station. He took the logbook and buried it in a paper recycling bin two wards north.
Now for the staff car park. As they approached a blind corner in the corridor, Samira grabbed his arm. Footsteps. He pushed her through a door into a bathroom and drew his weapon. The footsteps passed.
“Good timing,” he said. “I’m needing to use the facilities.”
As they emerged, they nearly collided with a trio of local police, packing Glocks.
“Shit, you gave me a hell of a fright,” Jamie chided in his best Scouse, tucking his weapon into the back of his waistband and pulling his jacket over top, hoping it looked like he was adjusting his jeans after a bathroom break. He leaned slightly to make Harriet’s ID spin facedown on his chest. Hopefully they were searching for a chubby guy with black hair, from the description Mariya would have given. “Know where we’re supposed to be going for this bloody lockdown? I skived off to the pub in the last drill.”
They listened intently to the bobbies’ directions, and set off accordingly, Jamie loudly grumbling that this was the last time he was coming in on his day off. When they were clear, they doubled back and crept through corridors and tunnels to the parking building, skirting security cameras wherever possible, hunkering into their clothing when not. He might be a rat in a maze, but this was his maze.
They found the car in its allotted space. “There she is,” Jamie said. “Saint Jude’s finest piece-of-shit hatchback.”
He tipped his rucksack into the car’s boot, nudging aside a collapsed wheelchair. Samira checked the car for a GPS unit or tracker.
“You’re giving the NHS credit for a bigger budget than they have,” Jamie said.
“Can’t be too careful when you’re committing a felony.”
“It’s just a regular old crime, over here.”
“That makes me feel so much better.”
Samira hid in the footwell of the rear seat, covered in her brown coat. Jamie wrapped himself up in a football scarf and the cap.
At the hospital gates, a barrier arm guarded the exit. A parking attendant leaned out of her station. “We’re on lockdown. No one in or out.”
“It’s an emergency.” Jamie went with a Welsh accent.
The woman frowned. “That’s an OT car. What even is an OT emergency?”
“You can ask me that when it’s your grandmother who can’t get off the loo because her grab rail came off in her hand.”
The attendant blinked, like she was seeing a mind picture, then shrugged and lifted the barrier.
Outside the gates, they crept into a traffic jam. Rain peppered the roof. The windows fogged up. No sign of the helicopter—it’d probably scarpered after failing to take down Jamie, before local forces could scramble to respond. This close to Whitehall and Buckingham Palace, the police wouldn’t take chances.
“What’s happening?” Samira hissed.
Jamie rubbed the windscreen. The wipers beat like a crazed metronome. “Not a lot. Who’d be a getaway car driver in London?”
“Oh my God, Jamie. We just stole a car.”
“Technically, I stole it—though you did force me into it. But don’t worry. We’ll return it clean and with a full tank.”
As they crawled onto Westminster Bridge, a familiar blond head snaked around the umbrellas bobbing along the pavement. Wisely leaving the sinking ship, ready to regroup. Jamie would have to drive right past him, but with a dozen cops in view, the goon would be keeping his head even lower than Jamie’s.
Police were waving traffic by with barely a glance. He’d bet they had no idea what they were looking for but figured it wasn’t an NHS hatchback going two miles an hour.
Jamie hung a left after Big Ben and the traffic eased up. Union Jacks sagged from the towers of Westminster and the Abbey. He had to fight the urge to drive on the right-hand side, after so many years on the Continent. When they’d passed through the main tourist area into the neoclassical stone of Millbank, he gave Samira the all clear to climb into the front seat. She slid her sunglasses back on and adjusted her wig. Not that anybody on the streets had their heads up. And the dreich day and foggy windows would mess with CCTV.
“So, Putney, right?” he said.
“You know how to get there?”
“Aye. Got an address?”
She recited it from memory. “I just hope Charlotte’s there. I had no safe way of telling her I was on my way. I don’t even know what we’re collecting. This could all be for nothing.”
“Ah, it’s been fun so far. But you’d better hold your breath—we’re passing MI5.” He jerked his head to a stately building to their right, no doubt ablaze with activity beneath its imperial facade, given the morning’s alert. “Look at it, sitting there all fat and self-important while an enemy of the American people passes right by.”
“Is this you trying to make me feel less anxious?”
“Not working?”
“Not working.”
“Stick with me. We’ll be okay.”
Right. Because nobody who stuck with him ever came unstuck?
She doesn’t need to know.
Then again, she’d had intimate experience of coming unstuck in his company. Shite, they were going to be alone in a car for maybe half an hour. She wouldn’t want to talk about what’d happened between them, would she?
As they left the spooks behind and veered back to the Thames, she swore and pulled something from her coat pocket. The goon’s phone.
“I’d forgotten about this,” she said.
“We’ll chuck it in the river. You know how Tess is about phones being traced.”
She lifted the phone to the gauzy light coming through her window and tilted it left to right, like she was looking for a way in. “Believe me, I’m the same.”
“You’ve caught her paranoid tendencies?”
“You could say we contracted them from the same source.”
“Get rid of it, Samira. The guy said something about GPS tracking.”
She squinted at it. “This won’t take a second.”
“What won’t?”
“It might be useful to find out what this guy knows, where he’s been. If they can GPS-track it, so can I.”
“How long will that take?”
“A minute or two. I’ll download a backup app and sync everything to the cloud—GPS data, phone calls, texts... I can sift through it later.”
“Just you do that. It’s not password-protected, then?”
“Looks like a swipe pattern,” she said, pulling off a glove. “Which is only effective if you wipe the screen after each use.” She flicked a fingertip in a Z shape and the screen lit up. “You see?”
Oh, he did see. Nothing sexier than a smart brain. And the longer she used it for techie stuff, the less time for awkward after-the-morning-after conversations. With luck, they’d get through the next few hours with no chance to even reference their...liaison. Just so long as he didn’t go kissing her again. Self-control wasn’t his strong point but he could at least manage that, dopamine or not.
Right?
CHAPTER SIX
“NO TEXTS OR EMAILS,” Samira said, swiping and tapping too fast for Jamie to get a fix on the screen. “No stored numbers. These guys are careful.”
A white bakery van stopped in front of them, and the driver climbed out and opened up the back. Jamie leaned on the horn. Samira jumped.
“Sorry,” he said. “This woman’s decided to use Grosvenor Road as a loading zone.” He veered around it. “Bloody London drivers.”
“Jamie, if we’re going to judge on stereotypes you’d be grumpy and pasty and miserly and I’d be a kid with a bloated stomach and flies in my eyes.”
“Too long in this country and I’ll be back to pasty and grumpy quick smart, don’t you worry. And on my income, I can’t be anything but miserly.” Humor. Yes. Humor was good. You couldn’t laugh and panic at the same time.
“I’ve forgotten what an income is.”
He peered out the windscreen. “How long until you’ve finished with that phone? I have an idea.”
“I’m done. I’ve uploaded the GPS data but I won’t be able to throw it into a mapping tool until I get to a computer.”
He lowered his window. “Give it here.”
She wiped her prints off it. As a double-decker sightseeing bus passed the other way, he tossed it onto the open top level. Rain had driven the tourists downstairs.
“That should have the mercenaries driving in loops around central London.”
“Nicely done,” she said, wonder in her voice. He liked hearing wonder in a woman’s voice. He’d missed hearing wonder in a woman’s voice. He’d missed her silky voice, best heard murmuring sweet groans into his—
“How long until Putney?” she said.
“Uh. Twenty minutes. We’ll park a few blocks from your friend’s apartment and walk. Just a precaution,” he added, as her shoulders tensed. “Ninety-nine percent of precautions are unnecessary. It’s the one in a hundred that turns out to be necessary that makes the other ninety-nine worth it. But you don’t need any lessons in caution now, do you?”
He resisted pointing out MI6 headquarters across the river, a cross between a Disney castle and a tiered wedding cake.
“So...you came here because there was no one else available...?”
Shite. “Uh, well, I know the territory, so I was the obvious choice.” And the fact that Samira was the one at risk? Well, Jamie hadn’t needed time to stop and weigh things up. Some would call that his downfall. That and dopamine. “And it sounded like a bit of fun.”
“Huh.”
What did she want to hear? That he hadn’t stopped thinking about her in thirteen long months? In France she’d made it excruciatingly clear she wanted him gone, stat. And his conscious brain had told him she was dead right, for both their sakes. Other parts of him, on the other hand...
He stole a sideways glance at her. Whatever her reason for pushing him away, he’d swear indifference wasn’t it.
“A bit of fun,” she echoed. “Kidnapping a woman from a train station, hijacking an ambulance, trespassing through a hospital, impersonating a doctor, lying to police, stealing a car, drugging a man.”
“Ah, but you’re forgetting the time I saved a man’s life while under fire using a rare and controversial technique, outran a helicopter assault, engaged in hand-to-hand combat to rescue said woman, outwitted the entire Met Police force and escaped under the noses of MI5 and MI6.”
“MI6?” she said, looking around.
“Oh, we left them way behind.”
“I’m not sure if you’re brave or reckless.”
He smiled. “Definitely reckless. You, on the other hand, are brave.”
“Hardly. I’m only doing this because I have no choice.”
He shrugged. “So am I.”
“What do you mean you don’t have a choice?”
“Well, I wasn’t going to let you walk into the hands of those bastards, was I? And with guys like Flynn and Angelito—when they say they need you, you don’t say no, regardless of the cost.”
Samira was silent a minute. She pulled her glove back on. “You shouldn’t have come.”
And there it was. What had he expected? Jamie, you have to leave, she’d said that morning in France, pushing away the croissants he’d bought from the boulangerie while she’d slept in. This was a mistake.
“Samira, look, it’ll take—what?—half a day to get this evidence off to Tess? Then you’ll never have to see me again, if that’s what you want.”
“No, I didn’t mean it like that.”
Well, that was something. “Then what did you mean?”
“I mean, it’s dangerous to be here with me.”
His eyes widened. Tell me about it.
“No, I don’t mean that, either.”
Shite, how did she follow that train of thought?
“I’m not very good at explaining myself. I mean, I’m relieved you’re here. But being around me makes you a target.”
“I know that. I’m good with that.” Her gaze practically itched the side of his face.
“Did I ever tell you how my fiancé died?”
Whoa. He hadn’t seen that coming. “I don’t believe so, no.” Come to think of it, she hadn’t mentioned the guy at all in France.
“He died in a US drone strike in Somalia after I called his cell phone,” she said, quiet and precise. “That’s how Hyland’s goons tracked him down—they’d been waiting for him to break cover.”
“A military strike? How’d Hyland get away with that?”
“Tess reckons he arranged for the US to get intel that a terrorist leader was hiding out where Latif was staying, and then pressured the president to deal with it. Latif was collateral damage, officially. Of course, by then Latif had given eno
ugh information to Tess to bring down Hyland’s former company and his cronies, but the senator slipped the noose. We think Latif had been hunting evidence that could bring Hyland down, too. And now Hyland wants me gone, thinking I know too much. Which, unfortunately, I don’t.”
“Oh Jesus. I knew some of that but not all. I’m sorry. And we think Charlotte now has this evidence? She works for GCHQ, right? Why wouldn’t she just tell her bosses?”
“Maybe she did. Or maybe she doesn’t know who to trust. Governments are loath to intrude on other governments’ dirty secrets. And everyone has secrets.” She sat straighter. “Anyway, my point is that if I’m a target, you’re a target. And I already lost one...”
He looked at her, but she was facing the other way. One...?
“I don’t think I could handle losing another...” She rubbed her hands down her thighs.
Ah. So there it was—confirmation. She’d pushed him away last year not because she wasn’t into him but because she was into him. And, hey, he’d left quite enough broken hearts in the rubble of his former life. Which, all put together, made them perfectly wrong for each other.
“Oh God,” she said, planting a palm on her forehead. “That sounds selfish, doesn’t it? What I mean is... I don’t want you to die for your sake. Not just for mine.”
“Sweet of you,” he said. “And you’re worried you might get me killed?”
“Awo.”
“Awo,” he repeated, mimicking the way she sucked in the word, like a breathy gasp.
“Sorry, it means yes. I got back into the habit of saying it when I was in hiding in Ethiopia last year.”
“I remember it. I like it—it’s catching. And what’s that other word you use, for okay, no problem.”
“Eshi.”
“Eshi,” he echoed. “And so...you’re worried the same thing might happen to me?”
“Awo.”
He waited, but she volunteered no more. “I appreciate your sweet concern but I’m here because I want to be. And I’m not leaving until this is done and you’re safe. Eshi?”
“Eshi.”
“But you’re welcome to not want me to die, for purely selfish reasons.”
