Relic (Uncommon Enemies: An Iniquus Romantic Suspense Mystery Thriller Book 2)

by Fiona Quinn

  She sat there and said nothing. He wanted the question of Lynx out of Sophia’s thoughts, he needed to make the case for staying there. His gut told him to hang on tight; things were about to spin out of control.

  “You mentioned my colleague, Lynx. I didn’t do a good job of introducing her before. Lynx Sobado is an intelligence operative who works on another Iniquus team called Strike Force. Their commander is Striker Rheas, and he’s Lynx’s fiancé. All of us operatives work hand in hand. We often rely on each other to stay alive in some very bad situations here and overseas. You probably thought we were together because you were picking up on that closeness. I’m her brother in arms. I’d do anything for her, and she for me. But we don’t have feelings for each other. I don’t feel anything for Lynx, not like—” Brian slammed the door on that thought.

  He certainly couldn’t say “what I feel for you,” though that’s what he wanted to say. There was so much he wanted to say to her. Like, it tore at his heart that she was in so much pain. Like, he would crawl through fire for one of her smiles—to hear her laugh. Like, though he’d barely met her boys, he’d seen so much of her in their eyes that he couldn’t help but fall in love with them. Just as he’d fallen for Sophia the moment she’d walked into the bar. He’d looked up, and he knew that there she was, the woman he had been made to love.

  “It must be weird for you,” Sophia said, her finger sliding in and out of the bracelet’s clasp. “You probably thought I was a completely different person last fall. I bet you had no idea that I was such a mess. Thank you for keeping me company on my birthday. Thank you for making my birthday memorable.”

  Brian pushed back in the chair and crossed his arms over his chest. Where the heck was she going with this? “Yes, I thought it was memorable too.”

  “I want to make sure, though, that we understand each other. I consider that night to be an aberration from who and what I ordinarily am. Normally I don’t have sex outside of a committed relationship.”

  “I understood that night that sleeping with strangers wasn’t your deal.” He watched her face flame red. Brian kept his expression unaffected. He thought maybe she was trying to bait him. No. That didn’t seem right.

  “I want to make sure you understand that I don’t date. It’s nothing personal.” She glanced up at him briefly then lowered her lashes again. “It’s simply practical. I don’t know if you thought that that might be a possibility and maybe that’s why you’re going out of your way for me.” She cleared her throat then muttered, “God, that sounded egotistical.” She gathered her hair over her shoulder and twisted it around her hand.

  Lynx had told Brian that that was a self-soothing gesture. But Brian didn’t need to know that to understand Sophia was stressed.

  “Please don’t go out of your way for me. I’m not interested in a relationship of any kind. Not emotional, not intimate.” She swallowed audibly, then fixed her gaze on him steadily. “I’m saying this for your own safety—you need to keep your distance from me. You need to stay uninvolved except within the scope of your contract with my company.”

  Brian leaned forward and put his elbows on his knees. “I’m caught on the ‘for your safety’ part of that sentence. Would you care to elaborate?”

  “No. I would not. Just take it at face value.”

  “You want me to act within the scope of my job and not consider you romantically because doing so would put me at some sort of risk. Emotional risk?” He canted his head. “Physical risk?”

  “Stop pushing me.”

  “I just want more information.”

  “I’m done with this conversation.” She stood. “I was clear. There can be no misunderstanding about our association.” She tilted her head back as if she was talking to someone hovering above them. She raised her voice, but not at him. “We have a professional relationship contracted through my employer.”

  Brian looked around to see who she was communicating to. This last part was obviously not meant for him, but someone else. He wondered if someone might be listening in on comms. He’d definitely do a sweep next time she was out of the house. Brian felt a cold prickle start at his hairline and crackle its way down his body. He felt spooked. He had never been spooked before. It was an eerie, otherworldly sensation that made him think of the broken goblet and the story about the Ouija board.

  “Sophia, things have been going badly for you for so long you can’t tell up from down. You have to lean on people you trust.” And as he said it, he realized that his name was going on the long list of people who were taking her down. Though he would do everything in his power to make the landing as soft as possible. Maybe if she approached the FBI before the FBI caught her, if she showed good faith, things might be all right. She’d have to trust him though. And he didn’t have much time to make his case. It was Saturday night and Jael was flying in on Monday.

  Sophia shook her head. “I don’t want to become dependent on anyone. If I use a crutch how am I going to be strong?”

  Brian stayed seated so that she would feel like she had control. “Sophia, are you hearing yourself? Tell me one physical problem that requires a crutch that doesn’t help you get stronger quicker for using it? What if you had a strain, or a break, or a twist in your ankle? Would you be better or worse for the crutch?”

  “Better.” She pouted.

  “What are you trying to prove to yourself?”

  “It’s not what I’m trying to prove to myself, it’s what’s already been proven to me. I can’t depend on anyone. Not my parents. Not my husband. Not my children’s grandparents. Not through their own fault, but that’s how the stars lined themselves up. When I lean on a wall, the wall topples. It’s better to build up my own muscles and not lean, because when the wall goes, I go with it. I can’t play the trust game and lean on any more walls. I don’t think I can survive it.”

  “That’s a metaphor that I can understand better. It’s rational from where you’re standing. I get it. I’ve never lived through what you have. But if you changed ‘person’ to ‘team’ I think you might change your mind. There are people who want to play on your team. Nadia, Lana, me, Lynx, Thorn, Nutsbe. If you have more players on a team, then if someone fumbles—and they will—the others can step up and help you move the ball to the end zone.”

  “Are you really talking sports with me?”

  “You’re trying to deflect. In this metaphor, the ball is your boys. You have to be happy and healthy for your boys. If you stand alone, and God forbid something were to happen to you, it’s not the wall that comes tumbling down, it’s their whole world. If you’re their everything, and fate steps in, then they have nothing. Build a team for their sake.”

  Sophia’s gaze was on the photo of her children. Maybe he’d pushed too far. Her eyes were glassy with unshed tears. He held very still. If she said yes to help, he could make a case with Iniquus to bring in the FBI and make a new plan, one where she wasn’t in prison, away from her kids.

  “I’d like to have some time to myself, to sing in the shower without you hearing me.” She smiled vacantly. She stood and headed for the stairs. “Feel free to check and make sure everything is locked up so you feel comfortable about leaving. I’m going to go wash away this day and go to bed.”

  “You had another seizure.” Brian couldn’t hide his frustration.

  She kept walking slowly up the stairs like she was carrying the weight of the world. “And it’s over,” she called over her shoulder. “Really.” She stopped with her hand on the newel post. “I want you to go home, Brian.”

  Brian was standing at the bottom of the stairs looking up at her.

  “I’m not asking you to leave.”

  Relief flooded through Brian.

  “I’m telling you to.”

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Brian

  Sunday a.m.

  “How’d thing go yesterday?” Brian asked as he moved to Nutsbe’s work station and looked at what he had going on. “Do we have everything ready
for Finley and Andersson?”

  “We’re still dotting our i’s, and crossing a few t’s,” Nutsbe said. “I did background checks on Will and Janice Sheppard. He’s an accountant at an insurance company. He’s been there for fifteen years. Been in their house for twelve. Nothing on his record, not even a traffic ticket. Janice hasn’t paid taxes in two years. It looks like she’s a stay-at-home wife. Her record is clean too. Nothing sticks out on that end. Have you met them?”

  “I’ve seen them. There’s something a little off about them, I think. They always seem to be looking out their windows. Sophia says they’re paranoid because the neighborhood women keep ringing their bell and throwing rocks at their windows. To be honest, if I lived in that neighborhood, I’d be a little paranoid too.”

  “Or it’s another family with deep-seated psychological problems. I wouldn’t drink the water in that neighborhood. Just sayin’, man.” Nutsbe raised his eyebrows for emphasis. “I ran them through the system because Lynx popped in to tell us about your adventure at the gun shop. She suggested I give the Sheppards a quick look-see.”

  “I’m mostly interested in last night’s cellphone conversation with the mystery contact.”

  “Yeah, you’re going to want to hear this.” Nutsbe pulled up a file.

  “777RFT6Y6.” Sophia’s voice warbled. “This has got to stop. I can’t handle anymore.”

  “We’re almost to the finish line. You can’t stop now. Everything you’ve been working for is right within reach.”

  “I’m serious. I can’t.”

  “Before you say any more, you should know that Aml Al Ahr has been captured.”

  There was a long pause with the sound of tap water running in the background.

  “Is he dead?” Sophia whispered.

  “I hope so, for his sake,” came the woman’s reply.

  “Red, please hear me, I don’t want to be involved anymore.”

  “You’re being weak. And this is not a time for weakness. We are too close to the finish line. I need to know; did you talk to Nadia about the tablet?”

  “No, the information came to my attention by mistake. I thought the obvious, that they’d realized the truth. I informed you, and that’s the scope of my interaction. There would be no reason to talk to Nadia about it.”

  “We’ve picked up on some chatter that makes us concerned about the transaction. You have a security group, Iniquus, working with you. Did you mention this to them?”

  “How do you know about Iniquus? Of course I didn’t mention it to them or anyone else. Only you. Iniquus was assigned as protection for Peru. They have no interest in anything other than securing the site at the boiling waters and protecting Nadia and me on our travels.”

  “That’s what I needed to know.”

  The line went dead.

  Thorn had joined them while the brief recording played. “Nutsbe and I did some digging last night. Aml Al Ahr was an academic who worked with a different consortium along the same lines as AACP. They work to save artifacts in Middle Eastern war zones. He was traveling to a planning meeting in Turkey when he was captured. He’s been gone for about forty-eight hours. How did Sophia act after that phone call?”

  “Like she’d taken a blow to the ribs. She was a mess yesterday.”

  “She’s not great this morning either. She’s been crying almost since she woke up.” Nutsbe checked his watch. “About an hour and a half ago.” He dragged the small window he had up into the center of the monitor and expanded it.

  Sophia sat on the couch, wrapped in a blanket, with a box of tissues in her lap, sniffing and wiping her nose.

  Thorn shook his head at the visual. His voice was defeated when he said, “So our takeaway is that Sophia kept the information from Nadia as she was told to do.”

  “Nadia didn’t bite at her hook?” Brian asked.

  “Not as far as we can tell. We haven’t picked up on anything that looks like Nadia’s trying to broker a deal, or that she paid any attention to the information after it was sent out. Her only calls went out to her mom, her sister, some friends. She doesn’t go much of anywhere. She looks clean as a whistle.”

  “Sophia was talking to a woman named Red, that’s a new piece.” Thorn folded his hands behind his head. “Whatever is in play is about to be over with. Luckily, it’s the FBI who has to connect the dots. Solving the puzzle isn’t part of our contract, just gathering the surveillance. Good damned thing too. I want as little to do with that takedown as possible.”

  “I hear you, brother,” Nutsbe said. “If that tablet makes its way to the US, and the FBI tracks it to its new home, there’s definitely a case to be made that puts Sophia in the driver’s seat.”

  They all sat quietly for a long moment.

  “Good, then we all agree that sometimes our job fucking sucks.” Nutsbe scratched his thumb between his brows and looked over at Brian. “Talking about things that suck, yesterday, after you and Lynx took off after Sophia, I went to find that stalker-chick, Marla. She was grocery shopping and walked away from her purse for a moment. I took her wallet out to my car, photographed it, and put the wallet back, all without her being any wiser. Surprising that someone so trusting could be such a shit.”

  “Sociopaths hit high on the narcissism scale,” Thorn said. “I’m assuming she thinks she’s so in control that no one would dare do anything to her. Her guard is always down.”

  “Good that you have that info now.” Brian lifted his chin toward Nutsbe. “The magistrate was asking for defining information, social security number, date of birth, and all we had was a physical description, name, and address.”

  “You didn’t have her name. Her ID doesn’t say Marla Richards. She’s Mary Johnson from Texas. I checked her driver’s license, and it was issued a year ago, before she moved to Virginia. I sent everything, including her wallet photos, to the research techs to see what they could come up with. My services included ingratiating myself to the research hounds by bringing pastries from La Bouche. They said they’d put me at the head of the queue.”

  “Above and beyond, thanks.” Brian gave Nutsbe a fist bump. “What time are Andersson and Finley getting here?”

  “Noon. It’s hard to ask them to get up too early on a Sunday morning. Most folks call this a day of rest, you know.”

  Thorn gave a one-sided smile. “Rest is for wimps.”

  “Sophia’s on the move.” Nutsbe flipped the camera and watched her gather her purse and keys and head out the door. He panned out. “What’s wrong with this picture?”

  Thorn and Brian both looked at Sophia standing on her driveway. Even from the side view they could see she had a perplexed look on her face.

  “Check the van. Is there something wrong with the van?” Thorn asked.

  “I had the alarm set to high last night, nothing passed the infrared line.”

  “She’s in her car now, let’s see where she’s headed. Five bucks says it’s chai.” Nutsbe pulled up a spilt screen that put the van on a GPS map. Out of the neighborhood. A U-turn. Back into the neighborhood, back into her driveway. Now she was jumping out of her van, slamming the door shut, her face red with anger. She had her phone in her hand.

  “Who’s she calling?” Brian asked.

  “That’s the non-emergency police number,” Nutsbe replied, tapping his computer to turn up the volume.

  “What is the nature of your call?”

  “My name is Sophia Abadi. I recently had a restraining order taken out against my neighbor. This morning I woke up and my garden is missing. My flowers are all gone. I was driving out of my neighborhood, and I saw that all my flowers are now planted over at Marla Richards’s house. She obviously has to have broken the restraining order for her to have been on my property destroying my garden.”

  “I’ll send a police officer to your address to take a statement. Please stay at your home and wait until they get there. Do not confront the neighbor on your own. We’ll handle this.”

  “What the heck?” Tho
rn swatted Nutsbe’s arm.

  Nutsbe moved to a different camera to bring more of the property into view. “I’ve got no visual.”

  Brian thought about the beautiful garden of perennials that Sophia said had been planted to keep her mother-in-law calm after her son’s brain injury. He imagined vast stretches of dirt and holes that looked like a prairie dog colony lived there. “Have we got anything on camera to take to the police?”

  Nutsbe began scrolling through what he had. “I didn’t get any flags…”

  “The flowers were there when I left last night. They aren’t there now. Unless a ghost reached down and yanked them up by the roots, something went wrong with the perimeter,” Brian said.

  Nutsbe finished his task. “I’ve got nothing.”

  “Okay, here’s part of the problem. Stop on that image.” Brian put his finger on a bush at the top of Joe’s property. “That’s where I have a sensor, the other one is way back here. There was nowhere to put it until this tree. That angle protects the driveway and sidewalk, but cuts off the whole garden. Someone in this area, here,” Brian pointed to the spot, “wouldn’t have been picked up.”

  Nutsbe turned toward Brian. “But you installed night vision cameras. They would have recorded the heat signature of someone or something in the garden.”

  “Something?” Brian asked.

  “Not as in ghost activity, as in animal,” Nutsbe clarified.

  “Not here in the front,” Brian countered. “Her property dips down a hill. In order to get the cameras to read what was next to the house, I had to angle them in such a way that the top third of her property was cut off. Getting a camera into range, I’d have to set it on her chimney. There were always too many eyes to make that a smart move.”

  “And the lights were angled up after her disco show pissed the neighbors off,” Nutsbe said. “If they figured that out through trial and error, they’d know they were safe as long as they were crawling on all fours.”