In Too Deep: A Romantic Suspense Novel

by Landish, Lauren

  Humming, I gave him a kiss on the cheek. "I don't know about that. Last night I felt ready to take on a lion barehanded afterward."

  Cam laughed softly and gave me a light swat on my backside, making me yelp. I didn't want to sit down, but at the same time, I relished in the ache, feeling stronger and more powerful than I'd ever felt before. While my 'inner workings' felt fine that morning, my actual butt cheeks were deliciously bruised from the pounding of Cam's hips into mine the night before. "Okay, point taken. Still mortal. So back to the nefarious network of nasty nincompoops."

  "Alliteration? Maybe you should be teaching English and not me," Cam chuckled, turning back. "Okay, so with Pinzetti's family taken out of the loop, we're left with a couple of other networks. I looked at his call log after I'd shut down his system before to make my next choice, and eliminated this particular network. It's his EPA branch, and while there are some inevitable connections to the other parts of the web, I don't consider them a major player, except for a few people who show up in other branches multiple times. So here."

  Another two clicks of his mouse and another branch disappeared. We were left with one main branch that then split off and made up most of the rest of the screen. "That's still over half the names on the screen. Who are these guys?"

  "They're dark matter," Cam said simply. "They're the people that I've been trying to stop, and trying to protect Albertine against. I'll be honest, this is a bigger network than even I imagined. Some of these people, I've known about them for years, and they almost never work together."

  "Wars and politics make strange bedfellows," I commented. "I read that once."

  "Mid 19th century, but it's been repeated by a lot of people since," Cam said, "and in this case, it's pretty accurate. So the question to determine is, which branch of this tree needs pruning?"

  "Why not spank them all?" I asked. "They all were involved on some level."

  Cam thought about it, shaking his head. "I'm worried that if we do, they're going to fight back without restraint."

  I thought about it, then shook my head. "Then crush them. Any sort of sick asshole who would be willing to even do business with a man like Pinzetti, they deserve it.”

  Cam looked like he was about to object, and I held up my hand. "I know what you're going to say. These people have power, and while they may not have the public faces of power, they are, what did you call them? The puppet masters? But people aren't puppets. You've been involved with these people for too long, and as wonderful a man as you are, you still have taken on a bit of their cynicism. But let me ask you, am I capable of taking care of myself?" "Of course," Cam said immediately. "You're just as smart and capable as I am. You didn't have any training, but you have good instincts. You reacted perfectly when Pinzetti attacked. You secured the laptop and trusted me to do what I needed to do."

  "And I'm no different than anyone else," I said softly, sitting on his lap and stroking his face. "Yet you've trusted me with not only your love but your secrets and your mission. If I can be trusted with this, then the rest of the world can at least be trusted enough to not destroy itself if these people are taken out.”

  I didn’t give him a chance to reply, continuing with my preaching. “Look at the state of the world over the past fifty years. Call them puppet masters, call them dark matter, whatever you want to call them, but they haven't made the world better, certainly not in my lifetime. The world's tearing itself apart. And this dark matter hasn't helped. By being in the shadows all the time, they've escaped real consequences. That's why Albertine is so scary and dangerous to them, it's the first time they've faced any sort of real threat."

  "So you think that they should be dragged out of the darkness and into the light," Cam said. He thought about it, a small smile creeping out on his face. He was warming to my idea, and he nodded. "On one condition, and one condition only."

  "What's that?" I asked, curious. I doubt any woman has ever been given such a statement.

  "I want you with me," Cam said softly. "You're right, I've been hiding in the darkness for too much of my life. You've redeemed me, and you gave me love. But I need someone to guide me, to make sure that my decisions are the right ones."

  "You want this to be a partnership," I said. "But I don't know how much help I can be.”

  Cam nodded. "I obviously don't need advice on tactics. I'll give you options on how we can move against them, and you help me decide which to choose. Help me make sure that my decisions are the right ones."

  "You want me to be your conscience," I laughed. "I've been offered a lot of things in my life. But to be offered the keys to the entire world . . . that's a lot for a girl to accept."

  "And you're the only woman who I would make such an offer to," Cam said, deep meaning in his eyes. "Even more than the love of marrying me, I'm making this offer because you’re more than just the love of my life, but the true mate to my soul."

  I brushed his hair out of his eyes and kissed him softly. "Take me to bed and show me. Then we can discuss the next step to take."

  * * *

  I was doing my first shift at the pharmacy since my unexpected short vacation. I walked in and found Jay waiting for me. "Hold on," he said, waving me into his office. We walked in, and he closed the door behind us. "Have a seat."

  "If it's okay, I'd like to stand," I said, laughing ruefully. "Bruised my backside, kind of hurts to sit right now."

  Jay didn't probe any deeper, which I was grateful for. I was sporting a wonderfully pink and bruised butt, and was wearing loose jeans because I wanted as little contact between my skin and anything else as possible. Still, telling your boss that you don't want to sit down because you've had multiple bouts of epic, athletic sex with your fiancée in the past fourteen hours isn’t an appropriate conversation.

  “All right,” he said, sitting behind his desk. "I just wanted to tell you that your sacrifice over the past few days has been appreciated by everyone. I went ahead and did what you asked, so while the hours works out the same for the state boys, the pay rate is going to show them doing the overtime. So thank you again on that."

  "You're welcome," I said. "I just thought other people deserved the chance to do what they needed to do."

  "Actually, that's the other thing I wanted to talk with you about," he said. “Betty Cruddup turned in her two week's notice this morning."

  I winced but nodded in understanding. Over the days since the incident, people were really starting to think about their lives and the lives of their children. Betty was a single mother, and in order to make ends meet, she did day shifts at the hospital while picking up night and weekend shifts with Jay. "Where's she going?"

  "She said she's going to take a job in Santa Fe," Jay said. "I wouldn't be surprised if she left New Mexico actually. She came here back when her husband was doing work for the State, but she doesn't have any other family in the area. Now that they’re no longer together, I think she’s been wanting to get away for a while now. I don’t blame her.”

  "I hope she does well for herself, she seemed like a good worker," I said. "What can I do to help?"

  Jay gave me a small smile. "How'd you like to be a pharmacy manager? I know that you'd have to do more weekend shifts, but if you're willing, I can promise you that during the week there'd be no closing shifts at all, at least while school's in session.”

  I thought about it. It was an attractive offer, but I also knew that by committing to a manager's role, even a shift manager, meant that I would have obligations that I wasn't sure I'd be able to keep. Despite Cam's assurances that he'd try to keep things stable with our actions involving Albertine, the fact of the matter was, we both knew we might have to disappear at some point. Thankfully, changing identities was about as easy as updating a Facebook status with Albertine, but that didn't mean I wanted to ditch my entire identity and leave people in a lurch.

  "Let me talk with Cam about it, Jay," I said after a moment's reflection. "It's not that I'm not blown away by your offer
and consider it an honor, but I need to know his long-term plans and such before I say yes to something like this. Would you mind if I give you a call on it maybe tomorrow?"

  "Just wait until your next shift," Jay said. "It's not going to blow up before then."

  As my shift progressed, I let my mind think about our next steps. I was certain that I wanted the job, not because of the money but because I wanted to have something in my life outside of Albertine. I'd heard Cam refer to it as the bitch goddess, and I understood the phrase perfectly. Sure, there was a lot to say to being the guardian of the world, but at the same time, it was a role that was truly thankless. If Cam and I did our job with Albertine properly, nobody would ever know what we’d done. While I'm not someone who needs public adulation, I couldn't go my entire life knowing that most of my energy was chained to a doomsday laptop.

  When work was over, I went home, and found Cam in our spare bedroom, sweat glistening on his torso as he pedaled at a furious pace. "Sorry, had some extra energy that I just had to burn off," he said, slowing his pace when I came in. "How was work?"

  "Jay offered me a pharmacy manager's position," I said, appreciating the view. He was wearing just some basketball shorts, his lightly tanned skin glowing as his muscles stood out on his torso. While I couldn't see the muscles of his thighs as they were hidden by his shorts, his calves were swollen and flushed with blood from his workout, and I could feel the familiar flush of desire go through me. Maybe it was just a side effect of the tragedy, maybe it was the fact we were spending nearly as much time together now as when we were on the island together, but I was always in the mood, and I never tired of it. Sadly, my hips were still aching, and I had to turn around. "Can you put a shirt on? I’m still a bit sore, but looking at you like that makes me want to drag you into the bedroom and ride you cowgirl style for a couple of hours."

  Cam's gulp at least caused me to smile a bit, and he stopped pedaling. "Um, yeah," he replied after a moment. "Sorry. Was just trying to save on the laundry, not overly arouse you."

  He came up behind me and gave me a quick hug and peck on the cheek, letting go before we went further. "Come on, let's get some dinner and then we can discuss our options. I made some plans, and I'd like to run them by you before we go to bed. I want it all set up before school starts back on Monday."

  Chapter 34

  Cam

  Our first target was Patricia Lanstridge, who was the person that directly sent Victor Pinzetti after me. She was ruthless. I’d worked with her during my days in intelligence, and knew that she was one of those sorts of people who put every other person she met into one of three groups. I had been in the first group, considered a useful asset, someone who had skills and an outlook that aligned enough with hers that she could use you to further her own ambitions. This person was to be exploited, cajoled and used until they were no longer helpful before being discarded like they were trash.

  Another group you could fall into, one that I was probably considered now, was a threat, someone who not only had skills and abilities but who was in her way. This group of people were to be destroyed utterly and without mercy, and if someone else got hurt in doing so, tough shit. That was the way of the world to Lanstridge.

  The third group was the vast bulk of humanity, and that was what I guess could best be called 'the groundlings,' to borrow a term from Shakespearian times. They were more or less beneath her consideration, except as something to be exploited. You could have been her housekeeper, the waiter who filled her glasses at a three Michelin star restaurant, or even a member of Congress, it made no difference to her. Except for the moments when you were at least marginally useful to her, she just didn't give a damn about you.

  She was fifth generation blue blood from Stamford, Connecticut, and had grown up rubbing elbows with the highest levels of society. She'd never married, wanting to protect the family name, although from what I had learned she’d given birth to three children, all of them from what she termed 'the finest breeding stock.' In public, she was just another old-money woman approaching her sixties, but in private she was one of the ten most powerful people in North America.

  I didn't want to just wipe her off the map, that wouldn't have been helpful at all. First of all, her name wasn't the sort that got headlines on a weekly basis, but it did have enough public weight that I couldn't eliminate it. She had friends, or at least social acquaintances that would be able to swing enough weight with the courts or court of public opinion that she couldn't just disappear. Not without a reason.

  My first move was to wipe out her bank accounts, but not through normal means. First, I took about a third of her money and had it given to various charities and groups that would garner her public disfavor. Then, using access to the New York Stock Exchange, I had all of the rest of her money put into stocks that I then intentionally false-shorted. Basically, each and every transaction lost her money. It didn't take a huge manipulation, half a cent on each of the stocks, but it was enough to take away almost all of the rest of her money. Within twenty-four hours, there were multi-million dollar liens on her family's estate, her public businesses, even her classic car collection she'd inherited from her father.

  The final piece, however, was the releasing of evidence against her. Patricia, as an aristocrat, rarely had gotten her hands personally dirty with her schemes. It was beneath her, at least in her point of view. But there had been one incident, about ten years prior, that she had gotten personally involved. When one of the fathers of her children approached her about the way she was raising them, she killed him. A twenty-five caliber bullet fired in the back of the head, in fact. Somehow, the initial coroner's report listed the man's death as a suicide. Such is the power of dark matter.

  A little bit of changes through Albertine however, and evidence that had been suppressed or thought destroyed at first was brought to light. The first group to get it was CNN, but when they didn't act fast enough, I had Albertine blast the same information to the BBC and place a news report on most of the major news websites. Of course, the news report was written by me and attributed to a false name, totally untraceable, but the evidence was solid, and the Internet went wild.

  By the time football season was over, Patricia Lanstridge was arraigned for the murder of her second child's father, awaiting trial while in jail, denied bond. Her family's home had been auctioned off to cover her stock debts, while her children were at least left somewhat untouched. She'd seen far enough ahead to give them trust funds at least, and both Melina and I felt it unnecessarily dangerous to back her children into a corner as well. They were true sociopaths, and I didn't want them desperate. Still, they would have to be corralled for the rest of their lives.

  The next largest target was Monroe Cavanaugh, who’d, at first, surprised me by his appearance on the network from Pinzetti. He and Patricia Lanstridge had traditionally been at odds, but as Melina had said, politics made strange bedfellows. He was totally unknown to the public, his family having had the unfortunate fate of being African American when they first garnered influence and power back in the eighteen hundreds when Monroe's great grandfather had become the guiding influence with the patriarch of a very powerful Southern agricultural family. A stupid patriarch and a daughter who was easily seduced, the Cavanaughs grabbed the keys to power, and they'd never let go. Still, it was the post-Civil War South, and as such, they learned to pluck the strings of power truly from the shadows, a tradition that Monroe continued regardless of public perception or laws nowadays.

  The man wasn’t famous at all. In fact, while he lived in a Park Avenue high-rise, if you passed him on the street you wouldn't have been able to tell him apart from any other man in New York City. He was as anonymous as anyone else, but controlled a network that could have crushed the entire city if he wanted. Yet outside of the doorman at his high rise, I doubt anyone knew his name.

  He was young, only a year older than myself, and didn't have any family, so I was able to totally take him out. First, I dele
ted him from the world. Every database, every bank account, every trace of him in public or private records was destroyed. By the time that was done, the only thing left to prove he even existed were hard copies of his old prep school yearbook.

  Next, I slipped a report into the NYPD's database that a delusional psychopath was holed up in Monroe's apartment. A court order and a raid by the police later, and Monroe Cavanaugh, now John Doe #1578, was locked up in a high-security psych ward in up-state New York for the foreseeable future.

  The rest of the takedowns were along similar lines, each target being crushed utterly and completely. It took me most of the time before school re-opened, and by the time Sunday night rolled around, I was exhausted. I'd been sitting in front of Albertine for fourteen hours a day for the past few days, barely taking the time to eat, shower, and sometimes sleep.

  It was nine o'clock Sunday night when Melina came up behind me, rubbing my shoulders. "Come on," she said softly in my ear. "You've done enough, and you have to get some rest before school tomorrow."

  I nodded, weary. There wasn't a lot left to do, just some of the minor players who were secondary in Pinzetti's action. My eyes were watering uncontrollably, and I reminded myself for the tenth time that day that I was going to get one of those anti-glare screens for myself. "You're right, of course. All right, let me double check this last guy and then I'll shut it down for the night."

  "Good," Melina said. "Because I have massage oil and soft music ready for you. No sex tonight, just relaxation."

  I smiled, placing my hand over hers and rubbing the back of her hand tenderly. "You know just what to say," I said before kissing her hand. "But my stomach says we need to have some food first. I know it's a little late for just dinner, but what about coming with me to the store for some ice cream? Or maybe the fixings for a small sundae?"