“And Dad’s okay with all this?”
“No, not at all. In fact, it was my insistence on getting serious about my . . . line of work that really led to our split last year.”
“You told me he yanked your trust-fund access because you destroyed Sheik Al Khamal’s sailboat.”
She smiled a bit sheepishly. “Actually, I did do that. Although, technically, it was a yacht. But it was part of a case I was working on. And when Dad found out, he blew his lid.” She sighed a bit petulantly. “He still sees me as his little girl. I think he just wants me to spend my life being his cute international hostess until I find a man who can ‘handle me,’ settle down, and start giving him grandbabies.” She smiled dryly. “And you have me to thank for taking that pressure off of you.”
Darby just sat there, blinking, as it all began to sink in. Pepper was actually serious. She was telling her the truth. Holy Spy Barbie, Batman. “You know, I see you sitting there; I see your mouth moving; I hear the words, and I know it’s my baby sister saying them, but . . .” She knocked her own forehead with her knuckles. “Not computing.”
“If it’s any consolation, it’s been killing me to tell you. Even more than your estrangement with Dad, I hate you thinking I’m still this irresponsible baby. I’m not. Or, at least, I’m trying not to be.” She sighed. “I’m not some super spy or anything, Darby. I just happen to be good at getting into places and talking to people who would never in a million years suspect that maybe, just maybe, I’m more than I appear to be.” Pepper looked at her and the earnestness in her gaze made Darby’s heart hurt.
“I want, more than anything, to make you and Dad proud of me,” she said. “He’s more scared than anything. Doesn’t understand why someone with my background would want to do this. I think I finally get what you two have been going through all these years. But I’m making a difference, Dar. Maybe not a big one, not all by myself, but what I do allows the other real super spies to do their job a bit more easily.” She grinned and the old Pepper finally peeked through. “Besides, the travel is great. And they cover my expenses. I’m still a bit big on expenses, I’m afraid. But I’m working on that,” she added quickly. “Promise.”
Darby just shook her head, then laughed and squinted at her sister. “Is that really my baby sister inside this grown-up woman I’m looking at?”
“Oh, Dar.” Pepper launched herself off the chair and dragged Darby up off the love seat and into a tight bear hug. “Honest, I’m not in any real danger, no matter what Daddy will tell you. I just listen and report back.” She set Darby back, her blue eyes sparkling with barely contained excitement. “I’m good at it, Darby. And I enjoy it. A lot.”
Darby drew a deep breath, let it out slowly. “It’s a lot to take in.”
“If it helps, I can be in your corner now. With Dad. You know, the trick with him is to simply not back down. He’s going to have to deal with this. With me doing this. He just won’t have a choice.” She looked at Darby with that odd mix of terribly-young-and-impossibly-wise eyes. “That’s what you have to do. Talk to him. Make him deal with who you are. I want my family back together. We need to stick together, Darby. Because, when you get right down to it, family is all we’ve got.”
Darby found herself glancing over at Shane, and sobered a little before looking back to her sister. “I’ve recently learned that maybe there is more to life than trudging along my own path alone, just for the sake of proving I could.”
Pepper looked between her sister and Shane, and a slow smile curved her lips. She impulsively hugged Darby again, surprising a grunt out of her. “Oh, that’s such good news! And I know that will help with our talk with Daddy.” She took Darby’s hands and squeezed them.
Darby frowned. “Our talk with him? He still doesn’t know I’m here, does he?”
“No. But he’ll be here tomorrow and we should go over what we’ll say, how we’ll approach this whole thing.”
“What whole thing? Pepper?” she said warningly. “Oh. Right. The infamous ‘deal.’ So what else haven’t you told me yet?”
“Oh, gosh,” Pepper said, letting out a little laugh. “Here we are, talking about family, and I almost forgot about the real reason I’m here.”
Darby looked at Shane. “Do you see what I’ve had to put up with all these years?”
Actually, Shane was beginning to see how Darby’s little sister could be an effective operative. Naturally effervescent personality, too beautiful for her own good, and definitely a real people person. No one would have a clue. He shook his head in amazement, then shifted his attention back to Darby. What she’d said about not wanting to walk the path alone anymore still echoed in his mind. His heart had admittedly skipped a beat. Or two.
Shane grinned and found himself wondering if Darby knew how lucky she was. How lucky she and Pepper both were, to have each other. For the first time in, well, forever, he thought that maybe life’s adventures would be a lot more interesting if he could share them with someone.
“Okay, what exactly is your ‘mission,’ ” Darby asked, crooking her fingers in quotation marks around that last word.
Pepper pouted briefly. “This is serious, Darby.” She looked from Darby to Shane. “Why don’t you tell me what you two know.”
Shane nodded for Darby to go ahead. “Okay, fine. Shane discovered some private files of his grandmother’s—Alexandra Morgan, who was the CEO of—”
Pepper waved her hand. “I know who she is—was.” She glanced to Shane. “I’m sorry,” she said sincerely. “My condolences.”
“Thank you. We weren’t close.” He glanced to Darby, who continued.
“Okay, then you know about the Celentrex buyout she had set up and the technology she was buying?”
Pepper nodded.
“Well, somewhere along the way, we think Alexandra hooked up with Stefan, and the two of them apparently developed some kind of adaptation to the Celentrex technology that would allow them to do something entirely different with it. Only she kept that part of the deal hush-hush. Even from Celentrex.”
Pepper waved her hand again. “I got all that, too. Go on.”
“So then I guess you also know they want to use it for illegal gemstone mining. Shane found documentation that they’re targeting some sites in South America—” She broke off then, her eyes growing wide. “That’s why you were down there?”
Pepper nodded.
“Jesus, Pepper. And Paolo?” Darby asked. “Was he . . . what? A decoy? Was he even real?”
Her sister gave a little appreciative sigh and fanned her face. “Oh, he was real, all right. I met him at a party in Rio—I was there making contact with one of our operatives who was down there tracking Bjornsen’s contacts—and we hit it right off. He was . . . convenient, too, I’ll admit. His house was just outside the city, which was a perfect base of operations for me, and certainly a lot nicer than the place the company wanted to set me up in.” She lowered her voice. “They do take care of expenses and all, but they balk at some of the pricier places, and really, how believable would it be for me, Paul Landon’s daughter, to stay at a Marriott? I mean, honestly—”
Darby held her hand up. “So you were there working on this deal, somehow, and? . . .”
“I was keeping an eye on Bjornsen’s contacts, trying to get close enough to any one of them, to see if I could get some information on exactly where they were setting up.”
“We might be able to help you with that,” Shane said. “If you haven’t already figured it out.”
Pepper swung her gaze to his. “You know where they’re going to mine? Precise locations?”
“Alexandra had copies of some engineering reports in her private files that might be of some use. I can get them for you.”
“Excellent,” she said, beaming as she looked between him and Darby. “You know, you guys are amazing. I had no idea you’d be so good at this. In fact, I didn’t think you’d get involved at all. But then, what were the chances you’d hit it off wit
h Shane, or find out about the mining deal? Honest, I swear I’d never have put you into something like this if I had any idea you could get involved.”
“Believe me, we didn’t plan on it, either,” Darby said. “But it’s not like we’ve done all that much. We suspect that Stefan is involved in something shady, but we don’t know what the hell he’s really doing here, or, for that matter, what in the hell to do about it. So, given what we know now, I say we simply tell Dad what’s really going on, he calls up his Interpol buddies, and they can deal with Stefan. And we’re out of it.”
Pepper looked at them both, switching back to Spy Barbie mode. “Tell me, exactly what has he been doing? Other than partying and waiting for Dad to show up? Anything suspicious?”
“Well, from what little you told me,” Darby said, sending a pointed look her sister’s way, “I knew he was here to talk to Dad about gemstones. At the same time, Shane’s been taking meetings all week on the proposed buyout, and when he dug into Alexandra’s private files, he realized something else was going on. So he hired a private firm to do some more digging. At the same time, he, uh, also had the firm do some digging on Stefan. I’d been feeling a bit weird about him and—”
“And I was being a typical guy with—what did you call it?” Shane asked Darby with a grin. “Testosterone poisoning?” Shane looked at Pepper. “We both felt something wasn’t right about the guy, but we had no idea he was connected to Alexandra until the firm I used dug up some messages he’d recently received. One of which was about okaying a site in Brazil and mentioned the type of gemstones they found there. Both of which matched a little too closely to what I’d discovered in Alexandra’s files. All circumstantial, but it was beginning to add up.”
Darby picked up the explanation. “We were waiting on another report, but in the meantime, Shane managed to overhear a phone call Stefan got here, and he mentioned the buyout, amongst other things. So now we figure he has to be involved, and with Alexandra suddenly out of the picture before the buyout can go through, he’s still trying to rig something up. Maybe he has the adaptation, but he needs to get his hands on the Celentrex technology, or at least something that will let him re-create it himself, to keep the operation going. Who knows. He’s had several private meetings since he’s gotten into town, and the phone conversation Shane overheard was pretty intense.”
Shane picked up the thread. “From what I heard, it sounds like he’s supposed to deliver something to the guy on the other end, and soon. He talked about not caring if the buyout went through, then said he had funding, which we figured was where your father comes in. What we didn’t understand was why, when Alexandra died, he didn’t just approach me directly. So we assume this deal is shady all the way around, which explains why my grandmother had this stuff buried in her private files to begin with.”
Pepper sighed. “Well. You’re right. It’s definitely shady. I guess I should tell you that several agencies have been tracking Stefan for some time—” She lifted a hand to stop Darby’s question. “He’s been involved on the fringes of a number of deals that were less than kosher, but we’ve never been able to tie him directly to any of them. Then we got wind of the Celentrex deal and his private dealings with your grandmother.” She looked to Shane. “When she died, we—well, we thought we might lose him again. But there was continued activity in Brazil, so we hoped he was still trying to make something happen. Only we didn’t know who he was working with here, or how he planned to get the original research. Dad was called in, and he insinuated himself into position as his investor, to get close enough to be inside the deal itself.” She gave Shane an apologetic look. “We initially suspected you might be involved, but our latest intel points in another direction. However, we decided to still have the meeting here, for simplicity’s sake. I’m sorry.”
“No offense taken,” Shane said. “I think he realized I’m not money-motivated and not worth the risk that I’d blow the whistle.”
“Did anything else happen yesterday?” Pepper asked. “Besides the phone call?”
“Not yesterday. We made sure he was with someone all day. He went to his room alone last night, but he did leave early this morning for a meeting.” Shane didn’t dare look at Darby. He was having a hard enough time keeping the color from creeping into his own cheeks. “Which I was going to try and follow, but I, uh, didn’t get down there in time.”
Pepper looked at Darby and Shane and a deep smile curved her lips. “Yes, well, totally understandable.”
Darby shot them both a look, but couldn’t quite keep the smile from curving her lips when her gaze met Shane’s. They both looked at Pepper and shrugged, not as guiltily, perhaps, as they should have.
“That’s pretty much all we know,” Shane said. “Darby was going to keep Stefan busy today while we waited for the new report to come in. I wasn’t sure what else to do. We were going to try and get to your dad when he arrived, feel him out, tell him what we’d discovered. We thought maybe we could get him to stall a little on the deal. I plan to publicly announce on Monday that Morgan Industries is going ahead with the buyout. Maybe that would end his scheme altogether.” He leaned back on the couch and rubbed Darby’s shoulder. “That’s all we got.”
Pepper just nodded. “Like I said, I’m really impressed.”
Darby leaned forward. “So why don’t you tell us what we don’t know? I think we deserve that much, don’t you?”
Pepper paused for a moment, then finally sighed and added, “I’m not authorized to tell you this, but when I asked permission, I had no idea you two were already as involved as you were.” She looked earnestly at Darby. “I feel bad about that, but I had no way of knowing you’d get caught up in this. Things started to finally come together in Sao Tempre, right when Dad got hung up in Belgium. He was there tracking the people Stefan and Alexandra had planned to unload the raw mined material on. He asked me to fill in for him here, only I knew I couldn’t leave just when things were finally happening.” She looked to Darby. “Honest, I figured you’d take him to the party and just hang out. I would never have knowingly put you in danger.”
Shane tensed, even as Darby said, “Danger?”
A guilty flush tinged Pepper’s cheeks. “Okay, this is the part that I’m not cleared to tell, so you can’t say anything. But seeing as you’re involved, I think you have a need to know.” She blew out a sigh, then scooted closer. “You wanted to know what was illegal about this setup. Well, Stefan has access to some sites in South America that aren’t exactly legal to drill in, or do anything in, for that matter. Sacred grounds that are maintained by the government, like a national park would be here. Except some of these are deep in the jungle, ruins mostly, and not exactly tourist attractions. There are factions the government hires to patrol the land, keeping artifact-hunters from stealing anything, and—”
“Factions?” Shane asked. “I’m guessing these guys aren’t national guardsmen or anything.”
“Hardly,” Pepper said. “More like drug-cartel thugs. But they keep the ruins safe from looting, and the government looks the other way as to what other business they might be conducting in the area. It can get a bit hairy at times, but they make it work. Most of the time.”
“And you’re telling me my grandmother decided to dig for gemstones right in the middle of all that?” Shane asked. The idea boggled him. His grandmother might have been focused on expanding the Morgan family coffers, and he could even buy the idea that she’d stretch the boundaries of moral ambiguity, if the payoff was big enough. But this? He shook his head. “This doesn’t sound like something she’d do. She liked to be in control of things, down to the last detail. And I don’t think she’d have risked the family reputation with something quite this far off the radar.”
“Well, maybe she didn’t know what she was getting into until it was too late.”
Shane slumped back against the couch, not sure what to think, or how to feel. Alexandra . . . vulnerable? It just didn’t jibe.
“As fo
r the selected sites . . . we’ve long suspected Stefan has some kind of connection to Santoriaga. Drug lord,” Pepper added when they both frowned. “As far as we can tell, the land controlled by Santoriaga is rich in gemstones. Regular technology would destroy the land in a way that would be hard to hide from government eyes, but this new adaptation would allow them to go in and drill in a way that leaves the surrounding area relatively undisturbed. We think Stefan worked a deal with Santoriaga, a percentage of the profits in exchange for drilling rights and protection. He’s had a crew doing the preliminary site work for the past several months, only we haven’t been able to get close enough to pinpoint the exact locations.”
Shane blew out a heavy sigh. “Then Alexandra dies, and leaves him and his very nasty cohorts hanging. I’m guessing we now know just who he was talking to.”
Pepper grew very serious. “Yeah. And it’s gotten worse. We got word from one of our guys in the field down there that it looks like Santoriaga ran out of patience and took Stefan’s men hostage. That’s why I’m here early. If Stefan took that call yesterday, then he probably knows the stakes have been raised. And that’s going to make him unpredictable. We don’t know who he’s in contact with here, or what his possible alternate deal is, to get his hands on the technology. We just didn’t want him taking off when things looked to be heading south fast.”
Shane raked his fingers through his hair. “I still can’t believe Alexandra got involved in all this.”
Darby looked worried and took his hand in hers. “Maybe Pepper is right, and your grandmother didn’t know it wasn’t on the up-and-up until it was too late.”
Pepper nodded. “There’s also the possibility she didn’t have a choice. Someone steered her to the fact that the technology couldbe adapted in the first place. Maybe he had something on her. I wouldn’t put it past him. Like I said, we’ve been tracking him for a long time.”
The Cinderella Rules Page 28
