Beating Ruby

by Camilla Monk

  That young man was March.

  I was fifteen, he was twenty-two, and unbeknownst to us both, he had set in motion a chain of events that would change our lives forever, like they say in movies.

  March left the Lions after that, and went on to fly solo, “cleaning” people on his own terms and becoming some kind of legendary criminal wildlife regulator, mostly for the Board, but sometimes also for the US government itself. I didn’t even remember him, until one fine night in October, he came knocking at my door—well, breaking in, really—for that goddamn rock . . .

  I figured I’d better not ask Alex if he knew any of this, and risk getting myself in even more trouble than I was already in.

  “What did you want me to tell you? I don’t even know that much about her. Don’t try to deflect this shit on me, Alex. I omitted a part of my life I felt it was too soon to tell you about; you made up an entire fricking life!” I snapped, getting up from my chair.

  He imitated me and walked around the desk. I stepped back until my shoulders hit the room’s locked door. “Don’t come near me. If I’m getting arrested anyway, I want to be handled by someone else. I won’t say anything to you.”

  God, I was trying to sound cool, but each intake of air betrayed my increasing panic. Alex’s brow lowered in a mask of barely controlled anger as he marched toward me. Without thinking, I raised my hands to shield myself as he lunged forward. His hands slammed hard on each side of my head against the door, trapping me. A faint whiff of his good-guy cologne floated in the air between us.

  I stood paralyzed. This man was a stranger who looked like Alex.

  “Island, I didn’t have the right to tell you!” he hissed. His eyes searched mine for a couple of seconds, and he drew a long breath through his nose. It dawned on me that the intensity I had mistaken for anger sounded in fact more like desperation. “No one knows about my job, not even Poppy. After we chatted and I offered to take you out, they screened you. It’s mandatory; we’re discouraged from engaging in relationships outside of the Agency.”

  His gaze had softened, and in spite of myself, my own animosity started to ebb; I knew what was coming.

  “The screening raised a number of red flags . . .”

  I went limp against the wall, overcome by a sense of mental exhaustion. “How do I know you’re not lying? That you weren’t just trying to bed me so you could better spy on me?”

  To my astonishment, this time his features relaxed, revealing the gentle expression I was accustomed to. His right hand left the door to caress my hair. I fought a shiver. “Look, I know this is gonna come out wrong, but—” He seemed to fight a smile. “Your file wasn’t big enough to warrant a seduction mission.”

  I pursed my lips, unable to find the right answer to this. Should I voice some degree of irritation at his clumsy statement? At the fact that in spite of my family tree, I was nothing but an ordinary girl he had picked up on Yaycupid? Or should I just be relieved that this wasn’t the storyline of Fatal and Sensual Ukrainian Nights after all?

  Still, I could spot a couple of loose ends in Alex’s version of events. “Why did you date me anyway, after the CIA screened me and said I was bad news?”

  He shifted closer, his eyes shining with warmth, a tender certainty I didn’t dare to name. “Because you were intriguing, and I liked you. I thought that whatever you were hiding, I could deal with. The more I got to know you, the more I wanted to protect you.”

  I averted my gaze. I couldn’t withstand the look in his eyes, those softly spoken words caressing me the same way his hands were. Alex was telling me exactly what I wanted—needed—to hear, and I was scared by the contradictory emotions fluttering in my chest. In that moment, I just wished I could have turned into a bubble and burst in his arms, free of all tension.

  “I’m not sure I believe you,” I finally said.

  At this, he bent down with slow, controlled movements—likely because he knew he had scared me and I was still shaken—and pressed a delicate kiss to my forehead. His lips moved to graze my ear, his voice down to a suave whisper. “And yet here I am. There are two agents waiting for you on the other side of that door, and I’m with you, baby.”

  No, I corrected him inwardly.

  Agent Morgan was with me.

  SEVEN

  The Caterpillar

  “‘How cheerfully he seems to grin,

  How neatly spread his claws,

  And welcome little fishes in

  With gently smiling jaws!’”

  —Lewis Caroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

  Alex had been right. When he opened the door, Classy-Trench-Coat Murrell and Mrs. Ponytail Di Stefano were waiting for us in the lobby with blank faces. Prince was no longer sitting at his desk, and I prayed he hadn’t been fired—or worse.

  I looked up at Alex anxiously; he placed a hand on my shoulder in response. “Island, there’s someone who wants to see you. It won’t take long. Do you mind coming with us?”

  Like I had a choice . . .

  “Yes. Can I just take my bag—”

  “It’s already been taken care of,” Di Stefano announced. She and Murrell took the lead, while Alex followed, sandwiching me on our way to a nearby elevator.

  We all stepped in, and Di Stefano pressed the Basement 2 button.

  I peeked up at Alex. “Where are we going?”

  “I can’t tell you that, but don’t worry, everything will be all right.” He patted my shoulder, and his hand lingered on my shoulder blades until it traveled down to my waist, squeezing it. That’s when I realized that my knees had turned to jelly and he was in fact supporting me.

  His hold loosened when the elevator stopped, doors sliding open onto a small lobby that led to the garage itself. Again, Murrell—whom I now realized smelled faintly of tobacco—and Di Stefano stepped out first before letting me out with Alex close behind, assuming their sandwich formation all the way to one of the black SUVs I had seen in the morning, parked next to an equally black minivan.

  We weren’t alone in the garage. Turtle-boy stood near the vehicles, next to a fortysomething blond guy who appeared to be helping him load equipment in the trunk. Gray suit, black coat—there seemed to be some sort of dress code going on around there, but Alex, with his wrinkled clothes, worn leather jacket, and unpolished boots, hadn’t gotten the memo.

  I’m not sure what came over me, but upon seeing Turtle-boy again, bits of the conversation I had witnessed in the clean room flashed in my mind, and I was swept by the irrepressible urge for a nerd in distress to reach out to another nerd.

  “I think the logs that got destroyed were the recent ones. Our old servers looked still intact,” I squeaked, avoiding Alex’s curious stare.

  I saw the older blond guy’s hand move to his pocket. I gulped.

  Turtle-boy took a step back from the trunk. “So, we could recover older simulations? See how the operation got planned?”

  “I think so. We used to store command and simulation logs on other servers during development, but we switched to those Opterons two weeks ago.”

  This was one of the many times I wished I could have shrunk like Antman and disappeared. They were all staring at me, and at least one of them was ready to shoot me. No, make that two, I thought, noticing how Di Stefano was reaching for something behind her back.

  I felt a touch on my shoulder. Alex’s. “I find it hard to believe that Thom could have missed such a crucial detail.”

  I batted his hand away and spun on my heels. “You don’t know that he did anything! Maybe it’s proof he’s innocent. Whoever did this apparently had no idea the servers were new ones!”

  His composure faltered, but not in the way you’d expect. That shadow passing over his features wasn’t so much surprise, or even anger, as a spark of excitement. He pinned me in place with a hard gaze, until his head jerked in Murrell’s direction. “She’ll ride with me.”

  Murrell answered with a nod and climbed into the SUV while Di Stefano took the wheel
.

  Turtle-boy and that blonde agent left in their turn, and I found myself alone with the “new” Alex . . . whose dominant behavior and sometimes cutting tone reminded me a lot of March’s bad side. Don’t even get me started on his very bad side; let’s just say that few people lived to tell about it. Still, riding with Alex sounded marginally better than being smuggled in a CIA van with a bunch of armed men in black.

  “Let’s go,” he said, pulling out a key from his pocket and pressing it. A beeping sound echoed in the garage, and a gray Corvette’s lights flashed twice.

  I sauntered closer to examine it. “It’s not really your car, right?”

  He unlocked the passenger door for me. “Why?”

  “It’s just—” My eyes scanned the silvery paint, the two large red stripes in the middle of the hood, and the twenty-one-inch wheels. “It looks like something straight out of Fast & Furious. I mean, this is ridiculous—there’s even a spoiler!”

  I settled in the black-and-red bucket seat. I could practically feel hair growing on my chest as I buckled up.

  Alex flashed me a smug smile. “So? Is it that bad? Girls usually like it.”

  I bristled at the implication of his words. Girls. The other girls. The ones he had shown his true self to. How many, anyway? Under my butt, I could feel the engine roaring. I stiffened. “Well, I guess I had gotten used to those dad cars you always showed up with. Shouldn’t the CIA give you something less flamboyant, though? Like a regular sedan or whatever?”

  “That’s exactly why I didn’t choose the FBI,” he said, shaking his head.

  In front of us, traffic was already pretty dense, but still manageable. Alex slipped between two cabs with practiced ease, moving fast down Broadway and toward Battery Tunnel.

  I fidgeted in my seat and peered at his profile while he drove. The peaceful expression I knew was back, as if being content were some sort of default mode for him. I found some modicum of comfort in the thought that this, at least, had been real. “Are you seriously going to pretend this is a standard vehicle for CIA agents?”

  “It’s not. Let’s call it a well-negotiated bonus.”

  “I bet you took all the options because you weren’t paying,” I huffed, secretly reveling in the feel of the seat’s black suede under my fingertips.

  “You have no idea . . .”

  My throat went dry. “Are we talking underbody lights here?”

  “Among other things.”

  Sweet Raptor Jesus . . . This was like GTA! I fought the urge to squish my nose against the window, hoping to verify his claim. I think my mind went a little into overdrive at that point, perhaps because of the stress. As we plunged—terrible choice of word—into the tunnel and got enveloped in its golden-orange hue, I thought of how it had been flooded by ninety million gallons of water during Sandy—almost a billion soda cans, people!—and then I wondered how often Murrell smoked, and if he had ever set someone on fire with his lighter like James Bond does to Sanchez at the end of License to Kill.

  “So, what were you doing in that vent?”

  My chest heaved, as if he had pulled the brake, sending the disjointed thoughts in my head to collide and shatter like glass. Alex—or rather Agent Morgan—was one sneaky asswipe. I folded my hands on my lap and looked in my mirror. Di Stefano and Murrell were following us closely. “I-I have the right to remain silent. Also I want to speak to a lawyer.”

  “You’re not under arrest, Island,” he said, as we came out of the tunnel.

  “Are you kidding me? You—” I paused upon realizing that the car had taken several turns in Red Hook and we were now somewhere on Brooklyn’s docks, surrounded by brick warehouses and a long, dilapidated concrete building that looked like an old factory. My pulse quickened. “Oh my God, this is starting to look like a bad kidnapping scenario. Am I getting cement shoes or something? Do you guys have the right to do this?”

  Alex chuckled. “Relax, baby. We just wanted a little privacy.”

  I gritted my teeth. It couldn’t be that bad. After all, less than twelve hours ago, Alex had still been the perfect boyfriend, and back in the storage room he had heavily implied he intended to remain so. Plus EMT had allowed him and his colleagues to question employees, and they seemed to be working hand in hand with our top management. Surely they wouldn’t waive procedures and waterboard me in an empty warehouse, even if they were CIA, right?

  In any case, I’d know soon; the Corvette had stopped in a deserted parking lot. With each frantic thump of my heart I thought of my mother. What would she have done in a situation like this? Perhaps flashed Alex a friendly smile of her own and asked him if he got off playing with people’s nerves in clichéd film noir settings?

  I shrank in my seat as I heard the Corvette’s doors unlock with a faint click.

  “Baby, no one is going to hurt you.”

  Shudders coursed through my body when he took my hand and stroked my palm with his thumb, the tender gesture at odds with the warning I could read in his eyes. Outside, Murrell had gotten out of his own vehicle and came to open my door. Once I was out, he stepped back, allowing Alex to escort me instead. I tensed at the feeling of his right hand brushing my waist, alertness and relief playing a constant game of tug-of-war within me whenever he got too close.

  The air was warm, the ground still humid from a light spring drizzle, and the scent of ocean and diesel floated in the air. I scanned the run-down buildings surrounding us and spotted a third car at the other end of the parking lot—some sort of long sedan. Alex guided me across the lot and toward it, his hand never leaving the small of my back—whether to comfort me or just to prevent my escape, I still wasn’t sure. Once we were close enough, it became clear that whoever awaited us did so in a Cadillac limo. Pissing all over my rights and buying luxury cars. With my tax dollars. Nice, government, nice. Alex opened the rear door and ushered me inside.

  As soon as we were seated on the black leather seat, I heard the doors lock, and my nostrils were assaulted by the strong smell of cigar smoke. Reclining in the opposite seat was a gray-haired guy smoking a cigarillo. At first he reminded me of the senior execs I’d sometimes encounter within EMT’s walls: lean build, well-cut dark suit, douchey poker face, like he was bored already. My gaze lingered on the deep creases around his mouth. That was the moment he chose to blow a fricking smoke ring, and my mind was made up: I was sitting face-to-face with Alice in Wonderland’s Caterpillar. Call me insane, but picturing the guy sitting on a giant mushroom helped me get my nerves back under control.

  Near me, Alex seemed just as relaxed, acknowledging our host with a slight duck of his head.

  The cigarillo finally left the Caterpillar’s lips. He spoke in a low baritone voice. “Miss Chaptal, I understand you are the last person who saw Thomas Roth alive.”

  Wow. Near-kidnapping, no greeting, no introductions? My jaw clenched, and as a second ring of smoke dissolved in the air, I felt the remnants of my fear give way to a growing irritation. “Good evening to you too, sir.”

  I heard Alex stifle a laugh.

  The Caterpillar’s nostrils flared. He spoke again, this time enunciating each word slowly. “When did you last access Ruby?”

  Okay, maybe I did chicken out, after all. “My last connection was yesterday night. I logged out around eight thirty. I did not attempt to access any of EMT’s servers until this morning, except for my e-mails; my phone makes automated connections to the mail server every minute.”

  He smirked. “The face of innocence. And yet I understand that you went to speak to Mr. Roth immediately after you disconnected. Any thoughts on this?”

  “I was the last one in the open space. I did see Thom before leaving, but it was nothing pressing—I just wanted to chat. He was working on Ruby, and he was worried that we wouldn’t be ready for our demo.” I swallowed. “He seemed tense, and he told me to go home. But I had no idea—”

  One of his shoulders jerked in the faintest shrug. “Why did Agent Morgan find you spying on our p
ersonnel in an air vent?”

  Okay, from where these guys stood, things looked bad, but did everybody have to make such a big deal of a tiny little . . . felony? I cleared my throat several times, looking for the best words to plead my case. “I didn’t do anything wrong. Well, I did, but I was upset by Thom’s death and also the way EMT was shutting down the entire Ruby program. And then I heard those rumors about someone cutting the power on the fifth floor at the time of Thom’s death, and how they didn’t have actual footage of him jumping . . . I just couldn’t believe it was a suicide. I wanted to learn more.”

  “That you did. Classified information, mostly, I’m afraid.”

  My fingers twisted in my lap. “I didn’t really hear anything. There was this huge rat in the vent, and I—”

  The Caterpillar dismissed my bullshit with a flick of his hand. “I’ll leave it to your boyfriend to hear this fascinating tale.” He flashed a pointed look at Alex. “I have other concerns. Tell me, Miss Chaptal.” He paused to take a long drag and blow a cloud of smoke through his nose. “When was the last time you left US soil?”

  Blood drained from my face, leaving an icy sensation underneath my skin. Did he know about March? Alex hadn’t seemed to be aware of his existence; all he had mentioned was my mother’s file. “I . . . Uh . . . My father took me to London in January. We spent a week there, together with his wife.”

  Yep, that trip to the UK three months ago was the last time I had legally left the country. My skin prickled at the memory of the fake passport March had purchased from his mobster friend Paulie to smuggle me out of the US during our hunt for the Cullinan.

  The Caterpillar appraised me with narrowed eyes for a good thirty seconds. I stole a glance at Alex. He was looking at me too, those soft cinnamon irises shining with something I couldn’t quite place, like a blend of tender amusement and pity. Inside me, something broke. He knew. He had known all along.

  The faint whisper of smoke being exhaled drew my attention back to the Caterpillar, who spoke in a suave voice. “Miss Chaptal, you’re being offered a parachute. I can only recommend you use it, as the opportunity might not present itself twice. If anything out of the ordinary happened in the past months, now is the best time to talk.”