How Spy I Am

by Diane Henders

  “As I said before, your primary mission is to return unscathed, as soon as possible. If at any time you’re asked to do anything that seems unsafe or unwise, I authorize and command you to lie and say it’s impossible, and/or use whatever persuasion or force you deem necessary to remove yourself from the situation. I leave the interpretation of this command entirely to your discretion.”

  Aw, shit. A no-win scenario. No matter what I did, he’d shuffle the blame off on me.

  I was opening my mouth to tell him where to stick it when he continued. “If it becomes necessary for you to carry out this order, I will take full responsibility for giving it. There will be no repercussions for you personally or professionally.”

  My mouth stayed open. After a moment, I gathered enough wits to close it.

  Stemp met my eyes. “Despite our various differences of opinion, I do trust your judgement. I hope you won’t give me reason to regret that.”

  “I’ll do my best not to.” My voice was a feeble croak.

  “Thank you. Dismissed.”

  When I stumbled back into my office to collect my things, it was deserted except for Kasper working at my desk. He rose and followed me when I headed for the door, and a glance at his expression told me he had something to report. My pulse quickened, and I studiously avoided looking at him while we walked down to the lobby.

  Kasper signed out first, and I was just scribbling my signature on the sign-out sheet when Kane emerged from the time-delay chamber. I tried not to stiffen when he caught my eye and strode over.

  “Do you want to car-pool down to Calgary?” he asked.

  Jeez, the guy was an amazing actor. You’d never know we’d just been at each other’s throats.

  I matched his noncommittal tone. “Thanks, but I’m going to take my own car. I have some errands to run in Calgary. I’ll see you at the airport.” Where I would do my very best to continue avoiding any conversation with him.

  His eyes cooled to the colour of storm clouds, but he nodded and gave me a friendly smile that looked absolutely genuine. “All right. See you then.” He strode away, no sign of tension in his posture, and I envied his self-control.

  I made myself turn toward the door, attempting the same easy gait. Kasper trailed me outside and fell into step beside me, and I tried without success to unobtrusively close my nose to his stench.

  “I’ve had contact,” he muttered.

  I stopped in my tracks, staring. “Did you see him?”

  “Keep walking,” he hissed. “Don’t be so obvious.”

  “Sorry.” I turned to stumble along the sidewalk again, my feet apparently incapable of walking while my brain whirled. “What happened? What did he tell you?”

  “We set up a meeting using the secure channel, but he must have had to abort. I didn’t see him.”

  “Same here,” I said, feeling a little better. At least I hadn’t been the only one he’d stood up. “I might not have been in the right place, though. Or maybe I missed him. I got there as soon as I could, but I might’ve been a few minutes late.”

  “You can’t just be a few minutes late, stupid! You’re not meeting your friends for a nice little cup of tea and some gossip.”

  I bit back an angry retort. Don’t burn this particular bridge.

  “Sorry. I got delayed. I waited for over an hour, but-”

  “You what?” he interrupted, frowning.

  “I waited over an hour…”

  He eyed me peevishly. “How stupid are you? If he wasn’t there at the appointed time, he obviously had to abort. You don’t hang around attracting attention.”

  “Sorry,” I said again before irritation overcame me. “Shit, stop calling me stupid! I’m not a fucking spy. How am I supposed to know what to do?”

  “You don’t have to be a spy,” he snapped. “Just use some common sense.”

  The realization that he was right and I’d probably been responsible for the failure of our meeting did nothing to improve my mood. I clenched my teeth.

  “So now what?” I ground out.

  “We wait.” He shot me another sour glance before crossing the street and walking away.

  Chapter 29

  I delayed my arrival at the Calgary airport for as long as I dared. When I finally walked away from my car, I swallowed queasy nervousness. Nothing like flying under an assumed name, going through U.S. Customs with a fake passport, and carrying a semi-illegal weapon while travelling with a man who very probably wanted to strangle me.

  I determinedly squelched the urge to hide in the trunk of my car until after the flight had departed.

  Inside the terminal, I held my face in the most benign expression I could muster and concentrated on keeping my shoulders relaxed. My act wasn’t aided by the security guard who’d glanced at me, muttered into his headset for a moment, and was now discreetly tailing me toward security. The harder I tried to stay loose, the more my joints seized up until I was certain I was walking like a robot that hadn’t seen grease in a decade.

  Finally, I couldn’t take it anymore. I ducked into the ladies’ washroom and locked myself into a cubicle. A few minutes of stretching, deep breathing, and a stern internal lecture about positive mental attitude, and I emerged ready to try again.

  In Customs, the border guard’s face betrayed nothing, but his gaze frisked me from top to toe. I was escorted politely through security as Stemp had promised, and I was relaxing fractionally when the boarding call for my flight made me realize I’d dawdled too long.

  A jog down the length of the terminal left me sweating profusely, and a few choice expletives leaked out when I spotted the empty boarding area.

  I was hurrying toward the desk when Kane rose from behind a newspaper.

  “Cutting it a little fine, aren’t you?” he muttered as we approached the impatient-looking airline clerk.

  “Sorry. Shit happened.”

  “Anything I need to know about?”

  “No.” I showed my boarding pass to the attendant and scurried down the ramp. Inside the plane, I buckled into my seat, crammed headphones into my ears, and closed my eyes, feigning deep relaxation.

  I nearly jumped out of my skin when Kane lifted my earbud out and leaned close. “We need to talk,” he murmured.

  I retrieved the earbud. “Not here, and not now.”

  “Why not? It’s uninterrupted time, and we really need to…”

  I held up a restraining hand. “I’m sorry, I’m really tired. I’ve only had a couple of hours sleep in the last few days, and I just can’t deal with this right now.”

  Not to mention I didn’t want to argue with him in the first ten minutes and then have to endure his fury all the way to Macon. I stuffed the earbud back in and kept my eyes clamped shut.

  I alternated between faking sleep and dozing fitfully for the duration of the flight segments, avoiding Kane as much as possible during our two plane changes to increasingly smaller aircraft. He apparently got the hint, and we travelled without speaking for the rest of the long, uncomfortable night.

  When we finally disembarked in Macon, I rubbed gritty eyes and tried unsuccessfully to stretch the kinks out of my back and shoulders. My small suitcase arrived at the baggage claim unscathed, and I was towing it away when Kane loomed up beside me.

  “How about some breakfast?” he asked.

  Now there was a smart man. Those were the only words in the entire English language that could have improved my mood at the moment.

  “Yes. Thanks.” When I smiled at him, I thought I saw his shoulders relax. “Where’s a good place to go?” I added.

  “I don’t know. I’ve never been here before. This was as much a revelation to me as it was to… you…” He stared down at me. “Did you know about this U.S. branch before?”

  “Didn’t I look just as surprised as everybody else in Stemp’s briefing?”

  Kane’s eyes narrowed. “Yes. I’m going to take that to mean you did know in advance. Nice acting job. Were you planning to share that kno
wledge with me at any point?”

  I sighed, feeling the tension knotting up in my shoulders. “I only found out on Saturday. And we haven’t been having a lot of friendly chats lately.”

  “No, you haven’t exactly been chatty,” he replied, and I hissed irritation through my teeth.

  “I don’t want to fight,” he said quickly. “We’re both tired and hungry. Let’s just get some breakfast.”

  After a mercifully short transaction at the rental car counter, we faced each other warily across the table in the airport café. Kane wisely said nothing until we were halfway through our breakfast.

  “Arlene,” he began.

  “Don’t call me that.”

  He sighed and leaned across the table, speaking softly. “You know I have to.”

  “Not when there’s nobody listening.”

  “It’s your cover identity. You need to respond to it as if it was your own name.”

  I leaned forward to match his quiet tones. “Yeah, but if it comes down to a life-or-death situation, I hope you’ll yell something more useful than my name. Like ‘Duck!’ or ‘Run!’ or something.”

  The corner of his mouth quirked up in a not-very-humorous smile. “Very funny.”

  “I’m not trying to be funny.”

  He regarded me for a few moments, his cop face firmly in place. “Look,” he said finally. “We need to be able to work together for the next few days. Can we just put aside our differences and do that?”

  I forked a fried potato with violent intent. “I don’t have any quarrel with you. You’re the one who’s been going all psycho-boyfriend on me. Treat me like you usually do, and everything will be fine.”

  Kane stiffened. “I apologize for my unprofessional behaviour,” he said, the words clipped off as if by razor-sharp shears. “You can be assured it won’t happen again.”

  I briefly considered whether to stick my fork in his eye or my own before deciding neither was a viable option. I settled for a weary sigh.

  “See, that’s exactly what I mean. I can’t say or do anything without you taking it the wrong way. I just want to go back to the way we were.”

  He let out a long sigh of his own, scrubbing his hand over the lines of fatigue on his face. When he met my eyes, the cop face was gone.

  “I don’t know if I can do that,” he said quietly.

  “You’re a spy. Just fake it for a few days.”

  He winced. “You really know how to hurt a guy, don’t you?”

  I reached across to touch his hand. “I wasn’t trying to hurt you. Not earlier, and not now.” When he looked down at my hand, I snatched it back, remembering his reaction in the sim. “Sorry,” I added.

  Kane reached across to enclose my hand gently in his. “No, I’m sorry,” he said. “We really need to talk.”

  He must have read my impulse to leap up from the table and run screaming, because he released my hand and added, “Later, when we’re not so tired and we have time. I want to check into our motel and wash up, and then we have to get to the site.”

  I drew in a surreptitious breath of relief when he signalled the waitress for the bill. After he’d handed over his credit card, he gave me a half-smile. “How would it be if I take you out for a nice dinner tonight? You can have a glass of wine and relax before…”

  He trailed off.

  “Before you start interrogating me,” I finished. “Yeah, sure, you’re Mr. Generous when you’re on the department expense account.”

  For a moment I thought I’d really put my foot in it, but then his sexy laugh lines crinkled in his first real smile.

  “Just for that, I’ll take you out for a fast-food burger,” he growled.

  “No, please, not that!” I begged in a fair approximation of abject terror. “I’ll talk! I’ll talk!”

  He chuckled. “That’s more like it.”

  Five minutes in the motel room was all it took. I grabbed my suitcase and marched out to pound on the door to Kane’s room.

  He jerked it open to frown down at me, and I nearly lost my train of thought at the sight of all his shirtless glory. Fortunately, sheer disgust kept my mind focused enough to limit me to a single gratifying glance.

  “I’m not staying here.”

  His frown deepened. “Why not?”

  “It’s fucking disgusting. It’s worse than disgusting, it’s, it’s…” I couldn’t summon an adequate word. “There’s hair in my bathtub. There’s a used condom under the sheets. And somebody wiped their ass with one of the towels. Either we go somewhere else, or I sleep in the car.”

  “This motel is the only one that’s close to our site. Just call the office. They probably just forgot to make up your room-”

  “The bed was made. The towels were folded. I’m out of here.”

  Kane blew out a breath and scrubbed his hand through his short hair, mussing it. I tried not to notice how incredibly sexy he looked half-dressed and rumpled and unshaven, but by the time I dragged my attention back to what he was saying, I wasn’t sure I’d caught it all.

  “…we’ll have to deal with it later,” he was saying. “We have to get to the site. Come in. I’m just going to wash up. I’ll be ready in a minute.”

  When he turned away, I gulped at the sight of his gun tucked into the waistband of his jeans in the middle of his back. Something about that shiny, dangerous metal against his naked skin…

  The powerful muscles rippled across his broad back as he pulled it out and disappeared into the bathroom. I heard water running for a while, followed by grunt that sounded like surprise.

  A moment later he stepped out of the bathroom clean-shaven, a sheen of moisture highlighting those delicious muscles. “You’re right,” he said. “We’re definitely going somewhere else.”

  I grimaced sympathy. “Somebody mistake your towels for toilet paper, too?”

  “No, mine just had hair in it.” He grabbed the balled-up T-shirt he’d worn earlier and used it as a makeshift towel. “We don’t have time to wrangle with them over it right now. I’ll deal with it when we get back.”

  He pulled on a fresh shirt, cutting short my enjoyment of the view, and moments later we were packed and driving.

  Chapter 30

  Our in-car GPS guided us to a low nondescript building. When we entered a modest lobby and approached the reception desk, the young blonde receptionist gave us a perky smile.

  “Oh, now, y’all are here to see Dr. Kraus?” she inquired in a soft drawl. When we nodded acquiescence and showed our ID, she waved it away with a gracious gesture and rose. “I’m Candy Parsons, and if y’all need anything, you just holler. Follow me, and Dr. Kraus’ll be right with y’all.”

  Candy got us settled in a small meeting room, and Kane accepted her offer of coffee. I declined beverages. I was too nervous for caffeine, and a full bladder seemed like a bad idea if I was going into the network for any length of time.

  Kane drank his coffee in silence while I held myself still in my chair, willing away the urge to squirm. What was their network going to be like? What if I couldn’t get in? Or worse, what if getting out triggered one of my violent pain reactions?

  I gnawed the inside of my cheek as another thought occurred to me. What kind of network access fobs did they use? Stemp hadn’t mentioned bringing our secret network key. Did Kane have it with him, or was I supposed to use whatever they used here…?

  My speculations were cut short when Sam appeared in the doorway. His jolly twinkle was nowhere to be seen, and his normally ruddy cheeks looked sallow. He sank into a chair with a sigh and surveyed us across the table. “You look as tired as I feel,” he said.

  “Gee, thanks, Sam. Flattery will get you everywhere,” I teased, and was rewarded with a smile. “How’s it going?” I added. “Any progress?”

  “No.” He leaned his elbows on the table to rub his eyes. “I hope you’ll be able to help.”

  “I’ll try, but I really don’t see how I can,” I said. “What do you want me to do?”


  “We just want you to see if you can communicate with Betty inside the network. She won’t respond to anybody else, but we’re hoping maybe another super-user might be able to get through to her.”

  My fatigue-sodden brain ground slowly into gear.

  Betty. From Macon.

  “Betty… Hooper?” I asked. When Sam nodded, I sat up indignantly. “Why the hell didn’t you tell me about the U.S. program and who Betty Hooper was when I thought I was going crazy last week?”

  Sam stiffened before leaning back slowly, combing his fingers through his beard. “I… uh, couldn’t,” he mumbled in the general direction of the table. “Orders. Need to know. I’m sorry.”

  I sighed and subsided. Stemp. Of course. The man wouldn’t admit he breathed if it wasn’t on somebody’s ‘need to know’ list.

  “It’s okay, Sam, I know how that goes. So what really happened last week? Did I get tangled up in Betty’s blog, or was it something else?”

  “Betty doesn’t have a blog.”

  “So what was it, then?”

  He glanced around the room as if searching for hidden listening devices and then leaned forward over the table to whisper. “This is strictly confidential. Don’t mention it to anybody here.”

  Kane held up a hand to halt him and reached into his pocket to extract one of Sirius’s bug detectors. Sam and I sucked in simultaneous breaths when it flashed red.

  I was glancing worriedly around the room looking for potential hiding places for a bug when Kane touched my arm next to the place where the tracer had been.

  Comprehension dawned and I nodded and rose, ignoring Sam’s fearful scrutiny. Outside the conference room I extracted my change purse and tucked it into the pocket of the light jacket I’d worn. When I headed down the hall toward the reception area, Candy looked up with a smile. “Can I help you?”

  “Yes, I was wondering if there’s somewhere I can leave my jacket instead of carrying it with me.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry, I should’ve asked if I could take your coat when you came in.” She bounced to her feet and extended her hand. “I’ll put it in the closet for you. It’ll be right around the corner here when you’re ready for it.” She indicated a door behind her desk, and I thanked her and returned to the conference room.