by Elise Noble
Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Epilogue
What's Coming Next?
Want to Stalk Me?
End of Book Stuff
Other Books by Elise Noble
SPHERE
Elise Noble
Published by Undercover Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2020 Elise Noble
v3
ISBN: 978-1-912888-21-4
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organisations, places, events, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the author.
Edited by Nikki Mentges
Cover design by Elise Noble
www.undercover-publishing.com
www.elise-noble.com
Expect the unexpected.
And whenever possible, be the unexpected.
CHAPTER 1
I CHECKED MY phone for the tenth time in as many minutes, willing it to ring. A hostage negotiation, a shoot-out, a sting operation, a last-minute assassination… Anything would have been better than what Bradley had planned for me today.
Speak of the devil. He appeared in my bedroom doorway, bouncing on his toes.
“Are you ready? Why aren’t you ready?” He put his hands on his hips. “Emmy, you’re still in your pyjamas.”
“Technically, these aren’t pyjamas.”
I always slept in a pair of boxer shorts and an oversized T-shirt, borrowed from my husband’s closet. In my world, comfort came before style.
“Stop being facetious and hurry up. Everyone else is ready and raring to go.”
Really? When I got into the hallway—now dressed under protest—Ana was sitting on one couch and Dan, Mack, and Carmen were on the other, all looking as if they were waiting to head to the gas chamber rather than take a fun-packed trip to Virginia’s newest family attraction. Honestly, I’d seen more enthusiasm amongst prisoners of war, and I couldn’t blame the girls. SciPark was billed as “education meets entertainment,” but to me, it felt like the fine line between purgatory and full-on hell. Hellgatory. Was that a thing? Only the kids seemed excited—Trick, Vine, Race, Josh, and Tabby—although I suspected Tabby would have been just as happy if Ana had taken her out the back and taught her how to shoot a crossbow. The kid was only three years old, and though I’d never admit it to my sister, Tabby made me very nervous.
“I still don’t understand why I have to go,” Mack said, clutching her laptop bag like a shield. “None of these children are mine.”
Bradley gave an overly theatrical sigh. “You want to be a mother, don’t you?”
“Someday.”
“Well, think of this as practice.”
I raised my hand. “I don’t want to be a mother, ever, so can I be excused?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Somebody needs to stop Ana from murdering Bradley,” Dan muttered. “And that somebody is you.”
“Remember what happened when he made us go to the spa?” Carmen asked. “We had to dig a grave. I’m not digging another grave, not even Bradley’s.”
“Fine, I’ll come. But I’m not going on any of the bloody rides.”
Ana leaned in close. “Why do you let him boss you around like this? You pay his salary, don’t you?”
Good question. With an equally excellent answer.
“Because he’s watched FernGully fifty times in the last fortnight, and he wants to plant a replica rainforest in the backyard.”
“A rainforest? How can he? We’re in Virginia. It’s too cold.”
“He also wants to build a giant greenhouse to go over the top. I caught him researching habitats for marmosets, and there’s no way we’re getting monkeys. No bloody way. The parakeets around the swimming pool were bad enough, and don’t even get me started on the swans. Anyhow, SciPark’s got a living rainforest, and I’m hoping that if he realises how badly the humidity will frizz his hair, he’ll have a rethink.”
“Why don’t we all chip in and send him on a trip to Borneo instead?”
“Hmm… That’s actually not a bad idea. Guys—”
“Hurry! Hurry!” Bradley clapped his hands together. “If you don’t get a move on, there’s no point in us going at all.”
“I’m not seeing a problem with that.”
“Of course, staying here would give me more time to work on my biosphere plans…”
“Okay, okay, I’m hurrying.”
Finally, we got everyone loaded into three cars. Three cars because if we only took two, then Mack would have had to ride with Dan and she didn’t have a death wish. So Dan took Race—her newly adopted son—plus his two buddies, I got Ana and Tabby, and Mack brought up the rear with Carmen and Josh. And Bradley, after he ran back inside to fetch his sunscreen and then again for his sun visor and yet again because his new shoes were rubbing. So much for leaving quickly.
While we were waiting, Ana glanced at her watch and sighed as Carmen tried to work out where to stuff Bradley’s enormous purse.
“I could have gone climbing after all. Sam will be back before we get out of the gates.”
Sam Quinn, Ana’s significant other, had taken a trip to Seneca Rocks with a group of his CIA buddies. A last-minute invite, so he said, and funnily enough, one that had only materialised after Bradley invited him to join us today. Ditto for Carmen’s husband and his sudden desire to audit the camera system at the California office of Blackwood Security, the company he and I co-owned along with my husband and Nick Goldman.
“I’m surprised you agreed to come in the first place,” I said.
Ana wasn’t a fan of crowds, not unless she was using them as a cover for something nefarious. Then she’d suck it up and deal.
“Bradley plays dirty. He showed Tabby a video of the big wheel, and now she wants to ride on it.” Another sigh. “I suppose it’ll be educational.”
“Let’s hope there’s a bar.”
“You’re driving.”
“Maybe I’ll make Bradley drive back.”
“You can’t. Sam and I have dinner reservations tomorrow, and if Bradley plays chauffeur, we’ll still be somewhere around Fredericksburg.”
“Fine, then I’ll have to settle for coffee.”
Bradley ran out of the house once more, and this time he was wearing sparkly pink hi-tops and matching sunglasses. I was half-surprised he hadn’t changed his hair colour as well, but that was still turquoise.
“Can we go now?” I yelled out of the Porsche’s window. I’d borrowed my husband’s Cayenne. He didn’t need it today because when Bradley suggested he might like to tag along, he’d helicoptered to the airfield and flown to Barcelona. Coward. Now the Porsche had a custom-made hot-pink leather baby seat installed in the back—courtesy of Bradley, of course—and I had a good mind to leave it there as a punishment.
“Yes, but if you’re going to be snippy, then I’ll ride with Mack.”
Ana settled back in her seat and adjusted her aviators. “Good. Snippiness rules.”
In the rear-view mirror, Tabby mimicked her mother with her
own Babiators, and I suppressed a shudder. I loved my niece, don’t get me wrong, but…yeah. She wasn’t a normal child. Kids scared me, I freely admitted that, but Tabby was a weird cross between a mini mercenary and a toddler, and I was never quite sure how to handle her.
Half of my little group of friends had kids now. I had a feeling Mack would soon join the club as well. That would leave me and Sofia as the only two non-moms, but Sofia had just connected with her long-lost brother, and he lived overseas, so she was travelling quite a bit. Which left me a little…not lonely, exactly, but I felt as if people were moving on without me. We’d always be there for each other, of that I was certain, and of course I was happy that they were happy, but still… Perhaps that was the real reason I was going today. I didn’t want to get left behind while their lives changed for good.
CHAPTER 2
AT THE PARK’S main gate, a bored-looking teenager in a SciPark baseball cap charged us a fortune, then issued us with paper maps.
“There’s an app too,” he told us in a monotone speech he’d obviously given a thousand times. “Your Wi-Fi password’s printed on your ticket, and the audio tour’s available in thirteen different languages.”
Thirteen? Couldn’t they have added one more to avoid bad luck? If I’d known what was to come, perhaps I’d have taken that as a sign. But since I’d left my crystal ball at home, I trailed into the park oblivious, hanging back as Bradley bounded on ahead in a silver jumpsuit that probably cost me a thousand bucks.
According to the map, the park was laid out in a series of concentric circles, nine of them, kind of like Dante’s Inferno except the middle was dominated by a giant silver sphere rather than a lake of ice. There were over six hundred exhibits. No way would we get through everything in one day, but I wasn’t about to mention that to Bradley because he’d probably check us into a hotel and then we’d be stuck there forever.
“What do you want to do first, guys?” Dan asked, her question aimed at her three boys. When she adopted ten-year-old Race not so long ago, his two older buddies had come as part of the package. Nobody minded. Before the trio crossed paths with Blackwood, they’d spent most of their time getting into trouble on the streets, the result of parents who just didn’t care. Now Trick, the eldest at fifteen, spent most of his spare time hanging out in Dan’s boyfriend’s recording studio, Vine had recently discovered baseball, and Race—or Caleb if one was to use his actual name, which Dan tended to—liked to come to the office. We’d given him a desk next to Dan’s, and he must have had the best grades in school considering the amount of help he got with his homework. They’d turned out to be good kids, even if their morals could be questionable at times. None of us were in a position to judge them for that. So far today, they’d been taking care of Josh, even though he was seven years old and probably ruined their street cred.
Dan was the only one of us who looked vaguely happy to be at SciPark. Probably because the three older boys could fend for themselves, meaning she was ready to hit the non-alcoholic cocktails at ten in the morning. On any other day, Carmen might have been okay with the trip as well, but her new rifle had been delivered yesterday, and I knew what she’d rather be doing.
“Can we see the dinosaurs?” Josh asked, and everyone else shrugged.
Jurassic Park it wasn’t. Live dinosaurs would have been an interesting spectacle, but these were all made of plastic and the ones that did move just jerked around on the spot while roars sounded through loudspeakers.
“How do they know what dinosaurs sounded like?” Race asked.
Good question, and I had no idea of the answer. It wasn’t something I needed to know in my line of work. Perhaps if I ever had to go undercover as a palaeontologist… Thankfully, Mack and Dr. Google were on the case.
“Okay, so nobody actually does know what dinosaurs sounded like. Scientists just guess based on the shape of their nasal and throat passages.” She scrolled down farther on her tablet. “In fact, they think a T-Rex made a low rumble, and birds honked rather than sang.”
“Then why don’t these pterodactyls honk?”
“Do you know how many guns there are in America?” I asked. “If we had to put up with constant honking, somebody would shoot the things.”
“But the sign at the entrance said no guns are allowed inside the park?”
Ah, such innocence. I glanced at Ana, and she smirked back. Dan obviously hadn’t corrupted her son completely yet.
“Why don’t we move on to the rainforest?”
“Wait, where’s Josh?” Carmen reappeared with a bag of donuts, and boy did I need the carbs.
“Bradley took him to the gift shop.”
“And you let him?”
“I didn’t think it would hurt. Neither of them’ll want to carry stuff around the park all day.”
“You didn’t think it would hurt?” Carmen stared daggers at me. “Have you met Bradley?”
Five minutes later, I found myself lugging two bags of assorted shite towards the rainforest as Josh waddled along beside Carmen in his dinosaur costume. Every so often, Carmen gave me a sideways glare, and worse, Race had told Josh about the honking and he’d decided to try it out. And people wondered why I didn’t want kids? If this carried on, I might be tempted to use the Walther CCP nestled in the small of my back on myself.
“Isn’t this fun?” Bradley asked.
“Do you want an honest answer to that?”
He ignored me completely. “I loooove amusement parks. Next time, we should come for the whole weekend.”
Next time, I’d be joining Black in Barcelona. Or perhaps I could fly home to London and visit a few old friends? Bradley could take his chances with Ana. Even the debacle at the health farm had been more fun than this.
Although I had to admit that the rainforest was cooler than I thought it would be, and do you know why? Fake rainforests in Virginia didn’t have mosquitos. Or poisonous spiders or bullet ants or giant centipedes. The caterpillars were safely locked up in a glass case, as were the titan beetles, and nobody needed to worry about getting dive-bombed by bees. As with the dinosaur collection, the background noises were piped in, albeit a little more realistic this time.
The long, curved glasshouse took up half of the park’s second ring, heated by solar panels that doubled as part of the “Manmade Miracles” exhibit in the next circle. The boys clambered up a wooden staircase to view the “forest” from above while the rest of us meandered along a brick path that wound through the trees below. Having visited the jungle many, many times before, I’d smoothed my hair down with plenty of anti-frizz serum and worn it in a French plait. The other girls had followed suit with sensible styles and plenty of bobby pins. Bradley, on the other hand, looked like the silver-and-turquoise love child of a Q-tip and a cotton candy machine by the time we got to the animal section, and none of us dared to look at each other because we’d have collapsed into giggles.
A girl holding a tame monkey in a lime-green harness seemed to be having a similar reaction. She approached with a smile, but every few seconds, her gaze strayed to Bradley’s hair and the corners of her mouth twitched.
“Would you like to meet Jimbo?” she asked. “He’s a capuchin monkey. Please don’t touch him, though.”
“Should he be out with people like that?” Dan asked. “This isn’t a circus.”
“He only comes out for fifteen minutes twice a day,” the girl explained. “The rest of the time, he lives with his friends in the enclosure over there. In an ideal world, the animals here wouldn’t be in captivity, but they’ve all been rescued from bad situations and none of them are suitable for release. Jimbo belonged to a pop star until the guy got sick of having to change his diaper and dumped him at a pseudo-sanctuary.”
“A pseudo-sanctuary?”
“One that claims to be a rescue operation, but really they’re breeding the animals and selling them. Jimbo’s cage hadn’t been cleaned for months, and he was just sitting in the corner, rocking. He gets lonely.” The
girl offered Jimbo a finger, and he held onto it. “See? He seems to identify more with humans than with other monkeys. We tried all sorts of enrichment ideas, but he’d just stand at the bars trying to touch people the whole day. So we’re experimenting with outings, and now he seems to be happier.”
I guess I understood that. After all, I had a pet jaguar at home. When I first rescued Kitty from a drug lord, I’d consulted various experts, and the final consensus was that he couldn’t go back to the Amazon. And also he thought he was a dog. We’d built him a huge cat house at the back of Riverley Hall, but he spent most of his time curled up in the kitchen with my elderly Doberman.
Bradley lined up for a selfie, but the shriek when he activated the front-facing camera on his iPhone made everyone in the glasshouse freeze. Everyone except Jimbo, that was. The monkey jerked the leash out of the keeper’s hands, made a grab for Bradley’s sunglasses, and ran straight to the nearest tree.
On second thoughts, I preferred the venomous centipedes.
“I’m so sorry!” the keeper gasped. “Jimbo’s never done anything like this before.”
Of course he hadn’t, but he’d also never met Bradley. And I had to hand it to the monkey—he looked good in Gucci.
Bradley made a grab for the leash, missed, then stumbled backwards with his arms windmilling as a caiman leapt towards the glass at the front of its tank and snapped. Jimbo bolted into the upper branches as Bradley landed in something squishy. Please say that was just mud. If it was monkey poop, he could get a cab back home.
Carmen snapped a picture, laughing, and Bradley turned on her, all indignant.
“Don’t just stand there taking photos! Do something.”
“What do you want me to do? Shoot it down?”
Everybody within earshot gasped, and Carmen raised her hands.
“I was joking.”
I mostly believed that. Mostly.
Jimbo leapt to the next tree, swung on a vine Tarzan-style, and landed on the railing of the upper walkway. A group of people who’d been watching the drama unfold screamed and scattered, but not before Jimbo managed to grab a baseball cap and a gold necklace to go with his shades. I was going to hazard a wild guess and say his previous owner had been a rapper rather than a pop star.
