Compromised (12 page)

T
he sun rose long before Simon did. He thought searching her room would reassure him. And it had temporarily. But again, these nagging doubts were back, invading his sleep, making him toss and turn until just before dawn.

He woke just before seven to find Mal had broken into his room again and was making coffee. “What the fuck?”

“Sorry, mate. I had a slight altercation with my coffee machine earlier. So I had to use yours.”

“Have you heard of room service?”

“I don't like people coming in my room. I don't like anyone in my room. I don't even get it serviced. Which sucks when I'm on a job for weeks at a time, but I'm not big on sharing private space with anyone.”

“But you think I am?” He hated this guy. Simon was always at a disadvantage when Garrett broke in like this, since he slept naked. He'd have to start sleeping in his clothes. Or he could booby-trap the hotel door. Yeah—that sounded more fun.

“Oh, take a pill. Anyone ever tell you how cranky you are in the morning?” He slurped his coffee and made himself at home in “his” armchair again.

“If you fucking made me a cup of coffee first, maybe I wouldn't be. Did you think of that?”

Garrett took another slurp. “Nope. Anyway, since when did you start sleeping in?”

When my ex-fiancée began screwing with my head.
“Stamov stayed with girlfriend number two for a long time.” Simon stifled a laugh. “I had to make a wrong-number call to his hotel room to wake his wife, who realized he wasn't there and called him to come home. It was the only way I figured I was getting any sleep at all. The horny bastard.”

Garrett laughed. “Ballsy move. Okay, that deserves a coffee.”

“Why don't you drink tea, anyway? I thought you Brits were all about your tea.”

He rolled his eyes. “Yeah, and it's always foggy in London.”

“Isn't it?” Ha. He'd found Garrett's weak spot.

“Fuck off.”

“God save the Queen.”

“La Marseillaise,” he replied. At Simon's frown, he said, “Oh, sorry—I thought we were just randomly naming national anthems.”

“Fuck off.”

“Okay, so now we've got our morning hard-ons for each other out of the way. We need to start making plans, right?”

Simon couldn't help but grin. Garrett was an annoying bastard but no more annoying than the others on his team. And where the fuck were they? “I need to speak to Barnum. My team was supposed to be here last week. There is something wrong with that.”

“Do you need me to leave?” Garrett asked, suddenly all business.

“Nope. He hired you. You're a part of this cluster whether you like it or not,” Simon said, sliding into his jeans, trying not to give Garrett an eyeful. He reached across the bed and opened the laptop he'd inadvertently slept next to after he'd seen the minister back to the hotel.

He clicked on the video call icon and then his boss's name. At the last minute he realized that he was video calling his boss from his bed with no shirt on. He grabbed the PC and threw it gently to Garrett just as Barnum picked up.

“Tennant? Who is that?”

Simon quickly shrugged on a T-shirt and grabbed the PC back. “Sorry, sir; that's Malone Garrett from Barracks Security.”

“Right. Good man, your boss,” he said, sounding a little tinny through the speaker.

“Thank you, sir,” Garrett said, embarrassed, shrugging at Simon from behind the computer screen.

“Do we have an ETA on my team, sir?”

“No, son. They've gotten as far as Albania. They were put on an EU watch list a couple of days ago, so we have the office there putting together fake passports. Something strange is happening there, Tennant. This has never happened before. But whatever it is, we will get them to you as soon as possible. The more barriers go up, the more determined we all are to get them to you. Understand?”

“Yessir.” None of that made his heart sing with the joys of spring.

“Have you worked out a plan yet?” Even though the line was secure, his boss was obviously still being careful.

“We should have it finalized by this evening, sir. Do you want a report…or…?”

“No. Not necessary. I'll get the details when you come back.” Typical Barnum. A good guy, a trustworthy guy, but he was all about the plausible deniability.

“Copy that, sir.” Barnum reached forward and the screen went dark.

“By this evening, huh? I guess we better get on that,” Garrett said, already starting another pot of coffee.

Simon nodded. At least it would be a busy day in which he wouldn't be thinking about Sadie. Unlike his dreams.

Sadie forced herself to get up early so that she had time to cover up any kind of appearance of a hangover. The pizza hadn't helped. She felt as if grease were pushing out of her pores.

As she went to turn the shower on, she heard a pinging that she hadn't heard before. She checked her company iPhone, her PC, and her two burner phones. None of them were beeping. And then she remembered. She'd set up the motion-detecting video camera to notify her after it had been activated. Her heart raced. Someone had been in her apartment?

She booted up her laptop and clicked on the secure-feed icon. A color video stream of her apartment came up, with her sitting on her bed looking at the video feed. She hit the
LAST ACTIVATION
button. The screen went dark and the “buffering” progress crept across the screen.

“Come on, come on, come on,” she breathed at its impossibly slow progress. Things are never as user-friendly as they seemed in the movies.

The screen changed to the recorded video, but just as the door opened and the footage showed a leg, it froze, buffering again.
Gahhh!
She resisted the temptation to throw the damn thing at the wall.

After a couple of minutes it started again, this time playing smoothly. It was Simon. Relief flooded through her, but a tension remained. It wasn't some unknown person touching her things, but it was someone who still obviously suspected her of…
oh my God
.

He was looking at her bedside table. He picked up her vibrator, and she watched as he jumped and started juggling it back into the drawer like it was a snake. She was mortified but couldn't help but giggle at his shock.

He moved around the room methodically until he sat on her bed and—what was he doing? Was he smelling her pillow? Warmth spread through her as she watched his chest heave in and out as if he couldn't get enough of her scent. Well, it was either that or he was trying to smother himself in a rather inefficient way.

Damn it—she wished she had a zoom lens on the camera. His hand was in his lap, and he looked like he was trying to rearrange himself. She pressed her hand to her mouth. But when he stood up, his erection was pretty clear.

He paused as he left, taking one last look around the room as if trying to memorize it. She was overwhelmed with warmth for him. Yes, he'd been searching her room, very efficiently. And yes, he obviously still had—correctly—doubts about her, but seeing him smell her pillow made a part of him—his non-covert-ops part—seem vulnerable to her. She wanted to see more of that part of him. More honesty, more openness. She wanted to really look in his eyes to see if what he said was real, what she felt was real. She put her PC down and clenched her fists. If she opened them, she would reach for her phone and write to the email address she'd been ignoring for months.

Instead she saved the video file—she was sure she'd want to watch it again—and took a shower before heading into work. She was the first at the office, so she got started reading the incoming telexes before getting back to checking all the people at the hotel when the incriminating email was sent. It was probably a fool's errand, because so many people could walk into a hotel and use its Internet in the public places…and that gave her an idea. She remembered that most hotels she'd been to had a separate password for people staying there. Maybe Stephanie could figure out whether it was a public-space Wi-Fi signal or a guest-room one. She wrote herself a note and went back to the list of names.

By the time Sebastian came in, she'd made herself some of his coffee and changed the number on the whiteboard to sixteen. He looked at it and grunted. “Great.”

“Are you okay? You look a little green.” She made a sympathetic face. “Do you want me to make you a cup of tea?”

“You're fine?” He rubbed his stomach again. “I thought it was the pizza.”

“I woke up a little fragile, but I think that was the bourbon. Why don't you lie down on the cot until you feel better? I've been through the telexes and there's nothing there. I'm still sifting through the list of hotel guests, but I have an idea that might cut that down a bit too. Go lie down, and I'll come get you if anything needs your attention.”

Sebastian got up. “Okay,” he said weakly.

Sadie was worried. She hadn't known him that long, but generally men in operational jobs didn't admit there was anything wrong with them even if they'd been shot. She watched him go, making a mental note to call Netta later if he wasn't better.

The external phone rang. Her head snapped toward it and then to watch Sebastian disappear around the corner. He didn't even look back and frown at the call. He really didn't like anyone using the “cover company” phones unless it was an emergency, and the fact that her mark had discovered the phone number and kept calling…well, if nothing came of this Platon and Stratigos thing, she was going to look like an idiot and be branded her whole career as the one who made the newbie mistakes. She wouldn't be able to bear it if her father found out either.

The fake receptionist picked it up and put it through to her. “Hello, Inventory Management,” she said in a singsong voice as if she'd been saying it for years.

“
Koukla mou
! I've missed you.” Platon's voice sounded normal again after his split lip.

She lowered her voice as if her boss were listening. “How
are
you? You sound better.”

“I'm fine. We need a favor. A big one. We will pay you lots of money. Are you interested?”

“Of course. What is it?” Her heart kicked up a notch.

“Stratigos did some research about your company, and he says you have a warehouse in Piraeus near the docks.”

“Yes, we do. We only use it for storage, though. No one really goes there unless one of our sites needs something in an emergency.” What were they going to do? A frisson of excitement shot through her.

“We just need the key for a night so that we can store something in there for a couple of days. Stratigos says he will give you three thousand euros.”

Sadie's eyes flitted toward the corner that Sebastian had disappeared around. They did have a warehouse, but it just had a bunch of fake construction supplies in it—a digger, some pallets of cement, cinder blocks, and a lot of timber. It was there for customs inspections that happened once a year or anyone looking into property that Devries held. She needed to get down there first to see if it was still looking like a construction warehouse.

She lowered her voice even more. “Sure. Shall I meet you down there? Maybe at midday?”

There was mumbling off the phone, and then he came back. “That will be perfect.”

She hung up and found the key to the warehouse in the chief's office. An icy finger of dread pressed up her spine, making her cold even in the humid office. What was she doing? She was so far out of her depth she had no idea how to get herself out, except by being right about Platon and Stratigos. Was it horrible to hope they were hoping to create mayhem so that she could stop them?

Yes, yes it was. Shit.

Why couldn't she have just done the job they'd wanted her to do? Be nice to people, buy drinks, expand her social network so that she had access to many different types of people for gathering intelligence. Instead, she'd gotten a complete hard-on for the one guy she found suspicious and hadn't really done much to get to know anyone else. She hadn't even followed up on the weird thumb drive that she'd retrieved—or stolen—from the director's office before.

She'd passed the point of no return now. She had to keep going. And if her instincts were right, she'd prove she'd earned this job, not just been handed the assignment because her father was the director.

But she was damned if she was going to get Sebastian involved in this mess too. At least not until she had some kind of hard evidence to show him.

She grabbed her bag and left the office with the key. She got a couple of copies made and then hustled back to the office to return the original to the station chief's office.

But instead of going to her desk, she went up one further flight of creaky stairs and used a keypad to enter her own individual passcode. Despite the old building they were in, the door opened smoothly as if it were on a hydraulic mechanism. For all she knew, it was. When she'd first been shown this room, she could barely suppress the feeling of being in
Mission Impossible
or something. Nothing really to do with the contents of the room—just the door. She sighed. She was kind of sad.

She used her phone to scan the barcode on a black acrylic backpack that held surveillance equipment and then the barcode on a large ziplock bag that had a wig in it. Well, there was no getting around the fact that she was logging out this equipment, so she was going to be found out eventually; she just hoped that she'd have something to show for it by the time it happened. She snagged some clothing items from the hooks along the wall and left the room.

In the ladies' room she changed into some jeans and work boots, tucked her hair into the short, dark wig, and put on one of her old, raggedy T-shirts she kept at the office in case she needed to sleep there. She slung her purse across her chest and pulled on the backpack. She attached a hard hat to the backpack. No one would question her going into the Devries warehouse at the docks. There was even a Devries logo on the hat.