How Spy I Am (49 page)

Poor Murren. I smiled
in spite of myself. “Yeah.”

Stemp’s tiny humorous
twitch tugged at his lips before he hurried out, and I let my
eyelids drift closed on the comforting sight of Kane sitting at the
foot of my bed.

Much too soon, Stemp
was back. “Terry Sherman and Tammy Mellor died in a bomb blast in
China late this afternoon. Their bodies were burned beyond
recognition, but they were identified by some personal
effects.”

I closed my eyes
again, feeling the ache drumming slowly in my bones. “So that’s the
last of the Knights. The other three must have arranged for Terry’s
murder when he didn’t join the revolt. And poor Plum Blossom was
just collateral damage. Did you recover any of the network
keys?”

“No. The mages didn’t
have them. We assume they were destroyed in your spectacular
explosion.” Stemp paused. “What did you use?”

“Forty-two geese and
two pallets of C4.”

I opened my eyes in
time to catch another twitch of amusement that vanished instantly.
“Why didn’t you come to me immediately when you discovered what the
Knights were doing?”

“I couldn’t. It
would’ve jeopardized my… other activities.”

Stemp held my gaze for
a long moment, and I successfully overcame the urge to look
away.

“I notice your
tracking device mysteriously ceased functioning at the time of the
explosion. And I notice your arm is healed.” His tone was as
emotionless as ever. “How did you discover the device?”

“I know what a burn
looks like. I could tell there was another injury there.” I kept my
voice as flat as his.

“So you extracted it
when?”

“The day you released
me.” I drew a shallow breath. “I couldn’t afford to let you
know.”

“And your other op?”
Stemp’s gaze dissected me.

I hesitated, then met
his eyes squarely. “I don’t have any other ops.”

“So I understand.” He
held me with his reptilian eyes. “That seems a waste of your…
talents. So since I apparently can’t prevent you from placing
yourself in harm’s way, I’m promoting you to field agent, effective
immediately. Report for a full briefing when you’re released from
hospital.” He rose and strode out without another word, leaving me
gaping at the closing door.

“Oh, shit.” I managed
a faint whisper at last.

Kane came around to
the side of the bed to squeeze my hand. “Aydan, that’s good news.
You’re not just an asset anymore. That means your death sentence is
lifted. Even if they find another way to decrypt files, they won’t
kill you.”

“I don’t know a damn
thing about being a field agent.”

Kane drew back to
study my face, his eyes twinkling. “Those old undercover habits die
hard, don’t they?”

“I’m not undercover!
I’m not an agent! I don’t have a fucking clue…”

He cut off my
increasingly frantic words with a gentle finger across my lips.
“Aydan, stop. Just rest. We’ll talk later.”

As if responding to
his command, my eyelids drooped despite myself.

The sound of the door
opening made me jerk upright, swearing and clutching my ribs.

Stemp spared no time
for pleasantries. “You’re being discharged, and we have Kraus. Do
you want to interrogate him?”

“Uh.” I blinked my way
to semi-alertness. “What time is it?”

“Nine A.M.”

“Can I leave now?”

“Yes. They only kept
you overnight as a precaution because of the hypothermia. Your
other injuries are minor. They’ll heal on their own.”

“Okay.” I pawed my
hair away from my face, wishing for a hot shower and a hairbrush.
“I’ll need Sam and Betty in my office at Sirius. I’ll get dressed
and get over there… shit. I need a vehicle. And clothes.”

“Your clothes are in
the wardrobe.” Stemp nodded toward the corner of the room. “Get
dressed while I arrange to transfer Betty, and I’ll drive you
over.” He vanished out the door before I finished nodding.

Pulling on the tight
leather was quiet torture, and I was slouched in the chair cradling
my complaining ribs when a tap on the door heralded Stemp’s return.
Minutes later, we were on our way to Sirius Dynamics.

When we entered my
office, I was shocked at Sam’s pallor. Seated between two large
black-clad guards, he looked haggard and defeated.

“Hi, Aydan,” he said
quietly.

“Hi, Sam.” I eyed him
awkwardly, torn between sympathy and anger. After a moment, I gave
it up. Deal with that later. Focus on the job at hand.

My small office was
crammed with Betty’s hospital stretcher and all the members of my
team. Spider’s face was pale, his hazel eyes dark with anguish, but
I didn’t know if it was because of Betty’s condition or Sam’s
betrayal. Kane and Kasper wore almost-identical cop faces, but a
spark of hatred kindled Kasper’s eyes when he regarded Sam.

“What do you want to
do?” Jack asked. Her face was white and strained, and she avoided
looking at Sam.

I sighed. “Just hook
me up. Sam, I have an idea that might work, but it isn’t going to
be pretty. I need you to use your mind control to push Betty into
the network traffic where I can meet her head-on again.”

He clasped trembling
hands together. “But, Aydan…”

“I’ll know you’re the
ghost,” I interrupted. “I won’t attack you. I just need her to be
in the network traffic, not in a sim, and she’s not going to get
there on her own. And I don’t want her to realize what’s happening,
so you’ll have to control her right up until I tell you to get her
out.”

“Aydan, is there any
risk to you?” Kane asked. “Is there any chance you’ll end up
catatonic as a result of this?”

“I doubt it. If it
didn’t happen the first time, I can’t see why it would this time.”
I looked up at Jack as she finished hooking up the monitors. “Are
you all set?”

She shot an anxious
look at Betty. “So I should see a set of ghost brainwaves on
Betty’s monitor, but not yours?”

“Yes.” I blew out a
breath. “Let’s do it.”

Kane’s avatar popped
into existence beside me only a second after I stepped into virtual
reality. He wore full combat body armour, and he glanced down at me
with a frown as Betty’s immobile avatar appeared.

“You should be wearing
armour,” he said. “Just in case bullets start flying again.”

“No, I think-” My
words were drowned out by Betty’s shrieks, but moments later her
avatar stood motionless and silent again, its face still twisted in
an expression of horror.

“…we’re done with the
bullets,” I finished as we turned to face the ravaged body
suspended by its chained and bleeding wrists, its all-too-familiar
massive upper body and short dark hair its only remaining
identifiable features. The smell of blood and burned flesh closed
my throat.

Kane’s hand found
mine. “Can you get rid of that?”

I choked down my gag
reflex and concentrated. “No. Sorry. I… it won’t, not while Betty’s
in the sim. I have to go, Sam’s holding her.” I took a deep breath
and faded into the data stream.

The dizzying maelstrom
of data sucked me under instantaneously. Clinging frantically to
Kane’s anchoring grip, I willed away panic and spread my virtual
net. Capture some data, release others. Just like fishing. Get the
net just right.

I was partly
successful. The turbulent chaos eased to a more ordered whirl, and
I held tightly to my bulging virtual net. Now the trick was to sort
out the remainder without losing hold on what I had…

An unknowable time
later, I sniffed out the last faintly familiar packet and tucked it
away.

My exhausted relief
was short-lived when I realized I couldn’t return to the virtual
sim without relinquishing my hold on the data. Despair swamped
me.

I was so close. So
damn close. And I couldn’t hold on much longer. Already I could
feel my grasp weakening, the packets surging against my fragile
net.

Panic mounting, I
seized on the first idea that came to me. Surely a guy with Kane’s
background would know Morse code.

The only Morse code I
knew was SOS. But I knew where I could find the rest.

I sent a desperate
tendril of consciousness into the internet. Moments later, I began
squeezing Kane’s virtual hand.

P-u-l-l-B-e-t-t-y-O-u-t. P-u-l-l-B-e-t-t-y-O-

The sudden absence of
data left me reeling, my consciousness imploding on the empty shell
of itself.

Completely
disoriented, I clung to the one thing I could still comprehend.
Kane’s virtual hand drawing me slowly and steadily back into the
sim, a data packet at a time.

His voice sounded
close, but I couldn’t see him. “It’s all right, Aydan, I’ve got
you. Stay with me now.”

I thought he was
touching me, but the jumbled sensory inputs seemed to come from
random directions. The blindness didn’t ease.

“All right, here’s the
portal. Let’s get you through.”

When the pain crashed
through my head, my own swearing was a welcome sound. I pried
streaming eyes open and collapsed against the sofa cushions in
sheer relief when the room wavered into focus.

I let my eyes close
again and lay limply while Kane’s strong warm hands worked their
magic on my temples.

A female voice with a
charming Southern drawl made my eyes pop open again.

“My heavens, what on
earth? Where am I? And who are y’all?” Betty sat up, staring around
her incredulously. Jack hovered over her, making reassuring
gestures.

I let my head fall
back to smile up at Kane behind me. “Thanks for getting me
out.”

He returned my smile.
“At least I didn’t need the bucket this time.” His smile widened.
“This time you were string.”

I squeezed my eyes
shut and thumped my head against the couch. “Yeah, that makes
sense. I felt like you were pulling me in a packet at a time, like
a long… string. Go figure.”

At last the activity
died down and the crowd dispersed from my office, leaving only Kane
and me. Across the hall, Betty and Jack talked handbags and fashion
in the lunchroom while ‘that nice Mr. Stemp’ made arrangements for
Betty’s trip home.

Kane turned to me.
“You’re sure you extracted all your memories from Betty’s
mind?”

I rubbed the ache in
my forehead. “I’ll never know for sure. She probably still has a
few floating around in her head, but they’ll never connect to
anything. And I made sure I got absolutely every classified thing I
ever knew.”

Kane’s face eased into
a smile, watching Betty’s animated conversation. “And you obviously
got all the traumatic ones.”

I blew out a sigh.
“Yeah. Thank God. She’ll never know they were ever in her head.
Never remember experiencing them at all.”

He sobered. “It’s too
bad nobody can do that for you.”

I shrugged, avoiding
his gaze.

“Come on,” he said
after a moment. “I’ll drive you out to get your truck.”

In Kane’s SUV, I let
the tension slowly ease from my body, leaning back in an attempt to
avoid abusing my aching ribs any more than necessary.

He glanced over but
said nothing, and we rode in comfortable silence until the
shattered windbreak of the Knights’ farm made my jaw drop.

“Holy shit.” I craned
my neck, surveying the devastation as we drove by. “Was there
anything left?”

“No.” Kane’s voice was
grim. He pulled in behind my truck and parked. “Thank God you
weren’t in it.”

“Yeah.” I reached for
the door handle. “Thanks for the ride.”

“Aydan.”

Something in his voice
sent me into red alert. I turned to face him, my shoulders
bunching.

God, please, no. Not
another relationship discussion. Not now.

Kane reached over to
gently enclose my hand in his. His fingertips stroked lightly
across my palm, and he glanced up to meet my eyes with a
half-smile.

“Don’t worry, I
promise not to corner you or ask for anything you can’t give…”

“Can we please talk
about this later?” I pleaded.

His grip tightened on
my hand. “No, I need to say this, and you need to hear it. I’ve
always demanded honesty in my relationships, and it’s a difficult
adjustment to know you have an undercover life that forces you to
lie-”

“I’m not a spy,
dammit, I’m just a dumb civilian bookkeeper!”

“Shh, let me finish.”
He clasped my hand in both of his. “You don’t have to deny or
explain anything to me. You’ve never demanded answers from me, and
from now on, I’ll do the same for you. I’ll do my best to accept
the limitations you place on your relationships-”

“John, I can’t…” I
began desperately.

He shook his head.
“No, don’t worry. You’re free. No questions. No expectations.
Whatever happens or doesn’t happen between us is up to you. And I
hope you’ll trust me not to compromise your secret mission,
whatever it is.”

I opened my mouth, but
he silenced me with a gentle squeeze of my hand. “I still need to
ask you one more thing.”

He searched my face.
“Now that it’s all over, tell me what threat you were protecting me
from.”

As much as I trusted
Kane, I couldn’t bring myself to betray my promise to Kasper. And I
couldn’t bear to voice the horrible things I’d believed about
Robert.

My husband, who’d
given his life for me.

“I…” My voice didn’t
seem to want to cooperate, and I swallowed hard. “I… can’t.”

“Let me see if I can
guess.” His grip tightened on my hand while he held me with his
gaze. “Your husband somehow survived my assassination attempt,
didn’t he? And last night, you killed him to protect me.”

“N-no…” The shocking
accuracy of his deduction made me blink and stammer. “No,” I
repeated firmly. “My husband died of a heart attack induced by your
undetectable drug. He’s been dead for nearly three years.”

“Yes, your husband
died then. A truth.” His clear grey eyes looked through to my soul.
“And last night you laid Robert to rest.”