Kissed by Fire (17 page)

“Fine. But it will look suspicious if we go
straight to that part of the building.”

“So, we start at this end. There are only a
couple of rooms.”

She nodded, so I slowly wheeled the cart to
the first door. I angled my body slightly so anyone watching us on
CCTV couldn’t see the card as I swiped it. I shouldn’t have
worried. The door opened immediately. Obviously, the twins had
gotten the hang of things.

We made quick work of the two rooms. The
cleaning company was probably going to get complaints. We moved out
into the lobby.

“Evening, ladies. New, aren’t you?” The
security guard looked like he should be in the WWE. Thick muscles
strained at his polyester uniform and he walked with that strut men
had when they knew they could beat the ever living crap out of just
about anyone they came across.

If I opened my mouth, we were goners. There
were plenty of Americans in London, but the coincidence would be a
little too much. Fortunately, Kabita spoke up.

“Hello, yes we are very, very new.”

It was all I could do not to wet myself
laughing. She’d put on the heaviest Indian accent I’d ever heard.
The guard didn’t even bat an eyelash.

“Your friend doesn’t talk much.”

“Oh, she be not speaking English. I try to
teach her, but it be taking time, you know.” She bobbled her head
from side to side. Damn, she was good.

“Really. Damn foreigners. Ought to learn
English if they want to live here.” He glared at me.

I pretended to look intimidated. In
actuality, I was furious. I’d have liked nothing more than to punch
the bigot right in his smug face.

Kabita edged us across the lobby, keeping up
the cheerful immigrant act. “You are right, sir. Of course! That is
why I teach her.”

She hurried us up to the door on the right
hand side of the lobby. The door popped open and we slid through as
she gave the security guard a little wave.

We both sucked in a deep breath, but we
weren’t out of the woods yet. I pushed the cart to the end of the
hall while Kabita kept up her ridiculous impression routine.

The door to the basement archives was dead
ahead in clear view of the CCTV camera. Fortunately, there was a
door perpendicular to it, which led into the women’s bathroom.

I angled the cart in front of the women’s
room so that it blocked the view of anyone coming or going from the
bathroom. If, that was, the person was crawling. Which is exactly
what I planned to do.

Kabita propped open the bathroom door as I
grabbed an armload of toilet paper rolls. Inside the bathroom, I
dropped the rolls and handed her the key card.

“OK, here’s my plan. You walk out there and
stand at the cart. Rustle around like you can’t find something and
make sure your body is blocking the archive door. I’ll crawl to the
door and you use the swipe card to let me in. Then you can clean
the bathroom while I see what I can find in the archives. Security
will think I’m still in there.”

“OK, fine. How about I give you fifteen
minutes then I’ll do it again so you can crawl out.”

Fifteen minutes wasn’t a lot of time, but
there wasn’t much we could do about it. Muscle Head knew where we
were, and I’d just bet he was watching us nice and close. Any more
than fifteen minutes and he’d be down wanting to know what we were
up to.

Our plan went off flawlessly and five minutes
later, I was in the belly of the whale. So to speak.

Honestly, I had no idea where to begin. The
archives were a mess. Sure, there were plenty of shelves with
neatly labeled boxes, but the labels made no sense. On top of that,
there were additional unlabeled boxes stacked haphazardly around
the room and topped with stacks of files and papers. There was a
single long table obviously meant for sorting through the archive
boxes, but it too was covered with dusty files.

“Crap.” Where to start? I only had fifteen
minutes to figure out what Alison had been researching down
here.

My mind cranked over, running through the
possibilities. Alison had been a smart woman. She wouldn’t have
just left her research for anyone to find. Not that anyone would be
able to find anything around here.

I headed to the back of the large room,
darting quickly through the shelves and around more piles of boxes.
There were a couple of desks shoved up against the far wall and
piled just as high with paperwork as the front table had been.
Seemed like the perfect place to hide an ongoing investigation.

I scanned the files and papers noticing that
one stack had significantly less dust than the others. Good place
to start.

The top file was still a bit dusty, so I
ignored it and pulled one from the middle of a stack on the desk
and flipped it open. Bingo. Inside the file was a hot pink sticky
note with some writing on it. I didn’t bother to read any more. I
couldn’t imagine too many MI8 agents using hot pink sticky notes.
The note was Alison’s. I was sure of it.

A quick scan through the rest of the pile
yielded no results, so I unzipped my coverall and stuffed the file
down into the top of my jeans. The coverall was loose, but not
loose enough to stand up to close examination.

I checked my watch. Nearly out of time. I
scurried back up the steps just as Kabita opened the door so I
could crawl back to the bathroom.

“Did you find anything?”

“Yeah.” I unzipped my coverall enough so she
could see the file.

“What’s in the file?”

“Didn’t have time to look. What next?”

“We need to get out of here without tipping
off the asshat.”

I snorted with laughter at that. “Any
ideas?”

She gave me an evil grin. I had a feeling I
wasn’t going to like this.

***

“Where are you two going? You haven’t
finished yet.” Muscle Head stormed down the stairs, buttons ready
to pop, suspicion written all over his face.

“It is my friend. It is Ingrid. She is
ill.”

Ingrid? Seriously?

I sagged a little more against Kabita. She
grunted under my weight and gave me a look that told me I was going
to pay for it later.

The guard took a step back. “What’s she
got?”

“I not be knowing. One minute she is fine.
The next,” she made a sound like somebody throwing up.

Muscle Head frowned. “You have to be
joking.”

“Oh, no, I not be joking, sir. I need to be
getting her home. Here.” She thrust me at the guard where I sagged
tragically in his arms.

“I be right back, sir. Need to be putting
this away.” She waved at the cleaning cart before disappearing
through the door.

The guard must have gotten a whiff of me.
“Jesus, you stink.” He made a face and shoved me down onto the
first step. “You better not be contagious.”

I made a gagging sound like I was about to
throw up. Muscle Head jumped back about a foot, swearing up a
storm. It was all I could do not to bust up laughing.

The thing about making a lie convincing is to
cover all your bases. Most people are good at thinking about sound
and sight, but they forget smell. Nothing will get a guy like
Muscle Head to back off like the smell of puke.

I am not an advocate for self-induced
vomiting. It’s a waste of perfectly good food. But as a disguise,
it totally worked.

Kabita came bustling back through the door,
heaved me off my feet (I made a few gasping sounds, just for
effect.) and got me out the front door of MI8 pronto. “Not to
worry, sir!” she shouted at Muscle Head, “we be sending someone to
finish cleaning. Not to worry.”

And we disappeared into the night with Muscle
Head staring after us, looking slightly green around the gills.
Points to us.

***

The first thing I did when we got back to the
hotel was brush my teeth. The second thing I did was gargle with
mouthwash. Twice. The third thing I did was to ask Kabita about the
file. She’d hidden it in her own coverall so Muscle Head wouldn’t
feel it when she threw me at him.

She flipped through the pages as I collapsed
on the bed. “Looks like we’ve got the information we were looking
for. These are the birth records of a Dragon Hunter.”

“Let me see that.” She handed me the file.
“So, Sandra was right. There is a Dragon Hunter on the loose and
MI8 is covering it up.” And apparently Alison had found out about
it.

“I don’t think MI8 are the ones covering it
up. I think it’s my father behind the cover up. It’s his
style.”

“But why?” There was so much crazy going on,
the possibilities were endless.

“No idea. What do the files say exactly?”

I leaned back against the pillows as I
scanned the documents. “This one is a birth certificate. It looks
like a girl was born on the first of June twenty-three years ago
right here in London. She was given the name Dara Boyd. No father’s
name and the mother’s name is redacted.”

“Excuse me? Redacted?”

“Yep. As is pretty much everything else. I
seriously doubt Boyd is her real name.”

She thought for a moment. “I doubt she uses
Dara anymore. She most likely has an entirely new identity. What
else?”

“It looks like MI8 kept pretty close tabs on
her. There are school records, names and addresses of foster
families, even medical and dental records.” I scrutinized the
documents, filing everything away in my brain for future reference.
“There are notes on her friends. She didn’t have many. No
boyfriends. One girlfriend.” I squinted at the pink sticky note. An
address. I’d bet anything it was the girlfriend’s.

“Maybe she knows something,” Kabita
suggested.

I shrugged. “Maybe, though from what we know
of Hunters, Dara may not have been aware of her nature. At least
until she was older. Even then I doubt she knew exactly what she
was.”

“Unless someone told her.”

There was that. I flipped to the last page of
the file. “Huh. The records end shortly after her eighteenth
birthday.”

“They stopped tracking her?”

“No.” I shook my head. “It looks like they
lost her. She disappeared off the grid.”

“Impossible.” She snagged the file out of my
hands, sinking down onto the desk chair to peruse it. She bit her
lower lip as she read. “She had help.”

“How do you know? Maybe she just moved or
something.”

“No. MI8 knew what she was and they were
keeping very close tabs on her. It wasn’t just a matter of
surveillance. They had her tagged.”

“What? Like on those wildlife shows where
they stick a GPS in the ear of a rabbit or something?”

She grimaced. “Pretty much. Any suspected
Hunter born on British soil is tracked that way from birth. Those
that show promise as Hunters are recruited. Those that don’t are
still kept under surveillance. Permanently.”

“Geez. Glad I wasn’t born here.” I touched my
ear. “Uh, they didn’t put a chip in me when I was in the hospital,
did they?”

She gave me an eye roll. “Don’t be
ridiculous.” She went back to reading the file.

“I’m serious, Kabita. Did they chip me?”

She was quiet a moment. “My father wanted to,
but you’re American and Americans don’t chip their Hunters.”

“Like that would stop Alister.”

She snorted. “It didn’t. Aunt Angeline
did.”

Ah. The aunt who’d saved me from MI8’s tender
mercies. “Thank the gods for Aunt Angeline.”

She grinned at that before returning to the
file. “They’d have never just let Dara Boyd go. Not unless … ” She
flipped through the file, a frown forming. “It looks like the
system was shut down for routine maintenance, only the backup
didn’t kick in. By the time it came back online, she was gone.
Somebody definitely helped her.”

“MI8 didn’t try to find her?”

Her face was grim. “No they didn’t. Look.”
She handed the file back, open to a yellow duplicate page.

It was a simple document ordering that the
search for Dara Boyd be terminated and her file destroyed. It was
signed by one Alister Jones.

“Damn.”

***

Breakfast the next morning was a tense one —
each of us lost in our own thoughts and each of us still pissed off
about Alister. I was pretty grateful he wasn’t my father right
about then. Honestly, the more I learned about him, the less I
liked him.

What I really wanted to know was exactly what
game he was playing at and why. Between his crazy witch hunting
obsession and his lying about there being a Dragon Hunter on the
loose, there was definitely something up.

After breakfast, we both needed to burn off
some energy, so we took a walk through the streets of Mayfair. The
pretty brick buildings with their arched and curlicue facades
turned that part of London from an ordinary city into something out
of a fairy tale. Or maybe Mary Poppins.

The American Embassy was mere blocks away,
but we didn’t go there. Instead, we wound up in the little park
just in front of it. Grosvenor Square was a mini playground for the
office drones in the area to picnic and catch some rays, or zzz’s
for that matter, during lunch. At that time of day it was nearly
empty.

“He’ll never tell the truth you know.” It was
the first Kabita had spoken since we left the hotel. The first time
we’d discussed what we’d found in the files since the previous
night.

“Nope,” I agreed. “We can hound him from here
to eternity and he won’t tell us anything. We’re going to have to
figure this out on our own.”

“And then what?” Her voice was unusually
dull.

“Then we do what we have to.”

She nodded. “OK.”

What else was there to say, really?

“Next step?”

She shook her head as though to clear it. “We
need to track this girl. Find out where she is, what she’s calling
herself, get a description. I think I should have a chat with her
girlfriend. What was her name?”