Man of Mystery: A BBW Romantic Suspense (10 page)

I dial his number again, but this time, there’s no answer.

Great, just bloody ignore me without giving me a chance to have my say.
Men!
Always think they fucking know what’s best for everyone else.

I shut down the spreadsheet, not giving a damn whether I’ll get into trouble for not finishing it. It doesn’t matter. Nothing matters. In another surge of rebellion, or recklessness, I turn the PC off by switching off the power, rather than doing it
the proper way.
I need to get out of here, right now!

Maggie will know what to do, even if it’s just to watch girlie movies and drink wine together. And ice cream. We’ll need ice cream.

I pick up my stuff and rush out of the office, straight to my car. I can’t think of anything, focus on anything other than that pathetic excuse for a conversation I had with Liam just now. It’s a miracle I make it to Maggie’s place in one piece.

Rather than ring the bell downstairs, I slip inside her building just as someone else leaves and head straight for her door.

“Mags, open up, it’s me,” I shout, while banging my fist on the plastic finish door - the types you often see in cheap housing from the early nineties.

When it unlocks, I’m surprised not to be faced with Maggie but a flustered-looking Alec. Shit, she had said he’d be coming over too. Crap.

“Hi. Maggie is just taking a shower,” he mumbles, while eyeing me suspiciously. “I’m Alec.”

I’m about to comment on his stares, when I realize that I’ve probably been crying, meaning my mascara must have run down my face, and the lack of sleep will have made me look half dead anyway.

“Hi. I’m Tess,” I say, while shaking the hand he’s offered and avoiding eye contact with him.

He waves at me to enter, and I follow him inside. Maggie’s house is a mess as always - a cozy mess, as she likes to say. We take a seat on the sofa, in silence.

“So… you’re Maggie’s best friend?” Alec starts, a painful few seconds later.

I just nod. I’m not up for small talk or generally in a sociable mood after everything that’s happened in the past twenty-four hours. If he thinks I’m an arrogant bitch because of it, so be it.

We don’t talk anymore until a bathrobe-wearing Maggie enters the room, with a towel wrapped around her head.

“Tess, when did you get here? So you two have met then. Good.” She walks around the messy coffee table, and I get up to give her a hug.

“Jesus, you look like shit.”

I try not to cry again, but my face contorts itself into an ugly frown anyway. “I called him. Finally.”

“Right… and?” Maggie sits down between Alec and me and puts her arm around me.

“After I’ve worried about him all night and day, no explanation, nothing. He’s calling it quits. What the hell is wrong with men?” Realizing Alec is still sitting there on the other end of the sofa, I lean forward, acknowledging his presence for a second. “No offense.”

“None taken,” Alec mumbles.

“He what?! The fucking nerve!” Maggie exclaims.

“Right? I don’t know what to do anymore.”

“You’re here now, and that’s what matters. Alec, would you be a dear and make us a cup of tea? We have a bit of girl talk to do,” Maggie says.

Alec mumbles in agreement he’s clearly uncomfortable with the situation as it’s about to unfold and glad to get the chance to escape the drama for a while.

We watch him leave before continuing our conversation.

“Now, don’t spare any details. What did he say?” Maggie says.

I tell her the entire story, showing her the text message he’d sent first, and then recount our phone call word for word, including how he didn’t even give me the chance to respond to any of it.

“It did sound like him, right?” she asks.

I nod through the fresh tears.
I think so.
Considering he did refer to something I’d told him when we were alone, I’m pretty certain it must have been him.

“You know how I felt about the guy, right?” Maggie gives me a big hug, as I continue to sob into her clean bathrobe.

“I thought he was different. That you were just being paranoid,” I complain.

“The whole thing from start to finish had alarm bells going off in my head,” Maggie says.

I guess she’s right. I can’t find the energy to argue anymore.

“There’s some ice cream in the freezer. Let’s get it out and see if we can find some ridiculous romantic movie on TV,” Maggie suggests, as she’s just about to get up.

“Wait, I’ll get it. You get dressed in the meantime.” I lift myself off the sofa, stretching out my shoulders which have completely locked up and reluctantly drag my tired body towards the kitchen, while trying not to bang into any furniture on the way. Meanwhile, Maggie stirs as well and disappears into the bedroom, shutting the door behind her.

“Hey,” I call out while opening the kitchen door, then pause when I hear his hushed voice inside.

“Look, I’ll be free soon,” Alec whispers. He hasn’t noticed my presence or heard me call him.

I push the door open a little further and see him with his back turned in my direction. He’s holding his phone against his ear.

“If the package is on the way to Folkestone already, we have nothing to worry about… Uhuh. Yes… And the agent himself? Right, so he’ll be there in a couple of hours, tops. Perfect timing.”

Remembering the weirdness at the airport last week, when Alec all of a sudden ended up manning the check-in desk of the flight Liam was trying to ground, formerly dormant suspicions are once again aroused. He blew off a date with Mags to
work.
That’s just plain weird. And as far as I’m aware, Maggie and Alec don’t even do check-in duty normally.

Now he’s talking about packages, agents… What the hell is going on?

“All ready.” Maggie’s cheerful voice makes both me and Alec jump. “How about that ice cream?”

“So you want us to believe that you managed to overpower two of Fletch’s men as well as the mastermind himself in some warehouse in Stanwell?” Mrs. Hill - the boss lady, or H, for short - looks like she has even less of a sense of humor than normal. The stark surroundings of our interrogation cell don’t help matters any; neither do the handcuffs around my wrists. Following our standard operating procedure, they’d kept me awake in isolation all night but not started questioning until my patience had worn thin, many hours later.

“Send a team in if you don’t believe me,” I say.

“Why didn’t you call for back-up?” Clark asks.

I eye him, looking for any sign that he is, in fact, playing for the wrong team. I can’t believe how quick they were to take me in, while completely ignoring the fact that our most valuable witness from the airport died in Clark’s custody yesterday.

Of course, I shouldn’t have kept Fletch’s threats to myself, nor should I have removed the chip from the dead suspect in the morgue and taken it to Fletch’s hide-out. But what other choice did I have? There’s a definite rat stink hanging around this unit, and until I could be sure whom to trust, what was I supposed to do? Let Tess die?

“Fine.” The boss lady dials a number on her phone, all the while keeping her eyes fixed on me. “134, Stanwell Moor Road. Beyond the reservoir?”

I nod in agreement. Yes, beyond the reservoir.

“This is a matter of extreme urgency, you understand? I’ll expect your report within the hour.”

“So where is this chip now?” Clark asks, leaning forward onto his elbows, which are resting on the steel interrogation room table.

“May I have a word, Ma’am?” I ignore Clark’s protests and keep my gaze firmly on H instead.

“Fine. Clark, I’ll call you back in if I need you.”

He reluctantly leaves, while I watch Mrs. Hill take a seat in the chair Clark had just vacated across from me. She crosses her legs and waits.

“In private,” I say, gesturing at the camera in the corner of the room.

She sighs and leans forward, switching it off with the button installed at the side of the table. Normally that’s where I sit. Normally, I control those cameras, while someone else is in my chair.

“The chip is safe.”

“Where is it now?” she asks.

“Soon, the other team will reach the warehouse and verify my story. Rather than waste time questioning me about some non-existent connections to Nexus, let’s put our heads together and figure out who could be the real mole in our unit,” I say.

She squints at me, pressing her lips together tightly like she does whenever she disapproves of something.

“I’m listening.”

“Yesterday, Clark and I were questioning the witness from the airport. After days of steely silence from his side, we were finally making progress, when all of a sudden the guy ends up having Clark’s pen stuck in his throat. Coincidence?”

I wait to give her the chance to let my words sink in.

“I received the phone call from Fletch - at least I presume it was, - and Clark was all over me. Who is it, where am I going, what’s happening- It was rather suspicious.”

“I see.”

“And he seems awfully keen to get his hands on that chip himself. And was he the one who alerted you when I left the office yesterday? He had no way of knowing where I was going, so how did he know I was lying to him?”

“It’s a theory worth exploring, certainly. If you let me know where the chip is, we can have it analyzed and find out what’s so important about it anyway.”

“Agreed,” I say, then tell her about leaving it in the glove box of my car.

“Thank you, agent. Now, there’s still the matter of the civilian. What do we know of her involvement?”

I shake my head. “Not involved. No way. We crossed paths last week completely by coincidence. I picked the first car I could find in moving traffic on the A4.”

“I see. And then you involved her. I don’t need to repeat myself and tell you what a reckless and stupid idea that was, do I?”

I take a deep breath. Tess. My heart wants me to think about her some more, but my current predicament means it’s less than practical. She’ll be worried sick about me by now.

“If she’s indeed just an innocent bystander in all of this, your contact with her was the sole reason her life was put in danger yesterday. You understand this, don’t you?” Strict as ever, H crosses her arms as she stares at me. Her tone is almost like a principal putting the guilt trip on a bad student.

“From now on, you can’t afford to make these kind of mistakes. Excuse me.” She nods at me and gets up to make another phone call. I may not like what she had to say about Tess and me, but she’s right. I knew it instinctively at the airport, but yesterday took things to a whole new level. Assuming she’ll be satisfied when she retrieves the chip and gets confirmation from the team at the warehouse, I’ll be back to work within the day. But I can’t just go back to how things were… Not if it means putting Tess into even more danger.

“Everson’s car. Glove box.” She pauses, and just for a moment, her expression breaks from her usual cold, controlled demeanor, into something looking like panic. “What do you mean
‘it’s not here’
? I’d ordered for it to be retrieved from that girl’s house when we picked up Everson last night! Don’t give me excuses. Find the bloody car! What does the tracker say?”

H cocks her hip and rests her hand on her side. “All right. I understand. Stay on it.”

“Agent Everson. Any idea what your car might be doing on the M20, heading for Maidstone, Kent?”

I shrug. Now it makes sense how they ended up at Tess’s house last night; of course, there’s a tracker in my car.

“Maybe ask one of your boys who participated in your little home invasion last night?” I remark.

Although I have no idea what’s going on, or why my vehicle is on the move, the outcome can’t be good. What’s on the M20? Where could it be heading? There’s nothing there but fields, and ferries, and…

“The tunnel,” I whisper.

“What’s that?” Mrs. H demands.

“That’s the only thing that makes sense. Nexus is planning to hit the Eurotunnel! And they want to make it look like I did it!”

“That’s ridiculous. You’re in custody, so you obviously couldn’t have,” she protests.

“True, but the general public and the media don’t know I’ve been arrested, neither will there be any records to prove it. Occupational hazard of working for an agency that operates largely without official orders… I bet that they’ve prepped my car with plenty of evidence to point my way.”

H’s heels click loudly against the concrete floor as she walks around the desk toward me. She unlocks my handcuffs and hands me back my work phone.

“You’re restored to active duty. Agent Jenkins will be your remote back-up. Follow the tracker, and I’ll dispatch another team to the Eurotunnel directly in the meantime. We can only hope that we’ll make it in time; whoever has your car has had quite a head start.”

I rub my sore wrists and give her a nod. Now things are personal. After yesterday’s kidnapping went seriously wrong for Nexus, they’re out for blood. And what better way to punish an anti-terrorism agent than to implicate him in what could very well be the worst terror attack in recent history?

Rushing through the empty corridors and down the stairs, I dial Jenkin’s number without even slowing down. “Jenkins. What’s the traffic situation like?” I ask.