Page 7 of Dangerous Liaisons

Chapter Five

The padded, red, leather door swung closed behind Jesse, dulling the painful blare of punk music from the West Side club dance floor. She paused on the dimly lit landing and gazed down the stairwell leading to the private room where The Professor said he would be waiting. The narrow tunnel of stairs disappeared into a murky bottom. She had been lucky so far, but luck was like baking a soufflé in a blasting zone. Plus, the hour had just struck midnight; the witching hour.

A dull thump, thump resonated through the walls, and Jesse shook her head in an effort to clear the calamity of music from her mind. She grimaced. The snakes and spiders she’d encountered in Colombia were preferable to the solid wall of skin, leather, and pierced body parts she’d slithered through in order to reach the back of the club.

She started down the worn treads. A lone black light at the bottom landing cast iridescent shadows off purple walls, and her sneaker laces shimmered as if energized. She hesitated before continuing forward. A blind man could spot her shoelaces a mile away. Leave it to The Professor to pick a place like this. She hit the landing and turned left down a narrow hallway. Jesse spotted the door he said she’d find and stopped just short of it. She pressed her back to the wall, reached out, and rapped with her knuckles.

“Come,” he called from within.

Jesse slipped inside. More black lights lit the room. Two white floor lamps were located beside the two stained red leather sofas, and two beanbags sat beneath glowing, florescent-colored posters of Jimmy Hendricks and Bon Jovi. The velvet painting of Elvis that hung behind the sofa where The Professor sat added the finishing touch of tackiness to the odor of moldy leather and BO tinged with dried semen.

The Professor reclined on the sofa, a cigarette pinched between thumb and forefinger. His eyes exuded sparkling innocence. His nerdy persona didn’t quite hide the good-looking devil lurking behind his dark brown eyes. At forty-four years of age, in three years, he could retire with thirty years in the service. Government intelligence was one place a teenager with three Ph.D.s could get a job. In many ways, he was still a kid.

“What a god-awful place, Tom,” she said.

He chuckled. “Don’t knock it. Anyone following wouldn’t make it past the skinheads upstairs. One is my sister’s husband.”

Jesse strode to the sofa, dropped to a squat in front of him, placed a hand on his shoulder, and kissed his cheek. He returned her kiss with one on the mouth. Affection rippled through her. He was the only Blue Team member she had any real affection for. He was The Professor to her Mary Ann. Or would she be Ginger? She sat beside him and crossed her legs.

“You’re in deep,” he said in a conversational tone.

“Uh huh,” she replied.

“You’re lucky I owe you,” he said. “This will square us for Lisbon.” Jesse raised a brow, and he grinned. “All right. I would do it for you anyway.”

He meant it. She had saved his life in Madrid when the gun dealer took him hostage—imprisoned and tortured him, is what the bastard had done. Jesse had gone in for him.

She smiled gently. “I know.”

“I hadn’t expected to hear from you so soon,” he said.

“Good. I’m counting on Green Leader thinking the same way. The longer I wait, the deeper he’ll burrow. Not to mention, he’s got his wife’s family connections. The last thing I need is for him to call in favors. He’ll bury me six feet under and piss on my grave if I give him the chance. Right now, it’s still early. He’s got to figure I’m running scared.”

“I don’t know how scared he is. They’re keeping quiet. But I heard he tracked you, and you stayed ahead of him.” Tom put his cigarette in his mouth and clapped softly. “Bravo.”

Jesse frowned. “Those things will kill you.”

He took a long drag, then snuffed out the butt in an ashtray on the floor beside the sofa. “They’re my only vice. Besides, our friends have enough of my DNA to grow me new lungs.”

“They probably could, at that.” Jesse folded her hands on a knee. “As for me, I’m expendable. He cleaned out my safe deposit box.”

The Professor scrutinized her. “I hope the information he’s after is somewhere safe.”

Jesse nodded. She had debated whether or not to tell him about the disc, and decided against it. She'd dragged him into this mess, but wouldn’t take him down if she fell. If Lanton deciphered the encryption, she would never confess that Tom had been involved in it ending up in her possession.

In the meantime, Lanton would drive himself crazy trying to break the encryption, but wouldn’t chance handing it over to anyone for fear it contained evidence that would incriminate him. Too bad she hadn’t saved the article written by DC’s most prominent gossip columnist Zoe Shelby about a certain RL who had been spotted in an off-the-beaten-path restaurant with a swanky uptown escort. The information was public knowledge, but the look on his face when he found the article in her safe deposit box would have been worth a year’s salary.

Gossip columnists thrived on stories that turned a boring marriage between a civil servant and socialite into a debutant done wrong by playboy husband story. They weren’t off the mark this time. The pre-nup Helen Beaumont’s family insisted Lanton sign hadn’t stopped him from squandering her considerable fortune over the past eighteen years on women and fast living that had graduated into BDSM at its best.

Jesse could imagine Helen’s face when she received the first consoling phone call from one of her socialite friends. Pissing away a woman’s fortune was one thing. Being seen about town with prostitutes was another. Lanton’s penchant for BDSM had yet to leak. Would that be enough for Helen Lanton to divorce him?

At five-ten, two hundred pounds, and a balding head, he didn’t fit the profile of a playboy with a rich wife and lovers. High priced hookers and exclusive BDSM clubs would be a thing of the past if his wife cut him off. At best, his GS-13 salary would buy him a back alley fuck.

“How’s Amanda?” Tom asked.

His question pulled her back to the present and the fear that hovered too close to the surface. “No one’s bothered her.” Jesse pictured Amanda’s face as it lit up whenever Jesse appeared. Despite Amanda’s chronological age of thirty-five, her smile was that of an innocent eight-year-old—hell, she was an eight-year-old.

“She’ll be all right,” Tom said.

Jesse smiled with affection. Tom was one of the few people who appreciated Amanda’s special gift of statistical calculus. He would want to help keep her safe, but Jesse wouldn’t drag him any deeper than this one meeting.

“Madrid and Hong Kong convinced me Lanton was dirty, but massacring his own team shocked me.” She blocked the mental picture of the two Green Team members’ deaths before it rose this time. “He deserves a slow death.”

The Professor raised both eyebrows. “Remind me never to piss you off.”

Jesse took a deep breath. “I thought you felt the same way.”

He grinned. “Well, seems I’m going to have the last say, doesn’t it?”

“If we can track the source of the two million dollar Swiss account you will. That has to be the money Amadeo Perez paid for Green Team’s slaughter.” She paused. “What do you know about them, Tom?”

“Nothing. Sorry. You didn’t ask—”

“No.” She shook her head. “It doesn’t matter.”

He paused for a long moment, then added in a hushed voice, “Those men aren’t the only ones who died as a result of Lanton’s double-cross.”

Jesse remembered Martinez, and started to agree, then realized what he meant. “No!” she cried. but saw the truth in his eyes.