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He’d gone white. He was looking at a new tear in Mike’s jacket on her other shoulder. He felt a wave of panic, gently pushed her jacket and shirt down and examined her upper arm. “Not bad,” he said, and let out a breath. “I’ll fix you up when we get to the suite.”
Mike looked down at her ripped jacket. “I didn’t feel a thing.” She looked up at him. “It hurts now. Isn’t that something?”
Louisa said, “It doesn’t look bad, Mike, thank goodness.”
Nicholas pulled Mike’s shirt back up, closed her jacket. “You are not sleeping in that room our lovely receptionist assigned you on the third floor. My suite has two bedrooms. The living room is good-sized, so we can use it for business. Don’t even think of arguing, Agent Caine, I can’t protect you if you’re half a hotel away. Louisa, would you please bring your first-aid kit? I need to clean up Agent Caine’s wound.”
Ten minutes later, the four of them were congregated in Nicholas’s suite, room service ordered, everyone settled in. Mike filled in Adam and Louisa on the shoot-out near the hospital while Nicholas cleaned up her arm. She wasn’t going to make a sound. She talked fast, through gritted teeth.
“There, all done,” he said what seemed like two years later, but she knew was only a couple of minutes. “The steri strips are fine. You’ll be good to go in a couple of days. Here, take the aspirin. I’ll have the nurse give you a lollipop on your way out.”
“Har-har.”
Adam handed her a glass of Coke Light and she got the aspirin down. “While we were waiting to hear about Lia’s surgery, I called Gray to ask him about the coverage drop in New York. He said he was still working on it, but it appeared the satellite they were using got off course and lost its signal. It’s totally down. It might have been tampered with, it might have been hit by space debris, don’t know yet.”
The pain in Mike’s arm was down to a dull throbbing, thank heavens. “But that doesn’t explain the inability to call us. Cellular shouldn’t have been affected.”
“That’s right,” Adam said. “Gray told me they went dark on all the screens for almost forty minutes. He said he’d get back to me when he had more information.
“Now, I’ve been searching for the drop in the system, myself, Nicholas, but so far, nothing. It’s gone. The data from that time has been erased. If our comms had gone down I’d be inclined to say it was a small EMP—an electromagnetic pulse—and that still might be the case, if there’s someone out there who’s developed a directional EMP. But at this rate, we might never know what happened. There aren’t any bugs in the system, none that I can see, at least. It’s like someone unplugged the coffeepot for a while, then remembered it hadn’t brewed totally and plugged it back in.”
“Keep on it, Adam, and your contacting Gray was a good idea. Keep in touch with him. If it was done on purpose, to cut communication to us, I’m betting there’ll b
e a trace. I have a hard time believing it was an accident, though.”
“Sounds coordinated to me,” Louisa said. “Adam, tell Mike and Nicholas about keeping track of Kitsune.”
Adam said, “Since she’s keeping an eye on us, we’ll see her again.”
“Sorry,” Mike said, “I forgot to tell you. Kitsune said she’d be coming here later.”
“Good. When she gets here I can tag her with a GPS tracker. Lia brought a couple of our new ingestables. It’s in her best interest for us to know where she is. Then we give her some tasty pasta, and pow!—she’s covered for seventy-two hours, give or take, and we always know where she is.”
“I think she will come,” Mike said. “But then I think about all the cock-ups today. She might be reconsidering our value to her as we speak.”
There was a knock at the door. A female voice called out in strongly accented English, “Room service.”
All eyes went to the door.
The knock sounded again, the voice more urgent, this time in Italian, “Apri la porta, per favore.”
“Not again. Wait, Nicholas, something isn’t right here.” Mike pulled out her Glock. Nicholas took one side of the door, Mike the other. Louisa had her weapon out as well, standing in front of Adam.
Nicholas opened the door, his Glock pointed at the server.
It was Kitsune, dressed in the hotel’s service outfit. She smiled, said, “Grazie,” and walked into the room.
“So where’s our dinner?” Nicholas said, slipping his Glock back into its holster.
“When I checked, I was told there was a twenty-minute wait. I hope you don’t mind, but I added an order of my own to yours.”
Mike said, “Well, no more long blond hair. But you still aren’t you.”
“No. To visit the hotel, I decided to go Italian native, no more tourist.” Kitsune patted her dark wig. “I am very sorry about your agent. Will she be all right?”
“Yes,” Mike said. “Thank you, Kitsune, for keeping a watch on us, for keeping us safe.” She paused. “You’re not a bad shot, either. I thought you hated guns.”
“I did. I do, but Grant—my husband—said I would occasionally find them useful and that meant I had to learn how to shoot. When he was satisfied, he gave me two Walther PPKs. I like them.”
