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“It’s a classic,” she said, amused.
“I didn’t say it wasn’t good, but it isn’t something you read over and over.” He ran his finger down the page, looking for anything that jumped out at him. “Guillotine.”
Turning back to the keyboard, he typed in the word. ACCESS DENIED flashed on the screen.
He shrugged and consulted the book again. “Dickens was damn wordy,” he grumbled. “This could take all day.” He tried “monarchs.” ACCESS DENIED.
“Monsters” was rejected, then “enchanter.”
The file list opened on “tumbrils.”
“How about that,” John said softly. “I was just shooting in the dark.”
“Lucky shot.” Except he wasn’t just lucky, he was so highly trained that instinct and experience put him several jumps ahead of almost everyone else, allowing him to see the significance of a battered copy of a classic lying in the open on Ronsard’s desk.
He slid a disk into the A drive and began calling up files and copying them onto the disk. He didn’t take time to read any of them, he just copied them as fast as possible, one eye on the closed-circuit monitor the entire time.
Niema moved around behind the desk. “I’ll watch the monitor,” she said. “You copy.”
He nodded, and the A drive began whirring almost continuously.
A moment later, watching the monitor, Niema saw the door at the end of the hallway open.
“Someone’s coming,” she whispered.
John glanced at the screen, but didn’t pause in what he was doing. “That’s one of the security team,” he replied.
“Do they do door checks?”
“Maybe.” The reply was terse. Since he had disabled the lock
on the door, it would open if anyone tried it.
Niema put her hand in the folds of the evening wrap. The pistol grip felt cool and heavy under her fingers. The guard began walking down the hallway toward the office. Her heartbeat picked up and her mouth went dry.
The hallway was a long one; on the small screen, it seemed to stretch out endlessly, with the guard becoming bigger and bigger as he approached. Niema found herself counting his steps. Nineteen, twenty, twenty-one—
“Don’t lose your cool,” John cautioned softly but didn’t look up from the list of files. “Almost finished here.”
The guard strode past, never even pausing outside the door. Watching him on the screen, hearing his footsteps pass by the office, gave her an odd sense of unreality because the sound came from a different direction than the activity she watched on the screen.
“That’s it.” Quickly he punched the release, and the disk popped out. He slipped it into a protective sleeve and put it in his inside jacket pocket. Then he turned off the computer, restored everything on the desk to its original position, and touched her elbow. “Ready?”
“I’ll say.”
She turned to go to the door, but suddenly he grabbed her arm, pulling her to a standstill. “More company.”
She looked back at the monitor. The hallway door was opening again. Someone had stopped in the doorway, half turned away as if he were speaking to someone on the other side of the door. The tiny figure on the screen had long dark hair.
“Ronsard,” she whispered, a cold twist of panic tightening her stomach. He wouldn’t be in this long hallway unless he were coming to his office.
John exploded into motion, literally lifting her off her feet. In two long strides he was beside the sofa. He set her down and began stripping out of his tuxedo jacket, carelessly dropping it on the floor. “Take off your underwear and lie down,” he ordered, his tone low and urgent.
They had only seconds, seconds before Ronsard would be coming through that door. Her hands shook as she pulled up her skirt and reached under it for the waistband of her panties. Pretending to have sex was such a cliché, trotted out in hundreds of movies, that no one would believe it, especially not someone as sophisticated and savvy as Ronsard. That was precisely why it just might work, because he wouldn’t believe Temple would be so hokey.
Of course John, being John, wouldn’t depend on a torrid clinch to give the impression he wanted. No, he wanted underwear off, clothes disarrayed, as if they truly were just about to make love.
Her heart was pounding so hard she could feel her pulse throbbing under her skin. She skimmed her panties down her thighs and let them drop, then hurriedly kicked them away and lay down on the sofa.
