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He left quickly, probably so I couldn’t get in the last word. Part of me was sad to see him go, so the rest of me reminded those lizard-brain-driven parts that the man had interrupted my investigation, sedated me, and ordered me around in my own home. Of course, I wouldn’t listen to him, but the nerve of him to think I would acquiesce to his every whim was beyond the pale. Then again, why wouldn’t he think that, after I’d stopped speaking and started touching? The drug he’d given me hadn’t manufactured my attraction to him. He didn’t fit the profile of my standard dating type, which was buttoned up, corporate, and lawyerly. Boring. But he did fit the profile of my deepest fantasy type. Whatever was in that sedative must have removed my filters and let my fantasies swim to the surface.
One more reason to be annoyed at TJ whoever-he-was. Finding out more about him would allay some of my pique, so I would spend my Sunday afternoon researching him.
In the meantime, he was right about my stomach needing to settle, and those eggs did smell delicious. As I plowed through them, then chewed on my buttered toast, my eyelids drifted closed. I finally gave up and set my plate back down on the coffee table, then lay down and pulled the cozy quilt up to my chin.
All right, so it appeared I would take two pieces of TJ’s advice. And I would rise to the challenge he’d all but dared me to undertake by investigating him. But after that, I was done listening to my mystery man.
A minute later, I shook myself awake, remembering one more thing that had come out of his beautiful, bossy mouth. Luka Kovac.
I sat up, rubbing the sleep out of my eyes. I needed coffee to chase away my brain fog. I stumbled into the kitchen and set up my coffee maker as I puzzled through the breadcrumbs TJ had left for me, probably intentionally. TJ had hustled me out of Izak’s office, but he hadn’t warned me away from him. Earlier, when he’d mentioned Kovac, he had only invoked Luka’s name, not Izak’s. I pieced that together with the reaction of Renalda and her husband, insisting she meet with me to sing Luka’s praises, despite what I could now see was probably fear on her part.
I would do the woman a kindness and leave her out of it, but despite TJ’s advice to drop my “fluff piece,” it was time for me to go all in on it. Unlike the guards and Renalda, and most other people I met these days, Luka hadn’t mentioned my kidnapping, which was a very public part of my recent history. I had no doubt he knew about it. I had naïvely thought he was being respectful and circumspect. I had also thought I’d been using the perfectly nice, somewhat shallow, incredibly vainglorious husband to get to his bad-guy husband. In reality, I’d been talking to the bad guy all along. Luka was the Kovac who was involved with the shady organization behind my kidnapping.
I would make him pay, first for his lies, but foremost for his part in blowing up my sense of my place in the world.
4
TJ
I stood in my office back at HEAT’s DC headquarters and watched my team through the half-glass wall. HEAT buildings were all built on the same footprint so that our teams, who constantly travel for missions, felt at home anywhere there was a HEAT facility. The first floor had a large, open gym at its center, where the entire Alpha Team worked out when we were together on a mission, although Li and Kessler, as our on-the-ground tactical team, spent the most hours there. Now, the two of them crossed the gym, on the way to the kitchen to grab caffeine and sustenance before heading to the second floor for our 0900 briefing.
They emerged from the kitchen with Penn and his logistics team partner, Tamela Sparks. Logistics had just returned from their shift of physically surveilling Ashlee Armand, which HEAT had been doing for the two days since I’d literally carried her home and left her with an ominous warning. So far, signs pointed to her behaving herself, although our emergency wiretapping subpoena was limited in scope, so Jensen couldn’t guarantee it. I was almost a little disappointed that I didn’t have an excuse to return to her house and spar with her some more. The woman was as quick and sharp as she was beautiful, a lethal combination.
Samantha Bond, team doctor and my counterpart on the leadership crew of Alpha Team, knocked on my open door. “The team is waiting in the SCIF,” she said, referring to the secret compartmentalized information facility, which was a large conference room on the second floor of every HEAT building. “Is X ready?”
I glanced at the wall that divided my office from the nonsecure conference room beside it, where X had set up camp as she prepared for yet another Senate subcommittee meeting. “She hasn’t poked her head out yet, but she’s usually punctual, so let’s give her a minute.”
Bond nodded and stepped into my office. She joined me in looking out across the gym floor and into the glass-walled technical and logistics offices on the opposite wall. Those rooms, as well as the staff kitchen and lounge along the back wall of the building, were empty because of the scheduled meeting.
“It’s strange when it’s this quiet, isn’t it?” Bond whispered.
“Eerie,” I agreed. What I feared was that it was prescient, a vision of things to come, because while the Carbonados had been a gathering storm front outside our agency, the Senate subcommittee had been threatening to become the murderer inside the house.
“Has X mentioned anything about Jensen and Sparks?” Bond asked.
“No, but even if she suspects something, she’s in the same position as the rest of us.”
We were all pretending our tech lead and our logistics second weren’t hot and heavy, because that would violate HEAT’s nonfraternization policy. Right now, I couldn’t afford to lose a single member of Alpha Team when we were overwhelmed and—as much as I hated to admit it and would never say out loud—often outmatched by the Carbonados. Our team had been assembled from the best and brightest talent within HEAT for the specific purpose of taking down that organization. But as an international criminal enterprise made up of mercenary former agents from the best spy agencies in the world, including Mossad, the KGB, MI6, and even the CIA, the group operated outside the bounds of any country’s laws and beyond any sense of ethics or morality.
The Carbonados had personally targeted four of my team members, and we had just barely saved them. The extreme measures we’d undertaken to protect ourselves had come under scrutiny from the subcommittee, who seemed to know every action we took almost before we executed our plans. The whole thing stank to high heaven. We had begun to suspect that the Carbonados had compromised someone high up on the food chain, maybe even a member of the subcommittee itself.
X emerged from the conference room. She wore her signature black, this time an expensive tailored pantsuit and low heels. Her black hair was pulled back off her face in a tight bun and, like most of the time these days, she was frowning. I remembered a day long ago, when HEAT was in its early days and I was fresh out of the Army, when she had smiled more, occasionally wore a color other than black, and seemed to enjoy her work. The past couple of years, and especially this last one, had taken a toll on her.
“How are you sleeping, Xi?” Bond asked, invoking X’s rarely used first name.
X glanced at Bond. “The same as I always do.”
I suspected this was a conversation they often had in private, so I stayed out of it. The three of us climbed the stairs, punched the day’s numeric code into the cipher lock, and entered the SCIF in silence. The whispered conversations that had been occurring around the table stopped.
I stood at the head of the conference table, beside the projection screen. “We’re all busy, so we’ll keep this meeting brief,” I said, bringing the meeting to order.
Jensen typed on his computer and brought up the standard meeting presentation. THE ARMAND JOB was typed across the top of the agenda as the first order of business.
Jensen spoke first, summarizing the innocuous data he had collected from Ashlee’s electronic devices. Per our limited warrant, he was not allowed to intercept or read anything that reasonably appeared to be communications with her newspaper. “If she is working with an editor there on a bigger Kovac story, she’s not likely to be sending it over email anyway.” He glanced at X. “Given her involvement with Kovac, what are the odds we could expand the warrant, just in case?”
X furrowed her brow. “I might know a judge who would be sympathetic. I’ll have an answer for you by this afternoon.”
Next, Martin summarized Ashlee’s trips out of her house, which included daily visits to her local coffee shop, a book drop-off at the library, and a Monday morning dentist appointment.
