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I looked back at the monitor, where the waiter was displaying a dessert wine to the couple, and Ashlee was shaking her head. In my ear, I heard her beg off for fear of developing a headache. Their meal was almost over, then she could leave and never have to see Kovac again. I, for one, was counting the seconds.
Kovac lifted his nearly empty wine glass to Ashlee. “To my beautiful lunch date.”
Ashlee smiled and, if I wasn’t mistaken, blushed, although that could have been my imagination. I snorted at the lame flirtation.
“I have a proposition,” Luka said. His grin had turned wolfish.
Then again, I had to admit to myself that he might be projecting. But I was sure of one thing. My pulse raced with the urge to punch Kovac in his face. Bond, who was doing her job and monitoring the whole team’s vitals, turned in her chair and looked at me. I ignored her.
“Izak and I are having a small dinner party at our home Friday night,” Kovac told Ashlee. “Join us.”
The entire team, who had been having side conversations as they monitored the meeting and Luka’s phone, went quiet. They were as worried as I was that this asshole seemed to be putting the moves on Ashlee. It took a few beats and Kessler speaking again for me to realize that wasn’t what had silenced them.
“We’re 99 percent sure that’s Kovac’s operations base,” Penn reminded the team. “Maybe she should go.”
“No.” I didn’t even have to think about it.
“Are you sure you want me to tell her to turn him down?” Kessler asked.
Everyone in the van turned to look at me. Obviously, they disagreed but weren’t about to challenge the chain of command. But I’d given Penn different instructions.
“TJ,” Penn said on our private channel, “we might not get this opportunity again to put someone inside that house.”
“Tell her to politely decline, then stall,” I told Kessler. That would be a lot for a trained operative to pull off on the fly, and I knew it was unfair to ask it of Ashlee, but I needed a minute to think.
“There’s nothing to think about,” Penn told me, as if he were reading my mind. He wasn’t, though. He was thinking like a team leader and recognized that I wasn’t.
“Shit,” I muttered. I grabbed a pen and paper and leaned over Kessler’s workstation, scribbling hasty instructions that she was already reading, trusting that the shorthand we’d all developed with each other would allow her to immediately grasp my plan.
“Ashlee, tell him you have a date Friday night,” Kessler began, feeding her the storyline. “You just started dating. You actually met him at the embassy party. He’s on his way downtown now, taking the afternoon off for a special date with you.”
I grabbed my suit jacket and headed for the back doors of the van.
“Going somewhere?” Bond asked.
Penn, despite sitting on a park bench a block and a half away, immediately grasped the situation. “TJ, what the fuck are you doing?”
“We need to get someone inside that house,” I said on the shared channel so the entire team could hear me because I didn’t want to say it twice. I checked to make sure no one was on the street, then climbed out of the van and headed for Taberna de Galicia. “We are not sending in a civilian by herself. There’s security footage from the gala of us together. Alder, start building the backstory immediately. Restaurant receipts, phone logs, a handful of texts a day.”
“On it, Boss,” Alder said.
“Make it fast. Pull resources from another HEAT team if you need them. Kovac will probably assign someone to start investigating me as soon as I get myself invited to his Friday fucking shindig.”
“I’m advising against this,” Penn said in my ear. “Like you asked me to do if you go off the fucking rails.”
I tapped my earpiece to switch to the private channel. “Noted and taken under advisement. Now, you’ll forgive me for ending this little discussion. I have a civilian to rescue.”
“Fuck me,” he muttered.
It was the last thing I heard him say before I clicked off the channel.
Through the comms, I heard Kessler. “Your phone is going to ring any minute. It will be TJ, telling you he’s early and is only a block away from where you’re meeting him, wondering if you can meet sooner.”
That would be my way in. Kovac would be curious and would want to meet the new man in Ashlee’s life. He would ask probing questions. I would have all the right answers that would check out when his team did a background check. And he’d be lulled into inviting the proverbial fox into his criminal henhouse.
In my ear, I heard Ashlee following Kessler’s lead to perfection. At the moment, she was telling Kovac about this afternoon’s date, which she had planned. An ad-lib on her part that made her sound like a smitten woman in the early stages of a relationship. A small part of me—okay, not small, in fact, probably the largest part of me—wanted to believe that came from a place of absolute truth.
“First, I’m taking him to see a movie,” she was telling Kovac. “It’s one of those places that sells wine with the popcorn. Then we’ll take a long stroll along the harbor, and we’ll end up at an Italian restaurant. It’s one of those great places that locals know about but tourists tend to miss.”
