Page 503 of Tease Me


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TJ pulled me tighter against him and pressed his mouth to mine. His tongue stroked my lips, which I parted slowly. I licked the tip of his tongue with mine. He moved his hand and slid my zipper down the back of my dress. And then it went dark. A few seconds later, light from the hallway filtered in through the crack under the door.

“Generators are running,” TJ whispered. He pulled on a black sweatshirt and black sneakers as he spoke. “I should be back in less than fifteen minutes. You know what to do.”

I kissed him one more time, then dashed into the bathroom to start the shower. He left the room, closing the door behind him while I shrugged out of my dress and poked my head into the steam behind the shower curtain. Our plan was that if anyone came to the door, it would appear that I had just stepped out of the shower, and I would tell them TJ was in there now.

My plan diverged slightly, depended upon no one coming to the door. I slipped on my own dark sweatpants and pulled on a dark T-shirt over my strapless bra. I tucked my mini recorder into my sweatpants pocket and crept out of the room in bare feet, heading in the opposite direction from TJ. If all went well, I’d be back in the room before he returned, and he would never have to know I’d left.

* * *

TJ

I slipped down the dimly lit hallways, secure in the knowledge that Jensen was in charge of the security feeds and was looping empty hallways on the guards’ monitors, and my comms unit was allowing Penn and Sparks to track my movements inside the house. Still, I clung to the shadows, anticipating a bad guy with a gun around every corner. Our recon had indicated that Kovac kept the property perimeter well-guarded, but the interior of the house less so. With his state-of-the-art security system, only keeping a few armed guards inside was a reasonable decision.

But not one I would have made.

“You’re close now,” Penn said in my ear. “Next right. Expect an armed hostile.”

I moved more slowly, stealthily, and as quietly as a cat, my fists pulled up in front of me, ready to strike. I caught the guard’s shadow when he was just around the corner. He spotted me immediately but wasn’t quick enough to lift his weapon or his hand. I punched him square in the face, then pulled a tranq dart out of my pocket and sank it into his neck. It was a twenty- to thirty-minute dose, so hopefully, he wouldn’t be knocked out long enough to be missed. It contained a little extra kick that would make him feel sick, like he had the flu, while also wiping his memory of the minutes before he went unconscious.

I pulled nitrile gloves out of my sweatshirt’s front pocket and dragged the lump of a man into a dark, secluded corner, where he’d either be discovered or would wake up, but either way would appear to have curled up there for a nap. I continued to the end of the corridor and stopped outside the room we’d identified as a repository for all things Carbonados. The only place better to hide it on US soil would have been inside the embassy itself, but even Luka Kovac couldn’t have done that without the full cooperation of his government, which wasn’t involved with the criminal organization.

“Okay, Jensen, I’m ready for your magic. Do you have the code?”

“I’ve had it since ten seconds after the system rolled over to the backup,” he said.

The three lights along the top of the security panel outside Kovac’s office door turned green. I turned the door handle, which gave immediately, slipped inside the room, and closed the door behind me.

Alder spoke in my ear. “I’ll walk you through cloning the computer and the backup hard drives we’ve located with electronic signals. Jensen’s still working on cracking the safe.”

Fuck me. A delay in opening the safe hadn’t been part of our plan.

Alder explained how to attach the tiny plastic disk to the bottom of Kovac’s laptop, although I already knew the drill. Still, protocol dictated that the tech crew was responsible for this part of the operation.

While I adjusted the disk, I asked, “Any electronic signatures coming from inside the safe?”

“Yes,” Alder answered quietly.

Translation: There was good stuff in there, important information we needed. I wasn’t leaving the room without it.

Two backup hard drives were easy enough to find inside locked desk drawers. Unlike Ashlee’s inexperienced fumbling a couple of weeks ago, my lock-picking skills were quick and precise. It only took a few minutes for all three tagged devices to be copied and sent out to our cloud, where Alder was pulling in the data.

“Serious encryption,” she said. “We expected that. I can make out some phrases already, though. Shit, guys, this is the mother lode!”

“Does it mention the organization by name?” I whispered into my comms.

“No, but by description and names of key players.” She whistled. “Shipping manifestos. Illegal bank transfers. God knows what else we’ll find by the time the offsite team gets it all decoded. Do you know what this means? He’s not a key player, he’s the key player.”

Luka Kovac was the head of the Carbonados. And we had Luka.

If there was half as much incriminating data in those files as we suspected, we’d be able to issue arrest warrants for him and his lieutenants by Monday, and the FBI and Interpol would take them all into custody. Ashlee would be safe and free. And if all the stars aligned—I would move heaven and hell to make sure they did—we’d cut off the head of the Carbonados within a month.

I smiled and breathed a sigh of relief. “Anything about Kovac’s high-level protectors?” I asked. That data was vital to drive a stake through the organization’s heart and kill it for good.

“No,” Jensen answered. “We expect that to be in the safe. It’s inside the closet.”

I pulled open the closet door. On the middle shelf, between stacks of office supplies, was a small and unassuming safe, but we knew it was built of reinforced steel, and we’d just learned it was protected by electronic security that was giving our world-class hacker a headache. Every indicator light on the safe’s front panel was still bright red. “Jensen—”

“Counting down to open in three, two, one.”

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