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Diego swallowed hard, taking in the sight of her pleasantly round ass as she bagged his cream on the back counter. He stiffened in his pants, his throat tightening along with his damn balls. This was dangerous, he knew. He needed to stay invisible, and part of that meant not going to the same store every fucking day, seeing the same people every day, talking to the same damn woman every day.
Take your stupid carton of cream, go back to your apartment, jerk yourself off picturing that ass bouncing on your cock, those tits slapping you in the face, those sad eyes gazing into yours as you come.
The image was vivid and wild, and Diego felt his restraint weaken as Mercy turned around and placed the brown-bagged cream on the counter. She was close enough that he could smell the warm aroma of her body, the subtle scent of her floral perfume mixing with a hint of perspiration from the steamy work of making those tamales.
“Do you know about plumbing?” she asked.
Diego blinked twice, frowned once, then remembered his damn uniform and the question about being a maintenance man. “Sure,” he muttered, grabbing the cream and turning to go.
“The faucet in the back has a leak,” she said, blinking and averting her eyes shyly. “I tried to fix it but made it worse. The plumber charges eighty dollars minimum. Perhaps you can take a look and I will pay you forty?” She shrugged, flashed a hesitant smile. “Plus a free tamale? It is pork belly today. Soft and succulent.”
Diego swallowed hard, forced himself to turn back in Mercy’s direction. From the side of his vision he could see the front door, the late morning sun streaming through the thick glass, casting a glow that made everything feel surreal, like things were shifting around Diego, like the universe was opening up two paths for him, fate forcing him to choose, destiny daring him to pick.
The feeling almost made his head spin, and Diego wasn’t certain what was coming over him. He stood there frozen, staring at Mercy, into those sad eyes that did something to him, to the man in him, a man who had brought much sadness into the world, done it like it was his mission, his calling, his fate, his destiny.
But right now it felt like fate was twisting inside him, destiny turning outside him, spinning up new possibilities, new pathways, all of it opening up ever since Diego had boarded theRivingtonin the darkest part of the night, crossed paths with that coyote John Benson, a man who’d popped up in Diego’s life again today, like the bastard was somehow pulling the strings of Diego’s fate, changing the path of Diego’s destiny, perhaps doing it without even knowing it.
And then, before Diego knew it, he found himself smiling and shrugging and turning away from the front door, following Mercy into the back, making a choice that felt like he was leaving something behind, starting something new.
12
This was something new to Ice.
Not sitting up all night and staring at a closed door, ready in case someone was dumb enough to come through it. Nah, he’d done that a hundred times before.
Just never with his attention elsewhere.
Behind another door.
The door to that bedroom.
Ice stood from the hard-cushioned sofa, stretching his body and then striding over to the front door of the hotel suite. He peered through the spyhole at the hallway outside. Nothing stirring. No room-service carts rolling down the hall. It was too late for midnight snacks, too early for coffee and breakfast.
He stepped away from the front door, paced the carpet like he’d been doing intermittently for hours. The drapes were still closed. The air-conditioning was back on.
But the heat still burned in Ice.
“Damn it, you shouldn’t have let that happen,” Ice muttered, turning at the far end of the hotel suite’s living room and stalking back towards the closed bedroom door. He stopped outside the door, listened for Indy’s gentle snores that told him she was still in la-la land.
He exhaled when he heard her rhythmic, deep breathing come through the door. Stroked his stubbly chin and continued his sentinel-march that had flattened the carpet fibers into a lonely pathway down the center of the suite.
After Benson had hung up Ice had quickly taken charge, deciding that they would leave in the morning but without checking out of the hotel. He trusted Benson’s word that the Darkwater alias was solid, but Ice’s image would have been captured at airport immigration on his way in, and it wasn’t a stretch to assume that NSA had access to pretty much every airport CCTV feed in the civilized world. In that case, with today’s computing power and artificial intelligence programs, it would be almost trivial for NSA facial-recognition to match his face to an Army mugshot that popped up with the name Michael “Ice” Wagner.
And since the Indians had stamped his fake passport and logged it into their system, NSA would easily be able to link Ice’s Darkwater alias with his real name.
After that it wouldn’t take much to run a search through Mumbai’s hotel databases to see if anything clicked.
And someone high up in Langley would absolutely have access to anything NSA could provide.
Ice should have connected the dots sooner, but he didn’t beat himself up over that too much. He’d have probably come to the Raj Palace Hotel anyway. First because the hotel had tight security, including a metal detector and baggage-scanner at the front entrance. Ice had snuck in his guns by dismantling the weapons and packing the parts in X-ray proof compartments of his military-issue duffel. That trick wouldn’t work with modern airport scanners, but there was no problem with most hotels.
Sure, a local wet-team could use the same trick to sneak in a handgun or two, but there was no way anyone was bringing heavy weaponry into a swanky hotel like this. That was enough of an advantage for Ice. Especially if he knew someone was coming.
And that was the second reason Ice would have checked into the Raj Palace anyway.
To set a trap for this mystery mastermind back in Langley.
Force him to use his CIA tech hacker-contact to track Ice down. Then force him to activate another wet team or local CIA asset.
