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A solid chess move, Rhett grudgingly admitted as his cheeks burned with the realization that Benson was still very much a master of the game.
Benson knew exactly how Rhett’s mind worked.
Knew that Rhett would choose a female target to handle the tech stuff.
Knew that Benson’s morning visit would spook Rhett enough to make him want to tie up loose ends, make sure there was nobody alive to tell tales.
And Benson had gone old-school with this. The guy must have simply pulled a list of every female techie and worked the damn phones until he got a bite, caught his fish. Yeah, Benson’s immediate goal was just to save Blondie’s life, cut down the collateral damage, Rhett thought angrily. The guy could match Rhett for ruthlessness any day of the week, but there was also something else in Benson’s psychological and emotional makeup that defied definition, was hard to articulate, even harder to understand.
Especially for a man like Rhett, for whom collateral damage was an essential part of the game—sometimes even thefunpart of the game.
Rhett sighed pointedly into the phone. “All right, you win. Go ahead and destroy a smart young woman’s career to make me look bad. Kaiser can’t fire her for this, but once word gets around, nobody will take Paige seriously. You know how vicious the rumor mill gets. So think about how that looks for Martin Kaiser, for the Director to get involved in something trivial and petty like this. I’m sure Senator Robinson will be very impressed with what his CIA Director is spending his time on these days.” Rhett snorted. “Anything else, Benson?”
Benson stayed silent. Rhett could hear him breathe, maybe even hear him think. Rhett waited for the bait, was almost looking forward to a little verbal sparring, master versus master, with Benson trying to make Rhett incriminate himself.
Bring it, Benson, Rhett thought as his lips tightened to a smirk. I’ll turn it around on you and Kaiser, make the two of you look like big bullies playing office politics. Come on, Benson. Step into the ring.
“Just make sure Paige Anderson shows up for work tonight. And every night.” Benson’s words came sharp and quick, followed by the click of the phone line going dead.
Rhett smiled tightly as he placed the handset back into its wall-cradle. Benson hadn’t even said the name O’Donnell, which meant he had nothing concrete on Rhett, was going on just a hunch, wasn’t absolutely certain that Rhett was behind the O’Donnell setup.
Which meant Benson and Kaiser definitely wanted to keep this quiet—for now, at least. Benson had made this call to save Blondie and take her off the board, and that was enough for this move.
Though of course there was a follow-up move: Benson and Kaiser would certainly try to get Blondie to flip, to give Rhett up this evening when she got to Langley.
It was certainly possible that Blondie would crack under the pressure of being questioned by Director Kaiser himself, Rhett thought grimly as he strolled past the nervously twitching Blondie and sank down into that pink sofa. But Rhett couldn’t kill her now. Didn’t matter if he staged a perfect suicide or a gangland killing or a highway accident or made it so that her body straight-up vaporized into thin fucking air. CIA didn’t give a shit about evidence that needed to hold up in court. This single phone call had pretty much guaranteed Blondie was untouchable, that Rhett had no choice but to let her walk into that office tonight and every night.
If Blondie went missing, the game was over for Rhett. It would look too sketchy for him if Benson played Robinson a recording of this phone-call. Even if there wasn’t enough to prove Rhett did anything to Blondie, his reputation would be tainted. No way Robinson could seriously consider Rhett for Director with something like that hanging over him.
“You know I won’t say anything, right?” Blondie’s voice was thin and peaked. “I’m one-hundred percent sure there’s no electronic trail for what we’ve done. I’ll come clean about our relationship, take the hit if they fire me. But I won’t give you up, Rhett.”
Rhett glanced up from the sofa. “Won’t giveyourselfup, you mean. Because if there is an electronic trail, it leads back to you, not me.” He shrugged coolly. “If Kaiser or anyone else questions me about anything to do with hacking into O’Donnell’s phone and planting that stuff, I’ll just say you engineered the whole thing to fuck me. That it was a genius MIT grad with low self-esteem trying to get back at me for dumping her. Jilted lover syndrome. Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. That kind of thing.”
“Wait, what?” Blondie’s eyelids fluttered, her fingernails digging into the foam armrests of her black swivel chair. Her voice wavered as she spoke. “Itwon’tcome back to you, Rhett, I swear! I’ll hold up under the pressure. For you I will.” She forced a trembling smile. “ForusI will. You won’t need to say all that. And you’re right—since I’m not a direct subordinate, we aren’t breaking any CIA rules with our affair. I’ll tell them we’re in love, and that’ll be the end of it.” Her blue eyes brightened. “Oh, Rhett, that means we won’t need to keep it a secret any longer.”
There is nowe, you dumb whore, Rhett thought viciously. But the smile he gave her betrayed none of that venom, hiding it all behind a well-rehearsed veneer of warm affection, loving trust, the kind of thing that turned these clueless kittens into panting lapdogs who would happily die for him.
And most certainlyliefor him.
“I love you, Paige,” he whispered gently, his heart almost warming when he saw her shoulders slump in relief, those premature worry-lines on her forehead disappear for an instant, making her look almost pretty from the inner glow of what he supposed was love.
Whatever gets the job done, Rhett thought callously as he stood from the sofa, leaned over and kissed her gently on the lips, wondering if the silly chicken knew how close she’d come to getting her neck wrung.
“I love you too, Rhett,” she cooed back at him, her doe-eyes big and blue and shining with an adoration that produced a sudden flash of contempt in Rhett.
You owe Benson your life, he thought as he rewarded her with another smile, then patted her cheek and gestured towards the laptop with his head. “Are you certain there’s no way for anyone to know that we activated Scarlet?”
Blondie nodded. “That’s how this system is set up. I checked the code. Scarlet doesn’t even exist in the system until she completes her mission and checks back in as available for redeployment.”
Rhett relaxed. He wasn't a tech genius, but he understood how the protocols worked. An NOC asset once deployed was a ghost to everyone except her handler.
Then something occurred to Rhett. He frowned, his jaw tightening, his throat going dry.
“Tell me something,” Rhett said, stepping back as he went over the protocol in his mind, connecting it with his superficial understanding of what Blondie had done with her hacker-magic. “The way this normally works is that the handler is able to communicate with the asset through encrypted chat. But if you hacked in, there’s no handler assigned to Scarlet, is there? Which means we can’t communicate with her now. Is that right?”
Blondie turned crimson, her eyelids fluttering like a butterfly in its death throes. “Shit.” She gulped, turned to the laptop, hit a few keys, then shook her head without daring to look up into Rhett’s eyes. “Didn’t think of that. You’re right. Scarlet got the first message with our instructions, but now we have no way of communicating with her. We won’t know anything unless we see her name pop back onto the list, which means she’s completed her mission and is back in the pool of available assets.” She sneaked a scared look upwards at Rhett. “I can keep monitoring the list to see if—”
“No,” Rhett said sharply. “They’ll be watching your every move. It’s too risky. You’re not to do anything unauthorized in the CIA systems from now on. I don’t give a shit how good you think you are—we can’t take a chance when Benson already suspects I’m involved.”
