Pink Slip

by Katrina Jackson

  So after Club Ménage, they’d visited a few of Banovíc’s haunts around the city without her. They never stayed for long, they just needed him to see them. And on this mission Monica’s bored gaze fit their cover perfectly. Why would she want anyone else, when Kierra was (safe) at their villa? And it seemed to be working. Every time Banovíc saw them out without Kierra, he seemed to grow more interested in them and in her absence.

  Lane pulled out a chair for Monica at the city’s best French restaurant, Ver de Terre.

  One thing they did actually have in common with Banovíc was that they too hated French food. He’d never visited this restaurant, no matter how many invitations the head chef extended with the promise that he was certain Banovíc would love his version of French food. It hadn’t worked so far, but the chef had made sure to host as many of Banovíc’s political allies and personal playthings, hoping to curry the dictator’s favor.

  But this lunch wasn’t about Banovíc. It was about his second in command.

  Martin Stepanov was Banovíc’s oldest comrade and just as corrupt as his boss. Their mission directives were limited to dealing with Banovíc, but he and Monica were nothing if not cautious. And in their experience, it was always prudent to explore the complicated web of power and relationships and give some consideration to the consequences a power vacuum might create. Reliable intel indicated that Stepanov was the most likely candidate to seize the presidency should Banovíc be removed.

  But there was less information on Stepanov than either Lane or Monica liked. He enjoyed staying in Banovíc’s shadow just a little too much and that made them both uncomfortable. The only kind of people who enjoy being second in command are people who are too weak to lead or who prefer to do their dirt in private. Whatever the motivations, Lane and Monica agreed that at best Stepanov would be neutralized without Banovíc and at worst he could be an even more dangerous snake in the grass. And it was in their best interest to decipher which one he could be before they completed their mission.

  As far as Lane and Monica were considered, all the intel in the world was nothing until they got the chance to look Stepanov directly in the eyes to see exactly what kind of man he was. So they leaned back amiably in their chairs, the sunlight spilling into Ver de Terre’s dining room, shopping bags full of frivolous and too expensive trinkets placed carelessly in the free chairs at their table as if the contents cost nothing. And they waited.

  They’d been seated at their table for five minutes, chatting, scanning the menu, looking out at the street and pretending to drink glasses of wine when they noticed the maître d' walking quietly between the tables surrounding them, apologizing to the other guests. Lane noticed, but didn’t flinch. He grabbed a piece of bread on the table, drawing Monica’s eyes to him. He watched her realize what was happening. They said nothing. Simply observed.

  Lane had a gun at his back. As usual. And Monica was armed with some of her favorite and sharpest knives, hidden artfully all over her body beneath her tight jeans and soft cashmere sweater. She crossed her right leg over her left. Someone watching them would think that she did so to lean closer to him, which she did, and gave him one of her prettiest smiles. She shifted her body so that she had better access to the knife sheathed in her knee-high boot.

  Her smile was genuine and for a second it distracted Lane, as always. Which was not good.

  “Don’t smile at me like that on a mission,” he whispered.

  “Why, old man?”

  He popped a piece of bread in his mouth and watched the maître d' moving in his peripheral vision. “That’s right, I am an old man. And the way you’ve been riding me every night of this trip I’m probably one good fuck away from a heart attack.” He smiled innocently at her.

  She bit her bottom lip and batted her eyes at him. And then she whispered, “They’re clearing out the dining room.”

  Lane’s smile didn’t falter, one slow blink his only acknowledgement of what she’d said.

  “You gonna keep taking all of your frustrations out on me?” He asked, leaning toward her. “Or are you going to finally let Kierra know how riled up you get when she crosses something off your to-do list?”

  He wasn’t sure if Monica was going to answer, but he noted her small exhale of relief when the maître d' stopped at their table. Lane was ready for him to tell them to leave as he watched a group of angry diners shuffle out of the restaurant.

  “Are you ready to order?” He asked instead.

  One of Lane’s eyebrows quirked up in response. “What would you recommend?”

  As he had begun to answer, a small entourage entered the restaurant. The maître d’ hid it well, but he jumped when his eyes landed on Stepanov. He turned back to Monica and Lane, bowed slightly in a deferential manner that Lane assumed the very rich and powerful in Serbia preferred, and then motioned for another waiter to serve them. “I am sorry. I have to greet another important guest, but please enjoy.”

  Lane and Monica didn’t listen to the waiter and so they weren’t entirely sure what they ordered. They just needed to get the man out of their line of vision quickly.

  Monica tapped her left index finger on the table four times, one for each guard stationed in plain sight inside the restaurant. Lane pretended to take a sip of wine and informed her of the car idling out on the street and another car with two bodyguards across from it.

  “That’s a lot of manpower for a casual lunch,” Monica breathed as she reached up to smooth the collar of Lane’s already immaculate suit jacket.

  He turned his head to brush his lips along her hand. He looked at her with all of the love he felt, “Either he’s paranoid or our cover is blown.”

  She bit her lip seductively, trailed her hand down his chest and around his waist, lowered her eyelashes and nodded.

  The sound of a man clearing his throat interrupted them. When they turned, one of Stepanov’s guards stood in front of their table waiting patiently. Lane’s hand rested high on Monica’s calf, his fingers gripping the handle of the knife in her boot. Her hand rested on the hilt of his gun. They waited.

  “Hello,” the guard said in heavily accented English. “Please accept this small token on behalf of my employer.”

  Their waiter moved forward, placed a bucket of ice with a bottle of very expensive champagne on the table. He lifted the bottle from the ice and showed its label to Lane, who nodded as he read the the vintage. Lane tilted his head to nod again across the dining room at Stepanov.

  Martin Stepanov was similar to Banovíc in many ways. They were of similar, average height, balding and with a clear penchant for expensive clothing. However, instead of Banovíc’s fake military uniform, Stepanov enjoyed tailored suits that almost made him look like a legitimate businessman and not a money launderer. He was sitting next to an attractive younger man who intel indicated was his lover, masquerading as his private secretary. The waiter opened the champagne and poured Monica and Lane a glass each. They held them up to respectfully salute Stepanov and took long sips.

  Stepanov smiled widely to indicate his approval and then nodded to the guard. Lane’s hand tightened on Monica’s knife.

  The guard reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a piece of paper. An address was printed on the piece of thick card stock.

  “My employer has heard good things of you from our Esteemed President. He would like to invite you to a private party that he is having tonight at this address.”

  Lane smiled his big, bright, Texas oil baron smile and raised his glass again to Stepanov. “It would be our pleasure, wouldn’t it sweetheart?”

  Monica smiled pleasantly, “Absolutely.”

  “Wonderful,” the guard replied, the smile on his face looking genuine, which made the hairs on the back of Lane’s neck stand up, but he wasn’t yet sure why. “I will convey your acceptance.” He turned to walk away and then stopped, turning back to their table. “I am told that you have another. Please know that the invitation extends to her as well. Per the particular re
quest of our Esteemed President.”

  Lane and Monica’s smiles widened.

  “She’ll consider that an honor,” Monica said, her voice light, even though her hand was tightly gripping Lane’s gun.

  The guard walked back to the table and then, just like that, Stepanov’s party rose from their chairs and headed toward the door. Stepanov turned toward them as he walked to the exit to smile his goodbye, his eyes roving over Lane’s face in appreciation.

  They both wanted to leave, especially Monica. They wanted to get back to the villa and make sure that Kierra was all right. But that would raise every alarm they’d been working to avoid. No one notices the man who politely and quietly robs a bank and then walks leisurely away, because they’re too busy watching after the guy running in the opposite direction. So they stayed put, pretended to chat about the weather, ate small bites of food that tasted like it was going to give Lane heartburn in a few hours. It was at least half an hour before they stood from their table, thanked the chef and maître d’ for their meal, not at all shocked to find that Stepanov had paid their bill.

  They didn’t speak until they were in their chauffeured car on the way back to their villa.

  “Calm down,” Lane said in a soothing tone. He gripped the back of Monica’s neck and smoothed circles at the tender flesh there.

  “We shouldn’t have asked her to do this,” Monica said. Her body was rigid beside him and her voice was full of worry. “This isn’t her job.”

  “And we won’t let anything happen to her.”

  Monica shirked his hand off of her neck and turned toward him with her eyes full of fear. “We should send her home.”

  Lane took a deep breath. “If you think that’s best, we can do that.”

  “You’re agreeing? Just like that.”

  “If you really want to send her home. We can.”

  Monica nodded. And then stopped, turning toward the window to watch the city pass them by.

  “We were supposed to have this last week with her. Just the three of us in Command. Normal.”

  Lane smiled and leaned forward to whisper in her ear, “It was never normal, darlin’.”

  six

  What does a personal assistant to spies do in a foreign country while her bosses are off doing the actual spy work?

  Kierra usually had more notice before a trip and liked to research museums to visit and plays to see. But she also wasn’t usually apart of her bosses’ operations. Knowing that Banovíc and his guards knew what she looked like made her nervous, even if the likelihood that she’d run into them in public seemed very low.

  But still, in lieu of a meticulously curated sightseeing itinerary, she decided to take an actual break from her job while Monica and Lane were out scaling buildings and hacking security systems or whatever it was they did.

  Kierra worked on her poetry collection while lounging by the pool, she took naps in the middle of the day and binge watched TV shows she’d been too busy to see over the past three years. It was actually quite nice for a while and after a couple of days, she’d almost forgotten why she was even in Serbia.

  Although this trip’s effect on her relationship with her bosses was not so easily forgotten. And that was certainly a good thing because Kierra didn’t want to forget that at all.

  Her bosses’ schedules were irregular. They usually all had breakfast together in the dining room down the hall from their bedrooms. Monica and Lane waited until the food had been served and their cook was on the other side of the villa to discuss the mission’s progress.

  They didn’t include Kierra in the conversation unless they needed to delegate some admin work to her. She kept her tablet close and jumped on each task quickly and efficiently. After breakfast they showered, separately – much to Kierra’s disappointment – and dressed for the day. Kierra usually slipped on one of the tiny bathing suits she’d found in Monica’s well-stocked walk-in closet, while they dressed in sophisticated clothing to keep up their cover as a Texas oil magnate and his spoiled wife.

  Just before they left the house, Monica had begun to lean down and press a soft kiss to the side of Kierra’s mouth and then Lane would smile that same gleeful smile at her as he reached down to playfully swat her ass in farewell. It was the literal stuff of her actual dreams.

  “Call if you need me,” Kierra always yelled after them, her heart beating fast in her chest.

  They never called, because they never needed her.

  Monica and Lane knew that Banovíc had been looking into their cover and so they made themselves as visible as possible. They wandered the city, spending money, eating in all of the right restaurants, meeting with all of the right socialites. Seeing and being seen. He had apparently been satisfied that they were who they said they were and their invitations to his private engagement had arrived the day after their initial encounter at Club Ménage.

  “Mr. & Mrs. Hudson and pet,” Kierra had screamed when she saw the address on the envelope. “And. Pet?”

  “It’s language they use in the subculture,” Lane had said in a placating tone. “Calm down.”

  “And? Pet?” Kierra had screamed again.

  She’d been ready to scream some more when Monica grasped the invitation from her hands and threw it haphazardly onto the table. She pulled Kierra’s body to hers and ran her hands up and down her bare arms, encouraging Kierra to take deep breaths. Kierra had only then remembered that she was in another of those very skimpy bathing suits and her nipples tightened at Monica’s touch.

  “Calm down, sweet girl,” Lane repeated. “It’s our cover.”

  “I’m not your pet,” she said in a fierce whisper aimed at Monica.

  Monica’s smirk unnerved her, because Kierra knew the question it asked before Lane said it.

  “You sure about that?”

  Whatever witty comeback Kierra normally might have come up with died on her tongue.

  She’d been halfway toward an orgasm after they’d left before she realized what she should have said. “You have to ask me to be your pet first.”

  But besides their increased physical contact, very little had changed. Unfortunately. And after three days cooped up in the villa like a hermit, Kierra’s sexual frustration was too much to bear. She threw on a pair of tight jean shorts and her old cropped band t-shirt and headed out to the city center, hoping to walk off her lust.

  If she’d been a real spy, she would have let Monica and Lane know where she was going before she left.

  If she’d been a real spy, she’d have found another temporary tracker and swallowed it. Just in case.

  But Kierra was not a real spy. And so she only had herself to blame when, while standing in the museum of modern art admiring some abstract floral painting by an artist she’d never heard of and whose name she couldn’t pronounce, she spotted one of Banovíc’s guards, easily recognizing him from Club Ménage.

  He stood sentry to her left, guarding the room. She turned her head minutely and saw that another guard had done the same to her right. She also noted that all of the other visitors who had previously been in this room had disappeared. And she was alone.

  Kierra pursed her lips together and tried not to scream or run, even though she desperately wanted to do both of those things. But she still jumped when she felt Banovíc’s finger move her hair aside, grazing her neck, so that he could whisper into her ear.

  “Now what is a pretty little bird like you doing out all alone?” His English was much less accented than his guard’s. Kierra knew that that was probably connected to a student exchange year in the U.S. that he’d participated in as a teenager and two years at Wharton for his business degree; all of the trappings of a Western-sponsored repressive regime.

  She took in a few breaths through her nose and tried to catalogue everything that she knew about him, which was more than normal since she collated mission intelligence, and found comfort in not being as ignorant as he seemed to presume she was.

  She turned to him, affecting
a pleasant but dim smile. “I love art,” she said, as if that was obvious.

  He let that one finger trace along her neck and jaw. Just before it reached her mouth she stepped out of his grasp. He did a passable job of smothering his rage. It was a quick, but intense glow that Kierra only caught because Monica was much better at controlling her emotions.

  “I don’t know how you treat your pets,” she said in a voice that thankfully hid her disgust at the word, “but where I come from we don’t touch other people’s property.” She leaned forward and whispered just low enough that he was forced to lean in if he wanted to hear, “Unless you ask for permission first.”

  The lascivious smile that spread across his face made Kierra’s skin crawl, but she tamped down on expressing anything that wouldn’t serve her in this moment. She smiled at him again, slowly, seductively and then turned on her heels to walk away.

  “I look forward to seeing you at my party, little bird,” Banovíc called after her.

  Kierra didn’t acknowledge him. She kept her back straight as she walked out of the museum. Her lips were pressed tight together as she hailed a cab with one hand. On the drive back to the villa, her nails bit into her palms as she fought the urge to scream out her terror. It was only when she was safely inside the foyer that she let out a harsh breath and the tears sprang to her eyes.

  “Where the hell have you been?” Lane rounded into the foyer, his neck red and splotchy in anger. It was rare that he abandoned the congenial mask that he offered the world or raised his voice above a sedate drawl. In three years, she felt certain that she’d only seen him truly angry once. And that one time paled in comparison to the rage she saw distorting his face now.

  “Answer me, Kierra. Where were you?”

  She opened her mouth to speak but wailed loudly instead. And then Lane’s arms were around her shoulders as he walked her to the living room. He took her to the couch and settled her into Monica’s arms.

  Kierra didn’t want to cry in front of them. No one likes crying in front of their bosses. But she’d been so scared and had bottled it up so well. And now that the anxiety she’d felt had broken free she couldn’t stop her tears.