“No idea, Mom.” Yes, why would any child’s feelings matter? If we’d ever been allowed to have a dog — Are you kidding? You’re too irresponsible! Remember what happened to Twinkie? — I can’t say I’d be surprised if she ran over it herself. (I swear to you, she poisoned that goldfish.)
“Anyway.” Her tone’s sharp enough to cut off any further interruptions. She steamrolls on. I let my head loll back against the headrest, and I pack away everything I might have told her, everything I might say, everything I might feel.
Yep, it’s my childhood all over again. She runs rampant, and I’m hiding.
I survive my meetings with Patrick from AeroTechCanada all Monday morning, until they turn us loose a little before lunch. We haven’t made much progress with the wing redesign, unless you count finding four methods that don’t work.
The putative Thomas Edison quote about discovering ten thousand ways not to do something didn’t go over so well, either. If my boss Carol hadn’t been in the room, I might’ve gotten desperate enough to pitch the really outside-the-box solutions I’ve been contemplating. And drafting. And calculating.
Unfortunately, Carol ran the meeting — into the ground. Fortunately, my job security isn’t on the line with this one task: I’ve got five others ahead of schedule or better than spec. I’ve earned a minute to chill once I’ve got my white pizza in the cafeteria.
Carol strolls over to my table, and I try not to let my tension around my boss show. So much for relaxing. I like her — I try to like her — but the feeling doesn’t seem mutual. “You’re not on the de-icing team, are you?” she asks me.
Isn’t it her job to know that? “No.”
“Would you like to be?”
“Um.” At my hesitation, Carol frowns. My schedule’s pretty full, and from what I’ve heard, Carol isn’t interested in trying anything new or different on de-icing. Without that draw, I’m ready to plead off.
“Oh, hey.” Another guy I know, Lucas, strolls up with his tray. “Talking about de-icing? We could really use you.”
Flattery isn’t enough to sway me, but the for real look Lucas and Carol are giving me might be. Guess I’m not that busy. “Okay, I’ll try to make room.”
“Great.” Carol beams, but I recognize fake enthusiasm. She sits down at the next table, like we’ll prolong this deal-making discussion.
Yeah, I’m gonna finish lunch at my desk. “Oh, just remembered — need to get an email out ASAP.” I grab my pizza to go and retreat to my office.
Once the door shuts behind me, I puff out a breath. After the AeroTechCanada meeting this morning, and a whole new project where I can spin my wheels, I need to de-stress. And my new favorite way to relax at work is researching a particular plane.
I find a site offering an online rental of a documentary on the Arrow and sit back to enjoy the show. While it’s loading, I check out the other comments on the page. One mentions a Facebook group for Arrow fans, and I pause the video to click through without a second thought. The public files have some interesting stuff — specs, models, etc. I’m almost tempted to reactivate my old account.
No matter how sneaky I am, Kendra would find out.
What am I afraid of? Having to ignore her again? Finding out she’s doing worse? Doubt it gets a whole lot worse than her mother in tears, begging me to save her daughter’s life.
I definitely don’t love her anymore — hard not to hate her some days — but I don’t want her dead. So I do the thing I’m never, never supposed to: I click in the search box at the top of the page and type her name.
The public version of her profile comes right up. Her picture’s the same flower she always used. The first post on her page is a photo of a sunrise. Dated eight weeks ago. That seems hopeful.
I scroll past the messages of support and bewilderment through March — I’m sure dozens more are visible to her friends. I keep moving past the memories until I reach the next photo. A selfie of Kendra in a white fur-lined hat, in front of a snowy neighborhood.
Takes a second to click — that neighborhood is my parents’.
The memories surge back. I know what day that was, though I never saw her. I don’t want to fall back into those memories I’ve worked so hard to forget; I can’t —
My phone buzzes. I pull my eyes from the monitor and check the text message. From Talia.
She has no idea how much I needed rescuing. Without looking at the monitor again, I hit the keys to kill the browser tab and turn to Talia’s message.
Time for your daily kitten!
Another message comes through, a kitten in sunglasses and a Hawaiian shirt. I glance around, like somebody’s going catch me grinning at a goofy picture.
How do you respond to a kitten? Send one back? Say it’s cute — implying that Talia and her flirting are cute? She must know I’m into her, but I still want to be careful.
Maybe more than careful. To be honest, I’ve been a little . . . worried about our next date. I want to go out with her — who wouldn’t? But as soon as I accepted, Arjay popped up, and everyone within twenty meters had to have heard him shouting we were “totally” getting married.
Just like yesterday, my stomach clenches. Is that what Talia expects? Because aside from the fact it’s ridiculously early in the relationship, I don’t know when I’ll be ready to think about that, other than not for a long time.
I’ve tried so hard to start over, to get past Kendra and all the crap I went through with her. It hasn’t been all that long, but . . . what if I can’t?
My gaze falls on my computer screen. The Arrow docu-mentary’s back up, paused on the dramatization of blowtorching the only five Arrows in existence into pieces. Some things you just can’t undo.
A knock at my door interrupts my thoughts’ spiral dive. “Come in,” I call.
“Hey, Danny?” Brad, one of my team members, pops his head in my office. “The wind tunnel tests for that SinclAir engine pod are back. Do you have a minute to go over them?”
“Yeah.” I take stock of my now-cold pizza, my unanswered text, my unfinished documentary. The documentary will wait. I shove two more bites of pizza in my mouth and stand.
Only one thing undone: the text. Definitely not a decision I wanted to make with an audience.
I’ve got to be reasonable. Objective. Losing my ability to think rationally to Kendra once again doesn’t help anything. I need to keep trying. Moving forward. Starting over.
Perfect timing, I text Talia. Thanks for the fix.
I look to Brad still standing in the door. “Let’s go.”
I’m going out with Talia this weekend. We will have fun. I might even kiss her.
I just need to make sure she knows I’m not on the marriage market.
Some days, it’s not so hard to juggle a law internship and a CIA job: you get up, you go into the (law) office, you work your day, you meet with an agent or two at night, you eat, you sleep.
Some days, you get up, you go into the office, you get a call, you fabricate a ridiculous yet believable excuse to run away, you pack up the depositions you’ll be annotating all night, and you go break into someone’s house while he’s home.
Some days, being a CIA officer looks a lot like being a cat burglar.
Could be worse, though. I could still be in the skirt and heels I wore to the office. Fortunately, I’ve learned to keep a spy-emergency outfit hidden in my trunk: breathable black shirt, form-fitting black pants, shoes designed to muffle my footsteps. Vasily can’t even hear me creeping over the hardwood floor through the open doorway to the living room.
Seeing me might be another story. I can’t afford to mess with a disguise when I need stealth. If Vasily catches me, not only are our dance covers blown, but he’ll hand off everything he knows about us to the Russians — it could end our careers. (Like a lot of risks we have to take.) But bugging Galina’s apart-ment yielded nothing so we’ve got to go to the source.
I pull a slim mirror from the pack on my belt and ease it around
the doorframe in slow motion, careful not to reflect a direct beam of light. Vasily’s on the couch, hunched over his laptop, his back to me.
Some days, things totally go your way. That laptop’s a definite win. We’re looking for copies of anything he’s fed to his handler, beyond the limited comms we’ve intercepted. I feel my belt pack again, checking for another device I packed: a hard drive cloner. (Like an external hard drive, but smaller and faster.)
There it is — plastic case the size of thick credit card. I push the slider to extend the USB plug. Doubt Vasily’s logged his next visit with his Russian handler in iCalendar, but there’s got to be something on there we can use, if only to figure out the next time to target him. Now I just have to get at his computer.
I rub my fingertip over my minimicrophone at my collar, signaling Elliott: brush brush tap, brush brush brush. Go.
In under a minute, Elliott knocks at the front door. (An-other reason I came in the back.) I sneak back to the kitchen. Not a great plan — no other escape routes — but it’s out of sight of the hall. I wait, listening.
“Sorry to bother you, sir,” Elliott begins when Vasily answers the door. That’s when I remember — Vasily and Elliott have met before, and Elliott didn’t detail a disguise for me in the mission rundown.
He’s smarter than that. Right? Or did we blow this?
“How can I help you?” Vasily asks. No sign of recognizing him.
“Luke Chambers with Ottawa Public Works. We’ve had reports of some damage to the pipes to your building.” Elliott keeps his tone perfectly polite — perfectly Canadian. “I’d like to test your water, if that’s possible? It’ll only take a few minutes.”
“Well . . .”
I hold my breath.
“We just need to make sure there’s no sewage leaking into your drinking water,” Elliott explains. Yeeeah, even I’d let somebody in for that. (With a reasonably convincing uniform.)
“All right,” Vasily says.
Whew.
“Thanks. Shall we start in the kitchen?”
I.e., where I am. Crap. I glance around, like a door into another room magically appeared in the last ten seconds. Nope. I tap the microphone almost as fast as my heart is beating, and roll my feet to noiselessly hurry to the pantry door.
“Oh, actually,” Elliott says, “could you show me to the restroom? Sometimes we get interference with kitchen appliances.”
If I were Vasily, I’d be gearing up to evict this liar. (Of course, I’m also a girl, so strange guys in my house telling lies would be three strikes, get out.) Fortunately, Vasily’s not me, and he’s buying Elliott’s nonsensical line. “Yes, this way.”
I’m curious to see how Elliott’s selling this, from disguise to props, but I don’t have time. He’s given me maybe three minutes to get out of the kitchen and on Vasily’s computer. Fortunately, he didn’t shut it down. I plug in the cloner. The blue LED lights up, and I crouch behind the gray suede couch, out of view of the hall. Elliott’s small talk focuses on keeping up his lie — something about pipe problems upstream, water testing kit spiel — and keeping Vasily pinned down. I watch the LED flicker, waiting, waiting, waiting.
Funny how fast this device seems when we test it in the office. I feel like I could do this faster copying the files manually. As in writing them by hand.
Elliott’s voice grows louder. Another advantage to his running commentary: locating him and Vasily. I drag a finger over my mic slowly, hoping he gets the signal to draw it out.
“Let’s test the water in the kitchen next.”
“It’s over there,” Vasily says. Like he’s not coming with Elliott.
Elliott’s no fool. “Sorry, could you show me which switch runs the garbage disposal?”
Vasily doesn’t respond aloud, and in the silence, my pulse thumps in my ears. I realize I’m clutching the arm of the couch, like it’ll protect me (or hide the cloner) if Vasily comes in. The seconds crawl by until I hear two sets of footsteps on the kitchen linoleum.
My heart rate returns to normal. I check the LED — green. All done. I pull the cloner out and slip it back into my belt pack. The hardware was always the easy part. Now I just have to get out.
The water runs in the kitchen and I take my opportunity to cross the room and slide my mirror around the doorframe again. Elliott, in a blond wig and I’m guessing a fake scar or something, holds up a tiny plastic cup. He tears open a black packet and pours in a white powder, then picks up a black plastic pod and squirts in a dark liquid. He adds tap water and offers it to Vasily. “Can you shake this for me for sixty seconds?”
“Sure,” Vasily says, hesitation hanging in his tone. But he takes whatever it is and starts shaking.
“Hold it up to the light. Let me know when it turns yellow.” Elliott points to the window — facing Vasily away from me. Elliott flips on the water and the garbage disposal, and I’ve got cover and a distraction to escape.
I creep to the front door, not bothering to wait for Elliott to finish “testing” the water.
Half an hour later, I beat Elliott to the rendezvous, a Tim Hortons/Coldstone Creamery, though I’ve taken my time in making sure I’m not being watched. I settle at a table to watch the sanitized weather and headline reports while I wait. (I’d get ice cream, but the food security at these restaurants is pretty lax.)
Elliott cruises through the parking lot in a gold Company car, and I meet him around back. He rolls down his window. “You didn’t get me anything?” he asks, a hand on his chest like he’s wounded.
“You were late. I ate it. Sorry.” I smile extra brightly to show I’m not sorry at all. I get in the passenger side, moving aside the stuff on the seat: a condiment cup with a lid, one of those liquid drink mix pods and . . . a packet of salt. “Your ‘water testing kit’?”
“I know you’re impressed.”
Okay. Maybe a little.
“You got it, right?” Elliott asks.
“Yep.” Anything sensitive will most likely be encrypted, and we’ll have to send that back to Langley, but now we’ve got a lot more than the fragmentary messages we’ve been able to intercept so far. We might even have enough to figure out the identities of the rest of his spy ring.
We head back to the office, with a few more stops to make sure we haven’t picked up any tails, though we were both clear when we met. After our final stop, we get on the Queensway.
“You know,” Elliott begins. He’s trying to sound casual, but he’s walking down a path I do not want to follow. He drags me along before I change the subject. “I haven’t heard anything about Danny lately.”
“Nothing to report.”
He glances at me — though his eyes aren’t teasing (like they normally are). Is he actually . . . concerned? “No second date?”
Though I contemplate not answering, I feel bad about leaving Elliott hanging when he might care. “Not until this Saturday.”
Elliott punches me in the shoulder. “What are you doing this time?”
“I don’t know. I have to figure it out — I asked him.”
“Hm.”
I can’t tell whether he’s thinking about that or worried I had to ask Danny. (It’s the twenty-first century. I can do that.) Or maybe just driving.
Elliott waits until we’re off the Queensway before he returns to that topic. “Been to the Rockcliffe Park pond?” he suggests. “Wait, I think that’s only open in the morning. You could try a ghost tour — or they do Shakespeare in the park.”
I frown, and he catches my skepticism. “What?” he says. “I have culture.”
“The bacterial kind?”
Elliott glares at me. “You’ve got to give me something to go on, unless you guys are going to pass the time planning your wedding.”
I ignore a minor jolt of shock. (Stupid W-word.)
“Any hobbies?”
Aside from kittens? “Not that I know of.”
“Local?”
“American.”
Elliott stops at
a red light, pondering. “What does he do for a living?”
“He’s an aerospace engineer —”
“Aviation museum,” he cuts me off.
Have to admit, not a bad idea. Maybe boring for me, but most museums try to appeal to the layman, right?
“What’s his last name again?” Elliott asks.
“Fluker,” I answer — then I realize he slipped one past me, just when I was starting to trust him. He doesn’t need that intel to figure out a good date, and I haven’t told him before. I can only imagine what he’ll use it for.
Before I can backtrack, we reach our office parking lot and switch back to business mode (or as close as Elliott gets). A couple coworkers are in the bullpen once we pass the reception area and security swipe, so we divvy up the intel from the hard drive cloner, and I get stuck with Vasily’s old emails.
Nothing looks suspicious, dance and trading shifts with another stylist (which is why he’s home today). After half an hour of scrolling through his social life, I’m out of leads.
“Hey, T,” Elliott says without moving from his desk. Rashad’s the only other guy in the office now, but he looks up, too. “When’s the last time we updated your call sign?”
“Maybe a year?”
“Time for a new one.” He turns to Rashad. “You need one?”
“Hit me.”
We’re supposed to use an approved list and pick something at random, but sometimes we get creative. “OTIS,” Elliott declares.
“Otis,” Rashad repeats. His scoff says you can’t be serious.
“Sure — wasn’t there a kid named Milo on The Cosby Show with Phylicia Rashad?”
Rashad pops up an eyebrow. “No Milos on that show.”
“Sure there were. Right?” He falls silent for a minute. The lack of an actual connection is good, though. Nobody else would ever make the logical leap Elliott did. “Well, whatever, Milo and Otis: OTIS.”
Rashad shakes his head like he can’t believe this white boy and goes back to his computer. Elliott looks to me. “Anybody call you Tally growing up?”
“No,” I lie. Nobody I want to admit to knowing.
Spy Another Day Prequel Box Set: Spy Noon, Mr. Nice Spy, and Spy by Night in one volume (Spy Another Day Prequels clean romantic suspense trilogy) Page 25