Emily watched Brent as he watched them closely. “Knock it off,” she hissed, nudging him surreptitiously. “They’re all too young for you.”
“It’s not like that,” Brent protested, coloring. “The important question here is: are you calling me old?”
Emily didn’t answer but shook her head. Brent joined her at the back counter where he helped her tidy up after the earlier flurry and the three orders she’d just made.
“You know, you’re better at getting people to talk than I am. I’ve had those girls—the two of them, at least—as regulars for nearly the whole year I’ve worked here. Never knew any of that about them.”
Brent didn’t answer right away.
“I know, I know. You’re a people person.” Emily shook her head. “All I’m saying is, you’re like a professional people-person. It’s a compliment.”
“Well, thanks.” He shifted his feet and shrugged, fiddling with the end of his apron tie.
“What’s the deal with the fancy shoes, by the way? I don’t know if you could hear me at the bus stop yesterday, but I really recommend comfy tennis shoes for this job.”
“Oh, I heard you. And appreciate it, I really do. But these are special shoes. They’re made to look nice but feel just as comfortable as any running shoe.”
“Wish they made women’s shoes like that!” Emily stared down at her well-worn tennis shoes.
“Well, they—” Brent stopped short and shrugged. “There’s probably something similar if you look hard enough.”
Not in my price range.
“Regular?” he said.
“Huh?” Emily turned. “Oh. The game. No, never seen him before.”
Brent’s eyes narrowed just a hair and he drew himself up, walking the few paces to the register. “Welcome to Sunrise Coffee. What can we get going for you?”
Emily wondered at Brent’s slight shift in demeanor. As she filled the man’s order, she watched out of the corner of her eye as he drew on the man’s napkin: a cottage with a billow of smoke coming out the chimney.
The man thanked them for the coffee and the drawing and left. The minute he was out the door, Brent relaxed a bit.
“You feeling all right today?” Emily asked in an undertone.
“Never better,” he said. But he seemed to be concentrating hard on the next person entering the coffee shop. “First time?”
“Yes.”
The day continued to be a busy one, with a steady stream of customers, many of whom parked themselves at the small bistro tables and in the brown leather chairs. Emily tried to catch glimpses of Brent’s napkin drawings as often as she could. One woman got a cat, another a goofy-looking car. A flower. A ballerina. A cowboy.
But the drawings for the men: that was what puzzled her as the hours crept by. Their male customers always got the same drawing: a cottage with a billow of smoke coming out of the chimney.
Chapter 6
SEVERAL TIMES, EMILY nearly teased Brent about favoring the ladies and drawing the same thing over and over for the men. But each time she looked at him, he was either scanning the room almost warily or keeping an eye on the door.
It was like he was looking for someone.
Or watching for them, more accurately. When actually interacting with the customers, however, he always seemed at ease and wore a wide, friendly grin.
In the last thirty minutes of their shift, he seemed to grow a little antsy.
“Impatient to get home?” she asked.
“Mm-hm,” he said absently, his eye on the man coming through the door. “First time?”
She looked over at the man. He was older, wearing a plain, light grey suit with a white shirt. His skin was pale and his hair was wispy and white.
“Yes, first time—and very monochromatic,” she said.
The man glanced around the room with a hint of uncertainty and then walked, with measured steps, to the ordering counter, removing dark sunglasses and wiping his glistening forehead as he did so.
“Good afternoon! Welcome to Sunrise Coffee. What can we get started for you?” Brent asked cheerfully.
The man’s eyes roved slowly over the menu, and he didn’t speak for a moment. “I’ll just have coffee,” he finally said quietly.
“Black?” Brent asked. “And hot?”
“Yes.”
Emily couldn’t help but raise her eyebrows as she turned to fill the order. The man was obviously roasting in the Arizona heat—no thanks to his suit jacket—and yet he ordered hot black coffee? Some people were just entirely too committed to that stuff.
Brent finished ringing up the man’s order and bent to do his napkin drawing.
Probably just another cottage.
She handed the cup to the man with a smile. “Here you go! Enjoy, and feel free to stay for the air conditioning. It’s a hot one out there today.”
“Thank you,” the man said solemnly. He turned from the counter, his gaze roaming the shop.
“Wait, you forgot your napkin,” Brent said hurriedly, reaching across the counter and holding out the light brown square.
“Oh, I’ll be fine without one,” the man said, waving his hand.
“It has custom art on it...” Brent said, a little too eager.
The man froze mid-step and turned back to the counter. “I—I’m rather fond of art,” he said.
Emily caught a glimpse of the drawing as it changed hands. Another cottage. She nearly said something to Brent, but the expression on his face stopped her.
He was watching the old man very closely, intensely, absently clicking the cap of his marker off and on. The man smoothed the napkin into the palm of his hand and stared at it for a long moment.
Then he said in a low voice, “It reminds me of my childhood home.”
Emily felt something in the air shift, and Brent’s hands stilled, no longer fiddling with the marker. She glanced down. He had wrapped the marker in his fist, and his knuckles were white from clenching it.
“That’s nice,” she said to the old man. His gaze flicked to her face.
“Perhaps—perhaps you can build one like it,” Brent said quietly. The old man nodded his head toward Brent ever so slightly.
“I think I’d like that,” he said.
“Feel free to take a seat in one of the chairs, if you’d like,” Brent said, his talkativeness suddenly returning. “As Emily said, we have nice cool air in here. You’ll want that when enjoying a hot drink like the one you ordered.”
The older man looked down at the coffee cup in his hand, as if registering what was in it for the first time. He laughed weakly. “Oh, yes. An excellent point.”
He found himself a chair in one corner of the room.
“That was weird,” Emily hissed. “Do you know that guy?”
Brent put a hand on her arm as if to physically stop her words. “Never seen him before,” he said, catching her eye and holding it.
Startled by the warning she saw in his gaze, she swallowed her teasing words and glanced warily about the room.
“Hey, our shift’s almost up, but we should inventory the fruit in the freezer,” she said in a normal conversational tone. “Wanna come help me?”
“Sure if I can still keep an eye on the door in case someone else comes in and needs to order.”
When they’d entered the narrow hall and opened the freezer, Emily whispered, “Is something going on?”
“You’re very perceptive.”
She stared at him. “Well, are you gonna tell me what it is?”
“I just did. What’s going on is... you’re very perceptive.” Brent gave her a smirk.
“Ha. Funny.” She began to wonder if she had imagined the brief, slight strangeness she’d noticed.
Brent wasn’t paying attention any longer. He had half-turned his head toward the front of the coffee shop and was watching one of the previous customers out of the corner of his eye. A woman in cheap business attire.
“What?” Emily asked. “What is it?”
“Emily,” he said, gripping her arms and gently turning her toward the chest freezer. “Do me a favor and just focus on the fruit?” She stared at him searchingly for a moment. “Please?”
Finally, she shrugged. There was no use arguing. He obviously wasn’t going to admit he was acting strangely or take time to explain himself.
“It’s really none of my business,” she muttered under her breath as his attention returned to the leaving customer. The woman hadn’t noticed his attention; she held her phone in front of her face as she walked—probably reading something.
He began to relax, but then stiffened again. Emily straightened and closed the lid of the chest freezer quietly, looking around for what had caught Brent’s eye.
The woman stood just outside the front door, on the street corner, apparently waiting for the crosswalk to change, for she stared across at the signal.
A man had joined her, also staring across the street. But he was really listening to something the customer was saying, Emily realized. The woman’s mouth was moving, although neither of them looked at each other. After a moment, the signal changed to “walk” and the woman started across. The man turned, however, and headed for the door of the coffee shop with a determined step.
“No,” Brent breathed. “Smoke!” He darted to the back room and emerged a moment later with his lunch bag.
“Emily, I need you to do something for me,” he said with an intensity she hadn’t seen in him before. “When you smell smoke, pull the fire alarm. Then leave through the back door.”
For some reason, she didn’t argue. The look on his face convinced her that something was terribly wrong.
Chapter 7
EMILY’S HEART HAMMERED in her throat as she made her way down the short hall and into the back room. Terry had already left, but Carl and Li hadn’t yet arrived to cover the next shift.
What was going on? And how did Brent know she’d be smelling smoke? What wasn’t he telling her?
Her fingers hovered over the pull for the fire alarm. A strange hissing sound met her ears, just barely audible over the usual murmur of the coffee shop.
A few seconds later, she caught a faint whiff of smoke.
Hesitating just a fraction of a second, she pulled the alarm and clapped her hands over her ears as a piercing wail ripped through the building. Darting back around the corner, she peered into the hallway. The prep area was rapidly filling with thick smoke.
Brent had told her to run out the back door, so she did, wanting to be away from the smoke and the piercing noise. Even after the heavy back door slammed shut behind her, she could hear the alarm blaring inside. Somewhere around the front of the building, the shop’s patrons would be spilling out into the street in a panic.
She began to wonder how this would reflect on the business.
“What on earth is going on, Brent Peterson?” She stared at the back door, waiting for him to appear.
It was taking too long. He should have been right behind her.
She shakily punched the security code into the keypad and yanked the door open. Smoke billowed out, and the screaming of the alarm made her wince.
She stepped into the hazy back room. “Brent! Are you all right?” Emily hurried forward into the thickening smoke and almost immediately collided with something dark and solid.
“Emily! I told you to get out of here!” Brent shouted over the noise. Taking her under his arm, he guided her through the smoke. In a moment they’d burst out the back door, coughing.
“Are you all right?” Emily asked again, between coughs. She turned to look at her coworker and was surprised to find he held their latest customer, the monochromatic gentleman by the arm.
“I’m fine, Emily,” Brent said distractedly. “We’ve got to move.”
The man in the suit nodded in fervent agreement.
“What is going on?” Emily demanded.
“You’re going to have to come with us and just not ask questions—not right now,” Brent said, taking her arm. He hurried the two of them down the alley at a jog.
“Did you set a fire in Sunrise Coffee, Brent?”
“Questions!” he panted. “No time for them!”
Exasperation welled up inside Emily, but she stuffed it down and kept moving. As they neared the opposite end of the alley, Brent pulled her and the monochromatic man to a crouch behind a large dumpster.
“Here,” he said to the man, “take off your suit jacket and throw this—” he produced a worn sweatshirt out of his messenger bag “—on over your shirt. Put your sunglasses on too.”
Emily couldn’t wait any longer. “Seriously... did you just set fire to Sunrise Coffee and kidnap this guy?” She asked.
Brent squeezed his eyes shut for a moment and grunted in frustration. “No,” he said, popping them open again. “I’m a special agent working for a covert agency, and he’s the contact I’ve been watching for. I set off smoke grenades to simulate a fire evacuation in order to get him away from the pair who were apparently tracking him. No, this isn’t how it was supposed to go down, but stuff happens.
“Now, while you think that over, let’s put as much distance between us and the shop as possible.”
Emily closed her mouth, realizing it had been hanging open for most of her coworker’s explanation. “You—” she began, but the monochromatic man interrupted in his quiet way.
“Miss, this young man is telling the truth. He’s the government man sent to bring me in.”
Emily looked from one to the other, speechless.
Brent met her gaze for just a moment and offered a ghost of his usual crooked grin. “Sorry about all this.”
He withdrew a cheap flip phone—much like the one Emily carried for emergencies—from his messenger bag and plugged a small black device into the charging port before dialing.
“Encryption?” The older man asked a little anxiously.
Brent nodded tightly. “North Pole? This is Nighthawk. Put me through to Santa,” he said into the phone.
Emily’s heart kicked up and she couldn’t contain the goofy smile spreading across her face. He really was a secret agent—a spy, perhaps?—and they used code names! Honest-to-goodness codenames.
She eyed him and thought just how perfectly Nighthawk fit him.
After a pause, Brent said, “Casserole from Prague.”
Emily shot a bewildered glance at the monochromatic man. “It’s probably the answer to a challenge question to make sure of his identity,” the man whispered.
She nodded. That made sense. Anyone could call in and say he was Nighthawk. Only the real agent would know the answer to the challenge question was “casserole from Prague.”
“Santa, hi. We have a problem. I made contact with Red Rover as instructed, but they somehow tracked his movements and there was apparently a plant in the coffee shop. No, sir. Nothing about her gave it away. She was an ordinary customer who was sitting and reading while drinking her iced latte-something-or-other. Yes, that’s right, sir, we’ve been made. I have Red Rover in temporary hiding, but we need immediate exfil.”
Brent scanned the alley behind them as he listened to the man on the other end of the phone. “Really, sir? How did they know? This is worse than I thought, then. How long?” He listened again and then rested his fist against his forehead, grimacing. “I understand, sir. I’ll improvise.”
He ended the call, removed the encryptor from the phone, and then proceeded to disassemble the device, breaking the SIM card in half.
“That sounded like bad news,” Emily said quietly.
“Yeah,” Brent answered, running a hand through his hair and glancing around tensely. “Listen, we had a backup team of two stationed a block away. Someone neutralized them, not 5 minutes ago. It’s unknown how the enemy agents knew their location.”
“That was our ride?” The older man asked.
“Yes. My boss can’t get anyone else here for another 20 minutes at least. We’ll have to improvise. C’mon.”
Bre
nt instructed the old man to keep his head low and his sunglasses on. He told Emily to let her hair down and dip her head as well. Withdrawing a hat from his bag, he pulled it low over his forehead. Creeping forward, he checked first and then led them out of the alley and into the busy sidewalk. Walking along at the brisk pace of the others, he spoke in an undertone.
“We need to lie low somewhere safe until our exfil team arrives.”
“I—just want to go home,” Emily said. “Any chance I could do that?”
“I’m afraid not,” Brent said, glancing sideways at her, regret showing on his face. “You’re stuck with us for now. It’s safest that way.”
Emily had been afraid he would say something like that.
“Unless... he said, raising his eyebrows and looking over at her again. “I just thought of something... you wouldn’t happen to have driven to work today, would you?”
“Yes, actually. Old Blue cooperated this morning. Maybe he was just feeling finicky the other day.”
“I’m glad it’s working today—you have no idea how glad.” He heaved a sigh and reluctantly said, “Where are you parked?”
“Wait,” Emily said. “Am I your new getaway car?”
“I’m hoping so...” Brent gave her a sheepish grin from under the brim of his hat.
“I can’t believe I got mixed up in this, but—it’s actually kind of cool. I’m in that parking garage just ahead.”
Chapter 8
BRENT STOOD WATCH AS Emily and Red Rover hurried into the parking garage elevator and punched the button for the third level. As the doors were closing, he slipped inside.
“Nobody followed us?” Emily asked.
“If their spies are any good, we wouldn’t necessarily know if they’d followed us,” he said wryly.
“He has a point,” the older man said. “But what I don’t understand is how they found me. I took every precaution.”
Red Rover, Red Rover Page 3