Deep Cover--A Love Over Duty Novel

by Scarlett Cole

  Though she’d never been found, the FBI had given her hope during those darkest times, something she wanted to offer others. Simply being in the FBI office made her feel like she was making a difference.

  “Murray.” Her boss, David Cunningham, stuck his head out of his office window. “You got a sec?”

  Amy dropped her purse off at her desk and grabbed a notebook and pen. She had no idea what he wanted, but whatever it was, she was determined to nail it. Heck, he could ask her to figure out how to make the world rotate in the opposite direction and she’d give it her best shot. She liked Cunningham. He was a straight-shooting kind of guy who said what was on his mind.

  “What do you need?” she asked, stepping inside of his chaotic office. His sandy-colored head was down as he read something on his phone. Papers were piled up around his elbows and three coffee cups stood in a line next to his laptop.

  He threw his pen down on top of the report open in front of him. “Those poker genes in your family … any of them get passed down to you?”

  Please don’t let it be a social card-game thing. Over the years, people had challenged her to games countless times. She usually won and then had to deal with the fragile egos of men who couldn’t handle being beaten by a woman. Those experiences had taught her to be very honest up front about her skills.

  “Yes,” she said firmly. “A whole heap of them, sir. I debated going pro like my dad after college, even won a couple of tournaments, but I loved forensic psychology too much.”

  Cunningham placed his elbows on the desk and rested his chin on his hands. “Is it just poker?”

  Just poker? Amy smiled. “Are you asking if I can play other games?”

  “I am, Murray.”

  “Yes, sir. I can play just about all the obvious casino games from blackjack to poker and craps. But also a whole bunch of lesser-known ones … like fara, pai gow, and acey deucey.”

  Her words hung in the air. Cunningham stared at her and grinned like she was the answer to all his prayers. “Your godfather is the pit boss at Caesars Palace, right?”

  Uncle Clive lived and breathed the betting floor. “He is, and he’d be happy to hear you used the term pit boss. He finds the PC term pit manager to lack a certain old-school class.”

  Cunningham took his glasses off and spun them by the arm. “You know where virtually all the missing women we are looking at worked.”

  Amy nodded. “The Lucky Seven Casino.”

  “Hypothetically,” he said, “if we needed someone on the inside of the casino—undercover, instead of a broader team role—perhaps someone who could play, or deal even…”

  Cunningham let his words hang. It wasn’t an invitation to an after-work card game. It was an invitation to a different role in the case. The most perfect kind of role for her, because if there was one thing she knew, it was how things happened in a casino. It was also a chance to walk a mile in the shoes of the women. To find out from the inside who they befriended, to see how seriously the casino cared about the security of their women, to be … bait. That last part was something that wasn’t directly stated, but couldn’t be overlooked.

  Amy sat a little straighter and tried to ignore the waves of excitement crashing in her stomach. “I’m your agent.”

  “The team’s about to grow in size … there’s a lot more to it than just the women. The CIA and a group of contractors they’ve been using suspect the Lucky Seven Casino of money laundering. It’s going to be unwieldy—us, the CIA, and SDPD. Representatives from the NSB—National Security Branch—and the Criminal, Cyber, Response and Services Branch. But we all need eyes on the ground, and one person can’t cover all the bases.”

  The Lucky Seven, just south of Del Mar, only twenty minutes north up the coast … where most of the missing women had worked. “So, we are going in as a team?”

  “Yeah. Us, the CIA, and some external guns for hire. Doesn’t make me happy, but it’s the only way of doing it. You’re going to need to bring your A game, Murray. I’d have preferred someone with more experience, but you’re the best candidate to go undercover in the casino. You think you’re up to that?” Cunningham leaned toward her and placed his elbows on the desk.

  “Yes sir,” Amy replied, anxious to begin.

  “Well, we start on Monday,” Cunningham said as he slid a folder toward her across the desk. “And you need to read this.”

  * * *

  “Vegas!” Mac declared just as Cabe walked through the door of the San Diego base of Eagle Securities.

  “What’s happening in Vegas?” Cabe asked as he dropped his bag onto the conference room table before grabbing a cinnamon roll. They were meeting in a few minutes with their CIA contact, Andrew Aitken, to talk about their ongoing project—one that had started with the attempted abduction of Six’s girlfriend and had later been supported by evidence provided by Mac’s investigative-reporter girlfriend, Delaney. But why would it have anything to do with Vegas?

  He caught the look that passed silently between Mac and Six. It seemed, for a fleeting moment, like concern. Or sympathy. Vegas. It could only mean one thing. Six was about to do the one thing Cabe’d missed out on. The one thing the guys knew he’d wanted more than his next mission. “Wait. Are you guys getting married there?”

  Six laughed, his blond hair falling in front of his eyes. “Good guess, but not quite. The three of us need to go there before November twenty-third.”

  “Why then?” Cabe asked.

  “Because November twenty-third is one of only three days between now and Christmas that the three of us aren’t scheduled to be away,” Six replied. “And of those three, November twenty-third is the only day city hall had availability. At ten in the morning. Because I know that if I give Lou all day to overthink leaving the house and marrying me in a room with twenty people in it, she won’t want to do it.”

  Joy for his friend filled Cabe. “Holy shit. Did Lou agree to this?” The differences between Six, his outgoing and fast-talking military brother, and Louisa, Six’s chronically shy fiancée, were too many to list. Crowds were most definitely not her thing.

  “Yeah. About that.” Six topped up his coffee from the pot in the corner. “We’re planning it. The wedding.”

  “What do you mean, we’re planning it?” Mac asked. “She is down with this plan, right?”

  “She is,” Six replied with a grin. “She’s going to take care of the dress. And that’s it. You didn’t see her the night I met her on that balcony before she had to just give a presentation. She was beyond freaked out. Calling caterers, booking venues, dealing with people … the thought of doing that would make her ill. And I don’t want her to have to worry about a thing. Which means I need you guys to do shit like taste-test cakes and whatever the hell else it is you need to do to get married right.”

  Cabe stared. “What on earth do we know about planning a wedding?” Jess had taken care of all of their wedding plans. He hadn’t even known whom he’d needed to call to cancel after she’d died. Among other things, he’d forgotten all about the company making the wedding invitations. When he’d returned home from his tour and opened the box his mom had left on his kitchen counter, he’d unashamedly wept. While in theatre, he’d refused to think about what it meant to not have her in his life anymore, but holding those beautiful navy and cream invitations in his hands was a bitter reminder of the future he’d lost.

  “Dude, we found our way out of Kunduz at night with no nav, no back-up, insurgents to the left of us and drug runners to our right, there I was, stuck in the middle with you,” Six said, breaking into a mashed-up version of the Stealers Wheel song. “How hard can it be to plan a wedding?”

  Mac groaned. “Okay, but I vote for roping in our moms. I’m not too much of a coward to admit I am out of my depth.”

  “You do realize that we’re in our thirties, right?” Six said with a laugh.

  Cabe shook his head. “You do realize we are completely useless at that kind of shit, right?”

 
Six stood and looked out into the hallway. “Too bad, because I already signed you guys up. You’ve had my back in more places than I can remember, and I have to tell you this is probably the scariest mission I’ve undertaken. I’m not going to do it without you.”

  As much as Cabe would rather pull his own fingernails out with a pair of pliers than organize a wedding, the slight hitch in Six’s voice reminded him they were family. “We’ll figure it out,” he said, his throat feeling a little dry. “We’ll give you and Louisa the best wedding you could possibly have.” He threw his arm over Six’s shoulder and hugged him tight just as Andrew Aitken walked into the room.

  “I’m not interrupting anything, am I?” he said as he put his bag down onto the table.

  Cabe stepped away from Six. “Not unless you count being roped in to plan a wedding.”

  As Aitken congratulated Six, Mac took a seat and Cabe helped himself to a cup of coffee. Once everyone was settled, Aitken pulled out a document and began.

  “We need a new formal contract for this,” he started. “When you guys first came to me to ask for permission to look into that chemical theft at VNP Laboratories, the lab where Louisa North worked, I said yes more as a favor to Six than for any other reason. I mean, there were always real implications for National Security … but then there always are. In the current political climate, it just didn’t rate high enough on our radar. But then, as you know, it grew.”

  “When we set out to help Louisa at the beginning of all of this, we had no idea where it would lead,” Cabe said. He remembered the day Louisa had arrived at their offices looking for Six. Cabe had wanted to redirect her concerns to the police, but it had been clear from the start, despite Cabe and Mac’s advice, that Six had already felt something for the shy scientist. But who would have thought that protecting Louisa would have turned into a mission to close a chemical weapons lab before it could start production. And he never could have imagined that exposing Louisa’s colleague, Ivan Popov, and his grandfather, Vasilii, for selling the drug Louisa had created to Ivan’s godfather, Sergei Lemtov, would have risked not only Louisa’s life, but that of her mother and Cabe’s colleagues. For that alone, Cabe had wanted to take Lemtov down. The fact that Lemtov was a mid-grade asshole in the syndicate with aspirations to grow his reach only added to the pleasure Cabe got from locking his ass his prison.

  “And to think,” Six said, with a grin on his face, “you’d said it wasn’t the kind of work we like to take on.”

  Cabe shrugged. “Guilty. But I don’t think any of us knew where it would lead, Mr. I’m Getting Married in Eleven Weeks.”

  Six laughed.

  Aitken coughed, which Cabe suspected was an attempt to get them back on track.

  “And then came the findings from Delaney’s investigative piece,” Cabe said, slowly turning his cup. Both alphabet agencies, the F.B.I. and C.I.A., had been embarrassed when Delaney had proven the round-robin supply route with drugs and weapons going one way and cash going the other.

  Obviously tired, given the dark circles under his eyes, Aitken rubbed a hand along his temple.

  Cabe placed his elbows on the table and rested his chin on his hands. “What do you need from us?”

  “We have some intel that supports Ms. Shapiro’s findings,” Aitken said. “But as you know, we need Sokolov, Lemtov’s boss. And we don’t have proof of the money laundering, which we know is necessary for them to keep operating. Before this all blows up in our face because we can’t close the net, we’re going to close in on where we think it’s happening: the Lucky Seven Casino.”

  Cabe nodded. It made sense. Ivan Popov had told Louisa that he was deeply in debt to the casino. They suspected that his debt was the reason he sold the formula as a chemical weapon to Lemtov, with the profits ultimately going to Sokolov, but they didn’t have proof that the casino staff or owners were directly involved in any major corruption.

  “The casino is owned by a private family,” Aitken continued. “Faulkner Woods is the manager, and his father, Hemingway Woods is the owner. I shit you not, those are their names. Right now, Hemingway is off cruising the Med with wife number four on the proceeds.”

  Cabe smiled to himself. Someone knew their titans of American modernist literature, given that Faulkner and Hemingway had been literary rivals, though, it struck Cabe as an odd method for naming a child. He wondered if a daughter named Steinbeck was hidden away somewhere.

  “Both of them walk and talk like hard-core businessmen,” Aitken continued. “It’s been impossible to pin anything down on them before now. We don’t understand their relationship to Lemtov or his boss Sokolov, other than the latter has been seen in the casino. But these men most definitely have the connections, the clout, and the cash to front what is happening.”

  Six stood and began to pace. “You want us to check it out?”

  Aitken nodded. “I want one of you to go undercover. It’s a cross-agency task force. Technically money laundering is FBI. The Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, RICO, falls under them. But you guys have been operating as one of us because of the threat to national security. You don’t need to worry about the pissing match. I spent eight hours of my life and lost numerous brain cells in that battle on Friday.”

  “Don’t envy you that,” Cabe said. While deployed, he’d listened to his seniors battle plenty of times for the right to control an op.

  “Thing is, when we approached them, they already had Lucky Seven in their sights. Part of an investigation into a number of missing women who they believe are linked. The only agreement we could get is that you work hand in hand with the FBI, specifically with an agent who will be working undercover as a dealer. I was going to fight it, but it turns out Special Agent Murray has a unique and distinctive skill set that should work in everyone’s favor.”

  “Missing women” was something Cabe hadn’t seen coming, and he’d prefer not to muddy the waters with two cases running simultaneously. “There’s no way we can go in on our own?”

  Aitken scowled. “No chance. The FBI will explain their reasons to investigate the casino themselves. I’ll let them explain at the project setup on Thursday. You guys in?”

  Cabe thought about the implications, including staffing. The majority of Mac’s team were committed to a South American shipping company dealing with piracy. Six’s team had just returned from a six-month on-and-off security detail in Syria. The guy had a wedding coming up and deserved to spend time with his wife-to-be. Which left Cabe and his team, who had a series of small jobs between now and the end of October, when they were to switch with Mac’s team and head into South America for two months. “My team is the only one that could take it on.”

  “I’d love to argue with you,” Mac said, “but I think it makes sense. If we need to, my team can keep rotating into South America until yours is ready to switch out, depending on how long the job takes.”

  Six nodded. “I agree. Mine needs some downtime. I know if we said they needed to do it, they’d find a way to figure it out. But really, Cabe’s team is on the freshest legs.”

  Andrew pulled open his briefcase and pulled out some paperwork. He slid it across the table to Cabe. “Take a look at the terms. Get back to me tomorrow. Kickoff meeting is over at the feeb office,” he said, referring to the Sorrento Valley FBI office. “Figured it would make them feel like they were in charge, even if we all know they’re not.”

  Cabe grinned. It looked like Eagle was going to land right in the middle of alphabet-agency soup, whether they liked it or not.

  * * *

  “Hey, Amy, sweetheart, it’s all set.” Uncle Clive’s gruff voice on her voicemail reflected the twenty-a-day habit he’d had for decades. According to Uncle Clive, Frank Sinatra had offered him his first cigarette in January 1977 when Clive had been hanging around the dressing rooms of Caesars Palace. He remembered the day, he’d said, because Frank’s mom, Dolly, had died in a plane crash on her way to see him perform. “You know you can come by the
casino any time. I’ll set you up with Valentina.”

  Amy smiled, pressing her phone to her ear as she juggled the notebook, folder, and pens in her hand. Valentina was the very best dealer at Caesars Palace, and arguably on The Strip. With her faint Spanish lilt that still lingered after thirty years in the States and a memory for faces and names and preferred decks of playing cards, she managed and dealt in the private rooms, where players would leave tips in the tens of thousands of dollars. Amy couldn’t think of a better person with whom to brush up her skills. When Amy had asked for help, her family had known better than to ask why she needed them. They’d simply said yes.

  Relief and excitement battled in her stomach as she took the eleven steps down to the conference room. Undercover roles came with high expectations, but she knew she had what it took to live up to them. There couldn’t be a more perfect intersection of her worlds. And the confidence boost she got from that was immeasurable. When she’d first moved to San Diego, she’d been nervous that her undeserved reputation would follow her. Or worse, some other dick would treat her the exact same way. But she had to give Cunningham his due. While he’d never asked her about what had happened, she knew he knew, and there had been no sign that anybody else had known when she’d arrived. There were no loaded stares, no nudging in the hallway as she walked by. Her gut told her that he believed the official statement she’d submitted. And that meant, as far as he was concerned, she had a clean slate for her professional career.

  She pushed open the door to the conference room. A quick scan told her there were thirteen chairs … not the most auspicious number. Amy dragged one of the chairs from under the window to the table. Better to be safe than sorry.

  Cunningham eyed her carefully. “Everything okay, Amy?” He looked tired, but then he always looked a little harassed. And while his suit was always expertly pressed, his shoes looked as though he’d walked a hundred miles too far in them.