Prince Charming

by CD Reiss

  “When did partnerships become illegal?” I ask.

  “When their purpose is to launder money,” Grinstead says, and I like her as the bad cop. She’s got a slick competence for wickedness that intrigues me.

  “Maybe not?” Rotter’s like a teddy bear at this point. “Or maybe you never intended to finance QI4 with laundered cash and it’s Kaos with the baggage. It’s Kaos who lied to you. Maybe you’re just getting caught up in his malfeasance.”

  I wait for her to go bad cop and say something refuting this soothing fairy tale, but she doesn’t.

  After a few breaths, I say, “I’m sure that you think you have something in that folder that proves I’m Alpha Wolf, or that I launder money through cybercurrencies. But I know you don’t. There are no recordings, no screenshots, no nothing of Kaos communicating with any persona you can prove is me. This is a parlor trick, and a particularly bad one.”

  I lean back, knowing I’m right. They have fuck-all. I know what exists in my world and I know what’s been erased, and by whom.

  “Thank you, Mr. Bridge,” Grinstead says, coming back around the table. She’s quite a sight, and I wonder why a woman that beautiful would want to be a federal agent. She must be ever so much more than she appears. “We’ll spare you further exposure to our parlor tricks.”

  She walks out, taking the air out of the room with her.

  3

  CASSIE

  “What were you thinking?” Ken’s look of incredulity is cartoonish on his generic handsomeness. “He’s not flipping.”

  We’re in the lunchroom of our field office with our boss, Special Agent in Charge Cesar Orlando. His shaved head has flat parts, leaving a dark arc connecting his ears every few days. His tie is loose and his suit is too wide at the shoulders, but that’s normal around here.

  A black-and-white poster of our ten most wanted hangs on the fridge with a curling note taped to it:

  Don’t be like these guys.

  Eat what you bring.

  By the side of the sink, mismatched mugs stand on their heads. Locked grey cabinets hide cleaning supplies. Crushed-cornered boxes of who-even-knows pile under the window.

  “We have an established pattern of racketeering,” I reply.

  “Onion site chats aren’t enough to bring him in,” Ken argues. He’s believable and passionate now. He’s most animated when disagreeing.

  Orlando stands against the counter with his arms crossed, silent until he has something to say. We’re chasing a white supremacist cell, one of many across the country with plans to start a race war with coordinated, simultaneous attacks, if we could just find them past the chatter. This is Orlando’s chance to validate the existence of our tiny office.

  “This guy doesn’t spook,” I say, pointing out the door in the general area of the unflappable Keaton Bridge. “He’s slipped past the cyber division a dozen times, and now he’s trying to go straight. He’s in transition between Alpha Wolf and…I don’t know—”

  “I agree,” Ken adds. “We need real-life leads, not digital creeps behind a screen.”

  I continue without acknowledging the comment because it’s the only way to be heard. “This QI4 thing he invested in? It’s huge, and from everything we can trace, it’s above board. If we don’t flip him now, before he’s too well-known to hide, we’ve lost him.”

  “He’s not taking the bluff, and he’s not a white supremacist. There’s a slim chance he’s useful.”

  “He knows every corner of the dark web. That’s where they’re organizing.”

  “I agree,” Ken snaps, not agreeing at all. “If he’s Alpha Wolf, he’s useful.”

  I cross my arms. “Do you want to get into Third Psyche or not? Because I do. And I want to do it before they take up arms.”

  “They’re not that organized.” He shoots a look at Orlando. “Not yet.”

  I’m waiting for Orlando to chime in and agree with Ken. I’m waiting to be erased. But it doesn’t happen. It’s on me to convince him through Ken.

  “Are you willing to be the guy who heard chatter about a synchronized multi-state armed takeover and didn’t follow up?” I ask.

  “We can follow up without that guy.”

  I’m about to answer when Orlando chimes in. “He’s a good lead right on our doorstep. But Ken’s right. He’s not flipping, and odds are against him even having the intel.”

  I don’t know why I don’t buckle. Maybe because—for a second—when Bridge saw me, he really saw me. Maybe I want to feel that again. Or maybe I’m just sick of taking a backseat.

  “Let him go, then give me half an hour,” I say to Orlando before I turn to Ken, wishing I’d said forty minutes. “I’ll have something. Maybe not enough to put into Delta, but something.”

  Orlando will say no, but I’ve said what needed saying. I’ll fight another day.

  “Take forty,” Orlando says. I’m shocked, but I keep my composure. “You’ve got the best shot. I think he liked you.”

  4

  KEATON

  The air is thick as London’s. Wet and foggy. A nip of cold. It’s early evening, and though I have control over my appetite, my stomach grumbles.

  That whole interview was a fishing expedition with a barbed hook. She must be their closer. I don’t trust my attraction to her. It’s coupled with a compulsion to speak to her, tell her things, break promises I made to myself.

  I want to tell her how important that company it is to me and why. Not Agent Rotter, not the FBI, but her. I cross the car park, closing my jacket and knotting my scarf as I walk over the wet concrete. I can resist the compulsion to see her, but even as I deny it, the pressure vibrates the webbing of my thoughts. I want her to understand me.

  Doverton’s a small city about twenty miles from the two-horse town of Barrington, where I need to be. I stayed at the Doverton country club on a few previous visits, so I have the lay of the land, more or less. I’m not lost or disoriented. I’m just slightly angry, very impatient, and deeply concerned.

  “Mr. Bridge!”

  Her voice cuts the mist with the accompanying clap of her high heels. Even at a half-run, she’s steady in them. Her hair is wet at the ends, and the grey corner of a laptop peeks out from the front of her coat. She cradles it to her chest as if it’s a baby.

  “I have to go,” I say. “If you want to arrest me—”

  “No.” She stops short in front of me. “This isn’t like that.”

  The misty rain is running the hell out of her mascara, enlarging the charcoal-colored ovals around her grey-fog eyes. Compared to how she came off in the interrogation room, this federal agent in front of me is the vulnerable version of herself. She’s not broken, but bending.

  Half-sodden, she’s still captivating. What would it take to break a woman like her?

  “What is it like?” I ask.

  “Can we get out of the rain?”

  I scan the car park. There’s no quick shelter. I check my watch. I don’t like being late, even for Taylor, but this version of Agent Grinstead in an uncontrolled environment is dangerous. I want to ask her what’s wrong. What has she given up on to run out after me like this? It could take all freaking night. Late is late, but too late is too late.

  “I don’t have time.” I walk, and she stays put.

  “I need your help.”

  I turn and look at her. Is this the same person? “What’s your game?”

  “No game. My laptop’s getting wet.”

  I let her get rained on, resisting the urge to hold my coat over her. “Your shoes are getting wet too.”

  “I have an extra pair in my desk.” She indicates my feet. “Do you?”

  I do not, and my shoes aren’t built for standing in the rain.

  She shivers once, quickly, then stills her body. That moment of vulnerability seals the deal. I figure Taylor can handle the pleasantries with Beaver.

  “Ten minutes,” I say.

  “My car is over there,” she says, turning and pointing at a blac
k Buick without extending her arm enough to drop the computer.

  “Your car or a company car?”

  I’m not getting into an FBI fleet car. They’ll record everything and collect DNA after.

  “Mine.”

  “Show me the registration.”

  “It’s in the glove compartment.”

  5

  CASSIE

  I’m already soaked through when I pluck the registration card out of the glove compartment. I hand it through the window. He unfolds it with his hands inside the car so it stays dry.

  His hands are six inches from me. They’re tendon and bone, calloused at the tips from hitting keys. They’re the hands of a man, and I want him to put his fingers in my mouth.

  Are you serious? Stop.

  He checks my name and the license plate. “Cassandra.”

  “That’s my name.”

  “Do you know the Cassandra complex?”

  “You’re getting wet.”

  He hands me the registration. He must have memorized everything already. “Cassandra was an ancient Greek woman with the power to see how the world was going to end, but no power to stop it.”

  “Let me guess. No one would listen to her.”

  He smirks and crosses in front of the car, touching the hood with the graceful tips of his fingers as he cuts the turn around it. I hit the unlock button. When the passenger door slaps shut, he and I are in a tight space. Was the car always this small? Was the roof this low? The seats this cramped?

  He slides the seat all the way back, but the length of his legs isn’t the issue. He’s fine. The car is suddenly too small for me. His presence fills the space between the dashboard and the back window, floor to ceiling with a sense of thick menace. He’s as stationary and lethal as a bullet in the chamber. As perfect as a polished barrel shining in the moonlight.

  Without the protection of my badge, the two-way mirror, or the buffer of a threat, I am small and vulnerable. I am made of alarms and denials. I’m water being poured into a container shaped like him.

  “So,” he says. “How is it you can be in the field office parking lot with me?”

  I close the windows and turn on the heat. Everything turns to steam. The air gets heavy, weighing down my eyelids in a way I know will be construed as seductive. I’m conflicted about giving that impression. I’m pretty sure there’s no way I can hide how beautiful I find him.

  “We have nothing on you. That doesn’t mean we aren’t close.”

  “I don’t know you, Agent Grinstead, but if I were a betting man, I’d bet entrapment was beneath you.”

  I look him in the eye, and the force of his gaze silences me. I feel powerless. Like cornered prey. The thickness of the air delivers his smell directly between my legs, which reacts with a sudden throb that’s almost painful, as if an unused delivery system is asked to do too much, too fast.

  I point out the half-fogged window, up at the light posts. “Those cameras?”

  He’s looking at me, not in the direction I’m pointing. I’m about to trust him with a piece of information. It’s easy negotiation calculus. I have to expose myself if he’s going to expose himself.

  I continue. “Out here in Doverton, they put them up, but they don’t have the resources to monitor them. Some work. Some don’t. That one in particular hasn’t worked in three months. That one over there.” I point behind him, but he doesn’t turn. “Couple of high school kids hit it with a rock and it points at the sky. It works if you want to know the weather.”

  “It’s raining.”

  “Yeah.”

  “It bothers you that they don’t work.”

  For a guy who makes a living hiding behind a computer screen, he sure can read people. Now, in addition to feeling turned on to the point of being liquid, I feel naked.

  “It bothers me. If you’re going to do something, you should do it. If they don’t want a field office in Doverton, they should close us. Don’t do this half-assed shit.”

  “Are you from here?”

  “I’m from Flint. Just outside Detroit.”

  “I know where Flint is.”

  Of course he does.

  After clearing my throat, I say, “So you’re wondering why I asked you to come into my car.”

  He smiles. He has great teeth. Not fake. Ever so slightly uneven. I notice the canines aren’t any longer or sharper than a normal person’s, then I wonder if that’s a trick to make his prey relax.

  “Not really,” he says. “I can work it out.”

  “Oh?” My apprehension gives way to curiosity. I turn off the heat, cutting the ambient noise so we can hear the pit pat of rain on the windshield.

  He taps his finger on his knee. His trousers are a nice tweed. He was on his way to the Barrington bottling plant for a celebration. He’s missed it, and I don’t feel bad about that at all.

  “You’re an open book, Ms. Grinstead.” He adjusts himself in his seat, looks away from a beat. He turns the heat back up, drowning out the sound of the rain.

  He waits.

  “You’re testing me,” I say. “I turned the heat off. You think it might be to unmask our voices because the car is wired? You don’t know.”

  “Now I do. You didn’t react when I turned it back on.”

  “The car isn’t bugged.”

  “It’s not.” He turns to face me with more of his body. “You’re taking a risk. You knew you had nothing on me. This meeting we’re having here isn’t planned. Maybe it’s personal. Looking to get information on an ex-boyfriend perhaps?”

  I huff out a laugh. My most recent ex-boyfriend, Doug, is harmless to the point of invisibility. If I want information from him, all I ever have to do is ask, except there’s nothing in his brain I want to know.

  But Keaton Bridge? Sitting so close to him, pressed against his presence like a raisin kneaded into cookie dough, I realize I want to know everything in his mind.

  “It’s not personal.” I pull my laptop out of my jacket. “But the bureau won’t let me be direct about it until you’re an asset.”

  “Ah. I have no intention of getting entered in your little database of informants.”

  I start to tell him that I know, but stop. I shouldn’t agree. I should ask him how he’s so sure, but I trip on the response. I wonder if I’m having the same effect on him as he is on me. Is he turned on to the point of distraction? Does he have an ache between his legs? Everything about him is distance and control.

  Imagine cracking through that.

  Imagine him losing control.

  Stop.

  I lay the laptop on my knee, and as I’m about to open it, he holds the top down. “Don’t open that.” He spreads his beautiful hand over the top. I look into his twilight eyes. “Tell me first.”

  “There’s an onion site.”

  “There are many.”

  The dark web is larger than the web we can see. No one knows how much larger, except maybe 4lph4_W0lF a.k.a. Alpha Wolf, the king of the underworld who is rumored to be Keaton Bridge.

  “I know, and I know Alpha Wolf—”

  “I didn’t say that was me.”

  “He was one of the ones who took down New Peanut Butter.”

  New Peanut Butter was a site for the utter destruction of innocence, like putting a knife into a new jar of peanut butter. They were taken down and unmasked to law enforcement by an anonymous group of hackers.

  “Good for him,” he says.

  “So you’re a moral person. On some level, you’re not evil.”

  “Thank you for your vote of confidence.”

  His answer doesn’t have a denial inside it. Is that calculated? Or did it slip?

  “I do know some of friends of his”—I use the third person as a buffer for his non-denial—“were in a white supremacist forum that moved a few months ago. I need the link.”

  That isn’t uncommon. There’s no Google of the dark web. You have a link or you don’t, and the links are randomly generated alphabet soup. Once a moderat
or gets a whiff of infiltration, he’ll send a new link to people he trusts and the forum will be left with a bunch of outsiders banging around in an otherwise empty room.

  “There are no friends on the dark web,” Keaton says.

  “Fine. Associates. The forum went dead, and I have no idea where it moved. It’s called Third Psyche.”

  “If you think I keep company with Nazis, you have something coming.”

  The rain gets heavier. Pat-patter on the windshield turns into the whoosh of rapid fire pah-pah-pah-pah.

  “So you’ve heard of it?”

  “I never claimed to know nothing.”

  “Are you going to help me?”

  “Me? Not us?”

  “Are you going to help or not?” I repeat without the pronoun.

  He hesitates. It’s not a pause. It’s indecision. Maybe the forwardness of the question has shocked him. “No.”

  “We may have nothing on you to arrest you today, Mr. Bridge, but we’re working on it.”

  “Call me Keaton. We’re old friends now.”

  “Your identity is out. We’re going to prove it.”

  “Back to we I see.”

  “We know the money you invested in QI4 was laundered, which makes the entire company subject to asset seizure.”

  He leans forward and puts his hand over mine. It’s dry and warm. I never knew I had nerves that went directly from the skin on my hand to the glands inside my thighs, but now I do.

  “You have nothing. The money is untraceable, and it was made honestly, taxed honestly, and used in an honest venture.”

  I hear a car pull up behind us. We both look. His cab.

  When he takes his hand from mine, the skin goes cold. He opens the passenger door. The muffled clop of raindrop sounds get sharper and more urgent.

  With one foot out the door, he stops and looks me in the eye. “If you want out of Doverton, you should try catching a criminal, Agent Grinstead.”