Chameleon's Challenge (Chameleon Assassin Series Book 3)

by BR Kingsolver

  “These others,” he said, opening a larger container filled with squat plastic cones twice the size of my fist, “are designed to be wired into the motion detectors on your security system. No batteries.”

  “And? How do they work?”

  “They pulse constantly. You’ll never notice them. But if a chameleon walks into the pulse, and it disrupts his broadcast, the motion detector will pick up his movements.”

  I smiled. “We are never selling these.”

  “Not a chance.”

  “Thanks, Dad.” I gave him a hug and hauled the loot to my place.

  Back at home, I threw some underwear and a couple of t-shirts in a small backpack. Then I packed two suitcases, one with equipment and weapons, the other with security equipment. I sure wasn’t going to rely on what Anna had installed at her apartment.

  We reconvened our little group the following morning at Entertaincorp, plus John Tremaine and Francois Renard. Pong explained our strategy, and Tremaine listened without expression.

  “I understand your concern,” Tremaine said, “but I’m not sure how this is going to work. How are you going to take Anna’s place? There can’t be two Annas.”

  Pong looked a little uncomfortable. “I planned to send Anna to Atlanta until we had this thing settled.”

  “But who will do Anna’s job?” Tremaine turned to me. “I doubt you have the requisite skills.”

  I certainly knew how to answer the phone, use a computer, and maintain a schedule, but I wasn’t sure those were the skills he was concerned about.

  “We can provide another secretary,” Renard said. “I think Carleton Weeks’s secretary can handle the job. Probably better than Anna can.” He pointedly looked at Tremaine.

  Tremaine donned a stoic mask. “Of course. However you want to run things, Francois.”

  It was decided that since Tremaine had moved into Weeks’s office, Weeks’s secretary would resume her position at the desk Anna had usurped. Pong’s men conducted Anna to her apartment and then to the airport. And I was given Anna’s old desk in Tremaine’s old office.

  “Don’t worry about looking busy,” Renard told me when he let me into the office and gave me the codes. “Are you sure you want to do this?”

  “I volunteered.”

  “That’s not what I asked.”

  I glanced around to be sure we were alone. “No, not really, but it’s the best solution we could figure out.” I leaned over and gave him a quick peck on the cheek. “Thank you for worrying about me, though.”

  He shook his head as he looked me up and down. “Grenier knows what Anna looks like. I understand that he tried to proposition her a couple of times.”

  “When I come back tomorrow, you won’t even know me.”

  I looked around the bare office and the computer terminal sitting on the desk.

  “I don’t suppose you could get me computer access so I can at least play games or do research on the infonet.”

  “What is your university degree?” From his grin and the twinkle in his eye, I had a feeling he was setting me up. I had long experience with Mr. Renard’s teasing. Besides, he knew what I’d studied at the university.

  “Computer science.”

  His smile broadened. “Not a chance.”

  Chapter 22

  I figured Anna was about three or four inches shorter than I was, and weighed about the same. The weight was distributed a bit differently, though. I only gave a rough guess as to the size of her butt and boobs, figuring I could refine that once I had her clothes to check against. The face and hair were the important things, along with making myself shorter. None of the murdered women were as tall as I was.

  The time I spent cooling my heels in Tremaine’s waiting room hadn’t been wasted. Between my memories of Anna and the pictures Pong gave me, I crafted a pretty good simulation. Devon didn’t recognize me when he, Wil, and half a dozen hand-picked Chamber operatives came by to pick me up at the office at the end of my first day at work.

  Other than the possibility of Grenier blowing my head off, my major concern was my bodyguards. When Dad trained me as an assassin, he emphasized that a professional only took out the target. Sometimes I might have to deal with a bodyguard or two who took their jobs a little too seriously, but families, and especially children, should never be harmed. Likewise innocent bystanders. Amateur assassins created collateral damage. Professionals did their jobs correctly.

  Grenier, obviously, didn’t have my professional standards, and he showed a particular callousness in killing bodyguards. I could only hope that Wil and his men survived this charade.

  When I got to Anna’s home, the first thing I did was install the security equipment I’d brought with me. Some of it went inside the apartment, some in the hallway, stairwell and elevator, and some outside the building.

  That took about three hours, and when I finished I was exhausted. I pulled a bottle of wine from Anna’s stash and poured myself a glass. I hadn’t eaten since lunch, and I still needed to go through Anna’s closet and perfect my image.

  No sooner did I sit down than the doorbell rang. Figuring it was Wil or Devon, I was halfway to the door when I gave a passing glance at the monitor I’d installed. The man standing in the hall was John Tremaine.

  For a moment, I wasn’t quite sure what to do. If I kept the Anna disguise, Tremaine would probably expect to see through it, since he knew her intimately. I morphed back to my real self and answered the door.

  “Mr. Tremaine. What a surprise.”

  He was holding a bottle of wine and takeout boxes from Ferdinand’s, one of the finest restaurants in Toronto.

  “I thought you might be hungry. I know that Anna isn’t much for cooking.”

  “How thoughtful of you. Come in.” He was right about the cooking part. Wine, cheese, and some pretty strange Icelandic food was all I’d found.

  I got plates from the cupboard and watched as he served me a medium rare steak with fresh steamed vegetables and a baked potato. The potato had bacon, butter, and sour cream. The vegetables came with a hollandaise sauce. It was creepy. I wondered how he knew exactly what I liked.

  He started to open the wine he’d brought.

  “I already have a bottle open,” I said, holding up my glass. Going over to the kitchen counter, I picked up the bottle to show it to him.

  Tremaine set the bottle he was holding on the table, walked over to me and took the bottle and the glass I was holding, then poured the wine in the sink.

  “That isn’t worthy of this food,” he said, moving close enough to brush my breasts and holding my eyes with his. In another setting, I might have been tempted to smile at the blatant super-seducer move. But the whole scene had me unsettled.

  He turned back to the table and resumed opening the wine. After he popped the cork, he poured for both of us, then said, “Come, sit down. Let’s enjoy this meal while it’s still warm.”

  I sat down and inhaled. It smelled wonderful. Unfortunately, I didn’t trust Tremaine. The food could be drugged, or maybe the wine. A man in his position wouldn’t worry about me calling rape in the morning. He’d already told me what he thought of his last mistress, and his presence told me what he thought of his current one. Interchangeable parts.

  Tremaine held up his glass. “To new beginnings.”

  I hoped not, but raised my glass and clinked it against his. A little hesitation allowed me to see him take a drink, then I took a small sip. The wine was excellent. It tasted like something my mom had poured the last time I had dinner with her at Dominik’s. But taste it was all I did. I needed all my wits for the situation.

  Like a call from heaven, my phone, which was sitting on the kitchen counter, rang. I jumped up, caught the table cloth under the table with my trailing hand, and tipped my plate off the table. It hit the floor about the same time I grabbed my phone.

  Turning to the clatter and breaking glass, I did my best to show an expression of dismay.

  “Oh, crap,” I said, stari
ng at the ruined meal. The look on Tremaine’s face, eyes wide, mouth hanging open, was exactly what I hoped my face also showed.

  “Libby? Libby?” a tiny voice could be heard from my phone.

  I put it to my ear. “Yes?”

  “Are you all right?” Wil asked.

  “Yeah. I’m fine. Look, I really can’t talk right now. I have company.” Something he knew since he and his team were watching the apartment. “Can I call you back later? Yeah, about an hour. Okay?”

  “Were you expecting Tremaine?” he asked.

  “No, no, not at all. I think it’s okay, but we’ll have to see. Talk to you later.” I hung up the phone, grabbed a dishrag, and started picking up the remains of my ruined dinner from the floor.

  I glanced up at Tremaine, whose expression had gone from dumbfounded to angry. I could tell he was trying to get his emotions under control.

  “I’m so sorry. Oh, God, I’m so clumsy sometimes. Oh, this lovely dinner, and now I’ve ruined it. I’m so sorry.” I continued in that vein for so long that I was sick of hearing it, so I knew he was, too. While I wailed, I picked up the food and broken glass and threw them in the trash. “Do you know where Anna keeps her mop?”

  “No. No, I don’t.”

  It took me some time to find the mop, mainly because I purposely looked in the most obvious place last. After I mopped up the spilled wine, then swept the floor to make sure I’d found all the glass, then mopped it again, I took a look at Tremaine and the table. The wine bottle had spilled a bit, but Tremaine had righted it. His meal sat on his plate going cold.

  “I’ve ruined everything, haven’t I?”

  “Yes, pretty much,” he said. I really appreciated the gallantry. With that attitude, he was lucky he had money or no woman would put up with him.

  “Go ahead and eat,” I said. “No reason for you to go hungry.” I poured myself some more wine as I watched him walk around the table.

  He heaved a sigh and reached for me, evidently planning to give me a comforting hug. “Accidents happen. Who was that on the phone?”

  I tucked my arms into my body as I let him grab me and pull me to him. Since I was holding the full wine glass, the case could be made that I didn’t spill my wine on him, but rather Tremaine spilled my wine on himself.

  “Oh, my God. Oh, I’m so sorry. God, I’m so clumsy.” I whirled around, set the glass on the counter, grabbed the dirty dishrag, and started trying to blot the wine from his shirt.

  Tremaine left less than ten minutes later. After he was gone, I called Wil and told him I was okay. Then I got the cheese out of the fridge, poured myself another glass of wine, and called Nellie.

  “Hey, you know all those bad dates we’ve had? Well, listen to this.”

  “You need to talk to him,” I told Pong the next morning. “He needs to understand this isn’t some sort of game.”

  “Absolutely,” Wil said. “I about had a heart attack when he showed up last night. And where the hell were his guards? Other than his chauffeur, he was alone, and the driver stayed in the car.”

  “I’ll talk to him, and I’ll talk to Mr. Renard,” Pong said, shaking his head. “I can’t imagine what he was thinking.”

  I had been pacing back and forth across his office. Turning, I said, “I know exactly what he was thinking. And I’m not getting paid nearly enough to satisfy his fantasies.” I walked over to Pong’s desk and bent toward him. “Understand me. If I get drugged and raped by one of your overgrown children, I’ll save Grenier the trouble.”

  Pong’s eyes widened. Wil stepped closer and said, “Libby,” in a warning sort of tone.

  “Don’t you ‘Libby’ me. You know I don’t threaten. I promise.” I looked back at Pong. “Take my warning as a promise.”

  I took my Anna Sigurdsdottir persona out the door and up to her bare, lonely office. Once there, I pulled out my tablet, plugged it into Entertaincorp’s network, and let it deal with the little software package I’d prepared the previous evening. When I received the message that the virus had done its work, I logged into Anna’s terminal, gave her administrator rights, then logged back in as Anna.

  As I expected, the games available on Entertaincorp’s network were fantastic, especially the experimental games—the ones they hadn’t released for sale yet. I wondered if I should document the bugs I found. It seemed like that was the least I could do for all the money they were paying me to sit around.

  I noted the name of one game designer with the idea of meeting him after we caught Grenier. I really liked the way the designer thought, and if he was in the least good looking and had any kind of personality, he’d probably be fun to date.

  As the week dragged on, nothing happened. I sat in Anna’s office and played games during the day, went home to her apartment and watched vids on her screen at night. No sign of Grenier.

  Friday after work, I told Wil, “This is driving me insane. I have to get out. Anna is going out to eat, and then going dancing.”

  “That’s pretty risky.”

  “The way things are going, I’ll die of boredom. Consider it trading one risk for another.”

  I’d taken a look at Anna’s bank account, so I knew where she spent her money. A nice dinner at her favorite restaurant along with half a bottle of wine did wonders for my attitude. At first I was puzzled, as well as flattered, by the waiter’s heavy flirting. When I went to the ladies’ room and looked at myself in the mirror, I remembered that I was wearing Anna’s body and face rather than my own. That was a bit disheartening.

  On the other hand, I had a lot of offers to dance after I arrived at The Pinnacle. I tried to tell myself that being so much shorter meant I intimidated fewer men. Repeatedly telling myself that didn’t really make me feel better. Anna might have been a lot of things I didn’t like, but she definitely was pretty and had the kind of body men thought was attractive.

  About two hours after I arrived at the club, Devon brushed against me at the bar. “Grenier showed up at the hospital and tried to kill Inspector Donofrio. No one died, but three people were shot. Two constables and a nurse.”

  “Donofrio’s all right?”

  “Yeah. It seems the good inspector is rather paranoid. He had a pistol under his pillow, and when the door opened with no one there, he fired several rounds.”

  “That’s weird,” I said. “Anna seems much more Grenier’s type. Donofrio’s blond, but he doesn’t have big boobs.”

  Devon snorted. “Let’s get you out of here.”

  “Okay. I’m tired of being Anna for the night.”

  “You seemed to be enjoying it when you danced with that last guy,” Devon said.

  “That was awkward. I’m pretty sure that he and Anna have slept together. Maybe they still do. He seemed to think it was a given that I’d go home with him, and he was a bit miffed when I demurred. Now he’ll see me leaving with you.”

  “The travails of a femme fatale,” Devon said with a smirk.

  “Yes, I’m sure beauty is a terrible burden. I feel so sorry for her.”

  Devon’s head jerked up and he stared at me.

  “What?” I asked.

  He opened his mouth, then closed it and shook his head. “Let’s get out of here.”

  I headed for the back door.

  “Wait,” he said, “where are you going?”

  “Out the back. I may be bait, but I don’t have to be dumb bait. If Grenier is waiting for me, I’d rather come at him from an angle he doesn’t expect. We’re only fifteen minutes from the hospital.”

  “Oh, okay. Hang on a minute.” He keyed his link and told Wil and the rest of their team what we were doing. Then he motioned for me to continue.

  I drew my pistol and pushed open the door to the alley. A long, slow scan didn’t show me anything resembling an invisible murderer. Crouching down with my head below the handle, I peered around the door to observe the other end of the alley.

  After about five minutes, I said, “I think we’re clear. Which way is the car?
”

  We walked along the walls across from each other, pistols at the ready. When we got to the end, we waited until Wil and another man pulled up in the car.

  “Any new word on the hospital?” I asked Wil as he pulled out into traffic.

  “None. Grenier evidently escaped.”

  “Well, maybe he’s headed over to visit Anna,” I said.

  But if he did visit after I got back to Anna’s, he was very, very quiet about it, and I eventually fell asleep on the couch.

  Chapter 23

  “I don’t get it,” I told Wil the next morning when he came over to fix breakfast. I didn’t cook, and my guardian angels didn’t want me going out. “A whole week and nothing. The only thing I can figure is he spotted you and your men.”

  For a week I had followed Anna’s routine as closely as possible. Walk to the metro in the morning, take the train to work, then the same route home in the evening. Sometimes I’d do a little window shopping, or stop into a carry-out place for dinner. The most dangerous thing I encountered was crossing the street. Toronto wasn’t noted for good drivers.

  “He might have figured out that we’re using you as bait.”

  “That’s sort of what I said, isn’t it?”

  He glowered at me.

  “So, what do I have to do to get assaulted?”

  Wil stared at me, then said, “I can’t believe you said that.”

  I shrugged. “Maybe I should try another persona. Any executive’s daughters that might fit the profile? I mean, who hasn’t he attacked?”

  “Tremaine, O’Malley, Bernard and Renard.”

  “He attacked Tremaine’s and Fisher’s mistresses. That’s why I thought Anna might be a good target. Renard shipped his family out in one direction and his mistress in the other. Bernard did the same thing. Fisher sent his family to Chicago after Myra died. Tremaine’s daughter is off in Europe on her honeymoon, so that leaves his wife and ten year-old son.”