Strange Tango

by Michelle Dayton

  She nodded, emphatically. “Yes. Totally stupid. But if Knoll wanted that access, he would have had to get someone in IT to do it for him. I suspect that unclear instructions were given to an idiot,” she said dryly.

  Comprehension lit up his eyes. “Your esteemed dancing partner from Saturday?”

  Jess scowled. “Yeah. I saw that Jerome had done all of the system security setup for the mknoll25 ID. At that time, I suspected Knoll had bribed Jerome for all of the access, but didn’t make it clear enough that he didn’t want it under his own ID.”

  “What do you think now?”

  She looked down. After six months, it still hurt. “After I disabled all of Knoll’s access, I went to tell my boss, Seymour Davies, my suspicions. I told him we had a breach situation and we needed to call the police. Jerome needed to be taken into custody. Seymour thanked me and said he would handle it, but he wanted to alert the University president beforehand in case of any fallout. That was on a Friday afternoon.”

  She forced herself to look up and speak matter-of-factly. “I was fired on Monday morning.”

  “So your boss is involved,” he said.

  “Now I think that Knoll probably went to Seymour, who gave the vague instructions to Jerome,” she agreed. “Jerome doesn’t know how to spell ‘indiscreet,’ let alone behave that way. But he is a greedy little prick, so I suppose he was perfect for whatever this is.”

  Jess took a sip of her bourbon. She hadn’t shared her thoughts on this with anyone. Getting it out in the open was both exhilarating and exhausting. What was the man across from her thinking? That her logic was flimsy? Some days she thought so too.

  “I could be wrong,” she admitted. “I suppose there could be a logical explanation for all of this. Knoll might not be up to anything...sinister. He could be a completely legitimate businessman.”

  “You’re not wrong,” he said, after a long pause. His expression didn’t waver, and she wondered if he was debating how much information to share with her. Who is this guy? “Maurice Knoll is a legitimate businessman. But he also has long-term ties with organized crime. Rumor has it that he’s also recently become a diamond smuggler, and that he’ll be receiving his first shipment sometime this summer.”

  Whatever she’d expected him to say, this was not it. She struggled to keep her face placid, but her hands, resting on top of her closed laptop, trembled. Organized crime? Diamond smuggling?

  Hope flooded through her veins, making her bounce with joy. “That’s such good news!”

  He burst into gravelly laughter. Reflexively, her thigh muscles squeezed together and her breathing went shallow. Ignore it.

  “Is it?” he asked, still chuckling.

  “Yes!” Obviously. Maybe he was using the University systems for his illegal activities. Maybe the worms she’d uploaded to the servers could help her find out how. “If I can prove what he’s doing, catch him in the act, then I can expose him. Get my life back.” She looked down at her laptop, itching to get to work.

  Out of the corner of one eye, she noticed that the man’s smile faded, and his bright eyes dimmed. She owed him a huge thanks. It was downright life-affirming to have her suspicions confirmed and to have direction again.

  But wait, who was he and why did he know all this?

  A wonderful thought occurred to her. She lowered her voice. “Are you, like, an undercover agent with the FBI?” That would explain all of his aliases, his insider knowledge of Knoll, how he quickly identified her as a fraud on Saturday night.

  To her surprise, he wrinkled his nose and narrowed his eyes. “No,” he said flatly.

  She quickly erased a silly mental image she’d formed of the two of them standing with arms crossed on their chests like superhero partners, victorious over Knoll as he cried on the floor next to an open suitcase of glittery jewels.

  “Listen, Blondie,” he said, his voice so quiet that she had to lean forward to hear him. “This isn’t going to end with you and the Feds catching Knoll red-handed with a suitcase of shiny diamonds.”

  She was intensely grateful for her poker face, embarrassed that he’d pinpointed her thoughts so easily. “How’s it going to end then?” she asked.

  He gave her a wolfish smile: cold eyes and teeth. “With me stealing the diamonds.”

  Chapter Four

  He was going to steal the diamonds? Under-react, Jess. Under-react. Which made him a...

  “You’re a professional thief?” With relief, she noted that her voice hadn’t risen. In fact, her tone was downright conversational, as though she sipped bourbon and ate pickles with career criminals every evening. Speaking of, she picked up another crispy spear and forced herself to take a large bite.

  His cold smile grew warm again, turning into an honest-to-goodness grin, with sexy crinkled eyes and everything. He even laughed a little. “I’ll hand it to you, Blondie, you’re a cool customer.”

  She acknowledged the compliment by a small twist of the lips. “Why go to the trouble of tracking me down?”

  He looked mock-disappointed in her, wagging a long finger back and forth. “You’re going to pretend you don’t know?”

  Well, crap. Of course she knew. He was well aware she’d borrowed Jerome’s keycard on Saturday night. If Jerome was in some way related to Knoll and this guy was after Knoll’s diamonds, then she might have information he could use. But wait, that only made sense in one scenario. “You think Knoll is somehow using his role as University trustee to smuggle the diamonds?”

  “You tell me.”

  “I have no idea,” she fired back. “I didn’t even know he was a criminal until you told me!” Well, not for sure. The unauthorized digging she’d done into his bank accounts over the past few months had certainly raised a lot of questions. But she hadn’t been able to link any of his financial weirdness with why he wanted all the University system access. Not yet, anyway. Her fingers itched to open her laptop.

  He leaned back against the booth. “What did you do with the keycard on Saturday night?”

  No, sir. That was her own work and her own business, thank you very goddamn much. She just gave him a Mona Lisa smile and sipped her bourbon.

  He lowered his eyelids and curled his lips in a small smile, watching her, and Jess tried to ignore the spear of heat igniting in her belly. Oh boy. If he was changing tactics to seduction, she’d still say no, but she’d sure enjoy the effort.

  He kept staring at her with those lazy eyes, but when he spoke his tone was clear and crisp. “Start talking about what you did on Saturday night or I’ll call the police anonymously and advise them about a mischievous wigged woman at the Ignatius ball.”

  She blinked, feeling unaccountably disappointed. “You’re blackmailing me?”

  He gave her an entirely unapologetic shrug.

  She fluttered her eyelids. “Gee, Michael-Collins-Thomas-Paine, do you blackmail all the girls?”

  Straight-faced, he answered, “Only the ones who are too smart to seduce.”

  Hmmph. For the first time in her life, she regretted her big brain.

  He raised an amused eyebrow at her, and she quickly ironed her poker face. What to do? He had her backed into a corner. But would explaining what she did put her at less of an advantage than she was already at? Not really.

  Decision made, she explained. “I uploaded a custom sort of tracking software to all of the University’s production and disaster recovery servers. Basically, all of Jerome’s movements and all of the IDs he or Seymour created since the date I was fired have a kind of trace on them. The activity is being sent to a server of mine housed anonymously in the Dark Web. To put a fine point on it, I’ll be trying to identify the replacement IDs that Jerome set up for Knoll. And then I’ll be seeing what he does with them.”

  “Excellent.” The man’s eyes gleamed.

&nb
sp; Before he could demand anything else, she felt she’d earned something. “What’s your real first name?” He blinked at her and shook his head.

  “I can’t refer to you as Michael-Collins-Thomas-Paine in my head. It’s irritating.” Not that she’d really think of him that way. “The Hot Thief” was probably closer.

  The man pointed to her fleece and raised a smug eyebrow. “If you’re truly a Cubs fan, maybe you can earn it. My namesake was traded to the Cubs for Starlin Castro in December of 2015. However, later—”

  “Adam,” Jess said, immediately. “Your name is Adam?”

  He gaped at her. Honestly, he gaped.

  It was one of the funniest things Jess had seen in her entire life. She started giggling, barely able to get the words out. “The Yankees traded Adam Warren for Starlin Castro. But in July of 2016, he went back to the Yankees.” Gasping for air, she rolled her eyes at him. “Didn’t your Google-ing tell you I was raised by a single father with four brothers?”

  Giddy from her, admittedly, minor triumph, she put her head on the table and kept laughing, her shoulders shaking. It was like Saturday night, when he busted her for her flailing British accent; she just couldn’t stop. Then, the famous AJ’s 10:00 radiant heat cranked on, earning the nightly groan from the regulars. Jess chimed in, and per tradition, Geoff gave the bar his middle finger.

  As steaming hot air blew on the booth from the window unit, she got her giggles in check and took off her fleece, revealing a simple white tank top. “You have to dress in layers at this bar,” she explained to Adam, finally in control enough to meet his eyes across the table.

  Holy shit.

  She thought she knew what arousal looked like on a man. She’d been wrong. This was arousal. His eyes were searing as they roamed over her exposed arms, neck, and throat before settling on her breasts. The normally vivid bright blue color was almost fully eclipsed by the black of his pupils. His jaw clenched and she could actually see the pulse beating hard in his throat.

  Her body flared in response. She felt her cheeks go pink and her nipples go hard against the thin fabric of her cotton shirt. She hadn’t thought she’d see anyone tonight; she hadn’t even worn a bra. As Adam’s eyes roamed up her neck to rest on her lips, her mouth literally watered.

  “Was it the Cubs trivia or the tank top?” she whispered.

  “Both,” he answered, speaking through gritted teeth. “Along with your laugh.”

  She liked that he didn’t deflect or deny the electrical current between them. They stared at one another for another full, tingling minute.

  Then Geoff dropped the check on the table with a loud thump, breaking the spell. “Getting late,” he grumbled.

  “Yeah, yeah,” Jess replied, but she was grateful for his interruption. Another minute of that sizzling stare and she’d be suggesting a stroll to her apartment, located only a convenient half-block away.

  Adam’s cool façade was back up as he dumped some cash on the table. His voice was crisp and distant, as though the little lust-storm had never happened. “You’ll send all of the information you find with your tracking software to the email address thomaspaine543210@mailbox.com.”

  “Or else you’ll report me to the police?”

  “You got it. See you, Blondie.”

  Without a backward glance, he picked up his bourbon glass and left the booth. She watched as he placed it in a bus tub on the bar and then vanished out the back door.

  This had to be the strangest encounter of her life. In the space of an hour, a professional thief had given her a new direction for reclaiming her life, announced that he was going to stop her from exposing Knoll, and turned her on so much that she was still jittery. Oh, and let’s not forget the blackmail.

  At the thought of the blackmail, her temper kicked in. The nerve of him! To stalk her and blackmail her into providing information like she was just some cog in a little machine he created. Huh. She might not be some professional criminal, but she did have guts and a top-notch brain. Both of which were telling her that all she needed to shake loose of him was a little leverage of her own.

  But what leverage? She thought all the way through both of their conversations, frustrated to realize he’d said almost nothing about himself at all.

  Geoff grabbed the cash off the table. “At least he was a good tipper,” he muttered. “You done, Jessie? Ready for me to take your glass?”

  Aha! Jess shot to her feet. Actions always spoke louder than words. Adam had picked up his bourbon glass and brought it to the bus tub even though it was on the bar for the staff, not patrons. If he was just overly courteous, he would have taken her glass as well. But he’d just removed his own...perhaps an automatic inclination for anyone who needed to protect their fingerprints?

  She found Adam’s bourbon glass in the bus tub and smiled. She wondered how much he researched about her before he came a-calling tonight. Did he know, for instance, that her oldest brother was a cop? She hollered over to Geoff. “Can I borrow a ziplock bag?”

  Chapter Five

  Hidden in a corner plush booth of the bar at the Peninsula Hotel, Adam took out his burner phone and sent a quick text. Five seconds later, he heard the resulting ding from the cell phone in the pocket of a man nearby.

  It was convenient that the Maurice Knoll situation had brought him home to Chicago for the spring, Adam reflected. It gave him a chance to finally go after the 1942 Rolex Chronograph owned by Keith Larsen. Only twelve of the watches were ever made. Larsen had procured his at a Christie’s auction for 1.16 million. Two years later, Adam would make at least that much from a very interested collector.

  Larsen, one of the men directly responsible for the 2008 financial crisis, had managed to escape prison with the help of his attorneys. Fortunately for Adam, the experience hadn’t humbled the former big bank president. Larsen continued to parade around like one of the rulers of the free world, flaunting his wealth and power.

  Tonight that arrogance was going to cost him.

  In town from New York for hedge fund meetings, Larsen was traveling with a valet/bodyguard and staying at a suite in the Peninsula. It was the same pattern he followed whenever he had meetings outside of New York. Always the same bodyguard, always a Peninsula hotel. Here in Chicago, he not only stayed at the Peninsula on every trip, he always stayed in the same damn suite.

  People were so stupid.

  As Larsen smoked cigars with a hedge fund friend, his bodyguard’s eyes scanned the text message on his phone. The corners of his mouth turned up and he straightened in his seat. Inwardly, Adam grinned. Although he grumbled about the idiocy of predictability, he still loved it when a plan came together.

  To be successful as a career thief of high-value items, you had to play the long game. One didn’t simply spy a rich dude on the street wearing a million-dollar Rolex and then steal it that night. At least one didn’t if he didn’t want to end up in jail for the rest of his life. To be successful, you needed a plan. You needed patience. You needed to work multiple projects at once.

  Adam had been a full-time thief officially for twelve years, but his tutelage at Uncle Tony’s side started much earlier. He’d started as a generalist like Tony, taking art, cash, jewelry—anything he could easily fence. But in the last six years, he’d specialized in jewels, especially diamonds. If he were a motivational speaker, he could break down the secrets of his success into a defined five-step process.

  Tonight, he was deep into Step Five with Larsen’s Rolex.

  When he began his periodic surveillance of Larsen a year ago, he learned about the bodyguard’s two biggest weaknesses: poker games and redheaded call girls. Either would have provided an acceptable way in, but since the bodyguard didn’t always play nice with the girls, Adam decided on poker.

  Over the past year, Adam and a few colleagues had posed as fellow poker enthusia
sts with an exciting late-Saturday-night game in the Shanghai Terrace restaurant, which was on the second floor of the Peninsula. The bodyguard wasn’t supposed to leave Larsen’s suite while the big boss was sleeping. But Adam and his crew had let the bodyguard win so many times that he almost always snuck away for an hour or two around 2:00 am.

  Keith Larsen waved his cigar around, flashing a glimpse of the Rolex. Couldn’t resist wearing it, could you? The banker was inordinately proud of his rare timepiece, Adam had noticed. He wore it to all business meetings, despite the conventional—and correct—wisdom that one shouldn’t travel with valuables. This wouldn’t even be a challenge. If he was attempting to lift the watch from Larsen’s Connecticut mansion with its state of the art security system, that might be something. Hotel jobs—as long as you did your homework—were so much easier.

  For the next fifteen minutes, Adam watched as Larsen and his friend finished their scotch and cigars. When the bartender brought over the tab, the bodyguard took advantage of Larsen’s distraction to quickly return Adam’s text. He was in for the game. Check. Adam left the bar and shot a message to his two-man crew to be in place at the restaurant by 1am.

  Now, back to his own room at the Peninsula to freshen up his disguise and wait. There was a surprising amount of waiting involved in thievery.

  As he left the bar, a woman with long platinum hair walked in. His breath caught in his throat—until she turned her head. It wasn’t her. Of course, it wasn’t her. For the hundredth time of the week, his thoughts returned to Monday night.To funny Jessica Hughes. Jess or Jessie to her friends. Not that she’d invited him to call her anything at all.

  He couldn’t remember the last time he’d thought about a woman so much. It wasn’t just her looks or their palpable chemistry, although she was going to figure prominently in his fantasies for a while. Hell, the woman made him hard just by laughing. But his thoughts about her weren’t solely focused on her face or body. It was more that she’d kept surprising him with her smarts and her humor and her toughness.