“Can we talk about this once we’re in out of the cold? It’s all I can do to keep my teeth from chattering every time I open my mouth.”
The look he gave her was maybe a little on the searching side, but what he said was “Sure.”
Like most of the buildings in the area, the hotel was made of pale stone. Wrought-iron balconies and gargoyles glowering over the eaves gave the facade a Gothic air. Six stories tall, it had many narrow windows spilling golden rectangles of light across the dark street.
The great thing about working with Colin was, as Bianca noted one more time, she didn’t have to spell things out for him. He was almost as well versed in tradecraft as she was herself. Countersurveillance was second nature to them both. Cold and wet though they were, there was no need to debate the pros and cons of watching the place for a while before going inside. He accepted the need for it automatically, just as she did. They approached the hotel from the opposite side of the street, strolled past it and, without exchanging a word, ducked into the pharmacy with its flashing green sign on the corner. The one with the big front window that allowed an unimpeded view of the hotel, the street and the area around it.
They emerged some ten minutes later with power bars and bottled water, a few necessary toiletries and matching Je heart Paris T-shirts, along with a high degree of certainty that they hadn’t picked up a tail. Still, Bianca kept a wary eye out.
They might have eluded their pursuers for now, but in no way did she feel safe. Every particle of the finely honed sense of danger she’d developed over the years screamed it: the “something deadly” she’d felt on the street earlier was still out there.
And she didn’t think the feeling had been generated by the thugs who’d tried to take her out at Le Chien Rouge.
The hotel lobby was small and dim. At one time the building had been luxurious, but it was slightly shabby now. A single desk clerk behind a long wooden counter was the only occupant. A wall-mounted TV blasted away.
“How much is a room for two people?” Colin asked the clerk in French as he approached the desk.
Keeping her face turned away from the clerk, Bianca drifted toward the TV.
That they would share a room was a foregone conclusion, so obvious a piece of tradecraft that they didn’t even bother to discuss it. Colin in his role as bodyguard wouldn’t have considered any other arrangement, and she in her role as putative victim would be foolish to insist on anything else. To strip the matter down to its simplest form, when an unknown number of bad guys want to kill or kidnap you, two highly skilled operatives are better than one, and it’s good to have someone who knows his way around a move or two watching your back.
The clerk’s answer was hailed as satisfactory, and Colin, using a fake name and paying cash, checked in. Bianca’s attention was caught by an on-air commentator’s report on North Korea, a topic in which she’d only recently (as in three days previously) developed an interest. The gist of the story was that North Korea was escalating its nuclear arms capability. The commentator opined that the isolated kingdom’s Dear Leader’s historic meeting with the US president had been nothing more than a ploy to buy time to finish developing a nuclear weapon that could reach the continental United States. That goal, the commentator felt, was within reach, and once that happened the balance of power in the region, and, indeed, the world, would change forever. With the United States no longer able to unilaterally threaten the Hermit Kingdom with military force, South Korea and Japan would be at immediate risk, and the world would tremble on the brink of nuclear war.
“Did you hear that?” Bianca asked Colin in a low voice as, check-in completed, he took her arm in a loverly way and steered her over to the elevator. Not that she needed to worry about being overheard, as a sidelong glance at the desk clerk confirmed. His bored expression said it all: one more dalliance amoureuse among the tourists, and he didn’t care. “They say we’re being fooled into giving North Korea more time to develop a nuke that can reach the United States.”
“We’re not being fooled.” The elevator arrived. They stepped inside and he punched the button for their floor. “Our side’s playing for time, too. That’s where what you’re doing comes in. While the powers that be make a lot of noise about talking, Operation Fifth Doctrine’s being deployed to get the information we need to change the game. Not knowing exactly what we’re dealing with gives them the advantage. The thought that we could go in militarily to take out their nuclear weapons and wind up missing some, which might then be fired at the United States and its allies in retaliation, is what’s making it so hard for our side to deal with the threat. It’s a dangerous game that we don’t want to play if we’re not one hundred percent sure we can win, and unfortunately, they know that.” He slanted a glance at her. “How does it feel to know you’re the game-changer?”
“Just peachy keen. You know, if this goes wrong, we might all wind up roasting weenies with nuclear fallout.” Her voice was tart.
He smiled as the elevator stopped and they stepped out into a long, narrow hall that smelled faintly of cigarettes and air freshener. “I like your faith in the combined abilities of our intelligence services.”
“Yeah, well, faith may move mountains, but then, so do nukes.”
He unlocked the door and they walked into their room. It was small. It was plain. She spent about ten seconds assessing points of ingress and egress: one tall, narrow window, one heavy wood door. Dark green carpet, white walls, white curtains over drawn blinds on the single window. A gurgling radiator beneath the window. A small dresser/desk combination with a TV on the dresser part and a straight-back chair tucked beneath the desk part. A double bed with two lumpy-looking pillows and a white spread. A nightstand with a lamp. An armchair in a corner with a floor lamp beside it.
A bathroom.
Taking off her coat, she hung it in the closet, snagged her earrings from her purse then dropped the purse on the closet floor, removed the power bars and water (aka breakfast) from the plastic bag, hooked the bag with its toiletries over her arm and headed for the bathroom.
“I’m going to take a shower,” she said. She was tired and wired and sick about the innocents who’d been killed and injured in the restaurant and on edge about what would be going down in the morning: the best medicine that she could think of at the moment for all of that was standing beneath endless streams of hot water. He’d taken off his coat, too, and draped it over the TV (more good tradecraft, in case anyone hoped to use the TV as a camera; she placed her earrings side by side beneath the TV as she passed it to foil any unlikely-but-possible listening device) and his hat, and was in the process of pulling his wet crewneck over his head. As a result, his reply was muffled. Didn’t matter: she didn’t wait for it.
When she emerged, she was clean and fragrant and warm, and he was on the phone. The cell phone. It had been a while since she’d stayed in a hotel room in Paris, but she didn’t think cell phones were standard amenities.
It had to be his.
“Merci,” he said into the phone, and disconnected as she stopped dead, staring at him. His eyes slid over her. She was blonde again, her hair freshly shampooed and blow-dried, and was wearing one of the Je heart Paris T-shirts they’d bought in the pharmacy. The red Alice wig and her discarded clothes hung over her arm. Her shoes dangled from her fingers. The T-shirt was perfectly decent—it reached midthigh. Still, by the time his eyes met hers again they had darkened.
She barely noticed, and didn’t care.
“Don’t tell me you’ve been carrying that on you. They can trace it.” Her voice was sharp. “You know that.”
“Relax.” He put the phone down on the dresser. She saw that it already held a collection of objects he’d had on his person, including their guns. “It’s a black phone. A spy phone. Specially configured, totally untraceable. Totally secure.”
“You sure?”
“Would I have it if I wasn’t?”
The constriction in her chest eased a little. “W
ho were you talking to? And if you say it’s none of my business, I’m walking. You can’t trust me, I can’t trust you.”
“I wasn’t going to say that. I called an associate and asked him to leave some weapons and ammo at a dead drop he knows of not far from here. In case you haven’t noticed, we’re getting low.”
She had noticed. “And?”
“We can pick them up on our way to meet Park in the morning.”
Okay. That made sense.
He cocked an eyebrow at her. “Satisfied?”
Not entirely, but she nodded. Took a breath. And found that she had recovered enough to register that he was stripped to the waist. The visual hit her like a bucket of water in the face. Black hair curling from the rain. Hard, handsome face. Deeply tan. Totally buff. Wide chest, muscular arms, ripped abs. A large raised scar running across one sculpted bicep. A manly vee of black chest hair.
His jeans rode low on lean hips. His belly button was an innie.
Be still, my heart.
Damn it, no!
“I’m going to take a shower,” he said, and walked into the bathroom. She got an eyeful of broad bare back as he passed her. “You can have the bed. I’ll take the chair.”
He closed the door. She looked at it, blinked, discovered that her pulse had quickened and got mad at herself.
So he was an absolutely gorgeous guy. So he was hot AF. So she’d noticed.
Get over it. Right now she had other, time-sensitive fish to fry. She spread her wet clothes and wig out on the radiator under the window, parked her shoes beside it, listened for the shower—and as soon as she heard it grabbed his phone.
Given her recent experiences, her new live-long-and-prosper motto was trust, but verify.
The phone was locked and secured by a touchpad that needed a code, presumably four digits because most codes of that type were. Trying to guess the code was a waste of time. The possible number combinations to find the four correct digits in the correct order was somewhere around ten thousand. And she couldn’t be entirely sure the code was merely four digits.
In her purse was a complexion-altering powder foundation that she used as Lynette. Rushing to the closet, she crouched, found the powder and scraped some into her palm. Grinding it into a fine dust between her thumb and forefinger, she sprinkled it over the touchpad. Then she gently blew the powder off.
Bingo. The oils left behind by his fingers caused the powder to adhere to three numbers: 4-6-9.
Three numbers. Hmm.
Obviously he used one twice.
“XMI6,” he said behind her. She nearly jumped out of her skin. No point in trying to hide what she’d been doing. The phone, with the powder still adhering to the numbers, was in her hand. She’d been listening for the shower. She listened again just to be sure: it was still running.
She rose and turned to find him leaning a shoulder against the jamb of the open bathroom door. His arms were crossed over his chest. Steam billowed behind him, filling the bathroom. He was still wearing his jeans, which, to be fair, didn’t appear to be all that wet. But the point was, he hadn’t even gotten undressed.
Indignation stiffened her spine. He’d been expecting her to do what she did. It was a trap, and she’d walked right into it.
20
“You want to check out my phone? Go ahead. Like I said, the code’s XMI6.”
Bianca fixed him with an accusing look. “You knew what I was going to do. You were expecting it.”
“I think we’ve already established that you have serious trust issues. After all we’ve been through together, too.” Colin shook his head, tsk-tsked.
“What about you? You turned on the shower then waited to catch me out. Talk about trust issues.”
“See, the difference is, mine were justified. Look who got caught with whose phone in her hand.”
Her lips pursed. “I didn’t only want to check out your phone. I was hoping that I could use it to email Doc and tell him to transfer the money Park is going to pay me in the morning out of the account it’s wired into as soon as it lands. Not that I think the money’s going to disappear or anything, but—”
“You could have asked me.”
“I was going to.”
“Liar.” He said it without heat.
If she’d tried to deny it the words would have stuck in her throat. Instead, she gave up. “Fine. Call it an occupational hazard. And, yes, I would like to check out your phone.”
He gestured at it. “Help yourself. Although before you send that email you should realize that since Doc’s a known associate of yours, all his communications, including his emails, are probably being monitored.”
“Think I didn’t take care of that before I left Savannah?” She made a scoffing sound. “We have a plan in place for emergency communications.”
XMI6: 9-6-4-6. She whisked the powder off the numbers with a forefinger, then punched them in. The phone unlocked.
“Now, wasn’t getting the code from me easier than trying umpteen different number combinations until your finger fell off?”
Flicking him a derisive look—once she knew the numbers involved there were actually fifty-four different combinations, which would have taken her under three minutes if she’d had to try them all and use her hack that kept the phone from locking after a certain number of wrong attempts—she hit recents in the phone app and a list of numbers came up. The latest was a local number, an outgoing call made eleven minutes ago. That meshed with what he’d told her.
“Look at that,” he said. “I was telling the truth.”
Her mouth thinned. A quick scroll down the list of numbers told her nothing: she didn’t recognize any of them.
“Satisfied?”
Without ringing all the numbers back, there was nothing else she could do, and ringing the numbers back brought its own set of problems with it. Like whoever was on the other end wondering why they were really being called, and by whom, and getting paranoid and suspicious and maybe doing something they wouldn’t have done because they were paranoid and suspicious—suffice it to say, callbacks to certain numbers could go very wrong.
“Yes.” If her answer was grudging, at least she was willing to believe he’d been telling the truth about the call he’d been on.
“You want to email your friend, hit the star and pound keys simultaneously. It’ll connect you to a secure internet service. When you’re ready to send, hit the plus sign.”
She did as he directed and sent her message to Doc. In the meantime, Colin went back into the bathroom and turned the water off.
“No shower?” she asked when he reemerged.
“Later. When there’s hot water again. If there’s hot water again.”
Come to think of it, the steam had stopped billowing in the middle of their conversation. “Looks like a cold shower is the price you pay for being paranoid.”
“Baby, it’s only considered being paranoid if the person you suspect is trying to break into your phone isn’t.”
“Like you wouldn’t have done the exact same thing.” Her tone was astringent to cover the fact that the little pulse of warmth he’d caused her to feel before was back, in spades. The ridiculous reason? He’d called her baby. For the second time. For some unknown reason baby felt a lot more—personal—than, say, beautiful, which he’d been calling her from the beginning, when he didn’t know her name. She thought about objecting, reminding him that they were professional colleagues (which was a better way of looking at it than blackmailer and blackmail-ee), but she didn’t want to let him know that it had made enough of an impact for her to notice it. Even if it had. No, because it had.
He was looking at her, she realized, and realized too that she was looking at him right back. Afraid of what he might be able to read in her eyes, she glanced away. Without really registering what she was seeing, she took in his purloined coat covering the TV, the miscellany of items he’d parked on the dresser, her clothes now starting to steam on the radiator—
Wait�
�go back. She hastily rescanned the items on the dresser. Her eyes widened, shot to his face. “Oh my God, where’s the ChapStick? Did we leave it in the apartment? Or—”
She broke off as, with a twist of a smile, he put his hand over the scar on his arm, plucked at the edge of it and peeled it off. Then he turned it over for her to look at. Inside what she saw was a silicone prosthetic nestled the ChapStick. The section of arm where it had been was now all smooth bronze muscle.
“Fake. Scar.” Marveling at the duplicity of it, she shook her head at him. “See why I have trust issues with you?”
“Says the girl with the multiple wigs. And the killer jewelry. And the dead sexy garter belt.” He crossed the room, held out his hand for his phone. Working hard to keep from looking sulky, she gave it to him. She didn’t like getting caught. It didn’t happen often.
“So you ever gonna tell me about that guy in the restaurant?” he asked.
She looked up at him. He was so close she had to do that. She liked that his height meant that she had to do it—and she also didn’t like it. Same way she liked but didn’t like all those honed muscles, or the scruff on his chin, or the breadth of his shoulders. In short, the man’s hunkiness quotient posed a problem. Complications of the sort her unwanted attraction to him could create she didn’t need.
“What do you want to know?” As a preemptive move to keep any wayward reactions at bay, she turned her back on him, dipping into the closet to fish her Lynette-wear out of her bag.
“How about you start with his name?” He was no longer behind her. Bianca registered that with relief as she stood up, Lynette-wear in hand. He watched her from the center of the room as she headed toward the desk. That still didn’t give her a lot of space because it was a small room and he took up what seemed like way more than his fair share of it.
The Fifth Doctrine: The Guardian Series Book 3 Page 19