Chameleon Uncovered
Book 2 of the Chameleon Assassin Series
By BR Kingsolver
brkingsolver.com
Cover art by Heather Hamilton-Senter
www.bookcoverartistry.com
Published by BR Kingsolver
Copyright 2017 BR Kingsolver
License Notes
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Coming late spring 2017
Book 3 of the Chameleon Assassin Series
Other books by BR Kingsolver
The Chameleon Assassin Series
Chameleon Assassin
The Telepathic Clans Saga
The Succubus Gift
Succubus Unleashed
Broken Dolls
Succubus Rising
Succubus Ascendant
Table of Contents
Back Cover
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Back Cover
The dark sequel to the best-selling Chameleon Assassin.
Libby has a chance to build a legitimate reputation when she’s hired by one of the world’s most prestigious museums to bolster their security. The gig is in Chicago, where her heartthrob lives, so she hopes for a little romance.
She's on a first-name basis with larceny, mayhem, and death, but Libby's not used to being on the receiving end. Chicago is far darker and more dangerous than her native Toronto. Amidst terrorist bombings, stolen treasure, and murder, a mutant prophet calls for revolution. Away from her family and friends, Libby has nowhere to turn as enemies assault her from all sides.
Their mistake. Libby is a dangerous enemy.
Chapter 1
Vengeance and justice are intertwined concepts. Religions and governments have struggled with the proper balance since mankind crawled out of their caves and began building their first social organizations.
Abstract concepts aside, people seemed to have difficulty separating the two things, and a lot of people had always been unhappy with how society defined justice.
Millennia after the first unhappy woman poisoned her mate’s breakfast, someone gave Evelyn Olson a phone number. Just a phone number, hand written on a scrap of paper. She didn’t do anything with it until one day after a court appearance in her divorce battle. Looking for something in her purse, she found the scrap of paper. She was frustrated and angry, so she called the number.
A woman’s voice answered. “Leave your name, phone number, and address. If we can help you, we will contact you.”
Evelyn left her information. A week passed, and she forgot about it. Then her phone rang.
“Be at Bistro68 on Tuesday at eleven fifty-five in the morning. Reservations for Evelyn and Elizabeth.” It was the same woman’s voice as on the recording at the mysterious number.
In my business, anonymity was important. I never wore my real face to meet a client, as I preferred to avoid unexpected knocks on the door late at night. Some people had no sense of humor when their heirlooms disappeared, and trusting to the discretion of someone who hired a thief or an assassin would just be stupid.
Bistro68 catered to the money-is-no-object crowd and was full on a weekday at noon. I strolled in and sat down across from Evelyn Olson, who looked exactly as she did in all the media pictures. I, on the other hand, looked nothing like myself. Projecting an image eight inches shorter and ten years older than my natural form, I was dressed much the same as the other corporate trophy wives meeting for lunch.
“Good afternoon, Evelyn. I’m Elizabeth. I understand that you have a problem. How can I help?”
I’d done a lot of research on her, her husband, and their divorce before I met her for lunch. Corporate marriages sometimes resembled royal marriages in ages past—a means of cementing alliances and creating acceptable babies. Negotiating teams for prenuptial agreements occasionally employed dozens of lawyers. Evelyn was from a prominent corporate family, and her prenup evidently was airtight, preventing Fredrick from just dumping her on the street.
Fredrick Olson’s new playmate was a scandal. Although undeniably beautiful, she was too young, too uneducated, and too middle-class to fit into corporate society properly. No one would have blinked if he wanted to keep her stashed away as his mistress, maybe not even Evelyn. But he wanted a divorce so he could marry the sixteen-year-old kid. Upper-class society was completely aghast.
Evelyn’s main complaint was her husband taking all her jewelry when he left. That pissed her off more than the mistress or the divorce. The divorce judge, a golfing buddy of Frederick’s, had denied her motion to have the jewelry returned.
“So, what would you like me to do for you?” I asked.
“I want my jewelry. A friend told me you might have—how did she put it?—a creative solution.”
“We might be able to do that,” I told her, “but our services are expensive. You might spend more than the jewelry is worth.”
She laughed. “I seriously doubt that.”
I quoted her a hundred thousand credits, and she didn’t bat an eye. When she showed me the insurance photos, I understood why.
Dad always told me to be careful about getting involved with domestic disputes, and I understood the potential problems. Evelyn showed me two pictures, one of her grandmother wearing a necklace, and then a picture of Fredrick’s sixteen-year-old sugar baby wearing the necklace. I was about as cynical as they came, but fair was fair.
An aircar rose from the roof, and soon after, most of the lights in the penthouse above the twenty-second floor went out. Time for me to go to work.
I’d spent the previous week scouting the job, following the mark and mapping his habits and movements. It all came down to sitting outside the exclusive apartment building, topped by Fredrick Olson’s penthouse overlooking the lake, and waiting for him and his arm candy to head out for a see-and-be-seen charity event. The kind of event where the richer-than-God crowd got together and donated fifteen minutes’ income, along with fifteen minutes’ lip service, to the “unfortunate among us.”
On a scouting foray into the building, I had learned that some of Olson’s security guards remained on duty when he went out. That eliminated the easy way in. Climbing a twenty-two-story building was a difficult proposition at the best of times, but I was recovering from a bullet wound and surgery to my left hand. Climbing anything taller than a molehill was still beyond my ability.
For a lot of reasons, I would rather break into a walled estate than a high-rise apartment building. During the day, when Fredrick Olson was at work, his mistress and the housekeeper were at home. In the evening, most of the other residents throughout th
e building were home, and the place was crawling with ‘personal security personnel’, also known as bodyguards.
I crossed the road, my chameleon talents allowing me to blend into the darkness. The deepest shadows lay on the southwest side of the building that was closest to the lake. If I kept completely still, even the security cameras couldn’t pick me up. I had to move, though, to reach my destination.
An arm’s length from the wall, I turned on the personal jetpack I wore—an unanticipated bonus from a previous job—and rose until I reached the roof. I pulled myself onto the roof and lay between the parapet and the greenhouse glass, barely breathing, waiting for some kind of alarm. Nothing happened.
The penthouse covered half of the roof, and the apartment included the entire floor below me. A domed greenhouse with a garden covered the other half of the roof. From the ground, the dome wasn’t visible, but the palm trees looked too healthy to be exposed to unfiltered city air.
Shrugging out of the jetpack harness, I crawled along until I reached the gardener’s shed. As far as I could tell, it was the only way to go from inside the dome to the outside. The door had an electronic combination lock and a simple alarm contact, but that was it. I bypassed the alarm and disabled the lock. When I pulled on the door, I discovered it hadn’t been used very often. Creaking, rusty hinges screamed, and I winced. A panicked glance at the house showed no movement or change. I hoped no one was inside the apartment. If so, I was already screwed.
Another door opened from the shed into the garden. The glass ceiling thirty feet overhead gave the impression of being truly outside. I seriously doubted security cameras or pressure sensors covered the space. Why bother? Breaking through the acrylic glass would’ve taken a bomb. Such rooftop conservatories were designed to withstand tree limbs blown into them at sixty miles an hour.
Keeping low and blending into the shadows, I made my way past a fountain to an area with several tables surrounded by chairs. No one sat outside enjoying sunny days anymore, at least not in the city, but if you were rich, you could pretend.
The sliding-glass door from the garden to the house didn’t have an alarm contact on it and wasn’t even locked. I walked right into an entertainment area with a bar, dance floor, and more tables and chairs. Beyond were a formal dining room and a small kitchen. The rest of the rooftop level included a game room and a gymnasium with a lap pool. I took the servants’ stairs from the small kitchen down to the main level.
Evelyn told me the jewelry would be in a safe in the master bedroom, and had given me the combination. Frederick hadn’t changed it. I took the jewelry that matched the insurance pictures she showed me and put the rest back. Evelyn wanted to send a message. I felt a little guilty, though. The gig was almost too easy.
If I had been working for myself, a lot of the artwork and the rest of the jewelry would have been in jeopardy. Evelyn hoped Fredrick wouldn’t realize the jewelry was missing, so I made every effort to leave everything exactly as I found it.
But what were the chances that Fredrick would miss a half-dozen bottles of wine and whiskey? On my way out, I looked into the wine cellar and under the bar. I wasn’t a real expert in fancy alcohol, so I used my phone to check his stock against the infonet. I pulled a few of the most expensive wines for Mom and the most expensive whiskeys for Dad. It never hurt to butter up the parents in case I needed a favor.
Evelyn and I met for lunch the following day at the same charming little bistro as before. I liked the place since the menu proudly boasted that the fish contained no heavy metals or toxins, and she was paying.
We did the so-good-to-see-you air-kiss thing, and I passed her a shopping bag. “Happy birthday!”
“Oh, you shouldn’t have,” she said, slipping me a payment card.
“I recovered all the pieces except one,” I told her after the waiter took our orders. “The diamond and turquoise choker.”
“The little slut probably wore it,” Evelyn said with a shrug. “Such is life. At least you got my grandmother’s necklace and the antique diamond set.” She grinned. “I’m going to love seeing Fredrick’s face at the museum fundraiser when I wear them.”
I chuckled. “Who are you going with?” A man I was dating had invited me, and it suddenly looked as though it might be more interesting than I’d thought.
“Dolores Channing and her brother,” Evelyn said. “You know I don’t dare go near a man until the divorce is final. It’s fine for him to screw around, but he would love to invoke the infidelity clause in the prenup.”
“Seems like a silly clause since you didn’t have any children,” I said.
“Definitely. It turns out that he’s sterile.” She gave an aggrieved sigh. “You know, Elizabeth, before the world went to hell in a hand basket, there was a movement in North America and Europe that came close to giving women true equality with men. But as soon as the corporations took over, the boys at the top put a stop to that.”
I’d read about that in my history classes at the university. It wasn’t that women were denied equality, but at the top of the social ladder, women such as Evelyn and her mother, and my maternal grandmother, traded equality for the comfort and luxury their beauty could buy. Very few women cracked the top levels of corporate hierarchies.
Nothing stopped Evelyn from going out and starting her own company, but instead of going to university when she was eighteen, she married a corporate executive eighteen years her senior. I didn’t have a lot of sympathy for her, since she was Olson’s second wife. He seemed to trade them in when they hit thirty-two.
We ate our lunches, gossiping like a normal pair of corporate trophy wives. After we parted, I went to the ladies’ room and changed my appearance, morphing from the woman Evelyn knew into plain old me. With a full purse and a bounce in my step, I ventured forth to hunt down a wicked pair of shoes I’d seen in a shop window.
Chapter 2
The Pinnacle was a fancy bar for young corporate types. My best friend managed it, and my other best friend sang there four nights a week. That’s where I met James McKenzie, Vice President of Technology Support for Ontario Power and Light. I’d been out to dinner with my father, but didn’t want to call it an early night, so I was sitting in the mezzanine overlooking the dance floor, nursing a drink and listening to Nellie sing.
“You’re dressed very nicely to be spending the evening alone,” a lovely baritone voice said. I looked up and discovered the voice came from a pleasant-looking man with dark hair and blue eyes, who was wearing a very expensive dark suit.
“So are you,” I said. “Did you take your mother to dinner?”
He barked out a laugh and said, “No, I didn’t. Why do you ask?”
“It was either that, or you got stood up, or you were terribly rude and your date ran away. No one dresses like that and goes out alone.”
“Or my date got sick.”
“I think I said that, didn’t I? Getting sick is the original excuse for bailing out of a bad date. I’m going to have to dock her score for lack of creativity.”
“Is that the only clean dress you had, or did you go to dinner with your father?”
I could tell he was trying to return my snark, but he was an amateur. “It was a very nice dinner, but Dad isn’t much for night clubs. Or dancing. So why didn’t you take her home? Didn’t have the bus fare?”
He seemed to think about it. “Maybe you’re right. I guess I am a cad. May I join you? I haven’t had anyone claw me all night.”
“Meow.” I gestured to the empty chair. “I tend to erect my defenses when approached by strange men. Are you strange or merely unusual?”
With a bemused smile, he said, “I have been accused of both. I prefer to think of myself as unique. Enjoying the people watching?”
“I’m not sure. I keep hoping someone will ask me to dance, but none of the available men seem to have learned how.”
The waiter brought me another drink and took my new friend’s order.
He looked down at the dan
ce floor, then looked me over again, obviously taking in my dress and jewelry. Dad had taken me to a really swanky place, so I was dolled out to the max.
“Would you care to dance?”
“Maybe.” I turned away from watching the dancers. “Have you known your date long?”
He handled the shift in topic without a problem. “Second date. We were at dinner, and it seemed as though something disagreed with her. Although, the paramedics said it was appendicitis. They weren’t too keen on allowing me in the ambulance.”
“Really? Aren’t you concerned? Don’t you want to be there to hold her hand and make her feel she’s important to you? Do you care if she lives or dies? Are you going to make her call a taxi to get home?”
“I’ll go around to see her in the morning. She’s in surgery this evening.”
Obviously, he wasn’t terribly concerned or broken up about it. “I assume you’re still hoping to hook up, then?” I asked, looking around. “What type of woman are you interested in? I suggest you choose someone with a stronger stomach.”
His cheerful demeanor took a hit. “I was hoping you might be interested.”
“Oh, I am. I think it’s fascinating to learn about various men’s taste in women. How about the redhead in the green dress?”
He looked. “Not bad, but a little too much.” The redhead probably carried an extra ten pounds, maybe a little more, which she’d probably gained since she bought the dress. The effect on her décolletage was rather eye-catching, though.
“Ah, a fitness snob. In that case, how about the brunette with hair down to her butt?” The woman was definitely drool-worthy.
“Nice, but I’m afraid she’s married.”
“How can you tell that from up here?” I rose a bit out of my chair and tried to see if there was a ring on her left hand.
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