Kick A** Heroines Box Set: The UltimatumFatal AffairAfter the DarkBulletproof SEAL (The Guardian)

by Karen Robards

  She said, “We can’t travel under our own names. I don’t want to leave a trail that could be traced back here once the job goes down. Any legend—” thief-speak for a false identity, including passport, other ID such as a driver’s license, credit cards and accompanying backstory “—you used before can never be used again. And there’s not enough time to get you a new one.”

  In fact, all the identification documentation connected with the disaster in Bahrain was sleeping with the fishes; once they’d made it safely back to Savannah, she’d collected everything, burned it and thrown the ashes in the river.

  The key was to make it as close to impossible as she could for anyone to retrace her path from Savannah to San Francisco after she completed the job. Protecting her identity and her bolt-hole from discovery and her friends from being involved was of paramount importance. She had a selection of legends to choose from; he was back to being Miles Davis Zeigler.

  Doc made a scoffing sound. “You think I don’t have a fake ID? I’ve got a drawer full.”

  The look she gave him was incredulous. “How?”

  “I made them. I’ve been making fake IDs since high school. I made decent money selling them back then, too.”

  “You’re getting on an airplane, not trying to sneak into a bar.”

  “They’re as good as anything you’ve got. Want to see?”

  “They’re here?”

  “Like I told you, I got a drawer full. A desk drawer.”

  “Show me.” Bianca stood up and followed Doc into his office. When he opened one of his desk drawers to show her his collection of driver’s licenses—he had more than a dozen, featuring his picture matched with different names, addresses, birth dates and states—she picked them up one at a time, examined them closely and was impressed. “These are good.”

  “Told ya.”

  “Why do you have these?” She was examining the bar code on a Texas license with Doc’s picture and the name Blake Warren—if she hadn’t known the thing was fake, she never would have been able to tell.

  He shrugged and looked shifty. Bianca’s attention was caught and her gaze sharpened on him.

  “Well?” she said.

  He sighed. “When I first got here, I wasn’t sure how long I was going to stay. I mean, I was tripping out over what happened, and I thought—well, I thought I might need to take off and fend for myself, you know what I mean? Go north again, or something. I might be fresh out of family, but New York—that’s still home.”

  Okay, she got that. “And now?”

  “I like it here. As long as the AC doesn’t go out.”

  Bianca had to smile.

  Seeing that, he added, “So I can come?”

  She hesitated. Her gut instinct was to keep the operation as small as possible, but on the other hand, going in naked—more thief-speak for alone—had its hazards, too.

  “You know you’re safe here in Savannah, and you can stay here and stay safe,” she said. “I don’t expect anything bad to come out of this job, but—”

  “Shit happens,” he finished for her and grimaced. “If I’d wanted to stay safe, I never would have hacked into government computers to begin with. Anyway, now—we’re kind of a team. I think.”

  He said it almost shyly.

  “I’ll book the tickets,” she said. She’d brought the credit card she intended to use with her tonight for just that purpose. It was in her purse, which was in her office. For the flight, she was Laura Green. When it landed, she would turn into somebody else. “Pick an ID. Two, because you’ll need a change once we land. Oh, and lose the black. You need to look like a tourist. You have anything like a gaudy Hawaiian shirt in your closet?”

  “You kidding?”

  “Nope,” Bianca said and headed back to her office to book the tickets.

  * * *

  “You brought coffee,” Doc said with sleepy-eyed appreciation when Bianca, all touristy in a pink button-up shirt over a pair of jeans, picked him up in front of his apartment at 5:50 the following morning.

  He was wearing baggy black cargo shorts, black high-tops and a brown T-shirt that read Got Milk Duds? above a picture of the candy.

  Okay, he’d made an effort.

  “Loving the duds,” she said.

  He gave a grunt that said aren’t you witty as he slid into the passenger’s seat beside her and picked up one of the two coffee cups in the holder between them, having already deposited his bag in the trunk. She already had two bags of her own in the trunk, a carry-on and a larger one to be checked that contained, along with various items of clothing and miscellaneous, commercial-airliner-friendly selections from her weapons vault that she’d thought might come in handy and a silver metal briefcase. She’d found it after a quick search of the local open-all-night Walmarts. It was aluminum rather than titanium, but the dimensions were roughly the same as the target and she’d weighted it so that it matched the target’s weight specifications. She didn’t expect the switch to go unnoticed for long, but then she didn’t need it to. Lee only had to remain unaware of what she’d done for long enough for her to get away, which would take a matter of maybe two minutes.

  “We’re on our way to Memphis to see Regions Bank about improving their cyber security, by the way.” Headlights slicing through the predawn gloom, she headed up the ramp to I-16 West as she spoke. The sun wasn’t yet up, but the sky to the east was glorious Technicolor. “I told Hay that you knew a guy in their tech department, and when they had a problem yesterday, he contacted you directly.”

  Coming up with a cover story that would account for both the sudden nature of her departure and the fact that she was taking Doc with her had required a little work. Fortunately, Hay had been too indignant with her—“You told Evie that Susan and I broke up, didn’t you? She’s trying to fix me up with Grace Cappy for that historic thing!”—to ask many questions. To Evie, she’d said the same thing, asked her to postpone the meeting with the Realtors until Tuesday and added that she would be back no later than Monday night. Since this was Friday, that gave her time to recover the target, follow it back to its source and do what had to be done to make sure the video, and the threat, was dealt with.

  “Guy I know at Regions Bank had a hacker emergency. Got it.” Doc winced as an 18-wheeler rumbled past them, practically blowing them into the other lane, which, fortunately, was empty. So early in the morning, traffic on the expressway was light. Doc took another swallow of coffee and slid a sideways glance at her. “Uh, I got some information for you.”

  Bianca picked up her own coffee and sipped at it. From the nervous look Doc gave her, she gathered that he preferred she keep both hands on the wheel. Well, too bad. She really needed coffee. “What kind of information?”

  “That computer search you had me do? It came up with two identities for your father.”

  “Hmm.” Since she, personally, knew of at least two dozen identities Richard had used over the years, she could only suppose he’d been very careful about not having a recognizable picture taken. “What were they?”

  “One was Andrew somebody, a Texas oilman. That one came up because he got his picture in the paper at the scene of a car crash. Easy to give a fake name, which I’m assuming that was. The other—” he drank some more coffee “—was a CIA badge. Issued, like, thirty years ago to an active field agent named Mason Thayer. Boss, I think that one was real.”

  Another 18-wheeler rattled up beside them. Bianca carefully set her coffee back in the cup holder and wrapped both hands around the wheel to hold the Acura steady. When the behemoth passed, she asked, “What makes you think so?”

  “I found it in the agency archives, in what’s kind of the dead agent file. It’s a hard place to get to. You have to worm past all kinds of firewalls and encryption and shit. But a fake badge—it wouldn’t be there. It just wouldn’t.”
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  “How on earth did you manage to get in there?” Easier to think of the difficulty involved in breaching the CIA’s—the CIA’s—computer network than to come to grips with the possibility that her father had once been a badge-carrying CIA agent.

  Doc smiled. “That thing I got arrested for? With the DoD computers? I left myself a couple of back doors in case I ever wanted to get back in. They’ve increased their protection, like, a thousandfold, but the back doors are still there.”

  “I’m impressed.” She was thinking of Richard, of his wide-ranging skills that included everything from breaking and entering to running cons to martial arts to crack marksmanship. She thought of the training he’d given her, of the experiences and instructors he’d provided, of the skills he’d made sure she’d acquired. “When you say the badge was in the dead agent file, did you mean that literally? That badges were put in that file because the agent died?”

  Doc nodded. “Yep.”

  Bianca gripped the wheel so hard she could feel the vibrations of the road through it. She stared unseeingly at the cars in front of her as she considered that information in the context of the story about Sean McAlister killing himself and his family and what she knew of her own life. And she thought, That fits.

  For whatever reason, CIA agent Mason Thayer apparently had been declared dead when he wasn’t. He had also pretended to be Sean McAlister and then faked his own and his daughter’s—her—death. After that, he had become master criminal Richard St. Ives.

  Why? That was the question that was starting to eat at her.

  “Here’s the other thing,” Doc said. He’d waited, Bianca noted, until she’d successfully negotiated the merge onto I-75 North, which as the sun rose was bristling with traffic zooming toward Atlanta. “I got an identity for that Sarah McAlister, too. Just one, but I’m sure this one’s legit. Her real name’s Anissa Renee Jones. I found her in two places. First, the University of Maryland yearbook archives. She was only there one year. The year after that, when she was nineteen years old, she was working full-time for DARPA. I found her ID badge.”

  Anissa. Issa. Bianca clenched her teeth and took a deep breath and focused, because while she was driving a car that was barreling down the expressway at seventy miles an hour was absolutely not the time to wig out.

  “DARPA?” she asked. When she could trust herself to speak—and think, and function—normally.

  “The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. It operates under the DoD. Just like the CIA. That’s the connection with your father. Anissa Jones and Mason Thayer both worked for agencies under the umbrella of the DoD. At the same time.”

  CHAPTER 16

  Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong. It wasn’t one of the rules, but it should have been. By the time the Boeing 777 touched down at San Francisco International Airport, Bianca was willing to accord it honorary status at the very least.

  Because of a medical emergency on board that had caused them to be diverted to Phoenix, they were more than four hours late getting into San Francisco. As they disembarked at 5:38 p.m., the airline had employees standing by at the gate offering help to any passenger who had missed a connection. Suppressing the urge to ask them if that included putting out an APB on an absconding thief, Bianca checked to make sure that United Flight 2 had arrived on time—of course it had, more than an hour earlier at 4:25—then rushed to pick up her bag and the rental car.

  Although, she realized as she pointed the nondescript white Hyundai Accent toward 101 South and the hotel where they had reservations, rushing was no longer necessary.

  They’d missed Justin Lee and his titanium briefcase by a mile. Or, more accurately, an hour, thirteen minutes. Given the size of San Francisco and the amount of traffic zooming everywhere, it might as well have been days.

  Shit, shit, shit.

  “Any luck on the rental car?” she asked Doc, who was wedged in beside her with his knees almost under his chin and his laptop open on his knees. He did not fit in the tiny front seat, but unfortunately by the time they got to the rental car counter, the car they’d reserved was gone, given to another customer whose flight had arrived on time, and they’d had to make do with what was left.

  Which was fine with Bianca, but Doc looked like a Saint Bernard crammed into a hamster wheel.

  “Not under the names Justin Lee or Austin Hunt or any of the other aliases I have for him.”

  “Hotel room?” Bianca asked without much hope. Doc had hacked into the reservation systems of the major hotels in the area, but the problem—well, one of the problems—was that there were a lot of hotels in the area, and not all of them used a hackable reservation system.

  “Nada.”

  Big surprise. Considering how her day was going, the surprise would have been if Doc had been able to find him.

  Okay, she was tired and hungry and crabby and had lost the object of her cross-country flight. In the back of her mind she was busy processing the minimal information in the file Doc had given her on Mason Thayer—basically the CIA equivalent of name, rank and serial number; Doc said that everything else had been scrubbed—and the slightly more extensive information in the file on Anissa Jones. Mechanic father, schoolteacher mother—thinking about them as her grandparents just messed with her objectivity, so Bianca did her best not to. Perfectly normal life growing up in Bethesda, Maryland. Until Anissa’s parents were killed in a car crash during her freshman year of college. By the following year, Anissa—Issa—was working for DARPA, and presumably on the path that had taken her into the orbit of CIA agent Mason Thayer.

  When he was thirty-eight and she was nineteen. With an almost twenty-year age difference between them, working for agencies under the DoD that should presumably have had little if any contact, they’d somehow managed to hook up and have her.

  Something to wrap her mind around later, when there weren’t at least half a dozen more urgent things to think about. She’d asked Doc to keep looking into the two of them, their connection, anything he could possibly find, and he’d set up programs that were running searches on thousands of databases even as they attended to the more immediate matter of the recovery of the prototype.

  “Think you can locate Walt Sturgeon?” Finding the likely prospective buyer wasn’t as sure a thing as finding the thief when it came to recovering the prototype, but under the circumstances Bianca was ready, willing and able to settle for whatever she could get.

  “I’ll try.”

  While Doc did things with his laptop, Bianca was briefly distracted by the view as the road curved and she suddenly found herself looking out over the sparkling blue expanse of San Francisco Bay. The boats skimming across the water trailing white ribbons of wake, the cloudless sky, the buildings studding the green hills that rolled away into the distance—the sight was breathtaking. San Francisco, with its iconic scarlet bridge and cable cars and trolleys and Victorian houses and steep, crooked streets, was one of her favorite cities in the world. She’d been there a number of times with her father, and not always to pull a robbery or scam. She’d actually had a couple of days to enjoy the area and explore.

  “Got him.” Doc shot her a triumphant look. “He’s having a party tonight on his boat to celebrate his daughter’s engagement. Apparently it’s a really big deal, because it rates half a page in the San Francisco Chronicle. The engagement, I mean. On the Society pages.”

  “His boat?”

  “He’s got a Gulf Craft Majesty 135. It’s like this huge yacht.” Doc’s tone made it clear that he was impressed. Bianca guessed he was looking at pictures. “It’s docked at the St. Francis Yacht Club, and the party’s from 6:30 to whenever. You think Lee will go there?”

  Bianca did a quick calculation. Lee had deplaned at 4:25. Give him twenty minutes to get out of the airport, and there was a gap of one hour, forty-five minutes before Sturgeon’s boat party.
Sturgeon—or somebody working for him—could have met Lee at the airport, or at any point thereafter, and relieved him of the prototype. On the other hand, since the kind of person who would pay millions of dollars for a stolen item tended to be unscrupulous and often downright dangerous, a prudent thief usually preferred that the handoff be conducted in a public place, or at least a place with plenty of witnesses. Otherwise, there was nothing to prevent the would-be buyer from shooting said thief, taking the object and saving his money. Win-win for the buyer, not so much for the thief.

  She said, “I don’t know. But right now it’s the only lead we have.”

  “If you’re going to try to make it, you need to turn around. The St. Francis Yacht Club is the other way, straight up 101 North.”

  “Tell me what else it says about the party.” Bianca would have made a U-turn, but a barrier prevented that. Anyway, she needed a place to change clothes. A Chevron sign caught her eye. Perfect.

  “Two hundred guests, dinner cruise around the bay—Ah!”

  Doc broke off with an alarmed exclamation as Bianca whipped the Hyundai off the expressway and around the bend that led to the Chevron service station.

  “You have to go potty that bad?” He looked at her in disbelief as she zipped past the crowded gasoline bays and braked beside the building.

  “I’m going to change clothes,” she told him. “I’ll be out in five minutes. While I’m in there, you find directions to that boat.”

  * * *

  Twilight was falling as Bianca pulled the Hyundai over within sight of Sturgeon’s megayacht, the Conquistador. It was docked alongside other equally impressive yachts in individual slips at the St. Francis Yacht Club. Beyond the curving row of multimillion-dollar boats tied up at the dock, Bianca could see the Mediterranean-style clubhouse and, beyond that, the Golden Gate Bridge. To the west, Alcatraz rose from the smooth waters of the bay like the bony head of a grim, gray sea monster.