Except Jamie’s family’s home was situated between Hyde Park and Holland Park, which Kyle had vaguely noted on their drive into the city yesterday. That meant an untold number of locals and tourists meandering between in search of winter greenery. The foot traffic was probably why the UMG had kept their surveillance circle small. With so many people passing through, a wider area would be harder to secure.
Kyle learned the surrounding streets over the course of the next few hours, committing the location to memory. He worked in a spiral, slowly widening it before working his way back in to the center. He was on Kensington High Street, having curved around Holland Park, when he passed a string of shops and restaurants. It was the pub on the corner up ahead that drew his attention, and not just because of the advertised happy hour to be found within.
The man sitting at one of the synthwood tables out front was engrossed in his tablet, nursing a beer and what looked like a plate of curry fries. He was alone, hat pulled low over his face to keep the late afternoon sunlight out of his eyes. It wasn’t enough to hide his features, and Kyle wasn’t surprised when his comms clicked on.
“That’s unexpected,” Katie said, because of course she would be monitoring him while hacking the solid state drive Jansen had given her. She took her role as their communications specialist seriously, but Kyle didn’t need her help for this.
“Don’t distract me,” Kyle told her under his breath.
Katie didn’t respond and Kyle picked up his pace a little until he’d reached the table and the man in question. Sliding onto the chair across from him, Kyle smiled sharply at Adam Dixon when the reporter looked up from his tablet.
“The table’s taken, in case you—you,” Adam said, blinking at Kyle in surprise.
“Me,” Kyle said, snagging a fry wedge and dragging it through the curry sauce before popping it into his mouth. “I’d ask what you’re doing here, but I’m pretty sure we both know the answer to that question.”
Adam straightened up and very pointedly biolocked his tablet, the screen going dark. “I’d say I don’t know what you’re talking about, but something tells me you wouldn’t appreciate the lie.”
Kyle stole another fry. “Nope.”
Adam eyed him warily, scratching at the side of his jaw. He’d combed his hair back, showing off his receding hairline. “How did you know I was here?”
“You really expect me to answer that?”
“On or off the record?”
Kyle finished chewing and grabbed Adam’s beer, taking a sip of it. The older man opened his mouth to protest, but Kyle pinned him with a look that made him shut up immediately.
“Word of advice,” Kyle said as he ate another fry. “Go back to New York.”
“I go where the story takes me.”
“There isn’t a story here.”
Adam smiled. Kyle wondered how badly he’d get reprimanded for punching a member of the press. “I think there is. You sitting here proves it.”
“I took a walk, something a lot of people do. That doesn’t prove anything.”
“Really?” Adam unlocked his tablet and tilted it so Kyle couldn’t see what he was doing. “I think these say otherwise.”
When he flipped the tablet around, Kyle had to remind himself to keep stealing the other man’s fries when all he wanted to do was pull out one of his guns and take out the threat.
Adam had set up a slideshow of pictures for him. They were taken from inside Vesuvius, the images a little blurry at the edges in the way that meant the camera was compensating for the darkness. Taken from someone’s tablet, probably posted on a website that focused on celebrities and socialites, sold for who knew how much, the pictures showed them as a group relaxing in the alcove on the second floor from half a dozen angles, the focus on Jamie, which meant Kyle showed up as well in the spotlight.
The last six were taken from a different angle, the person framing them most likely situated on the second level across from the side of the club the team had been on. The zoom was on for those ones, the edges of each picture fuzzy from it. They showed them sitting at Jansen’s table on the third level, though whoever had taken them luckily didn’t get the beginning of the meeting, when Alexei had ground Tomas’ face into the glass and Katie had drawn her gun. One or two did show Jansen with Tomas’ group prior to their arrival, though. It wouldn’t take a great leap of logic to believe they’d been introduced.
Kyle had to kill the quiet panic running through the back of his mind about classified identities. They’d prepared for this. He hoped the MDF’s fail-safes would be enough.
“All I see is a group of friends enjoying a night out on the town,” Kyle said after a moment, reaching for another fry.
Adam smiled thinly, but didn’t seem surprised Kyle wasn’t admitting to anything. “Most people wouldn’t consider Nikolaas Jansen a friend.”
“He owned the club and offered us free drinks.” Kyle shrugged. “I’m not one to say no to that.”
“Jamie Callahan could buy that club five times over and not break a sweat. Free drinks aren’t an incentive for a man like him. Whatever I’m sure you all discussed probably was.”
Kyle took another sip of the beer he’d claimed as his. “I wouldn’t know.”
“You were there.”
“Yeah, and apparently you didn’t hear me.” Kyle lifted the pint glass, pointing at it with his other hand in case it wasn’t obvious. “Free drinks.”
“I wonder if Jamie’s father is aware his only son is running around with a criminal when he’s supposedly deployed? You have to wonder how fast a story like this will travel when it’s linked to a presidential candidate.”
“I don’t make it a habit of reading lies.”
Adam’s eyes narrowed. He biolocked his tablet again, obviously a little put out by Kyle’s blasé reaction to his little reveal. “I follow where the story takes me.”
“So you said. But maybe next time you should think twice about buying a ticket to another country after getting a name and location alert from the internet. All you have is a group of friends enjoying a night out in a club. You bump into all kinds of people in a club or a bar. That’s not a story. You’re inferring something from those pictures that isn’t true.”
“There’s still enough of something there to infer about.”
“So you’re telling me The New York Times is going to run a story about Richard Callahan’s son hanging out with friends and try to spin it into, what, exactly? A hit-piece on the guy leading in early polls for the Republican presidential candidate nomination?”
“Jamie Callahan is supposed to be deployed, and yet, he’s here in London taking meetings with a known criminal.”
“Taking leave is a thing people in the military do. And if this Jansen guy was as much of a criminal as you’re trying to make me believe he is, then you’d think he’d be locked up in prison somewhere. What’d he supposedly do? Kill a guy?” Kyle grabbed another fry and ate it. “Guess what? So have I. That happens when you put on a uniform.”
Adam’s eyes got a little wide at that confession, but it wasn’t anything Kyle knew could get him in trouble in any court. Public opinion, sure, maybe, but inside the four walls of a courtroom? War gave soldiers more leeway for taking a life than any other profession in existence. Shit happened in the battlefield, and yeah, some nights Kyle didn’t sleep all that well when his memories dredged up old nightmares, old ghosts that wouldn’t stay buried. But his job was to serve and defend his country, and that meant defending himself in the process.
Kyle took another sip of the beer before deciding he really didn’t like this brand. It was cheap, bitter, without any hint of actual flavor. Just piss-water, really. He poured it out over the side of the table, keeping his gaze locked on Adam’s face as the alcohol puddled on the sidewalk. Adam jerked, like he wanted to grab the glass from Kyle before he wasted it all, but held himself back at the last second.
“You should double-check your sources before you put your name o
n that byline,” Kyle said as he stood up.
“I’m not dropping the story.”
“The story of friends on leave from the military taking a vacation together?” Kyle gave him a two-fingered salute over an easy smile. “Have fun with that.”
He walked off, keeping his stride slow and easy, hands tucked into the pockets of his jacket so Adam wouldn’t see the way he was clenching them into fists. Putting his back to the reporter made him want to check his six every other step, but Kyle refrained from doing so. He didn’t bother taking a circuitous route back to the house. If Adam was here, indulging in an early happy hour in Kensington, then he probably already knew where the house was located.
“You may want to hurry up,” Katie sighed over the comms less than a minute later. “Jamie isn’t happy.”
“On my way.”
It didn’t take Kyle long to make it back to the house, slipping through the front door on quiet feet. Donovan was sitting on the couch with Madison stretched out beside him. She had control of the television and Donovan wasn’t fighting her for the right to tell the computer what show they wanted to watch.
Alexei, Sean, and Trevor were nowhere to be seen, which meant Trevor was probably replacing their nanotech comms. They’d packed extra in the medical gear Gracie had sent along, the doctor apparently well-versed in the effects Sean’s power had on electronics. Annabelle was in the kitchen cooking something that smelled suspiciously like the lasagna the team was known to fight each other over for the last piece. He didn’t see Liam anywhere, which made him wonder if the other man had left for the day now that their show of a lunch date was over.
Kyle shrugged out of his jacket and draped it over the nearest chair before heading for the office on the first floor Katie and Jamie were both using. He knocked on the closed door before pushing it open. Katie was sitting behind the desk, surrounded by holoscreens of scrolling data, an intense look on her face as she munched on a bag of chips.
“Jamie is upstairs talking with his father,” Katie said, not looking away from her work.
“Did he witness the conversation?” Kyle asked.
“Called him in the second you made the guy. He wouldn’t let me remotely delete the reporter’s files.”
“I did my best to throw the bastard off the trail, but I don’t know if I made things worse by engaging. We have two different stories going on now—us being discharged for Jansen and deployed for The New York Times.”
“Better we know what we’re going up against than have it drop on us out of the blue and be unprepared. The brass will have to figure out a way to reconcile the two.” Katie pointed at the ceiling. “You should head up.”
Kyle took her words as a gentle dismissal and closed the office door behind him. Heading upstairs, he found the door to the master bedroom shut. He knocked loudly. When he got no response, he tried again. Kyle couldn’t hear anything through the door, which meant Jamie probably had the privacy mode up and running so the soundproofing was engaged. He tried the door handle and found it unlocked, so he pushed it open.
The screen embedded in the wall was on, but blank, the prompt to initiate another uplink displayed over the center. Jamie was sitting on the bed with his head in his hands, fingers gripping his hair tightly, the slump of his shoulders more tired than anything else. Kyle shut the door behind him and locked it before striding over to sink to his knees before Jamie.
“Hey,” Kyle said softly, resting his hands on Jamie’s knees.
Jamie heaved out a sigh and lifted his head, rubbing a hand over his face. “I called my father to update him on the reporter and that the man might have some trumped-up evidence to use in a story on him. He’s not happy about that.”
“He wasn’t happy about us doing this mission to begin with. I don’t see how things have changed.”
“You wouldn’t.”
The words stung. Kyle swallowed back the first and second retort that came to him. He knew Jamie didn’t mean anything by it, not really; the shadow of his father constantly followed Jamie around, which was something Kyle couldn’t help him with. He’d never even met the senator, nor his wife, nor Jamie’s little sister. Part of that was because Jamie’s relationship with his family had become even more strained over the past half year. The rest of it was because Kyle didn’t run in their circle. Nothing about Kyle screamed that he belonged in the world the Callahans lived in.
Except he belonged to Jamie, and in the long run, that might be the only ticket he needed.
Kyle pressed his fingers to Jamie’s jaw, tapping his index finger against the bone there until Jamie looked at him. “We got a warning. Your father can plan for it. That’s more than we sometimes get in this fight.”
Jamie smiled crookedly, reaching up to loosely wrap his hand around Kyle’s wrist, rubbing his thumb against the bones there. “I know. Still doesn’t make the mess any easier to deal with.”
“Offer still stands to shoot him,” Kyle said semi-jokingly.
“No shooting members of the free press.”
Jamie’s mouth twitched a little during his admonishment. Kyle stood up and framed Jamie’s face with cold hands, kissing the other man lightly. “C’mon. You’ll put yourself in a shitty mood if you stay up here. Annabelle’s making lasagna, I think, and Madison has taken control of the television.”
“Donovan was watching soccer before Katie called me into the office.”
“They call it football here, and Madison could coax rights to cable streams out of a debt-collection agency. You really think Donovan stood a chance?”
“Well, when you put it like that, no.”
Kyle kissed him again because he could, because it was just them in this room, holding on. “Let’s go.”
Kyle pulled Jamie to his feet and headed for the door. Jamie kept hold of his hand for a few seconds more beyond the door before they separated.
“You realize we’re going to have to get you a tuxedo,” Jamie said as they headed down the hall.
“Why do I need a tuxedo?”
“You didn’t pack one for your cover and a gala isn’t something you wear casual clothes to.”
Kyle made a face that Jamie couldn’t see. “We might not get an invite.”
“This is Katie we’re talking about. We’ll get the invite.”
Which meant Kyle was probably going to have to get a fucking suit and smile his way through what basically amounted to a dog and pony show of the civilian variety.
“Did you pack a tux?” Kyle asked.
“I always plan for every eventuality. So, yes, I brought a tux with me.”
“Fine, but I’m not paying for it. You want me in a tux, you’re buying it.”
“I’m picking it out for you, so of course I’m buying it.”
Kyle shot Jamie a look over his shoulder, the possessive smirk on Jamie’s face sending a shiver down his spine. Maybe shopping for clothes wouldn’t be that bad this time around if Jamie was the one making the choices for him.
10
A Compromise of Lies
Katie finished breaking the encryption on the solid state drive very early Tuesday morning. Jamie and Kyle were woken up by her pounding on the bedroom door and calling Jamie’s name. They’d turned the privacy and soundproofing mode off last night after having sex, but they couldn’t do anything about the lingering scent of it in the room.
“Give me five minutes,” Jamie called out to her.
He rubbed at his eyes and checked the time on the bioware embedded in his left forearm. The bright numbers of 0347 glowed softly back at him.
“Did she even sleep?” Kyle muttered, face burrowed in his pillow.
“You know she rarely sleeps when she’s running her own personal hackathon.” Jamie rolled over far enough to kiss Kyle on his bare shoulder. “Stay here. We’ll deal with it first.”
“Wasn’t gonna get up anyway. You wear the railroad tracks for a reason.”
Jamie snorted softly at Kyle’s half-asleep retort, the other man alread
y dozing off with the skill of a soldier who could nod off anywhere. A nice warm bed was just asking to be used.
Jamie got out of bed and headed for the bathroom. He spared a couple of minutes to wash his face and brush his teeth, take a piss, and make sure he’d cleaned up all evidence of their time together before they fell asleep. Pulling on a clean pair of underwear and a pair of sleeping pants that hadn’t seen much use lately, Jamie left the bedroom and headed downstairs.
Katie had three tea bags steeping in a large mug on the desk, one of the tiny jam jars he’d given her empty and tipped on its side near the very edge. Jamie grabbed the jar and lobbed it at the garbage bin, not wanting to risk it falling and breaking and someone walking on it with their bare feet.
“What is it?” Jamie asked.
Katie’s grim expression meant Jamie knew he wasn’t going to like whatever it was she had to show him.
Turned out he was right.
Katie spun the entire holographic display around to face Jamie and spread the data windows apart, moving from one to the next as she briefed him. “Edward Saunders is the vice president of Saunders & Associates, a financial consulting group in London that handles a lot of international clients looking to sink their money into Britain’s land and economy. It’s a multimillion-pound company that’s been around for decades. The father formed it, but it’s the son who is the target.”
“Let me guess. Young, rich, with a social circle of similar people,” Jamie said.
“And blood ties to a business with broad connections the Pavluhkins can infiltrate.”
“Does Edward have a controlling stake in the company?”
“Not yet. He’s twenty-eight. His father granted him a quarter-stake in the company when he turned twenty-five. He earns 10 percent more when he turns thirty and the rest gets allocated to him at age thirty-five, leaving him with 49 percent. His father won’t pass the company on to him until he retires.”
“No guarantee the father will sign over the shares at that time either.”
“A little less than 50 percent control is still more than most people get in a lifetime. Saunders & Associates was hacked late last year, resulting in some of its proprietary information being stolen. None of it has popped up for sale on the dark web, which leads me to believe the Pavluhkins are using the stolen information as leverage against Edward.”
In the Ruins (Metahuman Files Book 2) Page 20