Escapade

by Lisa Marie Rice

  “I bet.” Bennett said sourly.

  It was an act. The truth was, he was looking forward to working with her. Looking forward to watching all that formidable brainpower brought to bear on a problem that was vexing him and his company. Maybe she could help. God knows, after gnawing on it for a month they weren’t any closer to a resolution. “Let me finish clearing off the table and I can give you the details of an issue we have.”

  He had to avert his eyes because she simply glowed. No other word for it. It looked like a spotlight had lit up behind her eyes.

  She stood. “Absolutely not. You can clear the table any time. First, give me the parameters of the mission.”

  The parameters of the mission. He sighed again but went obediently into his room to get his own laptop, secretly smiling. This was going to be good.

  He set his laptop up on the desk next to hers. He looked at the two computers, then looked at her. “Next to your laptop, mine looks like a caveman’s club.”

  She smiled at him, pleased, and all he could do was stare and clench his fists. Goddamn, she was irresistible. You’d have to be dead to resist her, and Bennett wasn’t dead, he was very much alive. He could feel the blood pulsing in his veins and heat coursing through his body at her nearness. This close her skin looked like velvet, a magnet for his hands. He curled them and mentally handcuffed himself.

  The memory of their kiss was still vivid. The taste of her and the feel of her were imprinted on his brain, a really primitive part of it.

  No touching the principal. It would have been rule number one if he’d ever been tempted. As it was, he’d always thought that rule number one was No punching the principal because, God, he’d been tempted. Some principals were fucking impossible.

  Elle sure wasn’t. Right now, in fact, she was quivering with eagerness to help him.

  Bennett glanced over at her open laptop and stared. She’d put in a password and instead of defaulting to Google like every other laptop he’d ever seen, the screen was dark with just a small white search field in the center. She saw his look and smiled. “The dark web.”

  Bennett didn’t say anything. He was supposed to be an expert but he rarely used the dark web. Frankly didn’t know how to use it well.

  Everything about her computer was special, unique. No logos. Matte, dark gray surface that looked non-reflective and dense, like an alien spaceship.

  “Yours is better than mine,” he said.

  “Yes.” She looked at him and smirked. “It’s like the Maserati of computers.”

  “Fast?”

  “Like lightning. Almost quantum in its computing power.”

  He sighed, torn between lust for her and for her computer. “I suppose you wouldn’t sell it to me?”

  Her face morphed instantly, turning serious and somber. Her entire body tensed. “I … can’t. This computer was smuggled out of Shanghai and there are only three of them in the world.”

  Wow. Okay. “Really?”

  “Gotcha.” Elle laughed and relaxed. “No. I was just yanking your chain. It’s a beta product of a small company founded by three kids who studied under me, so I get to test-run the prototype. I think the company’s going to be big. I think it will be the equivalent of Apple in 2030. Maybe sooner.”

  Bennett sighed and felt ancient, a relic of another age. Some kids who had been her students had created a computer that made him feel like a Neanderthal in a cave.

  He was pushing forty and she made him feel like he was pushing eighty.

  Still … judging by the woodie pulsing under the table, not all of him felt eighty. His hard-on felt fourteen and uncontrollable.

  She turned smiling to him, deep blue eyes glowing, fingers laid gently along the sides of her computer, a little like a gunman keeping his trigger finger alongside the trigger, not inside the trigger guard. Waiting.

  Bennett wasn’t a fool. This was a challenge. That was okay. He was used to challenges. Hell, his entire military career had been one long challenge after another. And building his globe-spanning security business into the billion-dollar behemoth it was today had been another huge challenge.

  Good thing he liked challenges.

  “Hit me,” Elle said, smiling and … oh God. He closed his eyes because the image those words conjured up was entirely sexual. She was dressed in one of those clingy light-colored yoga outfits and they outlined her shape lovingly. Caressed those perfect breasts, dipped in at her tiny waist, swelled at her hips, outlined her long, slender legs.

  Sex. It was right there, on the table. Maybe even their laptops were infused with it. He sure was infused with it. Very vivid images, with sensorial input, of Elle spread out on her bed with the royal blue bedspread that matched her eyes filled his head. She was naked, all that smooth creamy skin a magnet for his hands and his mouth. She held up her arms for him and he covered her, entering her …

  “Bennett?” She frowned.

  Dear sweet God. What was wrong with him? He pulled every ounce of self control he had out of his ass and turned to her. “Sorry. Got a little distracted … by your laptop. So you want a real world problem to solve?”

  She nodded, sleek black hair swinging against her neck. “Tell me everything.”

  “Okay.” So. He was really going to do this. “We have a guy who has gone missing.”

  Elle nodded. “Okay. A good guy or a bad guy?”

  The thought of Arthur Kudlow wiped the smile from his face. “Bad guy. Greedy guy. The worst.”

  Her face turned serious. “Okay.”

  He was telling it wrong. Start from the beginning, he thought. “This guy, we’ll call him Mr. X, has disappeared with a whole bunch of files that are doing a lot of harm. The files contain sensitive economic and security data, which is what he stole them for, but they also contain the names of people cooperating with the US in countries around the world. Some nasty countries where we need friends. This is what happened to one of them. Last week.”

  Bennett typed in a command that brought up a photograph. It was one of the more presentable ones of the damage Kudlow had done. It showed a man lying face down on a dusty street, face turned slightly to the right. A big puddle of something dark and oily spread under him. It didn’t take much to realize that the puddle was blood and that the man was dead.

  Bennett didn’t want to show her the other photos. Some had missing limbs. One a missing head. One man had been strangled with his own entrails. No, this was the only one he would show her.

  “This is one of the men who has died as a result of these files?” Elle turned to him, eyes wide.

  “One of them.” Bennett’s jaws clenched.

  “Mr. X got the files from his job?”

  He nodded.

  “Where did he work?”

  “At a three-letter agency.”

  She cocked her head. “They are all three letter agencies, Bennett. CIA, NSA, DHS, DEA …”

  He held up a hand. Pointless being coy with Elle Castle. “NSA.”

  “So, he was an analyst.”

  “Yeah. And a good one.”

  “I understand analysts.”

  It hit him that she would understand analysts. More than he would. They operated on a different wavelength. “You probably do. More than I do.”

  “Probably.” She said it without any vanity whatsoever. A fact of life. “Bennett. Let’s cut to the chase. I imagine your Mr. X has disappeared and that you have been tasked with finding him. I also imagine you have checked, using facial recognition, all the airports and bus stations and train stations. Though if he is willing to sell his country out for money, he’s not taking a Greyhound bus to a small town in North Dakota where he will disappear to a shack in the woods. He’s abroad somewhere.”

  Bennett nodded. “Our conclusions exactly.”

  “So. He flew out of the country. When did he disappear?”

  “A month ago.”

  “You’ve checked all private airfields, right? He might have chartered a jet. Hell, if he is being
paid enough, he might have bought himself a jet.”

  Damn. It had taken him and his operatives 24 hours to think of that one, a private jet. But at least they had. He wasn’t going to be too humiliated. “Yeah. We caught him. Flying out of a private airfield in Connecticut, on a chartered jet. He had a valid passport, in a fake name. He filed a flight plan but the data was lost. Wiped out from the servers. And the pilot has disappeared. We lost him after that.”

  “He’ll have another name and another passport and probably another identity. If he deals with data, he’ll know how to do that.”

  Bennett nodded glumly. “We are scouring the world. There is some pressure on us to find him. Not just from the agency. We’re anxious too. There are lives at stake. Brave men and women are going to be betrayed.”

  “You’re going to have to give me all your files on this man, plus his real name.”

  He said nothing.

  “Bennett.” Her voice was gentle. “Data is a fingerprint. It’s identity. And anyway, his life and his name from before are gone. But I’d like to analyze who he was.”

  He still didn’t say anything.

  “If it helps, I have a TS/SCI security clearance.”

  That jolted him out of his paralysis. “You what?” It was the level of security clearance he’d had as a SEAL. “I thought you were a games theorist.”

  “I’ve been called in several times by — a three letter agency,” she said primly, looking at him out of the corner of her eye. “They needed help with some algorithms. You can give me data without transgressing the terms of your contract with your own agency. Technically, I could be an outside contractor. Happens all the time.”

  He let out a breath. Giving her the name of the shithead would have violated his contract. He would have given in eventually because he wanted Kudlow stopped in the worst way, but it would have eaten at his conscience. A little. But now …

  “I’ll email you all the files we have on him. Arthur Kudlow. I imagine you can receive them securely?”

  She smiled. “If your laptop were as good as my laptop, you could have transferred those files by tapping your computer to mine.” She shifted her space-age laptop a little so the corner touched his laptop. That kind of feature was years away for mere civilians like him. “But it’s not. Give me your email and I’ll send you a path to follow to send me everything you have on this guy, this Arthur Kudlow. The pathway is absolutely secure.”

  She did and he did and then she did the damndest thing.

  She disappeared.

  One minute she was there and the next she wasn’t.

  Her body was there, slender and still as a statue, but her spirit had disappeared inside her magic computer.

  She sat, for hours, moving only to key in commands from the keyboard and use the mouse, eyes tracking what was on her screen.

  Bennett was able to follow at first, because she was perusing the files on Arthur Kudlow that he’d sent her. Then she accessed an app of her own and he lost her. The screen was filled mainly with numbers and formulae and algorithms. She was absorbing information faster than the speed of light. There wasn’t much he could do from this point on as his beautiful witch worked her magic.

  He got up, cleared the table, loaded the dishwasher, and prepped dinner. He could have ordered in but, somehow he didn’t want to. There was a magical atmosphere in the apartment, as if they were closed up in their own bower, and he didn’t want any intrusions, not even a waiter delivering meals to them.

  While dinner was cooking — minestrone to be paired with baked cheese — he changed into his gym clothes and had another satisfying hour in the apartment’s gym. Worked some sexual tension out of his system, too. Then showered.

  When he put a cup of tea beside her, she took three sips, absent-mindedly, then pushed the cup away to write something on a piece of paper. An hour later, he put a fresh cup of tea next to her hand and over the next hour she finished it.

  There was complete silence but it wasn’t cold. He knew all about cold silences, which is what reigned in his own apartment after coming back from a long mission. Dead, chill silence. No, this silence was calm. He was surprised he couldn’t hear the clacking of her brain, because it felt like he should. He could almost see vibrations around it.

  Bennett had once dated a beautiful but flaky woman who had shifted all his furniture around because she said his apartment had terrible feng-shui, and then filled it with crystals, promising him they would absorb bad vibes and replace them with good ones.

  The only thing that came of that relationship was bruised shins because he kept bumping into his furniture in the dark. There was no noticeable change in the vibes of his home.

  But here … yeah. It had felt good when he came out of the gym to see Elle quietly absorbed, working with utter focus, like some genius fairy come down to earth to help him find that fucker Kudlow. She almost shimmered, and gave off very good vibes.

  After his shower, he’d sat down at his own computer and got through a lot of pending business and cleared his slate at around five in the afternoon. He felt good and relaxed, all caught up. So he was sitting in one of the apartment’s very comfortable armchairs, reading a history of modern China he’d been meaning to get to, when he looked up in surprise.

  Elle had made a sound of triumph and was sitting back, smiling, picking up the croissant left over from breakfast he’d put beside her and which she’d ignored up until now. “Got him!” she exclaimed.

  Bennett was usually fast on the uptake but he’d been immersed in China’s Cultural Revolution with Mao killing off a big segment of his people, and had to take a moment to focus. Thank God he didn’t say got who? Because that would have been embarrassing.

  “I have Arthur Kudlow,” Elle said and beckoned to him with a finger. “Come see.”

  He put down his iPad and walked over to her. He stood behind her, one hand on her delicate shoulder. He bent so his face was next to hers and looked at her laptop screen and ohmygod, there he was!

  Arthur Kudlow.

  Fatter, sunburned and happy, with his hand on the red fender of a car. It was impossible to make out the make of car and where he was.

  Elle clicked and the date of the picture and its GPS coordinates appeared. The date was three days ago and the coordinates — he started calculating in his head.

  “Bali,” Elle said. “He’s in Bali.”

  Bennett tightened his hold on her shoulder. Not enough to hurt but enough to say — you’re staying with me. I’m not letting you go. She’d solved a problem in something like six hours that he and his crew hadn’t been able to solve in a month. And she hadn’t broken a sweat.

  “You’re a miracle worker,” he said, bending down to look her in the face. She smiled, pleased. A tiny little blush pinked her cheeks and oh God, he was a goner. “Walk me through it.”

  Elle pointed at the extra chair and he scooted it over to her until he too was in front of Puff the Magic Computer and he was sitting so close to her their legs touched. Lines of electricity ran up and down his thigh.

  She brought up a screen which was incomprehensible. Then, as it came into focus, he could see it was a sort of cloud. He could make out chunks of data and how they connected with each other. Her monitor was amazingly sharp, the images carefully delineated, the colors bright.

  Looking closer, he could see that she had made a cloud of Kudlow’s life.

  “I suspect that you and your team were looking for him from his moment of disappearance on, am I right? Trying to project your way forward to where he’d gone to ground?”

  “Yeah. We’ve been scanning airports and train stations throughout the world but man, it’s a lot of data.”

  “An almost impossible amount of data and you’d need a lot of time and massive number crunching power to do it. But it’s a huge blunt instrument, when you can use a scalpel.”

  Bennett shook his head in admiration. Go, Elle. “Show me.”

  “Okay, I turned the problem on its head an
d started with the man himself. What he wants, what motivates him.”

  “Hell,” Bennett said in disgust. “I can tell you that. Money. He’s a greedy fuck.” He gave her a sideways glance. “Sorry.”

  “Well, yes, from what I could see he is a greedy fuck. So I put all the elements of his life in a cloud format and yes, he does seem to be highly motivated by money. He was constantly in debt and constantly buying new things, things he really didn’t need. He was a member of a golf club where membership cost $80,000 a year and he went exactly four times. He’s flipped three houses in the past five years, only he managed to buy high and sell low. But digging deeper, besides crass materialism, he is fascinated by Ferraris.”

  Bennett blinked.

  “Huh.” That wasn’t in Kudlow’s profile at all. How did they miss it? “He owned a Ferrari?” They definitely should have caught that.

  “He wished. No. But he had a fanboy level of fanaticism. He belonged to a number of online forums where there was passionate discussion — to the point of death threats — on the thickness of lacquer finishes and what was the best model Ferrari in 1956 and whether the ironblock is better than the F140.”

  “God,” he said.

  She looked over at him primly, mouth fighting a smile. “I wonder whether you might belong to gun forums where they fight over technical specifications.”

  Bennett sighed. “Busted.”

  To her credit, there was no snark. She just kept tapping away, pulling up page after page, which went up as tiles on the screen. She pointed at the tiles as she spoke. “Okay, so I broke down the data. Here you have the number of hours he was online after work. An average of five hours. Some days more, some days less, but that’s the mean. Here you have what he spent his time on and you can see that he spent 94% of his time on Ferrari forums, another 4% on the Ferrari site and 2% on porn sites. Those are not average figures. Most men spend at least 8% of their online time on porn sites.”

  She cast him a sideways glance.

  Bennett held his hands up. “Don’t look at me. I spend 0 hours scouting out porn.” It was true. He gave up porn at fifteen when he discovered that real life women were way more fun and much prettier than what could be seen in magazines or online.