by Elle James
“Then I’ll run like hell and come up with another idea. At the very least, you’ll get through the door and I’ll provide a little distraction while you poke around your office.”
Riley drew in a deep breath and pressed her foot to the accelerator. “You’re crazy, Mack Balkman. You know that, don’t you?”
“We do what we have to do to get the job done.” He shoved his arms into the sleeves and dragged the jumpsuit up over his broad shoulders. As he said, the jumpsuit was very large. Eudora must be a big woman.
Even so, he had to strain to get the front zipper all the way up. The fabric stretched taut over his muscles, and the legs of the suit didn’t cover his ankles. Thankfully, his boots covered the rest.
“You could do with a shave,” Riley muttered. “Unless Eudora is also prone to facial hair.”
“I’ve got that covered.” Mack reached in the glove box and pulled out a battery-powered razor. Moments later he’d removed most of the stubble from his chin, neck and cheeks.
Riley reached into her purse with one hand and rummaged around until she found a tube of lipstick. “Use this. It can’t hurt.”
Mack made a face but uncapped the lipstick and pulled the visor down to look at his reflection in the mirror. With an unpracticed hand, he applied a coat of fire-engine red to his lips and rubbed them together. When he was done, he clapped a cap on his head and grinned.
Riley laughed out loud. “For such a good-looking guy, you’re an ugly woman.”
“But will I do?”
Riley studied him briefly before returning her attention to the street. “You’ll do.” She gave him the location of her office. “I’ll watch for you and let you in when you get there. Only authorized personnel are allowed back there, but I know some of the cleaning staff have been cleared to enter for housekeeping purposes only.”
Mack glanced down at his name tag. “Hopefully, Eudora was one of them.”
Riley’s lips curled for the rest of the drive to the Quest campus. Mack dressed as a cleaning lady was too funny to not see the humor in the situation. She wished she could take the time to snap a picture of him. His buddies would give him hell.
Two blocks from the building, Riley pulled into an empty parking lot, parked the truck and nodded to Mack. “I’ll go first.”
“I won’t be long behind you.”
“If you get in.”
“I’ll get in,” he said, smiling with his bright red lipstick. “Just watch.” Then he winked.
Riley got out of the truck, clipped her badge on her shirt and slipped her purse over her shoulder. The way she saw it, her time was running out. If she didn’t find something inside the walls of Quest, she didn’t know where she’d look next, or if she had time.
Hang in there, Toby. I’m trying.
Chapter Seven
Mack waited until Riley entered the gate at Quest before he left the truck and made his way to the same gate. He checked his stride, hoping to imitate the way Riley walked with the natural sway of her hips and the much shorter steps. He had to look ridiculous in the jumpsuit that was too short and too tight. But it didn’t matter as long as he got through the gate using Eudora’s badge. Once inside, he’d find his way up to the floor where Riley worked.
Hunching over a little, he tried to make himself as small and short as possible, which was hard to do for a man over six feet tall. At the gate, he slid the badge through the card reader and waited for the light to turn green and the gate lock to click. For a second, he thought the card wasn’t going to work, but then the light flickered to green. He pushed through quickly and strode across the campus to the entrance.
As he passed the guard at the front desk, he averted his gaze and hurried toward the elevators.
“Hey!”
Out of Mack’s peripheral vision, he noticed the guard rising from his desk.
Pretending he didn’t hear, Mack punched the button for the elevator going up and counted his heartbeats until the door slid open.
“Hey, you!” the guard called out again.
“George, what are you doing on Saturday shift?” a female voice called out.
“Hey, Lois, long time no see,” George said, his voice not nearly as loud.
The elevator doors slid open. Mack stepped in and turned to punch the button for the floor where Riley worked. Then he hit the button to close the elevator door. He glanced across the floor to where George stood talking to Lois.
George looked over Lois’s shoulder at Mack. For a moment, the guard’s eyes narrowed.
Then the elevator door closed, and the car moved upward.
Mack let out the breath he’d been holding, willed his pulse to slow to normal and watched the floor numbers blink on and off until he stopped at Riley’s floor.
The door opened, and Mack stepped out.
Just outside the elevator stood a cleaning cart.
Mack looked both ways but didn’t see a cleaning person. He grabbed the handle of the cart and pushed it down the hallway toward the sign over the door that read Special Projects.
As he reached the door, it opened.
For a split second, Mack froze.
Then Riley poked her head out and waved him toward her. “In here.”
Mack pushed the cart through the door.
Riley closed it behind him.
“Remember to look for bugs or hidden cameras,” he whispered to her.
She nodded and held up a small electronic device that had been smashed. “Found this attached inside the receiver of my desk phone.”
“I’ll dust my way around the overhead light fixtures and see what I can clean out.”
“Good. In the meantime, I’ll be working my way through my desktop computer.”
Their conversation was whispered. Riley barely moved her lips as she spoke.
Mack wanted to bend down and kiss those incredibly pretty lips he knew to be soft and pliable beneath his. Then he recalled how ridiculous he looked and wondered if a woman like Riley would ever want to kiss him after seeing him dressed as he was, wearing red lipstick.
“By the way...” Riley glanced up, a wicked gleam in her eyes. “You’re cute in that getup.” Before he could respond, she turned and walked away.
Pushing the cart in front of him, Mack followed Riley into the realm of the Special Projects unit. He unloaded the small vacuum cleaner from the cart and plugged it into an electric socket. Then working his way from one end of the aisle Riley had gone down to the other, he vacuumed and dusted, checking the overhead light fixtures as he went. At one point, he climbed onto a stepladder he found affixed to the side of the cleaning cart to dust the fluorescent light that illuminated Riley’s desk. Inside the fixture he found a small device the size of a single throwing die. He swept the duster across it and trapped it in the microfiber, then dropped it into a trash bin, covering it with a wad of paper towels.
Riley barely acknowledged him. She worked at her computer, her head bent toward the screen, her fingers flying across the keyboard.
Mack emptied trash bins from beneath each of the desks surrounding Riley’s, checking through the discarded papers. He looked at the items on the desks, photographs and notes, hoping to find some anomaly. Most of the desks had photographs of family members or pets. Except one. The nameplate on the wall outside the cubicle read Steve Pruett.
Mack committed the name to memory. He’d ask Riley about Pruett when they were out of the building and somewhere it was safe to talk.
Dusting his way down the aisle on the far side of Riley’s cubicle, Mack paused when he thought he heard the door to the area creak open.
“Hello?” a female voice called out.
Mack ducked low and moved toward the end of the corridor to get a better view of the person who’d just entered.
Riley poked her head above the five-foot-high walls of the cube
s and answered, “Can I help you?”
“Sorry to disturb you, ma’am, but I seem to have misplaced my cleaning cart. I don’t suppose you’ve seen one around here?”
“Bridgett, is that you?”
“Oh, hi, Miss Lansing. Why are you here working on a weekend?”
“I had some catching up to do, since I was out a few days,” Riley responded. “I haven’t seen your cleaning cart, but then I haven’t been looking for one. Have you tried the area on the other side of the hall?”
“I have. It wasn’t there. I went down to supply for some window cleaner, came back and the cart was gone. Do you mind if I look?”
“No,” Riley said. “Go for it.”
Great. Mack listened for the sound of footsteps, gauged the direction they were coming from and went the opposite.
Just as he slipped around the end of the row of cubicles, he heard a gasp.
“Ah, there it is,” the cleaning woman said.
“You find it?” Riley asked.
“I did. I don’t know how it got in here, but it’s okay. I’ll get out of your hair and come back later to clean this area.”
“Thank you,” Riley said.
Mack hid in a cubicle on the other side of the wall from where he’d left the cleaning cart. He carefully controlled his breathing so the member of the cleaning staff didn’t hear him or come around the end of the row to find him lurking in his borrowed jumpsuit, with his purloined badge and red lipstick.
The cleaning woman wheeled the cart out of Special Projects, closing the door behind her.
Mack waited a full minute before he worked his way back to where Riley worked.
“That was close,” Riley said. “Find anything?”
“Other than the camcorder in your light fixture...no.”
“Camcorder?” Riley shivered. “I can’t believe that even in this area, someone was able to get in, plant devices and get out without being noticed.”
“Have you found anything?”
“I was able to get into the shared drives and into my old supervisor’s stored emails. He wrote some cryptic emails to one of the department heads that made no sense.”
“The emails or the department head?”
Riley’s lips twitched. “The emails.”
“That department head ever act weird around you?”
Her brow wrinkled. “I don’t think so. Though I don’t think Bryan Young liked me much. He always had a scowl on his face like he’d eaten something that didn’t agree with him.”
“When you were trying to figure out who was selling secrets, was Young ever on your list of maybes?” Mack asked.
Riley lifted a shoulder. “I guess he was. But my contacts with the FBI never found anything on him.”
“Who else were they monitoring?”
“Mr. Moretti, my supervisor, and Tracy Gibson, his secretary.”
“What happened to Tracy when Mr. Moretti didn’t come back to work?” Mack asked.
“She was laid off. No one wanted to take her on, knowing Mr. Moretti was one of the insiders helping to sell secrets.”
“Do you think she was as dirty as Moretti?”
“Hard to say. She might only have been in the wrong job with the wrong boss.”
Mack stared down at her. “What does your gut say?”
“After Moretti showed his true colors, I wouldn’t have trusted her.”
“She bears looking into. Whoever has Toby wanted Charlie dead. The rich widow could have been targeted for a number of reasons, one of which was hiring Declan to help find you, and in the process, exposing Moretti and the leak inside Quest.”
“Do you think they want Charlie dead out of vengeance?”
“It’s as good a motivation as any. And since you were involved in setting up the sting, what better way to dispose of Charlie than to force you to do it? And then you would be exposed for the Russian sleeper spy you were trained to be.”
“Could my handler be that entrenched in Quest and possibly one of the traitors selling or even buying the secrets?” Riley shook her head. “There are too many coincidences. And if the person on the inside of Quest isn’t actually my handler, how did he know the code word for my activation?”
“All good questions we won’t know the answers to until we find Toby and his kidnapper.”
“Then we better get started. I say we follow Bryan Young and see what he might know.”
“Got an address?” Mack asked.
“I was able to hack into HR files.” Riley pulled a sheet of paper off a pad and stuffed it into her pocket. “Got it.”
“Get Tracy Gibson’s, too,” Mack insisted.
“Give me a second.” Riley clicked keys and leaned toward the monitor.
“And while you’re at it, Steve Pruett,” Mack added.
She glanced up, her brow wrinkling. “Steve? Why him?”
“Just in case. His was the only desk with nothing on it.”
“Steve tends to be overly particular about his things. I’m not surprised his desk is neat. But a Russian spy?” Riley shook her head.
“He’s too neat. No indication of who he is. No personality, makes me think of a sociopath, in my opinion.”
Riley brought up Steve’s information and jotted down his address. “Got him and Tracy. Anyone else?”
“I didn’t see any other desk that triggered my instincts.”
Riley pursed her lips. “It’s sad when all we have to go on is gut instinct.”
“And your digging in the HR files.”
“I hope they can’t trace back to my hacking.”
“If Quest learns of your Russian upbringing, do you think they’d let you continue to work for them?”
Riley sighed. “I don’t think any American company would let me work for them.”
“Then let’s go.” Riley pushed herself to her feet. The door to the Special Projects unit opened at the same time. She ducked low. “Wait, someone’s coming,” she whispered.”
Mack dived into a cubicle and crouched behind a file cabinet. He didn’t like that he couldn’t confront whoever had come in, but he was the odd man in the room. Riley was the one who belonged.
* * *
RILEY SAT BACK at her desk and pulled up one of the drawings she’d been working on before everything had gone south in her life.
The tall, angular form of the head of the department, Bryan Young, stopped beside her desk. “Miss Lansing. I’m surprised to see you working on a weekend.”
She glanced up with a forced smile. “Oh, Mr. Young, I could say the same about you.”
The department head frowned. “I’m here quite often on Saturdays, or I wouldn’t have made that remark.”
“Oh, well... I was out a couple days and my work fell behind. I thought I’d come in and try to catch up. But I was just finishing what I was doing, and I’m about to leave. I have a few errands to run before I head home.” She exited out of the drawing file and pushed to her feet. “Are you staying long?”
The man shook his head. “No. I just stopped by to check on a few things and collect a document I needed to read over before Monday. Then I’m out of here.”
“Good. Weekends are for family,” Riley said. Normally, she’d be out at the cabin, spending time with Toby. Her heart squeezed hard in her chest at the thought of her little brother. She prayed they didn’t hurt him.
The man snorted. “Or a long to-do list,” Young muttered. “Have a nice day, Miss Lansing.”
“Thank you, Mr. Young. You, too.” She gathered her purse and stepped around the department head.
“Oh, and Miss Lansing, Human Resources has decided to conduct a thorough rescreening of all employees since Mr. Moretti’s untimely death and the ugly business of selling secrets to foreign countries. The FBI has asked to be involved.” Young gave h
er a narrow-eyed glance. “I trust that you weren’t involved in Moretti’s dealings.”
Riley tensed. “I assure you, Mr. Young, I had nothing to do with selling secrets to anyone. I work for Quest only.” She could say that with truth in her heart. Though she worked with the FBI to help flush out all those involved in selling data and plans from the project she had been working on, Riley had given bad data for the transfers to keep the data thieves from getting the real data for the secret project. None of her hard work had made it into the wrong hands, unless Moretti had hacked into her files and passed on the information before he was shot and killed.
“Well, I’m done here,” Riley said. “See you Monday.” If she found her brother, and if she still had a job then.
Riley walked toward the exit door, her pulse racing. Where was Mack? She prayed Mr. Young didn’t decide to inspect every desk in the Special Projects unit.
Mack needed Young to leave the area so that he could get out without being seen.
Riley waited until Young was almost to his office before she hurried after him. “Mr. Young. I had a question for you about Mr. Moretti’s replacement.”
She made it a point to pass by the cubicle where Mack hid. As she passed him, she jerked her thumb toward the exit.
“What is your question, Miss Lansing?”
“Are you going outside the organization to replace him, or will you be promoting within?” She stopped beside the man where he paused with his hand on the doorknob to his office.
He twisted the knob and pushed the door inward. “Why do you ask, Miss Lansing?” The man stepped through the door.
Riley glanced back over her shoulder.
A shadowy movement assured her Mack was making his way to the exit. All Riley had to do was divert Young’s attention until Mack cleared the unit.
“Mr. Young, I’ve been with Quest for over five years and moved up in ranks each year. I believe I could be the supervisor over Special Projects. I know everyone on the team and the work that is being done.”
“I’ll be sure to keep your name in mind when we decide to advertise the position.”
Out of the corner of her eye, Riley saw the exit door open and close.