by Zoe Allison
He hesitated, then shook his head. “The fewer people who know the better. She mentioned a rogue element. Just in case that’s also true, we had better keep it between us. It wouldn’t be the first time that we had a mole on our hands.”
Vic nodded. Unless by ‘rogue element’ Angelique was referring to me, rather than a mole. She took a deep breath.
He smiled and lifted his hand to her shoulder. “See you in the morning.” Then he turned and made his way along the corridor and out of sight.
Vic shut the door and glanced at the clock. It was approaching early evening, but her weariness had abated. It must have been due to the adrenalin rush of their secret trip.
On a whim, she grabbed her bag and let herself out of the flat. She’d head to the local bar for a drink and try to organize her thoughts into some sort of logical order.
She went down to the entrance of her block and out onto the street. People were milling around as they made their way home from work, many of them stopping at the bars and eateries on their way.
Vic entered her preferred establishment, and after ordering a vodka, she took at seat by the window and watched the people streaming past. Where were they all headed? And what did they have going on in their lives that caused them worry? Relationship issues? Social issues? Probably not the anxiety that a malevolent race of vampires was attempting to bring down civilization and they were powerless to stop it. And perhaps partly responsible for it…
Vic shook her head hard and took a drink. She concentrated on the sting of the liquid in her throat to distract from her thoughts. Lifting her gaze, she looked around the bar. It reminded her of a place she used to frequent in Sydney before she’d left to join The Organization. Thoughts of home always brought back painful memories, but she didn’t block them out, because she was still trying to distract herself from her guilt. She had left home in order to follow and keep track of Harvey. Later, joining The Organization had seemed a promising way of doing that, but now all they could track were dead ends.
She finished her drink and decided she may as well have another. After getting herself a refill at the bar, she sat down and stared out of the window again. It didn’t sit right that their DNA test had shown the Berlin body was not Erik Weber. She somehow had a feeling that it must be him, even though it made no sense. Her frustration grew and the gnaw of it tested her patience. They needed to figure out the meaning behind the attacks so she could predict the malevolents’ activities. Time was running out before their inevitable next strike. She needed to know where it would be in order to save potentially thousands more victims.
Was there any logical reason for the location of the bombings—or were they random? Something told her there must be a link. Her gaze drifted over the bar to settle on an Australian brand of beer. She wished her brain would stop reminding her of home. A thought crossed the back of her mind. Vic set down her glass and lifted out her diary. She pulled the postcard of The Shard from it. It would make sense if there was a mole in their ranks, because that was how Harvey could have found out her address. The corner of another, much older, postcard stuck out of the back pages. She removed it. It was pretty dog-eared from decades of her carrying it around. Harvey had sent it to her years ago, with his signature ‘H’ on the back but also a cryptic message that had made no sense at the time. She placed the old one next to the glossy new one and studied the picture. It was of the construction of the Sydney Opera House. Her blood ran cold.
Vic left the rest of her drink and jumped to her feet, trying not to knock anyone over in her hurry to leave the bar.
Chapter Nine
Vale surveyed the kitchen in an effort to find something else to clean or tidy. It was a struggle after his recent spree. He was probably going to have to start again from the top, because everything was gleaming and as neat as a pin.
He went over to pour himself a drink, uncharacteristically wound up. Why do I feel like this? He remembered his conversation with Gareth earlier and the way that his emotions had run out of control and gotten the better of him. It must be the mission. The lack of closure was adversely affecting him. That must be why he’d been having that recurring dream too, about the day he’d taken over as Mr. X.
There was a knock at the door and he carried his tumbler over. When he opened it and Vic was standing on the other side, he almost dropped the glass.
She raised her eyebrows. “Can I come in?”
Vale realized he had been staring at her. “Yes of course. Come through.” After closing the door, he followed her to the living area. “Can I get you a drink?”
Vic hesitated. “Go on then. Whatever you’re having.”
Vale poured her a glass. “What is going on?” he asked, passing her the drink.
She took a long sip. “I need to ask you something.”
He watched her as she knocked back the rest of it, waiting for her to be ready to talk.
She set her tumbler down. “We need to leave ASAP.”
Vale gestured for her to sit and took a seat next to her. “For where?”
She glanced at him. “Sydney.”
He met her gaze. “For the mission?”
“Yes,” she said..
Vale took a drink, trying to process her request. “You think that is where the next strike will be?”
Vic nodded and looked away.
Vale examined her expression. What was she thinking? Why was she not elaborating? He put down his glass. “Why do you suspect Sydney?”
She cleared her throat. “Gareth has found a link in Glassmarsh’s past that connects him with Sydney.”
He continued to watch her as she got up and poured herself another. She came back and sat next to him but didn’t offer any further explanation.
Vic sipped at her drink. “So?”
Vale frowned. “So, what?”
She swirled the drink in her glass. “Will you come with me?”
He rubbed his neck, hesitating. “What sort of link has he found?”
Vic glanced at his hand on his neck. “Sydney is where Glassmarsh grew up, so his sibling was likely to have been raised in the same area. Plus, the other sites of attack have been in cities where we know the sibling was active in the past, prior to The Organization capturing him for that brief period.”
“Good point,” Vale said. That did make sense. But there was something about her demeanor that was off. He felt like she was hiding something from him. He lifted his gaze to meet hers and studied the blue-green of her eyes. Maybe he was imagining it because he had been so stressed and paranoid about whatever was going on with her and Gareth.
Vic touched his arm. “Vale, we’ve always made a good team and I think our intuition is in tune. We understand each other, despite any recent tensions. Would you agree?”
His heart rate spiked. She’d noticed his tension? “Yes,” he said. “I would agree.”
She smiled. “We trust each other’s instincts.”
“Yes,” he said.
“So,” Vic said, “this is no more crazy than leaving on a whim for an unknown destination on the back of a motorbike.”
He smiled and lifted his tumbler. “Touché.”
“Cool,” she said. She finished her drink and handed him the glass, then got up to head for the door. “Tell Priyanka to get us on the next flight out of here.”
* * * *
Vale stretched out on his lie-flat seat and looked across at Vic sleeping beside him. It wasn’t too long now before they would land. He tuned in to the hum of the plane and tried not to analyze the way he felt about her. Something had shifted between them recently, and his emotions when Gareth was around her were unlike anything he had experienced before. He was not a jealous person, but he supposed that would be the correct description for those feelings. However, he didn’t understand why. They were just friends, so why should he feel jealous about her being involved with Gareth?
He shifted onto his side and continued to watch her. She had remained pretty quiet ever since they
’d left London. She’d kept checking her phone and saying she was looking for messages from Gareth about his intel, but he suspected the messages were of a more romantic nature. Vale felt guilty that Vic might have sensed his stress regarding his internal struggle with his emotions, but he was confident she wouldn’t have figured out why he had behaved that way, because she wouldn’t suspect someone who she regarded as just a friend of harboring such feelings.
Vale lifted his hand to the knot in his neck.
“You’re doing it again.”
He flicked his eyes up toward where Vic was watching him. “I thought you were sleeping.”
“I was just dozing,” she said. “What’s up with your neck? You’re always rubbing it.”
“It is nothing,” he said, lowering his hand.
She was still watching him. “You seem tense lately. Ever since we got back from Berlin.”
He stiffened, opening his mouth to reply but coming up with nothing. He wasn’t sure how to express his struggle with his emotions toward her and with regards to Gareth. Even if he could, he didn’t think it would be appropriate to voice them. And he certainly couldn’t tell her that he thought the tension building up in his neck was due to his struggle with his secret identity.
Eventually he smiled in an attempt to cover his discomfort. “I am just stressed about this mission. It concerns me that we might have another mole.”
“Yeah,” she said, turning onto her back. “I’ve been worrying about that too. It was enough trouble the last time around.”
Vale was relieved that she seemed to have accepted that explanation but also sad and regretful that he couldn’t just tell her everything he was feeling. The longer they were in each other’s company, the stronger his draw toward her became. He wanted to confide everything to her as much as he was desperate for her to do the same with him.
The announcement came regarding their descent, and before too long, they had landed and collected their baggage.
The journey from the airport to their hotel at Darling Harbor was only around twenty minutes, but it seemed longer to Vale. His torment regarding Gareth grew each time he watched her checking her phone.
The car pulled up at the hotel and they took their belongings inside to check in. Valentino had booked the rooms himself in order to be sure that they were staying separately. However, he had chosen adjoining ones because they would need to be in close proximity in order to work through whatever was happening here.
They reached the corridor where their rooms were situated. Vale slid his keycard into the lock and glanced over to where Vic was doing the same.
She looked up. “I’ll just dump my stuff and take a quick shower, then I’ll come over to discuss our next move.”
He nodded and let himself into his room.
As he unpacked and showered, he mulled over the possibilities. In order to find the malevolents’ next target, they would need to figure out what pattern linked the previous ones.
All the venues had contained people who had been drained en mass. So a building would be struck, but which one? In any city, there were hundreds of possibilities. London had been the largest-scale so far, so would that pattern continue with the attacks scaling up?
Vale toweled off and put on some clean clothes. He opened his laptop and brought up images of the city, scrolling through and making some brief notes. Priyanka and Lorenzo were back at HQ, searching intelligence for anything that may have recently come out of Sydney.
There was a knock at the door, and he went over to open it. Vic was there, freshly showered and dressed in leggings and a soft jersey top. She came into the room and his head swam momentarily as her scent wafted past him. He forced himself not to look at the shapely form of her legs.
She took a seat at the table where the laptop was sitting, and Vale sat next to her.
“I have been making a list of possibilities,” he said. “The target will be a populated building, likely over a number of floors. I think tower blocks could be a possibility given that the last attack was The Shard and, prior to that, a large office block in Berlin.”
Vic leafed through Vale’s notes and he tried to read her demeanor. Normally he could get an inkling of how she was feeling from her facial expression, but she was strangely closed off at the moment.
He pulled up some information on the laptop that Priyanka had sent through regarding her findings and suspicions. “What do you think?” he said.
Vic glanced through it all. “None of these feel right.”
He frowned. “In what way?”
She rubbed her forehead. “They don’t seem like the places he would want.”
Vale hesitated, studying her face. ““How do you know what sort of places he would want?”
She blew out a deep breath. “Just judging by what he’s done so far. Gut instinct.”
Vale watched her silently for a couple of seconds. “What characteristics do you think his target would have?”
Vic cleared her throat. “I think you’re right about it being a populated building. Clearly the aim of his campaign is to drain a whole establishment full of people and cover it up with an explosion.” She scrolled through some images of the buildings in Sydney’s city center. “But the scale is getting bigger. He’s a narcissist and he wants us to see what he’s capable of. The structures are becoming more iconic.” She lifted her gaze to meet Vale’s and for a second he was thrown by the green-blue tone of her eyes. “What are the most well-known sights in Sydney?”
“The harbor bridge,” Vale said, “but that’s not a building. It wouldn’t work for their plan.” He paused, realizing what she was getting at. “But the opera house would.”
Vic pointed at him. “Exactly.”
Vale leaned back and let out a breath. If her hunch was correct, then the scale truly was getting larger. “I think you are right,” he told her.
Something passed between them and there was a flicker of a smile at the corner of her mouth. “Thank you.”
“Okay,” Vale said, lifting his phone. “I will call Priyanka to ask for agents from our Sydney HQ to meet us at the opera house.”
“Wait,” Vic said, touching his hand.
He was hyperaware of the sensation of her skin on his. “What is it?”
“We should go ourselves first, then arrange backup if it pans out,” she said. “They’re organized, with their own intel. If too many of us turn up, they’ll get suspicious.”
Vale glanced at where her hand was still on his. She pulled it away quickly, leaving a cold disappointment in his gut.
“Okay,” he said. “We will do it your way. Let’s get over there now and take a look around.”
They left the room and headed for the hotel lobby. Vic took out her phone. “I’ll call for a driver.”
“No,” Vale said. “That will not be necessary. I have organized a different mode of transportation for while we are here. It should make things easier.”
Vic frowned. “Okay. What is it?”
He gestured for her to follow him. “This way.”
They went through the door that led to the underground parking and Vale took her through the rows of shiny vehicles. They came to a stop in front of another motorbike. Vic smiled. “Nice.”
Vale smiled back and tossed her a helmet. “Do you want to drive there—or on the way back?”
She pulled on her helmet. “You take this one, and I’ll do the return.”
Vale climbed on, followed by Victoria. She placed her arms around his waist. He tried to quiet the voice that was telling him the reason he’d chosen this form of transportation was because he had enjoyed having Vic pressed up close the last time they’d ridden a bike together. He suppressed that thought. It would be easier to get parked close to the area they’d be investigating with a bike. That was more likely why he’d chosen it.
He started the engine, and they rode out of the parking area up onto street level, heading north toward the opera house.
Vic kept her arms
tightly around him and he could feel the movements of her chest with her every breath. She shifted her weight exactly in tandem with him as he maneuvered the bike, as if they were molded into one being. They seemed to fit together perfectly, in much the same way that they fit as a team.
Vale concentrated on the road, blocking out the meaning behind all these thoughts. Self-control, that was what he needed. It was something he had always excelled at, so why was he struggling now?
Eventually they neared their destination and Vale drove into a nearby parking garage so that they could continue to the venue on foot.
Vic released her grip on him as they came to a stop, causing a flash of disappointment.
They placed their helmets on the bike. The items getting stolen wasn’t a concern for vampires, wearing them was only a token gesture in any case.
They made their way on to street level and started to walk toward the opera house.
“So,” Vale said, “I think we should pretend to be sightseers and try to gain access to the lower floors.”
“Okay,” Vic said. “They’ll be planning on planting the explosives on a low level. I imagine it will have taken them a while to infiltrate the staff to the point that they can start doing that, so hopefully we have time.”
They continued their walk, and the impressive building came into view. Vale admired the way it represented the sails of a ship in the harbor. They headed past groups of people sitting at tables at the opera kitchen overlooking the water. Vale paused by the steps, which led up and into the welcome center, pretending to take in the scenery while scanning the crowd. There didn’t seem to be any unusual activity.
Vic nudged his arm. “See anything?” She smiled and looped her arm through his, as if they were a couple enjoying the sights.
“No,” he said quietly. “Shall we go check out the inside?”
She nodded and led them both up the stairs, her arm still through his. He pulled his attention away from the heat created by her proximity and continued assessing the area as they climbed the stairs and entered the welcome center.