Dutch turned back to stir his sauce, but even from the couch I could hear him sigh heavily.
“So we’ve come to another dead end,” I said, belatedly regretting the pun.
“We have,” said Frost.
At that moment, Dutch’s cell chimed and he pulled it out of his pocket to check the text. We all waited for him to tell us what it said, and finally he picked his head up and addressed us. “That’s Grinkov. The auction is set. We leave for B.C. on his private jet tomorrow at noon.”
That night I sat in the bedroom feeling much better physically, although I still had to suffer through the coming-to-Jesus meeting that Dutch and Frost were having with Mandy out in the kitchen. And trust me when I tell you that it was a very LOUD coming-to-Jesus meeting.
From what I could overhear, Mandy was still really miffed at the fact that Frost had taken away all her purchases, and Frost and Dutch were attempting to remind her of her arrangement with the United States government.
“What you fail to understand, Mandy,” Frost was saying, “is that if you screw this up for us, it’s not just Agent Rivers and Ms. Cooper whose lives will be at risk, but your own too.”
“I’m not a spy!” she spat at him.
“Oh, but you are,” Dutch countered smoothly. “At least, that’s what Grinkov and Boklovich will assume if our identities are compromised. You won’t live to file another nail, sweetheart.”
“Then I won’t go,” Mandy told them.
“Which means your deal with us is off and you’ll never see your boyfriend again,” Frost warned her.
“Oh, screw him!” she shouted. “I could do way better than Rick!” Swallowing hard, I eased myself out of the bed and shuffled into the kitchen, where the three were arguing. “Mandy!” I said to get her attention.
Everyone looked up at me. “What?” she snapped.
“If you don’t come with us, then I’ll personally tell Grinkov that my intuition is suggesting that you are working with the CIA as a spy. You know how well connected Grinkov is, and because he likes me and trusts me, he’ll do a little research and find out about your arrangement with us. He’ll put a hit out on you like that,” I said, snapping my fingers to show her I was serious. “So you either come along and cooperate, playing the role of Rick’s doting girlfriend, or you die. It’s as simple as that.”
Mandy visibly paled and I didn’t even wait for her to reply. Instead, I turned on my heel and headed back to bed.
Later, Dutch came in and snuggled up close to me, spooning himself against my back. “You awake?” he whispered.
“Yeah. How’re you doing?”
He kissed my shoulder. “Honestly?”
“Of course.”
“I’m worried.”
I sighed and squeezed his arms, which wrapped a little more tightly around me. This would be the last night we’d get to spend together until after the auction. “Do you think Mandy’s going to blow it for us?”
“I don’t know,” he admitted. “What’s your radar say?”
“My head’s still throbbing, honey. There’s no way I can tune in tonight.”
“Which is yet another reason why I’d prefer you stay behind on this one.”
I half turned in his arms to face him over my shoulder. “Nice try,” I said sarcastically.
Even in the dark I could just make out Dutch’s frown. “You just don’t get it, do you?”
“What am I slow on the uptake about this time?”
“I couldn’t handle it if anything happened to you.”
I twisted all the way around then to face him and cupped his face with my hands. “And you expect me to handle it okay if something happens to you?”
“Yes,” he said frankly. “You’re beautiful and you’re talented and you’d find someone else in no time.”
I shook my head. “My God, Dutch, I think you’re probably the dumbest man on earth, and it’s clear you don’t understand women at all. You’re right. Maybe you should go first.”
I could feel his smile under my palms. “That’s what I keep trying to tell you, Edgar.”
I kissed him tenderly. “I love you every bit as much as you love me, cowboy, and you’re not shaking me loose on this one. We go in together or not at all. Period.”
“Okay,” he said, a bit reluctantly.
“Really?”
Dutch sighed heavily. “Yeah. I guess we don’t have a choice. But we’re coming out of this alive, you hear me?”
I kissed him again. “Oh, I hear you. After all, we’ve got a wedding to plan, remember?”
“Just not in six months,” he said, his expression playful.
“No way,” I laughed. “I want lots of time to plan. Maybe next June or July.”
“April,” he teased.
I laughed again and kissed him. “Okay, April,” I said, giving in.
“November,” he said next.
My eyes widened. “You’re pushing your luck, buddy.”
“What?” he said, all innocence and boyish charm. “You gave in on April pretty easily.”
“Yeah, but you’re going all the way back to November now and taking off even more time to plan.”
“I like November,” Dutch told me. “It feels right.”
I giggled. “Oh, so now you’re the psychic?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Maybe you’re rubbing off on me. My parents got married in November and they’ve had a really great forty-six-year marriage. My brother and his wife got married in November too, and they seem pretty rock solid. It’s a good omen, Abs. November is a great month for a wedding.”
“What happened to my argument about not planning the wedding in six months because I don’t want to rush it?”
“November is seven months away,” Dutch insisted. “That’s six months plus another whole month. Plenty of time.”
I rolled my eyes and kissed him again. “There’s no winning with you, is there?”
Dutch’s face became serious again. “I don’t want to wait,” he whispered. “I want to marry you, Abigail Cooper, and putting it off feels wrong. We don’t need a big fancy wedding. Just you, me, and the preacher.”
I sighed. “I can’t promise that I can do November, Dutch. I mean, I know you’re thinking it doesn’t matter what our wedding day is like, but it matters to me. I want it to be special, not rushed and last-minute, okay?”
“Okay,” he said, squeezing my hand. “Just promise me that you’ll meet me at the end of that aisle, okay?”
I looked him dead in the eyes and whispered, “I pinkie swear, cowboy.”
That night I had that dream again. I was free-falling from a very high place with no explanation of where I’d fallen from, just the air rushing past my face and the ground approaching with frightening speed. I woke with a jolt and sat bolt upright, my back and neck coated in sweat. Beside me Dutch slept on, and I wanted to wake him to tell him about it, but knew he’d need his sleep to keep his wits about him for the auction.
I wondered what the heck my subconscious was trying to tell me, and tried to avoid the obvious: that the free fall was my panicked response to discussions of weddings and becoming Dutch’s wife. But I couldn’t avoid looking at it from that perspective.
The weird thing was that consciously I really did want to marry him and I really did want to take my time planning the wedding because I wanted it to be perfect and a day I would always remember.
But the dream was certainly telling. I had it only when he brought up the wedding and our discussion turned to rushing me down that aisle.
With a sigh I lay down again and decided that the moment this mission was over, I was going to look at a calendar and set a date that I was comfortable with and not give in to anyone else who wanted to pressure me into doing it sooner.
Still, when I closed my eyes to go back to sleep, I had the most unsettling feeling that I’d missed the point entirely.
Early the next morning we met with Frost and Mandy in the kitchen. Frost seemed agitated, and h
e told us he’d need to speak with us privately after he briefed us on the game plan for the auction. During the briefing, Dutch and I took diligent notes, while Mandy looked bored, but every once in a while I caught her subtly paying attention. “Boklovich has an estate just north of Victoria, B.C., on Salt Spring Island. The island is really only accessible by plane or boat, and Boklovich has got his own personal landing strip near his estate.
“The estate is heavily guarded, and there’s nothing around it for miles but wilderness. In other words, once you guys are there, there’s no way we can get to you quickly. You’ll be completely cut off.”
I tried not to gulp too loudly as I considered the satellite map of Boklovich’s estate. The compound itself was massive, given the scale of it compared with the surrounding trees, and I could see the small brown strip nearby that must have been Boklovich’s landing strip. Extending out in all directions from the main house was nothing but wilderness for miles and miles. If things went south, Dutch and I would be on our own all right.
“When you get in there, you’ll need to identify the drone thief and gain access to Intuit. You’ll be looking for a small black box six inches by six inches. If it’s still mounted to the drone, it’ll be right under the belly, cradled between the wings. If you can’t steal it back, then you’ll need to insert this into the USB port located on the top left-hand side of the device.”
Frost held up a small silver flash drive and handed it to Dutch. “Once inserted, a virus will load which will render Intuit completely useless within twenty-four hours.”
“Twenty-four hours is still plenty of time to do some damage,” Dutch said, pocketing the flash drive.
Frost nodded. “Which is why you’ll need to assess the situation early and load the program if you’re unable to take Intuit with you when you make your escape. We would have instructed you to load the flash drive and devised it to kill Intuit immediately, but we considered that Boklovich will likely require you and the thief to hold a demonstration of Intuit’s capabilities to legitimize the sale and also drive up the price. We’re hoping that both devices will go to one individual, which will also help us identify who is most anxious to cause the U.S. and its allies harm.”
“Will the software you gave us actually work?” I asked, noticing the small CD on the table.
“Yes,” Frost told me. “But the CD has been loaded with two passwords to bypass the encryption code. One password will let you in and allow you to copy the software to any computer. The other password will let you in and appear to copy the software, but not before releasing a Trojan virus which will send a code back to our mainframes and lead us right to you. If we cannot locate the computer the software is loaded to within twenty-four hours, it will self-destruct, taking down any system it’s connected to in the process.”
“It’s a time-release kill switch,” I said, summing it up.
“Exactly. In the meantime you all know what your respective roles are. Mandy, you have to sell the attendees on the fact that Agent Rivers is the real Rick Des Vries. We can’t know how many of these people have actually met Rick face-to-face, so you’re there to sell them on the idea and help navigate him away from those people who may know Rick too well for Rivers to be able to pull off the disguise.”
“I know,” Mandy said moodily. My head was feeling better, so I used my radar to follow the thread of Mandy going along with the story that Dutch was Rick, and I was more than a little relieved to sense that she’d fully cooperate; however, there was also another thread that told me I couldn’t fully trust her and I’d better keep my eye on her.
“Cooper,” Frost said next, and I snapped my attention to him. “You and Rivers need to cool it.”
My brow furrowed. “Cool what?”
“Your attraction to each other is palpable, and we’re trying to sell your presence at this thing as Des Vries’s business associate, not his lover. Mandy’s filling that role, so you have to distance yourself from him emotionally. When you look at him, in your mind you’ve got to be looking at Rick Des Vries. Got it?”
I could feel my cheeks flush with anger. I thought I’d been doing a great job of portraying Abigail Carter so far, but as I chanced a look at Dutch, I could see that Frost’s warning was sinking in with him too. More than anything, his expression told me there was something to the warning and I’d better listen. “I hear you,” I told him. “He’s Rick Des Vries, weapons dealer and a real son of a beast.”
Frost’s shoulders seemed to relax, and that tempered my attitude even more. I could clearly see he’d been worried about how I’d take the advice. “It would be a good idea for you to continue to play coy with Grinkov too,” he added, looking at the tabletop. “He seems to like you, and that may work to our advantage.”
Dutch’s hand clenched once, but then he relaxed it. I knew he hated the idea, but he’d be good and play along. “Understood,” I said, hoping our handler would move on.
Frost nodded like he’d gotten the hard stuff out of the way, then reached under the table and pulled out a small briefcase. Opening it, he began to extract items one at a time. “Here,” he said, handing me a silver subcompact pistol no bigger than my hand. “It’s small,” he admitted, “but it’ll do the job.”
I took the gun, which was far heavier than it looked, and set it aside, nearly smiling when I realized that just a month ago I would have shaken my head and refused to accept the weapon.
Frost handed Dutch a much bigger gun. “This is Des Vries’s actual weapon,” he said. “It’s a Beretta Px4 Special Duty with a custom grip and you’ll note that it doesn’t handle like your Glock, but I’m sure you can manage.”
Dutch took the gun from Frost and inspected it moodily. I could tell he didn’t like the Beretta, which I knew from my week of gun training was quite a different gun from the Glock, but Dutch nodded and said, “I’ll make it work.”
“Remember, the biggest difference between it and your Glock is that the Beretta’s got a safety,” Frost told him. “Pull the trigger with that safety on, and nothing’s gonna happen.”
“Got it,” Dutch said, tucking the pistol away.
Next Frost handed Dutch and me two retractable ballpoint pens, one with a green cap and one with a red cap. He handed Mandy a pen too; her cap was also red. Mandy snatched hers, clicked the top, and immediately began to try to doodle on the newspaper. “Mine’s broken,” she announced when no ink appeared. She then threw the pen into the middle of the table and pouted like a five-year-old.
Frost gave her a look that was, well . . . frosty. “It’s not a pen,” he growled.
“Looks like a pen.”
Frost inhaled a deep breath, then reached for the instrument and twisted the red cap. A tiny beep came from the top and five seconds later Frost’s phone began ringing. He answered the line with a snappy, “Location and signal strength, please.” After a pause he added, “Good. Please log this as a test, Agent Brewster. Thank you for the prompt alert.”
I looked at my pens more closely. “Are these homing devices?”
“Yes,” Frost said, handing the pen back to Mandy with a steely glare. “If you twist the cap on the one with the red cap, it will send out an alert signal and we’ll know you’ve been compromised. We’ll then dispatch a team to attempt your recovery. I want to make it clear that you should activate the pens only as a last resort, because the odds that we’ll make it to you before you’re hunted down and killed are running in the ten-to-twenty percentiles.”
Ah, Frost. Ever the optimist.
“The pen with the green cap is an electronic scrambler. If you’re in a position to make an escape, twist the cap and hide it anywhere within five feet of Boklovich’s digital command center. It will turn all his video surveillance monitors to snow and give you guys the opportunity to get out of there without being tracked by camera.”
“How will we even know where his command center is?” I asked.
“It will likely be somewhere in the center of his compound, insid
e the main building. You and Dutch will have to do some surveillance on your own to find it.”
I looked uneasily at Dutch. He mouthed, “It’s okay” to me, but I hardly felt better. This mission was proving to be far more complicated than I’d ever imagined.
“Carry the pens on your person at all times,” Frost said to us.
I put the pen in my pocket and hoped I’d never have to use it.
Next, Frost pulled out what looked like two small manicure cases. Unzipping them, he revealed the usual toenail clippers, cuticle scissors, and nail file. Mandy leaned in, looking especially interested. “Where’s mine?” she demanded.
Frost ignored her and focused on me and Dutch. “Pull out the clippers and the back panel will open,” he said, demonstrating by removing the clippers and revealing a small tab that allowed the lining of the case to be removed. Behind the panel were several small syringes, lined up neatly and held in place by thin elastic bands. My stomach flipped over. I knew exactly what those were. “How many shots would we need?” I asked.
“Two,” he said. “And they must be delivered in quick succession within a minute or two of getting hit.”
“Are those drugs?” Mandy asked, her eyes large and immediately interested.
Frost turned to her, completely out of patience, and said, “You may be excused, Mandy.”
Mandy stuck her tongue out at him and clomped off loudly to her bedroom, leaving her pen behind. Frost eyed it with such irritation that I picked it up and said, “I’ll make sure she holds on to it.”
Frost looked like he was working to rein in his temper, and after a minute he said, “I wish we didn’t need her. But she’s the only one who can help cover Rivers here as Des Vries.”
“It’ll be okay,” I told him, only half sure it would be.
“Is there anything else?” Dutch asked, trying to get the briefing back on track.
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