She wrung her hands and moved closer. “Don’t hurt us, please! I’ll tell you where he is, only mmm hmm mmm.”
“Don’t be scared, honey.” Don’t be scayed, honeh. She fought the mad impulse to giggle. It was a little like talking to Foghorn Leghorn, in Kevlar. “Now what’s that?”
She threw her bouquet in his face, poor thing that it was after she’d denuded it to make the cake. He flinched back and she clawed for the pistol in the shoulder holster, ducking as he swung at her with almost no force. What was that—was he really not trying to hurt her? Moron.
(You’d better be sure, if you try for a man’s gun,)
She was sure. The Velcro tore…
(if he’s any good he’ll have one in the chamber, one in the chamber, one in the chamber)
…and she had the gun. She stuck it in his face the moment he cut his losses and backed up.
“You’d better come with me,” she said.
“Oh, dear God,” the minister said. He was in the far corner. Praying, not swearing. Funny. Half an hour ago, the guy had looked like he was in his early thirties. Now he looked ready for a retirement home. The black, of course, didn’t help.
The bad guy hadn’t lost his smile through the whole thing (weird!), and now he held his rifle out in front of him like a peace offering to a god, carefully put it down, backed up more, and raised his hands. “You got me, honey. I’ll come quietly.”
“Oh.”
He laughed. A great laugh, booming and rich. It echoed off the tiles. “You sound disappointed, honey! Were you hoping for a smackdown in the boys’ room?”
“Never you mind.” She moved to the side, the gun never wavering; she had sighted on the middle of his forehead. “Let’s go, Carolina.”
“Aww. Who told you mah nickname?”
Chapter 6
Kevin Stone felt abnormally cheerful as the gorgeous blonde escorted him to a conference room on the north side of the hotel. He should have been plenty pissed, not to mention scared for his life, but hell, she was so damn cute, and quick, too.
He was pretty sure he could have stopped her from taking his side arm, but he would have had to break her arm in a couple of places, or possibly her nose; and hell, it was too nice a day to go around roughing up the ladies.
And her nose was way too cute to break.
He was a little disappointed to see The Boss waiting for him in the conference room, gray-faced but still alive. Aw, who was he kidding? If he’d really wanted The Boss dead, he would have gone for a head shot.
No cops, which he expected—The Boss liked to keep things tidy and in-house.
The guests were long gone, which was a surprise. The rubberneck factor was usually pretty high. People lost all sense once they got over the initial duck-and-cover impulse. He imagined O.S.I. personnel had been firm about clearing the perimeter.
Mirage and The Wolf were there as well, and the three of them looked shocked. Not to see him, of course. To see the cute little receptionist holding his Glock.
“We got your call,” The Boss said, staring. “I sent the paramedics away. Nothing broken.”
“That’s good,” the cutie replied. Not that Mirage was hard on the eyes, either—with those long legs, sky-blue eyes, and white-blond hair, she was really something—but she was taken. Big-time taken. By the fellow standing to her right, and Kevin had about sixty other more important things to do than get into a pissing match with The Wolf over a woman. “Uh, while you were doing that, I went and caught the bad guy for you.” She seemed to gesture with the gun as if to say, here he is.
The Boss blinked. Mirage and The Wolf looked at each other. Nobody said anything. Kevin stifled a laugh.
“I, uh, don’t have the authority to arrest anyone. So I thought you should, uh, take him into custody? Or whatever.”
“They can’t arrest me either, honey,” he told her, nibbling on a fresh spork. It wasn’t really a laughing matter, but damn, the feeling was fine. And there had been goddamned little to laugh about these last four years. Six. Twenty. “Isn’t that right, Big Boss? The O.S.I. can’t arrest me. And all’s you can do is send me out without enough intel and get me killed. That’s what you do, right?”
“Who are you?” Mirage asked. “And if you really wanted him dead, here’s some friendly advice—next time try a head shot.”
His ego jumped up and he couldn’t keep his mouth shut. “Honey, if I wanted him dead, he’d be in a rubber bag in the morgue.”
“Don’t tease me,” she whispered.
“And—you shot him but did not want him dead?” The Wolf asked.
“Stacy was the target,” The Boss corrected, almost absently. “Not me.”
“Stacy was what?” Mirage had started calmly enough, but the last word was pretty much shrieked. Kevin was surprised the water glasses on the table didn’t shatter. Oooh, Blondie had a temper. Her fist dropped to the table and broke off a chunk like the thing was made of cardboard. “Chum, you’d better start talking.”
“Yes, you’d really better,” the cutie with the gun said, sounding almost apologetic. “Because that’s going to be a much bigger problem for us. Everybody’s much fonder of Stacy than her fiancé.” She glanced at The Boss. “No offense.”
The Boss inclined his head. “None taken.”
“Gonna be a long story,” he said cheerfully, fishing for a fresh spork. “You ladies better get comfortable.”
Chapter 7
After an impersonal but thorough frisking by The Wolf, Kevin was seated at one end of the table. The cutie popped the clip on his Glock, hit the slide, and caught the round in the chamber as it popped out. Then she set it by the pile of weapons Kevin had brought to the wedding.
“We’ve got some questions,” The Boss began. Then he cut his gaze to the cutie. “And I’ve got a few for you, too, dear, but time enough for that later.”
The cutie shrugged and looked down at her hands, then back at the pile of guns and knives and flash grenades.
“You don’t know me? You don’t recognize me?” Kevin asked him pleasantly. His temper, a vicious animal that he kept in a too-small cage, stirred. “You sure, Boss?”
“I’m sure.”
“Pretty sure?”
“Positively sure.”
“My name’s Kevin Stone. I work for the C.O.P. I’ve been undercover the last four years.”
“If that’s true, then you know General Bracton.”
“Brac’s dead.”
“Undercover,” The Wolf interrupted quietly, “doing what?”
“Infiltrating a splinter cell down south. Sort of the O.S.I.’s opposite number. Y’all do something good, they do something bad. Y’all use your funding to make helpful robot killers, they use theirs to blow up banks and pick up the pieces to put in their purse. They call themselves S.T.A.R.—Support Tracking and Recon. We call ’em the Snakepit.”
“Four years in the Snakepit?” The Wolf clarified.
“Yup, are you getting it now? Or do I need to talk slower?”
“We, ah, get it, as you say, but there’s a problem.”
Kevin snorted. “Only one?”
“C.O.P. lost their funding nineteen months ago,” The Boss said abruptly, with the air of a man who wants to deliver the bad news quickly and get it over with. “It’s been shut down.”
“Probably because the Senate didn’t know who the hell they were. O.S.I.? C.O.P.? S.T.A.R.? Come on,” Caitlyn said, “it’s like alphabet soup from hell.”
“Ah-yup, I figured when nobody was returning my calls.” His temper was rattling the bars now—it wanted out, it wanted to do some damage, it wanted to be free. Out, let it out. But he kept his voice nice and light. Training, it seemed, was good for more than hitting the bull’s eye.
“They forgot about you?” the cutie asked. “And didn’t pull you out first?” She gave a small shake of her head, looking small and pretty in her bridesmaid’s gown.
“We all know the risks in this sort of work, Jenny.” But Mirage
’s eyes sobered with a certain respect as she reconsidered him. “No wonder you carry around three guns.”
Four, honey. “That’s not why I came here,” he said. “I’m here because the Snakepit’s the only place paying me now. They gave me a new assignment—shoot The Boss’s pretty little bride-to-be. And—”
I couldn’t do it. Not even to stay safe. Not even to keep my hiding place. Couldn’t shoot a woman, a civilian, in cold blood. Nope. And nope and nope.
“—and saw your chance for revenge!” Jenny struggled between understanding and loathing. “Hitting Stacy did nothing for you. But hitting him—that would make you feel better, and it would probably satisfy the Snakepit, since hurting him would hurt her. You could always say you missed, or he saw you and put himself in front of his fiancée.”
No. Kevin shrugged. “Yeah, sure. That’s how it was.”
The Wolf was scanning him with those little freak teeny robots-nanobytes. Mirage, he saw, didn’t bother. That was interesting.
“Is there more to the story, Mr. Stone?” The Wolf asked, just as cool as a naked baby in February.
“Yeah, there’s more. I want to go to a fucking—er, a safe house and be debriefed. And I want a shower and I want a Big Mac. And I want a fu—an apology from the government of the U.S. of A. for dumping me in the Snakepit and then forgetting about me. One from The Boss here might be nice, too.”
There was a long, awkward silence when everyone looked everywhere but at Kevin.
“It’s okay,” the cutie said at last. “You can say fucking. We don’t mind.”
“I’s raised,” he replied, trying not to smile at her earnestness, “not to swear around the ladies. My daddy would beat me raw, he heard me talking to you like that. But that’s good to know, Miss—”
“Branch. Jennifer Branch.” She tilted her head slightly in greeting. Perhaps she already knew he had a fourth gun.
“You got quick hands, Miss Branch.”
“Well.” She shrugged. “I’m a receptionist.”
“For him?”
“Gosh, no!” She laughed. “I work in a hair salon.” She pointed to Mirage. “Her salon.”
“Yeah, nobody here works for The Boss,” Mirage said quickly. “It’s almost like you’re among friends.”
“I gotta see that hair salon,” he replied, and for some reason that made both the ladies smile.
Chapter 8
“Everything checks out—prints, everything. He is who he says he is. Not,” The Boss added in a mutter, “that finding his files was easy.”
“Um.” Caitlyn cleared her throat. “Can we wait a second before we get back into this? No offense, Jen, but what are you still doing here? This is sort of, uh, Boss business.”
It was later that same night; the minister had performed a quickie ceremony and The Boss had sent his new bride to the honeymoon suite with an escort of seven armed guards. Stacy had gone, cursing and protesting the whole way. Jenny was a little surprised she herself had not been escorted out with the bride.
Meanwhile, The Boss’s many minions had taken Kevin into protective custody, printing him, debriefing him, and bringing him fast food. Where this was happening exactly, of course, Jennifer had no idea.
And here they were, back in that same conference ballroom, The Boss popping Darvocets like they were Tic Tacs, and everybody feeling less than fresh.
“I’d like her to stay,” The Boss said, which Jenny found surprising; she had started to get up to leave.
“But—”
“Caitlyn, she’s earned the right to stay. Unless it was really one of you two who brought me the shooter, disguised as a salon secretary in a blond wig? No? As I guessed. Then may I continue?”
“Stone could have aimed about a foot lower,” she muttered, slumping in her chair, “and spilled your brains.”
“Singular wit. As I was saying, he is who he says he is. What are our options?”
“First things first,” Dmitri said with palm raised. “Did we really dump him and forget about him?”
“The C.O.P.s did, yes.”
“But it’s all the same thing, right? We’re all working for the same government. I mean, you and he are. We don’t, uh, work for you.”
“How could such a thing have happened?” Dmitri asked, ignoring Caitlyn’s interruption.
“He was deep in,” The Boss answered placidly. “For weeks after the budget cuts were announced, there was no way to warn him. By the time we tried, he had disappeared. He was either dead, a double agent, or deeper than ever. No matter what the reason, we had to cut the connection. Agents are trained to find their way back, under such circumstances.”
“And he did. Eventually. Are there others?”
“We’re working on it. I would like to think he was the only one.” Nobody was sure whether The Boss liked to think that because it was distasteful to leave an undercover agent in the field, or because he didn’t have the patience for more bullets today.
“Well.” Caitlyn looked around the small room. “Okay, that’s pretty bad, but at least he’s out and done now, right?”
“Hmm.”
“You’d like him to go back in,” Jenny guessed.
“What?” Caitlyn cried.
“Of course they do,” Dmitri added. “It’s the only logical course of action.”
“Why?”
“To finish the job.”
“What job? C.O.P. doesn’t exist anymore—ergo, there is no job.”
“There’s always work, I bet.”
“Correct, Jennifer. My, my, but don’t you have a knack for this sort of thing.” The Boss eased back in his chair, wincing as he felt his ribs. He let out a breath, then said, “However did you get his gun away from him?”
“Because he let me.”
“Is that right? Hmm…”
“Dude.”
“Yes, Caitlyn?”
“Dude. No.”
“Calm down. We’ve all had enough of your annoying hysterics for one day.”
“Watch yourself, sir,” Dmitri said, narrowing his eyes.
Caitlyn didn’t even notice. “Dude. No. You’ve contaminated my best friend—thanks to you, she had the bad guys trying to shoot her, and worse, you married her an hour ago! All that is bad enough; you are not sucking Jenny into the O.S.I. Not only is she a great friend, she’s the best receptionist I’ve ever had.”
“Well,” Jenny allowed, blushing at all the kind words, “I am the only one who knows the new phone system.”
“Right!” Caitlyn pounced on that fact like a tiger on a raw steak. “So you can’t have her.” Caitlyn jabbed a thumb at her own chest. “She’s mine.”
“Really, Caitlyn, you’re so paranoid.”
“People really are out to get me,” she replied flatly, “and that’s a fact. You’re plotting against me, and that’s also a fact.”
“True enough. Back to business. As I was trying to explain, I discussed the matter with my superior and they’d like Mr. Stone to go back undercover.”
“Does your superior have a forked tail and horns?”
Ignoring Caitlyn, he continued. “Apparently the Snakepit does quite a lot of damage and he’s still in a unique position to infiltrate and disrupt their doings.”
“Yeah, well, it’s kind of moot, right? You can’t ask him. The guy’s been living with the enemy for four years, probably scared shitless half the time, wondering what he’d done to get dumped in with the bad guys, and now that he’s out, you can’t ask him to go back.”
“Can’t is relative, dear.”
There was a pause while Caitlyn digested that, while Jenny glanced at Dmitri—oh, yes, he could see where this was going. It wasn’t difficult to surmise, really. The real difficulty…well…
She had an unkind thought for her boss and friend, something Stacy had once said in jest: With Caitlyn, everything takes twelve seconds longer.
Meanwhile, the yelling had recommenced. “You aren’t really thinking about asking him, right? Not really
? Oh, look who I’m talking to; you’ve got the conscience of a wood tick. Of course you’re gonna ask him—poor guy finally gets out and now you’re gonna ask him to go back to hell. Without his Big Macs, I bet.”
“No,” The Boss replied. “We aren’t going to ask him.” He glanced at Jenny, who had already braced herself for the rest of it. “Jennifer is.”
Chapter 9
As expected, Mirage and The Wolf were knocking on his door (not “his” door, but rather the safe house door—so really, the taxpayers’ door; but he was the one who had to answer it) before the clock struck nine.
The surprise was, they’d brought the receptionist cutie with them.
“Thanks again,” Mirage said, shaking his hand, “for shooting that jerk.”
“Aw,” he drawled, “’twazn’t nothin’, ma’am.”
The cutie giggled at that, and shook his hand also. The Wolf closed the door behind them (they had, presumably, been vetted by the two checkpoints and the four security guards) and held out his hand. Curious, Kevin seized it and shook. Hard. How strong was this guy, anyway? Surely those itty-bitty robots in his bloodstream couldn’t account for all that—
The bones in his hands ground together as The Wolf squeezed back. “Nice to see you again,” Kevin said, almost gasped. Damn! His daddy said you could tell a real man by the strength of his handshake and if that was true, The Wolf was the realest man on the planet. He managed to wrest free, and squashed the urge to massage his throbbing fingers. Speaking of squashed, he was almost afraid to look at his hand. “Come on in and grab a chair.”
“We’re sorry to bother you,” the cutie—Jennifer—said. “Ah.” She stopped.
He could see why. He was in custody; he was the bad guy. He’d shot the groom. But they were coming to ask a favor, treating him like a colleague—which he also was. So it was hard to figure out which way to go: soft or hard.
Since Jennifer was there, he figured soft. He should have been angry, should have let the beast loose. But he was so damn glad to see her again…