The Alias Agenda

Chapter 1

Vivian Martel’s phone woke me with a start. I would have been annoyed with her if I hadn’t been pretending to be her. And if I’d actually been asleep.

Peaceful rest evaded someone with my lifestyle.

Too much time away from consciousness was dangerous.

It took no more than a voice, a car door, a heavy footstep—things often signifying run—to snap me awake.

Or the case that rarely signified good news—the one happening at the moment—a phone call in the dark pit of night.

I slithered a bare arm from beneath the sheets soft as butter and snatched the phone off the nightstand, not daring to wake the man in an enviable state of oblivion beside me.

I knew he was out, really out, thanks to the pill I had slipped in his drink, and I was hoping to catch a little shut-eye for myself in the cocoon of his high-rise bedroom before I had to finish the job and make my escape. But still, I needed to be quiet.

His blood was as blue as it came, and his hands were filthy. A Wall Street stereotype so deep into insider trading, he was lucky they’d sent me to extract the incriminating evidence and not someone with a tire iron.

Unknown flashed on the phone’s screen, and as soon as I saw it, I wanted to go back to sleep even if it was restless and fleeting.

I knew who was calling. There was nothing unknown about it.

Every time I got a new phone, I saved his contact information under Unknown because it was safer that way.

And on the rare occasion it truly was an unknown number calling to offer me a free estimate on refinancing the auto loan I didn’t have, it made for a pleasant surprise.

I blinked a dry eye at the time and was not amused. The contact lenses I’d been wearing to turn my blue eyes brown scratched like sandpaper. The same as the brunette wig squeezing my scalp, I couldn’t wait to throw them in the trash.

“It’s three a.m., Wallace,” I hissed when I answered the phone.

“We’re moving you.”

The gruff voice came down the line with the same detached authority I had known since I was eighteen.

I had heard that phrase more times than I could count, and every time, it upended and replanted my life somewhere new.

Perhaps it was my semiconscious state, or maybe the city lights staring in the cold window at me, but the phrase sent a tingle down my spine. Something ominous flickered inside it.

“What? The job’s not done. I’m still—”

“Then finish it. Now. You’ll be in California by morning on the West Coast.”

I glanced over my shoulder at the sleeping man beside me.

The sharp nose, the pale flesh of his throat.

He looked stuck-up even passed out. He had gone to schools I had only seen in movies and was driven around in cars my dad had taught me how to hotwire before I hit puberty.

He had snob written all over him, and having spent my life in the shadow of privilege, I didn’t mind slipping that pill in his pinot and hacking his laptop while he slept.

But I wasn’t finished.

The computer had bio security, and I needed his fingerprint.

I could get it easy enough once he was passed out—and I knew he’d be passed out for a solid four hours given the dose of that pill.

But I was tired from the weeks of earning his trust that had led to this night and had planned to spend three and a half of those four hours curled into his luxury linens before I swiped the files the man on the phone needed and disappeared from his life as easily as I had come.

“What’s in California?” I whispered.

I heard wind through the phone, sounds of walking, perhaps at a hurried pace. Wallace was outside somewhere.

“Your next job,” he said. “Travel arrangements are at the usual drop. Your flight leaves at six a.m. Don’t miss it.”

I glanced at the time and considered whining about it, but that had gotten me nowhere as a smart-mouthed teenager and no further as an adult.

After ten years together, I knew Wallace’s boundaries like guardrails on a cliff.

He was quick to remind me of why he owned me.

Of why I wasn’t in prison and how he could put me there faster than I could even consider running.

I swallowed my complaint and slipped from the bed, my bare feet pressing into the chilled hardwood floor. I straightened the little black dress I’d worn to dinner from where it had twisted around my hips. “What do I do with the files?”

“Leave the drive at the drop. It’ll be collected.”

The wind whistled again. I thought I heard something catch in Wallace’s throat, a scrape of a shoe on pavement.

I glanced out the yawning bedroom window at an American flag hanging perfectly limp on the rooftop across the street.

The spring evening stood quiet and calm.

Wherever Wallace was, it wasn’t the Upper East Side.

“Where are you?”

I listened to his footsteps as his breathing grew heavier.

Even nearing retirement, Wallace was in excellent shape.

The tremor in his breath reminded me not of someone sucking air for being unfit but of someone breathing at a rate related to emotion, namely an emotion I had felt many times over the years thanks to positions he had put me in.

Fear.

“Are you all right?” I asked him as I tiptoed from the bedroom toward the office. I had to collect the laptop and return for a fingerprint.

Wallace ignored my question and asked his own. “Can you finish the job before you go?”

I rolled my eyes as I passed a towering vase in the entryway crawling with ornate, hand-painted roses, which looked like it should have been on display in a museum. It was hideous, and probably priceless, and I considered pushing it over on my way out.

“I’m working on it.”

I rounded into the office and caught a glimpse of the man’s safe mounted low in the glossy floor-to-ceiling bookshelf.

The thought of cracking it flirted with my focus, trying to lure me away from the job I had to do.

The chance it held what I needed—the thing I’d spent ten years searching for—was impossible, as was the case with every home safe I saw.

I might find a Rolex in there, some heirloom jewelry, maybe a gun—helpful things, but not what I needed.

But still, every locked door signaling keep out made me wonder.

I shook off the thought and continued around to the desk.

I jumped, but not at my ghostly reflection hovering in the black windows.

A loud crack rang through the phone, and Wallace sucked in a breath.

I couldn’t place the sound. A breaking branch?

Something clattering onto concrete? Something … worse?

“Get the job done and get to the airport,” he demanded.

The dark edge in his voice put a skip in my step.

I hurried back to the bedroom and crawled up onto the bed.

The man still wore what he’d worn to dinner too, minus his shoes and the tie I’d seductively unwound from his neck as I pulled him into his bedroom.

He lay flat on his back, one arm curled above his head and gentle snores coming from his parted lips.

I had kissed his lips once, and it had been a good kiss as far as deceitful kisses went.

He had already swallowed the pill at that point, and the kiss would be the last thing he remembered before waking to the authorities pounding on his door later that morning.

A pang of regret snapped through me that on the rare occasions I got a kiss, it was never real.

There’d been a few between-job hookups, sure, but nothing lasting because that was impossible for me.

I tried not to dwell on it as I pressed the sleeping man’s index finger into the pad on his laptop.

The lock screen dissolved into the password prompt, and I tapped in the code I had recovered with some covert spying.

Alas, access.

I pulled a flash drive from my clutch on the nightstand and shoved it into the laptop.

The man grumbled in his sleep, and I froze, my hands splayed across the keyboard.

I knew he was knocked out, but perhaps he could sense his secrets being extracted like gold from a digital mine.

I felt a moment of pity for him, then took one glance around the ostentatious room: the sleek flat-screen TV, the marble-top furniture, the original art—all things he’d procured by stealing other people’s money—and changed my mind.

“Got it,” I told Wallace and shut the laptop with a soft click.

I stood from the bed and searched for my shoes.

The night that had led to drugging the man in his own home began with a five-star dinner, in heels and a dress he would want to peel off of me, and if Wallace wanted me to get to the airport on time, I hoped he had stashed a change of clothes at the drop because an extra pit stop was not in the cards.

No way was I flying across the country in stilettos and a cocktail dress, though it wouldn’t have been the most inconvenient thing I had done in the name of staying out of prison.

“Good girl,” Wallace said, and I gnashed my teeth at the phrase.

He had been saying it like I was a trained poodle since I was a teenager, back when I first became his pawn. I hated it, and he knew I hated it. And we both knew it served as a reminder of who was in charge.

I left the laptop on the bed. It would be a dead giveaway something was off when the man woke to his computer in my place, but it didn’t matter. I would be in the wind. A ghost. A sweet memory turning sour as the gravity of what I had done to him took hold.

With a final look at him, I tiptoed from the room. I sighed. “See you in California, I guess,” I told Wallace.

A long pause filled the line. The wind kept whistling until a car door sharply cut it off. Wallace’s voice came back with the rounded resonance of someone speaking inside a small space. He took a deep, wavering breath. “Don’t miss your flight, Erin.”

He hung up, and I froze by the hideous vase in the entryway. I stared at my phone, shocked by what I had just heard.

No one had called me by my real name in ten years.