17. My friend in Washington
Chapter 17
My friend in Washington
Griff
She got on her bike and gave me a small tour of the town, my eyes barely coming off her ass for a second. If a woman - any woman - couldn’t keep a man’s attention while leaning forward, straddling a sports bike, then the man’s just not into her.
As it stood, I was very, very into Taz Guerro. So into her that my dick was ready to be in her.
I was sure she was trying to piss me off when she turned into the bail bondsman, and spent over an hour sitting there with her feet on his desk, smoking a cigar and rifling through some papers. I couldn’t see clearly through the glass and the two of them kept their backs to me as they talked. No listening devices, no lip reading. And worse yet, they knew I was there, and were purposely keeping any papers turned away from me.
Was I jealous of her and that old man? Fuck yes. And I knew I would be, so long as she and I were in this strange limbo. But the moment she was tied to me, I knew that this simmering hate would melt the fuck away. I just needed some certainty… I needed her to know that I was the man. I was her man.
But she and Noam Braun were making a fucking game of it, and she and the old man were getting too fucking close.
When he came over and gave her a hug, I was ready to get out of the car and punch him in the dick.
She left her bike behind, opting for one of the company cars with bars on the back seat.
This wasn’t some two-bit alleyway bondsman. The man was professional. I could see it from the uniform company cars in the side lot. The building might be run down, but his security cameras were legit, state of the art, federal-grade surveillance on a continuous, closed-circuit system.
Who is this Noam Braun, and what have you gotten yourself into, Taz?
I followed behind the Crown Royal, feeling a little robbed of the great view of her ass.
She was aimless for the first part of the drive… or was pretending to be.
And it all made me fucking hard. The chase – chasing her. There was something about the tug of it that heated my blood, and I was turning into the kind of stalker pervert I didn’t fucking recognize.
How much does a subdermal tracker cost?
Jesus, I have to get my mind off of this…
I powered on my phone - the one that was only turned on when I was calling her. I looked at all the missed messages and voicemails. I didn’t bother to check before I deleted them all. Half of them were from Kristin, the other half from my mother.
Instead, I called the only marginally sane person that was related to me.
“Yo, douche canoe,” Kaleb greeted.
“Hey dingleberry,” I responded. “What do I need to know?”
“You should call your mother.”
“She’s your mother, too.”
“You’ll never get me to admit it.” My brother had managed to dodge all possible family responsibilities and was living his best life renovating a lighthouse in Massachusetts Bay. Figures. Youngest kids have it so easy. “Our presence is required at the Masquerade.”
“Shit,” I said, through my teeth. “Where’s it held this time?”
Mom’s pet charities were always holding galas but there was one that happened around Halloween that was her particular favorite. A masquerade. Cheesy as fuck, but it had gained popularity over the years, and now was one of the biggest contributors to education and free lunch programs nationwide.
“On a boat,” Kaleb said.
I could vaguely hear him banging a hammer, and I guessed he was doing some construction work on his house.
A boat was more likely our luxury yacht – a timeshare that we had with three other prominent DC families. I could already feel the claustrophobia.
“ Fuuuuuuck ,” I said, agitated for a moment, until I imagined Taz in an evening gown. I had never seen her in one. While in the Army, she’d wear a uniform like the rest of us during military balls. Would she go with me? Maybe. But still, this was not great news. “A boat, with no exit.”
“Yup,” my brother said in an agitated tone that matched how I felt. “So, we can’t ditch early.”
“We could swim for it.” Maybe I should have been a Navy SEAL instead.
“Swim in the Potomac at the end of October?” he scoffed. “Only if you want your balls to start in-growing.”
“Any chance Mom doesn’t know I'm home?”
“Any chance our Dad, the head of the CIA, hasn’t told her?” He snorted. “Even I knew you were home, dude, and I’m always the last to know.”
“For a family of spies, we sure suck at keeping secrets.”
“Speaking of which…” he sounded amused as fuck, and I knew I was going to hate what he said next. “What’s this I hear about a girlfriend? Kristin’s been all in a tizzy about you seeing someone. Something about you getting shot, and some chick taking care of you?”
Shit. How the hell did anyone know anything about that? Fucking Dad was clearly abusing his power.
“Kai? Girlfriend?”
I wasn’t ready to confirm or deny… “Gotta go, bye.”
I hung up on him, even as he protested and warned that I had better not hang up.
Mom would call me next, I was sure of it. But at least I’d know what I was up against. I was already trying to look for excuses. I’d think of something.
Though Taz in a gown would be worth dealing with my family…
Assuming my family didn’t scare her off, of course.
There were a lot of things to worry about with Taz. So many ways I could lose her.
Taz could crash her bike on the side of the road, and no one would see her on these rural highways until she had bled out. She could come across a hasty ambush, alone, for the likes of Matthews and his cronies. She could be alone, in her trailer, when bad guys snuck in, and took her at gun point and used her against me. Against Cerberus. Against the entire US government.
And, of course, my family could scare her off with that particular brand of Griffith snobbery.
It all made sense to target me, because I was a man connected to the white house in a roundabout way. President Lau had been a friend to my father and had been at my Christening thirty-five years ago.
Now, Taz was at the end of all those links - the weak link I didn’t realize would ever be discovered.
I picked up my second phone. It was a brick satellite phone we had to keep it on us at all times. It was a secure Cerberus line that was locked in, meaning that they could only call the phones with its set. There were twenty-six phones, twenty-six agents, and twenty-six letters in the alphabet.
I scrolled until I got to the letter S, and let it dial.
“ Pryvit. ” Sierra’s Ukrainian hello sent a calm through me, because I had grown to know my partner.
“What have you got?” I asked.
“What do you mean?” I knew she was smirking. “Miss CIA told us not to look into it, and to just lay low.”
I snorted. “Yeah, sure. What have you found?”
There was zero chance - and I mean absolute zero - that Sierra had left things well enough alone. Man-woman pairings didn’t always work within the super large egos of the shadow world of spies, but Sierra and I got on like gangbusters. Probably because she was just near enough to Taz in personality that I could trust her, but without the face and body that I had learned had become my ‘type’.
I knew that she wouldn’t let this go. Lying low was not in her arsenal of tricks.
“I may have… found information related to their investigation of the leak,” she said, and I could imagine she was grinning from ear to ear. “And it’s most definitely from within the CIA.”
“How do you figure?”
“Because the CIA is currently investigating their personnel for a leak.”
“How do you know that?”
“I have a… human source.”
I smacked my forehead.
Jesus, she had either blackmailed or honeypot someone in the CIA for that information.
“Don’t worry, they have no idea that I figured it out,” she gave a little laugh. “They pretended to be an analyst for a venture capitalist, and there was an investigation at work. I could read between the lines.” She paused, then added, “I did not kill anyone or pull out their fingernails.”
“It’s telling that you have to specify that,” I chuckled. “So you’re screwing them?”
I wasn’t sure if it was a man, or woman, or both? Or several? Hard to tell with her.
“Well, yes. Of course. Good looking, big dicks are hard to find.” So, it was a man then. “Thankfully, it’s predictably found attached to someone who's not that smart.”
“So many ways I could be insulted…”
Before I could figure out what her words implied, she plowed the conversation forward.
“How is our future wife?” she asked, in that way she liked to tease.
When you have a partner, you tend to be right up their ass, and you become intimately aware of all their problems. Like Siamese twins, what I knew, she knew. What I didn’t tell her, she would snoop out because she had absolutely no respect for privacy.
“She hates me.”
“After only one day home? What did you do?” She was laughing at me. “You came off too strong, didn’t you? Have you proposed already?”
“No,” I grumbled. “It’s… too soon for that stuff, so quit it.”
Though if I had any inkling that she was amenable to it, I’d consider just picking her up and moving her into my DC condo.
“Aw, are you getting sensitive because you know she’ll say no?” She gave me that pouty, annoying voice.
“You’ll get sensitive when I punch you in the ovaries.”
I turned a corner, and Taz began to slow down the car. I let off the gas to match her pace.
Sierra laughed, but then moved on, thank God. “Matthews was a part of an organization of former government agents and veterans who are quite dissatisfied with the administration,” she said, sounding like she was rolling her eyes. “They’re targeting Cerberus because they think we’re the president's personal hit squad.”
“Aren’t we?”
“Not the point, Kilo.”
“Fine,” I said with a roll of my eyes. And this is why there was government oversight on clandestine services. We couldn’t be trusted. Our compasses were too jammed up in the wrong direction. “How’d you find those details?”
Rural towns turned into a small city, and the long Mohawk River came into view. As we went over the bridge, I admired the red brick buildings, and old broken factories that constituted the downtown area. The place was a little rundown since industry went south in the 70’s, but the buildings that were made to stand continued to house a more transient population.
It felt like a city that would recover, one day.
“My new boyfriend loves his dog. Made the classic mistake of using his name as part of the password. Took almost no time to get in.” She was shameless. But I appreciated that she was on my side. “And before you ask, the process of hacking is mostly automated. I had access before I even kicked him out in the morning.”
“Bullshit. You didn’t let him stay the night.”
She didn’t stop in the town of Amsterdam, but kept on moving, until the road became rural again. Where are you going, my sweet little Firefly?
“You know me well,” said Sierra.
“Anything else other than that?” What about me? What about my woman?
“No.” Sierra was a single woman, with no family. Whatever demons she was running from, she could quiet them with work. A trait both she and Taz shared. “I promise, I am looking, though.”
And that’s what real friends were for.
I was half afraid to introduce them, because they’d get along too well, and I’d be competing for Taz’s precious time.
I figured out her intended destination too fucking late. If I had been a little sharper, and a little smarter, I might have fucking pit maneuvered her, or cut her off before she turned into a drive that looked like it led to a prison. And a prison was where most of those Prodigal Sons belonged.
“Hey, since you’re all about spying… do me a favor,” I said, feeling my knuckles clench on the steering wheel, as I had to pass in order to not give myself away. Taz might know I was trailing her, but I didn’t need to be on the radar of those fucking MC criminals. “Find out what you can about the Prodigal Sons. They’re an MC Club here in upstate New York, but I have no idea if they came from elsewhere.”
“Sure, no problem,” she said, dismissively. “Anything else, your majesty? Would you like me to wipe your ass for you too?”
“I mean… is that off the table? I feel like you’re being sarcastic.”
This time, she hung up on me.