Chapter 7
CHAPTER 7
DESPITE BEING RUDELY awakened by Alex at six thirty, I still felt more relaxed than I had in days by the time Nick showed up with breakfast at ten. My hero. A bacon and egg roll with ketchup and HP sauce, just the way I liked it, and a hundred times better than the sugar-free muesli allocated by Toby.
Once I’d hidden the evidence in the bin, I grabbed my handbag and hopped into the passenger side of Nick’s shiny Dodge Ram.
“New truck?” He’d been driving a Chevrolet Silverado last time I was home. “You only bought the last one a month before I left.”
“Yeah, I did, but it looked a little second-hand after Dan borrowed it to chase a pair of trigger-happy terrorists. The body shop said there were too many bullet holes to repair economically.”
“Crikey. I take it Dan was okay?”
“Of course. She takes after you in that respect. When the cops dragged the terrorists out of the ravine they’d driven down to get away from her, they actually begged to be locked up rather than have to face her again.”
Good old Dan. Guys tended to think that because she was small and cute, she couldn’t pack a punch. Same with Mack and Carmen and me. We’d had a bunch of fun over the years showing them just how wrong they were.
Twenty minutes later, we arrived at the office. Rather than base our company in a high-rise building in town, we’d chosen a large estate in the country for our headquarters because that gave us the space to put our training facilities there as well. We also had a small office in Richmond for meeting clients, an hour away by car and a lot quicker by helicopter.
While we’d started off in Virginia, the company had expanded quickly, opening offices in New York and Washington, DC in our first year. Now we operated on six continents. If Nate ever made good on his promise to send me to Antarctica, we’d tick off the seventh. Forty-two countries and eighty-nine offices, not including the sixteen in the United States.
At last count, we had fourteen thousand permanent employees and probably the same again in regular contractors. From a humble start, with just my husband, Nate, and me working out of my husband’s house with a secretary and a handful of part-timers, security had turned into big business for us.
“Look what the cat dragged in,” Dan said as I walked into my office. She sat on my desk, swinging her legs. Abstract paintings and the occasional poem decorated the walls beside her, and, the bulletproof glass windows overlooked the outdoor shooting range beyond.
I stepped inside and closed the door before giving her a quick hug. I never showed my softer side to the rest of the employees. People needed to fear and respect me; they didn’t have to like me.
“What fun awaits me this morning?” I asked.
She showed me jazz hands. “Management meeting.”
“Oh, joy. I need coffee first.”
“Overall, things are doing well,” Nate said as I sucked down my third espresso. Of the eight people in the room, I was winning in terms of caffeine consumption. “Revenues are up, profits are up. Cash balances are good. The old mattress is overflowing.”
“And operationally?” I asked.
“No serious problems since you left.”
“Any minor ones?”
“Just the usual niggles.” He looked down at the tablet in front of him. As head of the Technology Division, Nate would never resort to a pen and paper.
I, on the other hand, needed something to doodle with.
“There was a dispute with the local army in Pakistan,” Nate continued. “They thought we were treading on their toes when we escorted a convoy of American businessmen through a conflict zone. We’ve smoothed that over now.”
“And one of our celebrity clients in LA had a few hysterics,” Nick chipped in. “The bodyguard we provided refused to let her fiancé backstage since he didn’t have the correct pass.”
I laughed. That kind of drama was why I happily left the Executive Protection Division to Nick. “Did the guard not recognise him?”
“He knew the woman was engaged to a rapper called T-Dog, but not what the dude looked like. When this kid wearing a pair of sweatpants with the crotch around his knees and enough gold necklaces to make a killing on eBay turned up, our guard didn’t realise he was a musical prodigy.”
“All that bling and no backstage pass? Our guy was just doing his job.” We drilled our security staff time and time again: if people didn’t have the right credentials, they didn’t get past. Someone had obviously listened. “Send him a bonus. What’s happening with Investigations?”
Dan shuffled papers on the desk in front of her. She’d headed up that division since my husband’s death, a promotion by default. “Running smoothly.” She gave us a brief rundown of the priority cases. “I’ve got a team flying to Puerto Rico tomorrow to try and find that missing kid and another heading for the Cayman Islands to hunt for the fraudster.”
I poured another coffee from the carafe on the table, aware of fourteen eyes following my every move. Dagnabbit. I couldn’t put it off any longer.
“So,” I said. “Special Projects?”
That was my division. We took on the tasks others had decided were so difficult, so dangerous, so unusual, or so crazy that they were impossible. It was our job to make them possible. All the tasks nobody else wanted to touch flowed our way, and not just our company’s problems. Governments, corporations, and oligarchs the world over flung theirs in our direction too. And they paid our outrageous prices.
What joyous tasks were on the list today?
“We’ve been telling your prospective clients you were working on a long-term project overseas,” Nate said.
“That wasn’t entirely untrue.”
“If you count finding your sanity as a project, it’s one you’ll never finish.”
Good to see he hadn’t changed. As usual, I ignored him.
“Did they believe the story?”
“Some were suspicious, some were annoyed, but most just accepted it. The CIA was trying to track you down, from what I heard on the grapevine.”
“Doesn’t surprise me, but they didn’t do a very good job.” Lower Foxford, the English village where I’d been living with Luke, wasn’t the type of place they cultivated assets. Lower Foxfordians got their intelligence from the local pub and the Women’s Institute, and the CIA had yet to tap into those.
“Rumour has it they sent a team to Barbados.”
“Wonder which genius got that signed off?” I took a cookie from the plate in the middle of the table. Sawdust and raisin—Toby had been around. “What’s on my agenda?”
Nate stuck a bullet-pointed list up on the plasma screen. “Number one: A civilian contractor who’s gone missing from his home in Afghanistan. The investigations team out there referred it up.”
“Why can’t the local office deal with it?”
“They’ve been looking into it,” Dan said. “But he’s been gone three days and the guy’s employer, who’s picking up our bill, is getting upset we haven’t found him yet.”
“The local team’s more than competent, and they’ve probably got better contacts out there than I do. Three days is nothing for locating a hostage, if he even is a hostage. From this report, there’s no evidence he’s been kidnapped.”
Dan nodded. “No signs of a struggle and no contact from any kidnappers.”
“So get the local team to put a couple of extra people on it and tell the client we’ve brought in some experts to help. It’s not like we’re lying—they’re all experts. If it turns into an actual rescue situation, kick it back to me. What’s next?”
“Fancy a trip to Florida?” Dan asked.
“I could do with some sun. What for?”
“Eighteen-year-old girl found strangled in a hotel room. The police gave up and the parents hired us. We’ve traced the murder weapon to a local gang boss called Chainsaw.”
“I bet his mother didn’t name him that.”
“No, she called him Cedric.”
“Poor guy.”
“Don’t feel too sorry for him. When our agents stopped by for a visit, he threatened them with a shotgun then got a pair of Rottweilers to chase them off the property.”
“I’ll take that one. It’s always interesting to chat with individuals from other sections of society.”
Nate gave me a pointed look. “Emmy, it’s your first day back. Is there any chance you could hold off on the jobs that might get you killed for just a week or two? You know, until you get back into the swing of things? And to give our nerves a chance to harden again.”
His concern touched me, even if it was hidden behind a veil of sarcasm. “Relax, Nate, that job will be fine. It’ll only take a few days. If it makes you feel better, old man, I promise not do anything really dangerous until you’ve had a chance to visit the doctor and pick up some Xanax.”
Dan snorted and turned it into a cough. Nate glared at her.
Aw, he loved us really.
Out of deference to Nate’s feelings, I turned down an undercover job with Interpol and an invitation from the CIA to hunt for chemical weapons in Syria. Even I could see that one was a suicide mission. That left one last item.
Evan Beck, our international coordinator, read out the details. “The UK police have requested assistance with a security training exercise in London. They want an independent team to act as the bad guys in a simulated terrorist attack.”
“Haven’t we done something similar before?”
“Last year.” He smiled, no doubt recalling the chaos we’d caused. “They reckon they’re better prepared this time.”
“At least you won’t come to much harm with all those cops around,” Nick said. “You’d keep Nate happy.”
Nate scowled at him.
I couldn’t deny the last job had been entertaining, but one thing made me hold back. London was awfully close to Luke.
Part of me wanted to go there, to find him and speak to him and apologise for everything I’d done. To see if any part of our relationship was salvageable. But the coward in me told me I wasn’t ready, that I was far better off on the American side of the Atlantic where he couldn’t yell at me or tell me to get lost.
Beside me, Dan piped up. “It’ll be men in uniform, Ems. I wouldn’t say no.”
“What’s the timescale?”
“A little over two weeks,” Evan said.
“That soon?”
“Apparently, they want to add an element of realism by giving those involved as little preparation time as possible.”
“Including us.” I took a deep breath and told myself I needed to be brave. “But I think we can do something reasonable in two weeks. Tell them it’s a yes, if the money’s decent.”
“It’s not great, but it’s enough. A couple of hundred grand for us to send a full team.”
“You’re right, it isn’t great. But I can borrow some bodies from the London office to save on travel costs. Dan, it looks like we’ve got planning to do.”