2. Calista
Chapter 2
Calista
T he techno beat makes my bones thrum and thump in time.
Someone’s out to get me. Call me paranoid, but I know the signs and I need to gather intel. As much as I can, before it’s too late.
I move through the darkened coffeehouse and club. The place is old, leftover from before the wall came down decades earlier. It’s cheap and fits with a punk and artist drug vibe with the feels of a speakeasy.
It’s a perfect place for someone like me.
Someone who’s trying to avoid Uncle Sam’s reach but wants to stay close to where I worked.
Wants?
No.
Needs to.
Getting out of Germany’s only half the battle. I need to get the hell out of Europe and back to the States, all without being flagged.
And I’m not sure how to do it.
First things first. If I can find Johnny, the field agent I’ve been handling, things will take a turn for the better. But I have a sinking feeling that if he does turn up somewhere, he won’t be alive to tell the story.
That familiar queasiness hits, rocking my stomach and sending burning bile up the back of my throat, leaving a bitter taste in my mouth.
Is he dead?
Gone underground?
Working for someone else as a double agent?
I don’t know. All I know is he stopped communicating and I waited too long to report it. There were reasons, like my own agenda and the fact that he asked me to hold off so he could look into Bolivia.
Now panic beats in my veins.
What I need is time I don’t have to look into Bolivia myself, to find my own contacts there, to poke into chatter on the dark web, to listen for any clues about where the hell Johnny might have ended up.
And my own agenda?
I get a soda from the bar and snake my way to the back, past the people in clusters who are high past their eyeballs and swaying to the beat of electronica, past the others hunkered down at tables with their computers and phones.
The corner table’s dark, close to an exit just past the restrooms that leads out to another Stra?e , or street. It’s a good vantage point because I can also see who comes into the place. I’m not an idiot. The CIA or one of their sneakier subsidiaries will have people out looking for me. My time’s borrowed and currently riding on a ticking bomb.
I put my personal computer down on the battered wooden table and open the lid, using the hot spot from the burner phone in my pocket. If I so much as touched my CIA-issued computer, they’d have me pinned in a hot second.
Every now and then I glance past my laptop screen, sipping from my glass. Sure, relying on my training should be enough. I should be able to read the room and people from my periphery.
But the information I have scrapes at my brain to the point where there are so many potential threats, I don’t know how I’ll ever be able to thwart them all.
Johnny thought the Iranians might be using Bolivia as a base of operations. Poor countries often take big chunks of money without looking too closely at where it’s coming from. The fact that he’s disappeared makes me wonder if he was onto something, something the Bolivians wanted to cover up.
And now I’m also sitting on information someone high up in the CIA wants. I squeeze the glass in my hand, my lips pressing tightly together.
I went deeper than I should, poked into things far above my clearance level, and now…
Well, with what I’ve got, I’m not sure who I can trust.
This new weapon is… scary. In the wrong hands, it’ll get buried deeper than the corpse they’ll turn me into if I reveal it to the wrong person.
I take a deep breath before tapping into the dark web in an attempt to gather information on CIA, and other international intelligence agencies such as Britain’s MI6, Germany’s BND, Russia’s FSB and SVR, and other government agencies, big and small.
I don’t get any hits.
Yet.
If someone from any of those agencies is actively looking for me, it’s classified, even beyond my reach.
But the niggle in my hacker brain keeps catching on a group of names, and landing on something in the illegal chatter and murk of the Obsidian Knights—whatever they are. That name’s so slippery, I can’t find anything beyond the odd mention.
I’d quickly dismiss something like the Obsidian Knights as just a code name, which it probably is, except for one thing that catches my attention.
The Collectors.
Sex trafficking.
Sex slave rings. Girls for sale.
Girls who suffered just like my mother did a long time ago.
She got out. In body, anyway. But her mind?
Not so lucky.
And definitely still captive to the travesties of that time in her life.
The Collectors are still around, and the reason I’m not about to turn myself in is that I’m going to ruin them all financially and then find one of their founders, Jon Trenton, who raped my mother and set her down the path of horror from age fifteen.
That was the name in her diary, anyway. All I have to go on.
He went dark, supposedly dead. Yet his accounts are active, all of the hidden ones, that is.
At least, up until the demise of the biggest wing of the Collectors.
Trenton’s not a concern to the CIA. Rogue agents and clandestine groups are. But my mentor, Aaron Riley, formerly of the CIA and now a senator, warned me about rich and powerful people like Trenton, of the seemingly dead. Of people who take high profile yet shadowy positions so they can fly under the radar to continue their depraved work. The ones who hide in both dark corners and out in the open.
Like the Devil himself .
Riley has a healthy distrust of everyone. It’s probably why politics suits him so well.
I shift on the uncomfortable wooden slab of a seat, trying to separate paranoia from possible real danger.
My calves tighten, as the urge to run grabs hold. But I don’t. Instead, I glance around in the darkness. No one new has come in since I arrived. Yet…
A cold whisper of unease slips down my spine. I copy the information I need to a thumb drive, just in case I can’t get online at some point. Then I send it to my Jane Doe cloud account where it’ll be stored securely.
Switching to some mindless gossip website, I log off the hot spot but keep the page up. I stare at it, pretending to read the words when the hairs on the back of my neck prickle with fear.
Three people sit to the left of me at another table, and to my right’s a man in black, his nose buried in a book.
For some reason, my gaze catches on him. He’s tall and needs a shave. He’s about mid to late thirties with chiseled good looks. Dark honey-brown hair, muscular, full lips. I absently twist a strand of hair around my finger as my eyes take note of every feature.
People read in places like this. He’s got the look of an artist, definitely German. But…
But.
But he rubs me in a way that has my senses screaming. I pack up my laptop and walk over to the bar. The man rises from his table. He brushes into me as he passes and electricity cascades.
Penetrating blue eyes meet mine. “ Entschúldigung ,” he says.
“ Das ist gut.”
I let him know all’s good, ignoring the velvet darkness of his voice that holds a carnal edge. Immediately, I decide to go to the bar for another soda. “Wolf,” I say to the bartender in German, “can you do me a favor? If anyone asks?—”
“I have never seen you, Hendrix.”
I flash a smile, hating the miniscule exposure of even this, standing here in the shadows. “And point anyone asking about me in the opposite direction of where I go when I leave. The usual.”
And I slide over a few more euros to him.
He palms them and winks.
The mystery man is gone, but I’m still unsettled, so much so I don’t log back in to the dark web when I sit back down at the table. I just mindlessly surf the web for celebrity gossip and fashion trends.
This time when I pack up my laptop, the deliberately battered shell that hides state-of-the-art hardware, I leave my drink and a copy of whatever book I pull from my pack on the table. Then I slide out the back door past the bathrooms and into the gloomy Berlin day. The inkling that my life is about to become equally gloomy suffocates me like someone just stuck a plastic bag over my head.
Because in my line of work, that could easily become my reality.
There’s no way I’m going to be able to nap at my little hole-in-the-wall sublet apartment in Mitte, so I decide to change clothes and my look. I twist my hair into knots on my head, exposing the undercut, and I pull on my schoolgirl-on-crack outfit. Long thigh-high striped socks and chunky Mary Janes, plaid skirt with a white shirt and tie.
Then I paint on cherry-red lips, heap on lots of eyeliner and mascara, and pull on a black jacket .
I quickly cram my computer, fake ID, and all my hardware into a red and black backpack and sling it on. I glance in the mirror.
Hacker to party girl in minutes.
A perfect disguise.
I bounce from place to place through the city. In and out of gallery shows and parties, skirting the edges, scouting for anyone who doesn’t belong.
The beat of unease grows deep in my gut, and I’m on edge, the needlelike teeth of that unease nibbling harder and harder.
Finally, I make my way into a club, dark and moody German industrial music playing in the background. I scout the space as my eyes adjust to the dim light. This place definitely takes in a certain type of clientele, and anyone working for the government—no matter which one—would stand out like a dick on a cake.
And field agents? They’re not sending one of those assets after me .
It’d be men in suits with no sense of humor.
Like when I got arrested at fourteen for hacking into top government sites.
Still, I’m itching like ants are crawling all over me, and I can’t stay still.
Rookie behavior, a voice in my mind screams.
I slip farther into the space. Smoke fills my lungs, stinging my eyes as I find my way to the center of the dance floor.
Although the real rookie behavior is me giving in to the emotions and physiological reactions to being followed.
Shit, it’s like a beacon calling out to anyone watching.
I push through the crowd on the dance floor to the bar on the other side. I order a whiskey and down it to calm my nerves. Then another for good measure. The golden heat of it sinks into my flesh to smooth the frayed edges of my nerves. I drink just enough for that, not nearly enough to lose the sharpness I need to survive.
In the next room, one that smells like sweat and smoke and the sweet and cloying aromas of vapes, I find a small table. I pull out a chair when a shadow falls on me.
All of my senses burst into life.
The man grabs my arm.
His touch is electric, burning through the fabric of the jacket.
“ Bitte ,” I say. “ Ich ?—”
“ Nein .” The velvet is hard now, cold like steel. Wintry. “You’re not as hard to find as you think.”
“ Bitte ,” I say again, letting out a string of German where I tell him he’s got the wrong person and to let me go. The words fall over each other but he understands them perfectly, even though he’s switched to English.
Dammit. I don’t want to cause a scene, but I also don’t want to be dragged off to a windowless room here or in the United States. So I act.
I stomp on his foot with my huge platform Mary Jane and elbow him hard in the chest.
His hand slips and I run.
Bolting out the back door, I gulp down oxygen, panic exploding into each and every cell. My lungs tighten as I pant out each constricted breath.
The alleyway behind the club takes me down and through a set of streets before I realize he’s not following me. I meander around, off the beaten path, wandering in and out of small places as I continue to peek over my shoulder at anyone who dares come close.
But I’m wasting time. And as the sky above rumbles with thunder, I make my way slowly back to my street. I should have probably hunkered down back at the apartment instead of risking my safety, but I needed to know for sure that somebody was out there looking for me.
And now I do.
I need to run. I need to just grab my shit and vanish again, move out of Berlin, maybe toward Latvia, or even somewhere like Italy, a place they might not think to look.
Keeping a firm grip on my panic, I eye the street around my building and organize in my mind what I need to do.
Make sure no one’s lurking.
Then fucking run.
If I pack the few things I need, I can be gone in under ten minutes. Well under. Get my stuff and run, then think.
Money, hard drives, makeup, clothes. I’m not a makeup wearer on the whole, but it works when a quick change in appearance is needed.
I look around me. No one’s lurking.
I circle the block twice, then cautiously make my way into the building.
The walk down the hall to my tiny little apartment is too long, too dark, too quiet.
It doesn’t matter if that’s all in my head. It’s how I feel, and my heart slams hard into my ribs with each step.
Outside my door, I tentatively place my hand against the wood. With extreme care and quiet, I insert my key and turn the knob.
Everything’s quiet. I flick on a lamp as lightning flares outside.
I look around.
Nothing seems out of place.
So far.
I drop my pack and jacket near the door.
Some might call me overly suspicious and paranoid. Everything seems to be untouched, and though there’s a shift in the air pressure, the tiny place seems empty.
But I’m way too aware of the meaning of the word “seems.”
Too aware of the panic that wants freedom.
I make my way to the bedroom and push open the door.
The shape moves so fast I almost don’t see it until his hands are on me and I’m slammed into the wall, face-first. My breath rushes from my lungs from the force but I still fight.
He twists my arm up, pinning me to the spot.
“If you want to fucking live, stop fucking moving. Now.”
Everything turns to ice at the growl that assaults my ears for the second time tonight.
Because I know exactly who that voice belongs to.
And I’ve got a pretty damn good idea of what he wants.