Chapter 5
Alice
Alice stole a look at Holt. He was scanning the scene as thoroughly as he’d scanned her.
Her instincts for people were usually solid—a decade of teaching did that for you.
But were her wires crossed because she was confusing the fictional Holt with this one?
Not that she’d detected major differences.
This version had more detail—the patchy unshaven hair on his neck growing in different directions and broken up by little red bumps, the curve at the end of his long nose, the sexy hollow between his jaw and his cheekbone, the messy tufted eyebrows…
Her Holt—Nika’s Holt—had been neater, a smoothed anime version of this guy.
He looked at Alice, one side of his lips curling. “So what do you think?”
She looked away. “About what?”
“My honeypot allure.”
She focused on the path ahead, hyper-aware of her cheeks and neck heating.
His sense of humor, that was a difference. Holt was taciturn and rarely joked.
“If you’re going to…” She wasn’t sure how that sentence was supposed to end. If he was going to kidnap her? Rescue her? “If you’re going to take me out of school, I should at least know your real name.” Then she might have a hope of separating fact from fantasy.
He paused a second. “Carter.”
“Last name or first name?”
Another pause, as if he was deciding which option to choose. “First.”
“Carter what?”
“Carter whatever-you-want-it-to-be. Or you can call me Holt if that has more allure.”
She threw him a whatevs look.
He laughed, wholeheartedly this time, and she recognized it from Nika’s description in the book: a surprisingly boyish giggle, four notes rising in pitch, which came with a rare glimpse of those top teeth. There really was no need to ask for his ID. “Beck. Carter Beck.”
Carter Beck. It suited him. Masculine, worldly, smart. Sexy. She mouthed the name, feeling the rhythm of it. She couldn’t have done better herself.
“Uh, so those window cleaners,” she said, snapping herself back to reality—or whatever this was. “They sounded Russian?”
“One was definitely Russian. Couldn’t hear the other.”
“Like, what kind of Russians?”
“What do you mean?”
“Who are they? Why are they dressed up as window cleaners and coming to find me?”
“My guess? Illegals. Sleeper agents, potentially.”
“What, like actual Russian spies?”
“Like actual spies. Except, not like actual spies. Actually actual spies.”
“Why would they be after me?”
“Again, just a guess, but if the Kremlin was involved in the killing in Moscow, it might be in their best interests if you weren’t around to point out that I wasn’t, in fact, the killer.”
“If I wasn’t around?”
“But hey, I’m spitballing, so don’t take my word for it. Go ask them, if you like. No, seriously, don’t.”
As they walked through the staff parking lot, her eyes drifted to her assigned spot. She gasped. Her car wasn’t there.
Of course it’s not, numbskull.
Holt’s eyes—Carter’s eyes—narrowed. She shook her head.
On any other day of her life it wouldn’t have been possible to forget that her car was stuck between two buildings.
Who knew a life could be flipped upside down in the space of half an hour—and how would she unflip it to return to her pleasantly ordinary routine?
She had exam marks to collate, tennis to coach, a plumber coming first thing tomorrow to install a bathroom vanity, Kimberly’s bachelorette party on Friday.
Truth be told, she was more excited about the new vanity than the night out—the existing one had been installed by her father before she was born, and early 1980s bathroom vanities weren’t famous for their style.
These were the things that marked her days, not subpoenas and rogue window cleaners and former SEALs turned spies turned…
Actually, what was this guy now? Earlier he’d called himself a “former” spy.
In the ending of her book, Holt had eluded his former bosses and slunk off into the shadows, never to be seen again.
As they rounded a corner to the service gate, she froze. A garbage truck was parked in the bay. Carter passed her, pulling a set of keys from a pocket.
“Your limousine,” he said, retrieving her purse and tossing the garbage bag into a dumpster.
“We’re stealing a garbage truck?”
“Not at all.”
“You found it on the lot at Avis?”
“It’s only used in the mornings. And, believe it or not, the Montrose Waste Transfer Station does not have world-class security.” He handed her the purse and opened the passenger door for her. Numbly, she pulled herself up. “This beast is surprisingly invisible on a suburban street.”
He closed her door, rounded the front and climbed into the driver’s seat. If it wasn’t a garbage truck, this might look like a date. He started it up.
“So we are stealing it,” she said as he slotted it into gear.
“No.”
Her best What are you on? look was wasted as he drove it onto the road.
“I already stole it. Past tense. So, no, we’re not stealing it. Legally, I imagine you can’t be charged with stealing the same thing twice, unless you give it back in between. Anyway, I only borrowed it. We’re about to return it without a scratch.”
“Not sure the law is on your side there. Are we driving it to my place? It’s not garbage day on my street. People will notice.”
“The transfer station is on the way to yours. We’ll swap vehicles there.”
“And take these coveralls off, I hope. Hang on, you know where I live?”
The crease on the nearest side of his mouth deepened. “Secret spy tools.”
“Really?”
“No. You’re in the phone book.”
“How impossibly naive of me. How long have you been planning this?”
“Plan? Now you’re overestimating me.”
Maybe so. She thought she knew Anderson Holt intimately.
Very intimately. How would she give a guy like that the slip?
If he assumed she was on his side, meekly going along with it, perhaps he’d let his guard down.
Once they were at her house she could climb out through the bathroom window and call an Uber from the neighbor’s.
“What will we do with the computer once we have it?” she said.
“Figure out how much Nika knew about the murder.”
“You think she knew something you didn’t?”
“Turns out she knew a lot of things I hadn’t given her credit for. And I gave her a lot of credit. But reading that book…”
“There’s a line that Nika wrote about our heroine: Their underestimation of me…”
“… will work in my favor,” he finished. “Seems we all underestimated her.”
He turned into the transfer station’s loading bay, hit the button on a garage door remote and rolled to a halt inside a large shed, beside two other trucks.
He set the roll-up door to close behind them and they jumped out.
On his instructions, they ditched the coveralls and left them in a laundry hamper—where he’d dug them from, presumably.
Underneath, he wore faded jeans and a gray T-shirt stretched over a chest that promised to be every bit as spectacular as the fictional one.
He kicked off the work boots and lined them up beside several other pairs, pulled on a pair of worn leather boots—his own, presumably—tossed his cap onto the truck’s driver’s seat, and held out a hand for hers.
“Should I hold onto it?” she said. “For a disguise?”
“I’ve known better disguises. And I thought you weren’t into theft.”
She handed it over. “A dirty cap isn’t quite the same as a dirty truck.”
He picked several curly strands from the cap and pocketed them, then climbed up to stash it in the glove compartment, his jeans tightening across his ass as he leaned into the cab. She heroically forced her eyes away.
“Is this where we whip out the Aston Martin?” she said, as he jumped down.
He gave that sly half-smile. “I’m guessing all the wry little jokes in the book—they were your additions?”
Compliment or criticism? She hadn’t intentionally put any jokes in the book. Holt wasn’t the joking type, and neither was Galina. She was pretty sure Nika hadn’t laughed the entire time she’d known her—but then, what was there to laugh about?
“You’re taking this all relatively calmly,” he said as she followed him around to the front of the truck.
“Not on the inside, I assure you. In my job, a blank face is the first line of defense.”
“Mine too.” He stopped at a large black motorcycle and opened a saddlebag, pulling something out and tossing it to her. She fumbled to catch it before it hit a slimy puddle at her feet.
“Jeans?” she said, holding them up.
“They’ll be better protection than those.” He nodded at her capris. “Your boots should be sturdy enough, though don’t go scratching my bike with those heels.”
She checked the label. “You knew my size?”
“I used special spy software to get your measurements.”
“Really?”
“I Googled,” he said, shrugging on a black biker jacket and zipping it up.
“There were photos from your book launch.” He indicated she should change, and turned away, rummaging in the bag.
She stared at his back. A man who could tell a woman’s size by looking at her had to be a man who’d been in a relationship—and a man who’d paid attention to that relationship.
Holt’s wife had gone missing while on assignment for the CIA and was never found, leaving him in emotional limbo. That was all Nika’s idea. Was it true?
“I’m not hearing any dressing going on there,” he called. “We need to hurry, before they figure out where we’ve gone.”
She tucked the jeans under her arm and unzipped her capris. “So you did plan this.”
“An internet search and a stop at Walmart hardly constitute planning. I had to act fast. This is all new to me, but the Agency and the Feds have known about you a little while. I wasn’t sure how much time we had.”
“The FBI now? And the CIA?”
“A joint task force, no less. And those guys don’t like working together unless they absolutely have to. Nice being special, isn’t it?”