Against the Dark (18 page)

The stuff was still decrypting. “Who cares?”

“I do,” she said.

The file was open. He scanned through charts, matching what he remembered to what he saw. This wasn’t it. He started decryption on another file while he narrowed down his shipping companies to three. Closer. He plugged new variables into a side equation.

She had more for him.
You had one. You had a Plan B and it needed to allow you to complete your mission. What was it?

He shook his head. He didn’t want to lie to her, but how could he just type it out?
To throw you under the train, but that was the backup plan before I fell for you.

She was typing furiously.
I was plan B. You would’ve let me take the fall
.

He stared at the words on the screen, feeling trapped by them. He had the crazy impulse to grab the device, to type that it wouldn’t have come to that. But he knew as well as any Associate that he didn’t have that level of control.

Even giving me the gun was part of it. Not about trust,
she added. She watched his face, wanting him to deny it.

He was about to protest when he realized that this was his chance to create the secure wall between them that he’d wished for. He could do it. Rip off the Band-Aid. He looked at her straight and mustered up all the coldness from the depths of his lonely life and asked, “You want a medal?”

Bewilderment shone in her eyes. He knew she was picturing herself in that room, at Borgola’s mercy.

There was nothing more to say.

A soft beep. He turned away. He had his info now: Caslon Shipping. He called up the routing and scheduling charts and figured out the boat’s data.

He’d done what it took to get the intel he needed to save hundreds of kids. That’s who he was. Dax’s guys could get the location off satellite feeds now. They could get to the people on time. He grabbed the earpiece he used with Dax and turned to her.

The pain and bewilderment in her eyes killed him. He’d fucked her and he would’ve let her die. Worse than die. An unspoken question:
How could you?

What was he supposed to tel her?
Now that I know you, I wouldn’t have devised a plan like that?

So he met her eyes once more, let her see him for who he was, let her hate him. It was the hardest thing in the world. He had the information he’d been willing to risk everything for, but her pain twisted into his heart like a knife. He reminded himself that she was a thief, that she’d taken a gamble when she ripped off Borgola. None of it mattered.

She was the one to look away now.

He got out of bed, went into the bathroom, and shut the door. He turned on shower and the fan and activated the line to Dax.

The spray from the water misted his arm as he waited. It would soon be light in California, but it would still be dark out in the Pacific, which would make it all the easier for the team to take over the boat, pirate-style. The feds would be involved after the takeover. Some story would get concocted to make it look like a win for the feds and the feds alone.

And Dax would get a good deal of money tucked into an account in the Caribbean. Not that Dax needed it—Cole felt quite sure Dax was wealthy many times over.

Voicemail.

He tried the alternate line, staring at the shower where he’d had the hottest sex of his life. He thought about Borgola’s idea that she be his decorator, remembering how she’d squeezed his leg. He’d forgotten to tease her about it. It was too late now.

She’s not for you.

Dax answered. “Dax.”

“It’s me. I’ve got an Internet blackout and not much time,” Cole whispered. “We’re looking for a freighter out of Hong Kong run by Caslon shipping, likely under one of three flags…” he read it all, the identifiers, routing, last port, destination. He could hear Dax typing away.

They had it.

“How hot is it there?” Dax asked.

“He doesn’t know anything.”

“How hot?”

“I’m fine. I want to shepherd this.”

“Is he looking at you at all?” Dax asked. “I mean it. You won’t be extractable—”

“This isn’t that.” Cole took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes, glanced at himself in the mirror—skin flushed, eyes a shade of wild. Volatile, that’s the only word for it. But Dax didn’t have the luxury of seeing his face, and Dax trusted his men to report when their rooms were bugged or when enemies threatened or when the pain of destroying a woman was burning a coil clear through their hearts.

“I’ll see this through,” Cole said lightly, as if he were ordering breakfast or something—I’ll have egg whites. Wheat toast. “This disintegration will be more productive if I shepherd it.”

“Productive for the Associate? Or the logistician?”

“Both.” A nation or an organization in chaos was the most fertile ground for intelligence gathering, and Dax knew it.

“Question,” Dax said. “Has it ever struck you as odd that helio astronomers don’t simply commission rocket ships to take them directly into the sun? Imagine the data they could glean from flying directly into the sun. Don’t they want to know?”

“This isn’t that.”

“No, it’s not. Because what you want to know can’t be known.”

“We done?”

A silence. “There’s nothing you could’ve done to save them. They overdosed and they died. It’s an unknown you can’t solve for.”

Cole let the silence expand.

“The girl?”

“I’m taking her home,” Cole said.

“Do we need to worry about her?”

“No.”

“I have a situation in Rio,” Dax said. “I need you to wrap this up and leave. The Krevass. It’s not good.”

This was Dax’s way of asking him to look beyond this end.

“Rio. Got it.”

He hung up. Dax was wrong. Like hell this was about Cole’s parents. He shook the image of their dead eyes out of his mind. The feel of cool skin.

He’d get Angel out and come back and wrap this thing. He felt relatively sure that Borgola would see the capture of the ship as an isolated incident. He’d suspect somebody in the shipping company; he certainly wouldn’t think his secret safe had been compromised. Which meant they could unravel other parts of his organization at relative leisure, start picking people up before evidence could be destroyed.

Cole had been through this a number of times; there would be some point where things really started imploding, a free-for-all where the guy at the top got crazy suspicions and made all the wrong decisions. Cole suspected that people had self destruct modes. He very much wanted to know why they got tripped and what affected them. It wasn’t about his parents—he just wanted to develop a theory of implosion behavior. Dax wasn’t a logistician, a mathematician. He didn’t get how important it was to know these things.

Cole would get away in the end, and Borgola would be dead or in a supermax. A job reference from a guy serving life in a supermax tended to be pretty solid with the set he typically worked for. It would make it a piece of cake to infiltrate the Krevass.

The people on the boat were safe. He had a plum opportunity to study an implosion. His next assignment would be great.

So why the hell did he feel like the world had ended?

She was a criminal, and she was expendable, yet she was walking away. What more did she want?

She was almost done packing up her things. She knew she could leave without his driving her out of there, but she didn’t want to be stupid about it. She’d take the ride home; he owed her that much.

She zipped up her bag and went to the dresser to grab her earrings and purse, glancing briefly in the mirror.

One of her favorite and most distinctive hair beads was missing.
Shit
.

Her heart sank as she remembered her braid getting smashed between two boxes in the safe. If that had jostled the bead loose, it would have probably fallen off there in the safe. Of course there were a number of other ways it could have come off, but she had a bad feeling it was back in the safe. She could just imagine it, gleaming on the padded floor for Borgola to see. Oh, he’d definitely recognize it.

Could Cole have dislodged it on purpose? No, she couldn’t imagine that. But he wouldn’t want her going back to retrieve it—he had the information he needed, and he didn’t give a rat’s ass about her safety. He might actually try and prevent her from going back. It was all up to her.

Her blood raced with fear and excitement. She knew where the cameras were, knew the route to take. The place was a piece of cake.

She would handle it herself.

She grabbed her lucky lipstick off the bedside table and put on a coat.

Two minutes later she was slipping through the early morning shadows. The guard at the end had changed over—not that asshole Mapes this time. She’d brought along a paperclip and she used Cole’s trick, tossing it into the hall on the other side of the opening, causing him to investigate so that she could slip by. It was almost five a.m.; she didn’t have much time until the house awoke. But she didn’t need much time. And Cole could go straight to hell.

He would’ve let her go down easy as anything; she’d seen the truth of it in his eyes. He hadn’t even bothered to deny it. He was a jerk. An asshole.

But deep down she didn’t really think it. The hate felt less poisonous than the hurt, that’s all.

She slipped down the hall like a quicksilver ghost through the morning quiet, heading out onto the dark grounds and around the perimeter. All the shame and anger and worry fell away as she went; it was only her and the danger and the darkness. Macy was right: Angel did love the high wire.

She picked Borgola’s exterior office door lock in half the time Cole had. She’d let him do the locks on the last round because they were together on a job, and you wanted to cut the competitive crap when you were on a job.

She felt her respiration slow as she pocketed her pick and wire set and went in. Even her eyes felt calmer, like they could take in more, and she thought if she looked into a mirror, they would be a clearer, lighter brown.

Cole had suggested safecrackers like her were consummate observers. The mistake didn’t surprise her; a lot of people thought picking a lock or cracking a safe was about acute senses, but that suggested you were apart from the lock you wanted to open, and really it was about sinking into the lock, being one with the lock. Or more—you had to give something up to it in order to let it into you. There was a certain amount of vulnerability in the process, but it was quite safe, too, because a safe wouldn’t do things like enchant you and fuck you and use you and not care if you were strung up and gutted. A safe was, in a word, safe.

The alarms were still offline, thanks to Cole. Eight minutes—that’s what this would take her. She’d be back before Cole was out of the bathroom. And if not, fine. Let him freak out.

In and out.

She would be home in time to make her meeting with the seamstress for Lisa’s curtains, she realized. It would be like nothing had ever happened.

She entered Borgola’s closet and hit the first combination lock. She put in the numbers and opened it. She always memorized the combinations, just in case. You always built in redundancy where it didn’t cost you.

She slipped through the torture filming room. Letting her get caught was his Plan B? It was unthinkable. Well, what did she expect? He was a criminal, a parasite, a jerk, some kind of operator with a boss who was probably Coke to Borgola’s Pepsi.

Her self-destructive man radar hadn’t been off after all. It just hadn’t picked up on how very destructive he was to her.

She moved the hutch aside as Cole had done and opened the walk-in. Three minutes she’d been gone.

She spied the bead nestled in the black rubber matting on the floor below the boxes, wedged into a horizontal slit. She grabbed it and pocketed it. Then she spotted the diamond bags on the shelf near the door.

Her heart beat a little faster.

Back in the car with Macy and White Jenny, she’d so badly wanted to hold them, to watch them sparkle in her palm, to complete the ritual. Instead she’d deprived herself, like she had to prove she wasn’t really into it anymore.

What the hell.

She grabbed the fattest bag, pulled it open, and tipped the diamonds into the shallow cup of her palm. She drew back the bag so that the jewels made a fat line of glitter.

She moved her hand, specking the small room with tiny disco ball sparkles, then she put her cheek to them. She felt curiously let down, holding all of that wealth in her palm. She remembered that let-down feeling from the old days. She’d always felt sure the stones would make everything different, but they never did. Yet she’d always had to hold them. She couldn’t pass up holding them.

She got them back into the bag and put the bag on the shelf, then she checked her phone. Five minutes she’d been gone; she’d burned an extra minute with the diamonds. She slipped back out, shut the door, and set the hutch back in place.

“Fancy meeting you here, Angel.”

Borgola. She spun around. He stood in the dark on the other side of the room; she couldn’t see him but she could see the red record light of his camera.

She pulled the gun out of her belt. Hands grabbed her from behind and disarmed her easily. So easily.

The warmth went out of her.

“I knew the Association would show up,” he said. “I certainly didn’t expect them to send such a lovely Associate, though.”

What was he talking about? Wildly she tried to shake free of the man holding her. She kicked for his knees, his balls, his toes. He avoided her attacks with a liquid level of ease that suggested years of training. More guys came out of the darkness.

“We’ll start in the chains,” Borgola said from behind the camera. “But I think it might be fun to do a round robin.”

She kicked fiercely, connecting with a knee, but there were four guys on her now, all easily as strong and deft as Cole, and they pressed her to the carpeted wall and locked metal cuffs around her wrists and ankles so that she was nothing more than a decorative X, a foot up on the wall. They checked her pockets and took her phone, her bead, and her tool.

She nearly threw up when Borgola came toward her. He handed the portable camera to yet another guard.