Femme Fatale (4 page)

He scrubbed his hands over his face and looked up in time to see Bear watching him with sympathy that instantly vanished. “Right, then,” Bear said brusquely. “Here’s some good news. Your Mystery Lady didn’t run far. Don’t know how she got there, but she left the docks
on foot and headed for the quaint cultural experiences of the waterfront. As far as we know, she’s still noodling about the shops, though we don’t currently have an exact location on her. It strikes me, Stellar, that the gentleman’s thing to do would be to return her coat.”

“You must have a mind-reading program installed into that OS of yours,” Jason said, pulling the parka from the end of the bed. This room was not so large that he couldn’t sit at its desk and reach just about anything he needed. He’d give the parka another examination before returning it to its owner, just in case it held any other little hidden thing to make his day miserable. With the cool fall nights, she might well be glad to see the thing again—though no doubt she’d have little welcome for him.

“Look after yourself on this one,” Bear said, and frowned. “And keep in touch. I’ve got dead air coming up for a while. That’s the hell of stealing sat feeds…can’t control the maintenance.”

Jason bunched the parka in his hand. The movement released a clean, crisp scent…something citrusy. He had to stop himself from bringing it closer to his face. “I always look after myself.”

“Yeah?” Bear said dryly. “Then quit grinning like a fool.”

“Get off.” Jason kept his voice mild. “I’ll be in touch.” He stabbed the quit key for the communications program and flipped the laptop closed.

He looked at the parka another long moment. It was a deep teal thing, or perhaps dark turquoise. The tan lining looked like it probably held secrets, things he needed to find before he returned it to her. He’d give it a good search, change his own clothes, and head right back to the waterfront. But for starters…

For starters he lifted the coat closer to his face and inhaled the scent of it.

Blue Crane.
As Beth fled for the refuge of the commercial waterfront, she considered Lyeta’s last words…and her own options.
Follow up on finding that computer keycard.
Okay, that was a given.
Check in with Barbara Price.
Also a given. Barbara might have some insight on Lyeta’s words…or she might know more about the MI6 agent now involved.

For Beth had no reason to consider him out of the game. He’d lick his wounds—not for very long, either—and then he’d be back after her. He thought she’d killed Lyeta; he suspected, rightly, that she had information of value. And he had a grudge.

She needed to stay ahead of him.

Returning to her hotel didn’t appeal to her. If Mr. MI6 had gotten a good look at her face, they might well have an ID on her by now, at least enough to know she was CIA-trained. They might well have broken her cover…they might be
at
her hotel. She could handle it if they were, but she didn’t want the delay the encounter would cause.

Best bet…get lost in a crowd. Find a corner to contact Barbara, courtesy of the highly enhanced PDA she had stashed in her sling pack, which she’d hidden near the warehouse and nabbed again on the way out. She couldn’t do much to disguise her basic look, but as she hesitated in the quiet shadows of the drawbridge on West Quay Road she pulled the band from her hair and bent over to give it a quick upside-down brushing. When she stood, flipping the blunt cut to fall into place around her shoulders, she had a different upper silhouette…and she could obscure her face simply by tipping her head.

The sling pack also held a sheer silk-knit gray twinset sweater; she pulled it on over her leotard, hiding her lean curves. Her backup pistol went in an ankle holster, and Wyatt into his discreet custom fanny pack. A light application of lipstick—just a shade more intense than her natural color—a little foundation to conceal her faint smatter of freckles and give her that fresh-faced morning tourist look, and she was ready to venture into the waterfront proper, an area with such intensity of charming character that it almost hurt. Shopping opportunities, African crafts and handmade items—all imported, since Cape Town itself had no booming cultural arts community—food for the hungry, quaint benches with a perfect view of Table Mountain and its end caps of Devil’s Peak and Lion’s Head—
3563 feet high,
she recited to herself—boat rentals, an IMAX theater and, out by the road to Cape Town proper, an aquarium.

Caffeine,
Beth decided. Caffeine was the way to start this day, and by then the Victoria Wharf Shopping Center would be open. If she could find a tourist-oriented bookstore or even a computer store with demo systems hooked up to the Internet, she might be able to make something of
Blue Crane,
at least as it related to South Africa. With luck,
under the table
would make more sense in the context of that information. Or Barbara would be able to help, and contacting her from a computer store was not likely to gather any attention at all. Testing a toy, that’s all.

She found a coffee shop and ordered herself something with foamy chocolate, choosing a powdered sugar doughnut. She considered contacting Barbara here and now, but it was too quiet here. Too obvious. She pulled the PDA from her sling pack, but powered it up only to consider Lyeta Denisov and her former lover, Kapoch Egorov.

There was Lyeta, a stunning digital image that could
well have been used as a cover photo for any upscale women’s magazine—if it hadn’t been for the cold, cold stare of her light blue eyes. Not a warm, inviting presence…very much a
beware of me
lady. In person, Beth had only seen her in blue Phantom night light or in the gloom of predawn; the photo jumped with the vivid color of Lyeta’s long red hair, the gentle waves of which did nothing to soften the sternness of her classic beauty. The photo proclaimed what she was: a woman of power, with intensity of life and ultimate self-confidence.

Beth found herself scowling and pressed her lips together, a fleeting self-admonishment. She took a deliberate sip of her cooling coffee. Lyeta was dead, and she’d chosen the path that ended her own life so prematurely. Now it was up to Beth to make sure Lyeta’s death—and her life—counted for something.

Beth returned to the PDA menu and picked the photo of Egorov. Another time, another world, he would have been called a crime kingpin. Now he was just a rich man of influence to most people, a charismatic man in his fifties with piercing blue eyes and a rakish scar on his cheek. But behind the scenes, Egorov played cultures against one another with terrorism as his tool and money and power as his reward. Now he was discovering what most people knew…that all the power in the world couldn’t cure what mankind had not learned to cure.

So he would die, and if Beth had her way, before he went he would know that his CIA mole had failed to kill Lyeta in time to protect his legacy.

Although the mole still had the chance to stop Beth. And the mole had far too many advantages for comfort—unlike Beth, he was not on the run. Mr. B.S., for Bad Sniper, although it amused her that the initials were multipurpose. And unlike Beth, Mr. B.S. likely had a local
team behind him, legitimately on the hunt for Lyeta and now the woman who’d supposedly killed her. Whereas Beth could not hunt for the mole, but simply do her best to evade him—and MI6—while she tried to understand Lyeta’s nonsensical death whispers.

Not undoable. But it would take some concentration…and just the right moves.

Not to mention doing without sleep for a while.
She closed Egorov’s photo and did some quick surfing on the PDA, blessing its many enhancements as she hunted for anything “Blue Crane.”

The little screen quickly filled with results, and she nibbled the doughnut, pondering and scrolling. Details on the bird itself, which didn’t seem like a useful thing to pursue. Various sports teams, mostly high school, didn’t strike her as particularly promising.

But ah…the fact that the Blue Crane was South Africa’s national bird…

That seemed like something. Just what, she wasn’t sure. But it was worth tucking away in the corner of her mind while she finished her coffee, blew doughnut crumbs off the PDA and slipped it back into her sling pack. As she slid out from behind the little round glass table at which she’d been seated, she caught the eye of the bored teen behind the service counter. He came right to attention, blushing a little behind his poor complexion, obviously considering those moments in which he’d been not so surreptitiously eyeing her. She asked him, “Know where I can find the Blue Crane?”

“Which one?” he blurted. He hastened to add, “There are so many of them right here on the waterfront…that’s not even counting the ones in town.”

Beth contrived to look confounded. “I don’t know,” she said. “I’m supposed to meet someone there.”

He shook his head. “You better ask ’em, or you’ll go bossies trying to track it down. Or try the shopping center, I suppose. There are a couple to choose from there. It doesn’t open for another hour, though.”

“Dankie,”
she said, and he grinned at her. Not necessarily a good thing; she didn’t want to be remembered. But then again, as the only customer who’d done anything more than rush in and out, she’d already gotten her share of attention.

But she’d learned something here, and that was worth something. Not only was her hunch right—there were local establishments with
Blue Crane
in the name—but she had her work cut out for her in sorting them out. It was a start…and Barbara Price could help her prioritize her search. She might even have the right tidbit of information to send her to the right place the first time.

Beth thought of the Breakwater Hotel, and decided against it. Even if it weren’t compromised, she couldn’t walk there and back before the shopping center opened. At the same time, the area had grown populated enough—mostly fishermen at this hour, but the occasional early-morning walker and overeager tourist—that she didn’t want to stay put. So she wandered, relaxed but her eyes surprisingly alert for a tall, hardened form in a dark olive oilcloth jacket. She strode past Market Square and over by the amphitheater, until she could make her way back to the shopping center and ease into the charm-laden building—a unique structure of indoor malls that from the outside looked like parallel buildings lined up against one another in stepping-stone fashion. The Blue Crane flower shop caught her eye right away; she didn’t stop. Unless she saw something that tugged at her, she’d simply “acquire” the shop locations to start with. Until then…

Quit looking for him,
she scolded herself as she noted
a pair of broad shoulders in drab olive. When the man turned he had a smartly trimmed beard and impressively hooked nose. Her MI6 man had had a straight blade of a nose with an interesting broad spot that spoke of a mild break.
It’s scary that you remember that, Flash.
By a Local Artists Only storefront, she caught sight of someone with a lean silhouette and light step, and instantly turned…

To find no one.

Good going, I Spy.
Clearly she’d been too long without a date. She’d have to do something about that when she got back to the States. Until then…

Blue Crane Sport and Surf. Blue Crane Books. Blue Crane Body Naturals. Beth stopped in, intrigued by the basket-held displays. Easy to leave something in this place. She made a point to run her hands along the bottom of every readily accessible basket, not really expecting to find anything. While she was there she bought new toothpaste and brush and found her favorite citrus body soap.
The four main classes of surfactants: Anionic, cationic, nonionic and zwitterionic.
Zwitterionic—as words went, who could beat that?

And upon leaving, she found herself facing an electronics and entertainment store. “I knew you’d be here somewhere,” she murmured at it. Better yet, it was one of the more populated stores in the center, full of kids playing with the games and adults admiring the big-screen entertainment system on display. The music was too loud to suit her purposes, but she found a spot near the entrance behind a stack of quiescent boom boxes and pulled out her personal digital assistant. A few quick shortcut commands with the stylus and the screen showed her the little dancer icon that Stony Man’s tech master, Aaron Kurtz
man, had installed on her PDA OS with much sly pleasure.

The dancer had blunt-cut hair and a unitard outfit, but was far too highly endowed to have made it as a professional; she danced across the small screen until Barbara Price’s image replaced her. It didn’t matter that it was late evening in Stony Man’s time zone; Barbara was somehow always there, always looking like Beth’s call was the most important thing in the world to her. Today Barbara didn’t bother with small talk. She said, “Things went badly.”

“They went badly,” Beth agreed, adjusting the ear bud that made Barbara’s end of the scrambled conversation private. “But not as badly as they could have. I have what she was carrying.”

Barbara frowned, with the faint drawing of her brow the only real manifestation of the expression. “Then why the delay? I expected to hear from you hours ago.”

Beth quickly sketched the events on the dock, and said, “I think I should stay. If Lyeta was right about Egorov’s involvement, then the Bad Sniper mole might be after the keycard. It’ll be a race to see who finds it first, and we have no idea what the mole already knows. You’ll lose too much time bringing in someone else. I’m already in place.”

“You’re compromised,” Barbara pointed out.

“You should be able to mitigate some of that from your end.” Beth kept her voice mild as two young teens hesitated by the boom boxes, swapping technical turns in Afrikaans accents thick enough to baffle her.

“Possibly.” Barbara gave her a thoughtful look. “But this isn’t the situation we sent you in to handle; you’re not prepared for it. You shouldn’t be alone, for one thing.”

“You never know,” Beth said, and she switched to
Russian for a few blunt words she didn’t want overheard. “Maybe Mr. MI6 will come along and I can convince him to play nice. I can use him, ditch him, and come home with the goods.” She added a quick description of the man, embellishing with a wicked grin.