Against the Dark (17 page)

She gave Cole a horrified look.

“Focus,” he whispered, and he began to wander around the perimeter, examining the fixtures and edges. “The safe is in here somewhere. This room leads to it.”

Focus?
They killed people and filmed them dying here. Cole searched for the safe. Was he not shocked? Was this business as usual for his set? What did he propose to do about it? And if he didn’t mean to do something about it, she sure as hell did.

He wasn’t surprised to find a mini-studio, knowing Borgola’s proclivities. This wouldn’t be where the main films took place—Cole would’ve noticed that level of activity, but Borgola didn’t use the room for nothing. Cole would’ve warned her if he’d known what they were going to find. Of course the old man would layer up his secrets.

His eyes fell on a rack of chains and whips—just the right size to conceal a walk-in safe door. He went over, lifted it easily, and set it aside. There it was—a small door embedded in the wall, and what looked to him like a Fenton Furst combination lock. Angel would know. She was back in the main part of the room looking at the implements, transfixed by the glass iron maiden.

He went to her. “Ready?”

She gave him a dark glance. “So he’s more than the world’s biggest slime-pimp-bag.”

“Come on.”

“Why aren’t you surprised? Did you know about this?”

“I know what kind of guy he is.”

“This can’t just…go on,” she said.

“Don’t worry.”

“What does
don’t worry
mean? Don’t worry, it’s just a torture chamber? Never mind? What kind of business are you people in?”

Cole wanted to tell her he wasn’t in any kind of business like Borgola. He wanted to tell her about the boat, that getting into the safe would help people in trouble, but he couldn’t risk it. If they were caught, he wouldn’t talk, but she might. “Do I seem like I’m on his side here?”

“Obviously not. But are you on the side of
this
?”

“Of course not.” He took her by the shoulders and turned her around, faced her toward the alcove. “Open it.”

She turned back to him. “I can’t forget seeing something like this.”

“Leave him to me,” he said. She watched his eyes, looked for something more, but it’s all he could give her. He nodded at the safe. “In and out,” he said.

She sucked a breath through her teeth. “Right.” She approached the safe, circling her shoulders, loosening them. He trailed behind and stopped when she stopped. She put out her hand for the flashlight. He handed it over and she played the beam around the face of the safe, out to the corners, in to the lock mechanism.

She handed back the flashlight and ran her fingers almost lovingly down its face. “Hello,” she whispered.

“Can you do it?”

“Yeah. This is a deluxe Fenton Furst. Two kinds of interference built in, but I wouldn’t be surprised if this one had something extra. No two are alike.”

“You can open it?”

“If you take the heat off.”

“That I can do.” He began creating a workaround, just like he’d done on the outer door.

“I’m sure it’s inside, too,” she said.

“Not for this one.”

“You’re sure?”

“I’m on the security team. I know how this place gets wired.” He worked away, rerouting and clipping so that the alarm wouldn’t sound when the seal got broken.

“We missed the internal alarm in the bedroom the other night.”

“You think?”

“Well, who the hell adds extra security to a Fenton Furst?”

Cole smiled wistfully. “Walter Borgola.”

She held the tools for him as he worked around the alarm, seeming to anticipate his needs. He loved how she knew her way around the process, and he loved how she felt as a partner. Every Associate had a quality of presence on a job; Arturio was predatory and lethal, like a very dangerous fox, or at least he had been before he lost his wife. Macmillan tended to be leonine—brilliant, majestic, splendid in his arrogance. But Angel was smooth, and there was a calm, wily softness to her. Like a mink, he thought. Soft and dangerous. Beautiful and sharp. A mink in the wild, though—not there to make anybody’s goddamn coat. And so alive, too—she seemed more alive in the dark and the danger.

“Ready for you,” he said. “I thought I’d have to blow this thing once I found it.”

“You can’t blow this kind,” she said matter-of-factly.

“At all?”

“A blast big enough to blow this model would destroy the contents.”

“Have you tried?”

“It was part of my apprenticeship. Blowing these things.”

He straightened in surprise. She’d worked with Furst.
Jesus
. Furst only took the best—like the MIT of safecracking. He’d wondered how she’d worked up a sensor like that. She set a stool in front of the safe and stepped on. No shortage of stools in this room, he thought wryly. She loosened her shoulders some more, getting into the zone. Then she set up the safe like she’d set up the first one with her numerical sticker and magnifying glass. She stuck the earbuds into her ears and placed her tool—that seemed to be what she called it—onto the body of the safe, and went to work.

He moved to the other side of the room to listen for anything out in the office and beyond, Glock in hand.

This was probably how she worked with her gang, he thought. Somebody looking out, somebody doing tech, though she hardly needed a lot of help for an inside job like this. He suspected she could’ve handled taking off the alarm if she’d needed to—certainly given the schematics she could’ve. And she’d had the best training; the woman was nothing short of a master criminal. He shouldn’t admire that, but he did; Cole had always admired true mastery. He loved how she’d greeted the safe like an old friend. He loved how she was cool under fire but just a little bit vulnerable, and how she could melt into the shadows as well as any pro, yet she hated the limelight. He wondered why. An esteem thing? Shame? It made him want to protect her.

And that was dangerous.

He moved away, as if he could distance himself from his protective feelings. He concentrated on monitoring the sounds beyond the room, giving her an oasis of calm as he tamped down his emotions.
Get the intel and get her out of here,
he told himself.
And then walk away.

“Pssst.”

He turned.

She stood next to the open safe door with just a bit of the devil in her eyes, all hot in her jeans and dark shirt and braid.

Admiration swelled through him. The space between them went electric as he moved toward her, eyes locked on hers. God, her excellence was sexy. Her enjoyment was sexy.
She
was sexy. But she was so much more than all that—she was different from any other woman he’d ever met. He’d recognized her on a gut level at that party and he’d wanted to be near her ever since.

It was here that he realized it: he was falling for this woman.

A lump formed in his throat. Because he still might have to sacrifice her. Collateral damage. She was in the game, after all, a low-level criminal and a highly convenient pawn—a woman who’d walked into Borgola’s mansion of her own accord…to rob him. No Associate on the planet would choose her over hundreds of innocent lives.

He’d told himself earlier that he’d try to save her if he could. That was no longer true, he realized.

He’d try to save her even if he couldn’t.

He moved lightly and quickly into the safe, as though he hadn’t been knocked off kilter, as though the gravity of her wasn’t warping the one true path he’d been on for so long. A woman didn’t factor into his mission, his life. A loving relationship wasn’t even on his radar. You couldn’t work with it, you couldn’t solve for it.
No
, he told himself—one simple word to clear away the complexity.

Not for you.

He braced himself and strolled past her.

The safe was set up like a walk-in closet lined with metal shelves that held boxes of different colors.

“Hopefully you plan to really screw this guy,” she said.

“I do.”

He pulled out his phone and took a shot of the way things looked, and then quickly located what he sought: the agreements and ownership documents. They consisted of a few files and two flash drives. He kneeled on the floor, sorting out the important stuff.

She was looking at the shelves. Going for the diamonds?

“Come here and help me,” he said. “Quick.” He had her turn the pages of a coded list as he shot them, one after another. Shipping concerns, ports.

Bingo
.

He had what he needed to solve the equation, but just to be safe, he emailed the shots to Dax. The team would be assembled on the air strip by now, waiting for the intel. He felt almost himself once more.

People had emotions all the time. You learned to un-choose them.

Now to get fingers into the rest of the man’s organization. They went through other files, and Cole snapped copies of everything in hard copy as she laid them out: Hong Kong concerns. A school in Sumatra. Slavik, German, Colombian, Panamanian. The guy had operations everywhere. Every piece of this would give him worlds.

He sensed Angel acting as the alert one now, one ear on the sounds beyond the safe as she assisted him. It allowed him to work faster.

“Just a few last things. Nobody knows we’re here. Hand me that flash.”

She complied. When he glanced at his phone he realized nothing he’d sent had gone through. Why couldn’t he transmit? This was bad—had Borgola blocked signals? Was he onto them?

“What?”

“Connection’s down.” If he could get the stuff onto his laptop back in his room he could do a workaround. “Help me put this stuff back.”

Together they restored the safe to its original appearance, working in harmony except for the one time when her long braid got caught between two boxes they shoved in simultaneously. She gave him a scolding glance, like he wasn’t paying attention well enough, but it was more comical than anything, as if they were working too much in unison.

They didn’t even need to use the photo for a guide; Angel knew where everything went, as if she’d made a mental map. They closed up the safe and got the hell out of that room, sneaking back out through his office and into the night.

“Midnight stroll.” He took her hand. Even if they got caught now, the only oddity would be how they’d gotten out of the room unseen.

Still they were stealthy, heading back the way they’d come, slipping carefully through the shadows and the blind spots. Angel’s dark hair flashed like silk in the moonlight, but something seemed to have come over her. There was so much underground with her; veins of secrets, rich with emotion.

He turned to her. “You okay?”

“You don’t get to ask that. Like you’re my friend or something.”

It was cold water in his face. She was absolutely right—he wasn’t her lover, her friend, or her ally. He was a blackmailer who’d made her feel dirty, used. He’d used her when he got her off in front of the cameras, and he’d used her for her Fenton Furst abilities. He had no right to her secrets. No right to her. “You’re right.” he said.

She’s not for you
. He’d transmit the data and get Angel the hell out. The farther away they got from each other, the better.

Too late he caught sight of a man in a shadowed alcove. The man wandered into the lit part of the corridor. Mapes.

“Out for a stroll?” Mapes asked.

“Got a problem with that, Mapes?” Cole tightened his arm over Angel.

Mapes smiled, gave him an innocent face. “
I
don’t,” he said. Emphasis on ‘I’.

Cole’s pulse sped. What had Mapes seen? Cole didn’t like the way he looked at them.

Cole smiled. “Well, if somebody decides it’s a problem, I’m sure they’ll let me know.” They took off again, strolling down the hall, doing the excruciating sort of pretending that they were doing now. They slipped back into the room without turning on the lights, but even in the dimness he noted the grim line of her jaw.

“Not your biggest fan,” she observed. She was speaking carefully for the camera and recorder, which was still covered, but she wanted to know if Mapes was a problem.

“He’s nobody,” he said. “Just jealous.” He grabbed his laptop, sat next to her on the bed, and opened a browser. No connection. He tried the house network, and still nothing. Sometimes Borgola got paranoid and had his tech block people’s ability to connect. It didn’t mean the old man suspected him specifically, though it could. He’d feel better once he transmitted. He fired up his Internet workaround, setting up the walls to create a secure and unblockable connection.

If only he could set up walls like that between him and Angel. Shut down his emotions. Cut the heat between them. He started transferring the files over and began low-level decryption, waiting for various bars to fill.

“The guy seemed like a menace, though.”

“The dinner went beautifully. Nothing can spoil that for us.” He looked at her significantly. “It’s all good. I knew it would be.”

She regarded him thoughtfully. “What if our dinner hadn’t been so delightful?”

He tapped in a few more commands and started one of his logostics equations running. “I always knew it would.”

“My dad has this saying,
Ratón conoce más que solo madriguera, y es capturado por del gato presto.
”

Alarm shot through him.

“It means, the rat that only knows one hole is soon caught by the cat.”

“I know what it means, darling.” Worse, he knew what she meant. What if they’d gotten caught? That had been the question that turned her mood back there. He needed to make it right. Somehow. Not now. “You gotta let me concentrate on this thing.”

The workaround failed. He’d have to do this the old fashioned way—by running the equations and calling Dax with the locations and routes. He went through the photos, grabbing details from the hard copy agreements, then started in on the downloads from the flash.

Angel poked him.

“Not now,” he whispered.

She showed him something written on the pad.
What was Plan B? And I’m not talking about escape routes.

He shook his head.

“What?” she hissed.