Cease and Desist (The IMA Book 4) (15 page)

California.

California seemed to be a blend of everything. There were parts that reminded me of the Oregon where I had grown up — forested, temperate suburban areas. San Francisco, on the other hand, reminded me of Seattle, although the perpetual melancholy induced by the grayscale environment had an overlay of consciously superficial good cheer. And there were parts of California, like Death Valley, that burned as bright and as hot as the deserts of Arizona.

There was something for everyone here, no matter which climate you preferred, and maybe that was why Michael was intent on staying in that state. He was just as amorphous, changing into whatever was most convenient to get the job done.

But not in San Francisco, apparently.

“We've officially worn out our welcome. We have to get out of the city today. It's no longer safe.”

Safe. I shook my head.

The whole time AMI had been stationed here, had we been like sitting ducks? It seemed unwise, having all of us in the same place; a well-timed bomb could have easily wiped our resistance movement off the face of the earth if our location were discovered. And knowing about those ex-yakuza who wanted Michael dead, the city felt less safe, still.

But everything seemed obvious in hindsight.

The rain started again. As it spattered against the windows I rubbed my arms, feeling as though ants were crawling on my skin.

I shuddered, and rubbed harder, wishing that the warming feeling spreading up my arms could mitigate the growing coldness I felt inside.

“What are you going to do with the two office suites?” I asked as the thought occurred to me.

Michael looked up with a frown. “Sell them when things settle down. Rent them out.”

“To whom? How?”

“That's not what's important right now.”

“I was just curious.”

“Don't be.”

Curiosity killed the cat
. Adrian had said that to me before, though in his case it was more like,
curiosity tortured the cat for a while, then killed it when it got bored.

The rejoinder was
satisfaction brought it back
. But I wasn't satisfied. Hadn't been so for a long time. My pitiful contributions did little for our cause, and I could feel Michael losing patience with me for that.

I glanced towards the room where Cliff was messing with the computers. After his questions from before, I wasn't sure I trusted him to complete the job.

“Should I help him then?” I asked impatiently.

“No. You stay with me.”

I folded my arms and waited, but no further commands were forthcoming. “Doing?”

Michael made an ominous sound without looking up. He scrolled through his phone — a different one than the model I'd seen him with last night. That was never good.  He might have broken the other one in anger. I'd seen him do that before.

“Emeryville is too close,” he muttered, swiping his finger across the screen. “Oakland is too unsafe.”

“What about Berkeley?” I asked. It seemed to cater to a whole host of people, and there was anonymity in numbers. I was feeling pretty useless just standing here. I had to do something.

“No,” said Michael.

I almost argued, but didn't. God knows what was waiting for us there. A bunch of trained ninjas masquerading as college students, maybe. I settled for glaring at him. If he noticed, he was pretending not to. “Then why don't we leave California entirely?” I asked him. “Why the hell not? We could just go.”

“No,” Michael said again, just as shortly. “We're going to Sacramento. I've decided.”

“How?” What I wanted to ask was why, but I knew he wouldn't answer. “By bus?”

“That never goes well,” Michael said. “We're going by plane.”

“And that's safer? On a plane you're essentially trapped in a steel coffin in the middle of the sky.”

Michael nodded. “Security's more rigid. Anyone can get on a bus.”

People like us
, I thought.
People the airlines are trying to screen out. Vigilantes and suspected terrorists.

“Are you serious?” I asked him.

A line formed between his eyebrows. “There's a flight leaving from the San Francisco airport in an hour — and we're going to be on it. Pack your things, anything you need. Wear layers.” In a low voice, he said, for the second time, “we won't be coming back.”

There never was any going back. Not with him.

To reminisce was human nature. Did Michael have many regrets? Or had he simply trained himself not to dwell on them?

I pulled on a tank top, with a button down shirt, and a hoodie. I slid a watch around my wrist, shoved everything that mattered into a battered suitcase, and everything that really mattered into my giant bag that would double as carry-on. I didn't have time to wash my hair, so I knotted it into a messy up-do, and added a pair of oversized sunglasses to hide my puffy eyes.

Michael was wearing a t-shirt under his leather jacket, jeans. He was screwing open a can of modeling dough. I stared at him in disbelief as the familiar smell assailed me.  It smelled like childhood.

“What are you doing?”

He drew his gun from his jacket and covered it in two cans' worth of the stuff. He tossed the dough-covered gun in a Tupperware container, and zipped it into the duffel. “The dough absorbs x-rays.”

Michael glanced at me, nodded. “Let's go.”

We hailed a taxi. A light drizzle was falling. The driver said nothing to us beyond the usual pleasantries, and once that was over, he cranked up the radio, blasting pop music.

Michael let his hand fall on my thigh, and I could feel the heat of his skin through my jeans. It made my clammy, rain-chilled skin buzz and tingle, and I shifted in my seat, darting a nervous look at him. He was leaning back with his eyes closed, the thumb of his free hand slung through his belt loops: a large predator at rest. “I'm so tired,” he said.

“Me too.”

“I know that.”

He stroked my leg with his large hand. I stared at his long, squared-off fingers: they were beautiful — strong, masculine, and deadly.

“I'm too hard on you.”

I put my hand on his. The heat of him seared, and the look that he gave me when he opened his eyes burned even hotter. I flushed, and suddenly the three layers I was wearing made me feel much too warm.

“Sometimes,” I said, shrugging off the coat.

His eyes dropped to my chest, which pushed out when I started to slide the sleeves of my coat off, and back to my flushed face. Then he kissed me, grabbing the sides of my button down shirt, bunching the fabric in his strong hands to pull me in as close as the seat belt would allow as the woman on the radio sang about starry eyes and electric storms and the light rain pelted the windshield. He kissed me, and for a few dangerous minutes, I forgot all my doubts, losing myself in his warmth, in his scent, in him.

I shifted uncomfortably, trying to free my arms from behind my back, and Michael laughed huskily. He pulled the sleeves over my hands. “Speaking of too hard…” he said, darting a wicked look at the driver before closing my fingers over his denim-clad erection.

Oh God
. I inhaled sharply and yanked my hand away as a spike of arousal punched through my gut.

“Not in the car,” I whispered, although there was a part of me that was considering letting things play out, and seeing where it took us, and hoping the driver wouldn't notice.

Maybe secretly hoping that he
would
.

My face flushed. What was I thinking?

He laughed again, and kissed me, a light touch of his lips against mine, the kind of kiss that promised more and left one wanting. Then he let his hand fall on my thigh again. “Put your jacket on your lap,” he said. “You're sitting on it. It's going to get wrinkled.”

I gave him an odd look, but did as he said. I shook my head, and the cool draft felt like ice on my overheated face. That was pointless. Why was he…? — and then he slipped his hand into my lap, under the hoodie, and I stared at him, lips parted in shock.

Oh, I thought. Oh,
God
.

Michael stared back intently, parting me through my sweatpants, and began moving his fingers in hard, firm circles. I dug my fingers into the armrest, my breath faltering.

“Don't fight it,” he said, in a low voice that was almost unintelligible beneath the loud baseline of the pop music on the radio.

If I tried to speak, I would moan. I clamped my lips shut and tried to focus on breathing, but a small sound escaped me as he quickened the pace, alternating light touches with hard pressure as he caused the fabric of my clothes to chafe in a way that fringed on pain in its intensity.

I tipped my head back, sliding down in the seat as the tiny muscles fluttered with minuscule contractions that tightened my belly and sent little beads of pleasure trickling down my spine like the rainwater condensing on the windshield. There were tears forming in my eyes, and my mouth suddenly felt as dry as cotton as I attempted, fruitlessly, to speak.

Michael chuckled, and pulled his hand away. “You can thank me later.”

It was a quick drive to the airport, under fifteen minutes, even though traffic was bad. It could have lasted longer, and I wouldn't have minded.

Michael pulled away reluctantly when the taxi stopped, stroking my face with the fingers of his other hand. A courtesy that was all the more sweet for being so simple.

“It's very dangerous what you do to me.”

My lips still burned from his kiss. My body felt like it was plummeting, weightless, suspended. He'd been there to catch me every time I fell so far, but I was so afraid that one day, I'd find myself hitting the ground.
“I'll catch you
,
”
he'd said.  Oh, how badly I found myself wanting to believe him.

“Why is that?” I asked hoarsely.

“Because you make me want to leave all this behind.”

“Can't you?”

Michael shook his head slowly, each movement of his head brushing his lips against mine. “No,” he said, and the breath fueling that word tickled my face and neck, “I can't.”

Chapter Eleven

Process

Christina

The airport was packed with bodies. People huddled by the door in puddles of rainwater, clutching at their umbrellas like lifelines, shifting from foot to foot as they waited for taxis and rides that were far too late in coming.

When had it become too late for Michael? At one point did the choices we make become set in stone?

I bought a pretzel from a stand sandwiched between a fast food restaurant and a bookstore that only sold NYT best-sellers. I ordered my ballpark pretzel heavy on the salt and slathered in yellow mustard. I wanted to sigh when I realized it was still warm. We hadn't had breakfast. When Michael got distracted, food was relegated to the back of his mind.

With that thought, I ordered him one, too — not that he'd appreciate it — as well as two fresh-squeezed lemonades. From the look of disgust the vendor gave me, it was obvious he thought I was going to eat everything myself. Once that would have upset me, but my priorities had been forcibly rearranged over the last two years. My weight and appearance no longer made me feel quite as neurotic, because they were no longer the things that determined the outcome of my life.

Plus, a man had just been so driven by desire that he had fucked me in a moving car, so there was that.

Said man was coming out of one of the airport convenience stores. Stores for travelers who save everything until the last minute and realize as they're boarding that they've forgotten their sunglasses. Michael was shoving a brown paper bag in his coat pocket, and I wondered what
he'd
forogtten.

“Sacramento's that way.” I decided to pretend I hadn't seen the paper bag, wouldn't ask about it. See no evil, speak no evil. “Gate ten.”

Michael caught my sleeve, halting me in my tracks. A man bearing a heavy suitcase cursed under his breath as he was forced to step around us. “We're not going to Sacramento.”

I stared at Michael in surprise. “We're staying here?”

“No. We're going someplace else.”

This was too much. “But you said — ”

“Don't whine at me. I know what I said. I had no idea if that place was bugged, and Sacramento was the first place that came to mind. So I lied.”

The crinkling of the pretzel wrapper let me know that my fingers had tightened. I saw his eyes move to it, drawn by the sound. “You think they're following us?” I asked. “We were tailed?”

“Cliff said he didn't see them do anything, but that doesn't mean that they didn't. It only takes a second to drop a mike or plant a recording device.” He paused. “And to be perfectly fucking honest, I'm starting to wonder if the others can be trusted.”

It took a moment to wrap my brain around that; Michael had lied to the very people from whom he demanded absolute honesty.

I shook my head slowly. “But…but they hate Adrian as much as we do. They have just as much to lose as we do if he succeeds.”

“When things go wrong, you need to examine all potential sources of trouble.”

A light clicked on in my brain. “You think they're the trouble? The attack with the—” I coughed “—the attack. You think they could have been responsible?”

He gave me a wry smile. “You should know that better than anyone, sweetheart, with your lines of code. Just switching a one and a zero can fuck the entire thing up.”

I stared at him. He had a point — but I hadn't realized he knew that much about coding, that he'd been watching me that closely. I coughed to break the silence. “So where are we going?”

“Los Angeles.”

The city of Angels
, I thought.

Unfortunately, to be an angel, you had to die first.

“Here.”

I handed him the cooling pretzel and the lemonade sweating in my palm, and Michael stared at them as though he had never seen food before.

Then his eyes went to my face.

I flushed. “These are for you.” He continued looking at me, in that oddly predatory way, and I lowered my eyes. “Enjoy.”

I really, really hoped to God that his choice of locale wasn't an omen.

Suraya

It was cold. The night air chilled my bare legs. The bitter and frozen darkness cast nearby buildings into shadowy relief, whose pitch-black umbrage threatened to engulf the entire alley.

The clothing I had been given to wear was a poor fit, and made of cheap material, but showed plenty of skin. That was all that mattered, I suppose.

A man I had never seen before dropped me off at the curb, assuring me that I would be watched.

“Don't try anything,” he suggested, before driving away, lest I mistake their protection of their assets for any real sense of concern.

The first 'client' came not ten minutes after that unmarked car pulled away from the curb. It was as though someone had alerted him to my presence. Someone probably had. He cried afterwards and tried to insist that he wasn't a bad person as he slipped a few crumpled twenties from the pockets of his counterfeit jeans. I said nothing. How to tell someone that they're even more horrible than they're afraid of being, because sometimes compliance can be one of the greatest evils of mankind? It's easy to ignore evil acts — until they happen to you. It was almost easier to excuse the bigots than the ones who truly believed that they were good people at heart.

The unmarked car pulled up to the curb and I slid inside, mindful of my heels as I stepped over the muck stagnating in the gutter. There were two men in the car: one in the front seat, and one in the back, with me. I handed the man in back the cash, unsurprised when he patted me down to make sure I wasn't holding anything — drugs, money — back.

He shifted through the money quickly; men who deal exclusively in cash get a feel for it, the same way dealers do with cards. Any girl who tried to cheat these men in that way would be in for an unpleasant surprise. But I wasn't that stupid.

He finished his shuffling and seemed pleased. “This is good,” he said, and opened a compartment in the car, gesturing for me to help myself to one of the soft drinks. As if I were a child receiving a reward.

What do I do?

I selected a can of Coke. Those were safer, if you were afraid of being drugged. Easy to fix a bottle so that the cap looked as if it had been sealed all along.

I popped the top and took a long swallow of the sugary fluid, grateful for the way it washed the taste of sex out of my mouth, even though the bubbles burned the bruised parts of my throat.

The back windows of the car were pitch-black. I couldn't see where we were going, but the drive wasn't too long, so wherever they were based wasn't a great distance from where they had their girls turn tricks. I sipped my drink, trying not to look too curious or alert. It must have worked. The man laughed when I was startled by the car stopping and spilled Coke on myself.

“Get inside,” he said, herding me towards the door. He started to come with me, and then his phone started ringing — a foreign pop song I didn't recognize, although the syrupy lyrics piping from it suggested it was a love song.

How sweet. The pimp had a girlfriend.

But I had a role to play, so I said hesitantly, darting my eyes around for effect, “…alone?”

The man was already looking away from me, focused on his phone and whoever was on the other line. I wasn't sure which scenario would be worse — that the girlfriend was kept in the dark about her lover's secret life, or that she was complicit.

“You know the way to your room.”

The door locked behind me before I could say that no, I didn't, exactly. Not this way.

This whole situation — it reeked of a trap.

Fuck
.

Complicit was worse, I decided. Any woman who was accepting of a man who treated other members of her sex this way was pathetic. It suggested an implicit belief that women were objects and, at some basic level, deserved to be treated this way.

I looked around, and bent down to take off my heels. They were making far too much noise. I looped them around my wrist and headed down the corridor that led to the bedrooms, breathing as quietly as possible, hoping to hear any sign of movement or life. This place was as lifeless as a graveyard.

And then I heard something — the low rumble of voices speaking so as not to be heard.

Corridors can play tricks with echoes; they can make a voice seem as though it's coming from one direction when it's really coming from another. Through trial and error I was able to locate the source of the voices, and I was pleased that by some act of providence, they were having their conversation in the room where I'd laid the bug — if it was still there.

If something is too good to be true, it almost always is. These men had engineered every bar of my cage, and this sudden lapse in security and caution on their part made me wonder if they were trying to flush me out. Did they suspect something? What?

There's nowhere to run now.
I tightened my grip on my shoes and waited, breathing as shallowly as I was able.
I might as well stand here and listen.

So I heard it quite clearly when one of the men —my captor, I believed it was — said, “The boss says that the women aren't working hard enough.”

The Albanian — the one who seemed to be in charge in this place — scoffed. “He wants to come down here and do it better?”

The first man made a shushing sound, urgent and, yes, rather nervous.
Interesting
.

But the Albanian was not finished. “The women here make good money. We have a good thing here, a system. If we push too hard, it may dry up.”

He laughed at his filthy joke. The other man did not. When he spoke again, he sounded fearful. “They say he brings death wherever he goes.”

Were they talking about Adrian Callaghan? It certainly sounded like it.

“Fairytales.” He spat noisily. “The kind mothers tell little children to bring them back before dark. I hadn't realized you were so attached to the tit, Aleks. Perhaps I should send you back to your mother in Vlora.”

These men were from Vlora? That was an area notorious for human trafficking. Now I had an idea of where Callaghan had found them. The BN had connections to Eastern Europe; when Callaghan forced the merger, he undoubtedly took advantage of those contacts to advance his own private agenda.

Now I also had something to tell Mr. Boutilier.

The door opened, catching me off-guard, and I stumbled to the floor. My skirt rode up past my thighs and I brought it down with a curse in Hindi. The two Albanian were standing in the doorway looking at me with a thunderous expression of commingled shock and rage.

“What is this?” the Albanian said. “What are you doing here?”

“My room,” I said, “I couldn't find my room.”

“How did you get out?” He seemed a step away from violence.

I talked fast, stumbling in my haste. I was not worried about sounding unintelligible. I had fallen on his radar and earned his suspicion. He would be looking for flaws. “I worked the streets tonight.”

“Hmm,” said the second man—Aleks. “She is dressed like it.”

“How much money did you make?” The Albanian asked bluntly. He did the book keeping. He would know what the average amount was. Anything too high or low would brand me as a liar. Luckily, I'd kept count. I rattled off the value of the bills I'd given to the pimp with the phone fetish.

“That is not bad,” the Albanian muttered, and I let out a sigh of relief. “Why are you alone?”

“The man in the car — he had to go.”

Aleks made a snide-sounding remark in his native language. It must not have been flattering; the Albanian man laughed nastily. “Not so,” he said. “He goes on my terms only.”

“Probably courting that whore of his.”

“We will make examples out of them both,” the Albanian decided, clapping his hands together. The sound it produced was like a single gunshot.
A mercy the man with the phone will probably never know
.

I bowed my head and took a step backwards. “My room…? Please — ”

“He will take you,” the Albanian said, nodding at Aleks. “But first — little girl.”

When I looked at him, a bright light flashed. The Albanian man looked at his phone and nodded, rotating it slowly so I could see my own surprised face looking back at me.

“I have your face,” he said, “I have your face right here, so I will know it.” He stuck his phone in his pocket. “If I see it again around this place, it will not look so pretty next time.” All emotion disappeared from his face as he looked at me, his face terrifyingly blank. “Is that clear?”

I nodded quickly, and my fear was not feigned.

“Good.”

He snapped his fingers dismissively at his underling.

“Take Big Nose to her room—and figure out who should have done that from the start so that I may deal with him presently.”

Everything I had worked for was crumbling through my outstretched fingers.

I had compromised everything.

Michael