Tall, Dark and Lethal (7 page)

He resented the tone of her voice. But he didn’t have time to worry about what she thought of him. It was bad enough that on some level he actually cared.
Don’t go there.

Okay, Bailey, here it comes.

“We are going to borrow another car, then break into the FBI’s local office,” he said as fast as he could, hoping she might miss the stickiest parts of the sentence.

Judging by the way her eyes widened and her jaw dropped, she hadn’t missed a thing.

Bailey leaned forward and let the man behind the desk catch a better glimpse of her cleavage. Cade stifled a groan, pretending deep interest in the settings on his camera. They were the only two visitors in the sparse waiting area at the FBI’s Newtown Square office, the hum of the air conditioner providing the background music for the not-so-subtle seduction that was happening at the front desk.

“It’s so nice in here. The weather is stifling outside. Too much humidity from that rain.” She fanned herself, pushing her breasts even farther out.

If the guy wasn’t careful, he was going to lose an eye. But the man seemed oblivious to danger.

“I’m just parched.” She licked her lips. Leisurely.

Cade shifted in his seat. Only because he was missing the feel of his gun at his back. He wasn’t one of those guys who felt off-kilter and naked without a weapon, but given a choice, he’d just as soon have it in his waistband, against his skin.

“Can I get you something to drink? We have a break room in the back.” The man looked like he would have been willing to offer a kidney if she needed it.

“You’re so sweet. I’m fine, thank you. But do you think I might use the little girls’ room?” She flashed a coy smile.

He pushed a button and motioned her through the second checkpoint, which was unmanned at the moment. They’d already passed through the metal detectors just inside the front entrance. “First door to the right.”

Cade set aside the camera he had picked up at a local shop to round out their cover. He tapped his foot on the industrial gray carpet, hoping the information they had on the layout of the building was correct, hoping that Bailey could perform her task without running into any trouble.

They could have waited until nightfall and maybe had an easier time getting in. Maybe. He was pretty good at doctoring locks and security systems, but without better tools and sufficient research, he’d determined the risks were too great. And he hadn’t wanted to wait. So they’d shown up as Jane Weigel, reporter from the
Philadelphia Inquirer,
and her photographer. They had an appointment with Agent Rubliczky about a new development in one of his old cases, they’d said.

Rubliczky was out because Cade had asked the Colonel to call the agent away for a meeting. He had prepped Bailey for her part of the mission and damn if she wasn’t a natural—she played the flirty reporter to perfection. The receptionist bought it down to the last tantalizing glimpse of her pale-blue lace bra. Hell, Cade was still hot and bothered from watching her seduce him.

The guy at the front desk was looking down the hallway after Bailey with rapture in his eyes, not wanting to miss a moment of her reappearance. Pitiful. Only two minutes passed. Cade settled in to wait with a bored expression on his face.

He didn’t have to wait for her too long.

She smiled at the receptionist as she sashayed by him on the way back, then sat next to Cade. “I think we’ll start with a quick summary of the case. Play up the age angle.” She sounded professional and preoccupied.

Five, four, three, two, one.
The fire alarm went off on cue.

The receptionist stood as he was shutting down his computer. “I’m sorry. We’ll have to evacuate. Emergency procedures.”

“No problem.” Cade strode to the door, showing only the slightest annoyance, and opened it for Bailey as people were filing out from the back offices. He watched them in the glass without turning around taking a head count. “We’ll wait in the car.”

They did, until it looked like everyone had come out. Four men and one woman—the ones who had the bad luck to be on weekend duty and a few who had hot cases running, he figured.

“Good job in there.” He kept his eyes on them as he talked to Bailey.

“I thought I was going to pass out from nerves,” she said.

But when he turned to her, he found her grinning. He knew why. He never felt as alive as during an op. And even if this one was pretty tame compared to most he’d been involved in, it was her first. And, let’s hope to God, her last. If the Colonel knew he was involving a civilian in this, he would have Cade’s head. Cade turned back to the FBI office.

“Do you really have to go back in?”

“Only if we want to figure out what’s going on. We are in trouble. I want to know how deep and how to get out of it. I need to see what they have on us.” He glanced at her.

She wasn’t smiling anymore. “Take your gun?” She popped the glove compartment open.

He hesitated for a second. He couldn’t really shoot an FBI agent. If things came to that—They wouldn’t. “It stays. If…”

Her eyes were dark with worry. “Yes?”

He decided not to say what he’d been about to say. “If lover boy comes to find you, just tell him I’ve gone off to stretch my legs. Keep him busy.” He offered a teasing grin.

She remained serious. “Be careful.”

“You bet.”

He slipped from the car and circled around the building at a distance and didn’t stop until he was in line with the bathroom window Bailey had left open for him. Good girl.

Nobody back here. Nothing but bushes. He made his way to the wall undetected, pulling on rubber gloves he’d picked up at the pharmacy on their way here.

He stopped to stare.

Close up, the opening proved to be smaller than it had appeared from afar when they’d circled the building during their twenty-minute recon. It had a wide outer frame, which he hadn’t fully seen from the bushes. The part of the window that actually opened was—

He consciously shifted his thoughts from focusing on the problem to moving forward, toward a solution. He wasn’t the type to walk away without trying.

He spent many long minutes attempting to get his shoulders through, performing moves that would have given a world-class extortionist a run for his money. At least he didn’t have to worry about making too much noise with the fire alarm still going.

A minuscule adjustment in angle allowed him to push through at last, and he glanced up at the motion detector in the corner above the double sink. The indicator light was off. Since even the smaller, regional FBI offices like this had some weekend coverage, the security system wasn’t on. No security cameras in the bathroom, either. Three hoorays for employee privacy.

He did have to make sure to keep his head down, however, when he stepped out to the hallway. He’d be recorded, but one of the rules of the game was not to worry about stuff that couldn’t be helped. They would know someone had been in here once they found Bailey’s hard drive gone, anyway. He tried to keep his face covered as best as he could and hoped they wouldn’t be able to identify him. The FBI security cameras weren’t like the ones at the corner convenience stores. No grainy, gray images here, no blurring. The video would have such high resolution they could count the small hairs on a fly’s behind.

He went straight to the computer lab. The Colonel had connections and had been able to tell him the exact location. All he was missing was an ID card for the scanner but it wasn’t a problem. When the emergency system was on, the scanner could be disabled by using an emergency override code on the keypad next to it. He had the code, thanks to the Colonel, who was risking his entire career and the future of the SDDU for him. The unconditional vote of confidence was humbling.

He was in the room a second later and going through the carefully labeled bags of evidence. Bailey’s hard drive was close to the top, identified by case number, date and address. It had come in only a couple of hours before, according to the date stamp. And had obviously already been worked on.

He stuck the piece of damning electronics under his shirt and was about to hightail it out of there when the alarm stopped. And after the ringing cleared in his ears, he could hear people talking. And coming closer.

Damn. He threw himself onto his stomach behind a desk and hoped that anyone walking by wouldn’t see him through the window in the door. Who the hell were they? Firemen? Security? Wouldn’t security also leave the building in a fire? Or would they check first to make sure there
was
a fire? He didn’t know what the FBI protocol was for the given situation since his job had never been about spending time in an office. He hated when he didn’t have time to prep for an op. Working with incomplete intel was a good way to get your head shot off.

He stayed put and listened, swearing when he couldn’t make out a word through the security glass. He glanced through a crack between two tables. Not firemen. They had no protective gear. The two men wore white shirts with ties.

He couldn’t get caught. Bailey was waiting for him in the car. He hoped that if he didn’t come out, she’d just get behind the steering wheel and drive away. He should have given her “in case of emergency” instructions, but she’d looked all stressed out that he was going back into the building.

Cade kept his attention on the men through the crack.
Okay, boys, time to move on.
He had to get out before fire rescue got here. They would check every room carefully to determine what had set off the alarm. He’d have to take the homemade smoke bomb from the ladies’ room with him when he left.

A tense moment passed before the men finally stopped yakking and walked away. Right in the direction he was supposed to be going. Damn.

He ran through the building’s blueprint in his head. Not much else he could use in the way of an escape route. The office windows were the kind that didn’t open, unlike in the bathroom. Trying to make it up to another floor didn’t make any sense. There was no fire-escape staircase—he had checked that during recon. That left the roof, but with the building being five stories high, jumping was out of the question. Even if the roof were lower, he couldn’t have jumped. He would have made too much noise in the bushes in the back, and in the front he would have been seen by the office staff milling around the building, waiting for the all clear so they could go back in. And he would bet his currently inaccessible bank account that most of them were armed.

The downstairs bathrooms were his only chance. He kept low and made it to the door, looking out. The hallway was empty. He eased outside and moved at a fast clip along the wall. The time to hesitate was over. Oh, hell, there never
had
been time to hesitate. If he bumped into anyone, he would punch their lights out and run like crazy.

But he made it back to the ladies’ room without trouble and breathed a sigh of relief before grabbing the remains of the smoke bomb and squeezing out the window. He was slipping back into the nondescript Oldsmobile he’d “acquired” despite Bailey’s squealing protest when the first fire truck turned the corner, sirens blaring full force.

“Anything happen out here?” He watched fire rescue arriving as he turned the key in the ignition.

“I sat tight like you told me. And sent positive thoughts to the universe. Find anything?” She was holding her breath, her hands clasped tight in her lap, her fine body vibrating with nerves.

He pulled away from the curb. Frankly, the question rankled. When he engaged in an operation, he saw to it that it was done. “What do you think?” He patted his shirt.
Ye of little faith.

“What’s that?”

“Encoded stuff. I’m going to need a friend to read it for me.”

She relaxed back against her seat. “I thought for sure that we would get caught.”

Deep breath in, deep breath out. Her breasts were moving against her top in a most interesting way. Not that he noticed.

“It almost seemed…too easy.” She blew air through pursed lips.

“There’s much to be said for simple plans.” He turned onto the main road, but not in the direction of the little shack that waited for them across the Maryland border. “They have good security, but not Pentagon good. It’s the FBI and just a small field office at that. The bad guys are usually running from them, not toward them. I don’t think they get a lot of burglary attempts.”

He drove to the nearest McDonald’s, parked and made a call. He didn’t identify himself. The person on the other end would know who he was by his ID code on the display.

“Would you look over a hard drive for me?” he asked without preamble. He hadn’t set this up ahead of time, because he didn’t want to give anyone time to track any calls and head him off. But Carly Tarasov was okay with having things sprung on her. She was born for this business: sharp, tough and flexible.

“How is retirement treating you?” she asked, with a smile in her voice.

“It’s not as quiet as I’d hoped.” He might have exaggerated the rueful tone a tad.

Carly, the SDDU’s top computer expert, laughed on the other end of the line. “You’d hate quiet.”

She was right. “How is the baby?”

“More trouble than a double mission.”

He believed that. His sister had two-year-old twin boys. He’d seen prison camps in Southeast Asia that were less scary than being left alone in a room with those two.

“Can you bring it over?” she asked.

“I’d prefer a drop-off.”

There was a moment of silence on the other end. Cade knew she was realizing that he was in the middle of something serious, not a routine job. “Where?”

He gave his location.

“I’ll be over in twenty minutes. Try not to get into any trouble before I get there.”

“You know me.”

“That’s why I worry. You need backup on this? I’ve been itching to get out of the house.”

He smiled at her wistful tone, then glanced at Bailey. “I got it. Thanks.”

And before Carly could try to talk him into giving her a break from changing diapers, her husband, Nick—another member of their unit—came on the line. “Are you getting my wife involved in anything I’m going to have to make you regret later?”

“I’m regretting it already.” And that was the truth. Domestic terrorism was not a charge to be taken lightly. And it wasn’t just the FBI looking for him—there had been the tangos with that grenade launcher. “Heard anything through the grapevine about any tangos coming stateside?” he asked, knowing that the chances for a positive answer were slim. The members of the SDDU worked alone for the most part. Nick would know only the details of whatever he was personally involved in. Even the Colonel, who had an overview of everything, hadn’t been able to come up with any usable information yet.