Rob was back on any of those damned combat ranges that the engineering staff set up at headquarters. Every Friday they went to work, tearing down the old Hogan’s Alley and building a new one from scratch, just so that agents training had something different every Monday.
The woman in charge of them was also something of a friendly sadist in her designs, but it kept Rob and the field agents hopping.
Like now.
The elevator doors opened and he stepped in, processing as he moved that Carlota/Helen just happened to be aboard, by herself, and not paying attention.
The class four practically teleported itself into his hand and Rob moved directly into the woman, pinning her back with one hand on a shoulder and the gun socketed into her cleavage. There was nowhere she could go to evade him that didn’t involve getting shot dead, because breasts or chin would hang up on the weapon itself long enough for him to pull the trigger.
Roxy had taught him that one. Didn’t work as well on most men, for obvious reasons, but that was why the hand went to the shoulder, gripping.
“Do not move,” Rob instructed the woman, not taking his eyes off the panic that was just starting to settle into her eyes.
He felt Mac enter and slide to one side. The doors closed.
“Hit the stop button,” Rob said aloud.
Mac did and the elevator ceased moving as soon as it had started.
Carlota/Helen was a professional. She didn’t scream. Didn’t struggle. Didn’t seem to even be breathing.
“Believe it or not, we’re here to help,” Rob said, allowing a smile on his face, even as he had her pinned. “Assuming you are who I think you are. What cover name would you like to use, Helen?”
The woman flinched. Mac reached in and pulled the little purse out of her unresisting hands.
Helen just stared at him, her eyes blinking too rapidly as she tried to process what had just happened.
A lightning bolt. That was what it was. He’d been all set to go upstairs and have Alicia remotely override the door lock so they could rush in and surprise the woman if she was in the room.
Five minutes earlier, and they might have been storming an empty space. That would have been fine. He’d have waited up for her.
Hopefully, she wouldn’t have been out all night again.
He’d have waited up for her then, too.
“Helen is fine,” she whispered, slowly drawing strength into herself. “What happens next?”
“Next, we verify your bonafides,” Rob said grimly. “I have one sure-fire way to do that. Then I have a whole raft of questions for you, Helen.”
“Okay,” the woman said, still not entirely present but coming back to herself.
Rob kept the rudeness of his pistol in place.
“I would like to think that you have a plan for surviving all this, and that we’re just along for the ride,” Rob continued. “Am I right, Helen?”
She slumped. A little. Not much. Enough.
The woman was expecting to die when it was all done.
“Who are you really, Helen?” he asked.
“You know,” she murmured. “That’s why you’re here.”
“I need you to say it,” he pressed.
“Hummingbird,” she breathed with another slump.
“Thank you,” Rob said to her. “I’m going to put my pistol away now. We’re going up to your room and talk. I think I can save you.”
There was no greater feeling in the entire universe than watching hope dawn in somebody’s eyes. He got to see it happen with Helen who might be Carlota Rojas.
Rob took a full step back and put away the class four. He nodded to Mac, but she’d never drawn hers. Instead, she pressed the button and the elevator began to rise again.
It opened on eleven and Rob took Helen by the elbow, like a date, and had Mac trail them with the stunner she’d found in Helen’s purse. He took the key for himself.
Helen wasn’t resisting, but he figured it was only a matter of time before she caught up with the present tense and did something. He’d surprised her at some sort of mental and emotional low moment, and taken advantage of the woman.
He would apologize later.
They got to her door and Rob keyed it open, practically dragging Helen inside, but she really didn’t have much choice. In her mind, he could see where she had correctly identified him as a foreign agent, hunting her like all the others.
She just hadn’t placed him yet geographically.
Rob looked around the room and put her on the bed. Mac was covering the door. Rob pulled a chair away from the desk and watched the woman flinch as he did.
Not at him. At where he was standing.
Rob paused to look around. Desk with a stack of empty mailing envelopes and nothing else. Chest of drawers off to one side. Suitcase tucked into the corner out of the way.
He pulled out his comm and dialed Alicia.
“Here,” she replied instantly.
“We accidentally stumbled into the woman in the elevator,” he said simply. “We’re inside her room right now, having a chat. Please keep watch on everything.”
“Right.” And she cut the line.
Alicia already owned the hotel’s systems. That included security lines. If anyone called them, she would know as soon as it happened and notify him.
What he would do still remained to be seen. He did have the grenades in his pocket like terrible eggs, ready to hatch out into mayhem.
“Helen,” Rob said. “Hummingbird. I think you are somebody important. A particular woman who is causing a bunch of other people a lot of stress.”
“Other people?” she asked, her voice finally finding strength.
“I’m not here to stop you,” Rob grinned. “If anything, my bosses would like your book to come out. They sent me because they understood that all these folks running around chasing you would make it much easier for me to mark them and start circulating their pictures later so we could burn them when we needed to. Or maybe consider doubling them.”
Her eyes were cagey now. Canny. Sharp.
This was not a woman to be trifled with. Certainly not overlooked, unless you were a complete dumbass.
Rob supposed that Roxy had made sure he got over any of those stupid ideas he might have had. As had Mac.
At the same time, he couldn’t see Salonnia or Fribourg getting that. Aquitaine wasn’t nearly as sexist, except that they’d apparently sent Wraith, and Mac had a low opinion of the man.
All of them chauvinist pigs, it seemed.
That left him.
“What do you want?” Helen demanded in a firm, hard voice.
She didn’t move. Mac would stun her as soon as she did. Helen seemed to respect that. Hopefully, she saw herself standing by the door, were the situation reversed.
“I would like to confirm that you are in fact Carlota Rojas,” Rob said, finally speaking that magical name out loud for the first time in front of her. “Then I would like to hear your plan for how you intended to survive this amazing shitshow you’ve unleashed on the various intelligence underworlds of the galactic arm.”
He was smiling as he spoke. After all, Rob could simply walk away this minute and go home with all the information he’d accumulated on the many folks running around chasing after Helen. He even knew who Emil Yankov was now, and could write an entire psychological dossier on the man to fill in any gaps that existed in the one back home.
Proper intelligence work wasn’t what Rob did. Those folks spent months and years slowly digging up clues in reports, leaks, and rumors. They watched folks do things that opened them up to blackmail, and then nailed them with it. They doubled agents who would pass along documents for ideological or financial reasons.
Kinetic solutions were only necessary in situations where everything had gone wrong. Or when you needed to remove someone who was a threat that could not be removed any other way.
He could go home tomorrow and the intelligence operatives would buy him a beer and spend months milking him for tidbits that would let them go after all these other spies.
It was good.
Helen watched him like a cobra facing down a mongoose. Not an inapt comparison. She was deadly. He was fast.
And could always walk away with clean hands and a clean conscience.
“What are you going to do?” Helen asked. “If I was?”
“I’m going to call you Carlota,” Rob decided. “I’m going to treat you like you are. If you aren’t, then we have a problem and I’ll deal with that as needed. In the meantime, I want answers. You can provide them, or I’ll burn you to everyone on the planet and let them decide what to do with you. Is that clear enough?”
Both women gasped in shock. Not surprising. Both were field agents. Assassin required a different mindset. A willingness to execute somebody for no better reason than their name was next on some list.
Handsome Rob knew he was a borderline sociopath. You had to be. They reinforced that, having him dance along that edge.
Normal people wouldn’t kill someone in cold blood.
He let Helen/Carlota see the cold death lingering in his eyes. Mac was behind him, but she’d already seen it. Touched it. Known it intimately, as it were.
He was a killer. Carlota could be a victim. Or someone he rescued.
Her choice.
He waited. She watched him. Then Mac. Then him again.
Rob waited. In the back of his head, he might have heard the music that the fakir plays to draw the cobra up out of the basket.
“You aren’t here to kill me?” Helen finally asked.
“Nope,” Rob said. “Worst, you piss me off enough that I tell everyone else where to find you, but you’d have to be working at it for that outcome to arrive.”
She flinched under his words, but he was trying to grind her down. Anyone who set out on the path Carlota Rojas had was already a hard, dangerous person. A woman with no more fucks left to give.
He could honor that, but it wasn’t going to turn his head.
“In the suitcase,” Helen said, nodding to the corner.
Rob nodded and rose, moving around the chair so he was never in Mac’s line of fire if she needed to take Helen down.
“Anything I need to know before I open it?” he said without touching.
“No,” Helen said. “There is a false bottom sewn in. The seam is along the top when upright.”
She seemed exhausted. Deflated.
It might still be an act. Rob pulled gloves from his pocket and moved the suitcase to the desk, standing and facing her across it.
He gave her one last moment to warn him, then turned to Mac.
“If something happens to me, I want her dead,” he announced calmly.
Mac flinched, but she nodded. He was in charge here. She worked for him, in spite of the age difference.
Assassin. Field Agent. Alicia was just an Analyst.
His game. His call.
Rob locked eyes with Helen and undid the flap holding the thing closed. It came away without any issues, revealing a hollow interior. The weight was wrong if it was.
He found the seam. A loose thread that seemed extremely heavy.
“Do I pull the thread?” he asked.
“Pull the flap,” she replied. “It will come away with a little effort.”
Rob grunted and nodded. He found a handhold and tugged. The thread slipped back through holes and he found the pocket she’d mentioned.
Inside, he found paper. Rob pulled it out.
Looked like the manuscript, halfway buried under a crap-ton of cash in bundles. Big bills bundled. A lot of them.
Methodically, he set the money off to one side, noting that it was all Cedi bills. Salonnian cash. Stupid amounts of it, which was always a useful thing in this business.
The stack of papers was what he wanted though, contained in another mailing envelope that was open at one end.
He slid the stack out, half a mind concentrated on Helen in case she moved, flinched, or spoke.
The contents came free and he put them on the desk. Randomly flipping, Rob confirmed everything.
And won a bet with himself over a pair of names she’d left out of Chapter Three by withholding that one page until the end.
With great care, he put it all back together, sliding it into the envelope and then walking over where he could toss it onto the bed close to Carlota.
She really was Carlota Rojas. That was the manuscript that had stirred up so many hornet nests around here.
“So, Carlota,” Rob said as he sat again. “Now what?”