“You know you shouldn’t go, right?” Anjali asked as she lounged on Colleen’s mattress in the back corner of the room. Her long black hair that fell past her butt spread over the pillows and swirled at the end, lest it trail onto the floor. Anjali was spinning her scrunchie on one finger like a hula hoop. “I feel like I should lock you in a basement so you can’t go tomorrow.”
Colleen folded a blouse and stuffed it into the corner of a roller suitcase. “Houses in Phoenix don’t have basements. With the high levels of uranium naturally occurring in the soil, they’d all be radon caves.”
Anjali sighed and flopped her arms on the mattress. “A closet would work, Ms. I’m-too-literal.”
Colleen rolled a pair of jeans into a bundle. “I will text you everything we do. Morning, noon, and night. Where he says we’re going, and where we actually end up. Just a constant stream of texts and location pins.”
She scowled. “Good, but I still say you’re being stupid. My parents would lock me in the attic if I did something like this, either to prevent me from going or afterward if I ever went home again. Did you even google this guy?”
“Yeah, I did a search. I didn’t find anything incriminating. He doesn’t seem to be on social media much.”
Actually, that wasn’t entirely true.
When Colleen had googled Tristan King, she hadn’t found anything at all, and that was weird. No Facebook. No TikTok. No websites. No blog, no Insta, no driver’s license records, no real estate records, no tax returns, and no pay-to-search results.
No internet tracks at all.
Either Tristan King was very serious about his privacy and knew how to cover his tracks exquisitely well, or Tristan King didn’t exist.
Colleen had even launched her Tor browser and gone onto the dark web, looking for any signs of Tristan King.
Nothing.
Maybe he’d given her a false name, and maybe his business card was fake. It wouldn’t surprise Colleen. People did all sorts of weird things.
However, what was really weird was that there was absolutely no mention of any Tristan King anywhere.
The Google search for Tristan plus King had returned zero results.
Colleen had never seen a Google search return a zero, even for flagrant misspellings.
According to the internet, nobody had ever been named Tristan King.
Nobody in the whole world had Tristan as a first name and King as a surname. Those names were gone. There was a gaping black hole in the internet where the words Tristan King should have been.
Tristan had said he was a coder. Some computer science majors and hackers were paranoid about any sort of presence on the internet. Her parents’ generation had opted into the facial recognition software on all the social media platforms, allowed tracking and spiders to engage because it made buying a toilet seat online so much easier, but computer science majors didn’t allow any tracking or electronic home assistants.
There were, of course, jokes about technology “enthusiasts” who had programmable thermostats, electronic home assistants shaped like disks or tubes listening to them at all times of the day and night, smartphone-controlled vacuum cleaners and sous vide devices, and their smartwatchs hooked up to their smartphones tracking every step they took and auto-posting the graph online.
On the other hand, cybersecurity professionals hardwired an analog kill switch for the internet on their laptop and used a printer with a USB cord with no Bluetooth connection, and that was all.
And they kept a loaded gun sitting next to the printer in case it started acting funny.
Maybe Tristan King was a privacy nut, but the absolute absence, zero-kelvin heat signature of Tristan plus King in every search result was bizarre.
But there was no way Colleen was telling Anjali that. The woman had just threatened to lock her in a basement to keep her from going.
“I know, but what do I have to lose?” Colleen asked the air as she wadded up her clothes and shoved them in her luggage. “I don’t have a job. I sure as hell don’t have a career. I don’t have a boyfriend or even a cat. And it’s only a week. You know, I think Tristan King did me a favor by getting me fired.”
“I do not see how being fired could ever be a favor,” Anjali said and propped herself up to sip from her glass of water.
“GameShack was a terrible place to work. They switch the schedule around every week and always manage to ‘accidentally’ schedule me for exactly thirty-eight hours a week so they don’t have to give me benefits. I haven’t had health insurance since I dropped out of college.”
“Well, I might have heard once or twice about how awful your manager was,” Anjali snarked.
“Right? I didn’t realize all those grotty tattoos were white-supremacist bullshit.”
Anjali flinched. “Ew.”
“Tristan King took one look at Miller and peeled him like a grape. It was freaky. Miller was practically squirming on the floor by the time Tristan stopped talking at him.”
“Hmm, so this Tristan King guy is perceptive and uses what he sees to be cruel.”
“Cruel to a white supremacist Nazi who was being a dickhead.”
Anjali bobbled her head. “I will make an exception for being cruel to a white supremacist colonizer dickhead.”
Colleen sighed. “And he’s got the most amazing eyes.”
Anjali rolled hers. “Because truly, recessive alleles for eye color are an excellent way to judge character and that’s definitely how to exclude someone from being a serial killer.”
“Look, there are five million people in the greater Phoenix area. What’s the chance that he’s the one serial killer in town?”
“I think your math is inaccurate.”
“Still.”
“Okay, there are a lot of people, but you should be careful. And eye color should not be a consideration.”
Yeah, she had a point. “Okay, I know I’m not supposed to be swayed by it, but his eyes are just gorgeous. I mean, like dark sapphire eyes. I thought they were contacts, but I can see colored contact lenses from a mile away because I wore them freshman year.”
“Are you thinking about having babies with him?”
“No!” Maybe.
. . . No.
She meant no.
She really did. She meant no.
“Then what does it matter what genes he has,” Anjali stated.
Colleen went on, “And he has messy dark hair, and with the verbal evisceration of Miller, I think he might be morally gray.”
“No, no,” Anjali said, shaking her head and a finger at Colleen. “No, this guy is not some high fae of the Winter Court that you will simp over. He is just some guy who happened to walk into the store where you work and needs to employ a computer science major. You are not going to turn this guy into a magical prince, and then you’ll be sad again when he turns out to be just another dude who lives in his parents’ basement instead of a castle.”
Colleen grinned as she rolled her one pair of pantyhose into a ball and stuffed it into the corner of her suitcase. “But he can fly.”
“In an airplane. He can fly in an airplane, bestie.”
“But he has an airplane.”
Anjali snorted. “It is probably a two-seater that sounds like a Chennai mosquito and will crash in the desert.”
Colleen regarded her apartment and tried to figure out what she was forgetting. “Hey, you said your monitor conked out. I’m only taking my laptop with me. Do you want to use my monitor for a week until I get back? That’ll alleviate some of your eyestrain.”
Anjali nodded pensively. “That would help me a lot. I’ll bring it back to you next weekend when you return from this foolish errand. I expect many texts, a running stream of texts and locations, though. Do I make myself perfectly clear?”
“Crystal clear.” Colleen finished shoving clothes into the tiny suitcase and then helped Anjali load the wide computer monitor into the back seat of her car.
Colleen’s desktop computer didn’t need a monitor to run its VPN while she was gone.
Late that night, Colleen was just lying down, ready to close her eyes and try to go to sleep and then stay asleep, when her phone buzzed on the floor beside her mattress.
She leaned over and looked at the bright screen that lit the white wall beside her.
The screen read Twist.
He shouldn’t be calling her. They’d agreed that forum decorum would forbid it.
And yet, there he was, Twist.
Not Tristan?
Oh, she’d already considered the similarities between Twist-the-TwistyTrader and Mr. Tristan King.
First, the name. Wow, could the similarity of “Twist” and “Tristan” be any more of a coincidence?
Twist was even nicknamed the King of the Killer Whales. It was so perfect that someone had to be playing a joke on her if they weren’t the same person, or else the gods had a wicked sense of humor that week.
And both of them happened to currently be in the greater Phoenix area. Twist, last night at the Devilhouse and Tristan King, today in her GameShack.
But—
Okay, first of all, there was the accent.
Both over the videocall and at the Devilhouse, every word Twist-the-TwistyTrader said had a clipped, cultured British accent. Very British. Perfectly British. More upper-crust British than Prince William British. He barely unclenched his jaw when he spoke and didn’t seem to be able to pronounce T’s unless he was adding them onto the ends of words that didn’t need them. Plus, Twist’s voice was so very deep that she’d practically felt the subsonic rumble through the floor under her feet. On the videocall, his voice hadn’t come from her computer’s speakers so much as from the subwoofer.
When TwistyTrader had gotten stern with her in the Devilhouse, he’d become quieter, and his voice had lowered to an ominous, demonic pitch.
But Tristan King had a normal man’s voice. It was on the low side, sure, because tall guys often, but not always, were basses. A tall guy’s larynx literally descended farther down his longer throat during puberty. But Tristan was a baritone, probably, and his accent was absolutely Midwestern standard American English. She hadn’t heard a whisker of British in there. Hadn’t he actually said Aw, shucks at one point?
But when Tristan King had verbally dismembered her manager, his tone had been precise and measured, even half-amused at some of the things he’d said, as he’d metaphorically eviscerated Miller and force-fed him his white-supremacist intestines while asking Miller to agree with Tristan’s assessment.
So that was different.
Plus, TwistyTrader had insinuated that he wasn’t a natural-born American or that something was off about his citizenship when they’d been trading IDs, saying that he “traveled under a US passport.” That didn’t sound like he was really an American, which was why she’d accused him of spying for MI-6.
Tristan King, however, had self-identified as solid Iowa corn-fed beef. She bet he could sing along with all the songs at fireworks displays on the Fourth of July.
And Tristan King was really, really dang tall, like six-four or six-five, maybe. While they’d been sitting at the high-top at the coffee shop, his feet had rested flat on the ground with his knees bent, and he’d almost ducked when they’d walked through the front door. Walking beside him made her feel like she was on the downslope of the side of a hill. He was a giant of a man.
TwistyTrader was tall, sure, but his chin had been eye-level when Colleen was standing in front of him. Twist must be something like five-eleven, or maybe he’d cracked six feet at the most.
But he was not six-four. She felt like a mouse beside someone who was six-four like Tristan King.
Plus, the vest of TwistyTrader’s three-piece suit had nipped in his waist, and his shoulders looked enormous.
Tristan King looked athletic and trim, but he wasn’t a powerhouse like TwistyTrader.
When TwistyTrader had been cradling her on his lap and she’d kissed his neck, he had a beard underneath his mask. She’d felt it on the insides of her thighs.
Tristan King was as clean-shaven as a Midwestern farm boy.
And then—Colleen reminded herself that she was not a creeper, that she was just observant—the two men smelled different.
When TwistyTrader had been holding Colleen cradled against his chest while he’d rocked her and told her what a good girl she was, how much he admired her, the scent filling her nose and lungs was like good wood smoke and cinnamon spice, like she was snuggling in front of a fireplace with spiced apple cider.
Earlier, when she’d been lying across his lap for the spanking, it had been more like she’d been standing too close to a forest fire and sucking on Red Hots candy.
But when she’d been hanging out on the sidewalk with Tristan King in the hot summer sun, a breeze had been blowing from behind him, bringing with it the scent of clean laundry and green herbs, like rolling around on a picnic sheet in a spring meadow. There was no denying that Tristan was hot, but he smelled like he was an outdoorsy, hiking type who would bring you wildflowers that he’d picked from beside his favorite trout stream and probably owned a big goofy dog like a yellow Labrador or a Weimaraner.
TwistyTrader seemed to be the kind of guy who drove a sportscar with a glovebox full of speeding tickets and knew where the Devilhouse was.
They just—they just couldn’t be the same guy. Their accents, their heights, their scents, the beard, and their demeanors were all so different.
And Tristan should have recognized her if they were the same person, right? She hadn’t been wearing a mask.
Just makeup.
And wouldn’t he have said something if he did?
Or maybe Twist was a big ol’ creeper who’d bribed that chick at the desk for Colleen’s name and address and then stalked her where she worked and got her fired so she’d have to take a job with him.
Colleen’s hand froze on her phone.
Could that be what had happened?
No. Tristan didn’t seem like the stalker type. She would have gotten a creeper vibe off him if he was. She’d spent enough time in college bars to finely hone her creep-o-meter, and he didn’t set off her warning bells in the slightest. Half the guys she met tripped her alarms, so she erred on the side of caution. No one had ever accused Colleen of being a wild child.
Plus, TwistyTrader had been very firm that they weren’t going to see each other again. If he’d planned a stalker scenario, wouldn’t he have been cagey and hinted around to never say never in that British accent?
And yet, her phone was buzzing.
They couldn’t be the same person. They were different heights and had different accents, for God’s sake.
Her phone buzzed again.
She picked it up and looked at his text.
I couldn’t stay away, his first DM through the Sherwood Forest direct messaging app said.
I haven’t stopped thinking about you since last night. We’ve already broken forum decorum in both letter and spirit by meeting in person. Why stop there? the next one read.
Colleen’s heart flopped over in her chest.
She shouldn’t DM him back. Forum rules were absolutely clear about meeting anyone from the boards in real life. It wasn’t just absolutely forbidden to ask, but it would be grounds for immediate banhammering.
Even for her.
It was to keep people safe, of course.
Somehow, Twist’s telling her that he couldn’t stop thinking about her was the most dangerous thing Colleen could think of.
And yet—
Colleen typed back, Last night was amazing. She paused for a long time before she added, I can’t stop thinking about you either, and hit Send.
She stared at the blinking cursor, wondering if she’d taken so long to reply that he’d gone to sleep.
Dots appeared.
And disappeared.
Colleen wanted to shake her phone.
Another message flashed into existence. I’m not going to be in the US long. In fact, I’m hoping to leave within two or three days, and I’ll probably be in New York most of that time. There’s no feasible way for me to see you again.
What a tease.
She typed back, I know.
And I don’t know when I’m going to be back. I don’t imagine it’ll be often. There’s a lot I’m working on.
I know, she typed.
But if we wanted to carry on . . . a correspondence, there’s no reason not to.
Even though she thought she might know the answer, Colleen asked him, What kind of correspondence?
Dots. No dots. Dots.
He wrote, A dirty one.
Colleen could already feel herself getting hot. Even though she wasn’t an innocent by any means, she wasn’t sure how to go about this, so she said, I don’t know how.
His reply came quickly. I’ve never carried on a long-distance relationship, either, especially one like this, but this is what I want. I want to tell you what to do, how to speak to me and about yourself, and what to do to yourself. You’ll do exactly what I tell you, and if you don’t, I will require you to punish yourself. And I will require evidence in the form of pictures.
Her skin was so heated that she felt she was glowing by the time she finished reading it.
I will require you to tell me if you speak badly of yourself or aren’t taking care of yourself. Those will be grounds for punishment. Do you understand?
Okay, she typed.
Is that acceptable to you? he asked.
She could hardly type Yes fast enough.
In general, punishments will be in the form of a pinch, hard enough to bruise. I’ll want pictures of those.
So she was going to have a sexting buddy, and a kinky one at that. Again, if she didn’t like it, it would be easy enough to stop.
Okay, she typed.
Shall we begin?
Colleen typed back, Yes, please.
Oh, so good. Are you in bed, princess?
She typed back, Yeah, I’m just lying down for the night.
You should be in bed before midnight. I told you at the Devilhouse to get enough sleep. You’re twenty minutes late, princess.
Yes, sir, she typed back.
And what do we get when we don’t take care of ourselves, princess?
Colleen bit her lip. She typed back, A pinch?
Yes, princess. That’s one. What colour are your sheets?
She smiled a little at his British spelling and imagined how he would pronounce it. She wrote, Pink.
And what colour are your pyjamas?
Oh, God. The cute Briticisms were like reading for her English Lit class in college, which she’d liked. Pink with lace.
Brilliant. I like it when you wear pretty things for me. Now, how was your day?
Colleen’s brain fumbled around, trying to decide what to say. Finally, she settled on, Eventful. I got a new job, and I’m not sure what my schedule is going to be for a few weeks.
It took a long time for Twist to reply, which wasn’t surprising because he probably had a lot of things to do that were more important than dirty DMing.
Colleen stared at her phone, waiting.
Finally, his message read, Is this new job an improvement?
Yes, at least I think so. It’s just a short-term gig until I can get something permanent. I was lucky to get it because I don’t have any skills or anything. They’re paying me way too much. I’m not worth that much.
She could almost hear his growl in his next message. You will speak well of yourself to me. That’s another pinch. Are you ready?
Her body had been blooming with anticipation ever since she’d seen his first message, and even though she was gentle when she touched herself between her legs, it was almost too much. With her other hand, she typed, Yes.
Right breast, he typed. Pinch it. Hard.
Colleen grabbed hold of her nipple with her knuckle and thumb through the pink tee-shirt she wore and tweaked her flesh hard.
A spike of pain flashed through her, and she was instantly sore.
Left inner thigh, he typed. Hard. I want a picture of your marked skin tomorrow.
Colleen did it. Another pinch, hard enough to bruise.
Come for me, my good girl.
She did.
The following day, Anjali dropped Colleen off at the airport’s private terminal, which she hadn’t even known existed. But maybe that was the point of a private terminal. The cement building looked a little sketchy from the front, but the parking lot was packed with Bentleys and Mercedes.
Anjali leaned over the steering wheel and craned her neck, swiveling to look at every corner of her car as she drove at a crawl through the narrow aisle of the parking lot. “Sri Ram, I don’t want to ding one of these mofos.”
Colleen was also giving the overpriced cars the apprehensive side-eye. “I’m glad I’m not the one driving.”
“I still do not believe you should go. I should turn this car around and take you right back to your apartment. I cannot believe that I am enabling such risky behavior. On our friendship, on my love for you, you should not go with this man you have never met before.”
“I promise I’ll be careful.”
“I’m not worried that you’re going to break your ankle. I’m worried this man who has convinced you to get on an airplane with him is going to kill you and throw your body in the desert somewhere.”
“Look on the bright side, Anjali. It was probably all a scam. He’s probably not going to show up, and I’ll never see him again. Nobody owns an airplane.”
“I still do not like it. I still do not like anything about it. I should turn around and drive away right now.”
“‘Kay-’kay. He’s supposed to be here soon. He said to meet him at eight, and it’s seven-fifty.”
“Should I park?” Anjali asked, still looking around.
A black town car glided to a halt at the sidewalk in front of the doors, and the chauffeur hopped out to open the passenger door behind him.
“You don’t suppose—” Colleen began.
A man’s foot wearing a brown shoe the color of good saddle leather stepped below the bottom of the door, and then an extraordinarily tall man unfolded himself from the backseat. He stepped away from the car, and sunlight shone on his black hair streaked with mahogany, but sunglasses shielded his eyes when he surveyed the parking lot and terminal. As he pulled his dark blue jacket to button it over the suit’s matching vest, the fabric molded to his narrow waist and broad shoulders, and the jacket’s sharp lapels neatly outlined his midnight blue tie.
“Okay,” Anjali said. “I get it now.”
Colleen nodded. “Right? Serial killers don’t have that much time to go to the gym. They’re out there killing people. Murdering takes a lot of time. That guy obviously doesn’t have any other hobbies.”
Anjali carefully drove around the parking lot's perimeter and coasted into place behind the black town car. By the time they pulled up, several more luggage bags were lying on the sidewalk, and another man had emerged from the vehicle.
The new guy was slimmer than Tristan King and wore a perfectly fitted black suit. His glossy, ebony hair was tied back in a tiny ponytail on the back of his head, and a short, knife-edge beard accentuated the hard slashes of his cheekbones and jawline.
Anjali leaned forward over the steering wheel again. “Who’s that?”
“I don’t know,” Colleen said. “Do you want me to ask if you can come along and find out?”
Anjali shook her head like she was trying to fling stupid off her face. “No. I am not going on this crazy jaunt of yours. I will stay here so somebody will receive your texts and know if you have gone missing. But you will find out that man’s name for me. And if he is married.”
“Roger dodger. Pop the trunk for me, will you?”
But still, Anjali marveled at the two men standing on the sidewalk. “The two of them must be steaming in those suits. It’s already over ninety degrees outside.”
Colleen hopped out of Anjali’s car and started to walk toward the back, but the chauffeur had beat her back there and was retrieving her suitcase.
From behind her, a deep male voice called out in a bland Midwestern non-accent, “The plane is nearly ready. Shall we?”
The hot desert wind fluttered her short skirt around her, and she grabbed the fabric and pressed it to her thigh. She should’ve worn something professional, but Colleen didn’t have anything professional. She’d gone from being a destitute college student to being a destitute retail worker. She owned three dresses, all of which she’d packed, a few pairs of sweatpants and workout clothes, and a whole bunch of jeans, three GameShack uniform shirts, plus five old cosplay costumes that she didn’t have the money to go to conventions to wear.
Anjali had stepped out of her car to give Colleen one last hug, and she whispered in Colleen’s ear, “And his phone number.”
“Got it.”
“Do you want me to stay?”
Colleen gestured toward the guys and the chauffeur who had thrown her suitcase on a luggage cart with the rest of the bags. “Seems like we’re going to be leaving soon. I don’t want you to be late for your next class.”
Anjali hugged her again, trotted to her car, and sped away because time was getting short to get back to the university and find parking.
When Colleen turned, Tristan King had removed his sunglasses and was examining her closely. As she’d seen yesterday at GameShack and the coffee shop, his brilliant blue eyes were also shrewd as hell, and he seemed to be analyzing her so closely that she was half-surprised he hadn’t lasered her clothes off her. “Brought your backpack, I see. I assume that’s your laptop?”
“Yep. You said you needed a computer science consultant, so I brought my laptop. I’d be pretty useless without it, huh?”
Tristan chuckled. “Good that you brought it, yes.” He took a breath like he had the intention of saying something but closed his lips—and what lush lips they were—but then he said, “I know this is an odd question, but by any chance, are you a—”
Gunshots cracked in the air.
Colleen had grown up on the west side of Phoenix in the Alhambra district, a part of town the police don’t enter without helicopter support. So she knew exactly what she was hearing—medium caliber, probably a handgun—and bent her knees to crouch and run behind the black town car still sitting in front of the terminal.
Before she could take two steps, however, Tristan had leaped away from the safety of the car and gathered her under his arm.
“Dude! Get down!” she screamed at him as he propelled her to the airport terminal and flung her through the door in front of him.
Behind them, another shot punched through the air.
Glass shattered and rained upon the pavement.
He grabbed her again, forcing her in front of himself and crouching to make his immense bulk smaller as he frog-marched her through the chaos inside. “Damn nutter.”
The small crowd within the terminal was already moving toward the rear. Men wearing suits with short haircuts and sunglasses directed other, usually older, people toward the hallways off to the sides or to the lower level, which would be shielded from gunfire by the cement planters filled with dirt and cacti.
Before Colleen and Tristan had walked more than a dozen steps, tires squealed outside the building, and two beater cars raced away.
Running people in the crowd jogged to a stop and turned to watch the developments.
Security personnel ran outside the building, holding their guns low and pointed at the sidewalk, while others covered positions near the doors.
Tristan straightened, looking behind them.
Colleen turned with him. The security personnel, maybe mercenaries, were strolling back inside and comparing notes.
He said, “Looks like the kerfuffle is over.”
Tristan’s arm and side surrounding Colleen were warm from the sunlight, and cologne drifted from his clothes. The scent was subtle, like chopped sweet herbs and clean laundry stored in a cedar chest. His chest was beside her ear, and she was aware of how alive this man was, his heart pumping and breath whooshing beside her. She’d wrapped her arm around his waist under his coat, and it was held pretty much straight out from her shoulder.
She felt him relax, and then he looked down at the top of her head, which only came up to his mid-chest. He tilted his head to the side, examining her, and Colleen felt even shorter than normal.
“You are just a tiny little thing, aren’t you? I’d thought you were taller, for some reason. I must be thinking about someone else.”
Colleen straightened and regretted her choice of wearing ballet flats with her short skirt, but she didn’t own any high-heeled shoes that weren’t part of a costume, even sandals. “Wait just a darn minute. What was all that? And I’m not that short. I’m five-two.”
“That’s perfectly acceptable, then,” he said, laughing a little as he looked up. “It looks like the excitement is over. Shall we proceed?”
“Wait, wait, wait. Are you just going to calmly stroll around like nothing happened? Were those guys shooting at you?”
Tristan frowned and took a look at the front doors. “That seems unlikely.”
“But it’s possible? Why would people be shooting at you?” She started looking for the luggage cart with her suitcase. “I’m going to call Anjali to come back and pick me up.”
“You don’t have to do that. I’m sure they weren’t shooting at me. I haven’t done anything that I know of for anyone to be shooting at me.”
“You say that like there’s a possibility you may have overlooked something. You don’t overlook things that might make people shoot at you. Either you know what that was about, or you don’t.”
Tristan shrugged, a sinuous movement that seemed only to emphasize his broad shoulders. “Considering the people who are standing in this terminal right now, I think I’m in the lower half on the list of people most likely to be shot at. They’re the people who’ve hired mercenaries, who were the guys who ran outside to return fire. Without looking around too much because it might draw attention to ourselves, I notice that in attendance, we have the CEO of a much-maligned oil company, a cable news personality who has the audacity to tell the truth and thus has many of the violence-prone mouth-breathers after her, and a Panamanian gentleman whose yacht is uncommonly large for a civil servant, among others.”
The terminal itself was a sumptuous room of white-leather furniture and low tables. Some of the strolling waiters were offering people appetizers as well as the drinks.
Colleen glanced around but had no idea whom he was talking about. “How do you know which guy has a yacht? I don’t see any yachts here in the middle of the desert.”
“I met him at a place where yachts go. My point is that I doubt they were shooting at me.”
“But you were the one who was outside. Who’s that other guy, the one who was in the car with you? Could they have been shooting at him?”
“Jian? I don’t think so.” He turned, and the guy was right there. “Jian, may I introduce you to our new computer consultant, Ms. Colleen Frost? Colleen, this is my personal assistant, Mr. Jian Laio.”
The other guy who’d gotten out of the car with Tristan, the one Anjali seemed to have called dibs on, was holding a clipboard.
Jian Laio tilted his head down to see Colleen because he was nearly as tall as Tristan, and he soberly greeted her before he turned back to Tristan King. His voice was low and deferential with a throaty trace of an Asian accent when he said, “Mr. King, the plane is ready. Considering the circumstances, I suggest we board immediately and leave as soon as possible.”
“Considering recent developments, I concur. Let’s see how soon we can get the jet in line.”
Jian strolled into the crowd, seemingly unhurried but covering the ground at an impressive rate with his long legs, walking toward a desk that had suddenly become quite popular.
Tristan turned back to Colleen. “I’m sure we’ll be ready in a moment. Would you like a drink?”
He snagged two champagne flutes of fizzy orange juice from a passing waiter and offered her one.
Colleen accepted the mimosa and kept an eye on the crowd. “Do you always drink at this time of the morning?”
“No, sometimes I have a drink quite early. Ah, Jian has pressed his way to the head of the line. Brilliant. We should be in the air within minutes.”
“It seemed like they were waiting for you and were shooting at you, not at the terminal in general. There’s no way they could’ve shot anyone who was inside the building because most of the front wall is solid. It’s only this back wall that’s glass.”
The private terminal’s rear wall was composed entirely of slightly blued glass that made the bright desert sky even more vivid and looked out over the tarmac, where small jets were parked and waiting. A man wearing a dark suit and holding a clipboard approached a small group near the back wall and said something while executing a subtle quarter-bow. The people gathered up their few carry-ons and followed him through a small door and out onto the asphalt, heading toward a small plane with a ramp that led up to its open door.
Tristan’s assistant-guy Jian returned. “There are two flights ahead of us. We should board in ten minutes.”
“Thank you, Jian,” Tristan replied. “Who did you have to bribe to get us off that quickly?”
The man straightened. “Such maneuvers do not require bribes, Mr. King. I merely reminded the coordinator that my previous employer, for whom he thinks I still work, ruled a country where his cousins live.”
Tristan chuckled. “Threats, then.”
The man’s eyes narrowed. “I would not call it such.” And then he turned away to watch the crowd.
Colleen sipped the fizzy champagne and orange juice and did not get in the middle of that conversation. They might have been joking, or that might’ve been real animosity.
As Jian Laio had predicted, they were ushered through the terminal and out onto the blazing tarmac to ascend a ramp to a small jet within ten minutes.
For Colleen, who’d never even been on a commercial flight, the plane seemed plenty big. It was certainly not a two-seater that sounded like an Indian mosquito, but something like a nice living room but with curved walls that met in a dome overhead and porthole windows, of course. The wide seats were honey-colored leather and grouped in two groups of four around two tables, and a long couch took up the other wall of the plane.
Two slim women near the rear of the plane smiled and waved as they walked in, so Colleen smiled and waved back at them. Inside her head, a voice kept muttering, be sophisticated, be sophisticated.
When they settled at one of the tables, Colleen texted Anjali, We are on the plane and leaving. So it appears that he does have a plane.
One of the flight attendants brought Tristan another glass of mimosa to replace the one they’d finished inside and asked Colleen what she wanted, smiling a doll-like smile.
“Just coffee, if you have some?”
When the stewardess had walked away, Colleen turned back to Tristan. “Okay, I’m here on the plane with you. I’m evidently going wherever we're going. Tell me the truth. Why were people shooting at you?”
He sighed and spread his hands. “I honestly don’t know, and I don’t know that they were shooting at me. I work on computer software. Unlike some of the other people in that terminal, I’m not a drug dealer or a Russian mafia boss or breaking US treaties with other countries.”
“So, if you’re just ‘in computer software,’ what is it that you do?”
“I’m a coder. I write code,” he said and sipped his champagne as if that would end their conversation.
Colleen pressed on. “What kind of code do you write, Tristan King, and why doesn’t Google know anything at all about you?”
And with that question, a sly smile lifted Tristan’s lips but didn’t reach his blue eyes.
The plane turned onto the runway and lifted off into the sky.