The Spy Is Cast Page 22

  I told Germain his steak was in the fridge and staggered into the back bedroom. I didn’t even hear the sound of the microwave.

  I jerked awake, eyes wide. The faint illumination from the moon outlined a large, dark figure in the doorway of the bedroom.

  “Aydan.” Kane spoke softly again, and I resumed breathing with a gasp of relief.

  “What?”

  “Sorry to wake you. Germain’s going out to relieve Hellhound. Do you feel up to going with him to check the network again?”

  I rolled stiffly off the bed. At least I wouldn’t have to get dressed. I hadn’t even taken off my boots before I fell asleep.

  “Okay. I just need to pee, and then I’m ready to go.”

  I stumbled into the bathroom without turning on the light. When I came out of the RV, the cool night air woke me like a slap. I shivered over to the Honda, and Germain and I rode quietly out of the campground.

  Chapter 29

  Back at Harchman’s, we pulled over beside the road and crossed the ditch to fade into the shadows of the trees. The rush of cold air on the ride over had chilled me to the bone. I left my helmet on for warmth and shivered miserably as I sank down and propped my back against a fence post.

  Inside the network, I found the security room sim active. A man sat at the virtual security console, and I studied his face, memorizing him before continuing down the virtual hallway to recheck the rooms.

  The flutes still played in the room occupied by the couple. Unwilling to invade their privacy a second time, I pressed my ear to the virtual door instead, and was rewarded with the sound of the man chuckling, followed by whispers and giggles. I let the sound ease my strained nerves, and floated away to finish my reconnaissance.

  I held my breath when I peeked into the room that held the blond man. Air leaked out between my teeth when I discovered him uninjured but still bound. His face was turned toward the door, his eyes closed. His chest rose and fell with his unhurried breathing, but still I sensed the tension in his body. Waiting. Not asleep.

  I watched his splendid nakedness a few seconds longer, fear for him warring with faintly queasy arousal. Then I turned away and floated uneasily back down the corridor.

  Back at the security sim, I drifted silently inside and hovered behind the operator to see the monitors. He flipped briskly through views of the deserted interior of the house and exterior views of the main house, guest house, and outbuildings. I noted a sentry still posted at the door of the guest house.

  Then the displays shifted to show another view I hadn’t seen before. We examined the gatehouse briefly as the single guard slouched in his chair. While we watched, he sat up, stretched, and luxuriously picked his nose. I invisibly mirrored the watcher’s grimace as he toggled the display to another unfamiliar view.

  I tried to puzzle out what I was seeing. As the views flipped by, I realized extra cameras had been added to the system. We were now looking at a much larger perimeter, mostly in the forested area surrounding the building site. In one view, the patrol guard and his dog walked past directly below the camera.

  I suppressed a gasp when the next view came up. I thought I recognized that clearing. Thank God, Hellhound was using the other one for surveillance tonight. Fear slammed into my veins. What if they’d discovered both surveillance points? Had they captured Hellhound?

  When the next view appeared, my heart kicked my ribs once before rattling frantically in the vicinity of my throat.

  The monitor showed two shadowy figures leaning against fence posts by the highway.

  Smothering my yelp of dismay, I shot through the wall and halted abruptly in front of the portal. If I went through too fast now, all would be lost.

  I stepped carefully through, jerking in silent pain. As soon as I could speak, I croaked, “Run! Busted! We’re busted!”

  Germain grabbed my arm and heaved me to my feet. I clutched my head with my free hand and tried to squint one eye open while he dragged me to our motorcycles. I managed to sling a leg over the bike before slumping on the seat, trying to force my eyes to focus. Germain stood alongside to balance me and I gritted, “Gotta get Hellhound,” through clenched teeth.

  “I’ll get him,” he promised.

  A few too-long seconds later, I finally regained enough vision and equilibrium to sit up straight, and Germain dashed for his bike while I fired up the Honda and pulled a hard U-turn. I rolled on the power with a trembling hand, and a few seconds later the throaty whine of the Yamaha rushed up behind me. Germain pulled abreast and gestured decisively to me, then forward. I nodded.

  He’d get Hellhound. I’d run for the campground. He cut the throttle and peeled off into the ditch while I rode on as fast as I dared in the dark, adrenaline surging.

  Glancing fearfully behind me, I spied no sign of pursuit. When I arrived at Beaver Flats, I idled quietly through the sleeping campground, clamping down on the urge to ride the twisting path at top speed. Kane stood up from the chair beside the RV as I pulled up. He strode quickly over as I cut the engine.

  “Where’s Hellhound?” he demanded. “You weren’t supposed to travel without an escort.”

  “We got busted,” I told him tremulously. “They’ve got a camera on the highway.” His head jerked up, scanning the quiet campground.

  “I don’t think I was followed,” I added. I tried to make my voice steady, but it quavered with my uncontrollable shivering. “I don’t know if Arnie got out. Carl went to get him. They should be behind me. I hope.”

  “Goddammit!” Kane swore softly but with great feeling.

  “What do we do now?”

  “We wait.” I could see the tension in his shadowy figure.

  “How long?” I demanded.

  “Twenty minutes. If they’re not back by then, we move. Keeping you and that key safe is still our top priority.” He held up a hand as I opened my mouth to argue. “They’ll make it,” he said firmly. “Tell me what happened.”

  “I went into the network from our spot by the side of the road. There was a man in the security sim, watching. They’ve expanded the perimeter of the security system. They’ve got cameras at the gatehouse, on our spot on the road, distributed through the trees, and I’m pretty sure there’s one on the first surveillance point you were using. I don’t know if they’ve gone as far as the second one or not. As soon as I saw us come up on monitor, I beat it out of the network and we ran.”

  Kane blew out a breath. “Lucky the security sim was up, or we’d never have known. They could have picked you off at their leisure.”

  “They might have gotten Hellhound and Germain anyway,” I said tightly. I wrapped my arms around my body as the shivering stepped up a notch.

  A faint sound caught my ear and I flung my head up. The sound swelled into a distant rumble, and I muttered, “Oh, please, oh, please,” under my breath. Kane and I stood motionless as the engine noise grew louder and then softened as if its rider was idling at low speed. A few seconds later, two headlights appeared, and Kane and I both let out an audible breath.

  Germain and Hellhound cut their engines and swung off their bikes. I resisted the urge to run over and hug both of them. They walked over, and I hugged them both anyway.

  “Any pursuit?” Kane demanded, and Germain shook his head.

  “No sign.”

  “Good. Let’s move the bikes out of sight behind the RV,” Kane said, his voice deep with relief. “I don’t want them in plain view, but we need to be mobile just in case.”

  We relocated the motorcycles and trooped into the RV. I looked around at the strained, tired faces.

  “Food,” I said decisively, and they laughed as I started to scrounge in the cupboards.

  A few minutes later, we all crammed onto the dinette benches with our meals. I appreciated the tight fit while I basked in Kane’s body heat beside me, my shivering gradually dissipating.

  “Now what?” I asked as we finished eating.

  “Damage control,” Kane said decisively. “Hellhou
nd, things are getting too hot around here. It’s time for you to pull out. You can head back to Calgary tomorrow morning.”

  Hellhound straightened in indignation. “What the hell? What about Aydan? She’s a civilian.”

  Kane sighed. “Yes, but she’s the only one who can do what we need done. Believe me, if I had any choice at all, she’d be far, far away from here.”

  “Well, I ain’t goin’ back and leavin’ ya short-handed out here. Ya got somebody to take my place?”

  “No.” Kane scrubbed his hands tiredly over his face. “But it’s too dangerous to send you in blind, and I can’t tell you what you need to know.”

  “Wouldn’t be the first time I went into danger blind, Cap,” Hellhound said quietly.

  Kane’s face looked old as he met Hellhound’s gaze. “I know.”

  I suppressed a shudder at the ghosts behind their eyes. I knew they’d both seen combat in Yugoslavia. I’d done a bit of reading about the Medak Pocket firefight.

  Germain broke the short silence. “We could still use him at base camp. It’d be a little safer than active surveillance.”

  “I can do that,” Hellhound said immediately.

  Kane hesitated. I knew he’d want to keep his old friend as far from danger as possible, but it was clear he needed the manpower.

  “We’ll see what happens in the morning,” he said finally. “Our surveillance plans may be completely out the window if they’ve expanded their perimeter. We don’t even know if Aydan can get close enough now. Dammit.”

  He turned to me. “Did you get a chance to check anything else?”

  His eyes flicked almost imperceptibly in Hellhound’s direction, and I responded carefully. “Yes, I checked. Nothing new tonight.”

  “Did you get any idea of where the cameras were placed?”

  “Where’s the site plan?” I asked.

  Germain dragged it out and spread it over the table again. We all hunched over it.

  “It was pretty hard to identify trees in the dark,” I said slowly. “But I was surprised at what I could see. They must have had the apertures cranked wide open. Or maybe it was night vision. What would that look like?”

  Hellhound shrugged and handed me the binoculars. “See for yourself.”

  I poked my head out the door of the RV and peered through the lenses. “Yep, that’s definitely what they’re using.”

  “Crap,” Germain said. “I was hoping we could still go back and scope things out while it was dark.”

  I shook my head. “We were wearing black clothes in the dark, and we showed up no problem on the monitor.”

  Kane’s head snapped up. “Were you identifiable?”

  “Um…” I thought back, trying to remember the quick glimpse I’d had before I fled. “No. We were both wearing our helmets.”

  “What about the bikes?” Kane demanded. “Would they have gotten license numbers?”

  “I didn’t see the bikes in the view.”

  “Small mercies.”

  “Yeah.” I bent over the plans. “Okay. There’s definitely a camera here.” I pinpointed the location that had shown the gatehouse. “And here.” I added a dot for the view of our stopping place beside the highway.

  I jerked up as a thought hit me. “Shit! I bet they saw Hellhound and me earlier. It was daylight, and we had our helmets off then.”

  Kane hissed forcefully through his teeth. “Dammit! Where exactly did you stop? Is there any chance they could have missed seeing you?”

  “We stopped right beside the road,” I said slowly. “The camera angle might not have caught us. We parked the bikes in about the same place, and we just went down the side of the ditch a few feet. We weren’t over by the fence line where Carl and I were tonight.”

  Luckily. I suppressed a shudder when I thought about how I’d tried to convince Arnie to take that walk in the woods. That would have been bad. I glanced at him and read the same thought on his face. Dumb civilians. Real spies would never have gotten distracted like that.

  “No point in worrying about it,” Kane said grimly. “Too late now.”

  I dragged my attention back to the map. “There’s probably another camera here.” I marked the first surveillance clearing. “I’m not positive it was the same clearing, but there was that funny-looking twisted tree on the one side, so I think it was.”

  “What funny-looking twisted tree?” Germain demanded.

  I shook my head and grinned at him. “City boy.”

  “All right, country girl. Tell us where the rest of the cameras are,” he challenged.

  I grimaced. “I’m not that good. There were at least four other cameras out in the woods. Maybe more. I ran as soon as I saw us come up on the monitors. No funny-looking trees in any of the views. But at least one of them is on the guards’ route. I saw a guard and dog walking underneath.”

  Kane traced an arc on the drawing, connecting the dots I’d drawn. “Okay, let’s suppose for the sake of argument that they’ve created a roughly circular perimeter.”

  He lightly marked in the completion of the circle. We stared glumly at the result. The building site nestled in one quadrant of the circle. If the cameras followed the line Kane had drawn, we wouldn’t be able to get close enough to come within range of the network.

  “Damn.”

  “I second the motion,” I agreed. Then I paused and leaned forward, looking at the map again. “Hold on.”

  “What?” Kane snapped.

  “I don’t know much about security camera systems. If you were going to install them, would you generally create a perimeter that you’d monitor thoroughly, and then not bother with much inside the perimeter?”

  “Generally, yes,” Kane agreed.

  “I wonder what the creek looks like when it comes through here.” I traced the line of the creek on the site map where it intersected Kane’s rough circle. “Because this is high land. Remember how the valley dropped off when we came around the corner of the driveway on Saturday?”

  “Right,” Kane said slowly. “So it might be in a deep cut.”

  “That’s what I’m thinking. I wonder if they’ve got a camera trained on the cut. Is there any way to detect the cameras?”

  “Not without physical surveillance,” Germain said.

  “Shit.” I leaned over the map again and traced a second circle around the building site, intersecting our old surveillance spot by the road and the dot that I’d marked the previous day where I’d accessed the network the first time.

  “What’s that?” Hellhound asked.

  “My usable range. Roughly. I need to be in this vicinity in order to… do what I need to do.” I marked the tiny sliver where the arc intersected the creek. “I might be able to get access from here.”

  “But it’s inside the camera perimeter. Theoretically,” Germain objected. “If they did actually create a circular perimeter.”

  I sighed. “Yeah.”

  Chapter 30

  I woke the next morning to the quiet rumble of voices from the main part of the RV. The bedroom was bright, and I rolled rapidly out of bed when I realized it was nine A.M. I threw on jeans and a T-shirt and emerged blinking into the sunny dining area.

  Germain, Hellhound, and Terry Wheeler sat at the table, drinking coffee and conversing in low tones. Wheeler wore the navy-blue security uniform of Harchman’s guards, and his blond good looks reminded me uncomfortably of the man in the sim.

  Germain glanced up as I entered. “Good morning, Sleeping Beauty,” he kidded me.

  “God, I can’t remember the last time I slept until nine o’clock,” I groaned. “I feel like shit. I don’t know how you guys deal with the irregular hours. Hi, Terry, nice to see you again,” I added, stifling a yawn.

  “Hi, Aydan, good to see you, too. The hours take some getting used to,” Wheeler agreed sympathetically.

  I glanced around. “Where’s Kane?”

  Germain and Hellhound exchanged a look.

  “What?” I demanded.

/>   “He’s scouting the new camera perimeter over at Harchman’s,” Germain said reluctantly, while Hellhound glowered. Germain held up a restraining hand at the sight of my expression. “I tried to convince him to let me do it, but he said he wanted to have at least one team member Harchman couldn’t identify, just in case. And yes, that’s a good strategy,” he added, forestalling my protest.

  “How long has he been gone?”

  “Only an hour. He’s already checked in once. His next check-in will be at 9:30.”

  I swallowed my fear and made my voice level. “Okay. I’m going to take a shower, if nobody needs the bathroom for a while.”

  “Go ahead.”

  I shut myself into the tiny room and awkwardly washed my hair in the inadequate shower. By the time I came out, Kane was sitting at the table holding a steaming mug. Everyone looked much happier. The tension released from my shoulders, too, and I beamed at them in relief.

  “Good news,” Kane greeted me. “It looks like there’s a gap in their perimeter right at the creek, as you’d guessed.”

  “Excellent,” I agreed. “Now the question is whether it gives me a usable access point or not.”

  He nodded. “That’s our next step. Wheeler, what can you tell us about the security detail?”

  Wheeler frowned. “I’m not getting as much information as I’d hoped. I haven’t overheard anything unusual between the men who are staffed through the security company. I think they’re all just ordinary rent-a-cops. There’s another group of security personnel that spends most of their time around the building site. They’re not staffed through the security company, so they must be directly on Harchman’s payroll. I’ve tried to gather some information there, but no luck yet. They don’t mingle.”

  “Have you seen a young, blue-eyed blond man anywhere?” I interrupted. “I’m not sure if he’s a prisoner or not.”

  “I’d need more information,” Wheeler responded. “There are a few men who fit that description.”

  Kane pushed the laptop across the table. “You know where to start.”

  I sighed and carried it over to the counter to begin entering parameters, dividing my attention between the database and the continuing briefing.