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“I need more information,” Scarlet had muttered. She’d tried several times to message the mission’s anonymous handler, but the system kept erroring out with some cryptic message sayingNo Recipient Found.
Strange and somewhat concerning, Scarlet had thought as that stab of dread pierced her heart once more.
Perhaps this was the inevitable CIA double-cross, her last mission, she’d wondered after trying once more to contact her anonymous handler, see if they’d at least been able to jam the hotel’s cameras to give her some breathing space, take some pressure off.
Same error. A sudden spark of frustration made her clutch the phone tight and almost fling it at the wall of neatly shelved poisons.
She fought back the rising anxiety. It was so easy to tell yourself stories while living alone in the shadows, so easy to fall prey to your own paranoia.
Scarlet had walked out onto her broad open-air terrace high above the lamplit streets, taken a deep breath of humid smoggy air, exhaled hard over the awakening city beneath her. The sun was rising in the east, and Scarlet narrowed her eyes at the red glow, searching for that cold hard place in her heart, the ruthlessness which had kept her alive all these years, that mystical place in her mind where intelligence met instinct, where questions based on imperfect information were answered by intuition, the subconscious part which understood event probabilities.
Scarlet asked that gut-instinct whether she herself was in imminent danger, whether she was the patsy, the fool, the old bitch being put down because she knew too much, had done too much, was destined today to become just another anonymous star on the wall at Langley.
Immediately the answer came that if Langley was going to fuck her, they wouldn’t do it this way—certainly not by giving her an unusual mission and then abruptly cutting her communications with some error message. Most likely the handler had screwed up on some technical detail when activating her, and with the extraordinary precautions built into the NOC system, they couldn’t get back in touch.
It was the first time she’d been cut off, but not the first time Scarlet had to fly almost blind on a mission. There’d been times when her handlers had gone radio silent, let her connect the dots on her own, make her own decisions—and therefore live alone with the consequences.
Langley operated outside the law, but not outside the self-righteous judgement of the American public if anything got leaked. So Scarlet understood that the puppet-masters at Langley needed to cover their asses, couldn’t help but go overboard to make sure there were no electronic trails that could get leaked or subpoenaed or divulged in those pesky Freedom of Information Act petitions.
Stepping back from the terrace, Scarlet had messaged her local freelance tech-wizard with whom she communicated anonymously via an encrypted account. She ran her fingers through her smooth long hair, shaking it open and tapping her bare foot on the tiles as she waited for the guy to respond.
“Damn it,” she snarled. The message bounced back with a delivery failure notification. The guy had changed phones again. He did it every few weeks to keep any cyber-spooks off his trail. Scarlet had to wait until he got around to broadcasting his new handle to his anonymous clients.
Inconvenient but not a show-stopper, Scarlet had told herself as she padded barefoot like a cat through the long empty living room, her breathing quick but quiet. The hotel cameras weren’t that big a deal in the end. She knew how to keep her face off the cameras, and the rest of her wouldn’t look particularly unique in a brown uniform.
Besides, she wasn’t going to be performing any overtly violent antics in the closed space of the hotel anyway—not with a Delta Force killer protecting the target.
Well, ScarletpresumedWagner was protecting O’Donnell.
But maybe it wasn’t that clear-cut.
Shit, whatwastheir relationship, Scarlet had wondered as she walked in circles over the black granite tiles of her eerily unfurnished flat. Why was a twenty-nine-year-old CIA analyst holed up in a swanky Mumbai hotel room with a former Delta guy in the first place?
Were they working on a CIA job together?
Were they off the reservation, doing something they shouldn’t?
Were they lovers?
Was this mission something personal for a bigshot at Langley?
Someone high up in the Agency hitting low just to get even with O’Donnell or Wagner or maybe even someone else?
Scarlet didn’t know, and she would probably never know. Usually she didn’t give a damn—the less irrelevant background she learned about her targets the better.
But this O’Donnell thing had gotten Scarlet curious like a cat.
Because there was something about India O’Donnell’s eyes in that file photograph.
Something that touched a part of Scarlet.
A part she thought was long dead.
Dead by her own hand.
Dead against her own breast.
She’d tried to kill the feeling, but it was irritatingly stubborn. Try as she might Scarlet couldn’t dismiss the strangely sickening emotion that O’Donnell’s eyes had evoked in her.