Page 49 of Baby Take Me Home

“Possiblybeing watched.” He pulled me into his arms. “In which case, we have to play the part of an amorous couple.”

“Is it really playing a part if it’s true?” I asked. “But your team is also watching.”

TJ grinned. “That’s why we’ll dance. Kovac will see it as sexy, suggestive foreplay, and my team will still be able to look us in the eye in the morning.” He pulled his phone out of his pocket, tapped it a few times to turn on some music, and set it on the dresser. He held out his hand to me.

I took it, and he enveloped me in his arms again, this time with one of my hands in his, and his other hand on the small of my back. He nuzzled my ear.

“I really did want to dance with you at the embassy,” he whispered.

“Yes, but that was just to stop me from ransacking Izak’s office.”

“Yeah, that was it. Someone had to take one for the team.”

“Hey!”

He laughed softly. “You know I don’t mean it. Hmm, this is even better than I imagined it would be.”

We held each other and swayed and kissed. It was pure bliss and I didn’t want it to end. But all too soon, the lights went out for two full seconds, Jensen’s signal that we were counting down from ten for the local power grid to go down for the next hour, forcing the Kovac’s emergency generator to kick in and the security system to roll over to a more quickly and easily hacked platform.

TJ pulled me tighter against him and pressed his mouth to mine. His tongue stroked my lips, which I parted slowly. I licked the tip of his tongue with mine. He moved his hand and slid my zipper down the back of my dress.

And then it went dark. A few seconds later, light from the hallway filtered in through the crack under the door.

“Generators are running,” TJ whispered. He pulled on a black sweatshirt and sneakers as he spoke. “I should be back in less than fifteen minutes. You know what to do.”

I kissed him one more time, then dashed into the bathroom to start the shower. He left the room, closing the door behind him while I shrugged out of my dress and poked my head into the steam behind the shower curtain. Our plan was that if anyone came to the door, it would appear that I had just stepped out of the shower, and I would tell them TJ was in there now.

Myplan diverged slightly and depended upon no one coming to the door. I slipped on my own dark sweatpants and pulled on a dark tee shirt over my strapless bra. I tucked my mini recorder into my sweatpants pocket and crept out of the room in bare feet, heading in the opposite direction from TJ. If all went well, I’d be back in the room before he returned, and he would never have to know I’d left.

CHAPTER 20

TJ

I slipped downthe dimly lit hallways, secure in the knowledge that Jensen was in charge of the security feeds and was looping empty hallways on the guards’ monitors, and my comms unit was allowing Penn and Sparks to track my movements inside the house. Still, I hung in the shadows, anticipating a bad guy with a gun around every corner. Our recon had indicated that Kovac kept the property perimeter well-guarded, but the interior of the house less so. With his state-of-the-art security system, only keeping a few armed guards inside was a reasonable decision.

But not one I would have made.

“You’re close now,” Penn said in my ear. “Next right. Expect an armed hostile.”

I moved more slowly, as stealthy and quiet as a cat, my fists pulled up in front of me, ready to strike. I caught the guard’s shadow when he was just around the corner. He spotted me immediately but wasn’t quick enough to lift his weapon or his hand. I punched him square in the face, then pulled a tranq dart out of my pocket and sank it into his neck. It was a 20- to 30-minute dose, so hopefully he wouldn’t be knocked out long enough to be missed. It contained a little extra kick that would make him feel sick, like he had the flu, while also wiping his memory of the minutes before he went unconscious.

I pulled nitrile gloves out of my sweatshirt front pocket and dragged the lump of a man into a dark, secluded corner, where he’d either be discovered or would wake up, but either way would appear to have curled up there for a nap. I continued to the end of the corridor and stopped outside the room we’d identified as a repository for all things Carbonados. The only place better to hide it on US soil would have been inside the embassy itself, but even Luka Kovac couldn’t have done that without the full cooperation of his government, which wasn’t involved with the criminal organization.

“Okay, Jensen, I’m ready for your magic. Do you have the code?”

“I’ve had it since ten seconds after the system rolled over to backup,” he said.

The three lights along the top of the security panel beside the data room door turned green. I slipped into the room and closed the door behind me.

Alder spoke in my ear. “I’ll walk you through cloning the computer and the backup hard drives we’ve located with electronic signals. Jensen’s still working on cracking the safe.”

Fuck me. A delay in opening the safe hadn’t been part of our plan.

Alder explained how to attach the tiny plastic disk to the bottom of Kovac’s laptop, although I already knew the drill. Still, protocol dictated that the tech crew was responsible for this part of the operation.

While I adjusted the disk, I asked, “Any electronic signatures coming from inside the safe?”

“Yes,” Alder answered quietly.