Page 62 of Tangled

But every keystroke was one minute closer to getting Anjali the hell away from Sergey and his Russian goons. “I can work a while longer.”

“You’re caught up with where I am. You can sleep whilst I get a few more hours of coding in, and then you can catch up with me again tomorrow morning.”

“It’s taking you a long time to code this. I don’t see how we’re going to finish by Wednesday.”

“Some of the other sections won’t take as long,” he assured her.

“Yeah, and it seems like you’re making a lot of mistakes. You didn’t make these kinds of syntax errors when we were coding Anonymity Plus.”

“Everyone does better work when they aren’t sleep-deprived.” Tristan stretched his long arms overhead and hooked his fingers on the top of the tall headboard, stretching his heavy pec muscles and arching his back. His tight tee-shirt strained over his thick triceps on the backs of his arms, and his abdominals traced rows of cobblestones under the black cotton.

Sadly, the trousers in Tristan’s emergency clothing delivery that afternoon had been black cargo pants, not gray sweatpants.

Also weird. Huh.

While stretching, he said, “Yeah, I suppose I should rest some, too. I’ll just finish this section so I don’t lose my place, and then I’ll nap for a bit.”

Colleen tucked herself under the covers. “Wake me up at two o’clock.”

He shrugged. “The next section after this is going to be a long one. Why don’t you sleep until five or six? There’s no way I can have this next part ready for you before that.”

She nodded sleepily as she warmed up under the blankets. Languor weighed down her limbs, and her legs felt glued to the bed. They had only slept a few fitful hours the night before after checking into the hotel at two o’clock in the morning, and then Sergey had phoned them at eight to demand his software ransom for Jian and Anjali.

And the entire last week had been tough, what with working on the Anonymity Plus program every damn minute of their waking hours, and now the AnonymityMinusprogram was eating their every waking minute.

And you know,all the sex.

So yeah, sleep deprivation caught up with Colleen. Within minutes, the steady clicking of Tristan’s keyboard became a flickering rattle and then faded away.

When she stirred at a quarter to one in the morning, the hotel room was entirely dark, and the bed beside her was empty.

35

Midnight Call

Tristan

Sneaking out without awakening Colleen had taken half an hour.

Hailing a rideshare car from the hotel on a Sunday night had taken only a few minutes and few winks from the driver about why Tristan was leaving a hotel in the middle of the night without luggage.

The coordinates specified in the text that Tristan had received was a vacant field, so he told the driver that his buddy had meant to meet him at the convenience store at the next intersection. As they passed, faint movements shifted in the dark, blocking the city lights like waving bushes.

No flashlights, he noted. No floodlamps or lanterns. Just darker shapes moving quietly in the faint starlight and glow from the city that spread out downhill of that neighborhood.

Farther uphill in this mountain pass, monoliths blotted out the smooth sheet of stars halfway up the sky. No moon interrupted the darkness.

Uphill and a mile away, spotlights glared on the Boulders Resort, a sleek building embedded in a red rock mountain like a spaceship crash-landed on rusty Mars.

Tristan walked along the road from the convenience store toward the desert field in the oppressively warm night. His long trousers trapped the heat, plastering it against his skin.

When Tristan stepped off the asphalt, gravelly dirt crunched under his running shoes. He took out his cell phone and used the screen, not the flashlight, to cast a dim glow on the thorny bushes and cacti in his path.

A man, clad all in black, loomed out of the darkness.

Tristen hopped sideways but didn’t make a sound.

Goggles covered the man’s eyes, and a long tube emerged from the bridge of his nose like a medieval plague mask. “You are?”