“Right,” she said and groaned. “Fine, so we’re back to room service.” She picked up the brochure and said, “Well, at least they have some decent choices but, wow, the prices.”
“Forget about that,” he said. “Just order what you want. For all of us. We’ll eat it.”
At that, she smiled. “Right, got it.” She went through the menu, quickly ordered coffee, and then ordered a nice seafood pasta dish for everybody, with garlic bread. By the time she ordered, she said, “That’ll take a little time to get here. I’ll have a shower and cool down a bit.”
“Go for it.”
She took one last look at the two men, both sitting at the table, laptops open, moving through their phones and their laptops, totally focused on the tasks at hand. She shook her head. “This is just business as usual, I guess,” she muttered.
“Nothing usual about this at all,” Shane said, looking up. “But, yes, it’s business, and we will handle it just like we need to.”
“Right.” Feeling out of sorts and not knowing why, yet still like the odd man out and unable to help, she stepped into a hot shower. After a long day of those damn transatlantic flights, it was a relief to be on dry land again. She’d slept a lot, which should help with the time change, but she knew it would take a few days for her to really adjust.
She didn’t know about Shane and Diesel, but they looked like they were raring to go already. She wondered about the adrenaline required to keep going on a steady basis for a job like this. She knew what it was like, when she was on a big job, and they were setting up communication systems and marketing plans for a new company. A certain amount of adrenaline kept her going, going, going. And then, all of a sudden, it was over, and it was almost a letdown. Not a letdown in the sense that she was disappointed, but all that adrenaline had no place to go, and it took her days to recover. She figured that this was what was happening here.
She wondered what Shane planned to do when this was all over with and when the recovery happened. She’d love to spend some time with him and have a vacation or something. Hell, maybe they could go away someplace, though, when she thought about it, she hadn’t been to London in years. Maybe they could just stay here for a while.
And she had to figure out what she would do about her job. When her phone buzzed, she noted an email from the cops, looking at her to answer some questions about the shootings at her old company, she winced. She hadn’t told them that she had left the country. When she was dried off and dressed and returned to the main room, braiding her shoulder-length hair on the side of her head, she brought it up. “I got an email from the cops,” she said. “They want me to come in for questioning.”
“Well, that won’t happen,” Shane said.
“Didn’t we get told not to leave town?” she asked.
“Nope, we did not,” he murmured, but he didn’t lift his head from his computer work.
“Will I be in trouble for leaving?”
“No,” he said. “Forward me the email, and I’ll take care of it.”
Not knowing what else to do, she quickly forwarded it to him. As she’d asked for the coffee right away and for room service to deliver the meals in a little while, she was hoping the coffee was already here. She opened the front door and stepped out into the hallway, and almost instantly Shane was right there beside her. She looked up in surprise.
“I was just looking for the coffee,” she said. He turned her around gently and led her back inside. She sighed. “That bad, huh?”
“He killed eleven people as a test,” he said. “How bad does it need to get?”
She winced at the reminder. “I guess I’m just out of sorts,” she said. “I want to help, but there doesn’t seem to be anything I can do. I don’t even know how your system works, so I don’t—I can’t do anything,” she said. “All I see is the people I used to work with, and now even looking for a new job seems wrong. It’s like a betrayal of everything they went through.”
“All you can do at this point in time is look after yourself,” he said. “That’s the one thing that’s important to me. I brought you here to keep you safe. You’ve been through a rough time already.”
She sagged into the chair. “I get that,” she said, looking down at her hands and then back up at him. “I’m just not used to being idle.”
“Let’s put you to work then,” he said, walking to the table and snatching a pad of paper and a pen. “Write down every connection between us that you could possibly think of where someone would have seen us together.”
“Wow,” she said. “You mean people and places?”
“Yes.”
“Since kindergarten?”
“Yes.”
“I can try,” she said, “but that’s a bit far-fetched, isn’t it?”
“Maybe, maybe not,” he said. “Then find all the pictures on the internet with you and I together.”
As much as they had a lot in motion, they didn’t have enough quite yet. Shane looked at Diesel a couple hours later. “We should have had some deliveries by now.”
He looked at his watch. “I think they’re on the way.”
“Dammit, I don’t have time for delays,” Shane said. “I’ll go get ready, so we can leave as soon as everything arrives.”
Diesel looked at Shelly, who was nodding asleep on the bed. “What about her?”
“I’ve got that taken care of,” he said. He looked at Diesel and winced. “I did something I wouldn’t normally do,” he murmured, “but we had to contact MI6 anyway.”
“Ow, ouch,” he said. “Stepping on their toes is getting to be a habit.”
“And they are a resource we can’t afford to burn,” he said. “So I brought them in on it, and they’re supplying an officer to look after her.”
“That’s actually a good solution,” he said.
At that, Shane headed to the bathroom and quickly got changed. Then he swiped on a layer of some of the military’s latest face paint on his exposed skin, to reduce his facial signature, until he was out of the public eye and could don his black ski mask. The trick was to be invisible, to cut down his heat signature, to stop his face from reflecting moonlight, streetlights, etc.
When he came back out, it was Diesel’s turn.
Shane saw the gear that he’d ordered had arrived, as well as the officer from MI6. Shane quickly put on his bulletproof vest. Now, dressed in black from top to bottom, it would get him where he needed to go. The black gear worked best at night in cityscapes, if he kept to the shadows. Or for tunnels under the city. However, in a jungle, camo was better. In the water, an invisibility cloak, aka the mirage effect, was pretty handy.
Once he had the gloves snapped on, he quickly loaded up his backpack and filled his pockets with the rest of what he needed. With his phone tucked into the chest pocket, he looked at Diesel. He was fully outfitted as well. With a quick nod, Shane said, “We’ll have to wipe out everything in the hallway.”
“I’ve got that,” said the MI6 operative, standing off to the side. “Gimme twenty seconds.”