Tristan wrapped his arms around her again. “I promise I will get them out of there as soon as possible. We’re working, right? We’re making progress.”
He hoped Rogue Security was working as hard as he was on just his cover story.
She sniffled and nodded and went back to working on the bogus code he was producing.
He felt bad about lying to Colleen, but he didn’t want her anywhere near the danger when Rogue Security broke in to rescue Anjali and Jian.
The light in the room turned warmer.
Outside the hotel, the sun was setting over the golf course, filling the sky with fire.
Three and a half hours until midnight.
34
Drone
Colleen
At ten-thirty that night, while Colleen was staring at the lines and lines and lines of code on her computer screen that Tristan had written and then handed off to her to test and debug, the hotel room started spinning when she blinked. “Damn.”
“Yeah?” Tristan lifted his head from where he was sitting on the bed and typing. “What’s up? Jian and Anjali all right?”
“Yeah, as far as I know. I haven’t heard anything from your phone except the TV. I think Sergey is watching the Game Show Channel. I’m just getting tired. Do you always work with that drone music on?”
Dreamy waves of elongated tones emanated from Tristan’s computer’s speakers, veiling the room in drifting sound.
Tristan said, “It helps me concentrate.”
It wasn’t helping her concentrate any. As a matter of fact, her head wobbled on her tired neck every time she rested her eyes. “It’s kind of monotonous. You didn’t listen to it last week.”
“Yeah, just sometimes.”
She gestured at the dimmed lamps. “And the lights are so low.”
“Yeah. It helps with eyestrain if one’s screen is on dark mode.”
“Right.” She yawned. “It’s chilly in here. Did you turn up the AC?”
“A little.” He waved his hand at the laptop resting on his legs. “The CPU was getting hot. Why don’t you get under the blankets, princess?”
She flipped the white hotel sheets and duvet over her legs. “Okay. I guess I’m just getting tired.”
Tristan nodded sagely. “We’ve had a rough couple of days. I didn’t sleep well last night, either, due to the adrenaline of breaking into GameShack and then finding out your apartment had been invaded. Maybe you should lie down for a bit. Just to rest a little.”
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 Anonymity Minus program 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?”
Spanish accent, Tristan noted. “Tristan King. I’m expected.”
The man nodded and handed a pair of similar goggles to Tristan.
He shoved his phone in his pocket and stretched the straps over his head.
As Tristan brought the mask down over his eyes, the world revealed itself in tones of electric green. The sky blazed with the light of a thousand suns, casting gray light through the air and over the band of thirty or so men standing in clusters farther from the road.