The Espionage Effect(17)

Then I turned and negotiated around a wicker chair and small table to gain access to the armoire beneath the TV. On the topmost surface sat a wooden serving tray that held two coffee mugs and two smaller espresso cups in matching brown earthenware. I opened the wooden doors below to reveal shelving that held shot glasses and a closed container of salt, wine glasses, and squat handblown tumblers with tiny imperfect bubbles in their glass sides and rims tinted a bright emerald green. I grabbed two of the tumblers with one hand. Then I opened the fridge and wrapped my other hand around the neck of a chilled Pellegrino bottle.

“Why the great interest in a house down the beach?” Had the question sounded casual? I’d struggled to strip the extreme curiosity from my tone.

“It belongs to a target of interest. We’re attempting to ascertain how he’s moving…product. And what communications methods he’s using.”

“Communications methods?” I twisted off the cap, and a loud puff sounded out as the compressed air released. I poured us each a glass of carbonated water, then carried them to the desk.

Without glancing up, he held his hand out. I placed the glass dead center in his palm, amazed at how attuned he remained to everything happening around him while he stayed focused on his analysis.

I turned around and retreated to the white slipcovered couch a few feet away, spun on a heel, and plopped onto it, crushing the blue throw pillow that had been so perfectly perched in the far corner. I stared at the slats of the shutters on the windows surrounding the desk, all of which he’d canted into an upward position, screening our nighttime activities from view.

“We’ve tapped his landlines, cloned the mobile phones and computers. Nothing. Yet every instinct I have tells me he’s operating from this house.”

Should I ask? Would he tell me?

What did I have to lose? So far, he seemed forthcoming. “What exactly is the ‘product’?”

His head shifted up slightly. Like he stared at an unidentified spot on the dark wooden shutters, trying to find the answer.

“A deadly virus.”

“Deadly?” My voice strangled out on a breaking squeak. What would a “target of interest” want with a virus…other than to hurt someone?

“And highly contagious.”

Correction: someones.

Dissatisfied with Alec’s innocuous tradecraft label of a man capable of doing something so evil, I asked, “What’s his name?”

He immediately answered, “Escobar.”

Escobar. I rolled the name over my tongue as my mind tucked away the information.

I took a sip of the cool fizzing mineral water. “Doesn’t seem that difficult to transport a virus. Couldn’t he, or someone, just carry it within a case into the house?”

“We’re not concerned only with the virus in its dormant state. It’s the active contagion that has him as our highest priority.”

“Who is ‘they’ and ‘our’? The CIA? Some black ops organization?” The question of Alec’s origin had been teasing my brain ever since he’d crashed onto the terrace just a few feet away and not so many hours ago. Every instinct I had told me he’d been honest so far, and that he operated just this side of the same darkness I cocooned myself in with familiar comfort.

At my last voiced speculation, he turned around to fully face me. With the light behind him now, his features were hidden completely in darkness. His deep chuckle rumbled into my ears. “Far more cloak-and-dagger than that.”

I flattened my lips into a line, fighting a smile. “Impossible. You can’t get more cloak-and-dagger than black ops. There are not degrees of obscurity.”

“Ahhh, but there are, Devin.” His voice softened, deepening into a rich silk that caressed, mesmerized. “When no one knows we exist but those who work for us. When membership means becoming a shadow, permanently. When we fly under the radar but out in plain sight for all to overlook. We’re the whisper of air that chases what goes bump in the night.”

My breaths grew shallow. The hairs on my arms stood on end.

I wanted to whisper. I wanted to chase.

“But you’re revealing yourself to me.” My voice sounded thready to my ears. “Does that mean I’m expendable?”

I heard a soft breath of air from him. “No. It means I trust you.”

“Because I stabbed you, then stitched you up?”

His soft laugh made the tension in my shoulders ease a bit. “There is that. But it’s more with me. I’m trained to read others down to the slightest nuance. It’s a gift I have and excel at in greater degree than anyone they’ve ever tested. I’m both a human lie detector and a fairly accurate predictor of someone’s future actions—with varying percentages of certainty—based on their past actions.”

Well. Wasn’t that disclosure mildly disconcerting? Did that mean he saw through me? Knew that I preferred the dark because darkness was an intrinsic part of me?

Silence stretched between us, a palpable, heavy thing that grew, pregnant with the weight of what he’d said and what we hadn’t extrapolated from it. If he’d been willing to reveal this much, did that mean I had carte blanche at the moment?

To test the waters, I asked a direct question. “What do you call yourselves?”

“Ethersphere One.”