The Espionage Effect(69)

“Good. When are you coming back?” she asked.

I turned around, staring at Alec. He’d busied himself at his laptop again, clicking away at the keyboard.

“Not until tomorrow night. You cool with that?” Some vacation the week had turned out to be. Her at the hospital for two days. Me, squirreled away in covert training for a couple more, just down the beach from our resort.

But the original plan to temporarily get away from the pressures of college? Had all been a superficial ruse anyway. I’d been looking to escape—more permanently—from everything wrong in my life.

Her voice grew distant, like she pulled the phone away from her face. “Want to stay the night?” She’d spoken to someone else.

“Escobar?” A pang of worry lanced through me as I spoke the name. Son, father, I hadn’t decided whether or not one or both were dirty. After seeing all the lab equipment, everyone seemed suspect.

Alec’s gaze shot up, a brow arching at the name as well. I mouthed out “Miguel.”

“Yeah, it’s cool,” she replied. “But that’s it. We only have three days left of vacation. No more boys. No more parties. Only girl time.”

“Only girl time.” The words I repeated held conviction, even though nothing remained certain any longer.

In my mind, only one thing had solidified.

No longer would I be headed along the stifling predestined route of genius physicist. I’d veered far off course, down a path I’d been searching for all along, one that had fortuitously revealed itself when I’d least expected, when I’d opened myself to the universe in question.

The universe had answered loud and clear: My future lie in the dark shadows of espionage.





Alec shifted his gaze toward the laptop as I ended the call with Anna. I crossed back to the desk, braving the dangerous erotic current between us, testing the waters. As I slid his phone onto the polished mahogany corner of his desk, nothing untoward happened. He didn’t pounce on me in predatory strike, and I didn’t melt into a puddle of quivering arousal at his feet.

But whether or not we acted on the sexual tension charging between us, it remained ever-present, at a low insistent hum, all the same.

“He’s positioning to make a move.”

“Escobar?” Not that Alec’s intimation needed clarification. “How do you know?”

“An alert was sent through the network. ESO picked up on a sudden increase in stock moves from Escobar’s shell corporations this morning.”

“ESO?” I glanced over his shoulder, noticing several open windows on his laptop screen. One had his organization’s name emblazoned in the upper right corner.

“EtherSphere One,” we uttered simultaneously. The acronym threw me because he’d often dropped the “One.”

“They’ve begun shorting stocks. In the hundreds of millions.”

“What kind of stocks?” I leaned in closer, scanning the information he’d displayed in the various windows.

He clicked on one of them, enlarging it. “Across the board. Mostly blue chip, corporate household names: Home Depot, Wal-Mart, Microsoft…GM…over a hundred different stocks.”

I scrutinized the list, recognizing most of them. “American,” I whispered under my breath, making the connection. “The stocks. The captives.”

“You’re sure?” He glanced up. “They were all American?”

Aided by my eidetic memory, I replayed the image of those prison cells again. The green Fighting Irish Notre Dame T-shirt. The cardinal and gold USC emblem on the baseball cap of one of the boys. “American college kids and sports fans. Like they’d been abducted from tailgate parties or local nightclubs.” Maybe they had. Drunk. Easily manipulated. Easier to drug. “But they didn’t seem to know each other.”

“How so?” His head cocked, ever so slightly.

Forcing myself past protective barriers I’d relied on for so long, I risked revisiting the scene in more detail and focused harder on the minute specifics to back up my gut feeling. “No one in the cells huddled closer than necessary. No one touched, that I could see.” No hands were locked together, gripping tightly to life and to their comrades by circumstance as they waited for what had to be certain doom.

After a sharp nod, he abruptly turned, pulled up a new window, and began typing a message.

Wondering how much he trusted me, I edged closer in. He didn’t flinch at my bold action. Didn’t question my involvement or my peering over his shoulder into my first focused glimpse of the covert EtherSphere One through the Shadow Network.

I remained quiet, observing. A certain peace descended over me as I gathered intel for my own personal agenda.

A deep-cover spy my whole life—in my own life—I finally stood at the towering precipice of realizing all I’d strived toward. To become the weapon the world had born and honed me to be.

The moment, the anticipation, the idea that I would seek revenge—if not for crimes against me and mine, then for those whose life currently teetered on the razor’s edge between salvation or forfeit—vibrated through every cell in my body.

I let out a controlled breath through pursed lips, tamping down the energetic excitement as I watched Alec scroll through the screens.

“If not tonight, then tomorrow night.” With lightning speed, he typed a missive to whatever authority he reported to on the other end, detailing our suspicions.