Page 67 of Fire for Effect

Though Taz in a gown would be worth dealing with my family…

Assuming my family didn’t scare her off, of course.

There were a lot of things to worry about with Taz. So many ways I could lose her.

Taz could crash her bike on the side of the road, and no one would see her on these rural highways until she had bled out. She could come across a hasty ambush, alone, for the likes of Matthews and his cronies. She could be alone, in her trailer, when bad guys snuck in, and took her at gun point and used her against me. Against Cerberus. Against the entire US government.

And, of course, my family could scare her off with that particular brand of Griffith snobbery.

It all made sense to target me, because I was a man connected to the white house in a roundabout way. President Lau had been a friend to my father and had been at my Christening thirty-five years ago.

Now, Taz was at the end of all those links - the weak link I didn’t realize would ever be discovered.

I picked up my second phone. It was a brick satellite phone we had to keep it on us at all times. It was a secure Cerberus line that was locked in, meaning that they could only call the phones with its set. There were twenty-six phones, twenty-six agents, and twenty-six letters in the alphabet.

I scrolled until I got to the letter S, and let it dial.

“Pryvit.” Sierra’s Ukrainian hello sent a calm through me, because I had grown to know my partner.

“What have you got?” I asked.

“What do you mean?” I knew she was smirking. “Miss CIA told us not to look into it, and to just lay low.”

I snorted. “Yeah, sure. What have you found?”

There was zero chance - and I mean absolute zero - that Sierra had left things well enough alone. Man-woman pairings didn’t always work within the super large egos of the shadow world of spies, but Sierra and I got on like gangbusters. Probably because she was just near enough to Taz in personality that I could trust her, but without the face and body that I had learned had become my ‘type’.

I knew that she wouldn’t let this go. Lying low was not in her arsenal of tricks.

“I may have… found information related to their investigation of the leak,” she said, and I could imagine she was grinning from ear to ear. “And it’s most definitely from within the CIA.”

“How do you figure?”

“Because the CIA is currently investigating their personnel for a leak.”

“How do you know that?”

“I have a… human source.”

I smacked my forehead.

Jesus, she had either blackmailed or honeypot someone in the CIA for that information.

“Don’t worry, they have no idea that I figured it out,” she gave a little laugh. “They pretended to be an analyst for a venture capitalist, and there was an investigation at work. I could read between the lines.” She paused, then added, “I did not kill anyone or pull out their fingernails.”

“It’s telling that you have to specify that,” I chuckled. “So you’re screwing them?”

I wasn’t sure if it was a man, or woman, or both? Or several? Hard to tell with her.

“Well, yes. Of course. Good looking, big dicks are hard to find.” So, it was a man then. “Thankfully, it’s predictably found attached to someone who's not that smart.”

“So many ways I could be insulted…”

Before I could figure out what her words implied, she plowed the conversation forward.

“How is our future wife?” she asked, in that way she liked to tease.

When you have a partner, you tend to be right up their ass, and you become intimately aware of all their problems. Like Siamese twins, what I knew, she knew. What I didn’t tell her, she would snoop out because she had absolutely no respect for privacy.

---