Page 28 of Play the Game

“Lucky for us, because it’s buying us time,” I answered.

“Li,” TJ said, “make the move. Get Alder and Sparks out of there, but don’t take your gun off him until you’re clear.”

Li cracked open the front door and signaled to the women inside. Sparks exited first, pulling Alder behind her. They disappeared into the shadows. Li followed them, walking backward so she didn’t lose track of the pisser, until she, too, faded into the darkness.

Over the comms, Bond said soothing things to Alder, trying to bring down her blood pressure and heart rate, which I could see, via her biometric monitoring watch, were still high. Using the street cam feeds, which I was sending to my equipment but blocking from any other systems, I kept an eye on Kessler and Kat, who had hiked the mile and a half back to the second van. They unloaded their gear in the back and climbed into the front. Kessler drove. As soon as she pulled away from the curb, I stopped the loops on the traffic cams near them and returned them to live streaming once they were past them so it would appear they’d never been there.

“Kessler, Kat, you good?” TJ asked over the comms.

“Already on the highway,” Kessler answered, which I could have told him because, of course, I was tracking the van and every team member, but there was something to be said for hearing people’s voices as they told you for themselves that they were all right.

Seconds later, Tam, Alder, and Li piled into the back of the command van. TJ put the vehicle in reverse, backed out of the parking lot, and pulled onto the dark, empty street. As we drove, I jammed the street cams as we passed them, while also emitting a static field around the van to interfere with any Ring Cams or private surveillance. Basically, we were shrouded in an electronic invisibility cloak until we entered the highway and headed toward our temporary quarters at the lake house.

“Good work, team,” TJ said, now that we were all clear. “Sparks, good call to go over the fence instead of through the lock.”

“Thanks, boss.” She spoke quietly, but she was smiling.

I tried to catch her eye and give her a thumbs-up, but she didn’t look in my direction. Space, I reminded myself. My best friend had asked for space. That didn’t mean I couldn’t remind her I cared about her. I would just have to communicate my appreciation for her in a different way, using a language that didn’t involve words.

CHAPTER 11

Tamela

The late nighthad thrown us off our sleep schedules, so the team meeting was delayed until the afternoon. Still, I was up by 8:00 a.m. and heard my teammates stirring, too. We were used to long hours and very little sleep. Normally, I didn’t mind early morning company, but today, I craved alone time.

There were eight bedrooms in the house, four each on the second and third floors. My room was on the third floor, so I quietly descended two levels of staircases to the first floor, with its enormous kitchen and dining room along the back of the house, looking out over a huge screened-in porch with a killer view of the river. Two great rooms, one with a big-screen TV and one without, were in the front of the house. Both were open all the way up to the top of the third floor and were set with multiple levels of windows so the whole front of the house appeared to be glass.

If we weren’t up to our eyeballs with more Carbonados bullshit, this would make a very nice vacation spot.

As I poured my coffee, I sniffed the air. I smelled eggs. Spicy eggs. I peeked into the oven, which was set to warm. There were two pans filled with Jason’s famous veggie frittata and a tray of bacon under those. My mouth watered. I knew it was another attempt at connecting, but I wasn’t ready for it. I needed more time by myself to figure out how to forget about Tuesday and be us again. I grabbed a couple of pieces of bacon and, carrying those and my coffee, headed out to walk the trail along the lake.

By the time I returned, everyone else was working in the barn. The builders were still finishing up some of the buildouts, but the floor-to-ceiling dividers between workspaces were in place, and the wires and cables had been installed. I slid into the small room assigned to Hart and me and buried myself in research and reports, breaking only for our afternoon team meeting.

TJ insisted on a team dinner at 8:00 p.m. to keep up morale. We had catered food delivered, which was not as good as Jason’s cooking, but he had his own work to do and couldn’t feed us all the time. Although, if he could have, I think a part of him would have loved that. He left the table first, though, heading back to the barn. He’d been furrowing his brow a lot today, and I understood why.

We hadn’t heard a peep from the Carbonados regarding his third-place win. Because we were monitoring their electronic devices and had personnel from other agencies, namely the FBI, watching them closely, we knew Pasco and Sarah Bee hadn’t been contacted, either. All the trees our operatives had been shaking across the border had proved fruitless, as well. The whole team was tense, tired, and living on adrenaline. If the Carbonados didn’t reach out to one of the three competitors by tomorrow, we would devise new plans to infiltrate their dirty bomb operation.

After Jason left the table, I carried a post-dinner glass of wine out to the back porch. With cicadas chirping, the river rushing past, and my friends chatting in the distance, I was in a rare state of peace. I sat alone for fifteen blissful minutes, in an almost meditative state, pondering the big questions of life. My career and my future with HEAT. My sisters’ lives and whether they’d found a balance I might never have. My mother’s late-in-life, happy second marriage and the faith it took to love again after a great loss.

My friendship with Jason and whether it was worth risking for the possibility of a different, or maybe just expansive, kind of love.

By the time the deck boards creaked, announcing that someone was joining me, I hadn’t had any great revelations, but I had concluded that I was ready to apologize to my best friend. I turned in the direction of the back door, expecting to see him there. Instead, it was Kat, carrying two glasses of port.

“Hey, partner.” She set one of the glasses in front of me. “You looked deep in thought. Hope I’m not interrupting.”

“I was, but you’re not.” I lifted the glass she’d brought me. “Thanks.”

“Ah, this is where the party is,” Li said as she joined us. She carried her own glass and the port bottle. “I’ve brought reinforcements.” She called more loudly, “Cynthia, we’re out on the back porch.”

Kessler joined a minute later. “Thank God. I came back from the bathroom and the dining room was deserted.”

“Alder is calling her family,” Li said, referring to Alder’s seven partners in her polyamorous partnership, “and the over-thirty-five crowd headed to bed.”

She was referring to Bond, who was thirty-five, and TJ, who was thirty-six. Practically ancient by HEAT standards. Even Penn was getting up there at the ripe old age of thirty-two. In a few months, I would cross the big 3-0 myself, long past time to fast-track my career.

“TJ doesn’t surprise me,” Kessler said. “He pulls a lot of all-nighters and is usually up and working before anyone else on the team,” she told Kat. “He grabs sleep whenever he can. But Bond usually only ditches us for a hot date, and as far as I know, Prescott is back in Chicago.”

“Wait,” Hart said, “Bond has settled down? The same Dr. Bond with a fellow doctor-slash-lover in every port? Tell me about this Dr. Prescott who finally got her to settle down.”

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