Page 41 of France Face-Off
“Madam, if you do not leave on your own, we will be forced to escort you out.” The new security guard reached for her arm.
For a moment, she considered fighting her way through, but Alex didn’t want to start a ruckus, drawing attention to herself. She’d have to leave and come back in another way. “I’m going.” She turned and left through the exit door at the rear of the conference room.
The door led down a short hallway to a loading dock where a truck stood empty at the ramp. The last of the delegates were being herded down steps and around the other side of the building. Alex glanced around, searching for another door into the building. She tried one marked “receiving” in French. The door was locked. A button on the wall had a sign to ring the bell for assistance. When Alex moved past the truck, two men stepped out of the back. Both wore dark overalls like delivery truck drivers and had baseball caps pulled down low over their foreheads, shadowing their faces.
As gooseflesh rose on her arms, Alex moved past them quickly, heading for the steps leading down from the ramp. If she hurried, she might catch up with the other summit attendees.
The two men didn’t give her the time she needed to reach the steps. They rushed toward her.
Alex ran, but she didn’t reach the steps before one of the men reached out and grabbed her arm, spinning her on her heels.
She came around fighting, sending a sidekick to his kidney.
The other man grabbed her other arm and shoved it up the middle of her back.
Pain shot through her arm and shoulder, and she stood as high as she could on her toes to find some relief.
The one she’d kicked pulled something out of his pocket. It looked like a syringe.
Alex stomped on the instep of the man trying to break her arm.
He cursed and loosened his grip just enough that Alex could pull her arm free and jab him with her elbow in the belly. She took two steps in her breakaway and was yanked up short when the man with the syringe grabbed a handful of her hair and dragged her backward against him. Before she could regain her balance, he jabbed the needle into her arm.
He let go of her hair.
When Alex darted away, her legs turned to jelly, her vision blurred and she crashed to the concrete.
Chapter 10
After Striker saw Alex to the summit session, he grabbed a cup of coffee and headed back to his room, where he powered on the computer and fit his comm devices into his ears. He’d forgotten them earlier when he’d stepped into the shower with Alex.
“Striker,” Lucie’s voice sounded in his ear.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“I take it you revealed what you know about Ms. Sokolov?”
“I did.”
“How did she respond?”
“She took it well.” He drew in a breath and launched into what he’d learned. “She said she’d been holding onto the flash drive since her parents’ deaths because she wanted to know what was on it. For the past two years, she couldn’t access one file on the drive. Everything else had to do with personal bank accounts and contacts. The file she couldn’t open was encrypted.”
“The CIA has entire teams devoted to decryption.”
“I know that. Alex’s not sure who she can trust or if she can trust the CIA, given the fact a double-agent for the CIA was the one who informed the Russians her parents had information they might not want to make it back to the CIA. She’s also worried that once she hands it over, she’ll never learn what was actually on the file that got her parents killed.”
“That’s quite possible,” Lucie agreed.
“Last night, she asked to use the laptop you assigned to me. While I was in the shower, she managed to get into that file. The laptop used the embedded facial recognition software, and it let her in.”
“What did she find?”
“Programming code. Some kind of software.”
“Interesting,” Lucie said.
“She doesn’t know what the code means and doesn’t want to learn how to read the language. She’s ready to hand it off to the people her parents had intended it should go to. Do you have contacts at the CIA?”
