accounts, was ignorant of the uglier side of life.
But she was no longer ignorant about the ugliest clothes in the universe. She’d topped the orange pants with a tentlike housecoat with rainbows all over it.
She’d tucked her hair up into a silver, curly-haired wig and donned an old pair of Mrs. Pfluger’s glasses, which had red frames and were only slightly uglier than Lucy’s own.
“My old walker is over there.” Mrs. Pfluger gestured toward a corner of her living room.
“This will never work,” Lucy said on a moan. “No one will believe I’m eighty years old.”
“Eighty-two,” Mrs. Pfluger said.
“Trust me, if anyone is watching the place, they won’t look past the obvious at the place next door.” He unfolded the portable walker and set it in front of Lucy. “Let’s see you do an old-lady walk.”
Lucy hunched over the walker and did a creditable imitation of an arthritic senior citizen inching along.
“Oh, heavens,” Mrs. Pfluger said. “Please don’t tell me I look like that when I walk.”
“I’m exaggerating,” Lucy said. Then she turned to her neighbor and gave her a spontaneous hug. “Oh, Mrs. Pfluger, I can’t thank you enough for helping us out like this. I mean, you don’t even know this guy.”
“He showed me a badge,” Mrs. Pfluger said innocently, having no clue the badge he’d shown her was fake and could be bought on any street corner in D.C.
“Anyway, he has trustworthy eyes. He’ll take care of you.”
“I’m counting on it,” Lucy said, giving Bryan a meaningful look. “Can we go now?”
Bryan thanked Lucy’s elderly neighbor, too, then “helped” Lucy out the door and down the wheelchair ramp.
“Keep your head down. That’s it,” he whispered. “You’re doing great. If I didn’t know better, I’d swear you were someone’s grandmother.” But he did know better.
The body that had been pressed against his when she’d fallen on him was not the slightest bit grandmotherly. In fact, he’d been surprised at how slim and firm she was beneath the frumpy suit she’d worn.
His Mercedes was parked at the curb. Knowing the town house might be under surveillance, he’d made no attempt to be stealthy, walking right up to the neighbor’s door and ringing the bell. He’d known she would be home. He’d also known she’d been an army nurse in Korea and her husband had been a World War II veteran. He’d been counting on her patriotism to make her willing to help him out, and he’d been right.
As he usually was. He liked to cover all the bases.
As soon as the motor started and the car was underway, he relaxed slightly. If anyone had been watching, Lucy’s old-lady act had fooled them. No one was following.
Bryan drove to a mall parking lot and pulled the Mercedes into a spot fairly close to where he’d found it.
“Why are we stopping here?” Lucy asked.
“Switching cars.” He turned off the engine and pulled his Multi-Key from the ignition.
“What is that?” Lucy asked, pointing to the strange-looking device. Then she gasped. “Oh my God, you stole this car!”
“Just borrowed it. The owner is blissfully shopping at Marshall Fields. She’ll never know.”
“That is really scary,” Lucy said. “That such a device even exists, and that our government employees steal cars.”
“Government employees do a lot worse than steal cars, I’m afraid,” he said as they exited the Mercedes. Unfortunately, he’d just found out the hard way what certain government employees were capable of.
Lucy grabbed the walker from the back seat, but she didn’t use it. She walked beside him with a spring in her step, lithe and graceful. He led her to the car he’d arrived in, a silver Jaguar XJE. Since he’d been driving his personal wheels and not a “company car,” he hadn’t wanted to risk it being identified.
Thus the switcheroo.
“Hmm, I liked this even better than the Mercedes,” she commented as she put the walker in the trunk. “Is this one stolen, too?”
“No, this one’s mine.”
“I hadn’t realized government employees earned enough money to afford a Jag.”
“We don’t. My government salary isn’t my only source of income.” He’d never imagined his cover business, the one he set up to satisfy friends and family, would turn so lucrative. He opened the passenger door for her. “You can ditch the disguise, now. We’re safe.”
“Thank God.” She pulled off the wig. Her real hair pulled loose from its bun in the process, spilling over her shoulders in a rich chestnut cascade. He’d never found brown hair all that exciting before, but Lucy’s was thick and luscious.
By the time he’d made it around to the driver’s side, Lucy was out of her housecoat, which she’d thrown on over her white tailored blouse. Then she cursed. “I forgot my jeans.”
“No, I put them in-” Then he stopped. He’d been so fascinated watching Lucy shimmy out of them, revealing a glimpse of her sensible white panties, that he had forgotten to bring the jeans along. “We’ll get you some clothes, don’t worry.”
He had no business thinking about Lucy’s panties, sensible or otherwise. He had a helluva problem here.
Finding the listening devices was disturbing enough. He’d been sure Lucy was exaggerating, that no one was following her or sneaking into her home. But she hadn’t installed those listening devices herself.
In fact, once he’d examined the bug in her telephone, the list of suspects who could have planted it had shrunk to a handful. That bug was the latest technology, purchased from Russia. So new, in fact, that only his agency had access to it. Besides the Russians, of course. And he didn’t think the Russians were involved in this.
Someone in his own organization had betrayed him, which meant his life and Lucy’s weren’t worth a used teabag unless he found out which agent was the Benedict Arnold-and neutralized him or her, fast.
Chapter 2
They drove in silence for a few minutes. Bryan took a route out of the city, darting on and off the freeway to be absolutely certain they weren’t being followed. Then he headed north on Interstate 95 as a plan slowly formed.
“Are you okay?” he asked Lucy. She was awfully quiet. He’d expected her to be peppering him with questions about where they were going and what would happen next, questions to which he didn’t have all the answers.
“I’m fine.”
“I’m sorry I put you in danger.”
“I knew what I was getting into when I signed on for this gig. You told me there would be some risk.”
She didn’t know the half of it. He’d never expected the risk to come from his own people. “You did great. I wish we could have finished the job, though.”
“I did.”
“Pardon me?”
“After I talked to you, I knew I wouldn’t be returning to Alliance Trust. So I threw caution out the window. Before, I was careful to cover my tracks when I downloaded information. I figured that didn’t matter anymore. So I just downloaded everything in sight. Practically the whole computer system. I can’t believe how much that little memory stick holds.”
“You downloaded everything?” he asked, hardly able to believe it.
“Everything I’ll need. It will take some time to go through it all. Whoever was embezzling from the retirement funds was very sneaky. But I’ve got calendars, phone lists, log-on and log-off times, passwords, who attended what meeting when. Using a process of elimination, I can figure out who made the illicit withdrawals-I know I can.”
“You won’t have to. The agency has some of the best minds in the country-” He stopped. Until he knew who had betrayed him, he didn’t dare turn this information over to anyone. One keystroke, and all of the evidence Lucy had risked her life for could be erased.
“I could do it,” Lucy said. “I’m very good at puzzles. Maybe your organization has experts and high-tech equipment, but I know the people involved. I know how everything worked at that bank. No one is more qualified than me to analyze this data.”
