Carol (Carol Schmidt Series) by Lori Cook Read Free Book Online Page B

for alcohol. Hot and dusty, the whole country loud and busy and
somehow dispiriting. She’d only been here a couple of days, and already she was
keen to leave. By midnight she’d be on a flight out of here. But before that
there was business to take care of. Perhaps she could have some fun with that,
at least.
    Yet she was still thinking about Jason, and the passion she had
shared with him on her first trip to New York, all those years ago. The thought
of what had happened to him since then gnawed at her, the sense of the injustice
of it, such a beautiful person crushed almost to nothing, slumped in front of
the television and blaming himself.
    “I have a suggestion,” she said softly.
    The Cardinal looked up from his thoughts, his head slightly to one
side, amused almost. Carol didn’t usually make suggestions. That was what he
liked about her; what she did, she did with utter dedication. But she never got
involved in his side of things.
    “Are you sure it fits our criteria?” he asked, polite but wary.
    “I think so.”
    She explained the situation briefly, making sure not to stress her
own emotional involvement in the case. It was, on the contrary, a matter of
theft on a grand scale, of a person becoming not a millionaire but a
billionaire. It was about people having been duped, quite legally. All things
considered, it was exactly the kind of case that moved the Cardinal to action.
    With his customary politeness, he let her finish, then pressed his
palms together and took a long time to think about it.
    “How much of this is public knowledge?” he asked.
    “Apparently, people tend not to mention it because it might reflect
badly on them. Plus, they might have difficulty finding work elsewhere if they
get a reputation for accusing employers of theft...”
    “Especially when they themselves signed their rights away.”
    She sighed. “Jason was young, innocent, and plagiarism of
programming code is hard to prove. He tried, but he didn’t have the resources
to do anything else about it.”
    The Cardinal stood to leave. “Let me look into this.”
    With that he gave her the briefest of nods.
    He didn’t smile. He didn’t need to. Their relationship was not one
of friendship. It was one of trust. He trusted her to get the job done. And now
he simply asked her to trust him. Within days he would know as much about
Strange Tech as any person on the planet. Of that Carol had no doubt.
    A minute later the Cardinal disappeared down the sidewalk. She would
see nothing more of him until the next time he had a use for her, which might be
weeks, months away. Who knew, she might never see him again. Although she
somehow suspected that they would be working together again quite soon...
     
    Her mind now drifted back to her first time in New York, after the
Cardinal had helped her escape from Mexico. Things had not changed much in
those ten years. When she’d first met the Cardinal, she had no idea who he was,
only that his modest black suit and white priest’s collar concealed something
deeper, more unnerving. This was no ordinary priest, swinging incense and
idling away the hours in the confessional. There was a natural authority to
him, a bearing of carefully wielded power in his tall, angular frame. She could
never have guessed what the Cardinal was, but a simple priest he most
definitely was not.
    He had appeared at the convent school the day after Raúl died, out
of nowhere, like a dark cloud moving suddenly across the sky. It had been just
a few days before she turned eighteen, and he’d saved her from a cruel and
underserved fate. But whatever this man had wanted in return, she’d told
herself, back then, as she gazed into his narrow eyes for the first time, she
had no idea.
    He had been slow and calculated, quite businesslike, as if Raúl’s
death was of merely passing interest. No; what the Cardinal required had been
far more complex than simply cleaning up after an untimely death. It would
require a great deal