Mr. Nice Spy by Jordan McCollum Read Free Book Online

this room was . . .” I scan the room beyond the guy, but I don’t see the woman. “Taken.”
    He’s too far in the shadows for me to make out his face, but I can hear the hard set to his jaw in his voice. “It is.”
    “We’ll be going, then.” I tow Talia outside. She obeys without a glance back in the room. Smart.
    A lot smarter than my cover. Aside from the James Bond–style cliché, there’s something else wrong with this picture.
    Talia didn’t kiss me back. She didn’t move.
    In fact, if I’m totally honest, the second I leaned in, her spine went rigid.
    We’ve made some major miscalculations here. Or I have.
    The silence between us is turning more sour by the second. I have to say something. “Got what we need?”
    “Yeah.”
    I don’t have to say the “let’s go” part out loud. We head to the garage.
    Major, major miscalculations.
    The smothering silence sucks the air out of the car, but I think we manage to look like a couple out for a good time through our surveillance detection run. Unsurprisingly, nobody’s following the entertainment home from a human rights summit reception. We park at our drop-off and get out. And don’t walk away.
    Because I guess we have to talk about this. I lean against the rear quarter of the car. At least the street’s quiet, and we can do this without an audience.
    Talia joins me and hands over her operational phone. Shadowy pictures of tonight’s greenroom show on the screen.
    “Not enough,” she murmurs. I want to reassure her — reassure both of us — but she’s right. You can barely make out that there are people in these pictures, let alone their faces. I’m sure she’s sent the picture in to our facial recognition program anyway. And I’m sure the results are as dismal as they seem.
    “Did you know him?”
    “No. I’d recognize him if I saw him, though.”
    With a full-time sketch artist — one we could afford to let in on this whole secret, that is — we might be able to start a trace. But until then, our American mole will be a mystery.
    “Did you see the woman?” Talia asks.
    “I saw a woman leave the ballroom headed that way, but I can’t be sure. Wife of an Emirati deputy.”
    Talia’s lips twist into a little knot of thought, and I can almost feel those lips again, but this time responding, countering, moving against mine.
    I’m in a lot of trouble.
    But Talia doesn’t mention it. “We need pictures of the rest of the staff. Dig up everybody. Figure out what other Americans were at this summit. We’ve got to find this guy.”
    “He didn’t tell you his name?” Hello, Flirting 101: exchange names as fast as possible.
    Talia focuses on the plate glass storefront across the street. Her voice barely qualifies as a whisper. “Some guys can tell when a woman’s not interested.”
    I let her walk away, watching her, waiting that split second between the blade slicing through the flesh and the raw nerves going haywire.
    Major, major, major miscalculation.
     

    I learned a long time ago life doesn’t come with an “undo” button. However, a lucky few of us are equipped with a fully functional play-it-off switch, and I am deep in that mode when Talia gets to the office Friday afternoon. She jumps into her work with barely a nod in my direction.
    I’m not planning to get all hostile, but I’m not going to complain about a little breathing room in this suddenly stuffy office. The awkward silence — and the stack of papers on my desk for Talia — still hammer at my concentration. It doesn’t help that everyone else is out doing actual spy stuff this afternoon, while I’m doing paperwork and biding my time until my Lebanese friend can chat.
    After half an hour, I can’t pretend to work anymore — I have to give this to her. I wheel my chair over to Talia’s desk, tail between my legs and the equivalent of the embassy’s yearbook under my arm. “Ready for this?”
    Normally she’d counter with an “always,” and the