Here is the next chapter in The Spy At the Embassy Special Edition. (Remember, you can follow the Kickstarter campaign for an early copy here.)
Enjoy!
Chapter 2
Officially, Reine was an attaché, which in her case meant that she was nothing more than a glorified secretary and messenger girl. A slightly cushy job, bestowed out of a lingering sense of guilt on a girl whose parents had given their lives in the service of their country.
Unofficially, she’d been recruited four years earlier by the Intelligence Division of Denquay’s Department of Defense. They had used her job as a cover for many covert tasks, but tonight was a new wrinkle.
The Intelligence Division suspected that the First Secretary in the Embassy in D.C., a woman named Ariane Montoya, was involved with something illegal. They hadn’t provided Reine with specifics. In this case, she didn’t need to know.
Her job was to break into Ariane’s computer, clone her hard drive, and get the evidence back to her handler, Erica.
It sounded simple, on the face of it, but the job was considerably more complicated than that. Denquay might be only a fraction of the United States’ size, with a fraction of their national security budget, but they had good tech. Really good tech.
Reine had been secretly training for this for several months. She’d assured her handler she could, well, handle things. The party tonight was both her mission and a chance to dress up in fancy clothes. (She’d kept being excited about that part to herself.)
Now, standing here in the ballroom while couples flooded to join the Ambassador and his wife on the dance floor, she casually glanced around for anything out of the ordinary. Anything that might derail her mission.
She didn’t expect anything, but of course, the only real rule of spying was to expect the unexpected. At some point tonight, something would probably go wrong. When it did, she’d deal with it just like she dealt with everything else.
Her problem now? She had entirely too much time on her hands until her window of opportunity opened.
A restless sense of energy filled her, curling and swirling through her nerves from her head, out to the tips of her fingers and all the way down to her toes. She did her best to banish it, to send a mental wave of calm through her body, like an imaginary wave of cool ice. Most of the time, this sort of exercise worked pretty well.
Tonight…tonight Reine was having a little trouble. She still felt on edge.
Maybe it was the fact that this was a big mission. Probably one of the biggest she’d been given, in her four years in the Intelligence Division. Everything else she’d ever done had involved a Consulate, and the Ambassador himself had only been there on one of those occasions. She’d never poked around the Embassy like this before.
Or perhaps, she mused, as she let her hips sway in time to the waltz’s rhythmic beat, perhaps it was not so much her locale as the politics behind it. She’d been told once by one of her supervisors in the Intelligence Division not to worry about the politics. She was a delicate instrument—an instrument meant to perform an assigned task, not to think on her own.
Those instructions had been politely—but firmly—negated by that man’s supervisor. Marcus was sometimes a dinosaur, Reine had been told. There were areas of life in which he failed to realize that Denquayan culture had marched out of the Old Days and into a new world that required more resources and more finesse.
Politics—both internal and international—absolutely colored everything. Politics were the entire reason agents like Reine were necessary in the first place.
Well, that and greed, she thought with a wry smile, letting the glass rim of her champagne flute rest against her lips. Greed colored a great many things as well.
She froze imperceptibly as the hair on the back of her neck prickled. Someone was staring at her. Reine maintained her cool, pleasant expression, but inside all her senses went on full alert.
It was probably one of the older men here. Even though she was usually more of an invisible wallflower, she still couldn’t escape. What was it about old people that they thought gave them the right to throw proper etiquette out the window and just openly stare? Or make comments that they’d never in a million years have made if they were two decades younger?
Slowly, Reine turned a little to the left, her hips still swaying to the music. Brown met hazel as her gaze collided with that of a man looking straight at her.
She took the measure of him in a quick once-over. He was perhaps early thirties, probably half a head taller than she was in her heels, with broad shoulders and an athletic build. Though dressed in an expensive black tuxedo and equally expensive Italian shoes, he had a look about him that screamed military. Or perhaps ex-military.
She wasn’t entirely sure what nationality he was—European or American, probably, judging by his light skin and sandy brown hair. She was sure he was not a politician. His posture was too stiff, and he lacked that suave confidence that oozed out of every pore of every politician she’d ever encountered.
He also had entirely too much scruff for a politician. On him, however, the slightly unkempt facial hair was oddly attractive. Reine pegged him as either a bodyguard, or the brainless muscled arm candy of somebody else more important than he was. Attractive, but probably not much of a conversationalist.
No sense being rude, however. She inclined her head in a polite nod.
The man returned the nod with a smile that lit his entire face, lending a genuine warmth to his hazel eyes.
That smile hit Reine with the force of a small bus. A little shaken, she turned away, lowering her champagne flute as she took a steadying breath. Okay. Perhaps she needed to revise her initial impression of him.
That smile made him surprisingly attractive, in a subtle way that kind of crept up on a woman.
Still not a politician, she thought, resisting the urge to look over her shoulder, but ‘brainless’ might have been too harsh.
She felt a presence come up behind her a second before someone tapped lightly on her bare shoulder and said, “Excuse me.”
Reine turned—and felt something flutter in the pit of her stomach as she found herself staring up at the handsome man.
“Hi,” he said with another amazing smile that was just a little shy around the edges. “I’m Clay Dawson.” His voice was a pleasant, husky rumble that was entirely too attractive.
He held out a hand to her. “May I have this dance?”