Erasing Faith (9 page)

“So that’s it?” I called after him, unable to let him leave without some kind of explanation. “You’re just going to walk away, Wes?”

He didn’t turn around — he was almost out of sight.

“What about fate?” My voice cracked on the last word.

“Don’t believe in it, Red.” His words drifted back to me through the night, a disembodied specter. “Never have, never will.”

I pressed my eyes closed so I didn’t have to see him disappear into the dark.

NO SHIT SHERLOCK

“Abbott,” I clipped into my phone.

“Identification?” The coolly detached female voice was as familiar to me as my own.

“01908.” I rattled off my personal ID tag from memory.

“Verified,” the voice confirmed. “Hold for connection.”

I waited about thirty seconds, listening to the faint buzz of white noise over the receiver as I was patched through to Command. You’d think the fucking CIA had enough left over in their trillion-dollar budget that they could’ve at least sprung for some canned hold-music.

Breathing hard, I tried to ignore the burning in my calves. The call had come in the middle of my run, and stopping so abruptly after jogging nearly ten miles of Buda’s rolling hills was enough to give even the fittest person shin splints. There was no avoiding it — when Command called, you answered. No exceptions.

Finally, Benson’s voice crackled over the line, his tone curt, sharper than a whip.

“Abbott. You haven’t checked in for twelve days. I need a status report on Szekely.”

I took a deep breath and prayed for patience. Dealing with Benson was a bigger pain in the ass than a fucking colonoscopy. Handlers were rarely a joy to work with, but Benson brought an all new level of asshattery to the job.

“Surveillance is in place on the exterior office doors.” I stepped off the deserted running path and positioned my body against a nearby tree, so I had an unobscured view of anyone approaching.  “I’ve got nothing inside yet — there are armed guards posted at every exit point. Not Rent-a-Cop types, either. Paid hitters, each with a long list of bodies on his resume.”

“We need eyes inside that building.”

No shit, Sherlock.

I somehow managed to hold in the retort. “I’ve been tailing three of Szekely’s top men — all of them are Hungarian ex-army intelligence, black ops. They take care of anyone who Szekely considers a threat or who so much as looks at him the wrong way. I’ve bugged their home landlines, but that has limited value. They do almost all their business on company cell phones. I’m working on access.”

“And Szekely’s main compound?”

“Impenetrable. Cameras, bodyguards, attack dogs. State of the art security system, with motion detection and heat sensors. You put your fucking pinky toe on his property, his head of security knows about it.”

“This man is running one of the biggest crime syndicates in Europe and no one’s ever seen his face. We’re the best intelligence organization in the world with the most sophisticated technology known to man, and we have nothing more than a grainy surveillance photo of his profile from two decades ago,” Benson said brusquely, as though I were somehow at fault for the agency’s twenty-year-old shitty intel.

“Man’s a ghost.” I shrugged.

Benson sighed. “Have you at least been able to confirm that Szekely is using the couriers to transfer arms and correspondence to his assets in the city?”

“Nothing definite, yet,” I hedged, hoping to steer the conversation in another direction.

“Abbott.” I could easily envision Benson leaning back in his chair, his doughy arms crossed over his chest in exasperation. “It sounds to me like you’re sitting on your ass, enjoying a Hungarian holiday. You’ve been there three weeks — I expect something more than phone taps and nanny cams. Where are you with infiltration? I assume you’ve isolated a mark, by this point.” He scoffed.

I scraped the knuckles of my free hand against the rough bark of the tree. 

It was easy to be pompous and peremptory from behind a desk. With his overweight, out-of-shape ass parked firmly in a plush leather chair, the only thing that made Benson break a sweat these days was Free Doughnut Day in the company cafeteria. He wouldn’t last a day out here. He had essentially no field experience. He probably hadn’t picked up his gun since he left The Farm. And here I was, reporting my every move to him.

Bureaucracy at its finest.

“Well?” Benson prompted impatiently.

“I have a mark,” I bit out, Faith’s face flashing in my mind.

“Excellent. I expect some intel on that front within the week. And Abbott?”

“Sir.” The word curdled on my tongue, sour as spoiled milk.

“If you can’t deliver, I will assign someone else to this mission. Keep me informed.”

He clicked off.

I slid the phone carefully back into the bicep-holster I used while running, took a deep breath in through my nose, and punched the tree with so much force, every knuckle on my right hand split wide open.

MARIONETTE STRINGS

I walked the dark halls of Hermes in a semi-daze. Ten days post-Wes and my anger had fizzled into depression, which in turn had faded into begrudging resignation. It was time to admit defeat, to acknowledge that he’d been right all along.

Fate was bullshit.

I’d never see Wes Adams again.

I wasn’t sure why that hurt so damn much. I barely knew the guy.

Can you miss something that was never yours to begin with?

Can you mourn the absence of someone you never even had?

My chest ached as though Wes had reached under my ribcage and removed a piece of my heart when he’d walked away. Perhaps I was grieving for our potential — for the future that might have been. Because in three short encounters with Wes, I’d felt things no one else had ever stirred in me. It sounded so cliché I couldn’t say it out loud — I could barely even say it in my head — but it was as though my soul had recognized something kindred in his. As if some facet of my innermost self had cried out because, at long last, it had found its mate.

In those briefest of shared moments, we’d come to know one another not through conversations or games of Twenty Questions, but through something far more elemental. Bound together by essential, invisible threads, we’d moved, breathed, existed as one — two twin marionettes on the same string.

But he’d cut his lines and walked away.

Now, I hung alone in empty air, as I’d done for most of my life. The solitude was familiar, but somehow seemed more unbearable now than it ever did before I’d known Wes existed.

Margot had surely noticed the absence of my usual cheerful disposition over the past two weeks, but she’d refrained from commenting or shoving an
I-told-you-so
down my throat. Instead, she’d been intent on distracting me — dragging me all over the city, exploring historic sites and hot clubs in equal measure. She even forced me to cross the Chain Bridge into Buda on our day off, waiting patiently as I freaked out for five long seconds before grabbing my hand and guiding me over.

As I’d counted to five, I couldn’t stop myself from imagining his face or hearing his voice.

You breathe them in, count them down. And when they’re over…

You tell the fear to go fuck itself.

I wasn’t sure whether it was his words or the memory of his dark eyes that made my fear flee. But, for the first time since I’d come to Budapest, I made it across the damn bridge without being reduced to a puddle of panic. I guess, if nothing else, he’d given me a way to get over my fears.

Too bad I couldn’t apply the same strategy when it came to getting over
him
.

I blew out an exasperated huff of air as I walked toward the staff room. I’d been so distracted, I’d completely forgotten my book bag in my locker after today’s shift. Typically, I would’ve seen that as a sign from the gods that I didn’t need to spend my night studying, but Professor Varga had emailed the entire class earlier this evening, warning of a possible pop quiz during tomorrow’s lecture. If I didn’t brush up on Hungarian history, my GPA would start to suffer right along with my heart.

The office was eerily quiet.

Deliveries stopped at 8 p.m. each night, and it was well past 10 p.m. by now. I’d never seen the halls so deserted — no couriers were rushing from the sorting room to their bikes, no new packages were speeding by on the now-motionless conveyor belt. The front doors had been firmly bolted, the entry lights doused. Irenka, Marko, and Istvan were absent from their usual posts. I’d had to walk around the side of the building and scan my company badge to open the small entrance by the delivery ramps.

It was strange to see what was typically a hub of endless activity totally silent — like wandering an amusement park alone after closing time, when the twirling carnival lights had gone dark and the rides had drawn to a standstill. It felt eerie. Unnatural.

I cast wary eyes around the empty office, suddenly worried I wasn’t supposed to be here after business hours.

But, surely, it was okay for me to dart in and out for a textbook. It wasn’t like I was vandalizing the place. I’d be here less than five minutes. No reason to freak out.

Still, I picked up my pace when I rounded a corner and spotted the door.

Halfway down the hallway, I started to a stop when I heard the unmistakable sounds of muffled conversation. Feet frozen, my eyes traveled to the small alcove I passed each day on the way to my locker. The double doors there were always firmly closed during my shifts, but now I saw they were slightly ajar, allowing hushed, male voices to spill into the passage and reach my ears. I couldn’t make out their words — they were speaking Hungarian — but the low, urgent nature of their tones made my feet falter and my heart begin to pound.

A little voice in the back of my mind was screaming at me to turn back, telling me something wasn’t right here. That I should forget the damned book and walk — no, run — for the nearest exit.

Curiosity killed the cat
, my inner voice shrieked.

I was more of a dog person, anyway.

Dismissing my intuition, I crept forward, my footfalls soft against the carpeted floor. When I reached the alcove, I peered around the corner through the cracked door. Two men wearing the same uniform Marko and Istvan always dressed in — night guards, from the looks of it — were standing in front of a large bank of screens.  Their discussion was growing more heated by the second, but my attention was focused on the pixelated wall behind them. From the looks of it, I’d stumbled upon a surveillance room.

There were six monitors, each displaying various views of hallways and exit points in what appeared to be multiple buildings. Some of the split-screen images showed what looked like the Hermes office interior; others were entirely foreign to me. On the largest monitor in the center, there was a computerized street map of Budapest, with several red blinking dots scattered at different locations throughout the city.

I wasn’t a tech expert by any means, but it looked like they were tracking something. Several somethings, actually.

But what — the bikes? The packages?

Why did a simple courier service need so much security?

And, more importantly… was I about to appear on one of those monitors?

I felt my stomach churn with unease at the thought. It took effort, but I managed to keep my eyes from wildly scanning the ceiling above, looking for cameras trained on me, as I backed slowly away from the door.

It was time to get out of here. Screw the textbook, screw the quiz. I didn’t want to be at Hermes another moment. The guards were distracted by their argument — they’d never know I was here.

Slinking back toward the exit, I cursed my stupid decision-making the entire time. Then, I cursed Wes Adams for clouding my head and making me forget my damn book bag in the first place. And
then
, I cursed Professor Varga because, really, if he hadn’t threatened a freaking pop quiz, I wouldn’t be in this mess at all.

As I neared the back door, I felt some of my panic ease. I hadn’t done anything wrong — I wasn’t sure why I’d responded with such fear. Even if I’d been spotted, it’s not like they would’ve done anything to me. I’d obviously overreacted.

Or… maybe not.

Because when I rounded the final corner that would lead me to the exit, I bumped straight into Istvan’s broad chest. And he did
not
look happy to see me.

***

“How did you get in here?” he hissed for the second time, his hands wrapped like iron shackles around my biceps. His normally friendly eyes were narrowed on my face and filled with suspicion.

“I told you already, Istvan! I scanned my badge and came through the delivery entrance.” I tried to calm my racing heartbeat. This was Istvan. We were friends — or, if not friends, then acquaintances. I said hi to him every time I arrived for a shift. He laughed at Margot’s lame jokes. He wouldn’t hurt me.

Right?

“There was no guard at the door?” he growled, disbelief written plainly on his features.

I shook my head.

“Why are you here?” His hands tightened on my arms.

“Look, I just needed my textbook.” I swallowed roughly. “I swear.”

He muttered something indecipherable in Hungarian.

“You’re hurting me,” I said quietly.

His grip loosened marginally but he didn’t release me.

“You aren’t supposed to be here after hours.” His expression was grim. “I should report this.”

“I didn’t know, Istvan. I’m really sorry. I had no idea.” I stared at him with wide eyes, imploring him to believe me. “I’m a terrible liar — just ask any of my older siblings. You’d know if I was lying to you. I have a big quiz tomorrow in my history class and I forgot my school bag. That’s it. I promise.”

He stared at me for a long moment, weighing my words.

“Wait here.” He released me abruptly and turned away. “And
don’t move
.”

Crap. I was so screwed. He was totally going to report me. I was definitely going to lose my job.

I rubbed my tender arm muscles as I watched him walk away. For two long minutes — the longest freaking minutes of my life — I waited for him to return. I didn’t dare run, knowing that would only make me look guiltier. If there was any chance of salvaging this situation, I had to hold my ground.

He finally returned and I nearly collapsed with relief when I saw he was alone and, to my surprise, carrying my book bag in one hand. He shoved it roughly in my direction, leveling me with a serious look that undoubtedly would’ve made me pee my pants had there been a single drop of liquid in my bladder.

“Office hours are 6 a.m. to 8 p.m.” His tone was grave. “Don’t forget it.”

I nodded, my shaky fingers clamping onto the fabric and clutching it tightly to my chest.

“You’re lucky it was me,” Istvan muttered, his eyes on the ceiling. “Anyone else and you’d be…”

“Fired?” I whispered.

His eyes flew back to mine. “Yeah…
fired
.”

There was something strange about the way he said those words, but I was so focused on the fact that he was letting me go without reporting me, I didn’t expend too much brainpower dissecting it.

“Thank you, Istvan.”

He stepped forward to pull the door open for me. “Don’t mention it.” He glanced at me through slitted eyes. “Seriously. Don’t.”

I nodded again.

“See you tomorrow, Faith.”

“Bye.”

I slipped through the exit and out into the night, thanking my lucky stars that my job — and my skin — were still intact. I didn’t let my thoughts linger too long on Istvan’s strange reaction, or the fact that Hermes had a heck of a lot of surveillance in place for a family-run courier service. Sometimes, it was simply better to be left in the dark.