Girl Undercover 4 & 5: Ariel & Financial Devil (12 page)

Emma cried harder when I asked that last question, buried her face in her hands. Her trembling got worse, so I embraced her, hoping it would calm her some. She hugged me back and I let her cry against my shoulder; she clearly needed it.

“You can tell me what’s going on, Emma. Whatever it is that’s troubling you so. I won’t tell anyone, I promise.”

“Okay…” Her voice was weak. “Okay, I’ll tell you…”

The door to the restroom opened and someone entered. I could feel Emma go rigid in my arms, then she let go of me. A tall, dark-haired woman was inside the restroom, but I couldn’t see who it was in the bathroom mirror before me. I turned around.

Janine Eastwood smiled at me as our eyes met.

“Hello, Jamie.” Her gaze went to Emma, who had paled and stopped crying, looking terrified instead. Janine glanced at me again. A vein in the senator’s smooth forehead had become visible. “Is everything okay here?”

I looked at Emma, who swiveled around and dashed into an empty stall. Shutting the door close, she locked it.
Wow, did
she
get embarrassed,
I thought, feeling bad for Emma. I returned my attention to my new client, throwing open my hands and shrugging.

“She’s just having really bad PMS,” I said discreetly, thinking that Emma might not want me to talk about the pregnancy with the senator. “You know how that can be, right?”

Janine stared at me with penetrating eyes and nodded slowly. “Yes, I do know how that can be.”

The air was so full of tension as she kept staring at me that I felt compelled to say something; clearly,
she
wasn’t about to cut the awkward moment short. “Well, anyway, I should get going. I’m late for my floor shift. See you tomorrow at three p.m.?”

“Yes, I will see you then.”

“Great.” I gave her a quick nod, slipped by her and left the restroom.

Whew, that was weird,
I thought as I strode toward the stairs. Had I not known better, I could have sworn the senator had been about to jump me she’d looked so furious. But the woman didn’t have a reason to be mad at me, so I knew it was just fantasies going haywire in my brain. It wasn’t unusual to get paranoid fantasies like that when you went undercover. It had happened to me on a few occasions the first time I was UC and months of stress had gone by.

Hoping that Emma would be okay on her own, I hurried up the stairs to the fourth floor where I would punch in at the end of the trainers’ lounge. When I saw her next and we were alone, I’d ask how she was; if I didn’t see her at all, I’d call to check on her. She really seemed to need to get a few things off her chest. I would lend an ear if she had no one else to talk to.

Fortunately, Rolf wasn’t in yet, so he didn’t notice that I clocked in more than twenty minutes late. I had nothing to worry about. I highly doubted he or anyone else actually went through everyone’s timesheets to make sure we arrived on time.

As the hours went by and I walked the floors of the club, talking to members, picking up dirty towels and re-racking weights, I thought of what to do about Ron, what my next step would be. How I would find out who his new clients were. One way would be to hack into Ron’s email correspondence to see with whom he corresponded on a regular basis. That would be the most efficient way as, surely, Ron used email to interact with his clients. Doing so would be time-consuming though, which was why I didn’t want to ask George to do it for me. He’d already helped me so much. George himself claimed it was okay—he wanted to see Nick’s killers caught almost as much as I did—so I should never hesitate to ask for his help. But I couldn’t keep taking advantage of his niceness; if at any point someone caught him hacking for me, he’d at best be out of a job, at worst prosecuted for computer crimes. It was unlikely that anyone would ever find out, but the possibility was still there. It was best to keep my requests to a minimum.

I could always shadow Ron the way I had done earlier today. I knew where he lived and worked, so I could easily just wait for him outside his house when he left for work in the morning or hang around his office and shadow him from there. Surely he’d meet up with his clients in some capacity at some point. The problem with that approach was that it was even more time-consuming and I couldn’t afford to spend several hours away from work every day, especially not during weekdays when Ron was most likely to meet up with clients. The only way to make that approach work was if I quit my job at Nikkei. I wanted to believe investigating Ron would lead to why Nick had been killed, even suspected strongly that it would. But after learning that Janine hadn’t been involved in Ariel’s murder after all, I couldn’t trust my gut. It seemed I had lost my touch for whatever reason.

So before I’d give up my job, I needed more proof that Ron would provide the answer I so desperately craved. The answer that would allow me to avenge my husband at last. An image of Nick’s brutalized body flashed through my mind and I felt how the temperature in my body shot up, my pulse suddenly storming in my ears. The day I was face-to-face with the bastards who had assaulted and tortured him, they would pay, all of them. I would make them wish they were dead already every second of the time they were in my hands…

I forced myself to snap back to the here and now before I got too carried away. I couldn’t afford to let anger overtake my thoughts or I would never find out the truth. A cool, calm mind was what I needed.

As I went to clock out for my shift, I had arrived at a solution—I would engage Ian in my investigation of Ron, even though doing so would no doubt annoy me to no end. However, the fact of the matter was that the man was a masterful hacker with tons of time on his hands. From what I had gathered, all he did in his life was working to stop Adler and the government faction from supposedly taking over the world with their super humans. When I spoke to him during our session this afternoon, I would tell him that I thought Ron might be involved in the conspiracy and therefore Ian needed to find out what he was up to. Someone was making Ron lots and lots of money, and I was convinced that something about it was dirty—either the client or the money derived from the business a client conducted. Possibly both. If he asked me exactly how that related to Adler and their cohorts, I’d just say that my secret source had suggested this. And I would never out my source, no matter how much Ian wanted to know who it was.

Combined with the fact that it looked like Ron was the text stalker, it should be enough to pique Ian’s curiosity.

Chapter 2

I bumped into Emma as I was making my way up to the fourth floor after having eaten lunch in the cafeteria a few hours later. She looked a lot better than she had this morning, walking straight and almost smiling. Still, I stopped before her to make sure she was really okay.

“Hey,” I began, “sorry I took off like that earlier. I was late for my shift. How are you doing?”

She brushed her hand aside like I was totally exaggerating what had happened. “Oh, no worries! I’m fine, just fine.” She lowered her voice somewhat. “I owe
you
an apology for losing it like that this morning. I’m so sorry about that. My hormones are just going crazy and sometimes I have a hard time controlling them. Thanks for taking me to the bathroom when I started crying.” She buried her face in her hands for a moment, then, “That was so, so embarrassing!”

I contemplated her. She sounded a bit manic. “It was nothing to be embarrassed about. Could have happened to anyone. I’m glad you’re feeling better now. So you don’t need to talk then? I’m available if you do.”

Her eyes widened as if with dismay. “No, no, definitely not! I’m not even sure why I said that in the first place. It must’ve been the hormones talking. Anyway, thanks again for putting up with my hysteric behavior.” She nodded toward the bottom of the stairs. “Gotta go. I haven’t eaten since this morning and I’m starving. See you later, Jamie!” She waved and took off.

“See you later,” I mumbled in response as I watched her walk away with a little too much pep in her step. Soon she’d disappeared behind a pillar.

I continued up the stairs toward the fitness desk where I’d meet Ian for our session. He was as usual already there, leaning against the wall while waiting for me. I checked my phone and saw that I was right on time.

“You know,” I began, “instead of just standing there, you could be warming up on a treadmill or a bike or something. That way I don’t have to warm you up and we can get into the good stuff right away.”

Ian smiled. “No, I like it when you warm me up.”

I shook my head. “Fine, have it your way. Let’s go up to the fifth floor.”

Joining me, Ian and I walked up to that floor where we would be lifting weights today. Before we started, I had him do a series of dynamic flexibility exercises and some jumping jacks to get him ready for the weights.

I pointed to a seated row machine in a corner and he sat down there. Eager to get him to agree to help me investigate Ron, I checked our surroundings to make sure there weren’t any trainers or members in the immediate vicinity that could overhear us. We were in the clear. I proceeded to tell him the story how I had received that final text from my text stalker, asking me to meet him at the sundeck at the club, and how I’d gone to see him.

Ian looked shocked. “Why didn’t you tell me? I would have come with you!”

“I didn’t want to bother you,” I replied, which wasn’t actually a lie.

Ian kept staring at me in disbelief. “Bother me? Exactly how would me coming along to make sure you were safe bother me? How many times do I have to tell you that your safety is of utmost concern to me?”

I wanted to tell him that, if that was true, he would never have threatened to reveal my identity in order for me to go through Nikkei’s membership in search of politicians for him. But I held my tongue, thinking it would be unwise, and instead I just shrugged.

“Well, it’s too late to think about that now,” I said. “What’s done is done. Besides, I know how to take care of myself. You know that.” Having made sure we were still at a good distance from other people, I told him about how I had bumped into Ron as I’d made my way down the stairs from the rooftop and why he’d had his head wrapped in bandage.

“He slipped and hit his head on the sink?” Ian asked, looking incredulous. “And then he passed out? Bloody hell! Who
does
that?”

“This guy clearly. Why would he have made it up? Plus, that was the way the cleaning staff found him. I doubt they would lie about it.”

“True.” Ian laughed. “Yes, no one would make up such an embarrassing story. That probably was exactly what happened. So you’re thinking this bloke’s the one behind the texts then?”

“Yeah, it’s gotta be him. I know him quite well. He’s never there that late and there was no one else besides security and the cleaning staff at the club at that hour.” I wasn’t about to add that Jonah had been at the club, too, as that would only complicate things. Ian might suggest that Jonah was the one behind the texts and then I’d have a harder time convincing him to help me investigate Ron.

“Hmm.” Ian scratched his chin that he hadn’t bothered to shave for a couple of days, giving him that scruffy look he’d sported when I’d first noticed him. It felt like that day happened forever ago. “And now what?”

“Now what what?”

“What are we going to do about it? I assume the reason you’re telling me about all this is because you need my help somehow.” He gave me a lopsided smile. “I’m glad you’ve realized it’s smarter if we work all the leads together than going at it alone.”

I smiled a little myself; Ian might be crazy and more annoying than most, but dense he was not and fairly bright, too. I decided I might as well go straight to the point.

“Yeah, it would be good if you could check what he’s up to,” I began. “It’ll be hard for me to do it since I’ve gotta be here most of the time. I already spent hours shadowing him yesterday and can’t afford to be away from work that long very often. Besides, starting by hacking into his email is so much more efficient. I can’t do that either.”

Ian nodded slowly. “Ah, now I see why you need me… Yes, you’re right that going into his emails as well as looking into who he’s contacting via phone would likely yield a lot quicker results than simply tagging him. But why do you think he’s up to something he shouldn’t be? Only because you believe he’s the person behind the texts?”

“No, there’s more. In addition to him probably being the text stalker, I just found out that he’s begun to make significantly more money in the last couple of years. Like a
lot
more money. And I’m not sure exactly how that money’s derived. It may be completely legal, but I still want to take a look at it to be sure.”

Ian screwed up his mouth and narrowed his eyes a touch as he took me in. “I have a feeling you’re convinced there something dirty about the way he’s making his money or you wouldn’t bother bringing me into this mix. Why are you so convinced of it?”

“Let’s just say that my gut’s telling me something’s up with this guy. Or screaming at me might be a better way to put it.” Ian was completely unaware of how much faith I’d lost in my instincts, so using that as an excuse should work beautifully.

“Uh-huh,” he replied. “And how did you find out about his changed income? He didn’t tell you, did he? Just to let you know, blokes have a tendency to exaggerate when it comes to their money and sexual prowess.”

I smirked, not about to deign that comment with a reply. Instead, I raised my chin and glanced down at him with a triumphant expression. “You’re not the only one that has resources. I have plenty of those myself... Great ones who provide me with sensitive information. According to my highly reliable source, this guy went from making three hundred and fifty grand to five million in one year.”

Ian whistled with approval. “That’s some serious cash. What does he do for a living? Rob banks?”

I chuckled. “Who knows? He might be doing that too. But his official job title is investment banker. He’s employed at Bank of America and has been for the last eight years.”