Ice Cold (10 page)

Honey found herself in a small vestibule. After she keyed in her security code with an additional sequence and had her eye scanned, the second door opened into what looked like the living room of a high-end home. Simple charcoal colored sofas flanked a picture window with a panoramic view of office buildings and rooftops.

A man sat reading the newspaper in a comfortable-looking, wingback chair near a crackling fire. The wall beside him had monitors showing various approaches to the building and the thirteenth floor. He glanced up with a small smile. “That was quick.”

Getting from Dresden to London? Walking up a single flight of stairs? “I guess.” Honey walked forward, holding out her hand. “Honey Winston.”

He smiled. “Still, I see.”

She frowned. Maybe it was a British thing, but he wasn’t making any sense. “We seem to be talking at cross purposes.”

He looked at her much the way she suspected she was looking at him. Suspiciously. He rose, casually resting his hand on the weapon tucked into the front of black slacks. “Did you find your comm?”

Honey carefully matched his movements and slipped her hand into the tote on her shoulder. She knew exactly where her SIG was and closed her fingers around it. Something was definitely off. “I didn’t lose it.”

“But you told me not ten minutes ago that you did.”

“No, I—Are you saying
I
was here ten minutes ago?”

“Of course.”

“No ‘of course’ about it. Navarro and I just arrived from the airport a few minutes ago. I came straight upstairs. We’ve never met.”

“You checked in thirty minutes ago, Winston. I showed you to your room myself.”

EIGHT

 R 
afe returned to the safe house at 1900, almost ten hours after landing in London. He was ready for a shower, a beer, and another three-inch-thick steak. Frozen to the marrow, he was exhausted, starving, and frustrated as hell.

While at the site, he’d requested a backup team. Nielson had given him names and scheduled a meeting for first thing in the morning. If the bombings were isolated incidences, the locals would do their thing but report to Rafe’s team. However, if, as he suspected, there
was
a connection between the bombings, that had to be established fast. The London team would coordinate with the T-FLAC teams in each country so everyone had an overview in real time.

Feeling like he was missing an important piece of the puzzle, Rafael passed through the outer security door on the thirteenth floor. The op in charge of this safe house was Charlie Rocha, a guy Rafael had known for years. He looked forward to eating, catching up, and crashing. In that order.

Once through the second secure door, he knew his evening’s plans might have to wait. The place smelled of sizzling steak. That was the good news.

Charlie, ginger hair standing up as if combed by an eggbeater, slouched in his chair beside the monitors, his weapon trained on Winston. Winston, corn silk hair twisted in an elegant coil on top of her head, wearing loose black pants, a long-sleeved, gray top, and an inscrutable expression, sat across the room. Booted feet crossed, she stretched out on the sofa, open computer, and SIG resting on her thighs.

Rafe glanced from one to the other. “What’s this? Don’t like each other? And here I thought you’d be such pals. What’s going on?”

“Winston is capable of appearing in two places at once.”

“An interesting skill, but that still doesn’t tell me why you two are holding each other hostage.”

“I checked her in at 10:19,” Charlie told him grimly.

Winston’s arctic eyes met his, steady, and cool. “I walked in the front door here—for the first time—at 11:42.”

So far, he didn’t see a problem, other than that Charlie’s watch was off. He addressed Charlie. “We were picked up—together—at Heathrow, drove here—again, together—and parted downstairs at 11:39, so I don’t see how she was here at 10:19. Better get your clocks recalibrated,” he said with a smile.

Charlie gave him a narrow-eyed look. “Are you sure it was Winston?”

“Jesus, Charlie. I’m sure. Since I have provenance as it were, I’ll vouch for the authenticity of the second Honey Winston.” He glanced at Winston. “Unless you have an identical twin, time-traveled, or left and came back?”

“Don’t make this more confusing than it is already, Navarro,” she said mildly. “I came straight upstairs after leaving you. I haven’t left his sight since.”

Rafe removed his coat, heavy with moisture, tossing it on a nearby chair. “Give me the salient facts,” he ordered, going into the open plan kitchen and checking the cupboard for a beer. He grabbed two cans of Boddingtons pale ale and popped the tab on one. Tossing the second to Charlie, he circled behind the couch.

“No thanks, I don’t enjoy beer.” Winston told him as he pushed her feet off the cushion and sat down at the opposite end of the couch.

He took a slug of warm beer, better than nothing. “Which is why you weren’t offered one. So, while I was at the site, freezing my ass off, sifting through tons of muddy, frozen debris, and kissing hands and shaking babies to pacify an alphabet soup of officialdom, the two of you sat here all day staring each other down and sipping tea?”

“There
was
tea, and I
did
work. Your suspicious friend, Charlie, over there sat holding me at gunpoint.”

“
After
I’d put the kettle on and served her a sandwich,” Charlie groused, getting up to go in the kitchen. “I got this started,” he said, apparently referring to dinner. “It needs a few more minutes, or would you like it to moo?”

“Just warm it.” Navarro raised his voice over the sound of clattering from the kitchen. “What’s your take on this doppelganger thing?”

“He didn’t imagine it—”

“I did
not
imagine her!” Charlie yelled from the kitchen.

Rafe drank the beer, enjoying the bitter fizz. His stomach growled. “Someone knew your code, had your print IDed on the scanner, and went through voice recognition.” Highly unlikely, and yet-

“All of the above,” she agreed. “And there’s more.”

“What happened to ‘Hi, honey, how was your day’?”

“My impersonator left a long-stemmed black rose, technically a
silk
rose, on the bed.” Winston ignored Navarro’s jest because she already knew the damned punch line.

“Ah, fuck!”
Black Rose?

“In here or in there?” Charlie yelled.

“Here. You eat yet?” he asked Winston.

“No, we were waiting for you.”

“You shouldn’t have.” Yeah, he really wished Charlie and stick-up-her-butt Winston hadn’t been waiting with this new unwelcome bit of news. Black Rose. Fucking, fucking hell.

Charlie brought their meals into the lounge and set up everything on the large coffee table. The steak and potatoes cooked just right. It would take more than a dormant and suddenly redirected tango cell to ruin his appetite. He dug in.

“Someone knows me very well if they were able to replicate my fingerprint, fool retinal scan
and
voice recognition programs, and provide my security codes. My not-so-secure codes, obviously.”

“They also knew your movements and that you were in London.” They were both dead serious and this was no joking matter, no matter how impossible. As Arthur Conan Doyle, Sr. had so famously once said; Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.”

“Looked
exactly
like Winston, as well.” Charlie cut into his steak.

Rafe couldn’t imagine anyone looking like Winston.

“I think it was the woman I saw on the sidewalk when we arrived. Black coat, black knit hat pulled low over her forehead? Unhappy brown and black dog?”

“The guy whose dog was stolen?” It seemed like a lifetime ago. “She left the building, saw us arrive, and snatched the dog.”

“Who’d suspect a woman casually walking her dog? Yeah. It wouldn’t have attracted attention if the owner hadn’t hauled ass trying to catch her.” She paused a few beats. “I think this was the same woman I saw yesterday on the way to Bäcker’s lab. Not a dog, a screaming kid.”

“Who? Why? How?”

“With the correct tools, voice recognition could be relatively easy if a quality sample can be obtained. And you know how easy it is to fake a fingerprint,” Winston pointed out. “Colored powder, a solution of Cyanoacrylate… She could’ve picked up any solid surface I’d touched, at any time, dusted my prints, and built a fingertip. Criminology 101.”

“Okay, all relatively simple if one knows how. Even the iris scan is easy with a forged eye biometrics recognition stamp. But data for the optical scans is not something you can collect from a hard surface or comm conversation.”

“It’s a mathematical pattern-recognition technique based on video images of an individual’s irises. Complex random patterns…iris recognition utilizing camera technology with subtle infrared illumination to acquire three-D images of the detail-rich, intricate structures of the–”

“Yeah,” Rafael cut her off dryly. “We got it.” With electronic information, technical savvy equipment, and plenty of patience, even an iris scan could be bypassed. But sure as shit, not by some random civilian off the street. Then there was the matter of the double having Honey’s security codes.

“We already had forensics here,” Charlie told him, clearly still pissed hours later. “We found a few blond hairs in the bedroom, no latents, she wore gloves. No dirt from her shoes. Not here, not on the stairs, not in the lift. It’s as if she was an apparition and just appeared.”

“Or a professional in the business. She knew where this safe house was, knew Winston was arriving in London
today,
knew what she looks like, and knew to have the right contact lens in, and the right voice software. Furthermore, she had Winston’s security codes, which I really don’t like. At all.” Navarro caught up with Charlie in the ‘pissed-off’ department.

“Only Control and the Garbage detail know that Jack was killed,” Winston pointed out. “And that I was tagged to come with you on this op.”

He gave her a measured look. “And the person who killed Jack.”

Her knuckles went white on the stem of the wine glass. Not that she was drinking, just holding. “Yes, and the person who killed Jack.”

Navarro turned to Charlie. “Since you’d never met Winston, just seen her ID picture, you wouldn’t know the woman you expected to see wasn’t the one who showed up, especially given how well-prepared she was.”

“True. Looking at Winston afterward, I saw subtle differences,” Charlie told him, with a fork hovering near his lips. “Hair was the exact same color, eyes, pretty much the same, pale skin, et cetera. One would believe she was Winston if one had never met her, and if the two women didn’t stand side by side.”

Rafe finished the beer. “What’s she want? Intel?”

“I had the First Responder intel up on the big monitors, numbers, stats. Not much more than what was on every news broadcast throughout the day.”

Rafe frowned as the hair rose on the back of his neck. “So she did what?”

“Came in, said hi, went into the bedroom, came out, and said bloody hell, I’ve lost my comm, be right back, bye. Gone.”

“You swept?”

Charlie gave him a pained look. “Of course. We’re bug-free, Rafe.”

“So what we have here is Winston’s evil twin strolling into a secure safe house and impersonating an operative that no one knew would be here? Hell. Close this place down for the duration. Winston and I are going to a hotel.”

There was a second safe house in Croydon, nine and a half miles away, but since the mystery woman had known about one, they couldn’t risk the possible breach of the other. Croydon was notified and put on alert while Honey and Navarro checked into a mid-grade hotel in the center of London, conveniently anonymous and well suited for their purpose.

The spacious hotel suite didn’t seem as large when filled to capacity by seven large men with testosterone to burn. Honey had spent most of the night hunched over her computer, with a few hours’ sleep squeezed in before the other operatives arrived and the city started to wake up. Two cups of coffee later, she felt energized and rarin’ to go.