Page 2 of Lock ’N’ Load

As Billy helped her up into the driver’s seat, she wondered how or where she would get the money to pay for a new mitt. She cranked over the motor, grateful for the engine’s loud, reliable rumble.

Billy climbed into the passenger seat, and she waited while he buckled up. An ironic snort of laughter bubbled in her throat. An evil, violent man would soon be coming for them, and all she could think of was that her son needed to fasten his seat belt before they drove off.

Taking one last look at the dilapidated house that used to be their home, she suddenly saw that her path moving forward was the clearest it had been since she’d made the horrible mistake of marrying Will. Once again, she prayed that this time she’d be able to find the resources and courage to do what needed to be done next.

Then she and her son would disappear. Forever.

Chapter One

Present day

Trista dug into her bag for her ID and pushed through the heavy glass door of the George Bush Center for Intelligence, aka CIA headquarters.

Though it was early September, summer was still in full swing, and the building’s cool interior was a welcoming, icy whisper over her face. Of course, on a day like today, she probably shouldn’t have worn her long gray pencil skirt with its matching long-sleeved knit blouse. But the outfit was comfy and covered nearly every square inch of her, which was precisely why she’d chosen it. Baring a lot of skin had never been her thing.

Voices echoed in the cavernous lobby as she walked briskly across the sixteen-foot-wide circular floor seal bearing the well-known eagle-and-shield symbol of the CIA. Trista groaned inwardly. She hated Mondays. Not because she hated work. Hardly. She absolutely loved her job and had ever since she’d interned with the CIA during college.

With majors in math and computer engineering, she’d been recruited by the agency only days after graduating from Columbia University. Having interned for several summers in St. Petersburg, she was also fluent in Russian and naturally gravitated to the agency’s Directorate of Analysis, focusing on Russian politics. But her true love was computer cryptography, part of the Directorate of Science and Technology. There, she’d quickly discovered she possessed that ultra-rare talent for seeing things in codes and ciphers that no one else could see, and finding patterns and associations hidden beneath layers of jumbled data. At thirty-three, she was one of the youngest—and the only CIA employee—to work on projects simultaneously for both directorates. Including her current assignment: surveil the cultural attaché to the Embassy of the Russian Federation in Washington, D.C. On the internet, that was. And she was eager to log in and get back on his digital trail.

I really, really do hate Mondays.

Mondays were reserved for tours, and sure enough, an early morning student tour of the building was already clogging the lobby, partially blocking the two employee lines to the security checkpoints. Even those lines were unusually long this morning. The magnetometer occasionally beeped from someone who failed to remove keys from their pocket, and the X-ray machine’s conveyor belt rattled and thumped as visitors placed their bags and briefcases down for inspection. Until recently, Langley didn’t allow public tours, but now that they did, they weren’t taking any chances with shoddy security.

She got into one of the two employee lines and began tapping her ID card against her thigh. Her latest assignment was the first one in months that had really gotten her juices flowing, and she was eager to dig in. With her analytical aptitude for anything requiring a computer and all things coded, she was a whiz at her job. Hence, the additional security clearances that came with the embedded circuitry in her ID card.

“C’mon, c’mon.” She tapped the card harder against her thigh. It was just before seven a.m., an atypically early time for a student tour. Due to the seven-hour time difference between Virginia and Russia, she’d altered her shift to start an hour earlier, and the delay at getting upstairs to her computer was irritating. Eavesdropping on someone eight time zones away was a royal pain in the zadnitsa.

To keep herself occupied, she turned her attention to several boys who were part of the tour. She’d learned early on as a child that she was a people watcher, and she was good at it. Ironic, since she considered herself socially inept. Her three gifts in life were her analytical mind, her ability to read people, and, of course, her fluency in Russian. Beyond that, I got nothin’. With her, social skills and good looks must have skipped a generation.

The boys had caught her attention partly because they were big, seventeen she’d guess, and partly because they were standing close to each other, leaning in and whispering. A clandestine huddle. She wasn’t an operative—a CIA agent—but she loved the lingo.

In unison, the boys craned their necks, eyeing the employee checkpoints. One of them grinned slyly, nodding his head. She’d bet he was the leader of the pack and was trying to act cool in front of his friends by doing something totally brainless.

She snorted. Don’t do it. He wouldn’t be the first idiot to try to blow past the visitors’ screening checkpoint, and he probably wouldn’t be the last.

“Hey, Tris!” a bubbly voice called from somewhere behind her.

She looked over her shoulder to see her friends, Bonnie and Kevin, at the back of the employee line. She waved back, grinning at Bonnie’s attire. Her friend was everything Trista was not—gorgeous and a social butterfly extraordinaire.

Bonnie Mistrano was tall, about five foot eight, voluptuous, and wore skintight clothes. She had that whole Italian beauty queen thing going, and it worked for her. Men loved Bonnie, and she loved men. Ironically, Bonnie had it bad for Trista’s teammate, Kevin Lowell. But Kevin was so blockheaded and job-obsessed that he appreciated RAM, memory space, and a super high-speed internet connection more than a beautiful woman’s attention.

Kevin was a classic, pocket protector–wearing computer geek who had eyes only for his computer screen. The man was totally oblivious to how much Bonnie lusted after him, and Trista had been sworn via pinkie oath never to reveal how much Bonnie loved the guy.

The familiar whooshing from the glass shield entry panels opening and closing meant she was closer to the checkpoint scanner, with only a half dozen people in front of her. That’s when she noticed the new cop standing in front of the scanner visually checking IDs before people swiped in. Holy moly. It would have been impossible not to notice him.

He was tall. Really tall. By her estimation, several inches over six feet. In her sensible, boring, flat shoes, he would easily tower over her measly five foot one. Perhaps he was new to the CIA’s Security Protective Service, because she didn’t think she recognized him. Then again, she probably needed new glasses.

Pushing her thick trifocals up higher on the bridge of her nose, she peered around the man in front of her to get a better look.

Wide shoulders and an impossibly broad chest filled out the cop’s navy-blue uniform shirt. His short sleeves were filled with thick, bunching biceps. Her gaze traveled down his torso to his trim hips and from there to a pair of long, muscled legs flexing beneath his uniform pants, then back up to his duty belt loaded with, among other things, a large holstered gun.

With the line shortening, there were only three people ahead of her now, giving her an even better view. Pathetic though it was, she couldn’t stop herself from cataloging more of the cop’s assets.

Short, dark-brown hair curled boyishly around his ears, as if his cop haircut was on the verge of needing a trim. Deep, chocolate-brown eyes. Like Ghirardelli. No, Lindt. My favorite. With his straight, patrician nose, high cheekbones, and chiseled square jaw, he was GQ-handsome, in a rugged kind of way.

The vigilant way he scanned the visitor line reminded her of a panther surveying the forest from the treetops, ready to strike its prey at any time. But what he did next was totally juxtaposed from the wild image she’d just created in her mind.

Alvin Sykes was the CIA’s oldest living employee, and Alvin refused to use a walker, instead preferring to lean heavily on his cane. As he hooked the cane over his forearm to swipe in, he tottered, and the officer shot out a hand, steadying Alvin and allowing him to use his arm for added balance.