Page 5 of Lock ’N’ Load

Trista opened her eyes in time to see Kevin roll his.

“Do you ever think about anything else besides hot guys and sex?” He arched a brow.

“Well…” Bonnie stuck her finger in her mouth, momentarily looking up at the ceiling while she pretended to think. “No. I don’t.”

Trista laughed. Bonnie did think about sex constantly, but only with Kevin. He just didn’t know it. Yet.

The doors opened, and they made their way into their office.

“And he was awesome,” Bonnie continued as she settled behind her desk. “The way he took that kid to the ground, he was like a giant panther.” She placed her hand over her heart and let out an exaggerated breath. “Be still my heart. I think I’m in serious lust.”

Trista dropped her bag onto the floor, amused that Bonnie had also likened Sgt. Connors to a panther. As she powered up her computer, she noted Kevin was frowning. Could it be he’s a tad jealous? ’Bout time.

“You’re pathetic.” He shook his head in obvious disgust, turning on his own computer. “All it takes is a few muscles and you go weak at the knees. Trista doesn’t need muscles on a guy. A guy’s gotta have a brain. Isn’t that right, Tris?”

“Huh?” She looked up from the log-in screen, already focused on her new assignment. “Right,” she answered and caught the wistful look of longing on Bonnie’s face as she watched Kevin from across the room.

As she logged in, she couldn’t stop shuddering at how close that dog—Sheba—had been to her. True, the animal had seemed well behaved and responsive to commands, but she hadn’t been that close to a canine since she was six, and she’d hoped to keep it that way. Besides, she had Poofy.

She glanced at the glossy photo on her desk of her beautiful, pure-white male Angora cat with enormous blue eyes. She and Poofy could do without dogs, thank you very much. And they could do just as well without gorgeous, muscle-bound cops with melty chocolate-brown eyes. She and Poofy had each other, and that’s all that mattered. Most of the time, anyway.

After inserting her ID card, she tapped her fingers on her desk, waiting for the password prompt.

Sgt. Connors certainly did have a lot of muscles. She’d felt them beneath her fingers as she’d leaned on his forearm for balance. While he’d been wearing a vest, it didn’t take a genius to figure out that, had he not been wearing one, her other hand would most certainly have come in contact with two of the hardest pectorals on the planet.

Get real.

Not that she was thinking about him or anything. Guys like him didn’t notice women like her. She knew what everyone thought of her. Mousy. Dowdy. Plain. Blending into the woodwork, so much so that at some point in her life, she’d actually begun trying to disappear. Hence the gray clothes. People didn’t notice gray so much, and she liked it better that way.

She typed in her password and clicked the enter button. While she waited for the various search programs to boot up, she realized her social clumsiness and humiliation weren’t the only things bugging her about what had happened in the lobby. She realized she was envious of Sgt. Connors. He was so confident and self-assured. Unlike her.

When the boot-up finished, she clicked on the Dark Curtain icon on her screen, then opened an internet search engine. A slew of news stories populated the screen, all concerning the U.S. presidential election in just over two months. Typing in the address for one of the many secret chat rooms on her list for the morning, Trista dug in.

Her short nails clicked on the keypad’s buttons so quickly it sounded like the pitter-patter of rain on a metal roof. The target—Alexy Nikolaevich Lukashin—was out there somewhere in cyberspace, and it was Trista’s new assignment to track his diplomatically protected butt down and uncover what he was up to. Unofficially, of course.

Alexy Nikolaevich Lukashin’s official cover was as cultural attaché to the Embassy of the Russian Federation in Washington, D.C. The CIA, however, knew him to be the rezidentura—a legal resident spy. Lukashin was an older man in his sixties, a product of the Cold War. Surprisingly, he was techno-savvy with a preference for utilizing social media. His favorite method to hold long-distance meetings with colleagues was hidden in black net chat rooms.

Glancing at the task bar, she verified Dark Curtain was running then proceeded to enter one chat room after the next, searching but not finding whom she was looking for. “Where are you, Lukashin?”

As her fingers flew across the keyboard, the clicking grew louder. Faster. Her heart rate kicked up, and her breathing went shallow. Darting her eyes from one quadrant of the screen to the next, she scanned the many pop-up windows for signs of the elusive rezidentura. This was her forte, an incomparable technical expertise few in the world possessed besides her. She might be a total dork where men were concerned, but there wasn’t a code she couldn’t decipher or a computer network anywhere in the world she couldn’t hack into.

During the next twenty minutes, she lost count of how many chat rooms she entered and exited using the Dark Curtain program she’d developed several years ago. Dark Curtain ran in the background, allowing her to penetrate any chat room, bypassing the standard username and password requirement. Once inside, it was like hiding behind a thick, dark curtain and listening to everything being said in a room without other participants ever knowing she was there.

The program was incredibly powerful, allowing her to get around military-class encryption and secret, complex passwords. She’d even added an enhanced feature that allowed her to capture plain-text conversation in a folder on her computer before a secret chat room’s auto-delete function kicked in, permanently deleting plain text after a preset amount of time had elapsed.

“There you are.” She smiled as Lukashin’s code name—Karakurt—popped up in a Russian-language chat room.

Months ago, she’d discovered that code name, musing over the symbolism. The Russian Karakurt spider was one of the ten most dangerous spiders on Earth. Poison from a single bite caused intense pain that would quickly spread throughout every muscle in the body.

Focusing on the conversation already in progress, she again verified Dark Curtain was still running on the task bar. The chat was in Russian, but with her fluency, it was no obstacle.

Karakurt: He is not who he says he is.

White: If this comes out, it will ruin everything. Who made the discovery?

Banks: A reporter. Thomas George.

White: Does anyone else know?