Deadly Allure. Elle James

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      “Help!” Ryan yelled.

      Great. With a calm she wasn’t exactly feeling, she pulled the tight roll of duct tape from her pocket, unrolled it and bent to slap it over Ryan’s mouth. “There, now. Let’s not disturb the cleaning staff. They have enough filth to clean.”

      He grunted and jerked, trying to tear into her.

      Nicole glanced at the monitor. The status bar filled and disappeared, displaying the message Download Complete.

      Now the fun began. With Ryan trussed up like the pig he was, it wouldn’t be long before the security staff got smart.

      Tucking the flash drive in the pocket of her black pants, she nudged Ryan with her toe. “I’ll be seeing you in court.”

      The man grunted and rolled toward her in an attempt to stop her.

      She grabbed the white coverall, slipped her legs inside, crammed her hair into a messy bun and shoved it into the cap. She grabbed a straight-back chair from the front office and dragged it into Ryan’s office. Leaning it against the back of the door, she then exited the outer door of Ryan’s office, the chair leaning against the back of the door dropping to the floor behind it. She tried to open the door, but the chair legs dug into the carpet on the other side, jamming it. It would take time to get to Brandon Ryan. The time she’d need to get out of the building.

      As she stepped into the hallway, the elevator car dinged. Before the door could slide open, Nicole ran for the fire alarm and jerked the handle down, setting off a screeching alarm and blinking lights marking the exits.

      Two security guards leaped out of the elevator car and pulled guns on her. “Halt!”

      “Oh, thank God!” She dropped to her knees on the hallway floor. “Mr. Ryan is in his office. There’s something wrong with him. I didn’t know what to do. Please help him. Please. And hurry.”

      The two guards ran past her and through the open outer office door. As soon as they were through, Nicole rose to her feet, pulled a pocketknife out of her pocket, closed the outer door and stabbed the keyboard. Wires shorted out and sparks flew.

      Wasting no more time, she ran to the stairwell and down all twenty-two floors of the building to the ground level and exited into the service area.

      The night shift evacuated the building, all talking at once about the fire alarm. Nicole blended in with the Acme Cleaning Services’ staff and left through the rear dock entrance. Once she cleared the building, she broke off from the rest, ducked behind a large trash container and waited until the others moved far enough away that they wouldn’t notice when she headed the opposite direction.

      A block away, she’d stashed a motorcycle behind a stack of empty pallets. Stripping out of the coveralls, she tossed them to the side, climbed on the motorcycle and drove away.

      Three fire engines and a ladder truck passed her on their way toward Ryan Technologies.

      Nicole kept going all the way out of the city, past the high-rises and big business of L.A., the six-lane freeways less crowded now than during the daytime. Eventually she passed through the suburbs, continuing north to Santa Clarita where she would rendezvous with the SOS plane and settle back for the long flight to D.C.

      As she neared the small airport, a police car pulled in behind her, lights flashing. A cold feeling washed over her. She hadn’t been speeding and she’d followed all the rules of the highway, determined to fly under the radar of local police. No one but the folks at SOS knew where she’d go after the heist at Ryan Technologies.

      Slowing, she debated pulling over and going through the motions of a routine traffic stop, but instinct told her, as late as it was, and after breaking and entering a building in L.A., there was nothing routine about this stop.

      As she neared the turn to the airport, she noted at least a half dozen police cars, lights strobing the night sky. Nicole revved the engine and peeled out, taking the motorcycle across a median, down into a ditch and onto another road that would lead her out of town. As soon as she lost the police car, she pulled around to the back of a deserted storage building, heart racing and dread filling her gut like poison.

      She fished out her cell phone and dialed Royce Fontaine’s number. It rang five times before voice mail picked up.

      Nicole frowned. Fontaine should have picked up on the first ring. Hell, he was expecting her report as soon as she reached the airport. He wouldn’t have deserted her when they stood a chance of nailing Ryan.

      She dialed Geek, who should have been in the computer lab following her every move via the GPS. Again, no answer.

      Sirens blared on the road behind her. Three police cars converged on her from two different directions. She gunned the engine, hopped over a sidewalk and sped down a quiet residential street to burst out on the main road. How had they found her so soon?

      For a moment she thought she’d shaken them. Then at the end of the alley another police car appeared. It was as if they knew where she’d be before she got there, as if they were tracking her.

      Nicole left the road, drove down a steep embankment and up to the other side, crossed a wide-open field and headed into a wooded area. She didn’t slow until she was completely surrounded by trees.

      As close as the police had come, they had to be tracking her. Nicole stopped long enough to ditch her cell phone, the only tracking device she had on her. Somehow her position had been compromised. With Fontaine and Geek offline, the entire operation could have been compromised. Her best bet was to get as far away from L.A. and her cell phone as possible and lay low until things died down and she could contact her boss.

      She knew of only one place far enough off the grid she could hide where she could keep in contact with other members of the close-knit SOS team.

      Having ditched her cell phone, she drove out of Santa Clarita and headed north toward Oregon and Cape Churn. The legendary Devil’s Shroud that could hide the rocks jutting out of the ocean from view of passing ships would be a great place to disappear to until she could decrypt the data she’d stolen from Ryan Technologies. Now all she had to do was to survive the more than nine-hundred-mile trip and avoid all members of the law-enforcement community.

Chapter 2

      Dave Logsdon slowed for a four-way stop. The fog had drifted in off the sea, blanketing the shoreline, homes and roads of Cape Churn, discouraging the residents from getting out. They called it the Devil’s Shroud. When it settled over the town, everyone hunkered down and waited until it cleared. Only the naive or desperate went out on nights such as this.

      Unfortunately, Dave had been in Portland to purchase additional supplies for the old yacht he’d been refurbishing. He rarely took a day off from his fishing and dive boat business until the end of the summer season when business slacked off. Today had been the first day in a month he hadn’t had a booking. If he hadn’t had to wait in line for the guy behind the paint counter to get to him, he’d have been back at least an hour earlier, before the fog settled in over the coast. Instead he’d been stuck in Portland rush hour, behind thousands of other motorists trying to get home from their day jobs.

      No sooner had he crossed the mountains, he’d run into the first signs of fog formed by warm air over the cool Pacific Ocean, the resulting formation of ground-hugging СКАЧАТЬ