Full-Time Father. Susan Mallery

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      “Have I told you this is a really bad part of the city?” Rafe Santorini lay back in the uncomfortable seat of the Ford Taurus he’d picked up to use for the night’s surveillance. At six feet two inches tall, he couldn’t quite get comfortable in the seat. His bad knee still ached and the gun on his right side kept digging into his hip.

      “Yes,” Allison Gracelyn replied. “Several times.”

      “Maybe I just haven’t gotten through to you how bad this section is.”

      “I’m looking at it now.”

      That caught Rafe’s attention. Challenged, he stared around the neighborhood. Since Allison was somewhere at her desk, currently—or so she said—in Fort Meade, Maryland, he knew she had to have some means of electronic surveillance.

      Unless she was using satellite coverage. Knowing Allison as he did, Rafe wouldn’t have put it past her, but he knew she was wanting to keep this op on the down-low. Whatever business he’d bought into, it was personal to her.

      Allison was one of the best ELINT and SIGNIT people he’d ever worked with. Electronic Intelligence and Signals Intelligence were two huge fields in espionage. Usually a person didn’t overlap in the job. Allison did.

      “Tired of playing Where’s Waldo?” Allison asked.

      Rafe knew she’d caught him looking. “If I didn’t have to watch the bar so closely, I’d find it.”

      “There’s a drugstore on the northwest corner,” Allison said.

      Rafe squinted against the darkness and didn’t look right at the drugstore. Peripheral vision was stronger and clearer at night than direct line of sight. He spotted the familiar rectangular bulk of the camera bolted to the second-floor corner of the building.

      “Are you getting my good side?” Rafe asked.

      “No. You’re sitting on it.”

      Despite the long hours spent following his target around for the last few days, Rafe had to laugh. He’d met Allison in the flesh twice, but he’d worked with her a couple dozen times over the last five years. He’d been a field agent with the National Security Agency. Allison was tech support—on steroids. There didn’t seem to be any computer system she couldn’t hack or information packet she couldn’t sniff out. She wasn’t known for her humor, but—on occasion—he’d seen it.

      Rafe turned his attention back to the seedy bar and rolled his watch over to have a look. It was 11:28 p.m. His target had gone inside—

      “Seventeen minutes ago,” Allison said. Her voice was quiet and controlled coming through the earwig he wore in his left ear.

      It was creepy how she did that, but Allison was a queen at multitasking. Agents Rafe had talked to had been blown away by how she could enhance an op and build in rabbit holes when things went south.

      “Seventeen minutes is a long time,” Rafe said.

      “If you’re holding your breath, maybe.”

      “Vincent Drago isn’t a nice guy.”

      “I know. That’s why I asked you to look into this when I found out he was involved.”

      Maybe it would help if you would tell me a little more about what’s going on, Rafe thought. But he knew she wouldn’t. Agents learned to be careful with the knowledge they had. Information was currency of the realm for a spy, and they never spent it casually, even at home.

      In the handful of years that Rafe had worked with Allison, three of them spent before he’d ever gotten a face-to-face with her, she’d never asked for anything. She didn’t seem like the type. Her phone call to the rental house in Jacksonville, North Carolina where he’d been recuperating for the past eight months, had been totally unexpected.

      The fact that she was so grudging with the information had hooked him further. He’d known better, but he’d trusted Allison.

      And you needed to get out of there, he reminded himself. Don’t forget that. That oceanside rental was becoming as much a prison as the other place.

      For a moment Rafe didn’t СКАЧАТЬ