Page 56 of Out of Control

He side-eyed Dray. “Keep making cracks. I’m keeping a tally of the snark for when you’re facedown beneath me getting the ever-loving hell pounded out of your ass.”

Drago grinned. “Don’t tease me. You’re making me hot.”

Spencer arched an eyebrow. “Do I look like I’m teasing?”

Drago’s throat muscles flexed as he swallowed, and his eyes blazed with black fire.

Dammit. If they were going to do this, if he was going to work with Drago again, he must not give in to temptation. Not again.

“Let’s get the trackers out of our backs and sanitize our electronics,” Spencer said past the sudden tightness in his own throat.

It didn’t take long for him to don surgical gloves, sterilize and numb a spot under Drago’s shoulder blade, and make a small incision. He pulled out the tracker, the size and shape of a pill capsule. He applied pressure until the bleeding mostly stopped and then butterflied the cut shut. He put heavy-duty adhesive tape over the whole thing in case they had to fight or run in the next few days… or have vigorous sex—

Stop that!

He sat still as Drago repeated the procedure on his back. In a few minutes, his tracker clanked into a saucer beside Dray’s. “Should we destroy them?” he asked.

Drago shook his head. “I’m thinking we should put them on a moving vehicle of some kind. Use them as a misdirect. Besides, if my tracker goes black, that’s a signal to my handlers to send in an emergency extraction team.”

Drago went into the other room, and from his angle at the kitchen table, Spencer saw him open a small wall safe. He emerged from the bedroom carrying a handful of plastic packages.

“New SIM cards for our phones,” Drago announced.

Spencer popped open his work and personal cell phones, removed and replaced the SIM cards, and deactivated the built-in tracking software. Taking apart their laptops to get to the chips in the motherboards took longer, but eventually those were added to the pile of old SIM cards.

“Got any tinfoil?” he asked.

“Coming up.” They wrapped the chips and SIM cards in the foil, and Spencer stowed them in a flat compartment hidden in the back of his utility belt.

“I’m regretting your ditching the Land Rover right about now,” Spencer said.

Drago grinned. “You abandoned my Jeep in the desert. It was the least I could do to repay the favor.”

“Maybe we can buy wheels from someone local?”

Drago nodded. “I know just the person. An older lady down the block has a flower shop. If I offer to buy her crappy VW bus for enough cash to buy a better van, she’ll jump on it.”

They spent the remainder of the evening trimming down their equipment into two duffel bags. They kept most of the surveillance gear, small and large weapons for each of them, and plenty of ammo. Given that they were going to Paris, they left behind the desert survival gear.

It turned out the flower shop took its deliveries of fresh flowers well before dawn, and the owner was beyond delighted to sell her piece-of-shit van for triple its market value. They ditched the trackers in the upholstery of a cab, and by 6:00 a.m., they were well clear of Berlin. They headed southwest on the A2.

The minibus was uncomfortable and smelled of leaking oil, but it surely wouldn’t draw the attention of anyone who might happen to go looking for them. Like any good spy, Drago had a significant stash of cash, and their road trip was well-funded. From here on out, they would operate strictly off the grid.

It didn’t help that Spencer was still plenty creaky from his beating in Tel Aviv. Sure, he could work through any amount of pain. But that didn’t have to mean he liked doing it.

Across the border into Belgium, they got off the Autobahn and took a smaller highway to Reims, a couple of hours east of Paris, to stop for the night. Spencer asked for two rooms when they checked into a middling hotel. Dray’s right eyebrow sailed up, but thankfully he didn’t make a stink about it.

Spencer’s bed was lumpy and lonely. He would much rather have slept beside Dray, but he already felt the old addiction calling to him, a sweet siren song of desire.

No surprise, he slept for shit and woke up aching from head to foot.

Later that morning, as the urban sprawl of Paris spread around them, he asked Dray, “I don’t suppose you own an apartment building in Paris, do you?”

“Too expensive a city for that. But I do have a modest flat. Real estate in this town is a bitch.”

Spencer shook his head. Never in a million years would he have guessed Drago would one day turn into a landlord, let alone a businessman.

They reached central Paris, and the Eiffel Tower loomed over the skyline at the west end of downtown, while the white domes of Sacré-Coeur loomed in the east. Spencer’s head was on a swivel, taking in the iconic sights—the bridges over the River Seine, the Egyptian Obelisk in the Place de la Concorde near where Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette lost their heads, the Paris Opera, the Louvre, and of course, mighty Notre Dame Cathedral, cloaked in scaffolding as repairs proceeded after its terrible fire.

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