Page 85 of Insidious Threats
“There is a risk. We’d be lying if we said otherwise. But, Connellyisa highly trained federal law enforcement agent.”
“And what about you?” Petra demanded.
“She’s the five-foot-nothing badass who broke my nose and my trigger finger the first time we met. And she’s the smartest person I’ve ever met,” Connelly said gravely.
Petra was momentarily distracted from the danger outside her door. “Is that true?”
Sasha shrugged.
“She also took down some machete-wielding mercenaries who crashed our wedding,” he added.
Petra was stuck on their meet-not-so-cute. “She broke your nose and your finger, and you married her?”
It was Connelly’s turn to shrug. “What can I say? I like my women small and violent.”
When Petra stopped laughing and caught her breath, she threw her hands up in a gesture of submission. “I’m in. Let’s kill Thor’s hammer.”
43
The sun set, and still Stasia stood across the street from the house, her head bent over her phone but her attention on the movement inside the first-floor apartment. At last, her patience was rewarded.
The husband and wife walked out the front door. They stopped on the porch and turned back to the inside of the house as if saying their goodbyes to their host. They descended the steps to the sidewalk side by side, and then they embraced briefly. She set off down the street, and he unlocked Petra’s car and got behind the wheel. Stasia had expected them to stay together.
Now what? The wife was walking at a steady, but not rapid, clip toward the town center. The husband started the vehicle and sat, either allowing the engine to warm up or waiting for Petra to exit the house, or both. There was no sign of motion from within the home.
Her priority on this mission had been to find out if Garwood March had told Petra about the project. But priorities shift, and this one had. The presence of Leo Connelly and Sasha McCandless-Connelly had changed things. Now, she had to decide: Follow her, or wait and see what he did.
Her gut told her to go after the woman. She’d be easy to overtake and, not for nothing, she appeared to be a soft target, regardless of what her glowing press accounts might want Stasia to think. She sat with the decision for a heartbeat, then nodded. It felt right. She pushed off the fence and jogged away from the house.
She kept her attention locked on her target’s back. She didn’t turn around. If she had, she would have seen Leo push open the passenger door while Petra Vukovic raced down her steps and hurtled herself inside the car.
* * *
Sasha smiledto herself when she heard the faint slap of shoes against the sidewalk. She didn’t turn around, but she knew if she did, she’d see a blonde woman jogging down the other side of the street. She’d taken the bait.
Her plan had survived the first inflection point. If Delone’s woman had stuck around to follow Connelly and Petra, they would have had a problem. But now, Sasha just needed to lead the blonde on a merry chase through the center of town. Petra had sketched out the route for her—a meandering two-mile journey that would end at ETS’s office after giving Petra and Connelly ample time to upload the worm to the FTP server and destroy Landon’s racist, authoritarian fever dream once and for all.
Sasha didn’t love using the office as the rendezvous point, but as Connelly had pointed out, with one car, they had limited options, and the less time they spent split up, the better. Luring the watcher to the office after it was too late for her to stop Petra and Connelly would tip the balance in their favor to two trained, experienced people (plus one hacker) versus one … whatever the woman was. If they could detain her, they had a chance to tie Delone to everything he’d done, which would go a long way toward helping Cinco out of any legal jeopardy he might be facing. It was a convoluted, complicated plan, made more so by her sleep-deprived state. But it was the only plan they had.
She let her eyelids flutter closed while she visualized the map Petra had drawn. Turn left at the corner. She opened her eyes and made the turn, catching a glimpse of platinum hair in her peripheral vision. There, two storefronts in from the corner, was the bakery with the big windows that Petra had mentioned.
Sasha slowed her pace and then came to a stop in front of the display window. She pretended to study the whimsical cupcakes and the six-tier tower of colorful macarons as she clocked her follower’s location. The woman had stopped and stooped to untie and retie her shoelace. Sasha waited until the woman had untied the lace again and then started walking. She knew it would cause the woman only the smallest, pettiest of delays, but it made her happy anyway.
She resumed her stroll, stopping in front of shops to window shop at seemingly random intervals. After twenty-four minutes, she crossed the street and wound her way through a public green space in the center of the business district. The trail was only lightly used. She saw two dog walkers, bundled up and pleading with their pups to do their business already. The woman wisely fell back so Sasha wouldn’t spot her. But her bright red coat flashed through the trees. She was still there.
Sasha emerged from the trail and exited the park. She wove a path through a residential neighborhood and past an urgent care center. She crossed the street and stood in front of the entrance to a business park. ETS’s offices were on the other side of the small campus. All she had left to do was to wind her way along the walking path that ran through the office park and reach the ETS building in twelve minutes. If all went according to plan, when she arrived Connelly and Petra would have deployed the virus and would be waiting for her in the car, doors unlocked and engine running.
She loved it when a plan came together.
She entered the business park and walked to the first white gazebo that marked the beginning of the insurance company-funded healthy habits trail. That’s when she realized: she’d lost her tail.
She waited a solid minute, her heart thumping in her chest, but there was no sign of a tall platinum blonde wearing an eye-catching red winter coat.
Sasha started to run.
44
Leo wheeled over the desk chair from the closet desk to Petra’s workstation and sat behind her and slightly to her right. He’d been pleased to see that she sat with her back to the wall, facing the door. He felt a pang of sympathy for the coders, developers, and programmers who had to sit on the opposite side of the big room. He would never be able to accomplish work sitting with his back to the door. Not to mention with his monitor exposed to anyone who walked into the room. The so-called bullpen was, he decided, a terrible office design.
