Page 110 of Wicked Sexy (Wicked Games 2)
With a pop and a sizzle, they’re extinguished, plunging us into blackness.
Into the dark, I sigh.
“It’s been nice chatting with you, Shaggy, but my ride’s here.”
Twenty-Nine
Connor
I don’t know how long I was out, but when I come to, I’m on the floor in the office next to the COM center, flat on my back. They must’ve dragged me in while I was unconscious.
By “they,” I mean the four FBI agents flanking either side of the closed door.
I sit up, wincing, and gingerly touch the back of my head. Sticky wetness, an open gash, a big-ass lump… Yeah, that’s gonna leave a mark.
I’ve had worse. And right now, I’ve got something much more important to worry about.
One of the agents says into the mic at his wrist, “He’s awake.”
They’re all miked, with small plastic receivers nested in their ears. Two of them have shotguns in hand. All of them are wearing their standard-issue Glocks on their belts. In appearance, they’re almost identical. Average height, medium-brown hair, beige trench coat, utterly forgettable. One of them works a toothpick between his teeth, but aside from that, they could be quadruplets.
I know enough to keep my mouth shut until their boss arrives. I busy myself by wiping the blood from my fingers onto the leg of my pants.
When the door opens a few minutes later, it’s the tall, iron-gray-hair dude who walks through it. He folds his arms over his chest and appraises me with an air of faint disappointment.
“Mr. Hughes—”
“Call me Connor. Where’ve you taken Tabitha West?”
Ignoring my interruption, he begins again. “Mr. Hughes, I’m Deputy Director Overton Downs.”
I wait for a second to see if he’s joking. When no one cracks a smile, I decide he’s not. “That’s a helluva name. Sounds more like a place. In England, maybe. ‘Come visit the spectacular gardens at Overton Downs,’ like that.”
Downs finds my humor lacking. His gray eyes take on a distinctive chill. He gestures to a chair. “Have a seat, Mr. Hughes.”
Guess we’re not gonna be on a first-name basis, then. Somehow I didn’t think we would be. Probably on account of that gun he shoved into my face.
I stand, cross to the chair he indicated, lower myself into it, and wait.
If he were going to arrest me, he’d have done it already, so this little meet and greet must be part of the debrief process. Most likely Ryan, Miranda, and everyone else have been separated and are getting raked over the coals as I’m about to be.
Deputy Director Downs—Overton? Really? What the fuck were his parents thinking?—pulls up a chair and straddles it backwards, very casual, very Mr. Government cool, very “we’re all just friends here.”
I’m not buying it for a second.
“I need to ask you a few questions, Mr. Hughes.”
His voice is clipped, precise as a scalpel. I peg him as an anal-retentive, by-the-book type, which won’t leave me much wiggle room to negotiate.
I nod. “I understand. Where is Tabitha West?”
His look sours. He reaches into the pocket of his trench coat, removes a travel-sized bottle of Tums, flips the cap open, shakes a few pale pink tablets into his mouth, and grinds them between his molars. “You know I can’t tell you that.”
Fighting the urge to curl my hands around his throat and choke the information out of him, I lean forward and rest my forearms on my knees.
“Look. I know how this works. You lunge, I parry. You thrust, I feint. We go round and round, rapiers clashing, until someone gets fatally stuck. Let’s just cut to the chase. You need information about what went down on this op and information about her. Anything you need to know about the op, I’ll tell you. Anything I’ve learned about Søren Killgaard, I’ll tell you, with the exception of what’s not mine to tell. I was entrusted with certain things. I’m not gonna break that trust. And I’ll tell you right now that if you ask me how she did it, I don’t have a clue. But I do know it wasn’t an accident. She knew exactly what she was doing.”
Downs seems surprised. “So you admit she hacked the NSA’s database.”
