Her head went back and forth. “You’re crazy if you think I—”
“You want the story of a lifetime? You got it.” Matthias cleared his throat. “Bear in mind, however, that the information in those files is explosive, so choose wisely who you share it with.”
“I’m not looking at it.”
“You will. You have to. For everyone’s sake, please just open the files.”
Matthias lifted his hand and held it above her hair, which had been left down and been loosely curled. Passing his palm downward, as if he were stroking the silky lengths, he then dropped his arm…and disappeared into the store.
XOps wasn’t going to come after Mels: Part of what he’d built into the organization was a self-destruct protocol. If there was ever an information data dump to the press, everyone was going to scatter, disavow knowledge, and disappear into the populace of whatever country they wanted to settle in.
After all, killers who had their murders come to light were not incented to confess and take their sentencings like good little children. If they stuck together, stood strong, or—and this was the most important piece—retaliated for exposure, they risked being put away for life, or executed for capital crimes against humanity.
Besides, if they were of a mind to lash out at having had their lifestyle taken away, they’d target the whistle-blower, not the reporter.
Matthias’s gut told him it was going to be okay—and he’d never been wrong when he was this certain. Ever.
He did not leave the store.
Calling on his years of training and experience, he made himself look like he was just another schlub with a baseball cap pulled down low, a hoodie up to his neck, and a book in front of his face.
In fact, he was a professional assassin who left no footprints, no trace, no mark of his ever having been in the store.
He kept his eye on Mels.
Especially as she palmed that SanDisk.
Standing in the Military section, Mels grabbed the flashdrive, the hard plastic casing cutting into her palm. She hated the sound of his voice, and more than that, she utterly despised the way her body seemed to recognize him, even as her mind was all about the epithets.
“Screw you, Matthias. You can take this and—”
She wheeled around, half a mind to throw the thing in his face.
He was gone.
Jogging around the floor-to-ceiling bookcase, she looked down the aisle in front of her…the stacks to the left and the right…the people milling through the store.
“Goddamn you…”
Mels marched all over, searching the Fiction section; then the lower level by the magazines, and even further on to the checkout area. Matthias was nowhere to be seen, no matter where she went or what she looked at. Hell, for all she knew, he’d taken off through a staff-only door.
Hitting the exit, she stepped out into the pale sunlight and shielded her eyes, measuring the crowds.
When it came to you, and being with you, I always told the truth—that was real, the only real I’ve ever had.
Okay, right, the healthy thing to do was throw his little parting gift in the trash and walk away from the drama to focus on something that actually mattered—like what she was going to do with the rest of her life or wrapping up that article on the dead women.
For all she knew, he’d just downloaded a bunch of eighties ballads off iTunes.
Left with a whole lot of nothing doing at the mall, Mels strode back to the CCJ offices, pushed her way inside the newsroom, and stopped as the chaos enveloped her. So familiar, the sounds of phones ringing and voices muttering and feet hitting the concrete floor as people paced by their desks or went back and forth to the kitchen for more coffee.
She was going to miss this place…
Holy crap—she was actually going to leave.
The irrevocable decision settled onto her shoulders not as a weighty burden, but more like a grounding that felt right. And God, she hung on to the positive sensation because, at the moment, she really needed something that didn’t feel like an epic failure.
That run-in with Matthias had taken the wind out of her sure as if she’d been knocked in the chest.
Walking over to her desk, she sat in her chair and took a stab at writing her resignation letter. The wording came out stiff and formal, but like there was another option? After massaging the text around for a while, and redoing the beginning, she saved the thing without printing it out. There was stuff yet to wrap up here, and Dick was just the kind of prick to take her two weeks’ notice and shove it down her throat by telling her to leave right away.
Besides, it was probably better to know where she was going first. In this economy, no one just walked out of a job.
Easing back in her chair, she stared at her computer screen again.
Hard to say how long it was before she took the SanDisk out of her pocket. Could have been ten minutes. Fifty. An hour and a half.
Rolling it around in her palm, she eventually eased down on the white slide, and extended the silver metal plug-in.
Leaning forward, she went to put it into the USB port…and stopped just short of pushing it home.
Getting up, she put her purse on her shoulder and went across the aisle to Tony’s partition. “I’m taking off for the day—just on follow-up. If anyone’s looking for me, tell them to hit my cell?”
“You got it,” he said as his own desk phone rang. “Tony DiSanto—hey, yeah, I was waiting to hear back from you….”
As he waved at her and fell into his conversation, she remembered she still didn’t have a car.
Outside, it took some time to get a cab, and of course, four in the afternoon was close enough to rush hour so that her taxi got stuck in the congestion on the Northway. When she finally got home, her mom was out, and as she checked the calendar on the wall and found that it was bingo night, she wondered why she hadn’t noticed all the entries in the little boxes before. Bridge, Pilates, yoga, volunteering at the church, manning the help desk at St. Francis in the pediatrics department, lunches and dinners with the girls…
Glancing around the kitchen, at least she knew that after she left, her mother wasn’t going to be alone.
Mels grabbed a raspberry Snapple out of the fridge and went upstairs, the wooden steps creaking in the same way they always had. Up in her room, she closed the door and turned to her closet.
For some reason, she felt like she should get out her mismatched suitcases and start packing.
But instead of starting that job way prematurely, she looked over at her desk. Her old laptop was sitting on the same stretch of painted wood she’d done her homework on when she’d been in middle school and high school.