Prescription: Makeover Read Free

a potentially dangerous op — she had breasts.
    He wasn’t proud of the chauvinism, but he figured he had a damn good reason for it.
    “She’ll stay in Boston, I promise,” Max persisted. “Give her some data to crunch, some leads to dead end, I don’t care. Just let her feel involved. She needs this, William. They killed someone she cared about.”
    That resonated, but William was no fool. “If all you wanted was some long-distance data crunching, you would’ve just turned her loose. Hell, that was how she found Forsythe for you. So give. What do you want from me?”
    Max grimaced. “I need you to keep her busy and I need you to make sure she stays in Boston.”
    A chill skittered through William. “You don’t think she’d actually go looking for —” He broke off and muttered a curse. “Of course she would. Hell. I don’t have time for this.” He glanced at Max. “And neither do you. But you’re still trying to save her from herself, aren’t you?”
    Max shrugged, rueful amusement tugging at his lips. “Ike calls it my DIDS. Damsel in Distress Syndrome. I can’t stop myself from trying to save them.”
    William could relate to that, but where Max saved people one at a time, William focused on the big picture, which sometimes demanded individual sacrifices in the name of the greater good.
    Like Sharilee?
a small thought prompted from within, bringing the smell of blood and gunfire and the sound of a soft body hitting the floor.
    “Fine,” he said before the memory could form. “You owe me big-time, but I’ll keep an eye on Ike for you, starting tomorrow.”
    He already had plans for tonight.
    H OPING NOBODY HAD seen her sneak across the dark, deserted seventeenth green, Ike shimmied up the side of the brick building, her breath adding white puffs to the clinging fog.
    She couldn’t believe she was actually doing this on her own, but what other choice did she have? Educated guesswork and an intercepted e-mail ghost had convinced her that several members of The Nine were meeting here at the Coach House, a posh country club restaurant outside Greenwich, Connecticut. She’d thought about asking Max to meet her, but given the way he’d been behaving lately, all Neanderthal and pat-the-little-woman on-the-head, she’d nixed that idea and driven down from Boston alone.
    It was just recon, after all.
    But as she hauled herself up to a narrow ledge of stone trim that ran most of the way around the second story of the brick building, her doubts crowded closer. She was a computer geek; she wasn’t trained for this sort of thing. Sure, she’d done surveillance before, both for freelance gigs and for HFH. And, yeah, she’d been on the edge of the action once or twice, even before Max had stumbled over evidence indicating that The Nine really existed.
    This time, though, she was on her own. There was no employer backing her, nobody waiting for her to check in.
    You’ve got your gun,
she told herself.
You can handle this.
More importantly, she
had
to handle it. Zed deserved more than he’d gotten in the way of justice. She owed him.
    Taking a breath of damp air that threatened rain, she edged across the brick wall. A series of lights set high on the building were tilted to illuminate the golf course beyond, their beams furred with mist. That same mist slicked her hand- and footholds as she pressed herself against the flat surface and began to move, using her black-gloved fingers to grip a thin pipe overhead while she clung to the narrow stone ledge by the toes of her black rubber-soled running shoes.
    Her destination was a half-open window about fifty feet away. Based on her assessment of downloaded blueprints, the window should open into the meeting space. Even better, the rear wing angled off the main building near the window, forming a corner where she could fade into the shadows.
    Score one for all black,
Ike thought, comfortable in her trademark tight dark clothes, one of the few constants she