Shadows Amongst Light (The Spy Who Loves Me) Read Free Page B

into the club to try to catch him at his own game, which clearly had failed miserably, then I wouldn’t have ended up on this ridiculous personal mission, instead of concentrating on what I should be doing in the first place.
                  I could almost hear Noah’s anger and frustration with me. I’d put my life on the line. For what? For a stupid hunch. I could be completely wrong about the guy. Given my emotional state as of late it was a very real possibility that I’d simply misread everything.
                  If I hadn’t wasted the time, it took to put my child and myself in jeopardy without any clear results I could be with Noah now. Not standing here alone in this deserted alley.
                  But none of that mattered now. The point was I hadn’t done any of the things that I should have. I fished the cell phone out of my purse when it continued to ring off its little hinges.
                  “Hello?”
                  “Cameron? What exactly do you think you’re doing? We’re all here. So where are you?”
                  That was Gina Manning’s way of getting the point across to me in no uncertain terms. Not that I needed any help. I knew how much Gina disliked me. Even if I’d been on time tonight, Gina would have found another way of showing her displeasure. At least I always knew where I stood with her.
                  As the only other female agent in our group, I believed Regina, a.k.a. Gina Manning, resented my presence in her men’s only club. She had been the queen bee for five years before I’d come onto the scene. Gina didn’t like to share her ‘boys’, as she was so fond of referring to the other four male members of our team.
                  But that wasn’t the only reason Gina and I were never going to be friends. I’d saved her life about two years ago when I was still considered a rookie, and she was supposed to be the seasoned pro. Gina had resented that obligation to me from the start.
                  And then there was the fact that I was ‘seeing the boss’ or so she and everyone one else in The Organization believed was to be the extinct of Noah’s and my relationship. I think this was actually something that Gina pictured herself doing. After all, Noah and Gina’s father were good friends. Adam Manning was like a father to Noah.
                  “Gina, I’m sorry. I ran into a little snag, but I’m on my way. I’ll be there as soon as I can.” It seemed that no matter how hard I tried I could never bridge Gina’s resentment towards me.
                  “Whatever, Cameron. Just get here. This is an important meeting--you knew that. Noah told us all to be here on time. We have a lot of information to go over tonight. You’re holding things up.”
                  Without so much as a goodbye, Gina hung up on me and I felt my frustration continue to grow. Gina and I were co-workers, fellow Agency pledges against the forces of evil. But that was it. We’d never be close. But then, that was the nature of our business. We worked close to people for years, but we didn’t fully trust any of them. It just doesn’t pay to get too close, because you never really knew whom you could trust completely.  
                  Most people might wonder how and more particularly, why anyone would put themselves in a position that could be both emotionally crippling as well as thankless in the first place.
                  Well, you don’t just wake up one day and decide you want to be this type of work for a living. It’s a calling so to speak. And how do you get such the calling? Unfortunately, it usually comes at the cost of someone close to you. It comes with death. In my case, it was my parents’ death.
                  The ‘official’ ruling had been an accident. Local authorities believed