The Spy Who Loves Me Read Free Page A

sorry you had to work with Bedichek to do it. I know you prefer to work alone.”
    â€œNo problem,” she said, crossing to her back patio and opening the door a crack. “I play well with others,” she said, “so long as I don’t have to play with them for very long. And besides, the assignment brought back memories.” She’d been fifteen when the Unit had trusted her with her first solo mission. A diplomatic party in Prague, posing as a senator’s daughter. She’d planted a bug on a foreign prime minister, never asking why. It hadn’t mattered. Nothing had mattered back then. Nothing except doing the job right so that they wouldn’t send her back to the center. Or, worse, back home.
    â€œThat’s what I mean,” Brandon said. “Kid’s play. I think you’re a little overtrained for the job.” He shrugged. “But there was no one else available.”
    â€œDon’t worry about it.” Blackie, the ancient stray cat she’d pseudo-adopted, wandered in, whiskers twitching. Amber reached down and gave it a good scratch behind the ears. “Your job was the highlight of my week.” That was an understatement. Eight days ago she’d been in Chechnya, deep undercover on one of James Monahan’s pet projects. She frowned. “He’s going to raise hell when he learns I’m back in the States.”
    Brandon grimaced. “Probably,” he said, clearly knowing exactly who Amber meant. “But there’s no way he could have known that you’d met Eli before. The moment he saw you, the deal would have collapsed.”
    â€œTrue enough,” Amber said. Her mission had been to go undercover as a photojournalist and use her manufactured press credentials to get close to a suspected gunrunner. Pretty standard stuff, until Amber learned that Eli Janovich, ex-CIA, had stepped in as head of security for her mark. Considering she and Eli went way back, she’d aborted the mission and called Roderick Schnell, Unit 7’s head honcho. Technically, she reported to James, the second-in-command. But he’d been unavailable, and she’d needed reassignment.
    â€œI left James a message,” she said, tamping down on a niggle of guilt. James had recruited both her and Brandon. No, that wasn’t quite right. He’d recruited her, yes. But considering the course of her life back then, he’d also saved her from sure hell. She’d been thirteen, a smart-mouthed kid, scared out of her mind and facing a felony murder charge and a district attorney determined to try her as an adult.
    James had pulled strings, gotten the charges dropped, and sent her to the Unit’s training facility in Montana. More than that, though, he’d given her a sense of self-worth, and in doing that, he’d given her the world. Going over his head felt disloyal, even when her safety was at issue. It was a crazy business, with loyalties lost and won over coffee or a beer. And with James on the verge of retiring, she didn’t want him to think that she’d already moved on.
    â€œHe’ll understand,” Brandon said, reading her mind as usual.
    â€œI hope so,” she said. “But he’s going to be pissed. Too bad, too. If I’m going to incur James’s wrath, I wish I were at least making some headway.” Schnell had ordered her to Los Angeles to keep an eye on Diana Traynor, a known associate of Drake Mackenzie, a former Navy SEAL and Black Ops commander. Mackenzie had even served with Schnell years ago. But while Schnell still worked for God and country, Drake had left the military for more profitable pursuits and had landed on the watch list of every intelligence organization in the free world.
    Diana kept a Los Angeles apartment, but rarely used it. So when she’d returned a week ago, the Unit took notice. And then, when she started hanging out with a low-level programmer at Zermatt