His Spy at Night (Spy Games Book 3) (6 page)

Lies’s heart plunged with disappointment. She and Yasmin shared a similar poor taste in men, if not paint, because Baart wasn’t what he pretended to be. A quick glance around the restaurant assured her of that. She hoped Yasmin wasn’t too deeply attached.

Yasmin took a sip of her wine, then leaned across the table. “You’ve met my friend. Now tell me about yours. You’ve been very quiet about him. Is everything OK?”

What made her think Harry was a boyfriend? Lies scanned her memory. What had she said that might have given Yasmin that impression?

Then she realized Yasmin was referring to Michael, who Lies had foolishly mentioned in a phone conversation a few months ago—not by name, but as someone she’d taken an interest in.

“It didn’t work out.” It no longer hurt to admit it. At least not as much.

“I could ask if Baart has a friend for you.”

Yasmin watched closely for her response and Lies knew she was sounding her out for her opinion on the new man in Yasmin’s life, but they weren’t going to have this conversation in here. “We’ll see.”

Lies only half listened to Yasmin’s chatter as they ate their meal. She was more interested in finding out what was going on inside the restaurant than Yasmin’s plans for her house.

When it was time for them to leave, Baart refused to accept Lies’s money. “I can’t expect pretty ladies to pay.”

He kissed Yasmin good-bye and waved to them from the door.

Out in the square, once he’d gone back inside and the door was closed, Yasmin turned to Lies with wary hope in her eyes. “What did you think of him?”

That Yasmin’s brother Pieter would definitely overreact if he met Baart.

And if Yasmin had known Lies was an intelligence officer she probably wouldn’t have introduced her to him either, but no one in the family knew what Lies did for a living other than that she worked for the government. Yasmin really believed she was a personal assistant on a short-term contract with the Canadian embassy.

Lies decided to tear off the Band-Aid rather than tug on it gently. “I think your boyfriend is a criminal.” She counted with her fingers as she recited her reasons. “We were the only women in the restaurant and the only people who didn’t know anyone else. Only two people paid for their meals and they used cash. Baart opened the till once all evening and that was to take money out. Nothing went in. Customers wandered in and out of his kitchen as if they owned it. And I think you already knew all of this was peculiar and it’s why you brought me to meet him. You wanted a second opinion.”

“He did seem too good to be true,” Yasmin admitted, her expression woeful but hardly heartbroken, Lies was relieved to see.

“They always are. He doesn’t have a key to your house, does he? You won’t have any trouble breaking things off with him?” Lies asked, suddenly anxious. Baart might very well be doing nothing more than cheating on his taxes, but to Lies, the whole picture reeked of organized crime. If someone had fronted him money to set up his restaurant, Yasmin didn’t need to be involved. While legally Lies had no business collecting information on non-Canadians outside of Canada, she would if she had to.

“No.” Yasmin brushed off that concern. “We aren’t exclusive. I have a school friend who is with the police. I’ll introduce them and that will be enough to make Baart lose interest.”

Lies hoped he’d be that easy to shed. Yasmin was smart, pretty, and a lot of fun.

Although, Lies was relieved to see, more astute than she’d given her credit for. Unless Yasmin had any trouble with him, she wouldn’t interfere.

“We’re going for drinks,” she decided. “And I want to go dancing. Let’s have some fun.”

She hooked her arm through Yasmin’s and dragged her toward the pub in the far corner of the square.

* * *

Harry relaxed on the sofa in his living room, a glass of wine in his hand. Across from him sat his friend Lars, who worked for the Dutch
Kernfysische dienst
, the Department of Nuclear Safety, Security and Safeguards.

Harry had spent the past two weeks watching everything he said around Lies, and trying to interpret everything she said to him, and he was exhausted. Let someone else deal with her for the weekend.

Lars, while not as pretty, offered a welcome respite.

“There’s been another report of a businessman who’s gone missing in Russia,” Lars was saying. A lick of blond hair that not even a generous application of gel had tamed stuck up at his temple. He sat with one ankle resting on the opposite knee. His left arm was slung along the back of the low, overstuffed chair in which his lanky frame slouched. Beside him, on a glass-topped end table, was an untouched drink. He’d accepted it to be polite, but in the three years Harry had known him, he’d rarely finished one.

“He knew the risks.” Harry hated to sound cold, but it was true. People regularly took black market goods across the border into Russia because the profits to be had were significant. However, it was equally common for the trucks carrying those goods to go missing, and their drivers never heard from again. The cost of doing cross-border business in a country unofficially run by organized crime was high. And well known.

“This one was different.” Lars frowned down the length of his arm at his drink, nudging the glass with a finger, causing its contents to sway dangerously close to the rim. “It’s rumored his truck wasn’t carrying television sets.”

Harry waited. A tight knot had a stranglehold on his chest. Whatever his preoccupied friend debated telling him, it was serious.

Lars dropped his foot to the floor and his arm to his knee. He leaned toward Harry, his face troubled. “You didn’t learn this from me. A reliable source heard from a less reliable one that the missing truck contained refurbished aircraft parts acquired through a Canadian maintenance company.”

This wasn’t what Harry wanted to hear. “Did your reliable source happen to mention the name of the company?”

“No. But he might also have said something about a drone with weapons capabilities being delivered to a shipbuilding company that’s connected to a Canadian ex-pat with Dutch citizenship. That same ex-pat was on friendly terms with the missing businessman.”

The ex-pat in question would be Bernard Vanderloord. Had to be. There weren’t that many Canadians with his kind of connections. He’d been out of the Netherlands, so Lies hadn’t yet met him, but Harry had received an invitation to an opening night at a local theater and Vanderloord was supposed to attend.

He guessed this meant it was time to introduce them.

“Why are you telling me this?” he asked Lars.

“Because a nuclear physicist who once did work for my department, and who I considered a friend—although granted, not a close one—died in London a few weeks ago. The official word is that he had an undiagnosed heart condition.” Lars’s troubled eyes met Harry’s. “The last time I saw him, he seemed very healthy. Coincidentally, he was also working on outfitting drones—built in Canada—with nuclear weapons. I thought you might find the information interesting.”

He did. Who would want a nuclear physicist arming a Canadian-manufactured drone dead? Where were those drones ending up?

The real question, Harry decided, wasn’t who was buying the drones, but rather, who was pocketing the money from the sale. His willingness to introduce Lies to Vanderloord took an uneasy, downward turn. He didn’t care what her job was. It didn’t feel right to throw a young woman into this kind of mess, especially since John Carmichael hadn’t known about the dead nuclear physicist and his connections to Canada and the Netherlands when he’d assigned her to the Canadian embassy.

Or maybe he had and Harry was being naïve. John ran a spy agency, not a temp service, and Lies wasn’t a secretary. He couldn’t ignore what he’d just been told. He’d have to pass this information on to her.

The conversation between the two men shifted to the world cycling championships.

An hour after that, Harry closed the door to his flat behind his friend. He reclaimed his chair by the living room window and stared out across the city, the night sky sparkling with lights. His thoughts immediately returned to Lies.

She was a flirt. Also easily bored, and it seemed she’d decided he was her entertainment of choice. She found dozens of little ways to get under his skin. Yet she did every mundane task he tossed her way with a careful attention to detail, as if her career in the diplomatic services rested on her ability to reconcile his credit card statements. He’d taken her to seven embassy functions so far and at each one she’d maintained her cover with ease. Everyone who’d met her accepted her as the well-meaning but very entitled daughter of a diplomat. As far as he could tell, he was the only one who paid any more than a surface attention to her. He had no reason to think she couldn’t do the job her real boss had assigned her.

But her becoming involved with Vanderloord was more dangerous than he’d suspected, or led CSIS to believe. Alcine had gone back to Italy scared, although she hadn’t been able—or willing—to explain why. If Lies didn’t already know any of what Lars had just told him, meaning she hadn’t been fully informed before accepting this assignment, then she had the right to back out. If she chose to stay, when Harry finally introduced her to Vanderloord he intended to stick close by her side.

He’d brought her here. That made him responsible for her safety.

Monday morning, he called her into his office. She looked tired and he wondered what she’d been up to all weekend. Irritation over the list of possibilities assaulting his imagination made him abrupt. Whatever it was, it must have been fun.

“I’m taking you to dinner,” he said. “There are a few things we need to discuss about your performance.” That was the code they’d established for anything important they didn’t want overheard in the office.

Her blue eyes lit up like those of a cat ready to pounce. She had zero respect for him or his position, especially when they were alone, and he’d learned to be wary of that particular glint in her eye.

She tucked a short, bouncy blond ringlet behind her ear. The diamond studs twinkled. “I’ll run home at five o’clock to change and then meet you back here.”

He saw no need for her to change. Her plan to do so further triggered alarms. She wore gray leggings and a black-and-gray striped tunic paired with wine-colored leather boots and clunky silver bracelets on both slender wrists. “What you have on is fine.”

“You’ve got to be kidding. My father would have a heart attack if I went out for a business dinner dressed like this.”

Whenever she brought up the fictitious father he knew he was in trouble. Yet in spite of it he was intrigued, curious to see where she was headed. “I thought we’d go somewhere casual.”

“I don’t believe you know what that word means.” She perched on the corner of his desk, making herself comfortable and him infinitely less so. “Tell you what. If you come by my flat around seven, I’ll cook dinner for you instead.”

Harry wasn’t especially great at witty repartee, but this one had been handed to him. “You can cook?”

She shrugged, a light lifting of one shoulder. “How hard can it be?” He had no quick comeback for that and she laughed. “Relax, Harry. Yes, I can cook. We’re having steaks. You can bring a bottle of wine if you like. I won’t have anything that’s up to your standards.”

Dinner in private with a beautiful woman who worked for him would be inappropriate, and under normal circumstances he’d never suggest it. But, considering the conversation they needed to have, it might be for the best. Still, letting her get her own way entirely wasn’t a safe thing to do.

“I’m not a wine snob.” He wasn’t a snob at all, or at least he liked to believe that he wasn’t, and it annoyed him that she was constantly alluding to it with these little digs. “I wasn’t born into money, Lies. I worked for this position.” He got in a dig of his own. “The same, I’m sure, as you worked for yours.” Since she was currently pretending to be someone whose father had earned her this position, she could hardly rebut.

Lies patted the desk. “In that case, there’s no need for you to bother with wine. I have a lovely bottle I picked up at the market.” Her lips curved into a bright smile as she stood. “See you at seven.”

And with that, Harry decided as the door closed behind her, he’d just lost any advantage he might have held. He drummed his fingertips on his thigh.

He was taking that bottle of wine.

Chapter Four

Things were finally progressing with Vanderloord. No matter how hard she pushed, nothing else would have made Harry agree to come to her place for dinner.

Lies was relieved. The embassy was dull as dirt. She wasn’t meant to work in an office day in and day out. Life was too short.

She stopped at the market on her way home to purchase the steaks she’d promised Harry, as well as ready-made salad and a few pastries to go with their post-dinner coffee. Food in the Netherlands was reasonably priced, fresh, and much of it already prepared for convenience. She loaded her purchases into the basket on her bicycle, unlocked it from the bike rack outside of the store, and pedaled home, where she stowed the bicycle in the garage on the main level of her building and took the lift to her floor.

Inside her flat, she dropped her groceries on the marble counter in the tiny kitchen and got to work. The steaks had been pre-marinated and would only take a short time to cook. She set placemats, napkins, and cutlery on a tall bistro table with two high-backed stools that faced sliding windows overlooking the roof garden on the townhouse next door.