Chapter Twenty
Red
When Red was in grad school, one of the ways that she took a break from the books was playing poker. Playing for pennies was about stress relief and friendship instead of a payday. But that didn't mean that it wasn't a cut-throat game. The stakes felt real, even if they weren't.
Red, by nature, was competitive, but she liked a slow game.
She was the turtle in the "Rabbit and the Turtle Race." She liked to bide her time and make measured but steady progress. It meant fewer people noticed her success. And that always proved a good thing. She could just inch on by the pack.
While others enjoyed big-ego bluster and talking smack, Red, sitting behind a hand of cards, was quietly observing, learning, and honing her skills.
Poker taught Red to spot a bluff. She'd learned to read a whole body, where some people tried to read just the eyes. The subtle tells of body language weren't lists she'd memorized from a book or heard in a behavioral psychology class at The Farm. Red's capacity was a hard-earned knowledge from hours, days, and years of observation. Trial and error, stakes-driven outcomes, she'd learned a lot from penny-ante.
Her body language reading skills were a hallmark of those who came up through violent childhoods. And Red was forever grateful that she built this skillset purposefully and safely; it hadn't been thrust upon her.
What she read about Elena at this moment was that she was dancing with a stranger while waiting to connect with someone else.
And that stranger was very into the nuances of Elena.
They looked lovely together as a couple. They had parallel good looks that seemed to come from the same social upbringing. But Red would swear they were strangers.
A head taller than most in the room, this man was basketball-player-tall if he were in America. Six foot four? Five? Six maybe?
Elena was supposed to be Red's height of five foot seven, and in her heels, she came up to his chin.
His beard was shaped, and his hair was styled with product to keep the length looking romantically Prince Charming-esque. But he was too comfortable in this setting, too relaxed and graceful in his dance steps to be anyone but an elite, someone of noble birth, probably old European money.
Not security. Not a foreign intelligence officer—even Grey, who was fine in these settings when not fumbling with his bowtie, didn't have the effortless hyper-masculine grace this guy exuded.
It put Red oddly in mind of knights in shining armor riding against the dragon in service of his lady.
The really odd thing about this man was that when Red looked at him, something short-circuited in her body.
Yes, really just the strangest thing. She was utterly unprepared for this visceral reaction, having never experienced it before. She'd like to assign it to her professional grief or her recovery from either bomb blast or salmonella typhoid, but she knew that categorization was cowardice on her part. This was something else.
Handsome?
Yes, handsome. Handsome-enough. Not handsome in a way that was over the top.
He was handsome in that his tails were tailored to his body, draping beautifully over his broad shoulders, powerful arms, and long muscular legs.
Something … Something about him was making her go haywire, and Red was growing pissed at the distraction.
Crazily enough, she was jealous of Elena right now. Red wanted to be the one in his arms gliding over the polished floor.
Shake it off, she mentally scolded herself.
Focus in.
Red still hadn't found an opportunity to get any spyware in place. She wasn't even sure that Elena had a phone with her tonight. Elena had to get off the dance floor and move somewhere where they could bump into each other. A little sleight of hand, a few bashful apologies, and it would be a done deal.
Letting her gaze take mini sips of the environment, Red looked for where Grey had gotten himself off to. Ah, there he was, waltzing with an older woman very near Elena. Nicely done.
Steady Grey, affable Grey, deadly as hell, and dependable Grey; he was bedrock. And she needed something solid to counter the crazy effects that Elena's dance partner was having on Red's system.
The questions looped like the twirls of the dancers. Why did Red think it was her place to be in that man's arms, to have her head resting on his chest. In fact, Red felt that she had been in that place before and that this man wasn't a stranger.
There was a component of life or death, an element of gentle care.
But Red was good with faces. Hadn't she recognized the man from Moussa's office as he approached?
So weird.
As a matter of fact, Red had clocked this guy from the moment she had entered the ballroom. She and Grey moved through the doors and handed their invitation to the man in golden livery at the top of the stairs. He accepted their invitation and called out their names to announce their presence.
"The Ambassador to the United States, Mr. and Mrs. Archibald Bland."
No, Color Code hadn't tried to change the names on the invitation. It might have called attention to them from the organizers. There might have been questions that no one wanted to answer.
When Red and Grey descended the red-carpeted stairs, on a couch against the far wall directly in front of them, an elderly lady sat in a lovely emerald-green dress—demurely cut and fitted. Behind her had stood that man, looking attentive and companionate. And Red had thought he was probably the woman's grandson.
Their eyes caught as Red took the last step, and she would swear something sizzled between them, recognition but not. Emotion, but not. Actually, she had no definition for the exchange. He'd bent and whispered something into the woman's ear, and the grandmotherly figure looked directly at Red and Grey as she shook her head no.
Maybe Dapper Dan knew that she and Grey were not, in fact, Mr. Ambassador and Mrs. Bland.
And he'd been wiggling there in her awareness, like a brain worm, ever since.
Maybe it wasn't just her.
Red widened her perceptions.
He was attracting attention amongst the women. There was a stir of jealousy that they, too, wished to be swept around the dance floor by someone gallant enough to have this guy's skills and not use them to boost his own ego but to showcase the woman in his arms.
He was the ball's Pied Piper, mesmerizing the women with dance instead of music.
Charming, yes. But uninteresting to her mission unless he turned out to be part of the ring deal.
And since Elena's gaze wasn't locked on his, and she was continuously scanning, Red thought Elena was immune to the man's elegance. She was here for the deal.
Understandable. It was about forty million euros sliding into her bank account and averting a possible indictment for the murder of five men and whatever the German equivalent was to manslaughter for Dr. Klein's death.
So no, Elena wasn't distracted by him.
But he, most certainly, was fixated on Elena.
It didn't matter.
He didn't matter.
Elena was the goal.
As the last strains of the dance were played, Red watched as the man bowed and Elena curtsied. Red watched as he seemed to notice something on the floor and crouched to pick it up right near the heel of Elena's shoe.
At that moment, Grey arrived by Red's side, and she repositioned him so she could keep her eyes on Elena.
Elena's gaze was on the door that exited toward the ladies' room. The man rose fluidly, holding out his discovery. Elena touched her ear and shook her head; no, it wasn't her earring. "She's going to head to the ladies' room," Red told Grey. "Keep an eye on her in case I'm wrong. I want to get there first. Time to plant some electronics." And time to get away from this guy and his strange effect.
"Get to it," Grey said. "Good luck."
***
Red bent over the sink, reapplying her lipstick as Elena entered the ladies' room.
With a quick look around to see the attendant adjusting a woman's dress and smoothing the back for her, Elena pulled out her phone and texted.
Red put her lipstick back in the pocket hidden in the folds of her dress. She caught Elena's gaze in the mirror. "Pockets!" she said victoriously, feigning a French accent.
"I'm jealous," Elena said, pulling her bag forward. It hung on a black beaded chain that blended with her gown. "But in a dress cut as this one, it would not work."
"Your gown is stunning, if impractical. But who wishes to be practical on such a night as this?" Red reached into her pockets and pulled out a handkerchief, her phone, and a tiny bottle of hairspray, placing each on the counter before reaching into the other pocket to retrieve a comb. "The designers this year are not our friends. Have you noticed the waistlines? How do they expect us to breathe?" Red pretended to use the comb and spray her hair and used her hands to smooth any frizzes into place. In fact, with the salon's spray, Red wasn't sure she'd ever need to comb her hair again.
With her banter and primping, Red was trying to accomplish two things simultaneously.
She used her chandelier earrings to take pictures of the rings on Elena's hands.
And, with Red's phone lying inches from Elena's. Red pressed the side button to activate the spiderware that moved through the WIFI. Within moments, it should reach into all the crevices of Elena's world—any app, file, connection, or contact that had been accessed from Elena's phone was now accessible to Langley. That was unless Elena had protections that could thwart CIA software. And it wouldn't be helpful if this was Elena's burner phone. From the tiny scratches on the corner, Red was sure that wasn't the case.
Elena's phone pinged. She sent Red a flat-lipped, this-chat-is-over smile and moved to a stall. Red walked down to the end and entered a booth far enough away that Elena wouldn't feel crowded or, worse, followed.
Red opened her own phone expectantly.
There it was.
Spyware success. On the app's display was the phone number that had called in and the readout of voices being recorded.
Red inserted earbuds to listen, and every time Elena spoke, Red tapped the program, flagging the AI.
From this, their AI software would learn Elena's voice. Red could simply tell the program to open Elena's cell phone mic and record. The recordings were two-fold. One included the ambient sounds. In another, the AI software focused on Elena's voice and the voice she was conversing with, removing that ambient noise for clarity.
In this way, the unimportant should not distract, but the important shouldn't be overlooked—someone sidling up to Elena and passing information by a quick passing phrase, for example.
While Elena was put on hold, Red opened her photo album.
Langley had floated the idea that Color Code might be able to find a way to exchange the Fire of the Desert for a fake that Red now carried in her pocket.
Finding such an opportunity was a stretch of the imagination.
Elena would have to be roofied or something to make that possible.
Someone at Langley—certainly not Black—had cooked up that scenario. If they did switch the ring, Grey and Red were told, then the US government could message Kamal that the ring was a fake and Dr. Klein's signature was a forgery should that be the route the government chose.
The pictures showed that each of Elena's fingers was decorated with a different ring with red stones. In her body-hugging black velvet dress, Elena made this look elegant. Not a single one of those rings, in and of themselves, looked like the Fire of the Desert. One wrapped Elena's right ring finger, embellished with stones from knuckle to knuckle in a Gothic swirl that incorporated a large stone and a starburst of smaller stones. Red was convinced that the Gothic-style ring was the Fire of the Desert hugged by a ring guard.
If you didn't know, you'd never know.
Smart woman.
Clever.
Red would have to remember that about Elena.