The Double

“We have to do this,” said Carrie. “We’ll never have an opportunity like this again and it’s our only shot at stopping a gang war. Doctor Franklin will operate on Alison tomorrow. Hailey, I want you to pull together all the information you have on Christina. I’m also having Christina flown here so we can question her. The Italian authorities found cocaine and amphetamines in her car so she’s looking at jail time unless she strikes a deal with us and cooperates. That’ll be all.”

As I left the conference room, Calahan grabbed my arm and pulled me into the stairwell. “We can’t let them send Alison into Konstantin’s bed!”

“I know! But….” I gave a helpless shrug. What can we do?

He pressed his lips together and looked furtively around. I started to get a bad feeling. “Konstantin’s in Boston tonight, at some political fundraiser. He’s staying the night in a hotel.” He looked at me carefully, watching my reaction. “So he’ll have a hotel room.”

I sighed. “If it was that easy, we’d have arrested him years ago. We’ll never get a warrant to search his room. Most of the judges are on his payroll.”

Calahan just looked at me.

My jaw dropped. “You want to search it without a warrant? You mean break in? Anything you found would be inadmissible!”

“I know! But maybe we can find something that’ll give us an advantage. A date, a place... something that’ll let us plan a bust. Then we can talk Carrie out of this plan.”

I gawped at him. “What if you get—” He made shh-ing gestures and I lowered my voice. “What if you get caught?! You’ll go to jail!”

“I won’t get caught,” he said levelly. “Not if I have someone keeping watch.”

My stomach dropped to my feet. “Oh God. No. No! Absolutely not. I am not running off to Boston with you on some illegal, unsanctioned….”

I trailed off. Calahan was looking right at me, open and sincere, and I could see the pain in his eyes. I remembered what he’d told me about his past. He can’t lose someone else he’s close to.

“Please,” he said.

He was my best friend. I couldn’t let him go alone. And Alison is like a big sister to me. If doing this kept her out of danger…. I sighed and my shoulders slumped in resignation. Then I pushed my glasses up my nose. “Okay,” I said. “Let’s go.”

2

Hailey

“FIND ANYTHING?” I asked for the tenth time.

Calahan’s voice was stressed and breathless in my earpiece. “Still nothing.”

This was not going well.

I was in a hotel room, staring at my laptop screen, using the hotel’s security cameras to keep tabs on Konstantin. Just across the hallway, Calahan was frantically searching Konstantin’s room. We were way behind schedule. The plan had been to get into Konstantin’s room as soon as he went downstairs to join the party, but one of the hotel security guards had been patrolling the hallway and we’d had to wait for him to leave. Calahan had only made it into Konstantin’s room a few minutes ago and we knew Konstantin would come back upstairs any moment.

“Anything?” I asked again.

“No!” snapped Calahan. I could hear the bangs as he pulled open drawers and slammed them shut. “Where is he?”

“Still in the ballroom,” I said. I watched as Konstantin prowled the room. I could actually see his power in the way the crowd parted ahead of him, reverent and fearful, in the way people turned to stare at him and then whispered in his wake. As I watched, Konstantin locked eyes with someone right on the other side of the room... and scowled. Just a tiny narrowing of those cold gray eyes, a tightening of those gorgeous lips, but it was enough to make the man on the receiving end go pale and stumble backwards, then flee the room entirely. The sheer, raw power of the man….

I knew Konstantin would start back upstairs any minute. He was at the party for business, not fun, and the second the last shady deal was done, he’d go back to his room to work. I’ve never known anyone so intensely focused. He never took a vacation. He didn’t seem to have any vices at all... or if he did, he kept them hidden within his mansion.

“Come on!” I told Calahan. “Get out of there!”

“Just keep watching him,” said Calahan stubbornly. “I want to check the closet.”

I gritted my teeth, my foot tap-tap-tapping on the floor with stress. If we didn’t pull this off, Alison would have to go undercover. And if we got caught, we’d be going to jail. I focused on Konstantin to try to take my mind off how high the stakes were.

But staring at Konstantin had its own problems. His back was turned to me, his dinner jacket stretched tight over his broad back, the fabric sweeping down elegantly in a vee to that tight, toned waist. The fabric was so expensive, so perfectly black, that it looked as if he’d had it made from a piece of the night sky. I imagined pressing my hand against his back, my palm caressed by the silky smoothness of his jacket and then the heated throb of the hard muscle underneath. The size of him, so much bigger than me...it would be like touching a bear, a lion, knowing that he could twist around in a heartbeat and end me….