Before he left, he paid the rent on the apartment for a year, and gave her the rest of the cash that he had. “I will tell my masters that I was robbed,” he said when she tried to refuse. “They are very wealthy. They will send more.”
She walked him out to his truck, and on impulse hugged him. “Thank you for everything.” She drew back. “I can’t believe you’re leaving. Will I ever see you again?”
“This is my last field assignment. After I finish my work, I am going home to be a teacher.” He took a scrap of paper from his pocket and wrote a long number on it. “If you are in trouble, call this number and leave a message for me. I will try to do what I can for you.”
She folded the paper and put it in her pocket. “I don’t even know your name.”
He smiled sadly and kissed her brow. “Ask for Brother Tomaseo.”
Chapter 17
“ … e non c’e’ nessuno, che mi può cambiare, che mi può staccare da lei …”3
Through the telephoto lens of her camera, Valori Trovatella murmured another chorus of the old, sad song as she watched Teresina Segreta help a tall, groggy man from the back of the limousine. Tracking the private car from Denver International Airport to a newly constructed facility outside the city had required a simple game; she had walked down the row of cars in the executive pickup area, punched in VINs on her BlackBerry, which illegally accessed the state’s registration database. When she’d found the car registered to GenHance, Inc., she went over to the driver’s window and tapped on it with the end of an unlit cigarette.
“Those mean security people took my matches away at the gate,” she told the driver as she bent down, putting her breasts at his eye level. She allowed a bit more Texas twang to color her voice as she asked, “Any chance you can light me up here, cowboy?”
The poor, muscle-bound dolt had produced a lighter, but the proximity of her chest had distracted him so much it took him three attempts to light her cigarette. That gave her ample time to drop the tracer in his pocket, although she probably could have tucked a small bomb between his legs and he wouldn’t have noticed.
The policeman would have, Tomaseo chided from inside her head.
“He was a sheriff,” she corrected her dead mentor, using the Cigarette Slut’s accent. She wrinkled her nose as she realized she still smelled faintly of tobacco. “He would also be suspicious that my brain had shrunk to the size of a walnut while my breasts had doubled in size.”
Breasts that were half padding and now itching unbearably, thanks to the spirit gum she’d used to hold the edges of the flesh-toned plastic falsies in place under her body makeup. She took one hand from the camera to reach into her blouse and pull the augmentations off her body, dropping them into the open tote on the floor.
You should not have dallied with him, Valori.
“It was one night of very good sex,” she pointed out, this time in her Snobby Blue Blood tone, “not a dalliance.”
You know what I mean. He is nothing to you.
“Perhaps.” If she hadn’t enjoyed Ethan Jemmet so much, she would have agreed. “But I was something to him,” she told Tomaseo in Lori’s voice.
Valori had rarely used the sweet, shy girl-next-door persona she had shown that night to the lonely lawman. “Lori” worked only on a narrow range of men with specific issues, such as the grieving father of a lost daughter, or a nervous, virginal postadolescent who feared aggressive women. But she’d instinctively brought out Lori as soon as she’d looked into Ethan Jemmet’s stern, handsome face, sensing an innocent charmer would be the woman to whom he would respond with the most kindness. In the end she had been gratified to know that Lori had been the perfect fit for the sheriff.
Just like our bodies.
Recalling the sex with Ethan, like hunger, exhaustion, and all her other personal needs, would have to wait for now. As soon as Teresina and the tired man disappeared into the back entrance of the building, Valori switched off the camera and checked her watch. Knowing Teresina, she would hand off the man and get straight to business; she had only a few hours before she would have to meet the men she’d hired to steal the bodies from Jonah Genaro.
You must stop her, alunna.
She started the engine. Her conversations with Tomaseo’s ghost were strictly products of loneliness and her own imagination, but that didn’t mean he was wrong. “I’m trying, mentore.”
Valori drove from her vantage point to a fenced-in cluster of electrical boxes, small satellite dishes, and other equipment that fed power and communications to the remote facility. While she suspected she would need a small army of operatives to break into GenHance’s new lab, they had yet to secure their perimeter. The only thing separating her from their data systems was a padlock on the fence gate.
Before she got out of the unmarked van she had stolen, Valori rolled her curls tight against the back of her head and used a slide clip to hold them in place. She then changed her silk blouse for a utility-company uniform shirt and clipped on a laminated ID tag with a smiling photo of her own face and the name of a real female district field inspector. A yellow hard hat, a company jacket, and a tool bag completed the illusion.
She checked her face in the visor mirror, pausing to wipe off a lingering trace of Cigarette Slut’s red lip paint. “I’m Inspector Pat Drysen,” she said in a colorless, no-nonsense voice. “Denver Power and Light. I am joyless but excellent at my job. I have an apartment, a cat, and no life. I hate men. No,” she corrected herself. “I envy men their superior salaries, which I don’t think they deserve simply for possessing a penis. I do not like being touched. I carry pepper spray in my purse. I am a Democrat and a Methodist. I eat microwave dinners. I watch television crime dramas obsessively.”
Until she dropped the persona or changed to another, she would be Pat Drysen, uptight and unforgiving career woman working in a man’s field.
It had not always been so. After discovering Valori had a natural affinity with electronics and machines, her many masters of childhood had taught her how to identify and infiltrate any security system. Unlike the other children at the Temple, she had not been born into service, but had been brought in from the streets where her unknown mother had dumped her. If Valori had been sickly, troublesome, or limited, she would have been promptly turned over to the Italian authorities, but she had been a healthy, placid infant who had grown into a quiet, highly intelligent toddler. She’d begun her training as soon as she could walk.
The council had originally designated her to serve as a servant or secretary, the most invisible member of any important household or business. It wasn’t until she matured that her other talent had come to their notice, and abruptly changed the nature of her tutelage.
Tomaseo had been the one to explain it to her, and he’d done so with as much kindness as he could. “You will be the butterfly now, alunna. Everyone who sees you will think, ‘Ah, how beautiful.’ They do not think this of the moth in the closet.”
She had been dutiful and devoted, still a child in many ways. Part of her dreaded this change in her duties, but for Tomaseo’s sake she hadn’t protested. She also knew her place. Only those born to service were treasured, her masters had taught her early on. A nameless bastard like her could only be of service to those who served. They expected only that she fulfill the traditional obligation, that of giving one year of her life for every year they had cared for her.
That she would spend eighteen years as a butterfly instead of a moth had not seemed so terrible in the beginning, not to a child of sixteen.
Valori was sent to Milan for initiation, and then on to Paris for polishing, and reported back to Napoli some two years later. She’d expected to be assigned as a monitor to one household, but after testing her abilities, the council revealed other, important plans for her. Her secret, fragile hope of finding happiness and belonging had finally died that day.
Tomaseo had kept her from descending completely into despair. To the council he had been her handler, but to Valori he had been her friend and confidant. He’d recognized the hopelessness and sadness beneath her many butterfly masks, and he’d promised to intercede on her behalf with the council when her term of service was concluded. That he had died before he could free her didn’t matter; his intentions had been genuine. But losing the man she considered a brother as well as a mentor had torn something out of her. After that, it had been easy to strike the bargain with the council.
“I will go and resolve the issue in America,” she had said before the grim faces of the fourteen padrones. “If I return, I wish to be freed of all further obligations and released from service.”
She owed them four more years, and they had no one as effective as she had been in the field, so for them the bargain had been costly. At the same time they didn’t expect the American issue to end well, and Valori had always been disposable to them. She hadn’t been surprised at all when they had agreed to her terms.
Surviving this final task would be next to impossible, but Valori didn’t fear death as much as losing what was left of her soul. She was glad she had given in to the impulse to spend the night with the handsome young sheriff.
It was a sin, Tomaseo said as he watched her work. An act of selfishness. A mistake.
“Yes,” she agreed readily in Pat’s dry voice, “and every moment of it was much better than having two glasses of wine and twenty minutes with the vibrator in my nightstand.”
Poor Pat was like too many women in the world; she simply needed to be tied up and pleasured by a slow, thorough lover.
Valori reached to remove her bracelet before she accessed the electrical panel, but felt only bare skin. She took it off only when she worked near high voltage, and her flawless memory raced backward in time to the last time she had seen it. She had been paying the waitress at the diner after leaving Ethan. It had jangled on her wrist as she handed over the money. The clasp had been old and worn; she had meant to have it replaced….