All He Wants For Christmas...: Flirting With Intent / Blame it on the Bikini / Restless. Kelly Hunter
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at him, and shut it again without saying a word.
They walked from her apartment to the nearest train station. Just another young couple getting from one place to the next, foreigners but not strangers to Hong Kong or the mass transit railway service it provided.
Comfortable, as they found two free seats and Damon slung his backpack between his feet and laced her hand in his and smiled, before turning to look out of the train window into subway darkness, his thoughts his own.
‘I should have bought a book,’ she said lightly, and he fished his phone out of his pack and handed it to her.
‘Take your pick.’ And she took it because she was curious and scrolled though his offerings.
‘No romance,’ she said after a time and handed the phone back to him and earned herself a very level gaze. ‘You said you’d explain what we were doing along the way. Why are we going to Kowloon?’
‘To find an internet access point. One that tracks back to a public place.’
‘Like a fast-food outlet?’
‘Often they have internet access. Not that it’ll do us any good. Too much surveillance. Not enough privacy.’
‘So why are we doing the fast food thing at all?’
‘I just like their coffee.’
He was deliberately messing with her head and from the glint in his eye he knew it.
‘Once we get to Kowloon, we’re looking for a combination of things within a short distance of each other,’ he said quietly. ‘A luxury hotel. A less than savoury hotel. And caffeine.’
‘And then what?’
‘And then we go to work.’
He found what he was looking for within five minutes of exiting the train station. Coffee stop at the fast-food place first, while Damon fiddled with his phone and largely ignored her. Normal behaviour for this part of the world, Ruby noted. Around here, mobile phones and miniature computers ruled supreme.
‘All set?’ he said, in less time than it took her to take two cautious sips of her surprisingly decent coffee. ‘Bring it with you,’ he said of her coffee. ‘We’re going to need a room.’
Not a room at the five-star hotel, however. No, Damon escorted her to a high rise nearby that boasted a bar on the ground floor, a hotel on the next, and several different categories of businesses after that, a brothel being one of them, given the nature of the girls lounging idly in the bar.
‘One room, one night, a window facing the street, no company, no room service and no questions,’ murmured Damon and handed a wad of Hong Kong dollars to the bruiser manning the reception desk.
‘You got it,’ said the bruiser and gave Damon a hotel swipe card and nodded towards the stairs.
‘And another innkeepers’ law bites the dust,’ she murmured as they started up the stairs. Damon glanced at her, his gaze faintly mocking.
‘Time to put the lawyer away, Ruby.’
‘You don’t say,’ she countered grimly and stepped over a pile of what looked like discarded clothing on the stairs. ‘Please tell me we’re not staying here the night.’
‘We’re not staying here the night.’
Good news, because room 203 was charmless, airless and decidedly unclean. Ruby stood in the centre of the room sipping her suddenly mighty fine coffee and watched as Damon slung his backpack off his shoulder and withdrew a small laptop from within it. He set it on the bedside table beside the window and set its innards whirring.
‘Pull up a chair,’ he said, but Ruby didn’t feel like sitting.
‘Mind if I pace instead?’
‘No pacing allowed,’ he said. ‘Sit.’
So she pulled up a chair and sat and stared at the computer screen, her heart beating too fast for comfort, and her eyes noticing the speed with which Damon’s big hands flew over the keyboard. Logging into the internet somehow, without logging in.
‘How do you know where to—? Oh, boy,’ she whispered as all of a sudden they were somewhere within FBI-land and screen after screen of information was opening up in new windows, with Damon chasing them down, one by one, and entering string after string of code.
‘Easy, Ruby,’ he whispered, his eyes on the screen in front of him, his focus absolute.
‘Relax.’
She wanted to ask him what he was doing and how he was doing it but she didn’t have the breath for it.
‘There’s a rhythm to hacking, to navigating the information flow and pitting your wits against a security system built by another,’ he said softly. ‘For some, reaching their destination without detection is thrill enough. Others, they only want to destroy. For some of us, the destination is just a portal to a bigger game and it’s a game based on power and knowledge and balance on the grandest of scales. That’s my game, and it’s more dangerous than you know. I need your silence on the issue, Ruby.’
‘Believe me, you have it.’
‘Not yet I don’t.’
A blur of information. So fast; all of it too fast for comprehension. A download option.
Damon’s hands falling away from the computer keys.
Ruby’s breath coming rapid and strained, adrenalin coursing fiercely through her body as she stared at the little arrow on the screen that Damon had placed atop the download link.
‘Your turn.’
Damon’s voice low and husky as he transferred that intense focus to her face.
‘It’s the FBI’s file on your father.’
Time slowed down to crawling as Ruby stared first at Damon and then at the screen. ‘I, ah—I’m not—sure. Oh, hell,’ she whispered, because she wanted that information and Damon had made it so easy for her to just reach out and take it.
‘Or we leave the information where it is, I tell my handler I’ve blown my cover with you and we see how that unfolds.’
‘No.’ Not with her father’s file sitting there just begging to be taken. ‘My father’s whereabouts in return for my silence. I get it, Damon. And I agree to your terms.’ Her hand moved. The download began. Her choice, and she wore that knowledge like a stain.
‘Guess I’m not as principled as I thought,’ she said faintly.
‘Who is?’ muttered Damon, his focus back on the screen.
The file took an agonisingly slow ten seconds to download, and then Damon was back at the keyboard, fingers flying.
‘You’re getting out of the FBI pages now, right?’ she said.
‘Right.’
And straight into the British intelligence system, and Ruby’s stomach lurched and her pulse rate soared all over again. ‘Hell of a ride,’ she said but he was gone again, skimming through supposedly secure cyberspace with an ease that made her gasp.
Another download link, but no agony of hesitation this time for Ruby. They were done and gone, with a swiftness she found hard to comprehend. All the way out this time. Two files stored on a USB the size of a thumbnail. Laptop off and opened up with a tiny screwdriver. One of the motherboard components replaced.
Fifteen minutes from start to finish, and they were walking back down those shabby hotel stairs and handing the door card over to Reception.
‘Any decent cheap yum cha restaurants around here?’ he asked the man, and got directions and nodded, while Ruby sweated and smiled and tried to resist the urge to flee.
‘Please tell me we’re not going back there,’