Brynn Kelly - A Risk Worth Taking

They found the car in its allotted space. “There she is,” Jamie said. “Saint Jude’s finest piece-of-shit hatchback.”

He tipped his rucksack into the car’s boot, nudging aside a collapsed wheelchair. Samira checked the car for a GPS unit or tracker.

“You’re giving the NHS credit for a bigger budget than they have,” Jamie said.

“Can’t be too careful when you’re committing a felony.”

“It’s just a regular old crime, over here.”

“That makes me feel so much better.”

Samira hid in the footwell of the rear seat, covered in her brown coat. Jamie wrapped himself up in a football scarf and the cap.

At the hospital gates, a barrier arm guarded the exit. A parking attendant leaned out of her station. “We’re on lockdown. No one in or out.”

“It’s an emergency.” Jamie went with a Welsh accent.

The woman frowned. “That’s an OT car. What even is an OT emergency?”

“You can ask me that when it’s your grandmother who can’t get off the loo because her grab rail came off in her hand.”

The attendant blinked, like she was seeing a mind picture, then shrugged and lifted the barrier.

Outside the gates, they crept into a traffic jam. Rain peppered the roof. The windows fogged up. No sign of the helicopter—it’d probably scarpered after failing to take down Jamie, before local forces could scramble to respond. This close to Whitehall and Buckingham Palace, the police wouldn’t take chances.

“What’s happening?” Samira hissed.

Jamie rubbed the windscreen. The wipers beat like a crazed metronome. “Not a lot. Who’d be a getaway car driver in London?”

“Oh my God, Jamie. We just stole a car.”

“Technically, I stole it—though you did force me into it. But don’t worry. We’ll return it clean and with a full tank.”

As they crawled onto Westminster Bridge, a familiar blond head snaked around the umbrellas bobbing along the pavement. Wisely leaving the sinking ship, ready to regroup. Jamie would have to drive right past him, but with a dozen cops in view, the goon would be keeping his head even lower than Jamie’s.

Police were waving traffic by with barely a glance. He’d bet they had no idea what they were looking for but figured it wasn’t an NHS hatchback going two miles an hour.

Jamie hung a left after Big Ben and the traffic eased up. Union Jacks sagged from the towers of Westminster and the Abbey. He had to fight the urge to drive on the right-hand side, after so many years on the Continent. When they’d passed through the main tourist area into the neoclassical stone of Millbank, he gave Samira the all clear to climb into the front seat. She slid her sunglasses back on and adjusted her wig. Not that anybody on the streets had their heads up. And the dreich day and foggy windows would mess with CCTV.

“So, Putney, right?” he said.

“You know how to get there?”

“Aye. Got an address?”

She recited it from memory. “I just hope Charlotte’s there. I had no safe way of telling her I was on my way. I don’t even know what we’re collecting. This could all be for nothing.”

“Ah, it’s been fun so far. But you’d better hold your breath—we’re passing MI5.” He jerked his head to a stately building to their right, no doubt ablaze with activity beneath its imperial facade, given the morning’s alert. “Look at it, sitting there all fat and self-important while an enemy of the American people passes right by.”

“Is this you trying to make me feel less anxious?”

“Not working?”

“Not working.”

“Stick with me. We’ll be okay.”

Right. Because nobody who stuck with him ever came unstuck?

She doesn’t need to know.

Then again, she’d had intimate experience of coming unstuck in his company. Shite, they were going to be alone in a car for maybe half an hour. She wouldn’t want to talk about what’d happened between them, would she?

As they left the spooks behind and veered back to the Thames, she swore and pulled something from her coat pocket. The goon’s phone.

“I’d forgotten about this,” she said.

“We’ll chuck it in the river. You know how Tess is about phones being traced.”

She lifted the phone to the gauzy light coming through her window and tilted it left to right, like she was looking for a way in. “Believe me, I’m the same.”

“You’ve caught her paranoid tendencies?”

“You could say we contracted them from the same source.”

“Get rid of it, Samira. The guy said something about GPS tracking.”

She squinted at it. “This won’t take a second.”

“What won’t?”

“It might be useful to find out what this guy knows, where he’s been. If they can GPS-track it, so can I.”

“How long will that take?”

“A minute or two. I’ll download a backup app and sync everything to the cloud—GPS data, phone calls, texts... I can sift through it later.”

“Just you do that. It’s not password-protected, then?”

“Looks like a swipe pattern,” she said, pulling off a glove. “Which is only effective if you wipe the screen after each use.” She flicked a fingertip in a Z shape and the screen lit up. “You see?”

Oh, he did see. Nothing sexier than a smart brain. And the longer she used it for techie stuff, the less time for awkward after-the-morning-after conversations. With luck, they’d get through the next few hours with no chance to even reference their...liaison. Just so long as he didn’t go kissing her again. Self-control wasn’t his strong point but he could at least manage that, dopamine or not.

Right?

CHAPTER SIX

“NO TEXTS OR EMAILS,” Samira said, swiping and tapping too fast for Jamie to get a fix on the screen. “No stored numbers. These guys are careful.”

A white bakery van stopped in front of them, and the driver climbed out and opened up the back. Jamie leaned on the horn. Samira jumped.

“Sorry,” he said. “This woman’s decided to use Grosvenor Road as a loading zone.” He veered around it. “Bloody London drivers.”

“Jamie, if we’re going to judge on stereotypes you’d be grumpy and pasty and miserly and I’d be a kid with a bloated stomach and flies in my eyes.”

“Too long in this country and I’ll be back to pasty and grumpy quick smart, don’t you worry. And on my income, I can’t be anything but miserly.” Humor. Yes. Humor was good. You couldn’t laugh and panic at the same time.

“I’ve forgotten what an income is.”

He peered out the windscreen. “How long until you’ve finished with that phone? I have an idea.”

“I’m done. I’ve uploaded the GPS data but I won’t be able to throw it into a mapping tool until I get to a computer.”

He lowered his window. “Give it here.”

She wiped her prints off it. As a double-decker sightseeing bus passed the other way, he tossed it onto the open top level. Rain had driven the tourists downstairs.

“That should have the mercenaries driving in loops around central London.”

“Nicely done,” she said, wonder in her voice. He liked hearing wonder in a woman’s voice. He’d missed hearing wonder in a woman’s voice. He’d missed her silky voice, best heard murmuring sweet groans into his—

“How long until Putney?” she said.

“Uh. Twenty minutes. We’ll park a few blocks from your friend’s apartment and walk. Just a precaution,” he added, as her shoulders tensed. “Ninety-nine percent of precautions are unnecessary. It’s the one in a hundred that turns out to be necessary that makes the other ninety-nine worth it. But you don’t need any lessons in caution now, do you?”

He resisted pointing out MI6 headquarters across the river, a cross between a Disney castle and a tiered wedding cake.