“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
“NOTEXTSOREMAILS,” 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.”
