Now the hard part—reporting in.
I can’t tell them I was with Lachlan. She was supposed to report on any friendship she had and lovers she took so they could be vetted. Relationships were a liability, and she’d wanted Lachlan for her own, not share him with the Agency. Now with Jeremy gone and Eva dead, Gina would look negligent at best and suspicious at worst.
Fuck, fuck, fuck.
She didn’t want to ask for a favor but she had no choice. So Gina quickly made one call to the last true friend she had in the world, explained the situation as quickly as she could, and asked for an alibi she hoped she wouldn’t have to use. She hung up just as there was a knock at the door that made Gina nearly jump out of her skin.
“Jeremy?” she called out as she went to the door, hoping against hope that he’d gone to some rendezvous like she had and that she’d gotten back first.
“Regina! So good to see you,” the unfamiliar woman said as she stood in the hall. “Well, come along then, time for tea. I have the perfect place in mind. Grab your purse and let’s be off.”
So. They had come to collect her.
“Yes, let’s,” Gina answered enthusiastically while feeling doubly nauseous. She stepped back into the room while her ‘friend’—a stranger sent by the London station to collect her; she knew by the carnation in her jacket lapel—waited outside per protocol.
The woman peered into the room.
“And your husband? Shall we bring him along as well?”
“Oh, Jeremy seems to have given me the slip.” She giggled as she grabbed her purse and coat. “He does that the second I turn my head away. Men.”
“Men indeed.” The woman smiled, but her eyes were steely. “Let’s hope he catches up.”
* * *
As soon as Gina walked into the briefing room at the station, she felt it in the air. The two men in the room—the station chief and her direct superior, Ted Davis—blamed her for Eva Lambert’s death. How could she explain that she'd been in Paris making plans with her fiancé to quit her job and run away?
The answer was, she couldn’t. No way would she let anything fall on Lach.
“Come in, please. Have a seat,” the station chief said, pulling out a chair for her at a conference table. His name was Nigel Greene and he was especially grim and unreadable.
“No thanks, I’ll stand. Update?”
Nigel paused. “You’ve undoubtedly heard the news reports?”
“That Eva Lambert was killed, yes. Do I believe that it was a burglary, no.”
Ted folded his hands on the table. “I’m just going to come out with it. Where the hell were you the past three days?”
Gina lied through her teeth about where she’d been and with whom, knowing that with one phone call, her lies would be verified as truth. Her alibi was perfect; even Gina acting secretive about meeting with her friend would make sense to the men.
She grabbed a legal pad on the table and scribbled down a phone number, then tore off the sheet and thrust it at Ted.
“Here. Go ahead and call. Right now.”
Ted glanced at the phone number and folded the paper in half.
“We will. Did Jeremy know where you were?”
“Yes. He encouraged me to go, actually.”
“And did he say what he was going to be doing in the meantime?”
“He said he’d keep an eye on Eva until she was on the plane to Little Edward Cay.” She looked back and forth between the men. “When was the last time he reported in?”
They looked at each other again.
“What? What is it?”
