Winter headed up the stairs and toward his bedroom. Sydney turnedaround, refusing to look back to see if he would do the same. Then she went down the stairs and out the front door. A good stairway exchange right out in the open. If someone on Morrison’s team really was watching them, it should have looked like just a genuine, supposedly secret moment between a star and his bodyguard flirting casually with each other, trying to keep up a hot, hidden affair. Frivolous celebrity behavior.
The night was cold, the drizzle still going. The chill in the air helped clear her head. It wasn’t that she’d never flirted while undercover with an agent—Sydney had messed around on the job before. She just hadn’t expected this particular agent to have an effect on her.
Too bad. I was having a good time.
She could still feel the sear of his dark eyes on her as he said it, see the intensity of that look. Just mocking her, she reminded herself. And why did she care anyway? Not that she did.
Scowling deeper, she wrenched her thoughts away from Winter and shoved a Necco Wafer in her mouth, sucking on the candy to distract herself.
She walked in the direction of the café several blocks down, strolling leisurely enough to file away the world around her. A butcher shop, a wine shop, a dental clinic, a grocery store the size of a postage stamp. Baskets of bright oranges and apples laid out under an awning. The smell of chocolate and butter wafting from a French patisserie, then the scent of coriander and cumin from an Indian café. Petals strewn on the path under a pub’s hanging baskets of flowers. Cuts of bologna and sausage suspended in a window. People bustling up from and down to an Underground station, their boots splashing through shallow puddles, their voices a mix of half a dozen different languages.
She paid particular attention to them—older women with exercise gear on underneath their winter coats, a rowdy bunch of football fans wearing Chelsea FC shirts, businessmen rushing along with briefcases held over their heads, tourists wheeling suitcases and squinting at mapson their phones, teenagers laughing together while huddled under transparent umbrellas, some of them still in their school uniforms. Then she turned the corner and watched for the same people to potentially reappear. If she saw the same rushing businessman on a different street in the opposite direction fifteen minutes later, they might be tailing her.
Finally, she ducked into a Caffè Nero shop. There, she picked up a latte for Winter and one for herself, careful to tap a specific credit card to pay. When the Panacea agent assigned to do her drop got the notification on their phone that the card’s balance had changed, they would recognize it as Sydney’s signal that she was successfully on her way to their rendezvous point.
As she turned toward the exit, she texted Winter.
Eta 20m
He texted back almost immediately.Hurry. Pining for you.
She almost laughed out loud at his deadpan, not sure whether to be exasperated or amused.
dsu, she replied.
What?
It stood forDon’t stay up, but she didn’t bother explaining it as she headed out the door and toward the post office. As she went, he texted again.
Have you ever texted in complete words?
Nt, she answered.
This one stood forNo time, but now she was just messing with him. She imagined his eye roll, smiled a little, then tucked her phone back into her pocket and focused on the street.
Her phone told her it would be a ten-minute walk—enough time for the asset to have checked her availability and dropped what she needed at the location.
This post office’s particular mail drops had been her pitch to Sauda for a secure site, too. It was a boring spot, one she’d had checked to ensure no street cams or surveillance was covering, a spot with relativelylow traffic in the city, and most importantly, was possible to get to at all hours. If all went well, she would drop Winter’s postcard into the mailbox and see a small package secured for her underneath the mailbox, waiting for pickup.
Then she’d use a Necco Wafer—her secret substitute for chalk—from her pocket to mark the bottom of the mailbox to announce a successful retrieval to her asset whenever they checked it out later.
She grinned at the memory of Niall putting a roll of the candy on her desk during her first official training day at Panacea.
“For you, kid,” he’d said to Sydney in his trademark grumble. “Always keep one in your pocket. You never know when you might need it.”
Sydney had pocketed it immediately. Only then did she realize that no one had ever bought candy for her before. “Yes, sir,” she’d answered.
The memory faded. Soon the rain picked up, turning from drizzle into a steady downpour. By the time she arrived at the shuttered post office, a loud symphony was pelting her umbrella. Under the deluge stood a row of cylindrical red mailboxes, dewy under the streetlight, their round sides emblazoned with royal crests.
Right away, she realized something had gone wrong.
The mailbox that they were supposed to use, the last in the line, had no subtle chalk marking on the drop slot. It meant that the asset never arrived. That there was no thin package secured inside the mailbox’s slot for her to pick up.
It meant that the drop had been aborted, likely because of someone watching them.
Always assume you’re being followed,Sauda told her every chance she got.
So she did assume, and didn’t turn back around. She didn’t look concerned. Instead, she just headed to the mailbox and unceremoniously dropped in Winter’s postcard. As she did, she scanned the streets from the corners of her eyes.
