She carried the same rucksack she had carried onto her last space transport. He had seen that footage as well, then he had hired a speed cruiser to get him here ahead of the transport ship. He had had a week to prepare, which was almost not enough. She also had a small bag that he hadn’t seen before.
He watched her stop in the middle of the sidewalk, and glance up at the building itself. It was that movement, more than anything, that convinced him he was looking at Rikki. The long graceful neck, the way her head arched. He remembered that movement from their night together.
Damn it, he remembered everything from their night together, every single detail.
He couldn’t clear it from his mind.
He made himself focus on the sidewalk, two and a half blocks away. He had picked this apartment for the unobstructed view of her place on the upper level of that upscale building, not for the view of the sidewalk. He had a partially obstructed view of the sidewalk—he saw the transport stop and the entrance to Rikki’s building, but there was a blind spot in between, caused by a chimney-like structure on a building one block over.
Rikki stepped forward, and the obstruction blocked Misha’s view. He held his breath and then made himself stop holding his breath when he realized what he was doing.
He was worried that she was just going to vanish on him again, like she had done on the ship. And it bothered him. He almost took it personally.
Rikki reappeared, walking purposefully into the building. She used some kind of palm reader identification—maybe a DNA scanner—to get into the building.
This time, it didn’t feel like she had disappeared, but that was partly because of the monitors he had set up.
He had gotten into the building through the basement entrance, which had fewer security protections than the main entrance. That was a sign of a building being rehabbed, not one with a full slate of tenants.
The building’s owners needed maintenance people, robots, and equipment to get in and out easily, without a lot of restrictions. Misha had initially planned to pose as one of them, but his friends at the Lakota Transport had given him a better idea.
He had posed as a member of the Transport Authority, to see if there was any possible way to locate an interior stop in the basement of the building. The building’s owners were thrilled, even though they knew it was a remote possibility.
But with an interior stop, they could attract a higher class of tenants, ones that wanted to stay invisible.
Like Rikki should have, but didn’t.
Misha had tracking devices on almost every part of the building. He had cameras on the interior staircases, and two more inside each of the elevators. He had sound equipment outside Rikki’s door, as well as some truly sophisticated cameras, some that no existing locating equipment could find.
He flicked a remote, shutting off the sniper lenses in his eyes for a moment, turning the lenses into clear material. Then he turned to one of the screens he had set up below the window, and watched Rikki climb the stairs.
She didn’t get winded as she climbed. That was another sign it was her, and not some woman who looked like her.
The cameras gave him a better view of her. Her hair was back to its normal color, which he very much liked. It accented her high cheekbones and made her beautiful eyes seem wider. She looked prettier, less austerely lovely, like this, almost approachable.
Although that might have been the clothing as well. It was nothing special, just some dark pants and a loose top. Maybe too loose, almost frumpy, hiding the in-shape body beneath.
If anyone took a cursory glance at this woman, they would see someone who let herself go, who didn’t care about her appearance.
But a close look would reveal an athletic woman in comfortable clothing, with near-flawless skin, and eyes so sharp that they missed nothing. It was hard to ignore the intelligence in those eyes, even though he suspected people would try.
She reached the top floor and let herself into her apartment with an economy of movement that surprised him.
He would have thought it would take a lot more to open that door’s security. In the two hours that he had given himself, he hadn’t been able to break in. He hadn’t even managed to figure out what kind of security system she had set up—and that irritated him.
He had hoped to place cameras inside her apartment as well, and he hadn’t been able to.
Instead, he had to console himself with the fact that the apartment had nearly a 360-degree view of its interior. Only the bearing walls inside prevented him from seeing a very small part of it.
He switched back to his sniper lenses and looked directly through the windows. The lenses gave him a double vision—one of her heat signature, and another of her movements inside, despite the nonreflective material on the windows themselves.
She set her pack down on a chair, fiddled with the small bag, pulled out bots and worked on them for a few minutes. Then she went into the bedroom. She stepped into a closet and changed clothes. When she came out, she wore even looser clothing, but it was made of a lighter-weight material, and it seemed to fit better.
She padded from the bedroom back to the entry, probably to pick up that pack.
And then she vanished.
He blinked twice, wondering if the lenses had shut down. But he knew they hadn’t. He could see the chair, the table beside it, the knickknacks in the living area, the dishes on the glassed-in cupboard in the kitchen.
He could see everything but Rikki.
She had fooled him again, and he wasn’t exactly sure how.
Rikki was tired, she was hungry, and she really, really didn’t want to talk with anyone. She curled her bare feet under her on the love seat and set down the tablet, then stretched under the light.
That was the problem with transports. No matter how hard you tried to remain private, you couldn’t—not quite. You always had to smile at a fellow passenger, or tell someone (politely) that a seat was taken even when it wasn’t. You had to fend off the most overly solicitous men, hoping to get laid on this short journey between here and there—no strings, as if that was an attractive part of the trip—and sometimes you even had to fend off interested women.
The key was to do it calmly, evenly, and without being memorable. Not being memorable was the most important part.
And not being memorable was also hard work. No inadvertent rudeness, no cursing, no elbow to the gut of the man who thought it sexy to run his hand over the ass of a woman he didn’t know.
It was tiring to be invisible, and now that she was here, in her hidey-hole, she didn’t want to work for at least a day or two. She wanted to stay private and hidden.
She had thought she would venture back out, get some food tonight, and then in the morning, do a bit of shopping, stocking up her kitchen so she wouldn’t have to venture out again.
She never did that before she got to a place—or rather, she didn’t do it any longer. She’d walked into too many of her hiding places to find that someone else had been there or that someone else was still there. Once she tossed a bag of groceries at some man who got up from her couch, politely smiled at her, and started to introduce himself.
She never ever knew who he was, and she really wasn’t curious.
All she knew was that she could never ever go back to that place—and she never ever had.
This afternoon, she shouldn’t have gotten comfortable. She shouldn’t have put on her favorite clothes and settled in her office. She should have scouted her place, and then she should have gone back out immediately and taken care of her food needs.
But she hadn’t done that.
And, honestly, even going back out was a risk. Someone might see her. Someone might follow her. Someone might try something.
Of course, if she lived her life in a constant state of paranoia, she would die of hunger long before she ever started to feel lonely.
She sighed and got up from her spot. The best thing to do would be to order in. She would use a bot service rather than some human service. Those were her only choices. Many places just sent things through an interconnected automated network. When she first moved here, the neighborhood was too dangerous for that.
By the time the building wanted to add that service, she was ready for them. She said no, and she could say no because she had owned her apartment long enough to be grandfathered into—or out of—any service that the building wanted to provide.
She didn’t want anything she didn’t authorize and couldn’t monitor to have access to her apartment, not even an automated food service network.
Which left her with robotic servers. She’d used several in the past, and as she got out of the ground transport, she had noticed that one of the services still existed. It was only two doors down, and it served sandwiches, which would do for the evening. If she bought a big enough one, it might even double as breakfast.
She stepped out of the office, went into the kitchen, and used the built-in network to order, paying out of her building fund. Then she made herself some coffee from the imported grounds she had brought in from one of her many stops, and contemplated her next move.
She probably shouldn’t be working yet. She probably should wait until she heard from Jack. Then she could have him vet her next jobs.
But just sitting around would drive her nuts. Hell, traveling here with no real purpose behind her had driven her nuts.
She had been alone in her head ever since she left the cruise ship and that was just too long.
She sipped the coffee, decided it was the right amount of bitter mixed with sweet, and took it back to the office.
She didn’t have to do anything today. She could take her own sweet time vetting the targets. In fact, she could take extra time vetting someone to vet the targets. And then maybe find someone else to vet the clients.
Still, she wanted to keep busy. If she kept busy, she didn’t have to think about Misha (Mikael), and if she wasn’t thinking about Misha
(Mikael)
, then she didn’t have to worry about what Jack would find.
Even though she was—both thinking of Mikael (Misha) and worrying about what Jack would find.
In fact, she was obsessing about them. Which was the last thing she wanted to do.
And the only way to stop obsessing that she knew, anyway, was to work hard.
So she took the coffee back to her office, leaving the door open so she could hear the slight ping from the robot delivery service.
The sandwich sounded good. The perfect way to cap her day, and to welcome herself to Lakota. She’d sit in the living room, look at the lake and force herself to decompress.
When the sandwich arrived.
Until then, she had targets to vet.
She sat down with the tablets and got back to work.
Rikki appeared suddenly, in the area where she had been standing when he lost her. Misha frowned. There was no way she could suddenly be at the entrance to her own apartment, but she was, standing just inside the door, near the chair where she had dropped the rucksack.
He sat in the apartment two and a half blocks away, the sniper lenses scraping his eyeballs as he squinted. He got as close to his windows as he could. He was frowning. That was making the sniper lenses hurt too.
She stood in that entry as if she had just come back into the apartment. Which she hadn’t, so far as he knew.
But he had no idea what had happened to her. There was no way she could have disappeared as thoroughly as she had either. She had even dropped off his heat vision sensors, which was very strange. His equipment should have kept an eye on her, even when he couldn’t see her.
And it hadn’t.
She ran a hand through her hair, tugged up her loose pants, and made her way to the kitchen. She was acting like someone who did not know she was being watched.
He always thought he would have a sixth sense about it if he was being watched. But the Guild told him he wouldn’t. They told him to always behave as if someone could see him, which made him just a bit too cautious, just a little to aware of his surroundings at all times.
Except that night with Rikki.
His cheeks warmed. God, he blushed every time he thought about it, which was just strange. He wanted to think that flush came from anger, but it didn’t. It came from the intimacy of the memory.
As he watched her meander to the kitchen, he also studied those bearing walls.
She had appeared in front of one of them.
Which only meant one thing: she had some kind of hidden passage in there.
He knew she had bought nearby apartments under other names. He wasn’t sure how many of the neighboring apartments she owned—he doubted he could track down all her aliases as fast as he wanted to—but he knew that she owned several of them.
Maybe she had built some kind of interior staircase that had taken her down to a different apartment, and maybe that staircase had been protected from all kinds of surveillance.
That was the only thing he could think of that would cause her to disappear like that.