Flirting With Intent (11 page)

‘The kind that don’t stand out.’

I
F
R
UBY
could press a rewind button she would.

This day would disappear for starters.

Russell’s society luncheon would go.

She wouldn’t go so far as to wipe Damon from memory completely but there were definitely things she would have done differently when it came to dealing with him.

Such as not push him for personal information he so clearly hadn’t wanted to give.

And not allow herself to become so enamoured of the physical side of their relationship that she lost all sense of self-preservation.

Fooling around with Damon in his bedroom, with a party in full swing not six yards away. What kind of idiot behaviour was that?

She’d thought she could play with Damon without consequence. Use him, as it were.

She really had thought she could be intimate with him and come away unscathed. Wrong.

‘First a father who may or may not be guilty of the biggest heist in banking history, and now a computer hacker for a lover,’ she murmured, and a small cat peeked out from beneath her bed and regarded her solemnly. ‘I’m really not having a good run. And what the hell kind of clothes does a person wear when committing a hacking offence?’

Damon had clothes in his backpack, or so he said. He’d retired to Ruby’s bathroom to get changed.

Ruby tossed her jacket on the bed and began to rifle through her wardrobe. Jeans, they’d do. A black T-shirt she usually wore when cleaning things. Flat shoes … apart from the ones she wore around the apartment, and they were little more than slippers, flat shoes really weren’t in her vocabulary. Almost-flat shoes, by way of a pair of black patent leather pumps with black and white spotted bows across the front of them, would have to do.

She put her hair up in a ponytail, left it ornament-free and returned to the lounge room in search of Damon, the man with the vagabond lifestyle, the secrets she didn’t want to
know, and a moral fluidity she couldn’t even begin to comprehend. Don’t judge.

Why did she always have to judge?

Damon had his Christmas jeans on and a grey T-shirt and the battered black backpack slung across his shoulder now looked half-empty. She’d never seen him looking quite so downmarket before. Or so dangerous.

‘Where are we going?’ she asked tentatively.

‘Out for some fast food.’ He looked her over, frowned when he got to her shoes. ‘Lose the shoes, Ruby. Or at least lose the bows.’

Fortunately for him, the bows came off without a great deal of persuasion and would go on again under the influence of superglue. ‘Do I have to
eat
the fast food?’ she said.

‘It’s tastier than it looks.’

‘Only if you have the palate of a two-year-old.’

He smiled at that and some of the tension between them dissipated. ‘It’s my show, Ruby,’ he said softly. ‘Let’s go.’

‘Wait!’ she said hastily. ‘You don’t want to talk about it first? Run me through what it is we’ll be doing?’

‘I’ll talk you through it as we’re doing it,’ he offered calmly.

Ruby opened her mouth to protest, took one look at him, and shut it again without saying a word.

They walked from her apartment to the nearest train station. Just another young couple getting from one place to the next, foreigners but not strangers to Hong Kong or the mass transit railway service it provided.

Comfortable, as they found two free seats and Damon slung his backpack between his feet and laced her hand in his and smiled, before turning to look out of the train window into subway darkness, his thoughts his own.

‘I should have bought a book,’ she said lightly, and he fished his phone out of his pack and handed it to her.

‘Take your pick.’ And she took it because she was curious and scrolled though his offerings.

‘No romance,’ she said after a time and handed the phone back to him and earned herself a very level gaze. ‘You said you’d explain what we were doing along the way. Why are we going to Kowloon?’

‘To find an internet access point. One that tracks back to a public place.’

‘Like a fast-food outlet?’

‘Often they have internet access. Not that it’ll do us any good. Too much surveillance. Not enough privacy.’

‘So why are we doing the fast food thing at all?’

‘I just like their coffee.’

He was deliberately messing with her head and from the glint in his eye he knew it.

‘Once we get to Kowloon, we’re looking for a combination of things within a short distance of each other,’ he said quietly. ‘A luxury hotel. A less than savoury hotel. And caffeine.’

‘And then what?’

‘And then we go to work.’

He found what he was looking for within five minutes of exiting the train station. Coffee stop at the fast-food place first, while Damon fiddled with his phone and largely ignored her. Normal behaviour for this part of the world, Ruby noted. Around here, mobile phones and miniature computers ruled supreme.

‘All set?’ he said, in less time than it took her to take two cautious sips of her surprisingly
decent coffee. ‘Bring it with you,’ he said of her coffee. ‘We’re going to need a room.’

Not a room at the five-star hotel, however. No, Damon escorted her to a high rise nearby that boasted a bar on the ground floor, a hotel on the next, and several different categories of businesses after that, a brothel being one of them, given the nature of the girls lounging idly in the bar.

‘One room, one night, a window facing the street, no company, no room service and no questions,’ murmured Damon and handed a wad of Hong Kong dollars to the bruiser manning the reception desk.

‘You got it,’ said the bruiser and gave Damon a hotel swipe card and nodded towards the stairs.

‘And another innkeepers’ law bites the dust,’ she murmured as they started up the stairs. Damon glanced at her, his gaze faintly mocking.

‘Time to put the lawyer away, Ruby.’

‘You don’t say,’ she countered grimly and stepped over a pile of what looked like discarded clothing on the stairs. ‘Please tell me we’re not staying here the night.’

‘We’re not staying here the night.’

Good news, because room 203 was charmless, airless and decidedly unclean. Ruby stood in the centre of the room sipping her suddenly mighty fine coffee and watched as Damon slung his backpack off his shoulder and withdrew a small laptop from within it. He set it on the bedside table beside the window and set its innards whirring.

‘Pull up a chair,’ he said, but Ruby didn’t feel like sitting.

‘Mind if I pace instead?’

‘No pacing allowed,’ he said. ‘Sit.’

So she pulled up a chair and sat and stared at the computer screen, her heart beating too fast for comfort, and her eyes noticing the speed with which Damon’s big hands flew over the keyboard. Logging into the internet somehow, without logging in.

‘How do you know where to—? Oh, boy,’ she whispered as all of a sudden they were somewhere within FBI-land and screen after screen of information was opening up in new windows, with Damon chasing them down, one by one, and entering string after string of code.

‘Easy, Ruby,’ he whispered, his eyes on the screen in front of him, his focus absolute.

‘Relax.’

She wanted to ask him what he was doing and how he was doing it but she didn’t have the breath for it.

‘There’s a rhythm to hacking, to navigating the information flow and pitting your wits against a security system built by another,’ he said softly. ‘For some, reaching their destination without detection is thrill enough. Others, they only want to destroy. For some of us, the destination is just a portal to a bigger game and it’s a game based on power and knowledge and balance on the grandest of scales. That’s my game, and it’s more dangerous than you know. I need your silence on the issue, Ruby.’

‘Believe me, you have it.’

‘Not yet I don’t.’

A blur of information. So fast; all of it too fast for comprehension. A download option.

Damon’s hands falling away from the computer keys.

Ruby’s breath coming rapid and strained, adrenalin coursing fiercely through her body as she stared at the little arrow on the screen that Damon had placed atop the download link.

‘Your turn.’

Damon’s voice low and husky as he transferred that intense focus to her face.

‘It’s the FBI’s file on your father.’

Time slowed down to crawling as Ruby stared first at Damon and then at the screen. ‘I, ah—I’m not—sure. Oh,
hell,’
she whispered, because she wanted that information and Damon had made it so easy for her to just reach out and take it.

‘Or we leave the information where it is, I tell my handler I’ve blown my cover with you and we see how that unfolds.’

‘No.’ Not with her father’s file sitting there just begging to be taken. ‘My father’s whereabouts in return for my silence. I get it, Damon. And I agree to your terms.’ Her hand moved. The download began. Her choice, and she wore that knowledge like a stain.

‘Guess I’m not as principled as I thought,’ she said faintly.

‘Who is?’ muttered Damon, his focus back on the screen.

The file took an agonisingly slow ten seconds to download, and then Damon was back at the keyboard, fingers flying.

‘You’re getting out of the FBI pages now, right?’ she said.

‘Right.’

And straight into the British intelligence system, and Ruby’s stomach lurched and her pulse rate soared all over again. ‘Hell of a ride,’ she said but he was gone again, skimming through supposedly secure cyberspace with an ease that made her gasp.

Another download link, but no agony of hesitation this time for Ruby. They were done and gone, with a swiftness she found hard to comprehend. All the way out this time. Two files stored on a USB the size of a thumbnail. Laptop off and opened up with a tiny screwdriver. One of the motherboard components replaced.

Fifteen minutes from start to finish, and they were walking back down those shabby hotel stairs and handing the door card over to Reception.

‘Any decent cheap
yum cha
restaurants around here?’ he asked the man, and got directions and nodded, while Ruby sweated and smiled and tried to resist the urge to flee.

‘Please tell me we’re not going back there,’ she said when they were two shopfronts away and Ruby was walking faster than she’d ever walked before, every nerve ending buzzing and every neon sign a thousand times
brighter than it had been fifteen minutes ago. She ran her hands up and down her arms, mildly surprised she didn’t give off sparks.

‘We’re not, right?’

‘Right.’

Damon’s pace had quickened too. Ruby was practically skipping. ‘So … where
are
we going?’

‘Yum cha?’

‘Are you serious?’ He couldn’t possibly be serious. He was.

‘Not
yum cha,’
she said. ‘I wouldn’t be able to sit still. I’m feeling …’ ‘Wired.’ ‘Exactly.’

‘It’ll pass.’

‘Yes, but
when?’

‘Soon,’ he said with a kick to his mouth that warned her she was amusing him.

‘Look!’ She pointed to a shopfront across the road. ‘Chinese massage. They’re very relaxing. We could have one of those.’

‘It’s a brothel, Ruby.’

‘Oh.’ Ruby took a closer look. ‘Brothel. Good pick-up. Maybe I just need to go back to the apartment and go for a swim. Soothing. Tactile. Potential to expend energy.

Plenty of energy happening here at the moment, Damon. Possibly a little too much.’ ‘Breathe, Ruby.’

‘I am. It’s not helping. I really need to get rid of some of this energy
now.
You are so hot when you’re hacking, by the way. Who knew?’

‘The things I do for you,’ he murmured, and swung her into an alleyway and pinned her against the wall, his mouth mere millimetres from her own. ‘Settle down, Ruby.’

‘Or what?’ she whispered, just before she snaked her hand around his neck and drew him down for a hot, open exploration of his mouth. Plenty of energy happening between them at the moment. Enough tactile stimulation to make her forget her own name.

Damon groaned and the kiss turned incendiary. Energy released only now the concern was that they’d both go up in flames.

‘You’ll get us arrested,’ he murmured, with a nip for her mouth as he wrapped his hand around her wrist, dragged it away from his neck and set them walking again. ‘Time to get you home, Ruby. Now.’

‘Authority has always
really
worked for me,’ she said breathlessly and meant every word. ‘Seriously, who doesn’t love a man
who knows how to take charge? An expert in his chosen field. How did you get into this field, by the way? I’m assuming it wasn’t part of any school study curriculum.’

‘It was something of a calling.’

‘Ah. Junior hacker, were you?’

‘Not now, Ruby.’

‘I’m thinking school database, assessment marks in need of rearranging …’

‘I was doing them a
service.
Pointing out the holes in the system.’

‘Of course you were. How old were you at the time? Fourteen? Fifteen?’

‘Twelve.’

‘What a brat.’ Two more steps and Ruby stopped dead. ‘Damon, I think I’ve found a solution to the energy crisis. See that clothes shop on the other side of the road? It’s open.’

‘I see it,’ he said. ‘But isn’t it a little Hello Kitty for you?’

‘You mean it’s a shop for teens? I can do teen wear.’ Ruby nodded vigorously. ‘I’m a felon. I can do anything.’

‘Technically, you’re only an accessory.’

‘Wrong. The skills were yours but I think you’ll find I’m a first-degree principal, which is what you intended all along. You had to draw me in. Make me part of it so that I
wouldn’t talk about it. Which I won’t. Ever. When do I get the files?’

‘You don’t. You get to read through them when you’re ready, take from them what you can and then I destroy them.’

‘I’m ready,’ she said, and the glance he cut her told her more plainly than words his thoughts on her readiness for anything.

‘No, really. I am. I am fully aware that these are not the sort of files you want to have hanging around. I should look at them soon.’

‘When you’re ready,’ he said, quietly inflexible. ‘You’re not ready.’