In Too Deep: A Romantic Suspense Novel (51 page)

S
ophie found
me the next morning typing away at my computer. She came padding in from the living room with her beautiful purple hair tousled and stringy. With one of my large white t-shirts being stretched out quite seductively by her breasts, I doubt there was a more beautiful sight a man could see in the morning.

"Wow, if you wanted to tempt me, I could think of worse looks," I said, standing up and pulling her into a good morning kiss.

"You're sweet, and I have horrible morning breath," Sophie said after we stepped apart. It was true, she did have morning breath, but still, kissing her was nice. "So what are you looking at?"

"The end game," I said, showing her the monitor I was plugged into. "It's a plan I've been working on for quite a while now. The final piece of the puzzle was using the information we stole from the Confederation computers."

Sophie nodded, studying the plan I had mapped out. I was worried she would object to the amount of bloodshed that could be required, and I prepared myself for the flood of concerns about the danger and violence. As Sophie's studying grew longer, punctuated with a few hums and other small sounds, I grew more and more nervous. Finally, she turned away from the plan and looked me in the eyes. "It's okay, but you left a lot of stuff out."

That was not the answer I'd been expecting, to say the least. It took me a moment not to just smile defensively, and clear my mind to hear what she had to say. "What did I leave out?" I asked, when I could let my curiosity be stronger than my ego or surprise.

"The biggest thing you left out is me," she replied, tapping the screen. “You’re planning on taking out four of the Confederation heads and you have yourself taking the shot each and every time."

"Yeah, I didn't want to place you in danger, and I figured that it would be best if I did...." I said, before Sophie cut me off.

"When I agreed to come back to the city, I told you I wanted to be fully involved, not sit and watch while you do everything,” she said, shaking her head. "I've worn the stupid suits, I've dealt with the danger, I shot a Spetznatz commando, all because I'm not your sidekick. I'm your partner, remember? Now, if I'm reading this plan right, you think that by taking out these four Confederation family heads, you can trigger a self consuming battle between the various Confederation members and Owen Lynch. But, you want to try and take each of these people out on separate days."

"Of course. Prepping a hit on people as protected as these people are takes either planning and patience, an overwhelming attack force, a shitload of luck, or a bit of all three. We don't have an overwhelming attack force."

Sophie chuckled. "You working by yourself isn't overwhelming at all. But the two of us working together, we can double our forces, and at the same time I was looking here at the first two hits."

"What about them?" I said, grudgingly admitting that Sophie had a point. Still, I wanted to start this damn war to clean up the city to protect her, not to put her into firefights with criminals.

"If you and I strike the first two targets on your list at the same time, we can increase the panic within the Confederation. Also, they'll start to doubt that it was Owen Lynch, because we can hit them where Lynch won't or can't. This first target, Han Faoxin, is the head of the local Chinese, right?"

"Yeah."

"But you note here that Owen Lynch doesn't know who he is. Of all the hits, his is actually the hardest because very few people know who he is. So if we take him and the second target, Illyusas Petrokias out at the same time, it turns the Confederation immediately against each other, and makes them unwilling to trust each other. Then their deaths can't be seen as either accidents or random chance."

I started laughing, causing Sophie to frown. "What? Did I say something wrong?"

"No, your logic is totally sound," I said after calming down. "It's just that you made the same mistake that a lot of people do with Han Faoxin."

"What?" Sophie said, getting a little peeved. I leaned down and kissed her on the cheek, and grabbed a chair. Sophie was right, I needed to bring her into the plan, and to let her know everything I knew.

"Han Faoxin is a woman," I said. I grabbed the wireless trackball for the computer and went into the file explorer. I quickly navigated to the profiles I had compiled over the years for the various criminals I had worked with, targeted, or were somehow related to either the Confederation or Owen Lynch. Pulling up Han Faoxin's file folder, I opened her personal profile.

"Han Faoxin, daughter of Han Gaotan, is the third generation of her family to control the Asian crime syndicate in the city. One of the things that made her control so different from her father's is that she's been able to cross the cultural lines that divided the various Asian groups. While the Yakuza aren't happy about it, being mostly locked out, she created an amalgamation of Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, Thai, and independent Japanese criminal groups that gave her total control over anything coming into the city from eastern Asia. She doesn't have control of the Middle Eastern groups, but has a good working relationship with them. Considering how relatively young she is, she's been considered next in line when Sal Giodano retires for taking control of the entire Confederation."

Sophie looked closely at the picture I had of her, the only picture I knew in existence of Faoxin that tied her to criminal activity. "Is that.... is that you next to her?"

Blushing, I nodded. "Yes. Just before she took over from her father, Faoxin and I were.... well, it was complicated."

"How so?"

"This isn't the conversation I thought I'd be having with my fiancée," I said sheepishly. "I guess you could say that while Faoxin and I weren't exactly dating, I was more than a hook-up to her as well. Perhaps you could say I was one of her steady boys for about a year. She had a penchant for younger men."

"Really?" Sophie said with a smirk. "So she was the one who taught you all those ancient Asian bedroom techniques you use on me. I'm not sure if we should kill her, or send her a thank you card."

I groaned and shook my head. "Note to self, hold off on discussing prior partners until after breakfast."

Sophie leaned over and kissed my cheek. "Don't worry, I'm not jealous," she said. "I can see from the picture that this was years ago, you could pass as a high schooler almost. And since you and I came together, you've been nothing but a loyal, wonderful boyfriend and lover. It's not like I expected that either of us came into this as pristine virgins. Although I do have to say one thing."

"What's that?"

"Faoxin, she's quite beautiful. It's kind of good for my ego to know that I can tempt you away from such a beautiful and powerful woman. How old is she anyway?"

I laughed and stood up, pulling Sophie to her feet. "First of all, you are far more beautiful than Faoxin," I said, kissing her nose. "Not just on the outside, but far more on the inside. That woman is as evil as she is beautiful, trust me on that. Now, before we discuss anything else, we're getting some breakfast, and then we have to put in our daily appearance as Marcus Smiley and Sophie Warbird."

"So how old is she?"

T
hat night
, up on the third floor of what had come to be known as the Smiley Building, if such a grand name could be given to a four story converted warehouse in the industrial district near the docks, I started the more difficult part, which was prepping my hit. The key to my plan was using a mix of styles. If each of the four hits were done in my preferred manner, a long range sniper shot using a heavy caliber rifle, I'd leave too consistent a trail, one that could be assigned to an individual. That individual was most likely me, since both Lynch and the Confederation knew I was active in town again. That was the last thing I wanted. I wanted the Confederation looking at each other and Owen Lynch first.

Sophie and I had agreed on one thing, and that was I needed to do the hit on Faoxin. There were a lot of reasons for this. First of all, while I had a picture of Faoxin, it was older, and I had enough memories of her that I could pick her out easily. Secondly, with Sophie taking at least one of the four hits, I wanted her to use her best skill, which was the long range rifle shot. While she wasn't as good as me, with the setup we had agreed on for the hit on Illyusas Petrokias, she didn't need to be, taking only a three hundred meter shot. That left me to focus on Faoxin.

A long range shot wouldn't work for a hit on Faoxin anyway. The key to her effectiveness was that, like me and Sophie, she lived a double life. Most of her communication with her soldiers was through scrambled voice calls. While she spent lots of time around her territory, she didn't advertise who she was. In fact, I knew of at least three times she had gone into various clubs or massage parlors she controlled as nothing more than either a customer or even an employee.

During the day however, Han Faoxin lived under her Americanized name, Anita Han. She was a high school teacher, who for ten years had taught advanced placement history at William Henry Harrison High School. Trust me, if she had been my history teacher, I probably would have paid attention a lot more in class. I don't know if I would have scored any better on my tests, but I would have certainly paid attention in class. I'm sure her students, at least the male ones, were the same way.

I didn't like my plan, but it was the easiest way for me to get to her. During the night, Han Faoxin was either protected or within structures that were controlled by the various Asian crime groups. There was little chance I could get in and out safely. But at Harrison High, I only had to worry about the security systems in place of a rather prestigious private high school and whatever weapon, if any, she had on her.

Not that Faoxin was a pushover. Trained from birth, she could more than handle herself, and I could be assured that she was carrying some form of weapon on her. Still, it was my best shot, and I couldn't think of a better chance.

W
hile Mark was preparing
himself for Han Faoxin, I was across town, taking a moment to see an old friend. Since being played and having her heart broken by Scott Pressman, the Knave of Hearts, I'd been worried about her. Tabby Williams was my best friend for a very long time, going on nine years. I'd never seen her as messed up as she was when Mark and I revealed who Scott Pressman was, and in the weeks since, something just hadn't been right with her.

Knocking lightly on the frame of her office door, Tabby looked up from her desk, long after most of the other financial analysts in her firm had left. "You know, I think it'll wait until tomorrow," I said with a smile, before doing a double take.

For as long as I'd known her, Tabby had long, lustrous auburn hair. It was the perfect color of red, dark enough so that she couldn't really call herself a "ginger" except as a joke, but bright enough that she was striking. Combined with her natural beauty, and Tabby had been a head turner as long as I'd known her.

One of her old flames, one who had come over to the dorm room Tabby and I shared and ended up spilling his guts, told me that Tabby had the kind of hair that wound through your fantasies, spread out over a pillow or draped over your vision. "The sun filtered through her hair would look blood red, like a ruby trapped in a web," he said while sipping at the beer I had offered him. "The thing is, that ruby could easily be your heart, and you knew it, but didn't care. When she was on top of me like that, none of it mattered."

Yeah, that was Tabby. Now, instead of the vivacious redhead, a raven haired woman with slightly drawn cheekbones looked up at me. Her normally creamy pale skin was bordering on sickly white, and she looked cadaverous. I realized I had gotten so busy over the past two weeks that even when she stopped by the office, I'd not looked at her as closely as I should have, and was put off by her bluff and bluster. The hair was new though, I was sure of that.

"Hey Sophie," Tabby said, trying to give me a smile. It didn't work, and looked more like a grimace of pain than a genuine smile. "What's up?"

"It doesn't matter," I said, coming over and closing her laptop. "You're coming with me, now."

"But I have a ton of work....." Tabby said before I cut her off. I seemed to be doing that a lot recently.

"Nothing that won't keep for a day, since I control eighty percent of your workload anyway," I said, taking her by the hand. "You're sitting here looking more like the Bride of Dracula than the woman who means most to my life, so we're getting out of here. If you insist, I'll bring your laptop with me, but you're not opening it until tomorrow morning, and then only at my house. You can send your bosses a note saying that Marcus and I got you up at six in the morning for a business meeting or some other sort of lie. I'll back you up on it."

Tabby looked like she was about to protest again, when I played my best weapon. Taking her other hand, I looked her in the eyes and smiled. "Come on, it'll be fun. Just the two of us."

It was obvious that she needed me. For all of Tabby’s playful flirting, and underneath that sex kitten exterior that she likes to put on, she has a deep romantic streak. She wanted more than anything to find someone that she could give her heart to, to share her soul with. And yes, someone who could keep up in bed with her. You think someone who studied for her freshman psychology final by listening to Bryan Adams ballads doesn't have a romantic streak?

"I guess I have been a bit too focused on work," she said, resting her head on my shoulder. She felt feather light, and I wondered if the ten pounds of weight loss was more. "I just haven't been able to sleep well."

"Even in your new place?" I asked. After Scott Pressman had broken her heart, she hadn't felt safe in her old apartment, so Mark and I had helped her move into a better place, one with security and no criminal control. Mark had also surreptitiously placed extra security measures that only the three of us knew about and made her apartment just about one of the most secure places in the entire city.