a way,” she admitted. It had been a very long time since she’d had adrenaline pumping through her veins and color in her cheeks. Years. She’d forgotten how good it felt. “And you enjoy it, too, or you wouldn’t be a spy to begin with.”
He nodded, conceding the point. “Let’s go.”
Casanova led Lucy through the hole he’d made in her sheetrock. “I’m glad Mrs. Pfluger wasn’t home,” she said. “You’d have probably scared her to death.”
“What makes you so sure she isn’t home?” And sure enough, sitting in the living room watching her TV was Lucy’s neighbor, Mrs. Pfluger, who was eighty-two years old. She smiled at Casanova. “So, you’re back,” she said with a bright smile. Although she was nearly incapacitated with arthritis, her mind was as sharp as any twenty-year-old’s. “Hello, Lucy, dear.”
Lucy stared, dumbfounded. “Do you two know each other?”
“We do now,” Mrs. Pfluger said. “He came to my door, and when he explained you were in danger from some terrorists, and that he needed my help so you could escape …” She shrugged helplessly, as if to say, Well, you know how these things are. Like they happened every day.
“But the wall. He ruined your wall,” Lucy said.
“He handed me a wad of cash to pay for it.” She turned back to Casanova. “Now, while you were busy searching Lucy’s apartment, I gathered the things you would need.” She gestured toward an old shopping bag. “They’re clothes and other things from my fat days. I won’t need them back.”
Casanova inspected the contents of the shopping bag, then grinned and looked at Lucy. “Excellent. Lucy, put these things on. You’re about to become Bessie Pfluger.”
Bryan Elliott, aka Casanova, tried not to grin as he watched Lucy Miller wiggle into a pair of huge orange polyester stretch pants and pin them at the waist. She’d turned out to be a surprise.
He already knew a lot about her from the background information he’d obtained—where she grew up, where she’d gone to school, her employment history. He’d pegged her as the perfect mole to work inside Alliance where the embezzling was taking place—dutiful, conscientious, intelligent. And she was all those things. Over the past few weeks she had proved amazingly helpful, downloading tons of information onto the supercapacity memory stick, following his instructions without question.
In person, though, she was surprisingly feisty—and damned efficient at defending herself. With the proper training—No, he shouldn’t even think about that. He’d let himself get sucked into a life of lies and shadows, and he was in so deep now he could never lead a normal life. He didn’t wish that on sweet Lucy Miller, who, by all accounts, was ignorant of the uglier side of life.
But she was no longer ignorant about the ugliest clothes in the universe. She’d topped the orange pants with a tentlike housecoat with rainbows all over it. She’d tucked her hair up into a silver, curly-haired wig and donned an old pair of Mrs. Pfluger’s glasses, which had red frames and were only slightly uglier than Lucy’s own.
“My old walker is over there.” Mrs. Pfluger gestured toward a corner of her living room.
“This will never work,” Lucy said on a moan. “No one will believe I’m eighty years old.”
“Eighty-two,” Mrs. Pfluger said.
“Trust me, if anyone is watching the place, they won’t look past the obvious at the place next door.” He unfolded the portable walker and set it in front of Lucy. “Let’s see you do an old-lady walk.”
Lucy hunched over the walker and did a creditable imitation of an arthritic senior citizen inching along.
“Oh, heavens,” Mrs. Pfluger said. “Please don’t tell me I look like that when I walk.”
“I’m exaggerating,” Lucy said. Then she turned to her neighbor and gave her a spontaneous hug. “Oh, Mrs. Pfluger, I can’t thank you enough for helping us out like this. I mean, you don’t even know this guy.”
“He showed me a badge,” Mrs. Pfluger said innocently, having no clue the badge he’d shown her was fake and could be bought on any street corner in D.C. “Anyway, he has trustworthy eyes. He’ll take care of you.”
“I’m counting on it,” Lucy said, giving Bryan a meaningful look. “Can we go now?”
Bryan thanked Lucy’s elderly neighbor, too, then “helped” Lucy out the door and down the wheelchair ramp.
“Keep your head down. That’s it,” he whispered. “You’re doing great. If I didn’t know better, I’d swear you were someone’s grandmother.” But he did know better. The body that had been pressed against his when she’d fallen on him was not the slightest bit grandmotherly. In fact, he’d been surprised at how slim and firm she was beneath the frumpy suit she’d worn.
His Mercedes was parked at the curb. Knowing the town house might be under surveillance, he’d made no attempt to be stealthy, walking right up to the neighbor’s door and ringing the bell. He’d known she would be home. He’d also known she’d been an army nurse in Korea and her husband had been a World War II veteran. He’d been counting on her patriotism to make her willing to help him out, and he’d been right.
As he usually was. He liked to cover all the bases.
As soon as the motor started and the car was underway, he relaxed slightly. If anyone had been watching, Lucy’s old-lady act had fooled them. No one was following.
Bryan drove to a mall parking lot and pulled the Mercedes into a spot fairly close to where he’d found it.
“Why are we stopping here?” Lucy asked.
“Switching cars.” He turned off the engine and pulled his Multi-Key from the ignition.
“What is that?” Lucy asked, pointing to the strange-looking device. Then she gasped. “Oh my God, you stole this car!”
“Just borrowed it. The owner is blissfully shopping at Marshall Fields. She’ll never know.”
“That is really scary,” Lucy said. “That such a device even exists, and that our government employees steal cars.”
“Government employees do a lot worse than steal cars, I’m afraid,” he said as they exited the Mercedes. Unfortunately, he’d just found out the hard way what certain government employees were capable of.
Lucy grabbed the walker from the back seat, but she didn’t use it. She walked beside him with a spring in her step, lithe and graceful. He led her to the car he’d arrived in, a silver Jaguar XJE. Since he’d been driving his personal wheels and not a “company car,” he hadn’t wanted to risk it being identified. Thus the switcheroo.
“Hmm, I liked this even better than the Mercedes,” she commented as she put the walker in the trunk. “Is this one stolen, too?”
“No, this one’s mine.”
“I hadn’t realized government employees earned enough money to afford a Jag.”
“We don’t. My government salary isn’t my only source of income.”
