A broken vase. That was only a minor crisis, one she could deal with long before Mr. Teague arrived tomorrow morning. By the time he got here, he’d see nothing but a smoothly operated building and four hundred happy tenants.
AS DEREK STONE strode through the parking garage of the Waterford, he felt that familiar rush of adrenaline that pulled every nerve taut and heightened all his senses. Even though the intelligence he’d received about this situation was reliable and the job had been scripted right down to the last footstep, that trace of uncertainty kept his head up and his body on full alert.
He passed one late-model luxury vehicle after another, testimonies to the wealth of the people who lived in this building. If Gerald Owens occupied the penthouse, his business of gathering blackmail information on U.S. government officials had to be pretty lucrative. Maybe even as lucrative as Derek’s business, which today just happened to involve retrieving blackmail information before it could cause a government incident.
Derek adjusted his earpiece to make sure the communication was loud and clear between him and the surveillance van parked across the street, and then he pulled his backpack more securely over his shoulder. When he reached the door that led to the private elevator lobby, he glanced over his shoulder and saw no one else in the vicinity.
“I’m at the door,” he said softly.
Through his earpiece, Derek heard the soft clacking of Kevin’s fingers on his computer keyboard. A moment later the door lock clicked open. Derek entered the lobby and headed for the private elevator that led directly to the penthouse suite.
“I’m in,” he said.
Derek listened to a few more seconds of Kevin’s keyboard clacking and then the lock clicked behind him.
Perfect.
Derek loved tightly integrated high-tech security systems like this one, because it made his job so much easier. Once they were breached, all it took was a few keystrokes to open doors all over the place. Not that the average hacker could penetrate a sophisticated system like the one at the Waterford, but the men on Derek’s team left average in the dust.
“Okay,” Derek said. “I’m at the elevator.”
“I’ve bypassed the circuit that reads the key card,” Kevin said in his ear. “Just punch in the code. It’s sixty-eight, fifty-four. That’s six, eight, five, four.”
Derek entered the numbers and the elevator doors opened.
“You’re a genius, Kevin.”
“Uh-huh. Can we talk about that raise now?”
“Don’t get cocky.”
As the elevator ascended, Kevin said, “The doors will open into the apartment itself. You can head to the safe right away.”
Two days ago, Derek’s contact in Washington had approached him about Congressman Galloway’s problem. In spite of the tight time frame and the possibility of a dozen things going wrong, Derek took the job. His team, as always, had risen to the challenge. They’d begun analyzing the intelligence, planning a breach of the building’s security system, and surveilling Gerald Owens.
Fortunately for Owens, Derek’s contact in Washington didn’t want him arrested or charged. He merely wanted the blackmail material Owens had gathered on Congressman Galloway to be retrieved and destroyed. Owens was only the hired help, anyway. Derek’s contact didn’t know who had ordered the man to gather the blackmail material, and he didn’t care. Making arrests in this case would only bring out into the open what needed to stay firmly under the rug—namely, that Galloway had a fondness for dressing in women’s clothing. If Derek didn’t retrieve the DVD that showed the congressman’s fetish in action, one of two things was going to happen on Monday morning. Either Galloway would vote against the trade bill coming to the House floor, a bill that would greatly restrict the import of certain Chinese goods to America, or Galloway would release the DVD to the press, revealing that Galloway was one of those men who knew Victoria’s secret. Once his redneck, gun-toting constituency from east Texas got wind of that, Galloway’s chances of reelection were nil.
As the elevator neared the top floor of the building, Derek pulled a ski mask from his pocket and put it on. If something went wrong inside the apartment, the last thing he wanted was for somebody to give his description to the police, which could lead to an artist’s rendering of his face being splashed all over the evening news. His team worked independently from contract to contract, sanctioned by the federal government but with no traceable ties to it. Translation: if something goes wrong, you’re on your own.
Derek mentally reviewed the floor plan of the apartment. A study of the architectural drawings of the building had told him where the safe was and the most direct route to it. He couldn’t say for sure that the blackmail material would be there—nothing was one-hundred-percent certain—but the intelligence reports had all pointed to this man, this building and this safe. A pair of Derek’s men were tailing Owens right now, ensuring that he stayed on the golf course long enough for Derek to break in. The housekeeping staff maintained a rigid schedule, which meant that the maid had already come and gone, and with Kevin in the van opening doors and keeping watch, this job was going to go off without a hitch.
And, most importantly, his team’s perfect record would stay intact.
2
AS ALYSSA TOSSED the last piece of broken vase into a trash bag, she reluctantly upgraded the crisis from minor to major. The magnitude of the mess and the size of the empty pedestal beside it told her that the vase had been at least four feet tall. And judging from the quality of the rest of the art in Owens’s apartment, it had undoubtedly been worth thousands of dollars.
The moment she’d arrived back at the building, she’d taken the lobby elevator to the penthouse floor to find the housekeeper in tears in the master bedroom. The woman told Alyssa that she usually cleaned the penthouse in the morning, but she’d had a doctor’s appointment, which meant she’d been late getting to work. Then, because she was running behind, she’d been in a hurry when she was sweeping the hardwood floor and accidentally bumped the pedestal, sending the vase crashing to the floor.
Alyssa assured the poor woman that of course it had been an accident and of course they had insurance to cover such things, but the housekeeper had been so freaked out that Alyssa had sent her to work on another floor. Then she’d taken off her jacket, tossed it onto the bed and cleaned up the mess herself.
In her mind she was already formulating a plan. She’d phone Owens’s decorator for the name of the gallery that had sold him the piece to see if they had a similar one. With luck, she could have it in place before Owens returned from his golf game—a weekly appointment he kept without fail—and discovered the empty pedestal. A similar piece of art couldn’t replace the one-of-a-kind vase that had been broken, but at least it would let Owens know that she’d made an effort to rectify the mistake in the most expedient and effective way possible. Since he’d only lived in the building a short time, she was especially motivated to solve the problem to his complete satisfaction.
Then, as she was twist-tying the trash bag, she heard a soft whirring noise. The rear elevator?
She froze. It couldn’t be. Mr. Owens wasn’t due back for two hours. The man never cut short his golf game. Never.
Sensing that something wasn’t right, Alyssa stood motionless, the strangest chill skating across the back of her
