The Persona Protocol - By Andy McDermott Page 0,60
her legs and body. As the American started to pull up the zipper, the door opened and Kyle rushed in. ‘Hey, we need to— Saaay,’ he said, tone swinging instantly from urgent to smarmy. ‘Two girls playing dress-up. Nice.’
‘Kyle!’ Holly Jo yelped. ‘First, knock. And second, shut up!’
‘For God’s sake!’ Bianca added, blushing. ‘Five seconds earlier and you would have caught me in my underwear!’
‘Oh, you shouldn’t have said that,’ said Holly Jo, with a disgusted sigh. ‘Now he’s thinking about it. What do you want?’
He filed away the mental image for future reference before becoming more professional. ‘We need to get moving. One of Lau’s guys at the casino said they’re about to start taking buy-ins for the game.’
‘Already?’ said Bianca. ‘I thought that wasn’t until six o’clock.’
‘I guess they can’t wait to get their hands on the money. Anyway, we’ve got to get over there before all the places are taken. It’s first come, first served.’
He backed out, giving Bianca another quick look before closing the door. ‘That jerk,’ Holly Jo muttered, pulling the zipper all the way up. ‘Okay?’
‘Yes.’ Bianca fidgeted with the dress, then hurriedly put on her shoes. They may have been knock-offs of a designer brand, but they were still a much better fit than the pair she had worn for the Luminica presentation – God, only four days before. Her life had undergone a drastic change in a very short time, she realised as she caught her reflection in the mirror. Red dress, high heels, glam look . . . and about to throw away a quarter of a million dollars as part of a plot hatched by a team of international spies. ‘This should be a movie,’ she said quietly, hardly able to believe it.
‘You look the part,’ Holly Jo assured her. ‘Ready?’
‘Yes. I think. I hope!’
The two women went back into the suite’s main room. Its occupants had been joined by Baxter and one of his men, the leader of the tactical team talking to Tony. ‘When our truck gets within twenty feet of the cab, the transponder activates the rigs under the passenger seats and Zykov and his guys all get a needle in the ass. By the time they feel it, the truck will have hit the car. Five seconds after that, they’re out . . .’ Baxter trailed off as he realised that Tony’s attention had wandered, and turned to see why. ‘Damn,’ he said as he saw Bianca.
‘All right, guys, knock it off,’ said Holly Jo. ‘It’s not as if you’ve never seen a woman before.’
‘Not one as stunning as this,’ said Adam, grinning broadly. He swaggered across the room to the pair. ‘Not that there was anything wrong with the way you were before, but right now you look like a million dollars.’
‘Only a quarter of a million,’ Bianca reminded him. She stopped, teetering for a moment on her towering shoes. ‘Oh! Bloody heels.’
‘They look great,’ Adam said, giving her legs an admiring look. ‘But they’d also look good kicked off at the foot of a bed.’
She couldn’t help blushing, the overbearing Vanwall persona so different from Adam’s usual self. ‘Well, er, they will be,’ she managed to say. His smile took on a more lascivious curl. ‘My bed, after we’re done tonight. And I go straight to sleep.’
The unctuous smirk faded, but didn’t disappear. ‘It’s gonna be a long night. Who knows what’ll happen?’
‘What’ll happen,’ said Tony firmly, with more than a hint of disapproval, ‘is that we complete the mission and get the hell out of here. Okay, the taxi is rigged. Adam, it’s up to you to get Zykov out of the casino and into that cab. Make sure that he’s mad enough to come after you to get his money back. We’ll handle the rest. Bianca, Billy’s got some equipment for you.’
From his use of the word ‘equipment’, she half expected to see a selection of guns and lasers laid out on the table for her, but instead found a pair of large gold earrings and two small plastic cases, similar to the kind used to hold memory cards. ‘These aren’t just to make me look pretty, I assume.’
‘No, no, these are something special,’ said Billy. He picked up one of the earrings, cradling it in his palm. ‘There’s a skittle camera inside it. It points forward, so it’ll see more or less what you see. It’ll set off the metal detector, but then it’s a piece of metal, so they’d expect