Chapter 10: The date with the enemy

Even with all the money he had access to, as expensive as his tastes had the potential to be, David still preferred things simple. He didn’t need to eat caviar or drink champagne. So he left the dinner plans up to what Jessica Scott wanted. Of course, he didn’t tell her that. He just wanted things set up so that she saw that Michael Crane had the same tastes that she had.

“That rotating stage is brilliant,” he said as they left the show. “It really gives you the feeling of movement.”

“My cousin does stage design,” she said. “So I tend to notice those things. I think that’s one of the best ones in the business.”

David nodded. “The lighting’s interesting too.”

“Brilliant,” she agreed.

He tossed over to another topic. “So what kind of food do you want,” he turned to look fully at her, “Italian, German, Thai, Chinese, Japanese, what?”

Jessica made a show of considering the options. But she didn’t have to. She’d reacted already, her eyes twitching just a little bit when he had come to the end of his list. She’s made the same twitch when he said Italian, but Japanese was more pronounced.

“I don’t know,” she said. “What do you want?”

“I was thinking maybe we could get sushi. If you don’t mind, that is.”

She smiled. “No, sushi’s great. I love sushi.”

He didn’t want to tell her that he already knew that. He’d already gone a bit far with that trick. Much farther and he’d be tipping his hand.

“So do you live in New York?” They were waiting for their food. It smelled good enough. David had eaten sushi before, a few times, and knew what to order. She was much more of an aficionado, of course. She knew exactly what she wanted, and even ordered in Japanese.

“Most of the time,” she said. “Sometimes I have to go to Washington, but the Bureau puts me up while I’m there. My apartment is on Long Island.” Like the Iced Tea.

That was good to know. It was important. She lived and worked in the area. She hadn’t been assigned there recently. It made it that much less likely that there was anything more than chance to their meeting. “Do you speak Japanese?”

“Only what I need for restaurants,” she said. David almost laughed. It sounded too much like ‘only what I read in magazines.’ She looked at him and gave him a very cute little frown. “Are you making fun of me?” She asked.

“Not at all.” He smiled. “I think it’s great that you learned that much.”

“I do speak German,” she said. “I specialized in international law at Harvard.”

“Was that for the FBI?”

She shrugged. “Not really. That was all pretty much an accident.”

She had his interest. He never really thought about how FBI agents were recruited. He knew a bit about how the CIA recruited, but not too much. Collins didn’t like talking about those days much. “An accident?”

She settled in her seat a little bit. “I was about to graduate from law school,” she said. “I’d spent some time over the summers at various internships, and I had a few leads for jobs, but there wasn’t really anything that grabbed me. Then, one day, I was on my way to an interview with a big law firm when I saw a man by the side of the road. He had a flat tire, and was trying to remove the flat with a crescent wrench.”

That sounded like a carjacking scenario to David. It was how he would do it, if he ever needed to switch cars quickly. Prey on the Good Samaritan.

“I pulled over and helped him change his tire, then I followed him to a local garage so that he could get a new tire instead of his spare.” She blushed a little. “I totally lost track of the time. By the time I thought to look at my watch, I was already late. I started freaking out, trying to call and reschedule. The guy I helped asked me what was wrong, and I ended up telling him.”

She took a breath. “Turns out the guy works for the FBI. He’s even a recruiter. He asks me what I was late for, I tell him, and he asks to take me out for a cup of coffee. Least he could do, he says. We get coffee, and by the end of the day, I’m applying for a job with the FBI, using him as a reference.”

“That’s a great story,” he said. “Strange the way life works, isn’t it?”

“How did you get into investigations?” She asked. She was prodding him for information. Information he still didn’t quite have. His forged investigator’s license was in his wallet, but he didn’t have a complete back-story planned out yet. He really should work on that. She was the inquisitive type.

“I just sort of fell into it,” he said. “It came kind of naturally.”

“I can see that,” she said. Her eyes told him she didn’t buy it. “With that Sherlock Holmes trick of yours and everything.”

David nodded, looking at the curves of her face and the movements of her lips when she talked. It was more than just trying to gather information, no matter how much he tried to deny it to himself.

Their food arrived, and Jessica pulled her chopsticks out of the white paper they were held in. She broke them apart, rubbed the splinters out of them, and dug into her food. She bit into a piece of sushi, slurped it up into her mouth, and gave a big, half embarrassed smile.

“I’m sorry,” she said, blushing a bit. “I don’t get to eat sushi all that often.”

“Why not?”

“FBI doesn’t pay all that well,” she said with a shrug. “Not just yet, anyway. Maybe someday, when I get promoted. But I’m still entry level.”

David nodded. It was one of the many, many reasons he had never gone into legitimate businesses. That and nine to five jobs just weren’t any fun. No danger.

“Well,” he said, “maybe we could do lunch tomorrow and get more.” Two days in a row would be too fast, and he knew it. But he had a trap all set, ready to spring. “Or maybe we could get Italian instead?”

She shook her head. “Mr. Crane. You continue to amaze me.”

David pretended ignorance. “What did I do?”

“My two favorite foods, one after another. How did you know?”

He shrugged. “That’s what I like,” he lied.

“You’re full of crap,” she said. “You listed a bunch of foods, checked out my reactions, and picked the ones I reacted to best, in order. If I hadn’t reacted to any of them, you would have kept going.”

David nodded. He was impressed. And frightened. She was very good. He just wasn’t sure how good.

He had to know if she suspected anything, and if she really had a chance to figure him out. He had to know, and that meant he had to spend more time with her. At least the lunch. Maybe more.

He told himself that was the reason. He told himself that he just wanted to make sure everything about the job was clean. He wasn’t making any kind of connection. He didn’t feel any genuine attraction to her. He could just walk away and never think of her again. That’s what he kept telling himself. He could dismiss her from his mind.

As soon as he was sure she wasn’t a threat.