Free Femme Fatale by Virginia Kantra, Doranna Durgin, Meredith Fletcher

still after her. And if they weren’t after her, they were certainly after the computer keycard Lyeta had hidden. In fact, they could be nothing but desperate for it.
    I’m going to get there first.
    Chasing down Blue Crane establishments was a fool’s errand and she knew it. She needed to know where Lyeta had spent her time. For all Beth knew, Lyeta had come straight to the dock upon entering Cape Town; the last traces of her existence might be in another country altogether. So for now, until she had more information, Beth would dress the part, avoid pursuit and capture, and continue to mull the cryptic meaning of Lyeta’s last words.
    But Lyeta didn’t mean for them to be cryptic. She’d been dying, and trying to communicate. She had used shorthand, but why tell Beth anything at all unless she meant for it to be helpful? Without Lyeta’s dying confession about the keycard, Beth would have walked away regretful, but she would have walked away. And Lyetahad no incentive to send Beth on a wild-goose chase. The words, as vague as they were, had to mean something simple and obvious. Something that, in context, provided no puzzle at all.
    Beth just had to get them in context.
    But first she had to get to this wine tasting. She’d seen enough of the brochure to know it was an informal affair, more of a weekly publicity open house than a bona fide wine tasting, and she very much hoped they’d have food available. She felt positively hollow…nothing in her system since the early-morning doughnut, and all that running, leaping and evading in the meantime.
    “Beth’s rule of spy survival,” she said to the grimy, yellowed acoustic tile ceiling above her open eyes. “A growly stomach messes with stealth mode.” Another rule, left unsaid: A grimy spy messes with a cool, elegant cover.
    She found a maintenance closet and took the best sink-bath she could manage with a roll of harsh brown paper towels. Her hair, flattened by the yellow helmet and speckled with plaster flakes, suffered under a hand-soap shampoo. She washed her leotard out and hung it up to dry, snagging a baby-doll shirt from the wardrobe rack and easing back upstairs to find the toolbox that every stage manager kept on hand. The argument up on stage had given way to silence; a peek into the seating area showed only one man, deeply involved in making notes all over a script. She crept to the back of the stage, well out of his earshot.
    She dulled the hacksaw blade and dealt herself several nasty cuts, but eventually the hardened metal of the security cuff gave way. She carefully buried it under the rest of the garbage in the bin by the back door. Then it was back downstairs to hunt out a dress and makeup.
    When she emerged, the only thing still Beth about her was the sling pack and squall parka—and those, she planned to stash before she entered the visitor’s building at the winery. She wanted them close. Otherwise, with her hair pulled back into a clip with a style that was at once casual and classy, and her dancer’s body poured into a slinky black dress with a plethora of top strapping and plenty of skin showing along her back and shoulders, she was ready to slip into the Cape Town nightlife. Silver evening shoes with more heel than she preferred adorned her feet, and she had a lined, black velvet shawl to cut out the chill of the night. Neither were ideal; they didn’t give her the flexibility to take action—or to retreat into the night—that she might need.
    Then again, she had danced in higher heels than these. She could certainly fight in them if she had to.
    But she wouldn’t plan on it. In, search, and out again. She didn’t know how the nondescripts had found her at Chandler’s hotel and she couldn’t assume they wouldn’t find her at the winery.
    She breezed out of the theater as though she owned it, checked the banker’s clock next to the theater front, and headed for the wine country bus stop with a firm, confident step.
     
    Even