Free Suddenly a Spy by Heather Huffman

car into gear and peel out. She forced
herself to slow down to the speed limit, knowing it would be just
her luck to get a ticket.
    “I am so sorry for bringing this to you,
Courtney.”
    “You had to go to someone,” she answered
without hesitation. “I’m glad it was me.”
    It took Veronica a second to swallow the lump
that had formed in her throat, when she did, she instructed the car
to call her brother.
    “Jeff, thank God you answered.”
    “Miss me already?”
    “I’m on my way over. I need your help.”
    “Twice in one weekend? You’re really going to
owe me.”
    “This is serious.”
    “When will you be here?”
    “Two minutes? I need to park in your garage;
I don’t want anyone seeing my car from the street.”
    “I’ll be right down.”
    She hung up and stopped on the street in
front of his house, waiting for him to move his car out of the
garage. Once the cars had been shuffled, she opened the back door
and began untangling canines.
    “How many dogs do you have in there?” he
asked, pulling his attention away from Courtney. “It’s like a
freaking clown car.”
     
     
     

Chapter Nine
     
    The light from the computer screen flickered
in the dark room. Veronica studied the monitor with pursed lips.
With Courtney under Jeff’s protection, she had borrowed his car and
gone to the office. The FBI Headquarters seemed as safe a place to
be as any, even if it was late on a Sunday evening.
    As happy as Jeff had been to have Courtney
staying in his home, he’d been a little reluctant to part with his
beloved Camaro. Not that Ronnie could blame him. She loved her
Volkswagen and the way its sleek engine purred. But there was
something rather delicious about the way his Camaro’s powerhouse
engine growled. She felt like she could take on Marko Kulenović
himself when driving Jeff’s car.
    But now, staring at a computer screen and
running dangerously low on coffee, she felt like she could barely
put a coherent thought together. The phone on her desk rang and she
jumped, quickly steadying her coffee cup before it spilled on her
keyboard. She recognized the number on her display screen and
hesitated briefly before answering it.
    “So, I’m standing here—in the morgue—looking
at what I can only assume is your handiwork,” the frustration was
thick in her husband’s voice.
    “I told you I could take care of myself.”
    “Taking care of it would have been somewhere
along the lines of quietly disposing of the assassin with one shot.
Preferably not in our dog-walker’s living room.”
    “Ex-dog-walker. You fired her, remember?”
    “To protect her. Fat lot of good that did
with you running straight to her house.”
    “I’ve already apologized to Courtney,
Dick.”
    “Well I’m sure that made it all better.”
    “Jeff called in a few favors. The Feds are
claiming jurisdiction. There won’t be any trouble with the police
over this. I’ll replace her door. It’ll all be okay.”
    “When are you going to start listening? This
isn’t a game.”
    “You’re right; it is time to stop playing
around. I’m done waiting for you to come clean, to include me. I’m
going to take care of this myself.”
    “That’s not what I meant.”
    “I’ve got to go. I’ve got a flight to catch
and a lot of work to do beforehand.”
    “To Denver, right? Please tell me to
Denver.”
    “If that’ll help you sleep at night,” she
hung up the phone with a certain amount of satisfaction. She turned
back to her computer screen with a new resolve. After another hour
of rifling through countless computer and paper files, she felt
reasonably sure that Marko would be in Bari, Italy if she got their
before he wrapped up the business he’d mentioned.
    A few phone calls and favors later, she was
pretty sure she could find him, too. In fact, by the time her
flight to Italy was taxiing on the runway, she was feeling pretty
darn proud of herself. She’d even managed to dismantle her handgun
to store it in a