Free Masks (Out of the Box Book 9) by Robert J. Crane Page A

so Nadine slipped off her clothes and stepped into the enormous tile shower, her feet cold now that she couldn’t pay for the cost of the floor heat to run anymore.
    She turned on one of the eight different jets and looked up and around in the cavelike darkness of her shower. Her mansion was old, the latest renovation a decade past. She’d thought about doing another, it had been on her list, but she’d been hesitant for one reason—she didn’t want to expose the house’s last great secret, the one that the previous owner had made sure didn’t show up during the last renovation. When he’d sold the place, he’d told her about it only after they’d signed on the dotted line. He’d died alone a few months later, luckily for her, which meant—hopefully—she was the only one who knew that the shower held a panic room.
    She pushed at the loose tile to her left and it opened just enough to reveal a keypad. It was outdated by any modern standard, but it made a satisfying clicking noise as she punched the code. Squares of tile yielded to her touch after that, the door swinging open as she stepped out of the darkness of the shower and into a deeper darkness inside the panic room.
    She shut the door behind her, finally daring to breathe. Her skin was wet from the shower, her hair dripping, but she didn’t care. She kept a towel just inside the door, and retrieved it and the robe she left on the hook, drying off and putting her wet hair over her shoulder.
    She slipped into the seat in front of her. An old computer console sat there, with emergency phone line access, its green, phosphor-lit screen the height of seventies technology. In the top corner of the room, there was a blinking light where the previous owner had installed a cell phone repeater with an antenna drilled through the steel so he could get reception. It, too, shone in the darkness. She ignored it, instead reaching into an old shoebox to the left and retrieving a burner phone, one of a dozen secreted away in here, and dialed a number on it.
    It hadn’t been built as a panic room. Solid metal all the way around, it was a fallout shelter, designed to withstand the predicted nuclear holocaust that everyone had feared in the days of the Cold War. Nadine smirked at that thought, at the casual idiocy of those who’d come before. It was lucky they’d planned for this, though, because now she had her own little secret lair, cut off from the rest of the house, where the FBI couldn’t get to her. Hell, if she’d known they were coming, she would have hidden out in here, waiting until they’d left, and then chartered a private plane and ditched the country. She could have come back later, after her name was cleared, instead of having to wade through this hell up to her neck.
    “Abner,” she said when he answered on the other side. “It’s me.”
    There was a pause and Abner spoke in his cool tones, inflected with just a suggestion of worry. “I saw what happened on the news. I was putting together a response when—”
    “It’s good you didn’t have to act,” Nadine said, a sense of relief filling her. “I’m sure the NYPD would have wondered—”
    “Pre-paid bodyguarding services,” Abner said, precise, as he always was. “A standard preparation in the world of finance. I have a team standing by in case this happens again.”
    “Hopefully it won’t,” Nadine said, sagging against the chair, letting it spin lazily as she regarded the steel ceiling by the dim fluorescent light. “How goes the progress?”
    “I am making inroads,” Abner said. “The evidence they have against you at the SEC is … strong. The FBI’s case is less so, and easier to sabotage.” She could imagine him, sitting at his desk, his wire-frame glasses catching the overhead light, his long fingers running over a list that he’d written in an innocuous code only he could understand. She’d watched him read it once, and to her it had looked like a simple to-do list: get