Pink Slip Read online

  Pink Slip

  The Spies Who Loved Her

  Katrina Jackson

  Trigger Warnings

  Hey! So I’ve never written a romantic suspense before and actually never thought I would. I don’t normally do trigger warnings, but I appreciate that y’all might want them. I’ll try to incorporate them from here on out since this book seemed to be crying out for them.

  So PINK SLIP has some graphic descriptions of violence throughout on and off page, deaths on- and off-page and a character is maimed in chapter sixteen.

  If you would prefer not to read this, I understand!

  If you’re looking for something less violent by me I highly recommend actually everything else I’ve written. I’m normally low angst and high heat. ☺

  prologue one: Lane

  prologue two: Monica

  PART ONE

  one

  Monica

  two

  three

  four

  five

  Lane

  six

  seven

  eight

  PART TWO

  nine

  ten

  eleven

  twelve

  Monica

  thirteen

  Lane

  fourteen

  fifteen

  Lane

  sixteen

  Monica

  seventeen

  epilogue

  prologue one: Lane

  three years ago

  When Lane was a teenager, he thought he’d be a baseball player. He was a solid pitcher, could catch a ball and had a pretty good eye for stealing bases, because he liked to show off. At fourteen those seemed like all of the skills necessary to make it to the majors.

  But then his father got a new job and moved their family to DC and whatever trajectory his life had been on shifted dramatically. Which isn’t to say that he would have played ball professionally if they’d stayed in Texas. He wouldn’t. But after the move, all of the things he’d once cared about felt like a million miles away and baseball became the least of his priorities. His family’s cross-country move to the Capitol precipitated the worst few years of his life. But he’d survived them and graduated from high school. And then he packed all of his few belongings, including the old stack of Dodgers baseball cards his father had given him - sometime before he’d left his mother and two kids for his secretary like the absolute piece of shit he was – and he vowed to never return to DC if he could help it for the rest of his life. He hadn’t really wanted to go to college, but he needed to put as much distance as he could between his trifling father and his broken mother. College was just a place to be for a while, as he tried to figure out what to do with himself next.

  But then he met Monica during his junior year and the trajectory of his life as an aimless frat boy shifted again.

  They were in an intro Political Science course that they both hated and transferred out of immediately. But options were limited and they clearly had similar schedule restrictions because when he walked into the Introduction to Criminology course he recognized her immediately, and sat in the open seat behind her as if compelled.

  Throughout the semester, Lane didn’t think much about Monica while sitting behind her in class twice a week, besides that she was fucking beautiful and it seemed odd that a girl who scowled as much as she did always smelled like peaches. It was such a happy and bright scent for someone who seemed to be neither. And he might have gone on not thinking much about her if she hadn’t saved his life.

  There’s nothing like drunkenly walking home from the pizza place just across the street from campus, almost getting mugged and then having the girl you vaguely had a crush on show up in her campus security outfit and scare the shit out of your would be muggers to help reset your life’s priorities. Maybe it was a little bit of hero worship. Or maybe it was that, after two years getting drunk at frat parties on weekends and fucking whoever seemed interested, while managing to eke by on a bottom of the barrel GPA, Lane only realized as he looked at Monica that he hadn’t learned anything of use in college.

  Because how was he a junior and only just discovering that he had a thing for a woman in uniform? As Monica walked him back to his dorm room without ever speaking more than two sentences (“Are you okay? Do you want to create an incident report?”), Lane had also realized that the strong and silent type did it for him. In a big way.

  What followed were a few really pathetic months of him running after Monica and her not giving him the time of day. He preferred not to remember that time in their relationship. Monica brought it up constantly. He had been just about to give up on pursuing her and chalk his infatuation up to the lingering effects of the adrenaline spike during his near mugging when he saw Monica rip a flyer from a message board in the International Affairs building for an internship program with the CIA.

  He ran after her, knowing instinctively that this was his chance. “So the CIA, huh? You thinking of signing up?” His Texas drawl, which normally just added a faint lilt to his words by this point in his life, was a bit thicker since he considered it to be about 30% of his charm. Although it hadn’t worked on Monica thus far.

  “You don’t just sign up to the CIA. Stop stalking me,” she replied matter-of-factly.

  “I’m not stalking you. We have class together.”

  She turned to him then and looked him up and down as if to confirm his identity.

  “Are you shitting me? I sit behind you twice a week.”

  “I don’t turn around in class. My education is important to me so I pay attention to lecture. Which is more than I can say for you.”

  Lane’s eyebrows knit together. “If you don’t turn around, then how do you know if I pay attention or not?”

  She opened her mouth to speak and then snapped it shut. She stopped walking and turned to look at him. Lane wanted to laugh. He had her. He knew it. But as he watched the frustration play over her face, he figured that this was a delicate moment. It wasn’t clear if it she was annoyed with him or herself, but he could bet that for someone who had for half the semester only displayed one singular emotion – focus – she probably hated that she had given herself away so easily. So for once in his life he stayed quiet.

  And twenty years later, he was damn happy that he had. Even if keeping his trap shut that day in the quad had directly led to the circumstances that had him hanging off of the side of a garbage truck on a hot early spring day in suburban Trenton. The stench of the refuse had long since burned away every hair in his nostrils.

  Lane banged on the side of the truck, signaling to the driver to stop.

  He checked the address and the house’s exterior, confirming that they were finally at the target’s residence. If their intel was correct, it would be empty. But intel was never foolproof, so he proceeded as if there might be someone home; or at least a nosy neighbor.

  He and the other agent hanging off the truck’s sides jumped down and grabbed the trash cans from the curb, emptying them into the waste collector. Lane took the now empty cans up the short driveway of the middle class pre-fabricated mansion, which was definitely the best house on the block, to the gate leading to the backyard. He reached over the top and unlocked it, shaking his head that a man alleged to have accepted close to $3 million from the Russian mob wasn’t even smart enough to buy a fence that might make breaking into his house somewhat of a challenge.

  Once he’d slipped into the backyard, Lane set the trash cans down and stripped off the dingy coveralls of his disguise and placed them on the cans. Underneath he wore a very unremarkable pair of jeans and a plain white t-shirt.

  “In the yard,” he said just loud enough to be heard.

  “Good. Hurry up,” Monica said, her voice coming through t
he transmitter in his ear.

  “Do you want this done fast? Or do you want this done right?”

  “I’ve been telling you for twenty years that the answer is both,” she said. He could hear the playful note in her voice that most people missed.

  He smiled but didn’t respond. He needed to concentrate and they needed to keep their chatter to a minimum.

  “Security system?” He asked as he leaned around the corner of the house to peer through the large floor-to-ceiling windows that separated the backyard from a spacious chef’s kitchen.

  “State of the art. Can’t hack it externally. When you set it off, you need to get to the control panel immediately and manually connect the decrypting device to it. I’ll reroute the company’s call and buy you some time.”

  “How much?”

  “Six minutes max. So work fast.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  The sliding door was locked and Lane pulled a lock picking set from his back pocket and bent down. He almost wished that the lock had been harder to pick. But he also wasn’t a man who enjoyed taking unnecessary risks. He had a good life and being a spy wasn’t the most important part of it. There was no adrenaline rush in the world that would be worth sacrificing one minute with Monica.

  When he pulled the sliding door open he expected to hear a blast of sound. But the house was eerily quiet and he stopped a few steps inside.

  “Silent alarm. Move,” Monica demanded in the hard tone that Lane loved.

  Lane had memorized the house’s schematics and turned to his right. He pushed open the pantry door and located the security panel behind it. He pulled the decrypting device from his back pocket and slid the connective chord into a small port underneath the panel.

  “In,” he announced and waited. He held his breath and listening to the quiet house for any signs that someone might be home.

  “Six minutes,” Monica said eventually.

  He disconnected the device and took off quickly but cautiously through the kitchen and then down the front hallway to the target’s office. He tamped down on the feeling that this was too easy. He wasn’t new to this. Most rookies thought every mission was a battle and if it wasn’t they assumed it must be a trap. Lane had been young, dumb and cocky after following Monica into The Agency like the love sick puppy he was. But after a particularly bloody take down of a German double agent that left him with a few broken ribs, a concussion and some sprained fingers because he’d let the other man goad him into an old-school fist fight rather than neutralize him as he should have, Monica had put her foot down. “I’m not marrying a man with a death wish. So if you want to be with me, you need to act like you want to live.” Lane had been so distracted by the forcefulness with which she’d said so many words at him all at once that it had taken a while for those words to sink in.

  Now they were in his bones. Her voice overrode every Agency protocol, every mission directive and ever biological instinct. Monica said he had to come home to her; so he did. Simple as that.

  He took a cloning device from his other pocket and connected it to the computer tower. He knew the target’s log-in but not the password. The Agency’s hackers had given him some options that he mentally filtered through in his head. He mentally disregarded the ones that seemed difficult to remember, because any man who had such a low fence and a standard lock on his exterior doors was unlikely to have bothered creating an elaborate string of random numbers and letters that might prove difficult to crack. And soon enough he was going to regret it.

  It took Lane three tries (wife, daughter, son) before he got it: Adam82005; the target’s son’s name and birthdate. He shook his head in disgust. Barely even a challenge. Once the computer was unlocked he began downloading the hard drive. He checked his watch and noted that he still had just over four minutes. So it was about time that something went wrong.

  Lane’s heart sped up as he heard the front door open.

  He knew, by the sound of the shoes and the fast, squirrelly pace of the footsteps, that it was the target.

  He pushed the office door closed silently and pressed himself against the wall behind it.

  The sound of his blood was racing in his ears. His eyes darted to the computer screen. The download was halfway completed.

  When the door opened, the target didn’t have enough time to register the scene on his desk before Lane put him in a rear chokehold. He thrashed around wildly in pure panic. But Lane kept his grip strong and calmly the waited for the target to drift into unconsciousness. This was the easy part.

  “ETA?” Monica’s voice invaded his ear as he was pulling the target onto the couch across the room. He pulled his lock-picking kit from his back pocket and grabbed the syringe Monica insisted he always have in the field, just in case.

  The liquid he injected into the target would keep him unconscious for a few hours and then break down in his system, mimicking alcohol. He’d have the worst hangover of his life and he wouldn’t remember anything of this encounter. It was more than he probably deserved.

  Lane moved to the target’s bar, filled a tumbler with whiskey and then put the glass into the target’s hand, pressing his fingers around the glass. He released his hold and watched the liquid splash onto the couch and carpet. Intel indicated that the target was a mostly high functioning alcoholic. This would certainly not be the first time he’d woken in his office this way.

  The scene set, Lane moved back to the desk. “Twenty seconds,” he said, finally answering Monica.

  She didn’t answer, but he knew her well enough to know that her lips were probably set in a hard line and she’d nodded, even though he couldn’t see it.

  The computer dinged. The download was complete.

  “Done,” Lane said and disconnected the cloning device. He closed the office door behind him and sprinted across the kitchen. He pushed the sliding door closed and headed out of the backyard the way he’d come. He grasped the coveralls but didn’t put them on. Out on the street he walked casually – not too fast but certainly not too slow – down the street, stripping the latex gloves from his hands, the garbage truck in his sights. When he was close, he crossed the street behind the truck and tossed his coveralls and gloves into the waste receptacle and nodded surreptitiously to the other agent - a sign that the mission was done and now it was time to scatter.

  “On my way,” he said as he turned off of the target’s street. There was an old black sedan that Monica had parked here the evening before specifically for his getaway.

  “Good. Now hurry up and get to The Warehouse. We’re interviewing another assistant.”

  Lane let out an exasperated breath as he folded his long, lanky body into the front seat. “Can’t we just let The Agency hire one?”

  “We did that last time,” Monica reminded him. “He almost got us both killed with dry cleaning.”

  “Fine. But I’m running home to shower. I can still smell that damn garbage truck on me.”

  “I was just about to suggest that.” Lane heard the smile in her voice. “I’ll meet you there. Love you.”

  “Love you too, boss.”

  “Don’t drive too fast,” she said and then disconnected the line.

  Just as Lane pulled onto the interstate, he manually rolled down the driver’s side window, snatched the receiver from his ear, tossed it out onto the highway and sped off.

  prologue two: Monica

  three years ago

  Monica liked things done her way. She liked her files in order, every book in its place and she wanted her to-do list executed to her very particular specifications.

  From the first time she’d ever laid eyes on Lane his presence had disrupted the order she craved. But that moment was not, as he remembers, the night he was almost mugged or sitting in front of him in Intro to Criminology or even before that in the Political Science class they’d both dropped after one day.

  It was two months prior. She was an incoming first year student on campus to meet with her new academic adviso
r, register for classes and get to know the campus. But Monica already knew the campus like the back of her own hands. Her father had worked as a campus security officer her entire life.

  He’d come to the Bronx from Puerto Rico when he was eighteen, met Monica’s mother through family friends a year later when he was still doing odd jobs around the neighborhood under the table while he worked on his accent, since his uncle had stressed –even before he’d bought his plane ticket to the US – that the thicker his accent, the lower his paycheck. After he met Monica’s mother, he saved every penny he earned, wanting to show her that he could provide for her and their future children. He was hired as a janitor at the university, married Monica’s mother three months later and a year after that he started as a probationary campus security officer. Monica’s father was her own personal model of the American Dream.

  That importance of hard work was Monica’s most enduring memory of her childhood. Educational success mattered to Monica’s parents, but for Monica or her two younger brothers to meet their standards, they had to put in the work. If Monica brought home an A on an exam that her parents hadn’t observed her studying for, her mother would make this sound in the back of her throat, as if tsk-ing at the fickleness of luck. But if she brought home a B for an exam that she’d spent every waking hour preparing for, her father would attach it to the fridge with a magnet as if it were the Nobel prize. Because luck runs out, but hard work is its own reward.

  So Lane was not the kind of boy she was looking for in college. Actually, she wasn’t looking for any boy or girl in college; she didn’t need the distraction. She was there to be the first person in her family to get a college degree, set a good example for her brothers, be recruited into the CIA and buy her parents the house they deserved so that they could finally retire. Her mission was clear. But as she was wandering across the large green lawn at the center of campus, she’d seen him. He was lanky, lean muscle covered in skin bronzed by the summer sun. His straight light brown hair was longer than she liked, almost touching his shoulders.