Chicklit meets James Bond at high speed…

CHAPTER ONE

It wasn’t my fault.

But the Swiss police weren’t listening, and half an hour after the ambulance carried away the last of the thugs, I was hustled into the American embassy and plopped in front of my former employer like a naughty child.

I didn’t feel like a naughty child. I felt put upon—by my would-be attackers, by the police, and by the world in general. And China. Did I mention China?

“Maybe I shouldn’t have let you quit. You’ve been gone less than a week, and already you’ve managed to create an international incident.” The ambassador glared at me over the rims of her reading glasses. I’d always suspected they were for effect, but that didn’t lessen the impact of that piercing stare now.

“It wasn’t my fault.” I was beginning to sound like a broken record, and even to my ears, the words had developed a petulant edge. “Madam ambassador,” I added hastily, casting a glance at the only other person in the library. He was a thin, graying man of average height, and he was watching me with unconcealed fascination. If he’d been in an old black and white movie, I’d’ve been tempted to call him dapper. Since he wasn’t, “prissy” came more quickly to mind. I had no idea why he was there. I only wished that he would go away. Or at least stop staring at me as if I’d grown horns.

The ambassador—or Mrs. Mehlaland, as I had come to know her over the past year—sighed and shook her head, her dangling earrings swinging at the motion. She was never a flashy dresser, but the aura of quiet expense that hung around her black gown and her rich, understated jewelry told me that whatever dinner party I had interrupted had been an important one.

My timing was as good as my luck that night, it seemed.

“I was attacked,” I explained patiently. Again. “Outside my apartment—my friend’s apartment. I defended myself.”

Mrs. Mehlaland ostensibly scanned the document in front of her again even though I very well knew that she remembered every word of the terse report. “It says here that five men went to the hospital.” Her eyes flickered back to mine. “Five. And you suffered no injury.”

I met her gaze levelly. “So I defended myself well. Nothing wrong with that. And I do have an injury—one of them had brass knuckles, and he bruised my arm. See?” I displayed the wounded forearm, the spreading purple splotch livid against the skin.
The man made a noise that might have been a snort or might have been laughter, and the corner of Mrs. Mehlaland’s mouth quirked up.

Then the library door opened, and one of the embassy aides came in, whispered something to the ambassador, and handed her a paper before slipping out again. Mrs. Mehlaland’s eyebrows rose as she read it. “It seems we have a confession of sorts. Congratulations, Rue. It seems you foiled a kidnapping plot.”

“Kidnap? Me?” I didn’t bother to hide my disbelief. “But I haven’t got any money. Why would anyone want to kidnap me?”

“I suppose they assumed that I still had fond feelings for my children’s ex-nanny,” she said. “We received a call demanding ransom at about the same time you said you were attacked.”

“I was attacked,” I said tightly.

She waved a hand dismissively. “I don’t doubt you.” Her expression turned wry. “Though I did hire a nanny with martial arts expertise because I wanted her to protect my children, not because I thought she might need to defend herself. That settles it, though. I’ll deal with all this, but you’re to be my guest until the investigation is over or until your visa is approved. I don’t want to risk you getting attacked again. Where are you heading next? Tibet?”

“China,” I said, fighting the sinking sensation in my belly. “But I really don’t—“

“No buts. You may have your old room for the duration.” She paused and smiled. “Michael and Annabel really will be delighted to see you again. They’ve missed you so much that I could almost be jealous.”

I returned her smile despite myself, knowing full well that the children adored their mother almost as much as she doted on them. “I’ll be delighted, too,” I said, trying to sound pleased as I resigned myself what amounted to house arrest. Only a few days, I assured myself. Surely my visa would arrive in just a few more days. Even the Chinese bureaucracy couldn’t be that slow. Then I’d leave the country, and all this would be just another travel memory.

If only I’d known then how very wrong I was.

###

“Ruby Torres?”

I stopped dead. I love my parents. I really do. But every time I hear that name come out of anyone’s mouth, I have to stifle the mental image of strangling them both and screaming, Why?

“Rue,” I snapped instead.

“Ah, yes, that’s right,” the voice said in a preoccupied tone of something just remembered.

“Rue.”

I turned around to face the prissy man from the night I was dragged into the library. A week ago, it was now. A week of being grounded as if I were thirteen instead of twenty-six. I wasn’t made to be cooped up. I get cabin fever. The cabin plague.

The man was looking at me expectantly. What did he think? That I’d explode? Start doing back flips and flying through the air like some Wu Shu actor in a Hong Kong special effects extravaganza?

“Yes?” I asked icily.

He cleared his throat, casting around as if it just occurred to him that staring was rude. “Ah, yes, Miss Torres.” And now his voice had a vague, fatherly tone. “I’ve spoken with the ambassador about you, and it seems that by all accounts you’re a remarkable woman.”

“Thanks,” I said, not meaning it. I leaned against the wall of the hallway and crossed my arms over my chest, glancing surreptitiously around to see who might have escorted him in. This was the residential floor of the embassy, and I’d never known a guest to be allowed to wander around at large. But no one else was in sight.

“Yes, yes,” the man repeated. “You graduated from high school at sixteen and Stanford at nineteen? And you went for your Ph.D. in linguistics at Potsdam’s Institute for Linguistics?”

“Institut für Linguistik. I didn’t finish.” I made my tone as flat and unfriendly as I could without insulting the ambassador’s guest outright, but the man just nodded amiably.

“Yes, but you didn’t fail out. You liked your summer travels better than your studies. So when you were twenty-two, you left on a three-week vacation to Greece and didn’t return. Left a fellowship, several well-received publications, and a very promising career. And never looked back?”

I lifted an eyebrow. He acted as if he were going down some sort of checklist of my life, but he wasn’t reading from anything. He just kept looking at me, a slightly foolish expression on his face. “You can’t see to steer if you keep looking back over your shoulder. What’s this about, anyway?” I asked.

He blinked at me. “In a moment. I just need to verify… You went to India last year? To, um, West Bengal? There was an incident with a robber, and he, yes, the official report said he fell off the train and broke his neck?”

I stiffened, remembering the flash of the knife as the man lunged at me, the twist, the flip, and his expression of amazement as he flew out the door– It had been an accident. A terrible accident that no one was supposed to know anything about.

“You’re really freaking me out now. How the hell did you find out about that?” My hands dropped to my sides.

“I have my sources,” the man said, pursing his lips.

“Well, take your sources and get out of my life.” I shifted without thinking, balancing myself on the balls of my feet, and the man must have noticed, for his air of abstraction evaporated, and he reaching into his jacket—I barely kept myself from jumping him—and pulled out a business card. God, I’ve got to get out of this prison before I go totally nuts, I thought. I took the card from his hand and glanced at it.

Reginald Toplofty, Director, Loss Prevention, Arden Group Banking and Financial Services. Then the usual mess of numbers, addresses, and logos.

Toplofty. “Is this a joke?” I demanded.

“Maybe.” He gave me a slightly ridiculous smile, and I mentally gave him a monocle and a cane. The image was perfect. Too perfect.

“So? Anyone can print out a business card.”

He nodded sagely, as if I’d just made some insightful observation. “True, true. But I didn’t. You may ask the ambassador, if you wish. I am the respectable representative of a respectable firm. Surely you’ve heard of us?”

I snorted. “Who hasn’t?” Arden was one of the biggest financial companies in the world. Banks, insurance companies, corporate accounting, stocks and bonds—there might be some area of finance Arden wasn’t involved with somehow, but if there was, it probably took place in the deep Amazon where they hadn’t gotten around to minting coins yet and used parrot feathers instead.

“Very true,” the man—Toplofty—said. “And we’re always looking for promising young individuals in my department. People with a certain flair and skill.”

“Are you offering me a job?” I could just see myself as the man’s high-heeled personal assistant-cum-bodyguard. Uh-huh. And just how personal would that assistant be?
“Why, yes. Yes, I am.” He seemed surprised at his own admission.

“Great,” I said, and I flicked the business card at him in a flat arc, turned my back, and strode toward my bedroom door. My parents will be delighted, I thought. They’d viewed my wanderings with a mixture of confusion, apprehension, guilt, and horror, and I could just hear the relief in my mother’s voice when I told her that I’d been hired by a company as, well, respectable as Arden.

“How wonderful! Wait until you father hears… How did you find the job? The Swiss ambassador?”

“American ambassador to Switzerland. And no, she didn’t get it for me. Arden has been scouting for women who hospitalize street thugs and push armed robbers out of moving trains.”

Yeah. Right.

“Miss Torres. Wait!”

At my door, I turned back around and treated Toplofty to my best withering glare.
He didn’t blink. “You haven’t heard the salary yet.”

I made an impatient noise and turned back around.

“One hundred and fifty thousand a year. Plus bonuses for every job.”

I stopped dead in my tracks. I didn’t need the money—okay, maybe I needed some money, but I didn’t want the money—but the sheer generosity of that offer made me curious. Clearly, this was no job for a personal assistant. “Chances for advancement?”

“Numerous,” he assured me.

My curiosity heightened. What kind of job would call for a multilingual martial artist, after all? “Come inside,” I said, opening my bedroom door. “Let’s talk.”

###

And to make a long story short, three days later, I was a Loss Prevention Field Division Representative.

Why? Well, my Chinese visa never came, and Mrs. Mehlaland verified Toplofty’s reliability—“An old friend, stops by whenever he’s in the country, very interested when he overheard your troubles, of course I indulged him” —and the job sounded exciting, and, okay, I was curious. I don’t know if curiosity killed the cat, but it’s gotten me into more than one tight spot. All my tight spots, really, since it’s the reason I’d been traveling around the Old World for four years. So I might have been a bit hasty, but what can I say? I always am.

As for the job, well… It wasn’t what I had expected. It wasn’t anything I had dreamed of. Quite simply, the Field Division’s job was to keep Arden from being ripped off in high-stakes deals. Insurance, investments, questionable financial numbers—whenever there was a problem or a potential problem big enough, one of the field reps was sent to investigate.

I felt like I was signing up as a secret agent, and I half expected to see some sort of plausible deniability clause in the paperwork. But there wasn’t, of course, because Arden was a company, not a country. It could get into big trouble for that kind of thing.
And big trouble is what we were supposed to keep the company out of.

“We give our field reps very long leashes,” Toplofty had said, suddenly looking very shrewd and not foolish at all. “We find that choosing reliable employees and giving them generous powers of discretion is the most effective way to achieve our corporate goals.” He paused. “But whatever you do, if it is in the least bit questionable, I never want to have to hear about it. From anyone.”

So the reps were shuttled around the world, conducting investigations, putting out fires.
“I won’t pretend it isn’t dangerous work. It is, and every year we lose at least one man.” He gave me a dry smile. “Don’t worry—your first assignments will be on an apprentice basis only. Low-risk. Though that does not give you any excuse to be lazy—“

The mention of danger, even death, should have cooled my interest in the whole scheme. It didn’t, of course. Even slouched in my favorite chair in the comfortable, familiar room that had been mine for almost a year, my pulse started to race. Images from random James Bond movies flashed through my mind. Ninja harem girls, castles of ice, chases on horseback… It was ridiculous, but I smiled.

And a week later, I was handed my first assignment.

“Brazil?” I blurted. “But I don’t know Portuguese!”

“I thought you were an expert in linguistics,” Toplofty said mildly.

I frowned over the debriefing sheet at my new employer. “I can speak Spanish, Italian, German, French, and Russian. I know some Arabic, Mandarin, Hindi, and Japanese. I don’t know Portuguese. I can muddle though in Portuguese.”

“Well, you’ll be fluent enough soon. Or at least, you’ll have the chance to be.” He tapped the sheet, and I saw what my eyes had scanned over the first time I read it. I was to go in for training, first four weeks at a language academy in Lisbon and then another month at the Field Division headquarters in—of all places—Denver, Colorado. More school. Great. Just what I needed. But I felt a smile tugging at the corners of my mouth.

“But I’ve never even been to Brazil,” I said, meaning to grumble. It came out sounding eager instead. Samba dancers, wild nightlife, teeming cities, and dark, primordial forest stretching mile after verdant mile…

Brazil!