Chapter 82

It was well past midnight when Svetlana called Simon on his cell phone. He picked up immediately. “What’s up?”

“We’ve just confirmed that Quinn is in her apartment and has gone to bed for the night. Are you up for a bit?” Svetlana answered.

“I can be,” said Simon.

“Great. Get dressed for the gym. I’ll be up in fifteen minutes.” Svetlana hung up without waiting for confirmation.

Simon got up from where he was sitting on his bed, stripped out of his suit, and was still pulling on his sweats when he heard a knock on the apartment door. He called out that it was unlocked.

A few seconds later, Svetlana poked her head in through the bedroom door. “Why do you leave your front door unlocked?”

Simon pulled a hoodie out of his closet. “Because they all do it and I don’t want to be the guy who locks his door even when he’s home.”

“Do you have one of those I can borrow?” Svetlana stepped into the room.

“A hoodie?” Simon asked and she nodded. He retrieved one from his closet. “You don’t own any hoodies, Sveta?”

“I do, but they all either have Gibraltar insignia on them or cop stuff. We’re pretty sure Quinn doesn’t know me as a member of the Loft security team and she shouldn’t spot me while we’re working on her, but just in case, I’m wearing civvies until further notice.”

“So, if Quinn sees you, she’s supposed to assume you’re just some hot, incredibly fit chick who hangs around the Loft for no good reason?” Simon asked.

Svetlana pulled on the hoodie and zipped it up over a white sports bra. “I’d hardly be the only person who fits that description.”

Simon frowned. “That’s not really true. Pretty much everybody around here has a job ... except maybe Casey ... and Paige ... and Ceri, I guess.”

Svetlana rested a hand on her hip. “Okay, if hot, fit chicks who hang around the Loft with nothing to do are rare, does Quinn know that? She seems pretty contemptuous of the mass of humanity.”

“Good point.” Simon said and gestured to the door. “Shall we?”

“It wasn’t a point. It was a question. Do you think Quinn would get suspicious if she saw me and I didn’t seem to have any reason for being in the Loft? You know her as well as anyone and you obviously understand holding most people in contempt,” said Svetlana.

Simon shot her a look. “Have I offended you somehow?”

Svetlana looked puzzled for a moment, then shook her head. “No, I never got the sense you held me in contempt. I was just explaining why I considered you qualified to answer that question. If there’s a chance I could queer this operation by making her suspicious, I should either establish a backstory or just stay off-site whenever she’s here.”

Simon frowned. “Shouldn’t you have a backstory ready anyway, just in case?”

Svetlana shook her head. “I have several ready to use as appropriate and I’m confident I could make one up on the spot with reasonable proficiency. But a backstory isn’t established until people already think it’s true. Like, if my backstory was that I was sleeping with you, I’d let your friends see me leaving your room in the morning wearing something more appropriate to the night before or...”

“That’s the first backstory that comes to mind?” Simon smirked.

“Yes, actually. Sex backstories are easy to establish because people are inclined both to believe them and to spread them around. On top of that, you’re single and I’m an incredibly fit hot chick, so I’m guessing you wouldn’t mind if people thought we were hooking up, would you?”

Simon knew he wasn’t good at reading people in the moment, but there was something about Svetlana’s words and body language that made him think she might be flirting with him. He didn’t really want to guess and get it wrong considering how much he was relying on her right now. He said, “People might seriously question your judgment, but my reputation couldn’t be anything but varnished by such a rumor.”

“The sort of people who are inclined to question my judgment have more than enough ammo by now. Ready?” Svetlana gestured to the door.

“Sure.” Simon followed her out of the room and then out of the apartment, pointedly locking the door behind him. “Where are we going again?”

“We’re doing some recon and I need a boxing lesson,” said Svetlana.

“From me? I just started learning how to box myself,” Simon pointed out.

“I don’t need you to train me for the Golden Gloves. I just need to know how to stand, how to move, maybe how to work the heavy bag if somebody walks in. You learned these things recently, so it should be fresh in your mind,” said Svetlana.

Simon didn’t answer because he was noticing how empty the Loft felt. Even past midnight, there was usually somebody in the main room, but with Dennis still on tour, Nick in Brooklyn, Max on Jayanesia, and Lev and Arwen traveling for some protest, the core energy seemed to have gone out of the place. He’d been skeptical of how long Nick’s experiment in communal living would last, but he’d thought it might be a bit longer than this.

When Svetlana hit the elevator button for ground level, Simon asked, “Aren’t we going to the gym?”

“Not here.” Svetlana shook her head, but didn’t explain further. Simon shrugged and followed her past security, out onto the street, and a block away. As they turned onto Crosby Street, he wrinkled his nose. Most of the neighborhood around the Loft was, if not upscale, the sort of place real estate agents would call “genteel and convivial,” but this particular block smelled like piss and hot garbage.

“This isn’t some object lesson on how I shouldn’t let hot women lead me down dark alleys just because they work for me, is it?” he quipped.

“I’m not just hot. I’m also incredibly fit. And no, this isn’t training. It’s an operation.” Svetlana led him to a door that, like most of the doors on this block, was flat black-painted steel set into a brick wall. She produced a key, unlocked the door, and waved him in.

Inside was a short hallway leading to a freight elevator. The same key that opened the door operated the elevator. As they ascended, Simon asked, “What is this place?”

“This is the private boxing gym where Quinn Quartermain rented a studio today during her lunch hour,” said Svetlana.

“Are we breaking into it?” Simon asked.

“No ... or at least not much. This afternoon, while you and Quinn were working, I came by here and rented the studio right next door to hers. These studios have twenty-four hour access.” Svetlana led him out of the elevator and down the hall to a wooden door marked 6C. A second key unlocked that door revealing a smallish room with a boxing ring, a couple of punching bags, and not much else. Once they were in the room, she closed and locked the door.

Simon looked around. “I assume you think she’s going to use her studio as part of her scheme to blackmail me?”

Svetlana nodded, heading for a door in one wall. “Come in here for a second.”

The space she led him into was a supply closet roughly the size of Simon’s bathroom. Even with no supplies, it wasn’t quite big enough for two people to stand in and spread their arms without touching. Simon asked, “Do you work in a lot of closets?”

“Occupational hazard of surveillance.” Svetlana knocked on the closet’s back wall and listened. “We’ve hit on a bit of luck. I only rented this studio to have access to the building, but we pulled the architect’s drawings for renovations they made a few years back. This studio and Quinn’s used to be a single room and this wall in particular was supposed to be thicker, but it looks like the contractor cut some corners. Her supply closet is on the other side of this wall.”

She put down her duffel bag, pulled out a pair of speakers, and a slim music player. “I’m going to drill a pinhole through the wall so I can see what’s on the other side. Set this up near the studio door and turn it on, please.”

Simon did as he was asked. Looking through Svetlana’s music collection seemed like a small invasion of privacy, but she’d asked him to do this and he wanted to choose carefully. After several minutes of scrolling through playlists, he chose one called “Zumba” that seemed to have a lot of fast-paced Spanish-language music on it. Once it was playing, he rejoined Svetlana in the closet.

Svetlana was lying flat on her belly with her head near the wall. “Could you hear the drill when you were standing by the door?” When Simon told her he hadn’t, she said, “Good. It’s going to be louder when I drill through, but not much. I’ll be quick.”

She extracted an electric drill from her bag and attached a long, skinny bit no wider than a ballpoint pen. The drill engine was almost silent, but the bit made a high-pitched whine as it dug into the wall. Simon waited for her to finish drilling before he spoke. “Not that I’m complaining, but should I be here for this? Isn’t this Gibraltar stuff?”

Svetlana retrieved a length of stiff wire with an LED and camera at one end and started feeding it through the hole she’d just drilled. “This is indeed Gibraltar stuff and, if you want me to keep you out of it, I can come back later with more appropriate backup, but I do need backup and you’ve shown a certain willingness to be involved in the operational side of things. If you’re going to put yourself in dangerous situations because you get off on them, you could benefit from some comfort level in the field.”

“I don’t think I necessarily get off on dangerous situations,” protested Simon.

Svetlana glanced back at him long enough to give him a look, then focused on plugging the end of the camera wire into an iPad. “Don’t you?”

“I ... may get off on situations that sometimes have the potential to put me in danger. That’s not exactly the same thing,” Simon said weakly.

“So, you’re not turned on right now?” Svetlana opened an app and started tapping controls.

If Dennis were here instead of Simon, he would know whether or not to flirt and exactly what to say if flirting were appropriate. Simon, on the other hand, was not in his element. “I ... that could be for a lot of reasons. Maybe I’m just really into empty rooms, big closets, and ... drilling.”

He didn’t mean to look at Svetlana’s ass as he said that, but she was wearing what looked like yoga pants and, as he had acknowledged, remarkably fit. She glanced back and clearly caught him looking. As a grainy night vision image appeared on the screen of her pad, she said, “Well, I do get off on dangerous situations which is kind of a blessing and a curse in this business. It means that I enjoy my work, but if my professionalism were ever to slip...” She shrugged. “Ah, good. That is her closet on the other side and the door is closed. I’m going to cut an access door.”

She’d taken Simon aback sufficiently that she already had her next tool assembled before he could speak. “Sveta, you know I have ... issues reading social situations, right?”

She paused in her work and turned to face him. “I do.”

“Right, so, if you’re not flirting with me, you should probably tell me you’re not flirting with me because...”

“I’m flirting with you, Simon.”

“Oh...” Simon looked her over.

She rolled neatly from prone to sitting. “I strongly suspect that our kinks line up pretty well, maybe scary-well. I’ll let you decide what you want to do with that, but in any case, we should put a pin in anything happening until we’ve resolved this situation with your little paralegal.”

“I...” Simon started to say.

“And any talk about it should probably wait until we’re not in the middle of committing a crime,” Svetlana added, holding up the tool she’d assembled. It looked like some sort of mini-chainsaw.

Simon shook his head. “Right, so ... how are you going to cut a door that she won’t notice if she opens the closet?”

Svetlana pulled out a roll of silver duct tape. “I’m not. I’m trusting that she hasn’t had time to look in the closet yet. I could go through and put a weak seal around the edges, but that would take hours, greatly increase the risk of getting caught, and necessitate my breaking out of her studio, possibly after sunrise. Instead, I’m just going to line the edges with duct tape, pull the door shut so that it kind of sticks, and trust that she’ll assume it’s just something the muscle-heads working here did because no self-respecting spy would ever do something so obvious.”

Simon frowned. “Okay, but why are you cutting a door at all, then?”

Svetlana took out a pencil and started drawing on the wall. “Well, we’re working from the assumption that Quinn’s plan is to get you alone in her studio at some point. When she does, we’ll do our best to get a team on the fire escape across the hall, but that’s going to be tricky because it faces Broadway and Broadway is never really empty. More likely, I’ll be here watching and listening on the other side of that door and, if she’s planning on doing you any harm or has an accomplice, I’ll come through and neutralize the situation.”

“That sounds ... dangerous,” said Simon.

“That’s why I’m here, to neutralize the danger,” said Svetlana.

“I meant for you. You’re just going to come through there and do what if she’s got some big guy there ready to cut my throat?” Simon asked.

Svetlana stopped drawing, put the pencil down, and turned to face him. “Simon, whatever scenarios you can imagine, I promise that we have a plan for it and the training to carry that plan out. But, we don’t have to go through with this. We have enough to squeeze Quinn already. We won’t be able to squeeze as hard as we might like, but enough to count this operation a success. You can call it off.”

Simon glared at her, sighed, and looked away. “Shit, maybe it’s not worth it.”

“It’s definitely not worth it if you get your throat slit,” said Svetlana evenly.

Simon nodded, but already his mind was heading in another direction. “Is there any chance of that actually happening?”

“I’m really the wrong person to ask that question, but I would say there’s a non-zero chance of some psycho coming out of nowhere and slitting your throat every day of your life. By engaging with this particular psycho, you’re increasing those odds. That being said, it doesn’t make a lot of sense for her to go to all the trouble of blackmailing you only to kill you, but she’s nuts, so you can’t be one hundred percent sure,” said Svetlana.

Simon managed a smile. “Is ‘nuts’ your official diagnosis, Dr. Semanov?”

Svetlana grinned at him. “If you want the technical term, I would say, ‘nutty as a fruitcake.’”

Simon took a deep breath. “Okay, remind me what we’re gaining with this?”

“Well, if we can put her in a position where she has enough to lose, we can turn her against Art Black and send his worthless ass to jail for the rest of his miserable life. We might be able to do that anyway if she’s sufficiently mercenary, but I’d personally trust her a good deal more if we had her by the cunt hairs. Also, you’ll probably get to beat and fuck Quinn Quartermain,” Svetlana reminded him.

“There is that.” Simon groaned and ran his hands over his head. “You’re the professional here. What do you think I should do, Sveta?”

Svetlana stood up to face him. Even though she was half a head shorter than him, the intensity of her gaze was intimidating. “As the professional here, I would recommend you at least consider cutting bait. As a vindictive woman with some deeply weird kinks, I really want to watch you break this bitch.” She smiled sweetly. “Does that help?”

Simon chuckled. “Actually, it does. Cut your door.”

Svetlana gestured with her head. “Check to make sure the hallway is clear, then lock the door, wait by it, and stall anyone who tries to come in long enough for me to hide what I’m doing, please. And Simon?”

“Yes?” Simon asked.

“If someone ever does have a knife to your throat and I’m there, worry about your own fucking self. White knight me and I will make you my bitch until you swear to never do it again.”

“I don’t...” Simon started to protest, then remembered what he said. “I don’t normally do that, but you just told me I had a chance of fucking you. Once I do, I’m sure I’ll be back to looking out for number one.”

Svetlana smirked, picked up her hand chainsaw, and turned it on. Simon went out, checked the hallway, then locked the door and waited. Over someone on the sound system singing what he assumed was meant to be the word “shaky” over and over again, Simon listened as Svetlana applied at least three different tools to the task of cutting a door through the wall into Quinn’s supply closet then closing that door again so that it looked too slipshod to be suspicious. She emerged peeling off Simon’s hoodie. “All right. Now show me how to box.”

Simon unzipped the hoodie he was wearing. “How is it possible that you don’t already know how to box? You look like some kind of late model Terminator.”

“I know how to fight, just not by anything you would call ‘the rules.’ I assume boxers aren’t allowed to gouge each other’s eyes out or push each other’s noses into their brains?” Svetlana held both fists up in front of her face and pumped them up and down. “Is this how we start?”

“If you’re following Marquis of Queensbury rules, yeah. Try this.” Simon showed her a proper stance. Once she had it, he added, “Okay, but we’ve already failed on the first rule of looking like a boxer.”

Svetlana jabbed playfully towards him. “What’s that?”

“We didn’t bring any boxing gloves,” said Simon.

She frowned at him. “I told you I needed a boxing lesson. Why didn’t you bring any gloves?”

Simon snorted. “Because I assumed you were bringing me down to the fully-equipped gym in the Loft, not that we were going to some sketchy boxing studio on Piss and Garbage Street for a bit of breaking and entering.”

“All right. Next time, I’ll remember to bring boxing gloves,” said Svetlana.

“Also headguards for sparring or mouthguards for an actual fight. You don’t want to try finding your teeth after a long fight otherwise,” said Simon.

“Next time.” Svetlana repeated. “Just don’t punch me in the face tonight, okay?”

“Bare-knuckle boxing can be pretty hard on the body and the fists too,” Simon warned.

Svetlana gave him a bring-it gesture. “Just ... don’t punch me in the face.”

“I like a date who knows how to set ground rules,” said Simon.

They spent the next hour going over the basics of how to stand, how to block, how to throw a legal punch and how to work the heavy and fast bags. Simon hadn’t appreciated all the things you weren’t allowed to do in boxing until he found himself stopping every few minutes to tell Svetlana that she’d found another way to break the rules.

Svetlana took it all in good humor. Having completed the dangerous, stressful part of tonight’s mission, she was relaxed and playful in a way Simon hadn’t seen before as well as being flirtatious in a way that he now recognized as such. In spite of Simon’s concerns, neither one of them landed more than a single solid hit on each other although the shot she got in on his ribs hurt like hell and was already starting to bruise.

When they finally called the session to a close, Svetlana gathered her things quickly and efficiently, leaving the music player for last. When she turned it off, silence fell over the room. She stood and listened for a moment then said, “All right.”

Once they were back at street level, she said, “So, we never saw or heard a sign of another person the whole time we were there. Nobody came up to see if we needed anything or were up to no good. If anybody was patrolling the halls, they weren’t listening very closely. There was no obvious security of any sort.”

Simon frowned. “What do you think that means?”

Svetlana shook her head. “If you’re asking why it’s like that, I have no idea. I’m observing and later I’ll report. If you want to know what it means for this operation going forward, it means that Quinn probably expects to be able to be alone with you in that studio for a long, uninterrupted stretch of time.”

Simon nodded thoughtfully. That sounded ominous, but it was an ominousness he’d come to terms with. “Can I ask you something ... off the record if you want?”

“Sure.”

“What we did tonight - the part where we cut a hole through the wall into Quinn’s studio - that was pretty clearly illegal. And it didn’t seem like it was your first time breaking the law on the job,” said Simon.

Svetlana smirked. “That’s not a question, Mr. Anderson. I hope you weren’t assuming I was just going to blurt out something incriminating.”

Simon shook his head. “No, that’s the opposite of what I want. I want to understand how you get away with that sort of thing. Do you just have amazing lawyers?”

“There are four stages of getting away with that sort of thing. Lawyers are the final stage. If things actually get to court, they’ve already gone pretty thoroughly tits up. The trick to getting away with that sort of thing is to first avoid getting caught, then if caught, try to convince the person or people who caught you not to turn you in. If they turn you in, the next step is to try to convince the arresting authorities to decide you didn’t do anything wrong or that, if it was wrong, it’s the kind of wrong that can be addressed via fines. Only if all those steps fail do we rely on our lawyers to keep us out of jail. Most people who go to court on criminal charges are convicted. Gibraltar’s lawyers are good and they improve the odds, but they’re not magicians,” said Svetlana.

“I guess that’s where Gibraltar and SSCS are different then? SSCS won’t break the law on the client’s behalf and Gibraltar won’t get caught breaking the law?” Simon suggested.

Svetlana shook her head. “For all practical purposes, there’s no difference between SSCS and Gibraltar. We are SSCS with a new paint job and the serial number filed off. If you drill down, SSCS’s policy of not breaking the law and our policy of not getting caught are exactly the same thing. You just have to look at the law holistically.”

Simon laughed humorlessly. “I hope you’ll forgive me if I think that’s a cop-out.”

“I won’t. If you’re accused of a crime, do you get to decide if you actually committed it or not?”

Simon paused. Svetlana had stopped walking to make her point and there was a challenge in her eyes now. He sighed. “Rhetorical question. Obviously I don’t. A judge decides.”

“A judge or jury can decide you did, but there are a whole string of people who can effectively decide that you didn’t, guaranteeing that prosecution doesn’t go forward. The system as a whole decides whether or not you committed a crime. SSCS follows exactly the same protocol as Gibraltar when it comes to the law. Don’t get caught. If caught, avoid prosecution. If prosecuted, avoid conviction. To the only authority that matters, if you’re not convicted, you didn’t commit a crime.”

Simon took a deep breath. Svetlana wasn’t the enemy, but he couldn’t be quiet. “That’s exactly the kind of thinking that lets some banker sitting in front of his computer foreclose on a thousand houses with a keystroke and walk away with the profit no matter how many people it kills.”

“Simon...” Svetlana’s voice was soft with a hint of pleading. “That’s the law. It’s a tool of the rich and powerful more often than it judges right and wrong. You were asking me about how we get away with things like trespassing and vandalism. I wouldn’t kill someone for Gibraltar and, if I did kill someone, Gibraltar wouldn’t cover it up.”

Simon wasn’t ready to let it go. “So, Gibraltar agents have never killed anyone and gotten away with it?”

“Gibraltar agents have killed people on the job. When they do, the company works with the authorities. If I killed someone, I’d have to convince our lawyers that I was justified before they would agree to defend me in court. If I did, they’d try to get me off. We’re not the mafia.”

Simon could tell he’d touched a nerve. Not that long ago, that would have been his cue to redouble the attack, but things had seemed a lot simpler when he’d been railing against the rich and powerful instead of trying to be one of them. His own attitude about the law wasn’t that different from the one Svetlana had described and he didn’t want to go to jail for what they’d done tonight anymore than she did. He ran a hand over his hair. “Sorry, I’m ... this is still new to me. If I thought Gibraltar were the mafia or, worse, Goldman Sachs, I wouldn’t be working with you.”

Svetlana looked him over, then smiled, and wrapped herself around his bicep. “Is Goldman Sachs worse than the other banks? Judging that sort of thing is kind of above my pay grade.”

Simon sighed and led her across the street to the Loft. “Probably not. One of them killed my grandparents, but the whole situation was so complicated, I doubt I could figure out which one even if I had everybody’s records. They’ve all got blood on their hands anyway.”

“Most people wouldn’t be able to do anything about something like that,” said Svetlana.

Simon startled at her. Nobody had said anything quite like that to him before. It almost sounded like she understood. Carefully, he said, “I don’t know if anybody can, but I’m in a better position to find out than I ever was before.”

She hugged his arm a little tighter. “The law isn’t the right tool to right every wrong, but there are other tools available.”

Simon didn’t answer because they were entering the lobby of the Loft. He expected Svetlana to release his arm then, but she didn’t until they were at the desk and she was asked to sign in. She gave Simon a meaningful look before doing so and it reminded him that she was undercover for the duration of the current mission. Security would treat her like a visitor, not a colleague.

If she’d meant to say more, she decided not to until they were in the elevator. As the car rose, she leaned into him until her back rested against his chest. Simon rested an arm around her waist.

As she followed him back to his room, Simon reminded himself that she might just be returning his sweatshirt. Svetlana had admitted she was flirting with him and put the ball in his court, but she’d also said they should wait to do anything about their attraction to each other until the business with Quinn was over. Not for the first time tonight, Simon suspected he was missing all sorts of subtext, but he was too tired to even try to pick apart everything that had passed between them.

As they stepped into the apartment, Svetlana unzipped the hoodie she was wearing, slid it free from her shoulders, and offered it to Simon. As he took it, she said, “So ... how do you feel about helping me establish a cover story tonight?”

Simon’s pulse jumped, but he managed to smirk as he took the garment from her. “Well, you certainly made the idea seem pretty appealing earlier.”

“Good.” Svetlana stepped into the circle of his arms, drew his head down, and kissed him.

Even though he’d almost half expected it, the kiss still came as a shock to Simon. He returned it, but when it broke, he said, “I thought that doing this now was a bad idea.”

Svetlana nodded, not releasing his head. “It is. It complicates things. I should just go home.”

Simon didn’t let her go. “But you won’t?”

She wrapped her arms around his chest. “I am horny as fuck right now and home is far away. There are so many other bad decisions I could make between here and there.”

Simon’s hands gripped her waist. A moment later, Svetlana’s legs were around his waist. Before he knew it, he’d carried her into the bedroom and laid her on the bed. Svetlana tore at his clothes and her own like she couldn’t wait to get them off. Simon wasn’t sure he could trust that a beautiful woman could be that eager to have sex with him, but he wasn’t about to question her sincerity. He helped her strip them naked.

As soon as his cock was free, Svetlana gripped it and guided it between her legs. The moment Simon’s body was in position, she had him inside her sex, which was hot and wet for him.

He thrust into her and her whole body urged him along, ankles locking around his thighs to drive him deeper. At the same time, she wrapped her arms around his shoulders and growled in his ear, “Fuck me, Simon.”

Simon could hardly have done anything else. He drove into Svetlana again and again. In the morning, his back would be covered in scratches, but he didn’t feel her nails once in the moment.

The next time Simon had a coherent thought, Svetlana was curled up against his side and the covers were over them. He could remember moving as she’d directed him to so that he wasn’t lying on top of the bedspread, but that had been instinctive more than conscious.

His first thought was that he had indeed complicated things tonight. It was possible that what he and Svetlana had just done was nothing more than a release of tension and that nothing would change, but he couldn’t convince himself to believe that would be the case.

By the time she felt Nick stirring to wakefulness, Ainsley had already been awake for a while. She couldn’t say how long because she hadn’t retrieved her phone upon waking up. She’d compounded this sin against productivity by refusing to look at any of the clocks that might be in the room. She’d opened her eyes long enough to take in the gorgeous view of the river, the two bridges, and Lower Manhattan beyond that, but then she’d closed them again to let nothing interfere with the sensations of warmth, closeness, and total satiety that had greeted her upon awakening.