The whiskey bottle hits the marble kitchen counter with a thud. I grimace and swear, but it doesn’t break – though it was close. I grab a glass, pour, knock a drink back, and close my eyes as the familiar burn soothes my throat.

“The hell just happened?” I mutter. Everything had been flowing so fucking well – and then?

Then it all went to shit.

I start pacing . It’s a habit of mine. I do it when I’m stressed, and right now is no exception. I’ve had women flip me the bird; had women pretend to fall against me just to get a feel of my chest; had women kiss me on the lips before they told me their name. But I have never, ever, had a woman freak out on me like Kimberly Sawyers.

And in a game of manufactured coincidences – “oh, you work at Landwolfe? Me too", and “no way – we’re neighbors?” – This doesn’t feel right. Not one little bit.

The amber liquid in the bottle swirls as I pour myself another stiff drink. Two fingers, three, then four – and I stop counting. There’s enough whiskey in that glass to knock out an elephant, and then some. But I don’t drink it. I need my wits about me.

I don’t like situations that don’t make sense. Surroundings that don’t make sense might end up getting me killed. I sure as hell don’t like circumstances that might get me killed. So I’ve got three questions: first – who the hell is Kimberly Sawyers? Second – does she know me? And the big third –?

Why the hell did she lose her shit with me?

I grab my laptop and throw myself back onto a leather couch. It’s next to a huge plate glass window looking out on the River Thames, but I don’t have eyes for the view. I don’t see the streetlights twinkling alive to my left across the river bank, nor the head flashlights on a small party of hardy kayakers dipping their blades into the churning water. I’m on the trail of a mystery, and nothing else matters.

“K - I - M - B - E - R- L -Y - S - A - W- Y -E -R -S,” I type, letter by letter, hitting the keys so hard the plastic frame of the keyboard begins to groan.

I chew my lip with frustration as the laptop whirs to life. I need answers now, not in ten goddamn minutes when technology finally decides to get its act together. “Hurry the fuck up, already,” I moan, clenching my jaw together.

Finally, a list of blue links appears on the screen. I click on the link that reads “LinkedIn” and begin scrolling through what seems like a hundred profiles all named Kimberly Sawyers. All kinds of faces pass by – blondes, brunettes, short hair, long hair, but none of them are her.

Until –

I find her. The computer’s mouse pad doesn’t feel strong enough to deal with how hard I click on her picture.

And my eyes aren’t strong enough to cope with what they see.

“Oh, shit,” I grunt, suddenly glad I didn’t have that second whiskey. “This isn’t good. This is really not good.”

I spring off the couch, not watching where the laptop ends up. I don’t hear a plastic crunch, so I figure it’s all good. I grab my cell phone off the table with one hand, and start to pull soaking wet leather shoes over damp woolen socks with the other. I don’t care. All I know is that if I don’t fix this soon, the whole operation is going to fall apart.

My thumb flies across the screen, and I jam the phone against my ear.

The ring tone seems to last forever.

“Hello –?”

“Natalie,” I interrupt. “We’ve got a problem: a really big fucking problem. I’m coming in now. Here’s what you need to do.”

***

The second the operations room doors hiss open, I can immediately tell two things. First, Natalie Morris, my handler, is pissed off by the way I spoke to her. Second, she knows how close to disaster we are, and that I was completely right to do what I did.

The room is alive with a quiet, but urgent, buzz. Stan and the others – the ones whose names I either don’t know or don’t care to remember – are all glued to computer screens, fingers tapping away with what sounds like barely concealed panic.

Then again, it’s hard to tell. Maybe that’s just the way these guys roll.

“You got here fast,” Natalie says, tightlipped.

“I got a moped,” I say in response. “Italian – one of those Vespas. I parked outside. Doubt it’s legal.”

Truth is, I weaved in and out, through stopped vehicles, and around slower traffic at a terrifying speed. Add to that the winter’s darkness and heavy droplets of rain, and it could’ve been a recipe for disaster. As it was, I ate up the 3 miles to the office in record time.

I looked around the room, trying to figure out what the hell they’ve been doing. “Are we –?”

We’re on it,” Natalie replies. Jesus, that doesn’t tell me anything. Then again, Natalie’s never struck me as much of a talker.

I look around, taking a renewed interest in what’s going on around me. The screens on the walls are all flickering with different information feeds – lines of code, CCTV feeds from outside, and video of –

“The fuck is this,” I hiss. “You bugged her?”

Natalie shrugs, but I only see it out of the corner of my eye. All I can look at is the feed of Kim, live from her apartment on the wall of the Paragon Group operations room. I don’t know why, but it doesn’t feel right. I feel like I’m intruding on a private moment. It doesn’t make sense – I shouldn’t give a damn.

But I do.

“I am doing my job, Nate,” Natalie says, with a bite in her voice. “Perhaps, if you had bothered to do the same, we would not be in this mess.”

“How the hell,” I grunt, “could I have known that we went –”

My handler simply stares at me, cold-eyed. It’s enough to cut me off. I shiver. She’s one intimidating woman. Besides, I know what she’s going to say.

“Nathaniel,” she says, low and slow. “Do you remember telling me that you did not need to know where she went to high school?”

I nod.

“I see,” she says. Natalie seems calm – too calm for my comfort. I feel like an explosion’s coming, and I don’t want to be in its path.

“Can you understand, Nate, how I feel now that I have found out you both went to the same goddamn high school?”

I gulp.

Kim’s pacing up and down in her flat. She’s got something in either hand. I have to squint to make out the details.

“What’s she holding?” I ask. None of the analysts look up.

I hate this. I want to be doing something – fixing this. But all I can do is stand here and watch as other people try and fix my problem.

Kim puts it against her ear, and I realize it’s a cell phone. She slumps down on a leather couch that looks identical to the one in my own apartment and – just like me twenty minutes ago – pulls her computer onto her lap. She cradles her phone between her shoulder and her ear and starts tapping away at the keys.

“Who’s she calling?” I ask to a room of people who seem bent on ignoring me.

No answer.

“Can we intercept that?” Natalie barks at one of the analysts.

He shakes his head. “No. She’s using Skype, or Face Time or something. We can’t get in the middle.”

The wall-mounted screen next to the one displaying the bird’s eye view of Kimberly’s apartment blinks into life. “What’s that? I ask.

Finally – an answer.

“We see what she sees,” Natalie says, drumming her fingers against her denim-clad legs.

A Google search box comes up on the screen. Christ, it’s like going twenty minutes back in time. Everything I did, Kim’s now doing.

“N – A – T – E,” she types. The letters appear slowly, and I can’t tell whether it’s a delay in the feed – or because Kim’s searching for a truth that she’s not ready to hear.

I feel the first, cold tendrils of dread starting to creep into my stomach.

She’s going to figure out who I am – even though I don’t remember her at all. I was only at Summer Hill High School for what, two weeks – before dad got shipped out to Coronado. I figure I must have done something awful to her to make her react this way. But the crazy thing, the thing that’s got my gut wrapped up in knots?

I have no idea what it could be.

“Are we doing something about this?” I ask, my voice higher-pitched than I ever remember it being. “If she figures out my real identity, then this whole operation –”

“We know, Nate,” Natalie says firmly.

On screen, Kim realizes the error of her ways. I breathe a sigh of relief as she deletes my name from the screen. But the feeling doesn’t linger.

“Oh, crap,” I groan as she replaces it with the word: “Nathaniel.”

And then: “Nathaniel F –”

Kim stops typing. The cursor stands alone, blinking in the search box. If my stomach was twisting itself into knots before, now it’s doing backflips. I crack my knuckles, and realize that I’m shifting my weight from side to side.

Kim’s lips move as she speaks into the phone. One part of me is inexplicably disgusted that Paragon has bugged her. The other part of me is just desperate to find out who she’s talking to and what she’s saying.

Kim’s fingers dance across the keyboard. The second I see the movement, my eyes flicker back to the live feed from her computer.

Backspace.

Backspace.

I heave a sigh of relief as Kim zeros out the search box. Natalie shoots me a sideways glance, as if to say “this is not over yet.” She’s right.

Kim types “Summer Hill High School,” into the search box, and as she does, I’m near ready to walk to the nearest window and throw myself out. I’m staring down the barrel of the end of the mission, but worse than that – I know I won’t get a chance to. If she finds out I’m lying to her, then I’m done before I got started.

Hell if I know why, but that thought fills me with dread. The curvy redhead is all I can think about. I want to know why she ran from me. No girl ever has before. It’s a mystery, and I want to solve it. I want to solve her.

And at the very least, I want to get the chance.

“How long do we have?” Natalie asks. The only sign that she’s operating under stress is a slight bite to her voice. I’ve no idea how she so calm.

Stan doesn’t look up as he speaks. “Thirty seconds, maybe less.”

The operations room feels soaked with a nervous energy. It’s like someone has doused every surface with gasoline, and we’re just waiting around for the spark.

I feel myself getting ready to say something, but I bite my lip. I’m big enough to know that this isn’t my area of expertise.

The high school home page flashes up on Kim’s screen. I’d like to say it brings me back, but it doesn’t. I was a military brat. I followed dad around a dozen schools, maybe more.

“Bring it down,” I mutter. “All of it.”

Natalie shoots me a withering look. “If we take the whole site down, Kim will just go search somewhere else. We can’t hack the whole Internet, Nate.”

I sit back on my heels, reduced to looking on impotently. Kim’s mouse pointer moves to a link titled: “Archived Yearbooks.” She clicks it.

“How long, Jake?” Natalie asks in a calm tone of voice.

“Ten, nine…”