he scent of rotting garbage and jet fuel clung to the stagnant air. Benson fussed like I was a shiny five-year-old heading off for her first day of kindergarten, while my dad retreated behind a stoic façade.
“Now if there’s anything you need,” Benson said, straightening my collar for the third time, “call me, day or night. That includes dumping the bodies of any randy blokes who even think of laying a paw on you.”
I gave him a watery smile. “Yes, Mom.”
Dad grabbed me into a hug that would have gone on forever if my military escort hadn’t impatiently cleared his throat. The transport to Germany would leave with or without me, so with a final nervous glance at the two men who were my unlikely parents, I dashed across the hot tarmac to a C-27 Spartan revving its engines.
Twenty-two hours later we touched down at Wheeler-Sack Army Airfield in upstate New York. I’d caught a ride with a 10th Mountain Division platoon at the end of their tour, playing chess with a handful of guys all the way across the Atlantic. We’d played for pocket change, and I happily swept the winning pot into my purse as we taxied to a stop.
“Are you sure you’re only seventeen?” The good-natured staff sergeant with a Tennessee twang had lost five bucks to me.
With a lot of fist bumping and calls of good luck, the soldiers filed off the transport and into the arms of excited families waiting with new babies and homemade signs of welcome. Shouldering my travel-weary duffle bag, I trudged down the ramp and into my future.
It took only a moment to find my ride; she was impossible to miss. The woman impatiently waiting next to a black town car looked like she could wrestle alligators and win. Standing almost six feet tall, she was a solid mass of muscle with a square jaw, copper skin, and tight black curls sculpted into a helmet rising a good four inches above her scalp. Her dark eyes swept over me, and by her sour expression, it was apparent she’d pulled the short straw for this assignment. Now I knew how new recruits must feel when meeting Benson for the first time.
“Riley Collins?” she asked in the no-nonsense tones of a native New Yorker. “I’m Karen Jones with the State Department. I’ve been assigned to check you into Harrington tomorrow, and by the look of things”—she pursed her wide lips at my travel-stained clothing while I shivered in the cold breeze—“I’ve got my work cut out for me.”
She launched right into my briefing. By the time we reached the city, my head swam with images of Harrington’s blueprints, employee lists and backgrounds, and even the names of the VIPs who sent their kids to the school.
“I doubt you’re going to need any of this, but you never know,” Karen said, pulling out a file marked HARRINGTON–FOOD VENDORS. Did they think Hayden was going to be poisoned by a lunch lady in a hairnet?
We’d come straight to Beau’s, a Mecca of beauty in the heart of Manhattan. The dull roar of blow dryers, ringing phones, and people shouting over the din greeted us as we entered a cavernous room of sparkling white and gleaming silver.
Karen delivered me into the hands of Diego, the first guy I’d ever seen in real life wearing eyeliner. His assistant, a sullen girl around my age who was dressed for a funeral, handed me a white cotton robe and ordered me to strip.
My hair was then smothered in fragrant oils and wrapped in plastic, my skin steamed until I was ready to be served with drawn butter, and they had performed an “extraction.” In my world, that meant a black ops team going into dangerous territory to recover a lost man. Here it involved squeezing every pore on my face until I would have willingly confessed to anything.
“Hold on, princess, this may sting a bit.” White bits of cloth were ripped from my eyebrows along with about six layers of skin. Tears sprang to my eyes as he tilted my chin to get a better view of his work. “Gorgeous,” he breezily pronounced in a Spanish accent. Reaching for a glass jar with contents the color of pistachio ice cream, he said, “This is an exfoliating mask, which you simply must have or die.”
I supposed painfully losing another layer of skin cells was preferable to death, but not by much.
Karen sauntered back in as I admired my first ever mani-pedi. Yet another assistant gently dried my newly lustrous ebony curls. My hair hadn’t been cut in ages, but despite the healthy trim, it still cascaded halfway down my back.
She inspected me critically before turning to Diego. “Make sure she has all the right makeup and products a Harrington girl would have, will you? I don’t want to get sloppy with the details.”
Someone thrust a fussy sandwich of tomatoes, mozzarella, and basil into my hand during a session with the makeup artist. Running on nothing but nerves and jet lag, I bolted it down while learning how to paint on a smoky eye.
Our next stop was Barney’s on Madison Avenue, where a small army of clones awaited. Petite, perfect, and all dressed in black, the sales clerks marched me to a spacious, mirror-lined dressing room where a rack of fabulous clothes awaited. Tags with names I’d only gawked at in fashion magazines–Prada, YSL, Chanel–dangled from wool crepe skirts, cashmere jackets, and silk tops. In the corner towered a mountain of shoeboxes from Manolo Blahnik, Gucci, and Jimmy Choo, along with stacks of flannel-wrapped handbags from designers like Céline and Chloé.
“Holy cow,” I said, forgetting I’d barely slept in the past twenty-four hours. This was a reality TV dream come true… until I glanced at a price tag and gasped. “This would feed a family of four in Karachi for a year!”
“Welcome to New York,” Karen said in a weary tone, trying to make herself comfortable on an unyielding white sofa. “What a ridiculous piece of furniture,” she muttered, accepting a bottle of designer water from one of the smiling young women.
She pulled out an electronic tablet and became immediately engrossed while one of the attendants slipped the first piece off the rack and held it out expectantly. Buying a wardrobe appeared to be a group activity. Self-consciously, I stripped down to my plain white cotton bra and underwear.
“One of every bra and panty you’ve got in La Perla,” Karen ordered, barely flicking her eyes up from her pad.
“Who’s paying for all this?” I whispered when the sales clerk glided off, presumably to relay Karen’s order.
“If I drop you off in that Land’s End special you were wearing, those Harrington kids will think you’re one of the gardeners,” she said.
I gritted my teeth but said no more, standing half-naked in front of strangers as dressers zipped and buttoned, laced and fastened. Karen signaled her approval over each purchase with a queenly nod.
“Get the navy Louboutins to go with those jeans,” she barked. “Have you ever discharged a firearm at a human target?” Her finger hovered over the pad in expectation of my answer.
“Um, no,” I said, whiplashed. “I did get shot at, though, when a militant made it over the embassy walls. At first I thought the thing that buzzed by my ear was one of those nasty sausage flies, but it turned out to be a bullet. Usually assassins bypass the living quarters and go right for the main offices, but this guy didn’t get the memo.” The girl returning with the requested shoes listened in horrified fascination.
“We’ll take it from here,” Karen said to the clerk, who thrust the heels into my arms before quickly making her escape.
I regarded Karen anxiously. “That story was on CNN. It’s not like it’s classified or anything, is it?”
She acted as if I hadn’t spoken. “Have you been informed of your mission?”
My job was to babysit a rich girl, sure, but mostly, as my dad kept saying, I was going to a top school and finally getting to make friends with people who didn’t carry AK-47s. “I’m supposed to hang out with Hayden Frasier. What else do I need to know?”
She stood and checked me out in the full-length mirror, and for a surprising moment her face reflected empathy. “Are you aware of the software Stephen Frasier is developing?”
“We were told something about spyware.” I peeled off the jeans and traded them for floral cigarette pants.
“It’s been classified as the Rosetta project,” she said, stepping closer to zip me up. “It’s supposed to be the ultimate encryption-breaking software, able to decipher any written message in any format in less than a minute.”
No wonder everyone was so jumpy. Whoever controlled that software would also be able to monitor every electronic communication the world over.
“The delivery date is sometime within the next twelve months,” she added.
The pants were awesome, but they were so tight, sitting down might not be an option. I never wore anything I couldn’t run in.
“Okay,” I said, “so we need to keep his daughter safe for the next year. I get it.”
“Intel says there currently isn’t any heat on the Frasier girl, but if other interested parties can’t get her father to open up the bidding, it’ll just be a matter of time.” She picked up a taffeta crop top. “Try this.”
I eyed her suspiciously, wondering why she was suddenly being so nice. “But I’m just the babysitter, right?” I slipped the shirt over my head.
“We’ve brought in a new security chief who has installed her own team at the school, so you’re in good hands.” She came up behind me and wrapped a Chanel belt around my waist. It totally rocked the outfit, though the girl in the mirror was a stranger to me.
I slipped on a white leather trench coat so buttery-soft you could sleep in it. “What are you not telling me?”
She met my eyes in the mirror. “I won’t lie to you. Every precaution is being taken to protect Stephen Frasier and his family. But keeping this technology exclusive to the United States and its allies is more important than my life… or yours.” Her gaze swept my figure. “Love the coat.”
A knock on the door announced the arrival of a smiling woman carrying a neatly folded stack of pastel silks and boldly printed cotton, which turned out to be sleepwear. Karen directed her to the growing pile of approved purchases while I waded back into the pool of clothes and tried not to worry about what had just been said.
Finally, after an appalling amount of taxpayer’s money had been shelled out, they let me out of the dressing room. Leaving behind instructions on where to send everything, Karen checked me into an elegant hotel facing Central Park. She left me alone with instructions to order dinner from room service before I keeled over from exhaustion.
Freshly showered and wrapped in a fluffy white robe, I parted the curtains on the picture windows. Evening had fallen, but the scene below pulsed with activity. Horse-drawn carriages jockeyed for position as hybrid taxis honked in annoyance. Antique streetlights of vintage milk glass illuminated the hotel doorman in his time-honored cap and overcoat as he spewed out rapid-fire directions to Arabic tourists in flowing white robes.
It was an uneasy jumble of old and new, of tradition and trend. I’d left behind a world steeped in rituals and customs dating back thousands of years, where change could be measured in centuries rather than heartbeats. Ahead was a social media wasteland where materialism and popularity was the coin of the realm. Add in the vague warning that trouble could arrive as unexpectedly and as deadly as a sand storm, and I was as unprepared as Dorothy when she was unceremoniously dropped into Oz.
Ten hours and roughly seven thousand miles separated New York from Karachi, but I suddenly longed to bridge the gap. I booted up my computer and put in a Skype call. It might wake my dad, but I needed the assurance only his familiar voice could offer.
He sounded alert, though that was no surprise; he could be jolted from sleep and be battle ready in about five seconds. His image appeared at the same time his bedside lamp switched on, looking about the way you’d expect if you’d been woken at four in the morning.
“Sorry to wake you, Dad.”
“No, I was awake, trying to decide if I should toss and turn another dozen times, or just give in and call you.” His hair stuck out in every direction, a testament to his sleepless night. “How’s New York?”
“Different, but the same.” I remembered the feeling of wide-eyed wonder on my previous visit. The city still had the power to captivate, but I saw it now through a grittier lens.
“You belong there. You just need to give it time.”
I cracked a rueful smile. “Do I look that pathetic?”
He laughed. “No, you look beautiful. I like your hair.” He grew wistful. “You look like your mother.” He didn’t say it often, but I knew there were times he saw her face when he looked at me.
I twisted the belt on my robe. “What was it like on your first mission?” I still hadn’t come to grips with the term, but there was no getting around the fact I had a job to do.
“Same as you,” he said, propping up a pillow and settling in. “I was young, green, scared, and made a ton of mistakes, but deep down I could survive whatever they threw at me.”
“What if I’m not like you? What if I’m not ready?” It had been way too long since I’d had any real sleep, and my emotions simmered just below the surface. I couldn’t prevent the tears from spilling down my cheeks.
“Hey, hey,” he soothed, touching his fingertips to the screen. “Do you think I would’ve agreed to this if I didn’t think you could pull it off?”
“But what if I hate it?” My second biggest fear. I’d rather crawl through fifty miles of scorpion-infested desert than be the loser no one wanted to eat lunch with.
His smile was bittersweet. “Every time we moved you acted like it was the end of the world. Remember how much you fought me over Karachi? Give it time. Maybe we’ll find out this is where you belong.”
My mouth went dry. “That’s just it, Dad. What if I love it?”
Because that’s what frightened me most.