Once Upon Stilettos - Page 34/125

Obviously, he’d put a lot of thought into this. Maybe he should have been in charge of this investigation. He knew a lot more about spying than I did. He looked at me expectantly, and I remembered that I’d been the one to ask for this meeting. I wrapped his coat tighter around my legs and asked, “What, exactly, did you do when you discovered that someone had been in your desk and looking at your notes?”

He frowned. “What do you mean?”

“Well, word got out pretty fast that there was a spy. I know you didn’t tell anyone other than Merlin and me. So either someone saw you react and made an assumption—”

“—or it was the spy who spread the rumor,” he finished. He worried his lower lip in his teeth as he thought. “I don’t think I reacted all that visibly,” he said after a while. “Not where anyone could see me. There may have been certain, um, well, words used in the privacy of my office.” A stain of red that I suspected had nothing to do with the cold spread across his cheeks. I had a hard time imagining him cursing. He probably did it in some arcane language. “But after that I don’t think I looked too different from any other time I think of something I need to talk to Mr. Mervyn about. Did I look all that different to you when I got to your office?”

“I could tell something was up because you didn’t bother with the usual niceties before saying you needed to see the boss.”

“Oh.” He winced. “Sorry about that.”

“But even that wouldn’t have been enough for me to assume it meant we had a spy in our midst. That’s a pretty big leap to take. To come to that conclusion, someone would almost have to have known why you were upset.”

“So you think our spy was the one who started rumors about us having a spy?”

“Maybe.” I wasn’t likely to find a more receptive audience, so I plunged forward. “In fact, I have this theory that the spy isn’t really spying at all. Yeah, if they find something, I’m sure they’d pass it on to Idris. But what would really help him is if we can’t pull together right now, if we’re so busy suspecting each other and worrying about who the spy is that we aren’t actually getting any work done. How have you spent your time for the last couple of days?”

He closed his eyes and groaned. “I’ve been checking our security. If you’re right, I totally fell for it.”

“The security panel in R and D and the camera in your office could be more red herrings, or they could be proof that I don’t know what I’m doing. We do know that someone tampered with the departmental security, got into your office, planted and veiled a camera, got into your desk, and looked at your notes. We don’t know how much of that was really part of their mission and how much was just giving us something to talk about.”

“The camera may have been to watch my reaction so they’d know when to start the rumors. They’d have looked stupid if they started spreading rumors before I noticed that anything was wrong.”

“Before I found the camera, I was pretty sure I’d narrowed our spy down to R and D because they’d be the ones who would have seen you react, but now it could be anyone, as long as at some point they had a chance to plant that camera. It seems like every time I close in on a theory, something happens to make me doubt it. When we get back to the office, what do you want to bet that something important will be missing, or a bomb planted, or worse?”

“Don’t talk like that.”

“I’m trying to track the rumor to its source, but that’s turning out to be a real challenge. I’m used to dealing with gossip, but not with technologically and magically assisted gossip.”

“I’m sure there’s a way to set a trap. I’ll see what I can come up with.”

“From your spy books?”

He blushed adorably. “You can learn a lot from Robert Ludlum.”

I added to my mental list of the very few things I knew about him and said, “So, lunch? I’m freezing and I’m starving.”

We found a nearby deli and had a quick lunch punctuated by small talk. He insisted on paying, which was good because my purse was still in my office. He said since we’d been talking business he could expense it, but I had a feeling he wouldn’t. It was another one of those non-dates that was as good as any date I’d been on, and it was with great reluctance that I gave his coat back to him in the lobby and headed up to my own office.

“You can go to lunch now if you want me to cover for you,” I said to Trix when I returned.