Under His Skin

Chapter 2-1

Chapter 2

Ben checked his look in the mirror. Everyone had their “thing,” something that would throw the entire meeting or experience off for them, and there was nothing that could rescue it. For Ben, it was talking to someone who had food stuck in their teeth. Anyone reporting to him knew that they needed to clean their teeth before stopping in for a meeting.

Ben’s commanding officer, Agent Dickinson, had a thing about people’s ties. They had to be perfectly straight and not askew in any way. Ben could remember coming out of a fight with a spy from a drug cartel, trying to make an immediate report to Agent Dickinson, and getting dressed down because his tie was crooked. Ben had been bleeding from a stab wound at the time. Agent Dickinson had been so distracted by the messy tie he couldn’t see the blood.

Ben wasn’t bleeding now. He had no legitimate excuse to be slovenly. He straightened his tie and brushed a few pieces of lint from the jacket as well. Then he headed out to go and face Agent Dickinson.

Dickinson waited for him in his office. A giant American flag stood behind him. Dickinson wasn’t usually that guy. They all knew where they were and who they were working for; they didn’t need to be clubbed over the head with it every time they walked into a room. The ever-present flags had come in with the new administration. Every room had to have a flag now. It was a mandate. Every room had to have a flag, and every lapel had to have a flag pin. Apparently the new president thought people would get confused without them.

“Siddown, Kellogg.” Dickinson drummed his fingertips on the desk for a moment and then he sighed. “It looks like we’ve got a burgeoning situation in Boston.”

Ben felt a twinge in his heart, but he ignored it. An agent wasn’t supposed to get twinges in his heart. An agent shouldn’t have felt anything for someone in his charge to begin with. Besides, Lennon had almost certainly moved on a long time ago. He probably had a movie star partner now. Maybe he’d married a model. Maybe they stood around looking gorgeous together on the red carpet.

“Kellogg!” Dickinson slapped his hand on his desk, making Ben jump. “You paying attention or you going to sit there and gather wool on the taxpayers’ dime?”

“Sorry sir.” Ben straightened up and forced his brain to focus. “Just trying to think of which Boston situation you could be referring to.”

Dickinson acknowledged Ben’s point with an incline of his head. “That place always was a hotbed of sedition. I’m talking about the ongoing operation at Interior, Inc.”

Ben had been trained to show no reaction to any stimuli, so he was able to keep his face neutral and relaxed when his supervisor mentioned Lennon’s company. Ben had very carefully not followed the company’s progress, at least not where anyone could track him. He didn’t want to get bitter toward the Agency. “I’ve been kept in the dark about the operation at Interior, sir.”

“And for good reason, too. You’ve been kept in the dark because you couldn’t keep it in your pants, and don’t think I’ve forgotten that.” Dickinson waved a finger at Ben. “But it’s been a good decade since then. With any luck, the threat can be neutralized without any issues at all. No one will ever need to know you were involved.”

Ben couldn’t help but close his eyes at that. He didn’t have any choice about it, of course. An agent couldn’t choose his assignments. It seemed egregiously cruel to put him on an assignment this close to Lennon and not let him speak to or see his old lover, but the Agency didn’t choose its assignments for the agents’ benefit.

He opened his eyes again. He would do what he had to. He knew Dickinson wouldn’t ask it of him lightly. “Okay. What’s the threat and what’s behind it?”

Dickinson nodded once, a little bit of grudging pride showing through in the gleam of his eyes. “You know what Interior does, correct?”

“Something involving nanotechnology. Len—Perig tried to explain it to me once, but it all went right over my head.” Ben chuckled. “I know my strengths, sir, and understanding that type of science isn’t one of them.”

“Don’t sell yourself short, kid. But yes. They make nanotech. They’ve revolutionized medicine, especially emergency medicine. Every time you go out into the field, get hurt, and get a shot of nanobots to heal up a wound, it’s because Lennon Perig made it possible.”

“He was working on that back when I knew him.” Ben swallowed. He could still remember the last night he’d spent with Lennon. He didn’t have to think very hard to call to mind that warm body in his arms.

“He was. His nanobots were why you were assigned to him. We’ve had someone watching over him ever since, of course. We had one posing as another student, and one as a professor. Now that Interior is a little bit bigger, we’ve had an agent in there as his security chief. The guy’s name is Kaden Townsend, and he’s been in there under his own name.”

Ben fought down a spike of jealousy. Why should this Townsend guy get to use his own name when Ben had been forced to lie? “Okay.”

“Apparently Perig has been working on something new and exciting. Most of the products coming out of Interior have had applications that applied more strictly to the health care space. The invention he finalized this week is different. Lennon Perig built a bullet.”

Ben shook his head. “Nah. Not Lennon. The guy wanted to save lives and build a better world. He wouldn’t design something that killed people.”

Dickinson raised an eyebrow. “Back to first names, are we?”

Ben met his supervisor’s eyes. “I know what I did was forbidden, and I accept that. Nothing changes the fact that it happened, and that I knew him better than anyone.”

“Valid. And you’re right. Perig designed a bullet that will change the face of war as we know it. The bullet releases nanobots into the bloodstream. Some of them act as a paralytic, one that lasts for up to five hours. The other releases platelet bots, to heal up injuries.”

“So it’s basically there to stun a victim. The bots heal the damage the bullet left behind.” Ben grinned. “Son of a b***h. He’s really going to do it.”

“Maybe.” Dickinson’s mouth twisted. “Townsend called in because in the weeks before Perig finished his designs, there was a significant spike in attacks against Interior’s systems from servers originating in Astrakhan, in Russia. They do have a customer in Russia, Astrakhan Health Initiatives.” He pushed a few keys on his keyboard and turned the monitor around. “We did some digging. AHI is owned by Arkady Matveev. Arkady Matveev is a young entrepreneur, probably a little too young to have his company built up to the extent that it is. Of course you could say the same thing about Perig, so you should take that with a grain of salt.”

“You wouldn’t be calling me into this case if there weren’t more to it than a young guy with a thriving company. Sir,” Ben added as an afterthought.

“No. We wouldn’t. We did a little bit more digging. Matveev’s family isn’t particularly well-off, but he got a lot of investment from some relatives on his mother’s side. Those relatives—second cousins, maybe—are a little more interesting.” The screen changed, and Ben found himself looking at a spread of Cyrillic writing. It took his brain a second to adjust to Russian. He hadn’t used it in a long time. “Meet the Kuznetsov family. They’ve been working for Russian intelligence since the Beria days.”

“Exciting. And they’ve stayed in, too, never been purged.” Ben scanned the Russian documents. “I’ve come up against some of them before. They’re loyal.”

“To Russia, no matter what. I’d admire that, if it weren’t such a problem for us.” He turned the monitor back toward himself. “You can imagine what the Russians would do if they could get their hands on Perig’s kind of technology. Or, and this is my real fear, if they could get their hands on and somehow compromise the guy who created this technology.”

“Nanobots sent to kill instead of heal.” Ben whispered the words. “Blood vessels exploding, or the paralytic used for torture instead of to prevent combat.”

“I’m sure Perig would be aghast at the thought, but everyone has a breaking point. We can’t take the chance that they would find his. I’m sending you up to Boston to help keep Perig safe. Do not engage, unless the worst should happen. Perig has no idea he’s under Agency protection and we want to keep it that way. Do I make myself clear?”

“Crystal, sir.” Ben managed to get the words around the lump in his throat, but he couldn’t figure out how.

“Excellent. You’ll be staying with Townsend. I suspect you’ll get along just fine. Don’t make waves, don’t get caught, and you have full discretion to use whatever force you deem necessary to keep the target safe.” Dickinson passed Ben a thumb drive. “That should contain all of the information you need. Drive up, don’t fly. You’ll need whatever hardware you can carry.”

That brought a grim smile to Ben’s face. If someone was threatening Lennon, Ben was going to make sure he used every bit of hardware in his arsenal. “I’ll leave as soon as possible, sir.”

He left Dickinson’s office and headed home to pack. He needed clothes that would blend in with what people wore in Boston and Cambridge. A suit might be appropriate every once, but casual wear would work for him more often. He had enough of both to get him through. He got his weapons hidden in the car, threw his suitcase and his laptop into the trunk, and headed north.

He’d missed Boston. He liked the old city. He used to take Lennon and prowl around the ancient and secret parts of it, whenever he could convince his brilliant lover to put the books down for a moment. Would he appreciate it as much if he could see the places he used to enjoy but without the man he loved in the scene?

The drive from Maryland to Cambridge took longer than he wanted, and his own misery made it seem longer than it did. He pulled up to the curb in front of Kaden Townsend’s house and waited for his host to come outside.

Ben didn’t know Kaden Townsend. He’d heard the name once or twice, but they’d never worked a case together. Townsend proved to be a black man around Ben’s age or maybe a little younger, a little shorter than average height with a typically military haircut and smooth brown skin. He grinned an affable grin at Ben when he came out to help him with his things and opened a gate to a small driveway, one that led to a well-locked garage.

“Welcome to my humble abode.” Kaden gestured to the yard and let Ben into the house. “I’ve got to say, I appreciate the quick response from headquarters on this. It’s going to be hard enough to keep Lennon safe without letting him know who I really am. It would be harder than ever to do it and try to keep the building safe too.”

“Well, that’s what I’m here for.” Ben couldn’t make himself smile. He hadn’t minded when Dickinson referred to Lennon, because he used Lennon’s surname. That made it more professional and kept things distant. To hear Townsend call him by his first name—Townsend, who was handsome and fit and allowed to be in close contact with Lennon every day—just made him angry. He couldn’t show his anger, of course. It wasn’t rational anger. It wasn’t appropriate anger. He still had to fight the urge to punch that affable smile right off Kaden Townsend’s face. “How do you want to work this?”

Townsend walked up an elegant set of stairs toward the second floor. “Your room’s right over here. Your bathroom’s right through those doors. There’s another bedroom on the other side, don’t worry about it. I don’t have any other guests. Anyway, I can’t get away with being off-site during the workday right now. I’m supposed to be the director of security and we’re fighting off cyber-attacks left and right. I have to be there and take care of that.”

“Fair enough.” Ben could probably help with those. He was no slouch when it came to cyber defense, but he didn’t think he could handle being in the same building as his love. “So during the day I’ll…”

Townsend grinned. “Sleep in, for starters. You had a long drive. Head up into his place tomorrow and check it out for listening devices or other monitoring. Maybe plant a few of our own, I don’t know. Whatever you think is best. Then maybe you can head over to the building and hang out, wait for him to leave. I’ll send you a copy of his schedule, when I’ll need you to have eyes on him.

“We’ve got a guy at the champagne bar he and Rada like. That was just a coincidence; there are a few operations here and top brass thought it would be a good idea to have a centrally located guy to pass messages through. So you won’t need to go in there, which is good because he’d notice you in a place like Bubble. Maybe not at first, but if he saw you in there more than once he’d absolutely pick up on it.”

“Makes sense. The guy’s supposed to be a genius, right?” Ben wanted to scream.

“So I’m told. Sometimes he surprises me, but hey. What do I know? I’m just an old Air Force guy. This guy, he can’t find Astrakhan on the map, but he can design molecule sized robots that patch up broken spines and talk about them in three languages.” Townsend chuckled and shook his head. “I’ve got to say, I’ve never had a charge I’ve liked so much before.”

“Really?” Ben knew that his tone was flat. He couldn’t help it.

“Don’t worry, bro. I’m not going to cross any lines. I’m not like that. This guy, though. He’s just so damn sweet, you know? He’s got a smile that just lasts for days.” Townsend sighed. “Sometimes you regret things about this job, you know?” He patted Ben on the shoulder. “I’ll send you the details in the morning. You look beat.”

“Thanks, man.” Ben watched as Townsend left the house.

Ben needed to get control of himself if he was going to accomplish anything on this job. He’d wanted to go after Townsend for so much as looking at Lennon, and that was ridiculous. Townsend hadn’t had to tell him he wasn’t going to make a play for Lennon. Ben knew Townsend wouldn’t make a play for Lennon because Townsend was a good agent who could act with professionalism and grace.

Townsend would never fall in love with the guy he was supposed to be protecting.

No, that kind of idiocy was reserved for Ben, and Ben alone. Tomorrow he would have to see the man he loved, and get close enough to protect him, without ever letting Lennon know he was there. It was the job, and he knew why it had to be done that way, but it hurt.

He lay down on the bed and closed his eyes. Somewhere across Cambridge, Lennon was closing his eyes too. Ben would have to be content with that.