Stormy Waters

The lightning flashed across the Vegas skyline, illuminating the hotel pool in stark blue-white—casting shadows where they shouldn't exist. Elena checked her watch again. 11:47 PM. Thirteen minutes until her contact arrived, assuming he wasn't already dead.

She'd spent three months undercover as a cocktail server at the Bellagio, extracting secrets from defense contractors who loosened their lips after three martinis. Corporate espionage wasn't the glamorous life movies promised. It was boredom and surveillance and sleeping with your makeup on because you never knew when you'd need to disappear.

The pool area was deserted—too cold for swimming, too late for tourists. Only the hum of the heating system and distant thunder.

"You're early."

Elena spun around. A man in a dark suit stood by the cabana doors. Not her contact. Someone else entirely.

"Who are you?" Her hand drifted to her bag, where her emergency burner phone lived.

"The real question," he said, stepping into the light, "is what the FBI's doing sending a corporate spy to meet a marked man."

Her heart stopped. Then raced. He knew. He knew everything.

"I'm not—" she began, but the lightning chose that moment to strike closer, turning the world into an x-ray flash. She saw it in that split second: the wire trailing from his earpiece. Not FBI. Counterintelligence. For whom, she couldn't guess.

"Save it, Elena. We have the files you extracted from Mercury Systems. We know you sold them to three different buyers. That's not corporate espionage. That's treason."

She'd needed the money. Her mother's cancer treatments, the apartment she couldn't afford, the life that kept crumbling around her. It was supposed to be a one-time thing, just enough to get ahead. But the money was too easy, and the buyers kept calling.

The pool's surface rippled in the wind, distorting their reflections. Two spies, caught in each's crosshairs.

"What do you want?" she asked quietly.

"You're going to help us bring them down. All of them. And then you're going to disappear."

"And if I refuse?"

He smiled sadly. "Then you become collateral damage. You know how it works."

She did. She'd seen it happen to others.

Another flash of lightning. The storm was moving closer. In the pool's reflection, she saw herself as she must have looked to him: tired, desperate, caught between choices that weren't really choices at all.

"Okay," she said. "But I want immunity. In writing."

"Done."

They stood there as the rain began to fall, watching the storm roll in, neither moving toward shelter. Some moments, you just had to let yourself get drenched.