Jackpot

35

Freed from the OIG investigation, Millie wanted to get back to keeping an eye on Arrow Donaldson, and find out what he was doing with the real Li Feng. She pushed back repeatedly on Quentin’s overtures toward staying in town longer and spending more time with her, but he was persistent.

“Let’s take the personal piece of it off the table. Say I don’t even want to see you or spend time with you. We both still have a case to investigate.”

“That’s a weird way to refer to sleeping together,” Millie said.

“The woman who died may not have been the woman you thought you were protecting, but someone still died, and it’s still my job to find out what happened to her. Plus, finding out who she is might help you with whatever it is you’ve been sent here to work on.”

“That’s a fair point.”

“I should have known better than to appeal to you on a personal level in the first place,” Quentin said jokingly. “Appealing to your work instincts is always a better path to your heart.”

Millie didn’t want to go back to the hotel where she’d been staying. She needed more room to spread out her investigation materials than the tiny economy room the government paid for offered, and frankly she didn’t want to be under the watchful eye of the government delegation, either. Quentin’s bosses hadn’t planned on him being in town long enough to book a room, so she made a few calls and opened up one of the CIA safe houses in the city and told Quentin he could join her if he didn’t mind sharing jurisdiction.

“It sounds so dirty when you say it like that,” he said.

“Wait until you hear me talk about legal attachés.”

“That just sounds like boring briefcase shopping.”

The safe house was on the far edge of Coloane Village in a rural family-centric area near the beach. Millie and Quentin had both spent too much time recently in the gloom of D.C., so even though the temperature was on the cold side, they took two chairs from the safe house and dragged them out to the beach for a couple hours. When they felt they’d achieved sufficient UV-ray exposure, they ventured back inside looking for food and technology.

Quentin worked on food and dinner, while Millie worked on finding out how capable the technology was in the safe house. By the time they reconvened in the dining room an hour later, Quentin had managed to put together a meal of stewed pork and shrimp paste with egg tarts for dessert, and Millie had connected her laptop through the house’s secure network to the CIA and FBI internal databases.

“It’s really amazing how far you’ve come with the Agency,” Quentin said as she showed off her handiwork. “I forget sometimes that you don’t need me as much as you used to.”

She looked up and smiled at Quentin with an edge that she hoped conveyed her interest in friendly conversation as long as it wasn’t about her future with the CIA. He took the cue and they got through dinner pleasantly enough. Then they took their egg tarts to the office to start digging up what they could find on the Li Feng decoy.

“These taste a lot like the custard tarts my roommate used to get when I studied in London,” Millie said.

She nibbled on her tart and smiled broadly. It was nice to have someone to eat with and talk with who understood, to a certain degree, what her life was like.

“I have a confession,” Quentin said.

Millie expected him to offer up details about his own life experiences that she wasn’t disinterested in, but she wasn’t ready for the intimacy that sharing things like that always seemed to bring. But he subverted her expectations and didn’t share any such thing.

“I didn’t make the tarts myself. There was a box of them in the pantry and I just toasted them in the oven.”

Millie couldn’t hold back her laugh and wrapped her arms around him in a hug that was the closest human contact she’d had in a while. She pulled away just as quickly and started signing into the databases.

A quick check on the woman’s fingerprints brought up her name as Lilly Dang and a home address in Los Angeles. It also brought up a fairly substantial rap sheet for drug and prostitution charges. While Millie finished her egg tart, Quentin took the laptop and plugged in the addresses of the woman’s last few arrests.

“Seems like she spent a lot of time getting arrested near Arrow Donaldson’s basketball arena,” he said.

“It’s probably not a stretch to assume she got in trouble once or twice with a player on Arrow Donaldson’s basketball team.”

“So maybe he makes some of her charges go away to keep his guy out of trouble, but then she owes Arrow a favor.”

“And he asks her to come to Macau with him and stay in a luxury penthouse and live the high life for a bit while pretending to be some big-shot Chinese government witness.”

“But why?” Quentin asked. “He already had his witness in Macau. Why did he need a decoy?”

“He wants to keep the real Li Feng away from us for some reason. Probably because she knows things she shouldn’t, and he doesn’t want her to accidentally let anything slip.”

“What kinds of things would she know?”

Millie looked up and gave Quentin the most genuine smile she could offer and said, “That’s what I’m in Macau to find out.”

Her phone buzzed with an incoming alert. She pushed her laptop back to Quentin while she looked at her phone. Arrow Donaldson was on his way to Hong Kong. She took her phone into the bedroom and called a man she knew very little about and said, “Arrow Donaldson is on his way to Hong Kong a day early.”