Joseph took her hand earnestly. Amber could feel the softness of his hands against hers. Her own were rougher now than they had been, thanks to the time she’d spent fighting and running obstacle courses. She’d had to get tougher through the FBI training, even if Amber suspected that she would never be quite as tough as some of the other agents.

  “You’re a lot more than just a story,” Joseph assured her. “In fact, I’ve been thinking a lot about us, and about our relationship.”

  That was a phrase that had, in Amber’s life to date, usually presaged some guy dumping her because he thought that her obsession with puzzles was too strange, and he didn’t like coming second to her need to find out obscure facts. It meant that Amber tensed automatically, even though Joseph’s tone made it all sound as if it were a good thing.

  “What do you mean?” Amber asked.

  “Nothing bad,” Joseph assured her. “The opposite. I mean that, now that you’re finished with your training and we have the time to actually be together, I’d like us to be something more than just casual.”

  That hadn’t been what Amber had been expecting at all when she’d come here. She’d thought that it would just be a celebration dinner, maybe spilling over into a whole night of just the two of them together, but she hadn’t expected, hadn’t hoped, for more than that. She and Joseph had dated, but there hadn’t been any suggestion that they were a serious couple, or even that they were exclusive. It had just been a series of one-off dates that had … well, they’d been great, but Amber hadn’t believed that she could ever mean more than that to a man like Joseph who could get any woman he wanted.

  “What do you mean ‘more than just casual’?” Amber asked. She assumed that he wasn’t proposing or anything, after the scattered dates they’d had. Although given how nice the restaurant was, and how much of an effort Joseph had made to dress up … “Wait, you’re not proposing or anything, are you?”

  It took Amber a moment to realize that she’d actually said that out loud, rather than just keeping it as a thought.

  Joseph looked shocked for a moment, then laughed. “Wait? What? You think I’d do that this early in a relationship?”

  “Sorry, it was just with the restaurant, and everything …”

  Amber saw Joseph look around the restaurant, taking it in carefully. She saw the realization dawn on his face as he saw the happy couples, the fine dining, and everyone dressed up so carefully. He laughed again then.

  “Oh God, it does look like the kind of place that you’d take someone if you were planning to propose to them,” Joseph said. Clearly, the thought hadn’t occurred to him before.

  “Or break up with them,” Amber said. “You know, take them somewhere expensive so that they don’t want to make a scene.”

  “I’m not here to break up with you,” Joseph said hurriedly. “Or propose to you. Not that I never want to … it’s just far too soon to be …”

  “It’s kind of cute, watching you be the one tripping over himself for once,” Amber said.

  “I just want us to be officially a couple. Boyfriend and girlfriend. Exclusive. Sorry, that all sounds very teenage, but I can’t think of a better way to put it.”

  To Amber, it seemed like the perfect way to put things.

  “I would love that,” she said. She saw Joseph relax slightly, his smile broadening.

  For a minute or two, they just sat there, enjoying one another’s company as another course of the dinner arrived. Eventually, though, Amber knew that she would need to say something. She couldn’t just stare longingly into Joseph’s eyes for the rest of the meal.

  “I got a job offer today,” Amber said.

  “A job offer? As a puzzle editor, or …”

  “As an FBI agent. Agent Phelps’s boss wants me to work in her department with him. In DC.”

  That was a big advantage of the job: it meant that she would be around. It meant that she and Joseph would actually have a chance to see how well they worked as a couple since they would both be in the same city for more than a few days at a time.

  “Doesn’t that department track down killers?” Joseph asked. “The last two cases you worked with them, you were in a lot of danger, Amber.”

  Amber nodded. “That’s one of the things I’m thinking about at the moment. I told Agent Palliser that I would get back to her.”

  “One of the things?” Joseph said. Of course, he was going to pick up on that as a well-trained reporter.

  “It’s also going to be this huge disruption to my life. I’ve enjoyed being able to help the FBI out with their cases, but if I take this job, I won’t be able to do other work on the side. I won’t be able to make puzzles for people or set questions for quizzes. That whole side of my life will start to fade away. Maybe I’ll be able to do the occasional quiz as a hobby, but it won’t be the same.”

  “Is that all of it?” Joseph asked. “Or is there more to it?”

  Amber took several seconds to think. “There’s more to it. I’ve been in these life and death situations. I’ve nearly died. I’ve had to shoot people. Maybe, compared to all of that, a life of just putting together a few puzzles sounds better.”

  “It’s a big change,” Joseph said. “And I can only tell you to do what feels right to you. You’ve been through the training, you know what being an agent will involve, so you probably know better than I ever could whether it’s going to be right for you.”

  Amber nodded. He was right, of course. It was up to her to make this decision. She could go back to her old life, or she could jump into being an FBI agent. It was just that, right then, she wasn’t sure which way she wanted to go.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  To Colm O’Rafferty, a prison was just another kind of puzzle to solve. Everything was—if you looked at it closely enough.

  He currently sat on the prison transport, waiting for his moment. The problem at the heart of this particular puzzle was a simple one: how to get from the inside to the outside without being caught. In some ways, the simplicity of it was almost irritating, yet it was made more interesting by an asymmetry at the heart of it: the prison had resources, guards, and power. Colm did not.

  His first thought had been to consider the possibility of a legal challenge to his incarceration. He had quickly dismissed that as unworkable. The evidence against him at his trial for the murders he’d committed so far had been compelling. He’d been caught red-handed at the last of them, after all, in a pure stroke of bad luck that had seen the witness able to get away before Colm could kill her.

  It might be possible to find a way to get that witness to recant her testimony, to cast doubt on the police officers who had brought him in, to steadily undermine the case, but Colm suspected that even if it worked, that would take far more time than he had. He wanted to be out of the prison now.

  So, Colm had started to make arrangements, charming, bribing, and threatening to get what he wanted. The other prisoners in his wing knew better than to cross him, even some of the gang members who thought that they ran the place under the noses of the guards.

  There was something soothing about the steady rumble of the transport van as it made its way along the highway. There were only a couple of other prisoners on it: a burly, shaven headed, mafia thug named Vincent and a slender man named Gunter who looked like an accountant and who had been found guilty of a multi-million-dollar investment fraud. Of course, Colm knew all about them. He’d made it his business to know everything about everyone who would be on that transport.

  He knew who the guards were. He knew the route for the vehicle. He knew the likely weather conditions, and the ways they impacted everything he had planned. Colm had arranged to be on this transport, paying a hacker to falsify a transfer order. A transport van was easier to break out of than a full penitentiary.

  Not that there weren’t complicating factors. Colm was shackled for transportation, wearing an orange, prison jumpsuit that would instantly mark him out as a fugitive if he got out of the van. There were two guard: one driving and one keeping an eye on the inmates in the van.

  Nothing insurmountable for a man of Colm’s talents.

  Colm couldn’t see out of the van, but he didn’t need to. He could feel the changes in the road, and he was keeping careful track of the time. Just a little longer, and everything would begin—if it turned out the way that he’d planned it.

  If. It was a word that Colm didn’t like in situations like this. He hated having to rely on others, hated that he wasn’t fully in control of the situation. He’d done everything he could to ensure that those involved would play their parts, and he felt that he understood human nature well enough to be confident that they would, but there was always that element of uncertainty there.

  Then again, what was a game without an element of risk?

  “Would you like to play a game, Vincent?” Colm asked the big mafioso.

  Vincent glared back at him. “Why are you talking to me, freak?”

  Freak? That seemed harsh. It was the kind of thing that people had said about Colm all his life whenever they’d worked out just how much cleverer he was than them. People seemed not to like playing games with him. Perhaps they simply understood that they would lose.

  “I’m asking you if you would like to play a game, Vincent. I spy with my little eye, something beginning with B.”

  “Shut up,” Vincent said. “Unless you want me to hurt you.”

  Hurting people was what Vincent did. He’d broken legs for one of the families for years, even killed a couple of people, they said. Colm wondered if he was meant to find that impressive.

  “Something beginning with B,” Colm insisted. “Well, two things, I suppose, but that isn’t really how the game works. Come on, it’s a simple puzzle.”

  “Be quiet back there!” one of the guards called out. Officer Trent. A man with two children and a dog named Oscar. Colm wondered if they would miss him.

  “What about you, Gunter? Will you guess? Something beginning with B? No? Oh well, I’ll just tell you then. The first thing is the bridge that we are currently passing over. The second is the bomb that’s coming towards us. Oh, there’s a third B, but that’s more of an instruction. Brace!”

  Colm held on tightly. He knew that out there somewhere was an explosive device strapped to a drone, heading straight for them. After all, he’d arranged it that way, making deals with the people who wanted the other occupants of this prison van dead in order to bring it about.

  Even set for it as he was, it was still a shock when the explosion came, rattling the van, the force of it seeming to rip through the front of it. The driver, Officer Marks, died instantly. Since he had no family and his only pet was a goldfish, Colm suspected that no one would miss him much.

  The van swerved out of control, as Colm had calculated that it would. It hit the edge of the bridge, again, as he had calculated. There was a brief sense of weightlessness and then …

  The impact with the water was almost greater than the blast had been, making Colm see stars for a moment or two. He recovered quickly, though, while around him the others cried out in terror and confusion. That probably had a lot to do with the part where the van was starting to fill up with water.

  Colm pulled out lockpicks that he’d carefully secreted about his person and started to work on the shackles holding him in place.

  “What are you doing back there?” Officer Trent demanded.

  “The van is sinking!” Colm called out. “Help us! We’ll drown if you don’t help us!”

  It was strange to Colm how easy to manipulate some people were, with their senses of decency and empathy. Never having been burdened by either, Colm couldn’t imagine falling for something as obvious as this, but the guard did. He opened the metal grill door between the front and back of the van, moving forward with his keys already in his hands.

  Colm leapt up, free from his shackles. He slammed into the guard, hitting him with an elbow, then with a headbutt. Both of those were distractions, though, only designed to buy Colm the time he needed to get a hand to the guard’s gun.

  Colm drew it in one smooth movement, kicking Officer Trent away so that he couldn’t fight for it. The man stood there with his hands up, as if this were some kind of robbery. Colm shot him twice, the sound of it almost deafening in the enclosed space of the van.

  “What is this?” Vincent demanded. “Some kind of—”

  Colm shot him too. He doubted that the big man would have anything to say that would be worth listening to in any case. That left only Gunter the fraudster.

  “Please,” he begged. “Please don’t shoot me.”

  Colm smiled then. “Oh, I’m not going to shoot you, Gunter. That wasn’t the arrangement I made with the people you took money from. You know, the ones who got that money from their drug business. They want you to drown.”

  “No! No, you can’t leave me!”

  Colm frowned at that. “Of course, I can. Goodbye, Gunter.”

  He snatched up Officer Trent’s keys, not only to stop the other man from using them, but also because he thought that he would still need them. Colm half clambered, half swam into the front of the vehicle, then took a moment to unlock the electronic ankle bracelet from around his ankle.

  After that, he shot the windscreen, emptying the clip into it to weaken the bullet resistant glass to the point where he could kick it out. Water only rushed in faster then, and Colm took a breath, plunging into the cold of the river.

  For a moment, being in the water was utterly disorienting. It took several seconds for Colm to spot the sunlight above and to start to swim for it. It was hard work; he was in shape, but it wasn’t as if the prison had a pool to let him practice this part of things. Colm’s lungs started to burn with the effort of holding his breath, but he kept heading upwards.

  As he swam up, Colm started to think about the reason that he’d finally decided to break out of the prison. The young puzzle editor who had been so helpful to the FBI, the one who seemed to be able to solve the hardest puzzles. She was a challenge worth escaping for, someone who might finally be able to make Colm’s life interesting again, free from the kind of drudgery that was almost as bad as being in prison.

  Finally, he rose above the surface, gulping in air greedily. If the men he’d made a deal with had kept their part of the bargain, there would be a bag with fresh clothes and a small bundle of cash waiting on the far bank. Of course, there was a good chance that someone would try to kill him there, to tie up any loose ends, which was why Colm was going to ignore it and go to one of his own stashes. He’d just needed them to believe that they were getting the better of him, even as he used them for his own ends.

  Colm set out with powerful strokes now, trying to get to shore. He had no doubt that the police would be here soon. Colm intended to be long gone by the time they showed up. He would steal a car, get to one of his stashes, and disappear for a day or two.

  Then he would start to put his plans into action in the game he was going to play with Amber Young.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Amber was working on a puzzle box, trying to decide if she should be an agent. For her, now, puzzle boxes would always be associated with the killer who had baited the FBI with just such a puzzle box.

  Yet from the moment she’d done it, she’d had offers coming through to design the puzzles for that kind of box. She was currently working on one for a builder from out of state. Her name had just become associated with them, so that now a small number of people wanted a puzzle sphere or cube or whatever designed by someone who had beaten what the killer claimed was the hardest one out there.

  Amber wasn’t entirely sure how she felt about that. After all, people had been killed by the man who had designed the puzzle box she beat. If people only wanted her to work on an object like that because of the case, wasn’t there something … macabre about that? At the same time, though, no one was being killed as a part of these puzzles, and it meant that Amber got to spend time doing something that she loved.

  She was sitting at the heart of her apartment as she worked. Amber had tidied some of the worst of the clutter away, but she was still surrounded by puzzles, with books on obscure subjects in stacks in case Amber needed one to research a fact. A couple of chessboards and a shogi set were set up with problems that Amber was in the process of solving whenever she got a spare moment. She thought there was a way to trap the queen on one, but she still wasn’t sure of the exact move order to make it work.

  Another, more pressing, problem ticked over in the back of Amber’s mind as she worked on the puzzle box design: should she accept Agent Palliser’s offer? Amber found herself going around and around on that question, building mental tables of the pros and cons.

  Amber switched to the more physical kind, grabbing a pen and paper that she might otherwise have used to draw concept diagrams for how a secret door with a puzzle based on the phases of the moon might work.

  In the pro column, Amber wrote down the fact that it was a regular job, rather than the kind of freelance work she’d been doing to support herself while she’d been at Quantico. She added in the fact that she had already been through the training, had already committed herself to becoming an agent. There was the opportunity for excitement at the FBI that there simply hadn’t been back at the newspaper, and crucially, there would be a feeling that she was making a real difference. Amber would be helping to take killers off the street, stopping them from hurting anyone else.

  In the cons column, she put the fact that it would mean she couldn’t work on puzzles professionally anymore, because the FBI would demand her time and attention. There was the potential danger, too, because on her last case, Amber had almost become the victim of the killer she’d been trying to catch. That had been terrifying.

  Yet it hadn’t stopped her, and as for not working on puzzles, she could still make them for fun, still solve other people’s puzzles. Unless Amber was really planning to go all in on being a freelance puzzle designer, shouldn’t it be obvious that she should accept Palliser’s offer?

 

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18