Read Online Mr. Nice Spy by Jordan McCollum - Free Book Online

phone.”
    What’s the purpose of a smartphone if you’re not going to use the features? As a reflex, I take mine out. The voicemail symbol sits on the little status bar. I check who it’s from.
    Shanna.
    My stomach hits the asphalt. I forgot her flight. I missed my chance. I missed my Shanna.
    No. No. She gets in tonight. I know it. I still have a chance.
    But does Shanna need me? Or is she calling because she needs more time? I turn away from Talia and hit the icon to pick up my voicemail.
    “Elliott?” Slow, even breathing fills in a long pause. At least she isn’t crying, but something about her voice is off. Could’ve been drinking. It’d explain why Shanna, always so in control, meticulous, careful, would contradict herself and reach out to me when she “needs time.”
    “So tonight my mom tricked me, set me up with a guy I went to high school with.” A slight slur, missing beats in her rhythm — maybe tipsy. Doesn’t take much.
    “And it was great.”
    I stop analyzing and start panicking. My chance is slipping through my fingers. I’ve already lost.
    If she’s tipsy enough to call me, she might actually have been drunk enough to do something really, really bad. Or at least bad for me.
    “I don’t—” She sighs. “Anyway, if you want it, here’s my flight info.” She rattles off the time, airline and flight number, before another long pause. And then another sigh.
    And then Shanna’s gone.
    I pull my phone back. Talia breaks into my thoughts. “All right, I think we’ve narrowed down the field to two choices.”
    I can’t look away from the voicemail screen and my two choices. Delete? Save?
    “Elliott?”
    “Yeah.” I power off the screen and push the phone into my pocket, forcing the panic and the pressure to the back of my mind. I don’t have time to be devastated. Yet. “What’s up?”
    Talia flips the cloned phone around to me. “Kelvin Adams and Marcus Lee. Neither of them show up in the embassy directory, and from the emails we’ve got, Rhodes has had both of them adjust his schedule.”
    “Which one’s which?”
    She shrugs. “Shockingly, there’s more than one Kelvin Adams and Marcus Lee on the Internet. Didn’t see anybody familiar, though.”
    “You checked the whole Internet?”
    “Twice.” Smirk. “Now what, Mister Brains-Behind-This-Op?”
    Now what, indeed. We’ve narrowed our list to two, but those options are faceless names. Waltzing into the embassy to talk to them doesn’t quite qualify as “covert.”
    We need something to tell them apart. Some way to make the real mole show his hand. Something like — “Wait, we’ve got his emails?”
    “A few. What was in the cache on his phone.”
    “Can we send emails as him?”
    Talia’s lip curls and she stares at the phone. “If DS&T’s as good as they claim.” The Department of Science & Technology is our real-life Q — and sometimes they’re way better. I’m hoping this standard phone cloning program is one of those times. “What’ve you got in mind?”
    Now it’s my lips curling into a smile I can’t stop, and I don’t want to. “Oh, just a way to tell John Doe from Joe Schmoe.”
    I let her peer over my shoulder while I fire off short emails with two polar opposite messages to the ambassador’s stoolies.
    I’ve given it some thought , I type in an email to Kelvin, and we need to talk to the Emiratis .
    Then I write the opposite message to Marcus: the Canadians and the Emiratis need to reach an agreement on their own .
    Now, when the mole relays the message to the Emiratis, we’ll know who he is from which message he sends. I can tell Talia is impressed by my genius by the way she’s trying so hard not to look impressed. “Are you sure that’s a good idea?”
    Shocker: Talia, paranoid.
    “We’re not here to interfere in international affairs,” she finishes.
    I cast her a sidelong glance. “Oh, aren’t we?” I shake off the teasing tone. “It’s minor. We’re fine.”
    “Until