~~Young~~

Chapter Two

   “He’s right you know,” another voice buzzed in Sera’s ear, “I’ve been sitting under this window long enough for the ivy to consider me its next victim, and not a peep.”

   “London hush!” Sera scolded her future replacement.

   Lizzy- or London as was her alias and a play on her full name, Elizabeth, as in the Queen who lives in London- certainly had the fortitude to lead them, but she could be reckless, taking unnecessary chances like having a conversation on a covert operation when sitting beside the mark’s house.

   “Both of you listen to me, my un- the Senator isn’t the kind of guy to take chances. The fact that you can see the laptop sitting on his desk when he’s out of town worries me. He should have taken it with him. If the intel Blondie got from that meathead on the football team is right, that his dad and the Senator went to the islands together, then he isn’t gone on pleasure. The two of them vacationing together means money is going to change hands so to speak and that can’t be done without that laptop.”

   Sera huffed as she squinted into the night to where she knew Lizzy was hiding. She knew things were off, but was her Uncle really setting a trap for them? It just seemed too easy. They figured they were going to have to wait for her Uncle to have a late night at the office, giving them a short window of opportunity to execute the plan. But never once did they think they would get a crack at the laptop itself. Duncan in all his technological wizardry had come up with a device to transmit the virus that would implement the transfers wirelessly.

   But Lizzy was right. They had been here for a couple of hours now, Duncan and her hiding on the fringes of the property, and Lizzy- after going in against orders- was sitting in the bushes under her Uncle’s first floor office window. Surely if anything was going to go down it would have happened already. Duncan may have rerouted the security, but if her Uncle was waiting for a break in then he should have been watching for just such a thing.

   And there was no way Chelsea- aka Blondie- would have given her bad info. Sera trusted only two people explicitly in this life outside of herself, Joey and Chelsea. It took Chelsea moving a country away from everything she knew to be with Sera at college for her to realize the two of them were friends. Sera in all her isolation never grasped that all those little things Chelsea had done for her at St. Anthony’s meant that. Chelsea never forgot her birthday, or Joey’s, she always came back with something for Sera’s side of the room when her parents would take her out shopping. She’d sit and talk to her when Sera was particularly down, take Sera with her on family vacations-at Chelsea’s parent’s encouragement- even shared her graduation party with her at the end of high school.

   If Chelsea told Sera something then she herself believed it to be true. Girl had a knack for information gathering. One flip of that thick blonde hair or a bat of those impossibly blue eyes and any man- and women too- would be putty in her hands. She never lost that baby face and after a short conversation people trusted her. She got them to drop their guards and knew just the right questions to ask and when, slipping into another topic seamlessly so they’d have no recollection of what they divulged when they parted ways.

   Of course when it came to that football boy Sera guessed it was the promise of a good time that got him to fess up. Not that Chelsea would have let it go that far, she knew how to tactfully put on the breaks, but most jocks jumped at the chance to, well, have a chance with her.

   Still…did he know who she was to the Better Angels? Had he purposely given her bad info?

   No, Sera thought to herself, Duncan had checked the airport itinerary. Both her Uncle and the jock’s dad had gotten on that plane, they had a layover in Houston, Texas and then they were on their way to the islands…