Delta: A Spy Novel

Chapter Fifteen

            Carefully, I turned so that I was standing next to Astrid, leaning against the wall. I glanced nonchalantly in the direction of Astrid’s dark gaze: a solitary figure, leaning against a building across the street, much as we were. I frowned. The guy looked, from what I could see, relatively dark-haired, dark eyed. I was strongly reminded of the guy Charlie and Astrid had chased, which didn’t help matters at all.

I took a deep breath, turning back to Astrid, whose face had suddenly tightened just a tiny bit, but enough for me to notice. “What?” I asked her immediately.

            She looked at me, her eyes unfocused, and I could tell she wasn’t really seeing me but something else that I couldn’t see. “Nothing,” she responded abstractly, but it didn’t take a genius to know she was lying. About what, though?

            Charlie seemed to have noticed too: his grey eyes darkened visibly and he opened his mouth to say something. I met his eyes and he shut it again. “What’s the matter?” I asked Astrid once more, and she shook her head, a little more violently than she needed to.

            “I’m fine,” she insisted, breaking free of my grasp. “Really.” She met my eyes for a full ten seconds, and finally I looked away. A frown was tugging at the corners of my mouth, and Charlie looked ominous again. Pierre ran his hand through his hair with a sigh of frustration and glared at me like it was my fault.

            “Okay,” he said after a moment. “We’re getting nowhere. We need to get something straight. We’re all on the same team here, and so if anyone’s hiding something that is crucial to this assignment, spilling it would be the best thing to do right now.”

            He was met with three blank faces. Charlie looked like he would be more willing to shoot the guy than talk to him, and Astrid was just giving him a confused look. I was trying to hold back a grin at his ignorance. He didn’t seem to be able to get anything out of our expressions – Charlie’s was rapidly turning dark again – and so he let loose another one of those big sighs and tried again.

            “Right,” he said, a little awkwardly. “Gotcha. No one has anything to spill.”

            Charlie looked like he was going to say something unpleasant, but I coughed, shooting him a warning look in the process. “All right, now that we have that covered,” I said, sounding amused, “what’s the plan, big shot?”

            Pierre gave me a vacant look that told me he really hadn’t had anything in mind and I had just blown him out of the water. Whoops. Charlie rolled his eyes, leaning against the wall again and looking away from us. Astrid still looked disorientated – from Pierre’s kiss or something else? – and she had one eye fixed on the man she had seen. Her face was an inscrutable mask, though, and she refused to make eye contact with me.

            Pierre blew out a deep breath. “Okay,” he said, marshalling his thoughts. “I say we do as Astrid says. Someone needs to follow that man. No,” he added sharply as Astrid opened her mouth, “not you.”

            Now her mask shifted as she scowled at him. “And why can’t I?” she demanded, sounding irrevocably like a preschooler. I decided not to point out this particular fact to her, however, given how moody she was being today.