The Blonde Who Came In from the Cold (The Blonde Identity, #2)

by Ally Carter

Alex felt awkward for the first time in her twenty-two years. Uncomfortable. Second-guessing everything from her T-shirt to her food choices to the fact that she was probably making a mistake with her career and her whole, entire life. She was second-guessing everything that had brought her to that moment even though Alex didn’t do second guesses. Or second chances. Or second place. Alex didn’t do seconds of any kind. Or, at least, she didn’t use to.

His watch was worth more than most cars, and he was going to order the most expensive scotch in the place and then slam it before offering to get one for Alex.

A guy who made sense! Everything from his fancy watch to his slicked-back hair told a story of mediocre grades at top-tier schools, of nasty divorces and bad credit and jobs he got from friends of his father.

“Her name is Mrs. Masterson,” someone said, and Alex turned to see The Guy standing behind her, a proprietary gleam in his eye. “I’m Mr. Masterson. Thanks for keeping my seat warm.”

“That could have been the love of my life.” “He wasn’t.” “You can’t possibly know—” The Guy turned toward her—just slightly. “He took his wedding ring off when he came in, did you see that?”

“I know you’re drinking something caffeine-free because you have to be up early and something boozeless because you have to be sharp. You asked for extra ice because you’ve been out of the country for a while—my guess is Europe—so now you’re jet-lagged, but you’re also hungry. You don’t eat fried food often, but this is a special occasion. And you’re nervous, which is why you’re not already asleep, but you know you should be. How am I doing?”

She hated everything about that feeling and that moment and that man. But mostly she hated how right he was.

They were hands that didn’t dabble. They performed. And a part of Alex itched to see what kind of performance they might coax out of her.

“Never give anyone your real name, Ms. Sterling.” Alex froze. “Never invite a stranger into your room. And never go to theirs.”

“I’m the guy telling you to go home. Lead a good life. Be happy.”

It wasn’t the first time Alexandra Sterling had woken up tied to a chair in the dark, but it was the first time she couldn’t remember exactly how she got there.

Panic was for the very naive, the supremely unprepared, and the extraordinarily stupid, and no one survives ten years in her business by being any of the three, so Alex tried to focus on what she was: Confused.

For a time, every intelligence service in the world had been trying to track her down, but that was more than a year ago, and Kozlov was dead now. Alex hadn’t officially resigned from the CIA, but disappearing without a trace for a year was the same thing, wasn’t it? And, besides, Alex had been a very good girl since she jumped off that mountain in Italy—literally flew into the sunset and disappeared.

And then she heard it—a groan in the darkness—a low, aching sound that meant one thing: she wasn’t alone.

The spies in the movies were tough. They were fearless. They knew how to stab with pencils and strangle with string, and they never, ever cried because their twin sister was about to have her heart pulled out of her chest and then sewn back together—again. They wore fancy dresses and drove fancier cars, and they didn’t need the person in the twin bed on the far side of the room because they weren’t half—they were whole. And they learned it all on some farm in Virginia.

What the CIA grew at Camp Peary, it turned out, were secrets. But that was okay. Alex had a knack for those too.

In reality, it was just a collection of neat, government-issue buildings surrounded by dense forest. On the drive, she’d spied (Ha!) shooting ranges and an airstrip and fractured glimpses of glistening water through breaks in the trees. It was all perfectly . . . ordinary.

He held out his hand and Alex took it because she was going to play nice, she’d decided. Make friends. She was a new person here, and she was going to learn how to be a million more people.

Don't You remember "The Guy's" advice? Don't Give Real names?

What Tyler the Kind of Boring didn’t know was that Alex’s sarcasm was the most ordinary thing about her.

The room smelled like burnt coffee and flop-sweating geniuses.

He was like a nature biographer—the Jane Goodall of covert operations—and if he stood still enough and stayed quiet long enough, then two dozen keenly observant people might fail to notice his existence.

Alex was brimming with questions because she was, at her core, a nosy bitch (and hence: spy school). But she was also smart enough not to push it.

Was she so unqualified that he’d had to track her down at an airport Ramada and steal her chicken fingers?

Alex didn’t know who he was or how he knew so much about her, but he was good at this. She could just tell—from the stillness to those ridiculously competent fingers to the way he’d inferred half her life story just by watching her order takeout.

Alex didn’t know who the woman was, but one thing was certain: Alex wanted to be her. Immediately.

“My name is Margaret Merritt,” the woman began. “I am seventy-one years old and still alive, which makes me an old spy. We are rare and we are precious. I have been doing this job since 1965. I’ve seen presidents come and go, regimes fall and rise. I worked both sides of the wall, back when Berlin had one, and I knocked more than a few holes in it along the way. Both literally and figuratively,”

“In short, I have seen things and done things, and the Agency has asked me to teach you how to not die. With a little luck, it might even work.”

“I’m not going to teach you how to blend in; I’m going to teach you how to cease to exist,” Merritt went on, but Alex couldn’t look away from Michael Kingsley. “You aren’t walking away from another job. You’re walking away from your other life. The person you were this morning died the moment you set foot on that bus. From this point forward, anyone you ever loved will believe a lie. Everyone you meet will be introduced to a mirage. Everything you do will be life or death. Make no mistake, even if this job doesn’t kill you, the person you used to be is already dead.”

“But if you want to stay”—Merritt looked at them all in turn—“know this: you don’t have friends anymore. You don’t have siblings or parents or sweethearts. There are only three types of people in the world going forward: targets, assets, and threats. If that doesn’t sound like how you want to live—or even if you just want to Not Die . . . A bus back to DC will leave in fifteen minutes.

Merritt gave a slow, sad smile. “No one ever does.”

“What did I do? You’re the one who’s been out in the cold for a year, Sterling. What did you do?”

She clearly hadn’t realized that the thing she was handcuffed to was him.

“Of all the idiots in all the abandoned shacks in all the world, I had to get tied up with you.”

It wasn’t a house. Maybe a barn or shed. It was dusty and dry and had the smell of disuse and desperation.

“Little dogs in expensive purses yap. I do not yap.”

Waking up, restrained in the dark, with you should have been outlawed by the Geneva convention.”

It simply wasn’t in his DNA to forget, so that might have been the weirdest thing about coming awake in the dark with no clue where he was or how he’d gotten there.

When he was five, King’s grandfather had bought him his first bicycle without training wheels. They were living in Vienna at the time, and as it turned out, bikes and centuries-old cobblestones don’t mix, so King had fallen and scraped his elbow. No matter how many times his mother washed the wound, he could always feel a little piece of grit under his skin. They said it was in his head, but King knew better. It was a part of him now, and he’d either have to cut it out or learn to live with it. That was how it felt when he met Alex Sterling.

How could he miss her when she was always there? Everywhere. All the time. For the last month, she’d been behind him on the ropes course and ahead of him in the cafeteria and beside him at the shooting range, drilling bull’s-eyes and giggling in a way that made her part prodigy, part psychopath. She was oxygen and he was too stubborn to breathe, so it was fitting, he supposed, that she would be the person he’d be locked inside a small, enclosed space with, sucking up all the available air.

“Yeah. They disabled the emergency release, but that’s not a problem.” She was tearing at the upholstery.

“Because everyone knows the 5 Series had a design flaw that . . .” She slipped her still-bound hands into the hole she’d made and, as if by magic, the trunk popped open. “How did you . . .” “I’m a mechanical prodigy.”

“Who do you think told them about the design flaw?” She turned and swung her bound legs out of the trunk and . . . yeah . . . shimmied out.

“Those drugs must have really knocked me for a loop because I honestly can’t tell if you’re lying.” “Of course I’m lying!” She laughed like he was the punchline of her favorite joke. “I wasn’t on a Formula One pit crew.” Of course not. “I was in the engineering department.”

She was brash and bold, the center of attention and the life of the party. There wasn’t a covert bone in Alex Sterling’s body, and yet he couldn’t shake the feeling that this was King’s world—his birthright—but she was the one who was alive there.

she was her most annoying when she was good.

Glasses swore and shot again, but this time the bullet connected with one of the handcuffs, and Alex stumbled a little when her right hand was no longer anchored to King’s left.

“Good job, Alex. Perfect. Now we have two bodies and zero answers.”

She couldn’t read his mind, but King looked like a cloud before it rained—dark and ready to storm.

Alex took a deep breath and reminded herself that, at the Farm, therapy wasn’t optional. At the Farm, therapy was good. At the Farm, people were taught how to plant bugs and make bombs, so it was important to ensure that trainees weren’t absolutely insane.

She didn’t know what it meant that it was the happiest she’d ever been in her life.