The Operator

  Praise for

  THE DRAFTER

  Book One in the Peri Reed Chronicles

  “Absolute perfect anytime read. Go find a comfy spot and sit down, because Harrison has provided an afternoon of sheer fantastical suspense.”

  —Suspense Magazine

  “The amazingly gifted Harrison is back . . . the multifaceted layers of this story line will keep readers guessing—and riveted. This is going to be one truly wild wide.”

  —RT Book Reviews, 4 stars

  “A kick-ass start to a new series!”

  —Book Riot

  “Entertaining . . . Harrison delivers moments of lyrical intensity.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “In this action-packed near-future urban fantasy novel . . . the puzzle of piecemeal memories is intriguing, and all the action keeps things interesting.”

  —Locus

  Thank you for downloading this Pocket Books eBook.

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  For Tim

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I’d like to thank the readers who stuck with me, trusting the storyteller, and my new readers who took a chance.

  CHAPTER

  ONE

  “Ah, ma’am? Please don’t touch the car,” the man with the glass tablet said, and Peri flicked her eyes to him, acknowledging his words as she lifted the handle of the hundred- thousand-dollar car. Immediately it opened, the door making a soft hush of sound that meant money well spent as she slipped inside and let the leather seats enfold her.

  “Ma’am?”

  It smelled new, and her eyes closed for a moment as she almost reverently set her hands on the wheel, smiling as her shoulders eased and an odd relaxed tension filled her. It was sleek, sexy without being over-the-top as if confident in its power and comfortable under the spotlight. Its red color went deep, showing shadowed layers that only an off-the-assembly-line paint could deliver. A two-seater, it looked fast, with wide tires that had ample turning radius in the wheel wells and an antenna array panel to plug in just about anything now or in the future. The sound system was adequate at best, but the onboard computer display was big enough to be useful and glass compatible. Much of it was plastic, though, and Peri’s nose wrinkled.

  “It looks as if it was made for you,” the man said, the annoyed slant to his brow belying his smile as he stood just outside and held his tablet like a fig leaf.

  Peri tossed her straight black hair out of her eyes, her smile real as she looked up at him. “I bet you say that to everyone.”

  He rocked closer. “No. Only those who look like they belong in it.” He cleared his tablet, and the car’s logo ghosted into existence on the clear glass. “Well?”

  Angling her slim form, she smoothly got out before he had a coronary. Immediately the chaos of Detroit’s auto show beat anew upon her, the air smelling of ozone and popcorn, and the rhythmic thump of ambient electronic dance music from the live stage pounding into her. Content, she sent her gaze up to the multitude of cameras set to record and identify, secure in the knowledge that the swirls of black smut she’d painted on her face would keep her anonymous.

  She wasn’t alone wearing it—face paint had become to Detroit’s auto show what big hats and mint juleps were to Churchill Downs. Both men and women sported well-placed dots and swirls to disguise themselves as they checked out the competition or just avoided being tagged and sent literature. As she was dressed in black leather pants and a cropped jacket with a silk shell and six-inch black boots, the paint made her feel especially flirty and powerful. Sexy.

  She turned back to the coup, thinking it was cheating to show it in a paint job that you couldn’t get from the factory. “How do you get around the weight issue of the batteries? You’ve got them in the front, but the drive tram is in the back. The weight isn’t over the wheels, and it’s going to turn as if it was on pudding.”

  His interest sharpened. “It’s not an issue at posted speeds.”

  Peri nodded, and he winced as she ran a hand caressingly over the car’s sleek lines—all the way from the front to the back. “Over posted speeds is when you need the control, though. Acceleration?”

  “Zero to sixty in four-point-two seconds,” he said, tapping his tablet awake.

  “Battery only, or warming engine assist?” she asked, and he smiled as he brought up the literature. Ten steps away, a printer came alive with the stats.

  “Engine assist. You can’t break four seconds on just battery.”

  “A Mantis can.”

  The man looked up. “I mean a real car.”

  Peri eyed him from under a lowered brow. “You’re saying a Mantis isn’t a real car?”

  “I mean,” he tried again, flustered, “a car you can actually have. If you’re looking for speed, have you considered—”

  “Sorry. No thanks.” Peri stepped out from under the hot spotlights and into the milling crowd, snagging a tiny flute of champagne in passing. Her dress and attitude parted the way, and her warm feeling of satisfaction grew as the tingle of alcohol slipped into her. It was nice to know she still had the best. Ahh, life is good.

  “Why do you tease them like that?” a voice said at her elbow, and she spun, hand fisted.

  But the man had dropped back as if expecting it, mirth crinkling the corners of his brown eyes. The brief protest of the surrounding people subsided as they pushed past and around them—and were forgotten.

  “Silas?” she questioned, her gaze flicking to the messenger drones at the ceiling, worried a high-Q might be hiding among them. Then her eyes dropped to his tall, body-building form. His cashmere coat across his wide shoulders made him even more bulky, but his waist was trim and his face clean-shaven. The white of salt from the street rimed his John Lobb shoes, and he grimaced when she noticed. “What are you doing here? How did you find me?” she said, shifting into the lee his body made when someone jostled her.

  Taking her empty flute and setting it aside, he pointed to a nearby communal area set up with tall tables and rentable connections to get a message outside the no-Internet-zone needed for security. “I’ve never known you to miss the opening of the Detroit auto show,” he said as they walked. His low voice at her ear slipped through her like smoke, staining the folds of her mind and bringing a thousand unremembered moments with him to hover just beyond recollection. “I like your hair that length.”

  It was quieter among the tables, and Peri touched the tips of her jet-black hair just brushing her shoulders. She’d let it grow. No need to cut it. Slowly she levered herself up on one of the high stools. He’d been watching her. That was probably where her itchy feeling had been coming from, not that she’d had to close her store on a Monday to hit opening day.

  The hot-spot connection found her phone and chimed for her attention, and she turned the rentable link facedown. Silas looked tired. There was a familiar pinch of worry in his eyes as he levered himself onto the seat across from her. He laced his thick hands together, setting them innocently on the table, but she could smell the hint of gunpowder on him; he’d been to the range recently. A black haze shadowed his jawline, and a memory surfaced of how it would feel if she ran her hand over it, delighting in the prickly sensation on her fingertips. Behind him, people in extravagant dress and having enough technology to run a small country mingled and played. She’d come to lose herself among them, to pretend that it was hers again for the day. She missed the feeling of being in control so surely that the rest of the world seemed a fantasy.

  I shouldn’t hav
e come here. I made a mistake.

  A misplaced anger seeped into her, pushing out the doubt. She’d made a place for herself, a new life, found a new security that didn’t hinge on anyone but herself. “Are you alone? Is Allen with you? Damn it, you do realize you might have blown my cover?”

  “It’s nice to see you, too. Yes, I’m fine,” Silas said dryly, and she slumped, looking past him and into the crowd for anyone watching without watching. Sighing, Silas scratched the side of his bent nose, his focus blurring as if remembering a past argument. “I might not have been the best agent, but I know better than to go to your coffee shop. As for Allen, I don’t particularly care where he is. I’ve not been in contact with him since”—he hesitated, lip twitching—“you quit.”

  She had left, and he’d found her. So not good. “Stay away from my coffee shop.” Heart pounding, she slid off the stool.

  “Peri. Wait,” he said, voice weary. “I only came to give you your book back,” he said, reaching past his coat to put one of her journals on the table.

  Her breath caught, and she stopped, recognizing the leather-bound tome. It had been painstakingly pieced back together, the damage pressed out as best as possible, but it was still obvious where the bullet had torn into it. Kind of like her life.

  It was from her last year in Opti training, an entire twelve months of memories intentionally erased from her mind so she could successfully bring down the corrupt Opti from the inside. The United States’ clandestine special ops program was gone, and the diary was her only link to why she had done it. Her pulse quickened at the answers that might lie in the pages. Why she hated blue sheets, why silver Mustangs made the scar on her pinky itch, why the scent of chocolate chip cookies left her melancholy. There were answers in the pages, guarded by demons she feared would tear apart what little self she’d managed to pull back. Her ignorance made her vulnerable, but it also made her safe.

  Hand to her cold face, she backed up, her footing unsure on the thick carpet. “I’m not that person anymore,” she whispered. Damn it, she was going to have to rabbit. If Silas had found her, anyone could.

  “Peri.”

  He pulled her to a stop. Anyone else would have gotten her heel through his instep, but she hesitated, letting him draw her back. Breath held, she looked up at him, her soul crying out for what she’d left behind. She’d liked who she’d been, and the wrongness of that still woke her in the night when all was quiet. Silas had been a big part of that, not the worst, but a part nevertheless.

  “I’m not asking you to return to the person you were, just understand her,” he said. “It’s been almost a year. You have to stop hiding from this. You won’t ever be free of it if you don’t come to grips with what you’ve done, the good and bad.”

  “Is that your professional opinion, Doctor?” she said, yanking out of his grip. Her wrist stung, but she refused to look at it.

  Silas’s jaw clenched as unknown thoughts flitted behind his eyes. Her chin lifted, daring him, and with a frustrated grimace, he turned away. “Never mind. I made a mistake. I shouldn’t have come. You take care of yourself, Peri.”

  “You, too,” she said as he walked away, hunched and unseeing. His tall frame and wide shoulders were tight under his coat as he wove through the lights, bare skin, and beautiful people. With a feeling of having won, she watched the crowd take him, but it shifted to worry as her fingers traced over the book in indecision, until finally she picked it up.

  A business card from the Georgia Aquarium slipped out, falling to the floor. It wasn’t Silas’s name on it, but he’d likely be using an alias. Next to it was a hand-printed phone number. She stared at the card for a moment before turning and walking away, leaving it to be lost in the clutter.

  To know what she had done might destroy everything she had made for herself. It was easier to ignore it, keep pretending she was happy and hope the lure to return to the power and prestige would never be stronger than the loathing of what she’d turned herself into to get there.

  But she wasn’t sure she could do that anymore.

  CHAPTER

  TWO

  “Babe, why don’t you wear that clingy black top anymore? I like how it makes your little breasts into gotta-have handfuls.”

  “Stop. Right there.” Brow furrowed, Peri eyed Jack over the noisy schuuuck of the milk steamer as he sat before the coffee shop’s cash register and worked a crossword puzzle on his tablet. Beyond him through the large windows, a January snow sifted down in a sedate hush, the unexpected pristine white beautiful until it hit the ground and was churned into a slushy brown by steady foot traffic and slow cars. She knew the top in question, and though she’d never wear it again, she couldn’t throw it away. It was good for dinner out and breaking in all at the same time. Finding that combination was hard—even if it had been ages since she’d done either.

  “That apron isn’t hiding anything,” Jack continued, clearly enjoying her irritation as she looked down at the cream-and-black cotton that said uniform. “You think these suits are here for your glass four-gen connection?”

  “I said stop.” She hadn’t seen Jack in three weeks—not since some fool kid had tried to pull a stab-and-grab. She’d thought Jack might be gone for good. Yet there he sat at her counter, looking like sex incarnate, his expression earnest in question as his blue eyes watched her, half-lidded behind his tousleable blond hair. His stubble was thick—just the way she liked it—and she could imagine the whiff of electronics he so excelled in. My God, he’d been good. They both had been. Maybe he’s here because I saw Silas.

  That had been four days ago, but her diary—hidden among her cookbooks for the first three days—had kept him at the forefront of her thoughts until she’d given in to the nauseating will-I, won’t-I and cracked the binding last night. That she’d found nothing in the first few pages but classes and grades had been both a shock and a relief. Just the briefest mention of Allen and Silas. Apparently Silas had been so stricken by his girlfriend’s death that he hadn’t seen her as anything other than a chair that wasn’t empty. It was obvious her naive self had been honored to have been chosen to help rout out the corruption in Opti, perhaps a little egotistical even. But most special ops agents were. They had to be to survive.

  Embarassed by her past gullibility, she took the to-go cup, sashaying around Jack to pluck a sheet from the store’s printer in passing. “Leave,” she muttered as she headed to a window table.

  Did someone make a pass at me and I didn’t notice? she wondered, her fingers rising to touch her felt-pen pendant as if it were a security doll. The one time that had happened, she’d nearly broken the man’s wrist, catching herself before causing permanent damage; the man’s lawyers made more than he did, which was saying a lot. Hand clenched around the pendant, she went over the last few hours. They were all accounted for. Every last second. Why is Jack here?

  Chuckling, Jack returned to his crosswords, ignored by the impeccably dressed business clientele scattered about the upscale coffeehouse.

  Peri had worked hard to divorce herself from her past, and yet she still found herself breathing in the expensive cologne of the suits she served as if it were a drug. She eyed their leather briefcases and high-end purses, knowing their cars were as shiny as the fob resting beside their state-of-the-art phones and tablets, all so new they smelled of factory. She knew the simplicity she’d built around herself was a lie as she lured in everything she missed, all the while pretending she’d made a clean break from what she didn’t want to be, what she couldn’t be. Even so, she’d been able to ignore it until Silas had shown up.

  I’m sick, she thought as she stopped before a thin man in a suit. “Headed out, Simon?” Peri asked, and he glanced up from his tablet, startled. It was hard to tell by looking, but he was worth between eight and ten million depending on the day. She’d done a search on him the first time he’d come in, worried he might be someone he wasn’t. “How about a refill?”

  The early-forties man waved closed
the weather map on his tablet, his brow still holding his worry for the coming snow. “Yes, thanks, Peri. You know me better than my wife.”

  She set the cup beside the rental-car fob, her focus blurring when his faint Asian accent brought a flash of memory of hot sun and smelly river. Bringing herself back with a jerk, she glanced at Jack. He’d been there. She was sure of it. Even if she didn’t remember it. “That’s because I see you more than she does. Going home this weekend?”

  The man blinked as he rolled his tablet into a tube and tucked it in a front pocket. “How did you know?”

  Smiling, she handed him his ticket from the printer, and he laughed. “I almost forgot that. Your phone dies one time at the terminal and you never trust it again. Thanks. I’ll see you on Monday.” But she’d known he was leaving before the printer had come alive. His socks were the same he’d worn yesterday, his hotel card wasn’t in his phone case when he’d paid, and his hat was in his satchel, not sitting on the nearby chair with his coat like it had been every other morning.

  The scent of his cologne rose as he began to gather his things. A longing—an ache almost—filled her, and she reached for his coat, the lapels still damp from the snow. Anyone watching would assume she was angling for a bigger tip as she held it for him and slipped it over his shoulders, but her eyes closed as she breathed in the smell of linen, stifling a shiver at the sound of it brushing against silk and the clicks of his weather-inappropriate dress shoes on the worn oak floor. She was a God-blessed junkie, and she took sips of her poison where she could. First class from Detroit to New York will have breakfast.

  “See you next week,” Simon said, saluting her with his coffee and heading for the door.

  “Watch yourself out there. It’s a jungle,” she said in farewell, but he was gone, the door chimes jiggling behind him. In an instant he was lost in the snow-slow maze of cars and foot traffic. She smiled at the big-engine cars pushing their way through the snow. The electric vehicles Detroit was known for tended to vanish in winter, replaced by the beefier combustion engines she’d grown up with until the temps pulled out of the negatives. Seeing them on the road, getting the job done, made her feel connected, home.