Michele Bravo pulled on her cargo shorts. They felt a bit tight, and she swore. This is what came of two weeks of travelling, with no biking or other exercise (so much for sex being a great form of exercise), and perhaps more egregiously, having hot chocolate sundaes for dessert after lunch as well as after dinner.
Well, she’d still been in the need for comfort food after the shock of the false Mr. Largo. And now he’d shown up again. By rights she should treat herself to a peanut buster parfait, but she’d have to resist. And tomorrow she’d have to buy a collapsible bike so she could get in some exercise during the rest of this trip. She was also a member of a health club chain that was supposed to have outlets everywhere…she’d better start looking for those, too, so she could get in a little swimming and a little weight training. She’d been allowing herself to slack off for too long.
Well, hell, she thought. She’d just got handed another shock – a worse one – the false Mr. Largo might know her identity – her real identity – as Michele Bravo. If that didn’t call for comfort food nothing would. She’d go have that buster bar parfait and give up on her desserts for lunch starting tomorrow.
“Feel like a Dairy Queen, Fitz?” she asked. “My treat.”
Fitz looked up from his computer. “No thanks. Are you having ice cream cravings?”
“Yes…I’ll be gone for half an hour or so.”
“Take your time. I’ve got to take notes on this documentary.”
“Okay. Later.”
Michele spent the time at the DQ savoring her parfait and trying to come up with a plan to discover what was going on with the false Mr. Largo.
She repeated to herself her belief that no secret agent bent on tracking down the “infamous Taran Tula” would just come to the Endless Caverns in the hopes of accidently seeing her. If he had been reading her blog…and he must have done so, he would have known she was going there, but not the time of day or anything like that. Why, if he knew Taran Tula was actually Michele Bravo, even go to the caverns at all? Why not stake out her apartment?
Michele took out a pocket notebook and made some notes. Their next stop was the Shenandoah Caverns. What if she were to mention that in her blog…and give the time of day – having some plausible reason for going into that much detail, of course – that she’d be there. Then, if she saw the false Mr. Largo again, she’d know that he had in actual fact been following her.
In one sense she hated to do it. If there was any kind of confrontation, she could hardly dispatch the false Mr. Largo with Fitz as a witness. And she didn’t know the terrain surrounding Shenandoah Caverns…if she needed to make a quick getaway she wouldn’t be able to do it…
No.
What she would do would be to post an entry that she’d been called home unexpectedly. So if the false Mr. Largo were following her, he’d go stake out her apartment to wait for her return. Meanwhile, she’d continue her cavernous adventures…her main writing was going into the magazine, anyway, not the blog…
But how to find out if the false Mr. Largo were staking out her apartment?
Easy. She was the head of Spindrift Security, after all. She’d put one of her operatives on her apartment, with instructions to find out if anyone else were watching it. And if anyone else was…find out – discreetly – who he was and who he worked for.
She’d draw up a likeness of the false Mr. Largo and send it along, to give her operative a heads up, but if the false Mr. Largo were working for the police or some other law enforcement agency, chances were they’d have half a dozen agents staked out around her place.
Finishing her peanut buster parfait and her plan at the same time, Michele sighed and got up. She’d make her sketch, then send an email later on tonight, setting things in motion. Then, there’d be nothing to do but wait.
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