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  Table of Contents

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  About Inside Man

  Praise for the Project Kobra series

  Author Note

  Title Page for Inside Man by Tracy Cooper-Posey

  [1] Latin Quarter, Paris, France. April.

  [2] The Sorbonne, Paris, France. The next day.

  [3] Washington D.C. Seven months later.

  [4] Zamalek District, Gezira Island, Central Cairo, Egypt. At the same time.

  [5] Latin Quarter, Paris, France. At the same time.

  [6] Gentilly, Paris, France. A few minutes later.

  [7] Latin Quarter, Paris, France. Same day.

  [8] Garrett Park, Maryland. A few hours later.

  [9] Quinze-Vingts, Paris, France.

  [10] Camp Peary, York County, Virginia.

  [11] Valence, Drôme, France.

  [12] Valence, Drôme, France. Three hours later.

  [13] Saint-Donat-sur-l’Herbasse, Drôme, France.

  [14] La Richonnière, Drôme, France.

  [15] The Isère…and beyond. France.

  [16] Somewhere in Montana, and the Atlas Mountains, Morocco.

  [17] Jerusalem, Israel.

  [18] Vercors Regional Natural Park, France.

  [19] …and on to Méaudre.

  [20] Baltimore, Maryland.

  [21] Parc Paul Mistral, Grenoble, France.

  [22] At the same time…

  [23] Undisclosed cemetery, Washington D.C. Ten days later.

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  The next book in the Project Kobra series.

  About the Author

  Other books by Tracy Cooper-Posey

  Copyright Information

  About Inside Man

  It’s her job to protect Cain…if she doesn’t kill him herself.

  Agata Kelsey is an MIT Engineering Honors graduate, speaks six languages fluently, and a CIA operative with no time for fools. As punishment for a job gone wrong, she is assigned to the Paris-based security detail guarding Cain Ishmael Warren, the wild, uncontrollable son of former Vice President Warren.

  Cain Warren resents his security detail with every shred of his rotten, irredeemable soul, especially the most recent addition, a lightweight piece of fluff with a mouth and an attitude. He ditches them at every opportunity, except she’s hard to shake off.

  When trouble arrives, Cain is shocked because it’s nothing to do with him. An old enemy of Agata’s puts them both in his sights, forcing Agata to run--and take Cain with her on a chase across France and into the Alps wilderness, with the Kobra’s venomous Gavril Zima far too close behind them...

  This romantic thriller is the second book in the Project Kobra series.

  1.0: Hunting The Kobra

  2.0: Inside Man

  …and more to come!

  Praise for the Project Kobra series

  Tracy brings serious competition to the big boys of spy thrillers.

  If you like John LeCarre, Lee Childs and John Grisham, you will absolutely love this book. It far surpassed my highest expectations.

  An unbelievably good book! It is fast moving with so much going on that you will never want to put this book down.

  Has it all: mystery, intrigue, action, espionage AND a heroine that isn’t too stupid to live.

  Amazing read!!

  A page turner and a pure pleasure.

  Author Note

  Inside Man is my official 100th standalone title.* I thought it might be interesting to include a nod to centuries or one-hundreds in this book’s plot, but the story simply wouldn’t allow it.

  For me, the story always comes first, which is why my publishing company is Stories Rule Press.

  Instead, I am mentioning this rare author milestone here.

  Enjoy the read.

  Tracy Cooper-Posey

  Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.

  May 2019

  ____

  [*For the complete official list of 100 titles, see: https://tracycooperposey.com/the-official-100-books/]

  [1]

  Latin Quarter, Paris, France. April.

  When the stout matron in bouclé tweed approached Cain’s table, her espresso in hand, the stupefyingly beautiful blonde woman sitting at the table across the aisle from him raised a languid, perfectly arched dark blonde brow before returning to her novel. Cain stopped wondering if he should try talking to the blonde and scowled up at the matron instead.

  “I would share the table with you, monsieur,” the matron told him. It was a reasonable expectation, for there were no other seats in the café—not even inside, which didn’t have the view or the pleasant spring air to enjoy.

  Even the blonde had a customer sitting on the other side of her table. In her case, a bespectacled, retired gentleman with a carefully folded copy of Les Échos in one hand, and a glass of wine in the other.

  The matron put her espresso on the other side of the little round table from Cain’s stack of books and the cup of green tea.

  “No,” Cain told her.

  “Excuse me?” The matron paused from pulling the chair out from the table, her eyes widening.

  “I said, madam, that you cannot sit here.”

  She pursed her lips, her indignation growing.

  “I do not want you across the table from me,” he added.

  Her lips parted. “Well, really! There is not another chair anywhere!”

  Cain put his phone on top of the stack of books and met her gaze. “I have tuberculoid leprosy, madam. The last thing you want is for me to cough on you.” He raised his hand and cleared his throat behind his fist.

  She backed up a step in alarm, her instincts shifting her feet, even while she rolled her eyes at the outrageous claim.

  Cain kept his gaze steady, willing her to dispute him.

  The blonde rose to her feet, behind the woman. “Here, madam, you can have my seat. I will sit there, instead.”

  The matron glanced at Cain, uncertainty and indignation warring in her breast.

  The blonde shrugged. “I had leprosy as a child. I am immune.”

  Cain just barely stopped himself from laughing out loud.

  Confusion wrinkled the woman’s brow. “Well, er…”

  The blonde scooped up the lady’s espresso, handed it to her and stepped back, waving to the chair she had been using. “Please, sit and relax.”

  “Very well.” The woman tugged at her tweed jacket and settled on the chair, turning her shoulders so she did not have to look at Cain even accidentally.

  The blonde sank onto the chair opposite Cain and put her coffee in front of her.

  Cain sat back. “With all due respect, miss, I do not want you sitting at my table, either.”

  The blonde gave him a hard smile which barely rounded the corners of her full mouth. She said in American-accented English, “You either put up with me, or a stranger who will insist upon talking. Take your pick.”

  Cain raked his gaze over her once more. “You’re not Parisian.” He used English, to match her. Yet everything about her, from the elegant, heeled pumps to the neat
skirt and simple pearls at her neck, to the plain enameled fingernails, screamed French chic.

  She closed the novel she had opened, her finger marking her place. It was a copy of Katherine Pancol’s Trois Baisers. “You didn’t read your security briefing this morning, did you?” Her tone was one of weary wisdom.

  Cain’s gut twisted. “No,” he said. She was his security detail? “Impossible. You’re not… You cannot possibly be—”

  Her smile was friendly, and purely for onlookers. “Agata Kelsey. I won’t repeat my affiliations here. They were in your briefing.”

  Cain shook his head. “I don’t care who you are. Where is Harry?” He glanced at her ear. “Are you wearing a worm? Tell him I want to speak to him right now.”

  “Sit the fuck down, Warren,” she said sharply, her smile fading. “You’re drawing attention to yourself.”

  It was the sharp, hard tone and the irreverent cursing which bent his knees and dropped him back upon the chair. He blinked at her. “What did you just say?”

  She leaned forward. “For all the non-English speakers watching us talk, we’re getting to know one another, okay?”

  Cain groaned. “You’re CIA, aren’t you? Cloak and daggers and play-acting. Where on earth did Harry dig you up from?”

  “There’s a reason you have a security detail, Mr. Warren—”

  He laughed. “I have a detail because my father was Vice President for a whole thirty seconds, last decade, and this is how he keeps tabs on me. How much do you weigh, Agata Kelsey?”

  It was her turn to blink. “That has nothing—”

  “Just over a hundred and thirty pounds, I’m guessing. If this detail was anything but the farce it is, then your inability to stop so much as a stiff breeze from taking me out would make you redundant.” He crossed his arms. “What did you do wrong to get yourself assigned to me?”

  She scowled. Her face turned pink.

  Cain watched the flush spread down her neck with amusement. “You will have to work on that tell, Kelsey. It’s way too revealing.”

  Her jaw worked. “Let me guess. You’ve played poker, too. Probably an illegal high stakes game. Something with—”

  “Too?” he said, then sighed mentally. Why was he engaging with her? It was kicking up his pulse. His heart was working too hard. Both were bad things. He squeezed the flesh over the bridge of his nose.

  She bridled. It was almost cute, except her tiny squirm spread her open jacket a few inches, giving him a glimpse of the butt of a pistol under her arm. From here, it looked like a Glock 9mm.

  The pressure built in his temples.

  One…breathe…two…breathe…three…breathe, he whispered in his head.

  She was already leaning forward. The table was small. She could lower her voice so no one heard her angry English phrases. Her icy green eyes glittered as she recounted, “Washed out of the U Olympic Biathlon team for performance-enhancing drug use. Kicked out of Stanford. Twice. Three sex scandals, one of them involving the wife of the Argentinean ambassador to the United States. Two drug charges, neither of which stuck, because Daddy took care of it, although that’s not on the rap sheet, of course. Some would call that enough and change their ways, only you just slid downhill from there, didn’t you?” Her tone was polite and enquiring. “Unlike you, I did read my daily brief.”

  One…breathe…two…breathe…three…breathe. Cain closed his thumb, forefinger and middle finger over each other with the count. Focused on the simple movements. “I don’t think you fit in with the detail, Ms. Kelsey.” He was grateful his voice emerged evenly. “I’ll talk to Harry. He’ll find you somewhere—”

  “If it’s such a shit detail, why do you care if I’m on it or not?” Her tone seemed genuinely curious.

  “They were prescription.”

  “Pardon me?”

  “The performance-enhancing drugs. They were prescription. I had allergies.” It sounded stupid, saying it aloud.

  “They were banned by the Olympic committee,” she pointed out.

  “They banned them thirty seconds before they busted down my door and turned the room over. The bottle was right there on the bathroom counter, but they had to make it look good.” He shrugged and made himself shut up and drink the tea.

  It was cold.

  “Cry me a river,” she breathed. “Sometimes, the world breaks bad on you. Why do you think I’m here?”

  Cain stared at her, speechless.

  Officer Kelsey gave him a small smile. “You’re right. My last assignment went so wrong, five of the eight major players we were following ended up dead and we learned nothing. As the ‘I’ in CIA stands for Intelligence, that didn’t look good. So I got busted to here. Only, I take my duty seriously, unlike you.”

  “I’m very serious,” he shot back, stung.

  She raised her hand, the long, slender fingers flexing as she counted off. “Pro sportsman, gangster, drug and booze addict and now dilettante student…which of those roles actually serves people?”

  “You think your presence in Paris actually serves anyone, Kelsey? You’re here because you’re in the doghouse.”

  She shook her head. “Your father might think he’s got you pinned like a butterfly, but the only way a detail like this gets assigned is if a dozen different people and departments sign off on it, including State. So many moving parts means more than a few people beyond your father think you having a detail is necessary. That’s all I need to know, Mr. Warren.”

  He held still, letting the heated irritation evaporate. “No one could ever confuse you for a State diplomat.”

  “One hundred and thirty-eight,” she said.

  “What?”

  “I weigh one hundred and thirty-eight pounds. I can’t stop a grown man in his tracks, but the Glock 19 Generation 4 9mm Luger in my holster can. That’s more than the average diplomat can claim. Drink your tea, Mr. Warren, and I’ll go back to reading. Your next lecture is in forty minutes.”

  She had memorized his lecture schedule.

  Cain sighed and turned his phone back on, bringing up the screen of text.

  It took every one of the forty minutes he had left to reach a point where the words on the screen made any sense.

  It took Agata only three minutes to decide she didn’t like Harry Mittelman very much. And that was just in the first four minutes. Nothing he had done in the last two days suggested she should amend her impression. Then he really capped it off.

  It was normal enough for men to dismiss her as irrelevant before they learned who she was. Only Harry had read her file before she arrived in Paris, sleep-deprived and still smarting from the knuckle-wrapping handed to her in Washington. He’d known exactly who she was. Despite that, he still managed to insert a sneer into everything he said to her.

  “We don’t need cowboys in this outfit,” he’d told her forty minutes after she’d cleared customs at Orly. “This is a long-term assignment. Everyone has learned how to get along without rocking the boat.”

  “I’m not here to bolster my resume,” Agata assured him.

  Mittelman grunted. “At least you look like a local.” He even managed to sound pleased about it.

  “National Security, right?” she asked him. “Retired.”

  He smoothed down his tie over his small, protruding gut. “That’s just a label,” he said hastily.

  She deliberately misunderstood. “National Security is just a label?”

  He scowled. “The retired thing. Get some sleep Ms. Kelsey. You’re on roster first thing tomorrow.”

  “Agata,” she corrected.

  “Make sure you read the brief.” He headed for the door of the cramped bedroom they’d assigned her. The entire security team lived in the same boarding house Warren did, on the floor below his. Warren got the top floor to himself, while the twelve—now thirteen—members of the team, and Mittelman, used the third floor. The cage elevator pre-dated World War One. No one used it. Agata would hear anyone using the stairs on the other side of the w
all from her pillow.

  After her first disastrous shift covering the subject, Agata had fully expected Mittelman would wipe her across the rug a few times, then stomp on her for good measure.

  It took until noon the next day for Agata to figure out that Cain Warren had not bitched to Mittelman about her rudeness. It took only until sunset of that day to figure out why.

  Cain Warren just plain didn’t care. Unless they were physically tripping him up, he ignored the detail. That was SOP. Usually, though, the subject did care that the detail was doing its job with more than routine efficiency. Warren, though, didn’t care if they could shoot straight or not. He’d told her that much on her first shift, only she hadn’t seriously considered he meant it.

  Mittelman was the one to make her see the truth. He found her sitting on the balcony of the big apartment around sunset, eating the canelé she’d bought for dinner, her bare heels resting on the wrought-iron railing.

  “Dessert, I see,” he remarked, closing the glass door behind him.

  “Uh…sure,” she replied, putting her feet back on the warm concrete beneath the old cane chair.

  Mittelman rubbed the back of his neck. He was overweight and perspired heavily in an effort to move his bulk around. He took his jacket off at every opportunity, and there were sweat rings beneath his arms and under the collar, and where his belly creased at the belt-line. Worse, there were pale tide marks on the blue fabric showing previous lines of sweat.

  Agata had already learned not to stand down wind of him.

  He nodded toward the sun, which blazed upon the balcony, dazzling off windows and glass between here and the horizon. “Tomorrow, things change up a bit,” he said.

  “They do?” The roster showed nothing out of the ordinary.

  “You’ll pick it up quickly enough,” Harry said. “You know about the lunch time stroll he takes?”