Under Covers

fourteen | vienna

fourteen | vienna

the capital city of Austria; referred to as the 'City of Music' for the long list of famous composers who have called it home, including Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Ludwig van Beethoven; also nicknamed the 'City of Dreams' as the residence of the father of psychoanalytic theory, Sigmund Freud

RAYNA

May 8th, 7:17 (GMT +2)
7 days until it happens

IT'S OFFICIALLY BEEN a week since Cassidy Dalton was declared missing, and for the very first time since the start of the case, I have solid proof that she's still alive.

Last night, before I could even zoom through the club's footage, I got an urgent notice from HQ that she'd been spotted in Vienna. They caught a face-match on her around eleven PM, roughly the same time I was hauling Jake's sorry-ass from that bar in Prague.

It was dark; they captured a side-clip of her profile wading through a clump of tourists in the iconic Innere Stadt district. She looked like she was being towed by a large man dressed in head-to-toe black. We didn't get a clear enough shot to ID him.

To complicate matters, the tape from the nightclub in Prague found a blurry snippet from two days ago of a woman with ninety-four-percent identical bone structure to Cassidy. The woman was dancing. Always positioned conveniently in the margins of the camera fields, skirting in and out of blindspots.

It makes no sense. So either it wasn't Cassidy – a distinct six-percent probability given the bizarreness of the situation – or it is, because it's too much of a coincidence that Cassidy's doppelganger would be spotted in that exact same club within the exact same target timeframe.

Was she under duress? Was it all a part of the mob's trafficking machinery?

And why the hell is she currently in Vienna? Surely moving such a high-profile hostage from country to country is too great a risk.

Or, maybe Occam was onto something. The simplest explanation is what makes the most sense. Maybe Cassidy is just—no. Nope. Don't go there, Shahid. That'll just open up another can of rotten worms that I have no idea how to deal with.

But hey. We gotta celebrate good news on those rare occasions that there's good news to celebrate. Cassidy is alive. Jake is getting his head bitten off by every rung above him on the MI6 ladder of command.

News broke this morning. The ABC, BBC, CBC, and the rest of the radio alphabet launched the story about MI6's glaring incompetence. He'll probably be taken off the case, maybe demoted; he might even be fired. Imagine!

Needless to say, I'm having a great morning.

Striding through the streets of Vienna, it's hard not to want to stop for a while, sip my caffeine in tranquility, take a selfie, maybe. Smallah, they really don't make cities like this in Canada. Ornate stone concert halls, vaulting statues, crashing fountains etched into the cobblestone pavement. Back home in Mississauga, it's all stucco and glass and steel, contemporary, utilitarian. There isn't the same sense of history, I guess. Put a fucking lid on it, Rayna. I'm not here to go sightseeing.

My thumb punches the elevator button in the lobby of my hotel. After spending the last few hours chasing dusty leads into nowhereland, it's time for a costume-change.

I slap my room-key against the sensor and shoulder the door open. My Blundstones are lobbed off my feet and my backpack and windbreaker clunk to the floor after them. My white tank-top has a giant, wet coffee stain in the middle of it from five minutes ago, so I make quick work of sloughing it off, too. My holstered gun lands on the bed with a plop.