Athena Force 25: Without A Trace by Sandra Moore

Author:Sandra Moore [Moore, Sandra]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Romance
Publisher: Silhouette
Published: 2011-09-19T01:22:43+00:00

Chapter 11

N ikki took one look at Li Bai and didn’t like her. She didn’t like her long, silky hair that fell in a shimmering raven-fall down her back, she didn’t like her long-limbed gracefulness as she sat at her neatly kept desk and she didn’t like the movie-perfect makeup that made the woman look like she wasn’t wearing any. Nikki didn’t like her almond-shaped eyes, her full, richly glossed lips, or her pushed-up cleavage straining her low-cut blouse.

She really didn’t like the way Johnny was leaning over the woman’s desk, clearly trying to see down the blouse, and the way Bai was angling her shoulders to let him look.

Pretty damned offensive, really, Nikki thought. Impolite. Time-wasting.

She thought harder. Juvenile.

She concentrated instead on the view out of the twenty-fourth-story office of the Information and Public Relations Section of the Hong Kong Marine Department. Victoria Harbor spread out below them; bright white ferries and garishly painted private taxi boats coasted through water the color of new denim. In the distance, a container ship appeared to stand still, but its wake lingered like a jet trail on the harbor’s surface.

“Did you find what we’ve been looking for?” Johnny asked, and if voices could drip with anything, his was slathered in raw sensuality.

Nikki tried not to roll her eyes like an exasperated teenager. Bai was the closest thing they had to someone who could figure out where Diviner was going to be loaded up next, and they were at her mercy.

Bai smiled prettily. “I might have it.”

“Show me.”

The woman turned her flat-panel computer monitor around so Johnny could focus on something other than her chest.

“I’m no longer in the shipping department, so it took me a while to get access to the right database.” She batted her long lashes in apparent apology. “Once I got in, I ran several searches. The container was not included in any manifests, so it took some time to find.” She cast another sexy smile Johnny’s way.

“It was on the manifest in Florida,” Nikki pointed out.

“The paper manifest, as you told me, yes, but not the electronic one,” Bai said reasonably. “Our database queries aren’t set up to find containers that haven’t been logged,” Bai continued in a less flirtatious voice, “so I had to write one that would retrieve containers being loaded onto other ships that didn’t have a matching incoming log entry.”

Johnny smiled warmly. “Nice.”

“It should have been easy, but it wasn’t. I had to call in a favor or two to be allowed to write a custom query.” Bai flicked a glance Nikki’s way. “I’m in marketing communications now. My permissions are quite low on this system.”

Clever, Nikki grudgingly admitted as she nodded her understanding. That wasn’t something the average marketing suit would know how to do, but this woman had pulled it off.

“I finally found some containers that matched our criteria. Three of them were keyed into the system incorrectly, so that took some time to resolve. We had to track them down manually. The fourth looks like the container you want.

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