by Lila Dubois
Necessary Pursuit
A Trinity Masters novel
Mari Carr
Lila Dubois
Copyright © 2020 by Mari Carr and Lila Dubois
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Created with Vellum
Contents
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Epilogue
Dear Reader
About the Authors
Prologue
“Lover, come back to bed.”
Oscar Hayden looked up from his computer toward the woman sprawled out on the mattress and grinned. He could see the peaks of her nipples through the sheet.
He usually didn’t like pet names because they brought up some past shit for him, but it didn’t bother him with her. Probably because the sex they’d just had was so fucking incredible.
He glanced back at the laptop, tablet, external hard drive, and tool roll he had open on the hotel desk. “Give me a second.” The tablet was in pieces—he’d had to use the hotel room hair dryer plus his heat roll from the tool kit to melt the special glue that held the tablet’s glass front to the body of the device. With that off, he’d been able to dissect the innards, connecting directly to the external hard drive and his computer in order to run the tests and analysis he hadn’t had the time for until now.
Selene Tanaka wrapped the sheet around herself as she slid gracefully off the bed. Her bare feet were silent as she walked over to where he sat. He’d pulled on a pair of boxers when he left the bed, but hadn’t bothered with a shirt.
It had been a wild couple of weeks due to an insane series of events started by his dipshit brother and an inadvertent tablet switch. Well, one of his dipshit brothers. He had two, the three of them identical triplets—his mother had occasionally remarked that if the fourth divided zygote had kept growing, giving her identical quadruplets, she’d have changed her name and left the country.
Langston, the current dipshit in question, had agreed to join a weird secret cult. The cult had dangerous enemies, and Oscar had come to Boston to help Langston track down a bomber. Langston hadn’t exactly asked for his help, but Oscar needed to protect his brother.
To give credit where it was due, the cult mobilized an effective strike team. They’d come close to capturing the bomber, a man named Luca Campisi, two days earlier, but he’d managed to escape by setting off a series of trash can smoke bombs around the Boston waterfront.
Langston would bitch if he heard Oscar calling the Trinity Masters—a secret society that had been around since the United States rebelled against England—a cult. The colonists traded King George for George Washington, and in addition to proclaiming that freedom, the founding fathers had opted to create a secret society that would bolster and protect the fledgling nation, modeled on a similar society—the Masters’ Admiralty—in Europe.
His sister Sylvia had joined the Masters’ Admiralty and moved to Europe. Now Langston was in the Trinity Masters. Oscar had been invited to join both cults as well, but the price of admission was too steep.
While being a member of the Trinity Masters had clear benefits—access to influential people, with the accompanying benefits of also accessing the money and power those people had—there was, in addition to loyalty and secrecy, a marriage requirement; specifically, an arranged marriage between three people.
Oscar had spent the last couple of years trying to recover from having his heart dropkicked by Faith, the woman he’d truly believed to be the love of his life.
Dating was an unholy nightmare, so he couldn’t deny there was a bit of appeal to the idea of having someone choose a spouse—wait, spouses—based on intellectual affinity and potential to innovate, and not anything as sticky as emotions.
However, Oscar had seen for himself that just because it was an arranged marriage with purpose didn’t mean the unions were wholly cerebral. Langston and Sylvia both fell in love with their trinities. If there was something the Haydens had in common, it was that they all tended to lead with their hearts. And if there was one thing Oscar didn’t have to give anymore, his heart was it.
He wasn’t going to join, but he had to admit the cults had good taste in members. After all, they wanted him to join, and his siblings, which clearly showed they knew quality.
And Selene? She was a member. And she was fucking amazing.
“What are you doing?” she asked, looking at the items he had spread out on the desk.
A brilliant theoretical atomic physicist at Cornell, she was rational, perceptive, and intelligent to a level that, if he was being honest, was a little intimidating. He and his brothers were all smart and successful, all hoping to change the world in their own ways. Selene would change the world. She was one of two dozen people who were in a position to design and propose things like new nuclear energy paradigms that would be both safe and far more sustainable than fossil fuel.
The bomb Langston had been trying to track down? A portable nuclear device large enough to level a city. That pants-shitting, terrifying idea had barely seemed to rattle Selene, who’d been brought in to interpret the bomb plan.
He’d met her at a tense gathering in a dramatic underground conference room beneath the Boston Public Library—because of course the cult had underground meeting rooms. The moment Oscar looked at Selene, there had been a spark. Something he hadn’t felt in a very, very long time.
He relaxed as she leaned against him, her lovely breasts brushing the back of his head. Relaxed wasn’t his default state. She leaned down, which meant even more boob contact, and peered at what he was doing.
While she wasn’t a computer engineer like he was, he was pretty sure there wasn’t anything she couldn’t understand if it was explained correctly.
Well, that, and she liked it when he pulled her hair.
Oscar had been studying the local storage of the bomber’s tablet. This whole shit show started when Langston had inadvertently switched tablets with an Italian man named Luca. Langston had been unknowingly carrying around the plans for the city-killer bomb with a potential twenty-kiloton output. Luca had followed Langston to the U.S. and was apparently willing to do anything to get the tablet back. Considering what was on it, that made sense.
Oscar tapped the external hard drive he had sitting in a cradle. “When I copied Luca’s data, I put it on here. I’ve opened up a similar tablet to attempt to recreate, not just mirror, his.” He pointed to the disassembled tablet he had propped up on a book, which looked almost lewd with its glass gone and thin wires running out of it. “And my laptop is running the data.”
He scooted his chair back and patted his lap. He liked touching Selene, being close to her. It had been a long time since he’d been with a woman, and Selene knew how to push all his hot buttons. The two of them shared a chemistry that was off the char
ts. She slid onto his knee, the sheet parting so her bare ass was against his thigh. His cock thickened.
“And what do you hope to find?” she asked.
“I don’t know. Maybe nothing, but the tablet had even the pre-programmed apps stripped out. I want to see when and how that happened. Or if they were never there, it might mean the tablet wasn’t bought retail, but as part of a bulk custom order, shipped out pre-consumer interface.”
“And that could potentially be traced?”
“Exactly.”
Selene cupped the back of his neck and smiled at him. “A clue.”
“Yes. And my program can run in the background.” Oscar nipped the soft skin at the crook of her elbow.
“Oh? Well then.” Selene let go of the sheet.
Was there anything hotter than a naked woman on your lap?
Oscar licked her nipple before sucking it into his mouth. When she started to whimper, he stood, hoisting her up with his hands under her ass. She wrapped her arms and legs around him, head falling back as he nibbled on her neck.
He carried her to the bed, dropping her on the mattress. He was just about to strip his boxers off when something caught his eye.
Glancing back toward the desk, his heart practically stopped. “Fuck.”
Selene tensed. “What?”
He leapt across the room and slapped the tablet facedown on the desk, then quickly shut his laptop. Selene jerked up, his tension clearly spreading to her, but her voice was calm as she asked again, “What’s wrong?”
“The camera turned on.”
“Perhaps you accidentally hit a button when you stood up?”
Oscar shook his head. “Not my computer. I have tape over it.” Most hackers, whether white or black hat, blacked out their cameras—aka, put a piece of electrician’s tape over it—or custom built computers without a camera. This was his travel laptop, and though he’d customized it, he hadn’t bothered to mess with the screen, except to black out the camera.
He’d done the same with the tablet he’d brought in order to test his theory, but the tape had been on the glass.
The glass he’d removed.
“Fuck,” he snarled. “It shouldn’t even be possible to…I mean, the functionality beyond the internal storage is all disabled.”
Selene rose, not bothering with the sheet this time. “The tablet—you’re saying it was the tablet’s camera?”
“Yes.”
“Maybe your test triggered something that turned on the camera. Perhaps your test activated a program or application that needed the camera.”
Damn, she was smart. And sexy. And sexy because she was smart.
“Possibly,” Oscar said slowly.
“But unlikely?”
“A malfunction or unanticipated hardware activation is the simplest explanation.”
“But we are not in a simple situation. The law of parsimony may not apply.”
He’d google that later. “The worst-case option is that Luca had some sort of backdoor alert in his system that I haven’t found yet.”
“Which would…allow him to turn on the camera remotely?”
“Possibly. I basically recreated his tablet, so…” Oscar closed his eyes, hoping it would make his brain work faster. He needed to be thinking worst-case scenario. Not that he didn’t always think that way. “Yes. He could have.”
Now Selene looked worried, and he felt like an almighty asshole. Goddammit, he always ended up feeling like an asshole with women, and the fact that a psycho bomb maker may have just seen the start of their sexy times was a very good reason for her to hate him.
“How do we know?” Her question was still calm, even if her expression was pinched with worry.
Oscar scrubbed his face. “I’m going to open the laptop. There’s a physical barrier on the camera. Hopefully the program captured the hardware toggle.”
Selene stepped to the side, out of range of the camera, and picked up her phone.
Oscar sat, then slowly opened his laptop. The window of the analysis program was still up, the program running. He scanned through the lines of code captured from the tablet via the hardwire connection.
There it was. A remote code access. Somehow Luca had found the replica of his own hard drive, used a backdoor access, and then, since the tablet was connected to the hard drive, he’d been able to turn on the camera. Without the glass, the image was probably out of focus, but he would have seen something.
He kept scanning, his heart in his throat. Oscar was good, but to manage this, Luca must have had concealed backdoors and traces on his tablet unlike anything Oscar had ever seen before.
“Fuck this fucking fuck,” Oscar snarled, enraged at his own incompetence.
Selene lifted her phone to her ear.
“Who are you calling?” Oscar snapped. He winced internally. He shouldn’t yell at her. She wasn’t the fucking dipshit in his room. He was.
Selene, however, was unfazed by his anger. “I know you don’t want to hear this, but we need help, Oscar.” She paused, clearly listening to whomever had answered. “Hello, Mr. Stewart, I need to speak to the Grand Master.”
Chapter One
“We don’t need to involve them,” Oscar snapped at Selene for the third or fourth time.
Selene merely arched a brow, not even bothering to look up from her phone. Ten minutes ago, she’d called the Trinity Masters. They’d rushed to dress and were now simply waiting. Well, she was waiting, perched in the desk chair, legs elegantly crossed. He was pacing while berating himself for being a moron, with the occasional terse comment to Selene, which made him berate himself more because he knew he shouldn’t be snapping at her.
She was unconcerned by his anger and, apparently, by the implications of what had just happened. If Luca had seen them, it was Selene who was at risk. Luca had met Langston, which meant Oscar’s face wasn’t exactly a major surprise, but now he might be able to identify Selene.
Never mind the violation of privacy she must be feeling.
He stopped pacing, took a deep breath, and turned to her. “I’m sorry.”
Now she looked up. “For?”
“I fucked up.”
Her cool, almost remote expression softened and she rose. “Mistakes were made, but it was hardly enough of a miscalculation to be a fuck-up.”
His lips quirked. “You have a quantifiable definition of fucked up?”
“A gradient scale from oops to the advent of agriculture.”
Oscar snorted in amused surprise. “The far end of that spectrum is the advent of agriculture?”
“Arguably one of homo sapiens’ greatest mistakes.”
Oscar hooked a hand around her waist and tugged her body against his, his anger melting away. “Says the nuclear physicist.”
He lowered his face to hers, and just before their lips met, there was a knock at the door.
Selene smiled and slid out of his arms even as he snarled silently.
She opened the door, and Sebastian, Franco, and the Grand Master walked in.
The hotel room, which had seemed palatial, now felt crowded. The Grand Master wasn’t particularly tall or imposing, but she carried an authority that made her presence fill the room. She wore a cape-like jacket with a hood pulled up. Langston had told him that members of the cult weren’t supposed to know who the Grand Master was. He and his brothers had seen her without the hood, thanks to the extraordinary circumstances during which they’d met when her husband, Franco, had been shot.
Selene inclined her head. “Grand Master.”
“Dr. Tanaka.” Though her face was somewhat shadowed by the hood, the light from the lamp on the desk allowed them to see her features, making the hood more of a pro-forma gesture. As she looked at Selene, the Grand Master’s lips quirked. “You were here with Mr. Hayden?”
“Yes.” Selene paused. “Having sex.” She looked at Oscar out of the corner of her eye, and he resisted the urge to make a face at her. Something about Selene made him want to kid a
round with her, laugh even. What the fuck was that about?
Oscar rubbed the spot between his eyebrows as Franco snickered. Luckily his complexion meant a blush wouldn’t show.
“What happened?” the Grand Master asked, turning to him.
He quickly went over what he’d been doing. Sebastian came over to the desk, examining the components and wires. The tablet was still facedown, though cocked at a drunk angle, thanks to laying on the wires and cords still hard-linked to its exposed components. He’d disconnected the other ends from both the laptop and external drive.
“You kept a complete copy of the bomber’s tablet for yourself?” the Grand Master asked coldly.
He’d known this was coming. “Yes.”
“And why would you do that?”
“Because the guy designed a backpack nuke. I thought maybe it would be a good idea to learn everything I could.” Oscar didn’t usually bother with sarcasm, but in this case it felt appropriate.
“You could.” The Grand Master arched a brow. “And what would you, a lone man with limited contacts, do with whatever information you discovered?”
Oscar’s back teeth ground together. He hated feeling stupid and useless, and right now he felt both.
She’s not wrong. Who, besides the Trinity Masters, could you go to with the information? You’re the dipshit now.
“How sure are you?” Sebastian asked, breaking the tight, silent tension.
“That the camera turned on? One hundred percent.”
“And that Luca Campisi was the one who did it?”
“Zero percent. I’d have to try to trace it back, and given that this fucker had a completely hidden backdoor, I wouldn’t attempt anything outside my lab.” Oscar took a breath, shoved his ego to the side, and added, “Or have someone more specialized than me look at it.”