Christmas Witness Conspiracy

by Maggie K. Black

  Reunited in peril... The family he never knew is under siege.

  Detective Liam Bearsmith’s life is turned upside down at Christmastime when the hacker he’s tracking turns out to be the witness he fell for twenty years ago. But Kelly Marshall insists she’s being framed, and he wants to believe her...especially after criminals attack them. Can he clear her name, even as he shields Kelly—and the family he never knew existed?

  Liam turned and walked toward the restaurant, so quickly and firmly she couldn’t have grabbed his hand again if she’d wanted to.

  Kelly followed him up the stairs and across the deck, the empty deck with its picnic tables inches deep in snow. He reached for the door, found it unlocked and pushed it open. They stepped into the restaurant. It was empty and dark. Chairs were stacked upside down on empty tables.

  As the door clicked shut between them, a young man in a thick beard stepped out from behind it and pressed the barrel of a gun into the side of Liam’s head.

  “Down on your knees.” The voice was low and mean. His face was lost in shadows and the click of the gun was unmistakable. “You’re about to learn what happens to someone who tries to lie to Bill Leckie, and it ain’t going to be pretty.”

  Maggie K. Black is an award-winning journalist and romantic suspense author with an insatiable love of traveling the world. She has lived in the American South, Europe and the Middle East. She now makes her home in Canada with her history-teacher husband, their two beautiful girls and a small but mighty dog. Maggie enjoys connecting with her readers at maggiekblack.com.

  Books by Maggie K. Black

  Love Inspired Suspense

  Protected Identities

  Christmas Witness Protection

  Runaway Witness

  Christmas Witness Conspiracy

  True North Heroes

  Undercover Holiday Fiancée

  The Littlest Target

  Rescuing His Secret Child

  Cold Case Secrets

  Amish Witness Protection

  Amish Hideout

  Military K-9 Unit

  Standing Fast

  Visit the Author Profile page at Harlequin.com for more titles.

  Christmas Witness Conspiracy

  Maggie K. Black

  Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.

  —Hebrews 11:1

  With thanks to all the incredible women I’ve had the privilege of teaching self-defense.

  And with love to my amazing daughter who never reads my stories because she’s busy writing her own.

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Dear Reader

  Excerpt from Wilderness Sabotage by Heather Woodhaven

  ONE

  Thick snow squalls blew down the Toronto shoreline of Lake Ontario, turning the city’s annual winter wonderland into a haze of sparkling lights. The cold hadn’t done much to quell the tourists, though, Detective Liam Bearsmith thought as he methodically trailed his hooded target around the skating rink and through the crowd. It was three days until Christmas and a few hours after sunset. Hopefully, the combination of the darkness, heavy flakes and general merriment would keep the jacket-clad criminal he was after from even realizing he was being followed. The “Sparrow” was a hacker. Just a tiny fish in the criminal pond, but a newly reborn and highly dangerous cyberterrorist group had just placed a pretty hefty bounty on the Sparrow’s capture in the hopes it would lead them to a master decipher key that could break any code. If Liam didn’t bring in the Sparrow now, terrorists could turn that code breaker into a weapon and the Sparrow could be dead, or worse, by Christmas.

  Thankfully, his target had finally stopped all that darting-around and doubling-back nonsense he’d been doing when Liam had first picked up his trail. The lone figure hurried up a metal footbridge festooned in white lights. A gust of wind caught the hood of the Sparrow’s jacket, tossing it back. Long dark hair flew loose around the Sparrow’s slender shoulders.

  Liam’s world froze as déjà vu flooded his senses. His target was a woman.

  What’s more, Liam was sure he’d seen her somewhere before. Although in that moment, for some inexplicable reason, his brain had stalled so completely he could only pray God would remind him of where.

  It had been almost a year since Liam’s secretive team of rogue Royal Canadian Mounted Police detectives had taken down a cyberterrorist duo called the “Imposters” on Christmas Eve, to stop them from auctioning off the RCMP’s entire witness-protection database to criminals on the dark web. Two of Liam’s colleagues had been reluctantly forced to kill the pair. Their team hadn’t realized for months that during the chaos, the Sparrow had somehow slipped her way into the Imposters’s criminal auction through a hacked back door and deleted just one witness’s file before it could be compromised. That file had belonged to a young woman named Hannah Phillips, whose military contractor husband, Renner, was presumed dead in Afghanistan after having developed a master decipher key that could hack any code in the world.

  Now, the Imposters had been reborn, as an all-new group of nameless and faceless hackers had taken up their mantle and hailed the original duo as heroes, vowing revenge on Liam’s team. They’d placed a bounty on Liam’s target, as well as being so determined to get their hands on Renner’s master-key decoding device that they were threatening to cause mass chaos on New Year’s Eve by crashing power grids around the world unless someone turned it over to them.

  Liam’s strategy had been to capture the Sparrow, question her and use the intel gleaned to locate these new Imposters. His brain freezing at the mere sight of her hadn’t exactly been part of the plan. The Sparrow reached up, grabbed her hood and yanked it back down again firmly, but not before Liam caught a glimpse of a delicate jaw that was determinedly set and of the thick flakes that clung to her long lashes. She hurried down the other side of the bridge. For a moment Liam just stood there, his hand on the railing and his heart still praying for clarity, as his mind filled with the name and face of a young woman he’d known and loved a very long time ago.

  Kelly Marshall.

  Kelly had been nineteen and he’d been twenty-two when he’d shown up on her college campus, over two decades ago, to break the news that her father had been laundering money for gangsters and she needed to go into witness protection with her mother. Kelly had been defiant, spectacular and beautiful. In the couple weeks they’d been in each other’s lives, she’d wrenched open his closed heart, made him question his will to be a cop and left a hole inside him so big he’d never risked loving anyone again.

  No. It couldn’t be Kelly. Not here. Not now.

  She plunged into a crowded Christmas market on the other side of the footbridge and now weaved her way through the mass of shoppers and stalls. Liam strode after her. At six foot five, with the build of a bouncer, he knew it took far more than just hiding his bulletproof vest under a leather jacket to make him look inconspicuous. So, instead, he’d learned how to be invisible—a handy skill for the son of a prominent RCMP officer growing up in a working-class town like Kingston, where over half the kids in his class had a relative in jail. Liam thankfully d
idn’t remember much about his abusive and unstable alcoholic mother, beyond knowing she was the reason he still sometimes flinched when people tried to hug him and why he had always appreciated his late father’s focus on calm, rules and self-discipline over emotion and sentiment. Liam moved along the edges of the stalls with the steady gait he’d learned from his father. It was the kind that made people instinctively get out of his way and then forget they’d ever seen him.

  His emotions swirled like the snow. He pushed them away and focused on facts. The rise and fall of military contractor Renner Phillips was fascinating. A low-level computer analyst in Afghanistan, he’d suddenly thwarted a major terrorist attack after breaking a seemingly impenetrable code. Rumor was he’d developed a powerful decryption device. The government ordered him to turn it over. Countless terrorist groups placed him on their target lists, offering Renner bribes and threatening to hurt his young wife, Hannah, as leverage. For a few brief hours he was the world’s most sought-after man. Then the SUV he’d been traveling in blew up. Renner was presumed dead, the decipher key was assumed destroyed in the explosion and Hannah had gone into RCMP witness protection.

  Everyone had thought it was over, until this woman he was now following—who inexplicably reminded him of Kelly—had nabbed Hannah’s RCMP witness-protection file from the original Imposters a year ago, and then these new reborn Imposters had threatened global chaos unless they got their hands on Renner’s decoding device.

  And Liam, for one, was tired of surprises.

  He reached for his cell phone and hit the number of their resident tech genius, Seth Miles. The phone rang in Liam’s earpiece. A former criminal hacker himself, Seth had spent most of his adult life trying to be some kind of vigilante, targeting bad guys and exposing their crimes, before he’d gone after the wrong guys and ended up in witness protection. Now, despite Seth’s sketchy past and unconventional way of doing things, he was the only noncop on Liam’s elite team. Seth didn’t answer.

  Liam hit Redial. Carolers belted tunes to his right. The smell of hot chocolate tried to yank his attention left. But his eyes stayed locked on the woman ahead, as she slipped from the stalls and attached herself to a small group of people now moving down the docks, as if pretending that she was with them.

  Smart move, Liam thought. It was a tactic his father had taught him and that he’d often used himself.

  His phone clicked. “Hey, Seth?”

  “Yo, Liam.” Seth’s voice filled his ear. “Tell me you want to split the cost of three toasters.”

  Three toasters? Liam’s eyes rolled for a nanosecond before he locked back on the woman ahead. As usual, Liam had no idea what Seth was talking about and limited patience to ferret it out. “Did you know the person who hacked into the file of deceased contractor Renner Phillips’s widow, Hannah, was a woman?”

  There was a slightly strangled sound on the line.

  “Are you sure?” Seth asked.

  “That Renner’s actually dead?” Liam asked. He and Seth had debated this one more than a few times since the new Imposters had threatened global chaos if they didn’t get Renner’s decoding device. Despite all evidence, Seth remained doggedly convinced that Renner was still alive. But if so, what kind of man would just abandon his new wife like that and disappear? “Still no. Though I’ve got no intel to back that up.”

  “That the Sparrow is a woman,” Seth clarified.

  “I have eyes on her as we speak.” The wood beneath his feet was slippery with ice and damp with melting snow. Now that he’d left the fair behind, all remaining foot traffic seemed to be heading toward a large, three-story cruise ship/party boat. According to the yellow posters taped to metal lampposts around him, it was about to set sail for the Ugly Sweater Holiday Cruise.

  “What does she look like?” Seth asked.

  Way too much like a woman named Kelly Marshall I placed in witness protection over twenty years ago.

  “Five foot five,” Liam said. “Long dark hair. Athletic legs. About a hundred and forty pounds, but hard to tell in the ski jacket. No clear visual on her face.”

  “But how do you know that you’re following the right person?” Seth wasn’t letting it go.

  “I got a tip,” Liam said.

  “From?” Seth asked.

  “A contact.” Liam kept from pointing out the fact that just because Seth hadn’t been able to get a solid lead on her didn’t mean no one could. “I know a lot of people who owe me one.”

  “How about you get me a picture and I’ll run it through the system?” Seth suggested.

  “Good idea,” Liam said. “Stand by.”

  A good hard look at his target’s face to prove to himself that she wasn’t Kelly might not hurt any. Someone had helpfully left a bright pink mitten on the back of a metal bench. He picked it up and rolled it between his fingers, as his footsteps quickened. “Any idea yet which specific power grids these new Imposters are targeting on New Year’s Eve?”

  “Not yet,” Seth said. “Have I told you I think it’s a colossal mistake for law enforcement to try to keep news of this threat from getting out?”

  “A few times.”

  But law enforcement tended to avoid leaking news of terrorist threats that could cause mass panic whenever they could help it. And “an anonymous mob of bad guys are threatening to do a really bad thing to unknown locations unless they get their hands on something powerful that might’ve been destroyed from someone who might be dead” was hardly reassuring. They didn’t even know any of these new Imposters’s identities. Only that they were young men who were angry, congregated online and had no centralized leader.

  “You can’t keep something off the internet forever,” Seth said. “It’s a cyberworld out there, old man.”

  “Duly noted,” Liam said. “Any word yet on who the leaders of the Imposters are?”

  “As I’ve explained, online mobs don’t have leaders,” Seth said. “They have lots of individuals suggesting chaos and others jumping on the bandwagon, with no one really sure who started it. Even if there was someone on the dark-web message boards posing as the big-bad-boss Imposter, there’s no reason to believe he has any more knowledge or leadership than anyone else. Pffft, anyone could randomly call themselves the leader of a group like that and it would be virtually meaningless.”

  The Sparrow had stopped by a tree a little bit away from the crowd. It looked like she was on the phone.

  “So about those toasters?” Seth’s voice was back in his ear. “You know we got three weddings in ten days now?”

  “Two weddings,” Liam corrected. Two of the detectives in their five-person team were getting married over the holidays, both to former witnesses whose files had been compromised by the Imposters. Noah Wilder was marrying Corporal Holly Asher in two days, on Christmas Eve, and Mack Grey was marrying Iris James, a social worker, a week later on New Year’s Eve. The team’s year of dealing with the auction’s fallout had definitely taken some eventful turns.

  “Three now,” Seth said. “Jess is getting married tomorrow at one.”

  “What?” Liam faltered a step. Last he’d heard, the final member of their team, Detective Jessica Eddington, was set to marry Travis Tatlow in the spring. “Everything okay?”

  “She got offered a contract consulting on a special-victims unit in Florida and decided they and the kids should all go together as a family,” Seth said. Travis had recently adopted two small children he’d grown close to while living in witness protection. “I’m really sorry. I just assumed she’d called you before me.”

  “Don’t worry,” Liam said. Jess and Seth had gotten close on a previous assignment, and Liam had never viewed his work as a popularity contest. “I’m sure she’s got a lot on her mind and a lot of people to contact.”

  In fact, Liam could see Jess’s name popping up on his phone now, but he declined her call, planning to congratulate her
later. The Sparrow had ended her call and had started walking again. Her pace quickened, and he sped up to match it.

  “So that just leaves us two bachelors standing,” Seth said. “But I’m hoping if marriage is contagious it’s only affecting detectives. Not that I think you’d be at risk.”

  “Uh... Huh?” Liam just grunted in response. What was that supposed to mean?

  “You know, I read your file—”

  “Don’t read people’s files—”

  “—it’s a great read,” Seth went on. “Two decades on the force, over a gazillion arrests, but no significant relationships. No brothers or sisters. No family, besides your late dad. Never married. Never dated. Never fallen in love. You’re practically one of those clay warriors come to life.”

  “I think you mean a golem,” Liam said.

  “Don’t think I’ve ever even seen you hug anyone—”

  “I’m not big on hugs.” Or on Seth’s usual nonsense. The Sparrow slipped her phone into her pocket. Liam was only a few feet behind her now. He readied his cell to snap a picture and then reached out with the mitten, tapping her arm as he did so. “Excuse me, miss? Did you drop this?”

  She turned. Kelly Marshall’s fierce green eyes locked defiantly on his. The delicate lips he’d once kissed parted in a gasp. Liam felt all the blood drain from his face. Seth had been wrong. Liam had thought himself in love once, with a woman he’d lost his heart, head and almost entire career over.

  And now he was going to arrest her.

  * * *

  “Liam?” Kelly felt the name of the man she’d once loved slip from her lips. Shivers cascaded down her limbs as she looked up into the dark eyes she’d never imagined she’d see again. For a moment, she couldn’t believe it was really him, or even if she’d said his name out loud, until she saw him nod and heard him say “Hey, Kelly” in that same deep voice that had always rumbled faintly like distant thunder at the edges of her memory.