by Juno Rushdan
Harper scooted forward. “When I undress, my necklace is the last thing I take off. Did you see her watch in the bathroom or bedroom?”
Cole shook his head, trying to keep track of the various streams of thought. “Her watch?” If relevant shit had slipped his focus, it was pretty much guaran-damn-teed he didn’t remember anything about a watch. He pressed the heels of his palms to his eyes and combed his mind. “Toothbrush, hand soap, towel. Box of tampons. No, I don’t think I saw a watch.”
“What difference does it make? How can it help?” Amanda asked, her face riddled with anxiety, her mouth pinched.
“Maddox has a smartwatch. She wears it every day,” Harper said in the quiet, dry tone that only changed if Cutter was getting under her skin. “If the watch wasn’t in her apartment, it means she still has it on.”
“Where are you going with this?” Sanborn asked.
Castle slapped the table. “You’re a genius. Her watch has a GPS chip linked to her smartphone. If we have her phone, we can locate her.”
Oh, thank God. Cole could breathe again.
“Wouldn’t the stun gun have shorted out the watch?” Cutter asked.
“This isn’t a Road Runner cartoon where electricity races over Wile E. Coyote,” Gideon said, and Cutter rolled his eyes. “Stun guns have a very high voltage to penetrate thicker layers of clothing at the point of contact. But the amps, the amount of juice they use is pretty minuscule. Not even high enough to short-out a pacemaker. Novak would’ve gotten Maddox where there’s a big bundle of nerves close to the skin. Stomach, neck. Her muscles would’ve absorbed the energy, disrupting her central nervous system. Incapacitated her for a minute, two at most. That’s why he drugged her.”
Amanda squeezed her eyes shut as if picturing the same horrible thing playing in Cole’s mind. The pain Maddox must’ve felt as Novak had gotten her in the stomach or neck. Cole pressed his fists against his thighs.
“Thanks for the science lesson, Golden Boy.” The sarcasm in Cutter’s voice rang clear as a bell.
Gideon’s jaw hardened.
Reece let out a low whistle, flipping off his cap and setting it on the table. “Kid, you’ve got some nerve calling Reaper that. Having an Annie spot on the team, you REMF, hasn’t earned you the right to razz this operator.”
“I might be a rear echelon motherfucker right now, working a desk as an analyst,” Cutter said, “but I’ve bled in the field with some of this country’s finest.” He straightened his suit jacket with a huff.
“Enough.” The single, fiery word from Sanborn ended the squabble steeped in history Cole wasn’t privy to.
“Unless he used the stun gun directly on the watch,” Harper said, not the slightest bit derailed, gaze glued to the table, “it should be functional.”
“What are we waiting for?” Cole ground out, fighting for patience. “Let’s use the GPS to find her.”
“It’s not that simple,” Harper said. “Not unless someone knows her password. It took the FBI weeks to crack into the smartphone of a terrorist, and I’ve never hacked one.”
A deflated sigh resonated through the room, and for a moment, Cole didn’t know if it came from him or Amanda or them both.
“Our firewalls are more stringent than the NSA’s Utah Data Center because you designed them.” Gideon chewed on his gum in a slow, steady rhythm, head lowered. “I bet the only reason you’ve never hacked a smartphone is because you’ve never tried. You’re smarter than any FBI techie or analyst. If anyone can do it fast, it’s you.”
Gideon never once glanced at Harper, and she sat with her doe eyes wide and face flushed, looking totally spooked.
You would’ve sworn it was either the first time the guy had ever spoken to her, or she was terrified of him. Both seemed plausible. They moved in opposing currents—where one went left, the other went right. Even now, they sat at opposite ends of the table.
“O-kay. Can you do it or not?” Cole hit the glass table with his palm.
Harper flinched, snapping out of her daze. “I’ve never tried.”
“Do you know how?” Cole raked his hands through his hair.
“In theory.”
Her iffy expression didn’t inspire the confidence needed to keep him planted in the damn chair any longer. Cole sprang to his feet and stalked the room.
“Does anyone know if she enabled the iOS option on her phone?” Harper asked.
“What?” Cole didn’t know the difference between iOS and DOS. Based on the heads shaking and shoulders shrugging, the others didn’t have an answer either.
“On a smartphone, typically a person picks an alphanumeric passcode between four to six digits long. With a simple four-digit code, there are about ten thousand combinations and it could take a few hours. The iOS option allows for a thirty-seven-digit code. It’d take weeks to crack.”
His hands clenched. “We have hours! She has hours!”
Harper cowered as if the anger in his voice had smacked her with physical force.
“Settle down.” Gideon’s ever-steady tone took on an edge. “This isn’t helping.”
Cole nodded. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to yell.”
Harper clutched her pearls and wrapped an arm around herself. “I have a program where I can run personal data to help pinpoint a code faster. Most people pick passwords for their private laptops and cell phones from personal identifiers. If I had more information about her, it would speed up the process.”
The news was shifting from iffy to not too bad. “Collectively, those of us in this room probably know everything there is to know about Maddox.”
“First, I need to do some NAND mirroring.”
“What’s that?” Castle asked. “No geek speak.”
“The smartphone only gives you ten attempts at entering a password before you’re permanently blocked. I need to clone the NAND chip where the encryption security is onto a field programmable gate array chip and remirror the FPGA every nine tries, so I can input an infinite number of passcodes until I find the right one.”
Hope welled, and Cole prayed Novak wasn’t hurting Maddox. “I don’t care how it’s done, Harper. Just do it.”
Chapter 28
Somewhere along the Potomac River
9:52 a.m. EDT
A headache jackhammered Maddox’s brain. The foul smell of decay and mold smashed through the dissipating drowsy haze. Dryness caked her throat like she’d swallowed sawdust.
She sat against a wall, wrists bound above her head and ankles zip-tied together. Her heart lurched as details came back in a brutal rush. Electric blue light crackling. The grip of excruciating pain—a hundred fists twisting. The pungent scent of ozone.
Novak. It had to be.
Pressure built behind her eyes, her vision clearing. She was in a room. Decrepit, wide space. Broken windows. Walls smeared with black soot and grime.
A whisper of death brushed her hand, creeping, creeping down her forearm. Prickles slinking over her elbow, tickling. Goose bumps raked her clammy skin. She looked up at her wrists, bound to a rusty metal bar bolted to the wall.
Prickly, black straw-like legs crawled on her bicep, inching closer to her face. Not into her shirt. Not in her hair. Not in her ear. Please. She jerked, yanking down hard on the bar.
Novak drifted into sight, stealthy and eerie as a nightmare.
Terror slithered in along with him.
He knelt on the debris-covered floor beside her. “Ah, you’re awake.” He swept the spider off her arm into a pile of rotted wood.
Sweat matted her hair to her forehead and cheek. Panic cramped her chest as she stared into his empty, dead eyes. “You don’t have to do this.” Good, her voice sounded steady, calm. Even though her heartbeat was a feral, desperate roar in her ears. “We’ll back off.”
“Don’t lie. Not to me.” He gestured to his che
st as if offended. “I hold you in high esteem. Don’t take that away.” His words rolled in a social tone like they were colleagues or business competitors, instead of sounding like the madman he was.
“What do you want?” Trembling, she tamped down the fear—of spiders, of Novak, of dying. She scanned the room for Novak’s son but didn’t see him. “Why are you doing this?”
“I suspect you have answers to both questions.”
He wanted revenge for his family, and she’d gotten too close at the hotel.
“Are you going to kill me?” She wasn’t ready to die, not here, not a victim. But if he was going to kill her, why hadn’t he already? A bullet in her head would’ve been easier than holding her hostage. Unless he needed her for leverage.
“I don’t want your life.” He tilted his head to the side, staring at her. “I want you as bait.”
Bait. In less than three days, she’d gone from A-team operative on the rise, to agency tool being worked like an asset, and now damn bait. Liability.
“I’ve every confidence your scarred-face man has the Gray Box stirred into a frenzy to find you. But I needed to galvanize their sense of urgency. So I made a little phone call.”
A smug smile played at his lips.
Her breath caught and held.
Screwing with her team by nabbing her wasn’t enough. This sick bastard wanted to play on their testosterone and alpha-male instincts—both of which, when dialed too high, became as volatile and unstable as nitroglycerin.
Cole would do absolutely anything to find her.
Gideon, Reece, and Castle would be torn, their judgments clouded, but they’d stick with the mission. They’d better. The ethics they lived by dictated it.
Novak was a pro, but even pros made mistakes. Maybe whatever call he had made was traced.
“I know what you’re wondering.” His eyes narrowed, and that grin turned taunting. “The call was untraceable. I used a scrambler. Bounced the signal from one cell tower to the next.”
Novak stayed one step ahead of them. She’d expected cunning and skill, but how in the hell had he found her? He knew her real name, but she wasn’t listed. She’d been careful about safeguarding her identity and whereabouts to the point of paranoia.
“On the yacht, how did you know who I was?” He’d gotten inside information from someone. She needed to know from whom. “How did you find out where I lived?”
His spooky smile deepened with sinister joy. She’d have nightmares about it for weeks—if she lived that long.
A ragged breath rocked through her chest, and she fought to steady it, to focus on this tiny window of opportunity. She had to shake the tree to get some fruit. “Who is your informant in the Gray Box?”
“The only person I know who works for the Gray Box is you.” He touched her nose with the tip of his gloved finger.
She jerked her arms against the restraints, turning her face away from his touch.
“But…I have an expensive friend.” He leaned into her face, and she recoiled, pressing the back of her head against the wall. “A powerful information broker with little birdies everywhere.”
And one of those birdies was their mole, feeding this broker intelligence, which he was in turn selling to this soulless animal.
“Does your friend have a name?”
“My friend has many names. And many ears and eyes, everywhere.”
She gritted her teeth through the frustration souring her stomach. There had to be something she could get out of him. The smallest nugget might lead somewhere. “Where am I?”
He craned his head back, looking around. His face was close enough for her to sink her teeth into one of his ears. She could hold on and do her best to rip it off. But then what, with her hands and feet tied?
“Someplace that’ll make it very difficult for your men to find you.” He flashed that creepy-crawly grin. “But after a long search in all the wrong places, I’ll send them to you.” He angled his head toward her, those dead eyes stuck to hers. “And then you can go home and sleep in your bed tonight. Safe, but knowing you failed.”
She swallowed the vitriol burning the back of her throat.
This wasn’t over. Not yet.
He wasn’t going to win. She refused to let him.
“You don’t have to hurt anyone else.” Reason wouldn’t work on Novak, but she had to try and talk him down, get him to rethink a bloodbath. “Taking more lives won’t bring back your wife and daughter. Killing innocent people isn’t justice.”
“Justice,” he scoffed. “Justice isn’t possible. I want vengeance. I want to punish this country. It’ll be slow and painful. It’ll rip out the heart of every citizen as I make them watch. This mighty nation will be glued to the television, helpless to look away, powerless to stop it once it has begun.”
“That’s what makes you a monster.”
“I want to hurt and humiliate your government. I want your leadership, the heads of the most powerful country in the world, to feel small and helpless to defend their own. Just as I felt small and helpless to protect my family. If that makes me a monster, then yes, I suppose I am.”
Everyone could be baited with the right hook. If she pressed the right button, he might let something slip. “If your wife and daughter could see you now, do you think they’d be proud that you’re about to kill innocent women and children as payment for their deaths?”
“Save your breath, Agent Kinkade. Or I’ll have to find something in this room to use as a gag. Something filthy and rotten you wouldn’t like in your mouth.”
He grabbed her chin with gloved fingers, and that sickening vulnerability gripped her even tighter. Novak wrenched her head to the right. A black leather-covered finger pointed to a dead rat in the corner. Maggots crawled through its decomposing flesh.
Bile inched up her throat. She gritted her teeth, grateful her belly was empty, or she might’ve heaved.
Scrunching his face in mock disgust, he tsk-tsked. “Silence is best. If you keep talking, you might make Levik angry. He already wants to kill you, but…” He shook his head.
Who in the hell is Levik? His son’s name was supposed to be Valmir.
“Your death isn’t necessary. In fact, it would work against me in many ways.” He stood and dusted off his knees. “Once I’m gone, feel free to scream until your lungs burn. There’s no one around for miles, and help will not be on the way anytime soon. Now, I must leave and prepare for tonight.”
“Why didn’t you kill me on the yacht? You could’ve snapped my neck. No problem.”
He stared at her for a long, hard moment, a haunted look in his eyes. “Death is not easy. You look at a man like me, contemplate the things I’ve done, and assume that killing is simple. You assume I’m a monster.”
His face wrinkled with such tortured emotion, if he had a heart, she would’ve sworn it was aching.
“Just as the murder of my wife and daughter shall soon become a problem for your country, killing you would’ve been a problem for me. I don’t want your scarred-face monster nipping at my heels for the rest of my life. Make no mistake, he is the kind of man who would go to the ends of the earth, through all nine circles of hell if necessary, for his vengeance. I wish you a long life with your monster, Agent Kinkade, but if I ever see you again, I will kill you.”
Her blood ran cold.
Novak pivoted, practically floating away as he strode from her sight, not making a single sound.
Chapter 29
Gray Box Headquarters, Northern Virginia
10:33 a.m. EDT
Cole prowled behind Harper at work on her dual-monitor computer setup, watching her fingers whiz across her keyboard as she tried to hack Maddox’s smartphone. Every time she glanced over her shoulder at him, he paced and somehow ended up hovering again.
Raking a hand through his hair, he floundered for an
ounce of patience.
Nothing moved fast enough. Not Harper’s flying fingers. Not Cutter sitting ten feet away, hunting for more information that might help. Not Reece, who was out searching the Goodwill van they’d found abandoned on Route 1 off I-495. Not even Janet brewed more coffee fast enough.
And for some reason, the mind-numbing palette of this underground facility—with its subdued blue partitions, lifeless beige walls, and corpse-gray carpet—reminded him of an upscale funeral home. He was suffocating in it.
Turning, he marched over to Harper and went to tap her on the shoulder.
“Wouldn’t do that if I were you.” Amanda handed him a cup of coffee. “She has this thing about being touched.” She nodded in Harper’s direction. “But don’t let her know that you know. She tries to keep it hush-hush. The three of us learned the hard way.” Amanda waved a sweeping finger at Doc and Cutter, who both chatted with Janet while she refilled their mugs. “We don’t talk about it with the others. And she’ll work better if you don’t loom. I guess you haven’t noticed, but she needs her space.”
The analyst gestured to the layout of their section. Harper sat far removed, working in a corner—actually, facing the corner with her back to everyone, wearing earbuds—while the other three had their workspaces in close proximity on the opposite side of a round conference table.
This wasn’t his day for noticing the little things. “Thanks. For the heads-up and the coffee.”
“No problem.” She gave a sympathetic smile. “I hope black is okay. I didn’t know how you take it.”
“Black and strong is perfect.” He wondered if Amanda Woodrow was in Maddox’s inner circle. Clearly, one existed. If you were on the inside, Maddox called you by your first name. If you weren’t, it was simply Harper, Cutter, Doc. “Hey, to Maddox, are you Amanda or Woodrow?”
“You’re asking if we’re friends.” She waved for him to follow her over to the section near the televisions.
Taking a gulp of coffee, he trailed along.
“I see you’ve picked up on the inner dynamics around here,” she said. “Operators form a tight bond pretty fast. They’re out in the field risking their lives together. They tend to keep a little distance from their intel analysts. Operators live or die by the intelligence they get, and having a clear line is a good thing, but we’re all pretty friendly and socialize. Except for Willow. The one exception to the name rule is Reece. He was Delta Force for so long, I think it makes him uneasy if you call him John.”