Today was the second day of February. He had a month until the verdict reading in Brussels on March first to tell Sam what he was trying to tell her when she’d shut the door in his face. Even the most stubborn human could change her mind, and he was nothing if not patient.
“Now exhale. Slowly,” he said, glancing down, his heart melting at the sight of her trying so hard to follow his directions. He dragged his eyes back to the buildings of the Right Bank and picked up his pace. “That’s it. You’re doing great. Breathe in. One—two—three—as slow as you can. Almost there. Hold your breath. Hold it. Hold it, okay, now start a long, slow, exhale. Through your lips. Slow.” He’d find a way, around whatever bombs got thrown at them, around the bounty hunt, and around the ITT proceedings. He’d find a way to make her not only listen, he’d find a way to address the mistake he’d made.
The mistake she let me make.
He’d do it the only way he knew how—he’d find a way to take them both back to the few days of absolute bliss that they’d shared, before life threw a curve ball that he’d hit the wrong fucking way. Once there, they could decide where to go. Her almost-fiancé was an obstacle, but Zeus knew obstacles were just something to figure out. None were insurmountable. Justin McDougall was only going to be an insurmountable problem if Sam wanted him to be one.
“Now breathe in again. Slowly. One—two—three—”
“Hope you’re helping her, Zeus. You have me so relaxed I almost fell asleep. God, I like this new, softer version of you. By the way, the tracking devices merge when the two of you are so close together,” Ragno’s voice grounded him. “Samantha’s chip produces a red blip on my GPS. You’re blue. When you’re smashed against one another, the two of you are one small purple blob. How is she?”
He glanced down. “Fine. Hanging on for dear life, face buried in my coat, and, I’m damn happy to report, not puking,” he said, “Breathe in, long and slow.”
“Yes, sir. Oh. You’re talking to her, aren’t you?” Ragno said, before switching from her friendly, slightly concerned yet teasing tone, to the clipped one she typically used for business. “We’ve got open communication with ITT Security Forces. They’re getting ready to shut the bridges and seal the island to foot traffic. Theory is the person who left the bomb could still be on the island. Hold a second, Zeus.”
Ragno went off mic, but didn’t mute her connection. Zeus heard her talking to other agents who were on-site in Denver with her and heard her keyboard clicking. “I’m back. We’re communicating with ITT security, but don’t know if what we’re telling them will filter down to the boots on the ground at the foot of the bridge. If you don’t want the hassle of a roadblock, hurry.”
“We’re fifteen yards from stepping off the bridge,” he said.
“I’ve got you,” Ragno said. “When you step off, the very first street is Quai des Grand Augustins. Go right.”
“Zeus.” Sam’s voice was muffled in his overcoat, because her mouth was still smashed there. She didn’t attempt to look up.
“Yeah?”
“Need to think about something pleasant. Tell me about the sunset from your Keys house.”
“What?”
“Your Keys house. Sunset.”
“How’d you know I got it?” Five yards from the edge of the bridge. Deal, Jenkins, and Miles were in step with him. Road wasn’t blocked.
“Seven years ago it was a dream.” She buried her face deeper. “Know you well enough to know you made it happen.”
Turning right on Quais des Grand Augustins, eyes constantly moving to spot danger, he said, “It’s on Islamorada. On the Florida Bay, which leads to the Gulf of Mexico. It’s a raised house. Sits on an acre and a half. I was lucky to get the property.”
“The sunset, Hernandez.”
He thought through words that would give her a visual of the specialness of the place, which was oriented for sunset views. “It faces west. Sunsets are spectacular from the deck, which I’ve set up like a kitchen and living room, with a giant outdoor television.”
Gripping his coat tighter, she shook her head. “Sunset. Colors. Tell me.”
“Patience, Sam.” He chuckled. “I’m getting to it. No matter what I’m doing there, whether I’m working or doing things with Ana, I settle in about fifteen minutes before and wait for the show. I’ve got these chairs—I swear time stands still when I sit in one.” He drew a deep breath. “The sunsets are wonderful.”
“The colors. Tell me about the colors.”
“Zeus. Take your first left,” Ragno said. “Small side street. Rue Git-le-Coeur. Vehicles are waiting for you in the first block.”
He exhaled, having to think hard about the colors. Describing a sunset while running from a bombing was a new one for him. Hell. Describing a sunset was a new one for him. “When the sun first touches the horizon, pinks, oranges, and reds shoot through the sky. The colors reflect off the rippling water. It’s one of the prettiest sights I’ve ever seen.”
Aside from you.
Chapter Twelve
Thirty minutes later, the Amicus team was at the safe house. He and Sam stripped off their coats at the door. Cheeks burning bright red, she climbed the stairs to their third floor bedrooms, eyes averted from everyone so that she wouldn’t risk seeing blood. He followed her into the living room that separated their bedrooms.
Before she slipped into her room, he asked, “Are you feeling okay?”
Her back to him, she nodded and answered, “Humiliated, but fine.”
He thought about telling her it was okay to be human, then decided she wouldn’t want to hear it. He turned to enter his own bedroom to do a quick clean up before a Black Raven medic worked on his wounds.
“Thank you, Zeus.”
Turning back to her, he saw that she was leaning against the door to her bedroom. She didn’t face him and he knew why. The blood had stopped flowing, but he hadn’t cleaned it off his forehead, and the wound from his arm had bled through his suit jacket and shirt sleeve. “No need to thank me.”
“What about you?”
“Me?”
Her face was to the side, but she still didn’t gaze at him. Her attention focused on a lamp, she lifted her hand to smooth her hair. His arms ached to once again feel the weight of her. “Your forehead. Are you okay?”
He shrugged, even though she couldn’t see it. “It’s minor.”
“Your agents?”
“One serious. Others will be okay.” He watched her shudder. “I’m waiting on reports.”
“The whole thing was horrific. If you hadn’t moved us away from there…”
Whichever Amicus team member had gotten into the rear seat of the Black Raven car closest to the blast would’ve been severely injured, if not killed, along with the Black Raven agent in the car. He tried not to think about Sam being in that rear car, but the thought haunted him. Until he implemented Plan B, that had been his plan.
“Best not to think about it.”
“Your job sucks, but you do it well. Regarding that instant message that you sent to me while I was at the podium?”
“Yes?”
“Your offer of the French investigative files and their analyses still stands?”
“Of course,” he said, though the trepidation that he’d felt when he made the offer came back to him with a pang that twisted in his gut. Giving Sam the information Black Raven was uncovering for the bounty hunt would result in Sam wanting to use the information in ITT proceedings. He and Sam would be able to put their heads together and figure out a way to use the evidence without Black Raven’s acquisition tactics being highlighted, so that wasn’t the real sticking point. The bigger problem in giving her access to Black Raven data was that he didn’t want to create a reason for her to be front and center. Didn’t want her there at all, much less at the forefront of controversial arguments.
He just didn’t believe he could keep the information from her. Sam had lectured him on ethics and integrity, and what she didn’t realiz
e was he operated on a higher plane than most other individuals. Her grandfather was paying for the information. Her grandfather wanted Maximov captured at all costs. Accomplishing that goal didn’t mean keeping potentially relevant information from Sam.
“I want the files. I want everything you’re uncovering for the bounty hunt. Free access.” Her tone had hardened, making his gut twisted even more. “Regardless of how you’ve come across the data.”
“What happened to your concern about Black Raven breaking laws? I believe you accused me of committing a felony. With a capital F.”
“Today.” Even with only her profile showing, he could see that she set her jaw. “Today happened.”
He wished they were facing each other. The partial view of her face told him the resolve there was a beautiful thing. She didn’t need to say more.
“This is all wrong,” she continued, quietly. “Morgan—dead, under circumstances that could be viewed as suspicions. Eric—a murder, by cyanide. The Boulevard Saint-Germain bombing. Judge Devlin’s wife—murdered,” she added. “This afternoon—another bomb. I don’t understand how this can be happening.”
“No one does.”
“But my job is to try to make sense of this proceeding. Stanley Morgan was bothered, and so am I. The world wants a conviction of something bigger than the two-bit thugs who engineered each of the individual attacks, but the evidence isn’t adding up. I feel as though I’m trying to put together a puzzle, without all the pieces.”
Tell me about it.
Through Jigsaw, Black Raven had been trying to do the same thing. Jigsaw was privy to any data obtained by the U.S. government—through any intelligence effort. It was also privy to data that the government didn’t have, because Black Raven analysts who were working on Jigsaw followed prompts that led elsewhere. It was strict company policy to do anything and everything needed to get the job done. Even if it meant bending a law or two to do it. Even if it meant hacking through private networks without authorization and breaking encryption codes.
Jigsaw spied on citizens and law enforcement alike. Any cyber-data it collected became puzzle pieces that led to more puzzle pieces. Jigsaw took information, dissected it, analyzed it, and used it continually, over and over, until seemingly random bits of information made sense. It detected human behavior by analyzing co-existing relationships in cyber-data. With its ability to trace and follow co-existing digital devices, it found human connections in the proximity of digital devices. Privacy was a quaint, nonexistent concept for the program.
There was one big problem with Jigsaw. Data-gathering techniques used by Black Raven for Jigsaw would outrage anyone who believed in old-fashioned notions of privacy, and that was most Americans. Exposure of the job to the public and to governmental agencies, who were unknowingly providing the pieces to the puzzle, would, no doubt, end it.
“Or maybe all the pieces are here, somewhere in the record, and I’m just not seeing it,” Sam continued. “No one is seeing it. If I’m going to make any sense of this at all, I need more puzzle pieces, and frankly”—she drew a deep breath, and her cheeks became a little less pale—“after today, I don’t care how I get them. I’m done following the rules. I want to see whatever information you’re using for the bounty hunt. My grandfather hired you. He’ll direct you to share that information with me, if you need him to do that.”
“We can share bounty hunt information with you, but Black Raven intel cannot be integrated with ITT files. You’re correct. There are sourcing issues.” He laid out the only condition he thought was a legitimate prerequisite, given the fact that her grandfather was funding the bounty hunt and the information-gathering effort that went with it.
“Of course not,” she said.
“And there will likely be some files we cannot produce.” Because he couldn’t produce to her the bulk of the information that Jigsaw had acquired. She didn’t have clearance to know the job even existed. “Information exchange results in confidentiality agreements that sometimes cannot be breached. We don’t give our word, then break it.”
“Good to hear. Do you think this could be one person, orchestrating all of these attacks?”
“Don’t know yet.”
“Seems to me that if this is one person who is trying so hard to stop the ITT, something in the ITT record should give us a goddamn clue as to who it is.”
His heart beat harder in his chest. She’d gone from zero to sixty—scared to determined—in just a few minutes. “Couldn’t agree more, and that is exactly what we’re looking for. We’re working on the theory that somehow we’ll find a clue that will lead us to Maximov.”
“I want it all.”
He thought she was going to say more, but she didn’t. She opened her door.
“Sam, your grandfather wants you to call him.”
“You’ve told him I’m fine, haven’t you?”
“He’d rather hear it from you than from me or Ragno.”
“I’m not talking to him, and he knows why.”
“Isn’t the silent treatment tactic a bit juvenile?”
“I’ve learned to communicate with people in a manner they can understand, and my grandfather evidently doesn’t understand more adult forms of communication. By the way, you, of all people, should stay out of this one.” She stepped in her bedroom and shut the door behind her.
As the door closed, he decided it was best if he did exactly as she said. Her refusal to talk to her grandfather was none of his business, particularly when he was still working on getting closer to her good graces. Turning to go into his own bedroom, Zeus shrugged off his concern for Samuel.
The bomb blast had scared her to death, and rightly so. But she was more determined than ever, and she recognized a valuable asset when she saw one. Black Raven investigative files on the bounty hunt were going to be a treasure trove of information. Sam was brilliant enough to know that she should have the information, because something, somewhere, could be relevant to her task with the ITT.
“I’d say she’s a damn effective communicator, and she’s nothing if not tenacious,” Ragno said in his ear as he stepped into his bedroom. “You know you can’t tell her about Jigsaw, right? She doesn’t have clearance.”
“Yep. Don’t need that reminder.”
“You’re having a medic look at you, right?”
Zeus chuckled. As usual, Ragno’s timing was spot on, her sentence ending as an agent walked in his room with a first aid kit. “Rix is here.”
“Good. While he works on you, I have Sebastian on the line.”
“Zeus,” Sebastian said. “Good call on implementing Plan B outside of the courthouse. Would have been worse for you guys had you gotten in the vehicles. Still, that was a hell of a lot of blood running down your face.”
“Thanks for the concern, and I’m fine. Aren’t you supposed to be honeymooning?”
“I am,” Sebastian said. “But that doesn’t mean I’m not working.”
Sebastian and Skye hadn’t planned a post-wedding trip. Rather, given how busy the company was, his friend had opted to delay an extended trip and simply spend their first few post-wedding days at his new wife’s home in Covington, Louisiana. Zeus knew his friend enough to know that given the bombing outside of the ITT proceeding, Sebastian was now maintaining constant contact with Ragno.
“I have more intel on TRCR,” Ragno said.
Texas Rebels for Civil Rights. The group Ragno had mentioned as being new to the hate party, when they’d been trying to persuade Sam to resign. Zeus stepped into the bathroom with Rix, leaning over the sink as Rix prepared to wash the wound on his forehead.
“Info I talked about the other night came from DHS files,” Ragno continued, recapping for Sebastian that the TRCR was a new terrorist group that intelligence had revealed was operating in rural Texas. “I didn’t know the source. Zeus, you asked me to find it. I did. Had to use Jigsaw-level clearance, and now I fully understand why. If this gets out, there’d be a war on the U.S.–Mexico border.�
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“Who is it?” Sebastian asked.
“It’s coming from Protectors of Peace.”
Protectors of Peace—known in shorthand lingo as the Protectors—was a motorcycle gang operating primarily out of West Texas, with members numbering seven hundred to a thousand. They were notorious for anything but peace along the Mexico-U.S. border. They’d been a steady source of income for Black Raven for years. People and businesses on both sides of the border needed protection from the Protectors.
Zeus winced as Rix sprayed alcohol into his forehead wound. As fresh blood and liquid dripped into the sink, he shut his eyes to prevent the liquid from going there. “You’re kidding.”
“Nope,” Ragno answered.
“Never have known them to run with law enforcement for anything,” Zeus muttered.
“Remember a few months ago that video that exploded on social networking sites of one of their gang members being decapitated?” Ragno asked.
“Yep.” Even in Zeus’s world, where violence and bloodshed was commonplace, a beheading was hard to watch.
“Certainly enough of an impetus,” Sebastian said.
“Yes,” Ragno said. “The Protectors said to the Department of Homeland Security—and nowhere else I can tell—that the TRCR was responsible for the beheading. Jigsaw hasn’t identified a source for the beheading. Yet.”
“Can’t trust a damn thing the Protectors say.”
“Agreed, and government intel only goes so far. Good enough for government work doesn’t mean good enough for us,” Ragno said, repeating a phrase that had been used so frequently in Black Raven it had become a cliché. That was why the government came to them for projects like Jigsaw. “For Jigsaw’s sake, seems like we should probe further. It might lead us somewhere.”
Jigsaw (Black Raven Book 2) Page 14