Morgan’s gaze narrowed on me, brows arching toward her forehead. “Is that why you were playing that hypothetical game with me earlier?”
“Yeah.” My blush suffused my face. “The funny thing is, I expected him to blow up, but he was fine.”
“Well that’s good.”
“M-hmm,” I mumbled. “He already knew what I had to tell him.”
That’s when I decided to come clean with Morgan, telling her all about my familial link to the Canadian politician, his abducted beauty queen of a fiancée, and his addict son.
Morgan’s enthralled expression was rather comical.
I had no idea what possessed me to bare my soul to her, other than the fact that she was genuinely a good person. Much like Skylar and Tamara, she was a ball of energy and hilarious to boot. Not like the other two, however, she had this talk-to-me demeanor that required little to no effort on her part for me to give into.
That meant that I talked myself silly, sharing a bit more about myself, my life, my family, how I got into hacking.
Morgan shared too, which made me feel that much more secure in the budding friendship we were developing.
“He told you he loves you?” Morgan choked out, eyes wide to the point she looked like she’d swallowed something massive and it got lodged in her throat.
My hand waved at the air as if that fact was inconsequential. “I’m sure it was just a slipup.”
“I’ve only known him for a little over a year, but girl…” She simply let her words hang as she sucked in her lips.
“It’s strange, isn’t it?” I said. “I mean, we’ve known each other for as little as three weeks, then wham!”
Morgan wore the largest grin I’d ever seen. In a matter of seconds, it disappeared before I was met with the other woman’s intent gaze. “Dev, no one knows if it’s too quick but the two people in the relationship. Hell, I knew I loved Theo within two weeks!”
“You’re shitting me, right?”
The woman shook her head. “It’s funny how people are brought together.” Morgan paused to think over her next words before sharing them. “Theo and I had a lot going on when we first met. My house,” she waved her hand all around her, “was in shambles, thanks to a leak in my roof. I called around, but no one was answering until I remembered a friend of mine mentioning Theo’s company. Late on a Friday evening, I was shocked when he answered, delighted that he was popping by. I think I might have contributed to the accumulating moisture on my floor with the drooling I did when he made it to my front door.” She wagged her brows up and down, causing me to burst into giggles.
“He is pretty easy on the eyes, isn’t he?”
“M-hmm.” Morgan winked. “What I’m saying is that we didn’t rush to get to how we felt. It just happened. Shit hit the fan all around us: first the flood, then my house being vandalized, Theo’s was burned down…the kidnapping. We had no choice but to fight together. We knew we were stronger that way.”
“But I—”
Morgan leaned forward and covered my clasped hands. “I know you’re going to say that you chose to keep watch over us this past year. I know you’re convinced that the only reason you’re here is because all this is your fault. It’s not.”
“I wasn’t—”
“Your uncle took that trip with his woman and his son. He’s the one with the shady dealings. And he’s the one who came to you for help. All you did was go with your gut on a recommendation and you weren’t wrong in doing so. Dalton is a solid choice,” she said.
“Dalton’s just so…”
“Gorgeous? Sweet? Smart? Charming? Did I mention gorgeous?” Morgan supplied on a giggle after the last.
I shook my head, laughing. “I was going to go with high-handed, abrupt, and scary to name a few, but your list is much better.” And it was all true. “What you said is why I love the Neanderthal.”
“You love him?” Morgan got up, then started shimmying her hips in some sort of Funky Chicken styled happy dance.
Rex poked his head into the room, smirking at the crazy lady, then peered at me where I proceeded to roll my eyes.
Later that night, Rex shocked the hell out of me as we rode the elevator up to my floor.
“Solid man that Dalton,” he said.
My head snapped up to look at him. Feeling my gaze on him, he peered down at me and gifted me with a brief smile. A smile!
“In our line of work, a lot of shit can go down. Do him and yourself a favor, doll. Make sure you tell him,” he rasped the last, then turned to face forward again.
“Tell him what?”
The man sighed, then gave me that you-know-what look before focusing on the opening elevator doors.
As he exited the elevator, me falling in step beside him, he repeated, “Tell him, Devolin.”
I watched Rex from the corner of my eye, seeing through his alert expression. I knew it wasn’t my business, but I couldn’t help but be curious about what the man had been through to put that haunted look in his eyes. I was pretty sure that it had something to do with that scar though.
Chapter 33
Dalton
Knowing that Devolin would be sleeping, I pulled up Rex’s contact.
“’Lo?”
“It’s Dalton. All good?”
“For now,” he said.
“Does she know about anything?”
“No. She didn’t even realize that she had a tail on her throughout the day.” He yawned into the phone. “The fucker called a few times, sent texts. I managed to hide the envelope that was slid under her apartment door when we got back from her friend’s place, though. Sick fuck.”
That meant he’d looked inside the envelope. I’d already seen the texts, thanks to Brycen, who’d hacked into Devolin’s phone and worked his magic. Now, instead of Devolin receiving her old boss’s calls and texts, Brycen, Rex, and myself were receiving them.
“He’s got cameras in here too, D,” he continued. “I’ve got pictures to prove it. Just so you know, I’m having Stan install a security system in here.”
“Get him to install his best,” I ordered. “I’ll cover it. Now tell me, what was in the envelope?”
“Your ugly ass for one,” he growled, “and then some.”
A smile crept onto my face, despite the burning rage festering in my gut. “Have you done anything about the cameras yet?”
“Fuck, yeah I did. Took me some maneuvering, but I convinced your girl to take a bath to unwind. She was looking wired. I found and dismounted the two in her bedroom while she was in the tub. Did the one in the bathroom’s air return before that, just so you know. I searched the rest of her place after she went to bed. Found two high-tech ones with zooms pointed right at her computers in her office, one in her kitchen, two more in the living room,” he listed. “She doesn’t know about them. I shoved them in a trash bag, smashed everything out on her balcony and dumped it into her kitchen garbage. I’ll take care of that when we leave for NSI later.”
“Fuck!” I took a calming breath. “You know things are going to escalate now that we’ve taken away his eye candy, right?”
Rex groaned. “A simple babysitting job this ain’t no more, bro.”
No, it wasn’t.
So, I had to ask, “Are you okay with this? I know—”
“Get your shit done, then get your ass back home to your woman,” the man grumped.
“Anything else?”
“Nope.”
“Later, then,” I said, then hung up. “Yo, Brycen?” I yelled, turning to the men still standing by the LongRanger.
“Yo!”
“ETA on our ride?”
“Ten minutes out.”
Right. That meant I had time to call my woman.
“Kip?”
My dick jumped in my black fatigue pants. “You have no idea what that sleepy, sultry voice of yours does to me, baby,” I told her.
“Mmm,” she purred. “Are yo
u in?”
“Landed. Miguel is ten minutes out with our SUVs. Once they get here, the guys and I are going to go over the equipment and make sure that Miguel got everything we need. Might sneak in a few hours of shut-eye, then we head out.”
“I’m going to get Rex and we’ll go in right away.” She sounded much more awake now. “I can see if there’s an updated map from the satellites.”
“Babe,” my shoulders shook as I laughed internally, “our phones automatically update with the most recent shit. You made sure of that.”
“Right,” she paused. “I should probably check the coding to make sure that I didn’t miss something.”
“Dev?”
“Yeah,” she whispered.
“Everything will be alright,” I tried my best to reassure her. “We’ll deal with things as they come. If going into the office will make you feel better, then go ahead. If we run into something, we’ll all be connected to you. You’ll be able to feed us the real-time info as we need it, and let us know if something seems fishy.”
“Okay, Kip,” she said in that sleepy voice of hers. She seemed much more relaxed now.
“In the meantime, if you decide to head into the office early, Brycen’s sent you something. With the perks of in-flight Internet, he was dicking around on his computer, and it looks like he might have found an in on Ortiz,” I told her.
“What kind of an in?” The excitement in her voice was palpable.
“His email account,” I said. “Looks like your phishing scam idea paid off, sweetheart.”
“What do you mean?”
“Brycen decided to try a little something after I told him about your gut feeling that we were missing something. Once he hooked Ortiz, he whaled him,” I announced.
The woman burst out laughing. “Babe, you should stay away from hacker terminology,” she gasped between giggles. “You meant a whaling attack?”
“Yeah,” I chuckled. “Anyway, he sent you a bunch of the guy’s login credentials. I’m going to need you to go through those, see if you can access his emails, and keep us posted on what you find.”
“I’ll give you more than that,” she said, determination lacing her words. “Let’s just hope I have enough time.”
“Okay, sweetheart.” The crunch of tires over gravel had me turning to find two Range Rovers approaching. “Babe, I’ve got to go.”
“Be safe, Kip,” she said.
“You too, babe,” I said. Then threw in, “Love you,” for the second time in less than twelve hours, before hanging up without waiting to hear her answer, or her goodbye.
The first time I’d said it, I hadn’t meant to, but once the words were out, I belatedly realized that I’d meant them. Completely. This time, I consciously said the words, testing them on my tongue as they came out. Hanging up, the way I did though, was a pure pussy move. I wasn’t quite ready to deal with her refuting my feelings or to feel like I was pressuring her to say the words back to me either. I simply wanted her to know.
Chapter 34
Devolin
He’d said it again.
And he’d hung up on me again, too.
It had been just after three in the morning when Dalton called. I’d spent the next few hours laying there tossing and turning, thinking of how I’d go about to work with the information that Brycen had dug up on Ortiz.
Since work and Dalton dominated my thoughts, I called it quits on getting any more sleep by five a.m.
Jumping out of bed, I made a beeline for the bathroom. It wasn’t until I was rinsing the conditioner out of my hair that I noticed how the air return vent looked off-kilter. I didn’t think anything of it, aside from making a mental note to straighten the thing when I had time.
Maybe I’ll get Rex to fix it.
Making quick work of dressing, choosing my comfy yoga pants over jeans and a loose-fitting tank, layered with a hooded zip sweater, I made my way to the kitchen.
“Morning, Rex,” I said, as I grabbed the carafe from the coffee maker, poured out yesterday morning’s dregs into the sink, then gave it a good wash.
All I got from the man was a grunt.
Turning to face him, after pulling the coffee grinds and a new filter down from the upper cabinet, I noticed how tired he looked. “You didn’t take the pullout in my office, did you?”
He shook his head to indicate the negative, dry scrubbing his face.
“I know it’s early, and I’m not much of a breakfast person, but if you want—”
“Just coffee,” he replied. “Black.” Then he disappeared into the hall, closing the bathroom door behind him.
An hour later, I was at my desk, studying what Brycen had done to get to Ortiz. It had all started with a shelf-baby. Plainly speaking, a shelf-baby is a digital identity that is created, and then made to look like it’s led a full life before using that identity for nefarious purposes. Case in point, to lure Ortiz into providing information he wouldn’t think twice of providing a site he was familiar with, like his login information.
It’s surprising how much illegal business goes on online, right beneath everyone’s noses. Hell, I once read in the paper that a woman had been stabbed and nearly died, had it not been for the 7-Eleven clerk that saw the whole thing, and called 911. She’d tried to sell a purse online and had agreed to meet the buyer in the store’s parking lot. He’d asked her to wrap the Coach purse she was selling in red paper. She had no idea that Coach was code for cocaine, and that red had something to do with the quantity of said product.
See? Even something so innocent can be dangerous.
I kept sifting through Brycen’s work. From that false identity he’d created, all it took was a Backdoor Trojan sent to Ortiz’s inbox, made to look like a message notification coming from a site he visited weekly to conduct some of his business.
It was what I would call a Hail Mary Hack. The reason being that the email was coming from a different server, which meant that had Ortiz’s email security settings been programmed to the highest level, the hack would have never worked, seeing as the email would have made its way to his junk mail and been purged within a matter of twenty-four hours, or however frequently he’d set his purge settings.
But it had worked which made it a massive break for the team and me.
Once Ortiz logged into the mirror image of the site to retrieve his message however, the Trojan got straight to work, populating Brycen with so much information. Information I was now responsible to sift through.
The first thing I noticed was that he had multiple email addresses and profiles. I set forth for a brute force attack, attempting every password combination to get in, starting with the one Ortiz had provided on that spoofed site.
By the time the computer on my far left pinged that the men’s com units were active, I put my earpiece in and turned it on.
“Morning, sunshine!” I chimed. “I need a roll call so I know everyone’s devices are working.”
“Hey, babe,” Dalton went first, chuckling. Someone snickered, then each man announced himself. Even Preacher, who’d opted to join them, and Miguel, Dalton’s Mexican law enforcement friend chimed in.
It took some work, but I managed to narrow things down to three buildings that Nadia was most likely being held in—one of which being the main house.
The compound housed thirteen buildings on farm acreage. The Juan Cartel was known for its drug trading quite prolifically. Their drugs of choice: cocaine, heroine, methamphetamines, and marijuana. They were also involved in money laundering, prostitution, and human trafficking along the West Coast waterways, usually through California’s various ports. The drugs, however, were being run throughout the U.S. at an alarming rate, and the DEA was having a field day collaborating with the Mexican military and law enforcement.
“This would work so much better if the power went out,” I heard Shane state.
“Brycen?” I called out.
“What’s up?”
> “You think you can get onto your computer and access the grid to shut it down? I can’t do it from here,” I told him.
“Sure.”
“I’ll guide you through it now, so you can when the time comes,” I told him.
The man was tapping away at the keys on his laptop. “Giv’er, Huss,” he chuckled.
“Funny,” I snorted. “I should call you my script kiddie.”
“Now, now,” he chided. “I may be at a lower level of talent in the hacking world, but I can still best you in programming, if I wanted to.” Meaning I’d accused him of only being proficient while using someone else’s codes and not creating any of his own.
I barked a laugh. “We’ll see, kiddo.”
Chapter 35
Dalton
Day 1
Daylight broke shortly after our arrival, which meant we’d spend the day doing reconnaissance.
Satellite imagery was an asset during missions such as this one, but being able to physically circle the grounds, even at a distance, and getting the lay of the land had its perks. We were able to get a feel for how Ortiz ran his operation: how many enforcers per building, shift changes, generally getting a pulse on everyone’s habits.
We spent most of our time in the woods outside the compound, exchanging information over our com units about the goings on surrounding the three buildings we suspected our mark was being held in.
Ortiz and a few of his higher-level enforcers had been sighted. They’d taken off together in some old rusted military Jeep, right at dusk.
“Everyone ready to go in when I give the signal?” I asked. “Remember, tonight’s strictly a recon effort. We’re going in, checking things out, then getting out. If you get a visual on Ms. Alvarez, let me know. We’ll regroup, then decide what to do from there. No one’s playing hero, got it?”
I heard a slew of copys and Roger thats.
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