Zero Hour

by Megan Erickson

  A phone rang, cutting through the large room. Everyone checked their pockets, but it was Jock who came up with a beeping phone. He frowned at the number and answered it. “Hello.”

  There was a pause, then a tinny voice filtered through the speakerphone. “It’s me.”

  Roarke and Erick grabbed each other at the same time. Roarke leaned on his friend as they both shook with relief. Wren’s voice. She was alive and could speak. There was hope yet. Roarke had always been logical, and he knew their odds were shit, but when it came to Wren, he didn’t give a fuck if they had a one-in-a-hundred-million shot. It was better than nothing.

  Marisol leaped off the desk and raced over to plaster herself to Jock’s back. He immediately began to type, no doubt working to trace the call. He held up a hand, signaling them to be silent. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m okay,” Wren said. A male voice said something unintelligible in the background. “Um, Arden has me. Along with…some guards. I’m to tell you Arden has files on me and Marisol, and he’s in the process of working on all your identities. If you don’t drop this, he will ruin you. His words.”

  Roarke wanted to speak up, to let her know he was okay, but he didn’t know who was listening to this phone call. She’d called Jock so he stayed silent, but he wished he could reach through the phone and hold her. He was dying inside listening to her speak and not knowing how she was being treated.

  “Anything else?” Jock said.

  “Arden said if the patch isn’t removed, he’ll kill me.”

  The deeper voice filtered in through the background again.

  Wren sighed. “Okay, he wants me to tell you that he actually said he’d cut off all my fingers one by one, then kill me.” She sounded irritated, and he would have smiled if it wasn’t about violence. “So I’m going to remove it.”

  Jock frowned, and he opened his mouth like he planned to protest, but Dade smacked his hand against Jock’s stomach. Jock clenched his jaw shut, glared at Dade, and said, “Okay. Do you need anything from me?”

  “It’ll take me about an hour and a half, and I need you to let it happen. My life is on the line here, okay?”

  Erick left Roarke’s side and shoved Dade out of the way, typing quickly on the computer as maps and lists flashed across the screen.

  “I won’t interfere,” Jock said.

  “Thank you.” Her voice cracked on the last word. “I’ll…see you soon.”

  The line went dead, and Jock slammed his fist down onto the table. “Fuck! She wasn’t on long enough for me to trace.”

  “It’s okay,” Erick said. “There!” He pointed at a topographic map on his computer screen. “I ran every property the Saltners own in all of their names and LLCs, and this one in Maryland is within an hour and a half, and the closest to the tower that broadcast that cell phone signal.” Erick turned to them with wide eyes as he pounded the computer screen with a shaking finger. “She’s there. Looks like an abandoned warehouse. If she’s got an hour and a half to pull the patch, then we’ve got less time than that to get there.”

  Roarke began walking to the exit. “Let’s go.”

  “Whoa, whoa,” Marisol said. “I don’t think you’re going anywhere.”

  He whirled around, ignoring the vertigo, and pointed one by one at every person in the room. “I am going. To rescue Wren, and to put Saltner in the ground. I don’t give a fuck what any of you say because it’s not up for debate. Dade, you stay here with Marisol. Jock, Erick, and I are about to take over a warehouse. Is everything understood?”

  Four heads nodded. Not a word was spoken.

  “Good,” Roarke grumbled. “Jock, grab the weapons, and let’s get the fuck out of here.”

  The man was on it, quickly pulling a black duffel holding their cache of guns out of a locker in the back. With the two men he trusted most at his back, Roarke strode out of HQ.

  * * *

  Wren would kill for an Advil or ten right about now. The pain in her jaw had spread to take over her entire face, and the force of the blow must have twisted something in her neck because pain jolted up her spine with every movement of her fingers on her keyboard.

  It pissed her off. If she wasn’t tied to this chair, she’d show him how much bodily injury she could do. The two men who had taken her from her apartment were watching her, one puffing steadily on a cigarette and the other dozing while she pretended to remove the patch. It wouldn’t take an hour and a half to fix the patch—maybe thirty minutes, tops. She wasn’t doing it though. She had other plans, which could maybe work if Jock understood all her clues.

  She didn’t know if she made sense on the phone. Arden had been watching her the whole time with his beady eyes, and it’d taken all of her energy to maintain a cool facade when inside she was screaming.

  Arden and his two men were visible, talking at a table in another part of the warehouse. Smoker Man kicked Dozer—the one who shot Roarke—who jerked his head up with a glare. “What?”

  “Don’t fucking sleep, that’s what.”

  “The girl is tied to a chair, she weighs like a buck ten, and Arden threatened her limbs. Chill the fuck out.”

  Smoker narrowed his eyes. “Don’t underestimate anyone, asshole.”

  “That’s what you said about the Brennan job, and you took him out easily.”

  She tried not to flinch at the careless way they talked about Flynn. If only she could get her hands on them…

  “Hey, honey,” Dozer said.

  She didn’t even lift her gaze away from the screen, where she was writing scripts of random code. “What?”

  “Any chance you can finish this up early? I saw a burger place on the way near a hotel, just saying.”

  She turned her head slowly, first because she didn’t want to show fear and second because it really fucking hurt. “No thanks. And no, I don’t think I’ll be finishing this up early.”

  Dozer crossed his arms over his chest and sighed. “Yeah, I figured.”

  She tuned them out as they talked in low tones about the next job they’d been hired to do. They weren’t her problem. She had more issues to worry about than two hit men. She wondered when this mission went bad. Darren had seemed to accept her excuse, so did this have to do with Franklin cornering her at the party? She couldn’t understand where the leak was, how they figured out she wasn’t who she said she was. She hoped it didn’t have to do with Darren, because if they found out her tie to Fiona…Wren squeezed her eyes shut. She didn’t want to think about that. After this was over, if she made it out alive, she’d have to contact Fiona, install some sort of protection for her, especially if Darren was still around.

  Minutes went by before Arden walked over to her, and she pulled up the patch correction and began to work on it. He watched her steadily, and she knew he didn’t trust her. The feeling was mutual.

  “So how did you figure out who I was?” she asked.

  “That you weren’t Lacy Kim? Well, we’ve been noticing some activity on our accounts for weeks—from our bank to our phones. You were someone new, someone who Darren had decided to let into our inner circle against my wishes.”

  “We only wanted to prevent the zero-day from being exploited,” she said quickly. “Really, when this is all over, we’ll never bother you again.”

  Arden sighed heavily and scraped a chair across the dirty floor to set it down beside her. He plopped his large body on it so the legs creaked. “Ah, Wren, do you think I believe that?”

  Shit, the way he was looking at her, all sympathetic, like she was a moron, she knew whatever he told her next wasn’t going to be good. “I know your brother is Erick Lee, I know Flynn Brennan was his lover, and I know Roarke Brennan was in your bed last night. I also know Marisol Rosa was in my home, and you have some other ex-military hacker working with you.” He shook his head. “You almost got away with it, I’ll give you that. But when you ran from my house, your Roarke forgot to cut the cameras like he did on the way in.”

  She swallowed,
but her mouth was the Sahara. Fuck. He knew. “Does…does Maximus know who we are?”

  He cocked his head a minute, like he hadn’t realized she knew the hacker. “No, of course not. I want to continue to do business with him, and he’d disapprove of how messy this situation got. He thinks you’re lone vigilantes and I plan for it to stay that way.”

  Why was he so calm? He knew what information they had on him. “So…”

  “So, if I’m correct, then your crew, or part of it, is on its way here. You gave them clues on the phone, didn’t you?”

  She stayed silent as her heart beat against her rib cage like a trapped bird. He knew, he knew, and oh fuck, it was probably a trap, and this was going to end in tragedy.

  He smiled sadly. “That’s what I thought. Well, we’re ready for them.” He gestured to the computer. “You better get to work. I don’t think you want to see what I’m capable of if it’s not done by the time they get here.”

  She swallowed and focused back on the monitor. Her fingers hovered over the keyboard as she considered her next move. With her jaw on fire and her heart racing to an unknown finish line, she couldn’t concentrate. Who’d show up to rescue her? Erick? Was the team in chaos without Roarke at the head?

  Shit, she couldn’t go there now, couldn’t entertain the thought that Roarke’s body was still lying in her apartment in a pool of blood. Whoever showed up to rescue her wouldn’t be a match for whatever Arden had planned. Fuck, why hadn’t she thought to warn them? She should have questioned him more, worked harder to read him. But his backhand to her face had thrown her off. She was wary now, worried he’d hit her again and do something permanent. Like cut off a finger.

  She had about twenty minutes left in her hour-and-a-half time frame. Depending upon when her crew left, they would be arriving soon. She had to make her decision now. Her original intent was to fake it. Code a program that would make the patch undetectable so the zero-day would be usable, up until the hacker tried to download the supposedly mined data. Except it wasn’t real, and anyone worth their salt would see that right away. It would buy her an hour or two though, and hopefully by then, she’d be far away from this place.

  But now, with the knowledge that Saltner was prepared for her crew, that he knew this was personal, she wasn’t sure that was the right decision. Maybe she should remove the patch. Do what Arden said, and hopefully a happy Maximus would make Arden feel merciful and release her and the crew from whatever hell he had planned.

  Because if Maximus found out the patch hadn’t been removed while she was still with Arden…Well, she didn’t think that would go over well at all.

  Her fingers tapped the keys, a clacking rhythm in the cavernous space of the warehouse. She glanced up at Smoker, who was still smoking, and at Dozer, who was still dozing. Arden stood at the front of the warehouse with his two men.

  Outside, she heard doors open, and she froze, waiting to see if her friends were dragged inside in handcuffs. She imagined Erick, his face beaten and dirty, pleading with her to do something to get them out of this situation.

  When the warehouse doors opened, five more men walked inside, all with rifles over their shoulders. They stood in a deadly circle with Arden like they weren’t planning a trap for her crew and hadn’t orchestrated stealing the personal data of millions of people. Like they hadn’t murdered Flynn in cold blood or protected a son who did unspeakable things to women like Fiona.

  Wren clenched her jaw, wincing at the pain, and focused again on her task. She wasn’t the praying type, but she prayed to something, her eyes squeezed shut and her lips moving. She thought of the flowers in Seocheon between the earth and the afterlife—she wished she had the revival flower to bring back Roarke and the destruction flower to wipe out entire armies. If she had both, she’d make it through this.

  When she opened her eyes, she knew the right decision. She wasn’t sure if it was the one Roarke would have chosen, but it was the one she thought was right for her, for this mission.

  Her fingers flew across the keyboard, and within five minutes, it was done. She blew out a breath, staring at the screen. Her hands lay clasped in her lap, trembling over what she’d just done and the potential consequences of her actions, and just when Arden and his group of men began to walk toward her with determination and she opened her mouth to tell him she’d done what he asked, the lights went out, and the warehouse was plunged into darkness.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  As soon as the lights in the warehouse went dark, Roarke exhaled. Night would have been best, when they’d be under the cover of darkness. Instead, the afternoon sun slipped in and out of the clouds.

  Erick had broken just about every traffic law to arrive at this warehouse in the middle of Nowhere Maryland. On the way, Roarke and Jock had worked together to hack into the electrical grid to control the power. They hoped there was no generator, and based on the still-dark warehouse, there didn’t seem to be one.

  Jock slipped his rifle under the rusty tractor that hid them from view. They’d parked a half mile away and walked after ensuring there was no security system around. Now they crouched behind antique farm equipment that hadn’t been used since the seventies and waited.

  Roarke had his Glock, and Erick had his handgun, too, but they were both poor shots. Jock, on the other hand, had many talents, and one of them was sharpshooting. The man kept mum about his training, and Roarke wasn’t entirely sure of the guy’s whole background. All he knew was that he trusted Jock, and Jock trusted him, and he was so damn glad Jock was on his crew.

  The door at the front of the warehouse remained closed.

  “Roof and sides,” Jock muttered. “Aren’t gonna walk out the front. Unless they’re dumb fucks.”

  Roarke’s head was still a mass of pain, but he managed to understand what Jock was telling him. “Erick, you watch each corner on the ground. I’ll watch the roof.”

  “On it,” Erick said. They both had binoculars, and Roarke adjusted the focus to scan the roof.

  None of them trusted Arden, and if he knew who Wren was, then he probably knew she had a crew behind her. A crew who was capable of finding where she was and would attempt to rescue her. Jock had told them on the drive that assuming they had the element of surprise was a death knell.

  So they’d come prepared.

  Movement on the roof caught Roarke’s attention. The top of a man’s head and his large sunglasses peered over the top. Before Roarke could even open his mouth, a muted zrip sounded beside him, and the man’s head kicked back with a spray of blood.

  Roarke lowered his binoculars and stared at Jock. “I didn’t even tell you yet.”

  “Too slow,” Jock said, not taking his eyes away from the scope on his rifle.

  “Christ,” Roarke muttered. He went back to studying the roof, just in time to see a man crouched along the top, running to help his companion. “Movement—”

  Another zrip, another spray of blood, and the man wasn’t running anymore.

  The front of the warehouse opened, and a third man walked out, assault rifle drawn. It was one of the men who’d broken into Wren’s apartment, the one who fucking shot him. Jock took him out immediately. “There’s always one dumb fuck,” he muttered.

  Roarke didn’t feel much remorse. He held his breath as a breeze caught the front door of the warehouse, and it slammed against the side of the building with a loud clap. The sound was louder than Jock’s rifle, and the bang sent a chill down Roarke’s spine. They crouched in silence, all three. Roarke didn’t breathe or blink, and forced himself to keep the panic down while he waited. How many more men?

  A scream ripped out of the warehouse, a female shriek of terror that could be none other than Wren, followed by a crash.

  His instinct, his heart that belonged to Wren, called to him to throw caution to the wind and barrel into the warehouse with gun drawn. But the firepower he’d already witnessed led him to believe they knew someone would be coming to rescue her. Still, he ground his teeth,
the echoes of her screams in his head. They were like fuel to his analytical brain, as gears turned with every possible scenario to rescue her safely.

  A handful of men poured out of the warehouse, and Jock’s sniper rifle went off, followed by the staccato sounds of the men’s rifles, as well as the piercing shots of Erick’s handgun. This was Roarke’s chance, the chaos he needed to get to Wren. He took off at a dead sprint and managed to duck to the right before the other men saw him, crouching behind barrels he hoped didn’t hold something flammable.

  Roarke’s fists clenched as more screams carried on the breeze from the warehouse, with curses mixed in now. He squinted out of a small space between the barrels. If he ran like the wind, he could slip in behind the men, who now dwindled to three, while they were engaged in a firefight with Jock and Erick.

  Roarke had to get inside.

  He took a deep breath, prayed like hell he still had a sense of balance with his head fucked up, and took off toward the warehouse. A shout pierced the air that didn’t sound like Jock or Erick. He’d been spotted. That eerie feeling of being chased and watched spurred him to move faster, so he ran harder, lungs burning and fists pumping. He dove inside of the warehouse door just as a bullet pinged off the metal latch near where his back had been. He didn’t have time to think about how fucking close he’d come to getting shot a second time that day. He scrambled to his feet and plastered himself to the wall. He’d never felt this exposed in his life, and he was so fucking out of his element that he was just waiting for the bullet that wouldn’t miss this time.

  He followed the shouts and crashes to a loft on the left. Wren’s lavender hair caught in a small patch of light as she struggled against a pole she was tied to. In front of her stood Arden and another man, and the insults she was hurling at them were quite clear over the sound of the gunshots outside.

  Roarke ran behind a rusted car frame and crouched, even though he was sure he’d been spotted.

  “So the brother lives?” Arden glanced at the man beside him—who Roarke recognized as one of the men who had broken into Wren’s apartment.