by Dee Davis
Seconds ticked by and then someone—a man—brandishing a knife walked into the room, and Hannah could almost feel the woman tensing. There was no sound, but it almost wasn’t necessary, the man’s actions screaming off the tiny screen, each cut more vile than the last. Bile rose in Hannah’s throat, the horror threatening to engulf her. Forcing her finger to work, she hit stop, her attention jerking back to reality. To Tina.
“Who sent this to you?”
“I’ve no idea.” Tina shook her head, eyes wide, clearly as revolted as Hannah had been. “It was just there in my email. At first I thought it was from Princeton. You remember I applied for the Ph.D. program there.” She blew out a slow breath, clearly still shaken. “The header said it was from Anderson Wells. He’s the recruiter that first talked to me about the program. I figured he had some news. But instead I found,” she paused, looking down at the phone again, “that.”
“But you don’t think it’s from him.”
“No way. He’s a great guy. He’d never send me something like this.”
“It’s easy enough to hijack an email address.” Harrison did it all the time.
“So do you think it’s real?” Tina asked, her eyes still on the cell’s screen. “I mean, maybe it’s just for show.” She actually sounded hopeful. “I’ve heard about people making movies like that.”
“I don’t know.” Hannah shook her head, suppressing a shiver. “It certainly seemed real enough. Do you recognize the woman?”
“No. But then you can’t really see her. Or the man. The whole thing is pretty grainy, and it’s so dark. Maybe it got sent to me by mistake?”
“At this point, I don’t think we can rule anything out. Have you shown anyone else?”
“No.” Tina shook her head. “I thought about calling the police, but then I thought that if it was a fake, I’d be over-reacting. So I brought it to you.”
“You did the right thing. I’ve got a friend, Harrison Blake—”
“The new head of the computer science department,” Tina said. “I’ve got a class with him this semester. We all think he’s dreamy.”
Despite the seriousness of the moment, Hannah smiled. She had to admit Harrison did have a certain charm. “Well, more important, he’s really good with things like this. He’ll be able to tell us if it’s real and quite possibly figure out where it originated.”
“And if it’s real?”
“Then we’ll call in the authorities. But I want you to keep it on the down low for now. All right? If it comes out, you know it’ll go viral. Which could be exactly what whoever sent this is hoping for.”
Tina nodded, chewing her bottom lip, her eyes back on the phone. “So you’ll take it? The phone, I mean?”
“If you can manage without it,” Hannah tried for a smile, needing to lighten the mood.
“Yeah, at least for an hour or so.” Tina grinned, the resilience of youth coming to her aid. “But after that, I don’t know…” She shook her head, still smiling, then sobered. “Seriously, I need to know what this is. What it means. If someone’s in trouble, we have to help.”
“All things considered, you’re looking pretty damn good today,” Harrison said as he walked over to where Hannah was waiting for access to A-Tac’s inner sanctum.
“I’ll take that as a compliment, I think.” Hannah smiled up at him as she turned the key to summon the elevator marked “professors only.”
“Absolutely. I don’t think I could have pulled off what you did and still have made my classes this morning.”
“But you were there, too,” she said as the elevator doors slid open and they stepped inside. “And you’re obviously working today.” She nodded at the briefcase he held in his hand.
“Just grading some papers. No classes until tomorrow. And besides, I didn’t have to make my way out of a building full of hostiles wearing three-inch heels and a skirt slit to here.” He grinned, motioning to his hip as he inserted a second key in the slot behind the Otis elevator sign.
“Well, for the record, I ditched the shoes, and the slit was self-inflicted.” She shrugged. “It was the only way I could move in the damn thing.”
“That’s what’s so great about you,” he said, as the elevator lurched downward. “Always resourceful. Got to love a woman who thinks on her feet.”
“Two compliments in one day. A girl could get the wrong idea.”
His smile turned a little wicked. “Well, they do say that once a person saves your life, you owe them.”
Their gazes met as the elevator lurched to a stop, and just for a moment, she let herself get lost in his eyes. Tina was right. Harrison was hot. Tousled brown hair and the half stubble of a beard. Broad shoulders leading to what had to be an equally muscled chest. And judging from last night, arms that could not only pull a woman to safety but also… She shook her head, clearing her thoughts, grateful when the doors slid open.
She was already dealing with two jobs, which meant there wasn’t time for anything else, and just because the rest of the team were acting like A-Tac was the latest incarnation of the Love Boat, it didn’t mean she had to fall for all that nonsense. Hannah didn’t do relationships. The risk of fallout was simply too great.
And besides, Harrison was her friend. He was joking around. Nothing more. She was the one with the runaway libido.
“You okay?” he asked, his hand warm against her shoulder.
“Yeah.” She nodded, as she slapped her palm against Aaron Thomas’s bust and a door in the far wall of the reception area slid open. “Just a little more out of it than I thought.”
“A brush with death has a way of doing that.” His gaze had turned somber. “If you need to talk, I’m here.”
“Thanks. But I’m fine.” Except for the part of her brain that was still picturing him naked. “I do have something I want you to take a look at though.” She reached into her bag for Tina’s cellphone. “My grad student found this in her email,” she said as they stopped just outside A-Tac’s war room, the door leading to the elevator sliding closed behind them. “It’s pretty gruesome stuff.”
“Gruesome as in?”
“Torture. Murder. I don’t know. I’m not even sure it’s real. It could even be a student’s project. A horror movie or something. But just in case it’s not, I was hoping you could work your cyber mojo and figure out what’s what. And maybe track down who sent it.”
“I take it your student didn’t recognize the sender?” he asked, taking the phone from her.
“Well, she did. Or at least she thought so. But she says the guy whose name was on the thing wouldn’t have sent her something like this. He’s a recruiter for a Ph.D. program she’s interested in.”
“Sometimes really frightening people hide under perfectly normal guises.”
“You’re preaching to the choir.” Hannah nodded. “That’s why I brought it to you. And I told Tina to keep it to herself until you had the chance to look at it.”
“Did you tell her you were bringing it to me?”
“You are the head of the IT department. Seemed logical. Besides, she thinks you’re dreamy.”
“Smart girl,” he said, his eyes crinkling as he smiled down at her. “Now if I can just convince her mentor.”
Hannah’s heart literally did a stutter step, and she ducked her head, making a play of adjusting her glasses. When the hell had she turned into a simpering coed?
“You guys going to stand here making eyes at each other or do you want to maybe come inside and get this show on the road?” Simon’s voice echoed in her ears, and Hannah felt her face go red.
Running a hand through her hair, she nodded and slipped past them both, taking a seat next to Annie, who was already at the war room conference table. Across from them sat Drake Flynn, the unit’s extraction expert. He’d flown in just this morning from California.
“So how are the newlyweds?” Hannah asked, ignoring Harrison as he walked into the room with Simon. There was nothing to be embarrassed about. They’d just been kidding ar
ound, and she’d let her stupid pheromones get the better of her.
“I wouldn’t really know,” Drake was saying, blue eyes twinkling. “Except for meals and some long walks on the beach, they really haven’t left their bedroom all that much.”
Drake’s brother Tucker and his new wife, Alexis, had rented a house in Laguna Beach for some much-needed downtime after Alexis’s near miss with the Consortium. Drake and his wife, Madeline, had been visiting when the news about Alain DuBois had surfaced.
“Did Madeline come back with you?” Annie asked.
“No. I figured with the house under construction she’s better off in California. And nocturnal activities notwithstanding, I think Tucker and Alexis are happy to have her there. Besides, she’s been having a time with morning sickness so flying cross-country wasn’t exactly on her top ten list of fun things to do.”
“This too shall pass,” Annie said with a shudder. “I thought I was never going to be able to eat again the first two months with Adam. But then I hit month three and started eating everything that wasn’t nailed down. It’s a wonder I didn’t gain five hundred pounds.”
“Well, I’ll be happy when we get to that stage. Right now, she’s pretty damn miserable.”
Across the table, Simon cleared his throat, looking decidedly uncomfortable.
“Welcome to the new and improved A-Tac.” Harrison laughed, making a face over the top of his laptop screen as he settled behind the computer. “Not exactly the kind of conversation you expected when you signed on, huh?”
“No worries,” Annie said with a calculated smile. “We may talk domestic bliss, but as you saw in Montreal, we’re more than capable of rising to a challenge.”
“Which brings us to the case at hand,” Avery said, cutting through the small talk as he walked to the front of the room. “I just got off the phone with Tyler, and it’s just as we expected. The bomb site is practically clean.” Tyler Hanson was the team’s ordnance expert. She’d flown in to Montreal with Nash Brennon, A-Tac’s second in command and Annie’s husband, almost before the dust had begun to settle. Annie was heading back after the debrief to help them.
“So we’ve got nothing?” Simon asked, his impatience showing.
“I wouldn’t say that. Tyler and Nash still have a long way to go with their investigation. And based on the coordination it took to instigate a blast that size while at the same time taking out DuBois, I think we can safely assume that the whole thing had to have been planned well in advance.”
“Which means it was a set-up.” Annie frowned. “They were trying to take us out along with DuBois.”
“Whoever the hell these people are, they’ve definitely got a hard-on for A-Tac,” Drake said, leaning forward so that his elbows rested on the table, his fingers steepled. “Hell, they can’t seem to get enough of us.”
“Maybe they’re just trying to keep us occupied,” Annie suggested. “I mean, the whole thing with Jason was just a ploy to keep us from the real threat—the bomb in Manhattan. Maybe this is the same kind of thing.”
“They knew we were looking for DuBois,” Hannah said, picking up the thread. “So why not just kill him outright? Why risk us getting to him first? There had to be another reason to pull us into it.”
“Like maybe to wipe us out?” Simon queried, lips quirking.
“It wouldn’t have been all of us,” Harrison said, his eyes on his computer screen, as usual multi-tasking.
“Harrison’s right,” Drake agreed. “So while I’m fairly certain our deaths would have been icing on the cake, I still think there had to be something more.”
“Hannah, you’re the expert with intel. Are you seeing anything in the chatter to indicate that there’s something else going on?” Avery asked.
“Nothing concrete, no.” Hannah shook her head. “But that doesn’t mean anything. The Consortium has made an art form out of staying under the radar.”
“Well, we can’t ignore the fact that they seem intent on taking us down,” Annie said. “One way or the other.”
“I think that’s a given.” Avery paused, his gaze encompassing them all. “But until we can identify these people, the only thing we can do is to monitor the situation, keep our eyes open, and hope that Tyler’s investigation turns up a lead.”
“And in the meantime?” Simon asked, clearly wanting more.
“It’s business as usual. But make no mistake, we’re going to run these people to ground, and we’re going to eliminate them. After all, that’s what we do best.”
CHAPTER 3
So I’m assuming you found something?” Hannah said as she walked into A-Tac’s computer room.
“Sort of.” Harrison shrugged, looking up from the computer where he and Avery were studying the video. Hannah had stopped in the doorway, confusion playing across her face. She was dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, her hair in more disarray than usual, her glasses glinting in the light. “Thanks for coming so quickly.”
“I thought we’d agreed to keep this between us until we knew what was going on.”
“We did,” Harrison said, lifting a hand in apology, truly sorry to have broken her confidence, “but that was before Avery shared his news.”
“There’s been a potential complication,” Avery said, swiveling his chair so that he was facing Hannah. “We’ve got a coed missing.”
“Damn,” Hannah said, crossing the room to take a seat beside Harrison. “Who is it?”
“A junior named Sara Lauter. History major.” Avery nodded to Harrison, who pulled a picture up on the computer monitor mounted on the wall above his desk. The girl smiled out from the screen as if she had no cares in the world.
Memories surfaced, but Harrison pushed the thoughts aside. There was nothing yet to indicate that the girl and the video were related. Still, he couldn’t control the wash of dread, and prayed it wasn’t a premonition.
“I know her,” Hannah said, pulling Harrison from his thoughts. “At least a little. She was in a seminar I taught last year on nineteenth-century political philosophy. If memory serves, she was the kind of person you want in class. Smart and studious. So how long has she been missing?”
“Not quite twenty-four hours. She was supposed to meet her boyfriend for breakfast and never showed.” Avery sat back, looking up at the screen. “College policy states that we wait forty-eight hours before launching an investigation, but under the circumstances, it seemed prudent to at least consider the possibility that the video is tied in to her disappearance.”
“It’s an awful thought,” Hannah sighed, “but I don’t see how we can avoid it.”
“I knew you’d agree,” Harrison said with a somber nod. “That’s why when Avery told me about the missing girl, I figured bringing him into the loop was essential.” Actually, he’d had an uncanny sense of déjà vu, but he wasn’t ready to share that with the team yet. Not even Hannah, who’d been his right hand since coming on board with A-Tac.
“So have you found anything?” she asked, eyes narrowing as she studied him. “You look like you’re holding something back.”
“I’m not. I swear,” he said, shaken by the fact that she’d nearly read his mind. “This kind of thing is tricky. I’ve tried to trace the email and all I’ve been able to do is verify that it wasn’t sent from Princeton. Avery’s got Simon tracking down the dude who supposedly sent it to your TA, but I’m pretty sure he’ll just corroborate what we already know.”
“What about authenticity? Have you been able to verify that the mpeg wasn’t just a prank?” she asked.
“I haven’t been able to prove it technically, but I sent it to a friend of mine who used to be a profiler with the FBI, and she thinks it may be real. The quality of the video, the lighting, even the staging or lack thereof—all of it suggests that whoever filmed this wasn’t worrying overmuch about presentation. It’s more like he was intent on making a record of the act.”
“Well, if it is real, and if this is our student…” Hannah trailed off, her gaze
moving from the photograph to the two of them.
“Then we have a very real problem. And a ticking clock,” Avery said.
“So what do we do now? Bring in the police?” Hannah asked.
“No. They have the same forty-eight-hour rule we do. And besides, Langley doesn’t want to risk exposure by bringing in the locals. So for now we’re on our own, which considering our resources isn’t such a bad thing. And worst case, we’ll call for help from the FBI.”
“My old stomping grounds,” Harrison said, his mind still on the missing girl.
“When’s the last time anyone saw Sara?” Hannah asked with a frown.
“Last night. She was in the library studying and left sometime just after midnight. No one’s seen her since.”
“What about her roommate?” Harrison queried as he continued to type on his keyboard. “Wasn’t she concerned?”
“Haven’t been able to run her to ground either,” Avery said. “Which made it seem as if they’d possibly gone off somewhere together. Although Tony swears they weren’t really friends.”
“Tony?” Hannah asked, her attention drawn back to the screen as Harrison switched back to the video, the grainy film work just as horrifying the second time.
“Marcuso,” Avery said, his gaze also on the screen above them. “The boyfriend. Another junior. Econ major.”
“Any reason to believe he might have something to do with the disappearance?” Harrison frowned as he magnified the picture on the monitor, the enlarged scene seeming even more ominous.
“Not so far. But we need to talk to him again. And the roommate, along with your TA, Hannah.”
“Tina? She’s definitely not a part of this, if that’s what you’re thinking. I saw her reaction to the video. She was as horrified as I was. There’s no faking that kind of thing. Besides, if she were involved, she wouldn’t have brought the video to me.”
“She’s not a suspect,” Avery said. “Hell, we don’t even know that we have a crime. But someone sent the video to her for a reason. And if we can figure that out, maybe it’ll lead us to a source. Maybe there’s a connection between Tina and Sara.”