by Paula Graves
He read over her jotted notes. “Good questions,” he noted with a faint quirk of his lips. “I’ll tell you what sticks out to me, if you like.”
She waved her hand at him. “Please.”
“What did they want from you? If you’re right, and Robert’s murder was connected to your kidnapping, then I don’t think ransom could be the motive for your kidnapping.”
“Agreed.”
“So what would they have accomplished by kidnapping you?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t have money. You’re not a romantic rival someone needs to get out of the way—if Robert had some obsessive stalker, she’d have kidnapped you by herself, not hired two thugs to take you, and she probably wouldn’t have killed Robert, at least not this early in the game.”
“Your mind works in some really scary ways,” Tara muttered.
His smile was a little wider that time. “It’s part of my charm.”
“Okay, so no ransom, no crazy jealous chick.”
“You do have one thing that someone might want,” Owen said after a brief pause. “Your work.”
She frowned. “But how many people really know what I do? Most of my friends think I’m a systems analyst, and frankly, they don’t know or care what that is anyway.”
“But you’re a systems analyst for one of the top security and intelligence think tanks in the country—the world, in fact. And more to the point, you have a pretty astounding security clearance level for a civilian contractor. I’m your best friend in the world, and even I don’t know exactly what it is you and your company are planning these days, except that it must be pretty damn big if you couldn’t take a couple of weeks off for a honeymoon.”
Owen was right. The project she was working on these days was huge and considered top secret in her company. Only a few people she worked with knew what her part of the job entailed, and that was on purpose, since she had been tasked with planning a supersecret security symposium that would be drawing some of the highest-ranking security and intelligence officers from friendly—and even a few not-so-friendly—nations across the globe. Not even her fiancé, Robert, knew the full scope of what she was doing these days, though he’d been insatiably curious.
She frowned, a terrible thought occurring to her. “What if Robert was killed in an attempt to find out what I was doing for my company?”
“You mean they tried to get information from him and something went wrong?”
She swallowed with difficulty. “Or they realized he didn’t know anything and wasn’t any use to them, so...”
“They killed him,” Owen finished for her. “I suppose it’s possible, if your job is really what’s behind what happened today.”
She rubbed her neck, where tension was building into coiling snakes of pain. “I’m so tired I can’t think, but I can’t seem to turn my brain off.”
Owen reached out and caught her hand. “I’ll give you a neck rub. That’ll help, won’t it?”
She met his gaze, seeing no guile there. Owen wasn’t like most other men. His offers of kindness had no ulterior motives. That was one of the reasons she trusted him in a way she’d never trusted anyone else in her life, not even Robert. To Owen, a neck rub was just a neck rub.
She turned her chair until her back was in front of him. The elastic band holding her ponytail had slipped a little, so she reached up and tightened it, giving him a clear view of her neck.
A moment passed before his hands touched her neck. They were neither hot nor cold, just pleasantly warm against her flesh. He eased his way into the massage, first with light strokes that sent minute shivers rippling down her spine. But soon, his fingers pressed deeper into her muscles, eliciting a flood of pleasure-pain that sent tremors rumbling low in her belly.
A neck rub might just be a neck rub for Owen, she realized, but it had never been, and never would be, just a neck rub for her.
He wasn’t anywhere near the perfect man of her wish list. He was too much the introvert, too prone to shutting out the world and burrowing into his own head when he got interested in a project. He lacked the driving ambition that might have made him the next Steve Jobs or Elon Musk. His occasional social awkwardness, which seemed to hit him at the worst possible moments, was such a contrast to the sort of social charm and ease that Robert Mallory had checked off her must-have list.
And yet he was deliciously sexy in the way that a really smart, really decent man could be. He had a wicked sense of humor and a delight in all things absurd that always seemed to be able to bring her out of even the worst mood, on those days when the weight of her world seemed insupportable. His intensely blue eyes could mesmerize her when he was talking about something he was passionate about, whether it was some intricacy of computer science she couldn’t understand or his love of baseball, an obsession they shared.
And his hands. He had the best hands, long-fingered and strong, with a deft dexterity that could turn a simple neck rub into pure seduction.
“Are you being nice to me now to make up for pissing me off earlier?” She kept her tone intentionally light, struggling against his spell.
His low voice hummed against her skin. “Is it working?”
Spectacularly, she thought. “If I say yes, you might not try as hard.”
“Nonsense. I always strive to do my best.”
If he were anyone but Owen, she’d be seriously contemplating sex right about now, she realized. But he was Owen, and Owen was off-limits, so she eased away from his touch. “That was just what I needed. I think maybe I can get a little sleep now.”
As she’d known he would, Owen stepped away from the bed. “You do that. I’ll try to get some sleep myself and then if you’re awake in a few hours, we’ll see about something for supper.”
Impulsively, she caught his hand as he turned to go and pulled him into a tight hug. His arms enfolded her, strong to her unexpectedly weak.
“It’s going to be all right,” he murmured against her temple. “We’ll figure all this out, I promise.”
She let go and covered her emotion with a soft laugh. “We’ve had our share of figuring our way out of trouble, haven’t we?”
He gave her ponytail a light tug. “Tara and Owen, the terrors of Mercerville.”
“That was mostly me,” she said wryly.
He smiled. “True.”
She watched him leave the room and close the door behind him, feeling suddenly, terribly alone.
* * *
MADDOX HELLER WAS not alone in his office when Archer Trask arrived for their meeting. He took in the three people sitting in the small office space with unexpected trepidation, for he wasn’t a man easily intimidated. But Heller had called in the other two chief officers of Campbell Cove Security, the enigmatic Alexander Quinn, a former CIA agent and a man who seemed to grow inexplicably more mysterious with each revelation about his past; and the elegant and beautiful Rebecca Cameron, a woman who Archer Trask knew primarily by her reputation as an accomplished diplomat and a brilliant historian. It was she who rose to greet him, extending her graceful, long-fingered hand for a shake.
“I hope you don’t mind if Alexander and I join the meeting,” she said with a friendly smile that brought sparkles to her dark eyes and carved handsome curves in her otherwise ageless face. She smelled good, Trask thought, her scent delicate but intoxicating. She was probably his elder by at least five or six years, but she had a youthful grace that made him feel ancient next to her.
“Saves you the trouble of questioning us separately,” Maddox drawled, flashing a quicksilver smile that Trask didn’t quite buy.
More like prevents me from separating you in the effort to catch you in a discrepancy, he thought. He took the seat Maddox offered, situated in front of their chairs, subtly surrounded by them.
As if he we
re the one being questioned.
“How long has Owen Stiles worked for your company?” he asked before someone could interrupt to offer him coffee or some other distraction.
“Almost a year now,” Quinn answered. “He was one of our earliest hires and has worked out very well.”
“He’s in your IT department?” Trask asked, knowing it was a leading question. He already knew Stiles worked in Cybersecurity, although even his best intel hadn’t managed to uncover exactly what cybersecurity meant to a company like Campbell Cove Security. Was he an analyst? Or was he a white hat hacker of some sort?
Or perhaps both?
“He’s in Cybersecurity,” Quinn answered blandly. “He analyzes security threats in both government and civilian networks and comes up with solutions to close the gaps that terrorists try to exploit.”
Quinn came across as open and honest on the surface, but Trask didn’t buy it. The only problem was, he wasn’t sure Quinn was actually lying. He might be telling the truth, or he might be leaving out something important. Trask honestly couldn’t tell.
“Do you have any idea where he is now?”
“No,” Quinn answered. “We’ve been trying to find him, as you can imagine. He’s vital to our work here, and his disappearance is troubling.”
Trask narrowed his eyes, looking past Quinn to Rebecca Cameron. Her expression was as placid as the surface of a lake on a still day, reflecting her surroundings more than revealing anything beneath the surface. As for Maddox Heller, he simply shot Trask a look that was somewhere between a smile and a smirk, as if he knew exactly how frustrating this interview was turning out to be.
Clearly, they had circled the wagons around their employee, and nothing Trask asked in this particular interview would cause them to break ranks. So he changed direction.
“Do you know Tara Bentley?”
He spotted a slight flicker in Heller’s expression before he pasted on that smirky smile again. “She asked Owen to be her man of honor in her wedding, so I know they’re good friends.”
“I believe they grew up together,” Quinn offered blandly.
“Since middle school, didn’t Owen say?” Cameron offered. “Sweet, to have stayed friends so many years, don’t you think?”
“Have any of you met her?”
“Briefly, I think. She’s come by to take him to lunch a couple of times, hasn’t she?” Cameron smiled at her coworkers.
“But other than that, you know nothing about her?”
There wasn’t even the briefest of pauses before Alexander Quinn answered, “No. Nothing at all.”
* * *
OWEN HAD GONE to his bedroom with good intentions, but moments after he’d stretched out on the bed, the call of his computer overcame his weariness. Planting himself in front of the computer array, he considered his options.
Something had been bothering him since Maddox Heller rescued him and Tara from the road near the old Boy Scout camp. At the time, he’d been too wet, tired and hungry to ask any questions, but now that he was dry and warm, with a light lunch still filling his belly, he’d had time to realize something wasn’t quite right about the situation.
For one thing, Maddox Heller had asked almost nothing about what had happened to them. He’d taken Owen’s terse explanation over the phone at face value, asking no questions of any import. He’d simply accepted that Tara and Owen must be telling the truth, no matter how strange the circumstances of their abduction and despite the utter dearth of proof of their story.
Yes, he’d been their employee for a year now, but he knew that if one of the people working under him in the Cybersecurity section at Campbell Cove Security had come to him with such a strange story, he’d have asked a few more questions himself.
So why hadn’t Heller?
He bypassed the normal remote desktop access to his work computer and instead decided to exploit a back door he’d created to anonymously monitor any computer activity company-wide. But to his astonishment, he found that his back door was blocked.
What the hell? Had Quinn ordered his full network access to be revoked? Why? Did he suspect Owen of something nefarious after all?
Maybe that was why Heller hadn’t asked any extra questions. Maybe they were trying to contain Owen and Tara, keeping them under control in the secluded little safe house until they could finish an investigation.
He kept digging, trying other potential network access points until he managed to get back into the system through another narrow gap in security. It wouldn’t take long for someone to notice the network intrusion, so he had to work fast before he was detected.
He went right to the most likely source of information—Alexander Quinn. If anything worth knowing about was going on at Campbell Cove Security, Alexander Quinn would know about it.
He was running out of time, fast, when he stumbled across a file about five levels deep in his user directory. It was hidden among Quinn’s download files, though the file itself seemed to have been created in the directory rather than downloaded.
What caught Owen’s eye was the file name: Jane0216.
Jane was Tara’s middle name. And February 16 was her birthday.
Acutely aware of the ticking clock, Owen quickly copied the file to his personal cloud server account and backed out of the network. He was pretty sure his intrusion hadn’t been detected; he’d seen no signs of anyone trying to block him out. He made a mental note to shore up the security for the network entry point as soon as he could. And he was going to do a little digging around when he got a chance to see how the cybersecurity team at Campbell Cove Security had blocked him out of his usual entry point.
But first he wanted a look at that mysterious file.
It was password protected, of course. But one of the courses Owen taught at Campbell Cove Academy was on password cracking for law enforcement. In fact, Owen had written a program for password cracking, using a set of queries that helped create a list of likely passwords based on an individual’s unique set of personal connections and statistics. Of course, Quinn posed a particular problem, since both his past and present were shrouded in mystery. Owen was too smart to use the usual password prompts, but with a little creative thinking, combined with his knowledge of Quinn’s past exploits, he managed to sniff out the password in a couple of hours.
“‘DaresSalaamNairobi_080798,’” he read aloud with a satisfied smile. The boss had made a mistake after all, using a seminal moment in his history as a CIA agent to create his password. Quinn had once told Owen that it was August 7, 1998, not September 11, 2001, that had been the real start of Osama bin Laden’s war against the United States. “He and Zawahiri killed over two hundred people in those attacks on our embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, including friends of mine. But it happened halfway around the world, so people just didn’t pay attention, even though the intelligence community was practically screaming for them to wake up.”
Holding his breath, Owen opened the file.
It was a background check on Tara Bentley, he saw. Detailed and intrusive, chronicling her life back to childhood. It appeared to cover all the details Owen knew about Tara and a few he didn’t.
“What on earth is that?”
Tara’s voice, shockingly close behind him, made him jump. He whirled around in his desk chair to look at her and found her staring at the computer screen, her eyes wide with horror.
“You have a file on me?” she asked, her pained gaze meeting his.
“Not me,” he said, reaching out to take her hand, overwhelmed by the need to connect with her before she withdrew from him completely. “This isn’t my file. I found it on the Campbell Cove Security network. Specifically, on my boss’s computer.”
“Maddox Heller?” she asked, her expression still a vivid picture of dismay. She felt violated, Owen knew, and he didn’t blame her.
“No. Alexander Quinn.”
“The CIA guy?” She looked confused. “Why would he be keeping a dossier on me?”
“That,” Owen said, “is what we’re going to find out.”
Chapter Six
Weekends weren’t technically days off at Campbell Cove Security. Most of the security experts who worked for the company had signed on knowing they were on call 24/7. But Alexander Quinn wasn’t a heartless beast, despite his reputation. He knew several of his agents were married and many had children, and he had already seen the murky world he and his fellow agents navigated rip apart too many marriages and families. After the meeting with Archer Trask, he’d sent Heller home to his pretty wife and adorable children, and even Becky Cameron had wandered off to do whatever it was she did on her time off.
His part of the building was very quiet, though he knew there were a few classes going on in the academy section and some of the unmarried employees actually preferred to work weekends and take their days off during the week. Now and then he heard the faint tap of footsteps down a distant hall or the muffled shout coming from the academy wing, but he seemed to have the executive office area to himself.
Which was why the sound of a ding on the computer behind him sent a frisson of alarm racing through his nervous system.
He turned to look at the computer and found a query box blinking back at him.
“Why do you have a file on Tara Bentley?”
His eyes narrowing, he tapped an answer on his keyboard.
“Because she’s important to you.”
There was a long pause before another message popped onto the screen.
“Do you know why she was kidnapped?”
How to answer that question? In truth, while Quinn had some ideas what might be behind the woman’s abduction, he didn’t know anything for sure. Her work at the Security Strategies Foundation was, in part, classified, requiring a certain level of security clearance.
Technically, based on his own company’s contract with the US government, Quinn’s clearance was sufficient to access that level of information, but there were protocols of information sharing that would take time to work through. And unless the government deemed the situation to be a national security risk, Security Solutions could always refuse to share the information.