Apex Predator Thriller Series Collection (Including the blockbuster new shark park thriller, Salechii)

by Carolyn McCray

  “I’m double-checking,” Quirk said. “Wherever he’s going, he doesn’t have any backup. It is just the one car. No new alerts beyond that lame all-points bulletin fax that went out earlier today.”

  “Okay, so this may have nothing to do with us,” Ronnie said, relaxing, getting more into the moby of the hack.

  “Except for the fact that he just pulled into the oil company’s parking lot.”

  CHAPTER 3

  Zach jumped out of the car and rushed to the building’s main door. Two security guards sat behind a large granite desk. Zach put his badge up against the window.

  “FBI.”

  The guards looked to one another, then shook their heads. Who the hell shook their heads at a federal officer?

  “Let me in!” Zach shouted through the glass. “Now.”

  One of the guards cautiously came around the corner of the large desk and stepped out onto the checker board pattern floor. The guy wasn’t exactly steady on his feet. Zach waved for him to hurry up.

  “What do you want?” the guard asked when he finally arrived at the door.

  “Open the door.” The guy was wary, though, squinting his eyes, body angled away from Zach. “Look, I don’t care that you are wasted on the job. I just need in.”

  “Why?”

  “There is a high probability that you are being hacked as we speak,” Zach answered, trying really hard not to threaten the guy with his gun or start talking about how obstruction of justice was a felony.

  The guard looked back to his partner. They exchanged a few words—Zach couldn’t tell through the glass what they were—but both men shook their head.

  “Controls are showing green lights,” the guard responded.

  “Of course they are. It is the Robin Hood Hacker.” That got the guy’s attention. So Zach pressed on. “You won’t know Robin Hood was here until the billions are missing from your boss’s bank account.”

  Gulping, the guard got out his key and opened the door.

  Zach charged through the door as he checked in with Warp. “Where do I need to go?”

  “The penthouse would be the most likely point of entry, since the main servers are located up in the CEO’s office,” the tech answered.

  Zach turned to the guard. “I need to get into the Penthouse.”

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” the guard said, backing away from Zach. Even the other guard came out from behind the desk. “No one goes up there.”

  “Don’t you make security rounds?”

  “We’re not allowed up there, not even for rounds. There’s a double key system that has to be triggered to even get the elevator to go up that far.”

  “There’s got to be another way,” Zach insisted.

  The guards shook their heads. “Not without authorization from the top.”

  Zach turned away from the men, moving out of earshot. “Warp, I need clearance.”

  “I’m trying,” Warp said. “But it’s Christmas. I can’t get ahold of anyone with the authority to grant you access. I think they are in St. Barts…But…”

  “But what?” Zach asked.

  “I could fake the—”

  “No,” Zach answered, interrupting Warp.

  “I know you are the straightest of the straight arrows, but, Agent Hunt, if we were able to ask the owner of this company if we could go up to stop billions from being stolen from him, what do you think his answer would be?”

  Zach shook his head. “Doesn’t matter until we actually get his permission.”

  “Or I could just…”

  “No.” The law was the law. “Besides, I thought you were a cracker?”

  Warp must have heard that in his voice, because the tech backed down. “You’re the boss.”

  Although Zach certainly didn’t feel like one right now. He wasn’t going to let that slow him down any, though. “Be sure to check with secretaries, janitorial staff. Someone besides the board of directors has got to have a way up there.”

  “I’ll try,” Warp answered, not sounding all that hopeful.

  Zach didn’t blame him. How could he, while standing in the lobby of the company that Robin Hood was about to hack and not being able to do anything about it?

  Hold on. Maybe there was something he could do.

  Force the hacker into an error.

  He turned and found the closest security camera in the lobby. Zach walked up to it and stared straight at the camera.

  “I’m coming.”

  * * *

  “OMG, he is hot,” Quirk said.

  Yes, this agent— Zachary Hunt, if Quirk was correct in his identification— was easy on the eyes, okay, he was extremely easy on the eyes, however he was still a FBI agent in the lobby of this building.

  “Options?” Ronnie asked, as she rooted under yet another firewall.

  “What options?” Quirk asked. “We’ve got to abort.”

  But that wasn’t an option to Ronnie. They had worked too long and too hard on this hack to quit now. It would take months before they could strike again. She couldn’t let a G-man, no matter how hot, stop her.

  “There’s another option,” Ronnie stated.

  “What do you mean?” Quirk said, then hurried on. “No. Ronnie. No.”

  Ronnie pressed on, though. “The only reason this hack is taking so long is that fact I am staying under the radar. That I am tediously avoiding sounding any alarms.”

  “No,” Quirk said. “Means no, Ronnie.”

  “The FBI is already here,” she reminded Quirk. “I might as well bring the house down and extract the money.”

  Quirk tsked in her ear. “I think you just want an excuse to meet the hunk.”

  She ignored her assistant’s barb. She wasn’t interested in meeting anyone, especially not an FBI agent. That pairing would make Romeo and Juliet look like a John Hughes high school romantic comedy. Pretty in Cuffs is what hers would be called.

  “I am doing it,” Ronnie said.

  “Wait!” Quirk yelled in her ear. “At least let me get the secondary protocols in place.”

  While she waited, Ronnie watched the video feed of the lobby. Special Agent Zachary Hunt paced across the black and white floor. He looked like he was arguing with himself—however, she could guess he had a geeky tech in his ear, as well. But no one was as good as Quirk. Which is why he worked with her.

  Even so, could the world’s best two hackers steal over ten billion dollars with the FBI in the house?

  Ronnie cracked her fingers again. It certainly was going to be fun to find out.

  * * *

  Zach strode the length of the glassed-in lobby. Clearly, the hacker hadn’t taken his bait. Everything still seemed hunky-dory at the company. Which meant they had to wait to get permission to get up to the penthouse.

  What was taking the tech so damn long? “Warp, have you made any headway?”

  “Like we said. It’s Christmas and there isn’t a Buddhist in the bunch.”

  Zach had never been pissed off at Santa Claus before, but this was getting ridiculous. Just thinking about Robin Hood sitting over his keyboard, looking out over El Paso from the Penthouse window, thinking he was above the law, stuck in Zach’s craw. But it still wasn’t enough to get him to break the laws he swore to protect. Although Warp's offer to lie their way into the penthouse was looking more and more attractive. It was a siren song that Zach had to resist.

  Alarms went off all around. Zach spun on his heel, pulling his gun in the same motion. “What’s going on?” When Warp didn’t answer, Zach yelled louder, “Is this you?”

  “No!” Warp shouted back. “The Robin Hood Hacker is inside the company’s mainframe.”

  Maybe this was his Christmas present after all. He owed St. Nick a few apologies, but they would have to wait. Charging past the desk, Zach hit the button for the elevator. Nothing lit up.

  “It looks like Robin Hood has overridden the elevators.”

  “You know what?” Zach said, jerking open the door to the stairwell. �
��I think I like the stairs better anyway.” The sound of his boots pounding against the concrete steps filled the stairwell, making it hard to hear Warp. “Come again?”

  “The stairs don’t go all the way to the penthouse. They stop at the floor below.”

  “No worries,” Zach answered, passing the second floor. That gung ho attitude got him up to the sixth floor. After that, he started to feel the strain in his thighs. He really needed to install that stationary bike in his basement.

  “Any progress on the hack?” Zach asked, sounding a little more winded than he’d like.

  “The crack is going pretty well. I think Robin Hood is a little flustered. He didn’t close several backdoors. I think I can stop the flow of funds.”

  “Good,” Zach commented, passing the eleventh-floor landing. One more to go. Twenty-six more steps. Twenty-five. Twenty-four. Damn, these last few burned.

  Finally he made it to the twelfth floor’s door. Aiming his gun, he pulled open the door and swept into the hallway, checking his corners. There wasn’t a sound. Nor should there be. He raced over to the elevator and pried open the doors.

  Flipping on his flashlight, Zach surveyed the elevator shaft. “Looks like he came up the access shaft, then breached through the penthouse’s elevator doors.”

  “That would be the route least likely to trip the alarms.”

  Holstering his gun, Zach braced the doors open, then leaped to the cabling. Catching it, he wrapped his legs around the bundle. His suit was trashed from the grease and soot, but that was a small price to pay for being hot on the Robin Hood Hacker’s trail.

  Hand over hand, Zach climbed the cabling. Now it was his arms’ turn to ache.

  Once level with the penthouse, Zach said, “I need those doors opened.”

  “I’m trying, but I think you’re going to have to manually open them.”

  Easy to say when sitting in an ergonomic chair half a city away. Not so easy here. There was barely a ledge to stand on, let alone enough room to really get the leverage he would need.

  Then he saw it. Two large magnets with handles. It must have been how Robin Hood had climbed across the elevator shaft. Now, of course, he just had to jump across the wide open space, catch onto the handles and not fall several stories. A risk that he was more than willing to take, knowing that the Robin Hood Hacker was just an elevator door away.

  Zach climbed up several more feet on the cables. Best to try this stunt with gravity on his side. Bracing his feet against the metal, he shoved off. Twisting mid-air, he caught one handle and narrowly missed the other. Worse, the handle turned under his weight and the magnetic disc started moving to the left.

  What the hell?

  Quickly, he swung his feet, maneuvering his body over so that his other hand caught the second magnet. This one held. Once his feet were firmly on the beam, he turned the handle of the magnet and got it to stop its wandering. This hacker had some weird-ass toys.

  No matter, he had a job to do. Releasing the magnets, he stepped onto the elevator door’s ledge. Now all he needed to do was open the elevator doors. Which, apparently, was harder than it looked. On the inside, there wasn’t enough space between the doors to even give his fingertips leverage. And simply pushing them apart just wasn’t happening.

  “Warp,” Zach whispered harshly. “There’s no way to get these open?”

  “Sorry, no.”

  He could not come this freaking close and miss the hacker because of a stupid door. Then he looked to the magnets. Carefully, he turned the handle all the way around. It released its hold on the metal so fast that Zach nearly dropped the thing. He reattached the disc to the elevator door, then repeated the process with the other disc.

  Taking in a deep breath, he turned the handles in opposite directions. Between their force and his upper body strength, the elevator doors cracked open. He shoved a foot between them and pushed. With a creek, the doors opened all the way.

  Jumping through, Zach released the magnets and pulled his gun. He landed hard and dropped to his knee, sweeping his gun in an arc.

  “FBI,” he announced…to no one. The office was empty.

  How?

  “Well?” Warp asked in his ear.

  Zach rushed over to the desk. The hacker seemed to have abandoned his keyboard and everything else during their hasty escape. The computer screen had been left on the company’s bank account page.

  “You stopped the transfer?” he asked.

  “Holding at ten point one eight billion,” Warp said with a distinct sense of pride.

  With the money safe, Zach could go after the hacker.

  “I’m following him down the access tunnel,” Zach said, sprinting back to the elevator doors. “Do you think you could round up some back up now?”

  “Oh, you know it.”

  * * *

  “Where’s the helicopter?” Ronnie asked, turning her back to the wind. Of course there had to be a storm coming in. That was just her rotten luck today.

  “Darlin’, he is en route, you’re just going to have to shiver for a while.”

  “Why isn’t he here now?” Ronnie demanded. She was a little short on patience after having her hack interrupted.

  Quirk tsked her again. “Remember how you wouldn’t let me prepay for his services? Remember how you said the chances we would need a helicopter on this job were so slim that you wouldn’t waste the double overtime?”

  Oh yeah. She did say that. Sometimes her frugalness did interfere with a speedy exit. But hey, she had an island country to buy. “Fine. ETA?”

  “I don’t know,” Quirk stated. “How long does it take to make your apologies from Christmas dinner, get suited up and fly over?”

  Ronnie stifled a scathing retort. This was her fault. Sort of.

  “So how did the FBI know we were here?” she said tightening her collar around her neck.

  “Your guess is as good as mine,” Quirk said, although not with his usual snappy tone. She knew that he was as affronted as she was. This just didn’t happen to them.

  “Uh oh.”

  Every muscle in Ronnie body tensed. “What?”

  “Okay, which do you want? The bad news or the really bad news?”

  “Quirk!”

  “The Feds have called for backup. Just about every on-duty cop in the city is heading for you.”

  Ronnie’s body trembled and it wasn’t all from the cold. “And?”

  “The helicopter pilot is in the middle of some kind of gift exchange that may—” “Double his pay,” Ronnie interrupted. She wasn’t going to get to use her own private island if she was incarcerated. There was a delay on the other side of the line. “I mean it, Quirk.”

  “Oh, trust me, I love to spend your money, but even if he left right now…”

  Ronnie didn’t have to ask Quirk for clarification. Not as sirens sounded on the wind. Red and blue lights flashed in the distance. The building would be swarmed within minutes.

  “You’ve got to use it,” Quirk said.

  “There’s got to be another way.”

  “Nope,” Quirk said flatly. “We’re on to plan C.”

  But Ronnie hated plan C. Okay, she’d loved plan C when they were thinking it up, but now that she had to implement it? Not so much.

  “You better start stripping, or even plan C isn’t going to get you out of this mess.”

  Ronnie knew her assistant was correct, however she was having a hard time putting that knowledge into action. The sirens helped, though. And knowing that an FBI agent might be barging through that rooftop door got her fingers moving. Quickly, she stripped out of her outerwear to reveal her “swallow suit.”

  Skin tight, the aerodynamic body suit had another feature. “Wings.” Not really wings, but flaps of resilient fabric under her arms and between her legs. She zipped each of the pieces into place.

  “Do you like the embellishments?” Quirk asked.

  Ronnie hadn’t even noticed the tiny swallow stitched onto her shoulder. Somehow t
hat gave her resolve. “Yes, I do.”

  Still, looking over the side of the building, preparing to jump with just a glorified yoga outfit, Ronnie hesitated. “You know what to do if this doesn’t work out.”

  “Oh please,” Quirk said in her ear. “Don’t be so maudlin.”

  Wind whipping all around, Ronnie stepped onto the ledge.

  It was now or never.

  CHAPTER 4

  “He’s on the roof!” Warp screamed in Zach’s ear.

  Zach clutched the pipes. He’d just gotten around the junction and was on his way down. Now the hacker was on the roof? Damn it.

  “No. Wait.” Warp said, then screamed again, this time much like a little girl. “He’s jumped!”

  Jumped? Nothing in the hacker’s psych file indicated suicidal tendencies. If anything, his survival instinct measured off the charts.

  “No, he’s flying!”

  “Warp, damn it. Which is it?”

  “The satellite feed is coming in at a low angle, but the dude is in some kind of hang gliding outfit, only without the hang glider.”

  Zach had no idea whatsoever what that meant, but it did mean that he had to get out of there, pronto. And there was only one way to do it. No more “walking” his way down the pipes.

  Instead, he released his grip and slid down the copper. He gained speed rapidly. He must have passed several floors by now. Looking down, the end of the tunnel rapidly approached. Braking with his feet, his shoes squeaked in protest. That floor was coming up pretty damned fast.

  He hit way harder than he’d wanted to, but knee pain was a small price to pay for getting back onto the Robin Hood Hacker’s trail. Zach burst through the access door and into a small electrical room. Jerking open the door, he charged across the lobby, not even bothering to answer the shouting security guards.

  Hitting the front door at full speed, Zach ran out into the parking lot. He looked up to find a figure in a black suit, with armpit wings, no less, sailing overhead.

  Screw that.

  Hopping into his car, he gunned the engine and squealed out into the street. Leaning forward, Zach watched the figure bank right. Sure the guy was high-flying now, but he had to come down sometime, and when he did, Zach was going to be right there.