Shadows (Black Raven Book 1)

by Barcelona, Stella

  “Immediately?”

  Even under duress she was bargaining? He bit back a smile of admiration and nodded. His smile disappeared when he realized Spring wasn’t making eye contact with either of them and Skye looked as scared as he’d seen her look all day.

  “Her meds are in my purse. In the van,” she paused, drew a deep breath, and worked her hands around Spring’s fists, which were now clenched around long strands of her own hair. “And we need our backpacks,” she informed him, not removing her eyes, or her arms, from her sister. “We can’t leave here without our backpacks; right, sweetheart? Come on, honey. You’re fine. We’re fine. There’s no need to be scared. Breathe for me.”

  Some of his adrenaline-driven emotions faded as he watched Skye try to soothe Spring, but his irritation didn’t ebb. “Why the hell didn’t you,” with Skye’s glare, he softened his tone to one that was as nice as he could make it, “grab your things when you were just at the van, retrieving the damn do-” Another glare made him soften his tone even more. “Candy?”

  “Because I hadn’t decided to go with you,” Skye said, trying to restrain her sister, who was once again fighting the contact. “Until now. If you’re in such an all-fire hurry, do your thing, and let’s go.” Her tone was calm and sugar-sweet, but her eyes blazed sparks into his. “No one knew who we were before you figured it out, so I can only assume you’re the one who led them to us. So hurry, and get us out of this mess that you created.”

  Chapter Six

  Sebastian was at the van in a few seconds, grabbed a purse, two backpacks, and made sure he wasn’t leaving anything behind, before running back to the Range Rover.

  To Pete, over Spring’s loud, steady sobs, Sebastian said, “Go. Now.”

  Jesus. Clusterfuck? Yes. Of epic proportions. A frosting-covered dog, one female who wouldn’t stop sobbing so loud it resonated in his head, and another female who had figured out a way to blame him for the debacle, when she should have been thanking him for saving her ass. Four dead, two of whom were bystanders. His fault? Unlikely. Yet he sure as hell was going to figure out the how, the who, and the why. Raven One was an option for evacuation, but he didn’t want to jeopardize Spring, if there was a possibility of brain trauma. New Orleans and doctors he knew were less than an hour away by car. Proximity made driving a better option than getting on Raven One and heading to headquarters, and given that they were already in the car, he decided it was best to just drive the whole way. “Head to New Orleans.”

  On a more minor level, he had Skye’s purse, their two backpacks, one of which was decorated with about a million rhinestones in a riot of color, and his own backpack, all crowded into the space where his legs needed to stretch. Embrace the suck was a Black Raven mantra. It meant all kinds of things in his line of work. He could handle this, no matter how odd it was. While his gut told him he’d just gotten one step closer to an answer to the question of the day, a sinking feeling told him that if this was how he was going to find Richard Barrows, the ride ahead was going to be damn turbulent.

  As Pete put the car in drive, Sebastian unholstered his Glock. Keeping the gun at his side, he glanced into the backseat. Smears of white cake, orange and turquoise icing, and blood marred the dog’s fur and both sisters. Spring had her face buried in Candy’s fur and her shoulders heaved with the force of her sobs. Skye wasn’t looking at him, and, though her arms were around her sister, her attention wasn’t focused on Spring, either. Rubbing her sister’s narrow back, she looked out of the rear window and didn’t return his gaze until Creative Confections was gone from view. Gone, he knew, from their lives for now and for the foreseeable future.

  When her eyes finally met his, Skye’s eyes had the fear of a trapped animal and the irritation of a woman who had lost control. “Hand me my purse.” No longer pacifying, she now sounded defeated, worried, and not at all happy about her predicament. Her cheeks were flushed and her eyes were bright. If he hadn’t seen so many photographs of her gorgeous smile, by looking at her now he’d have thought that she wasn’t capable of such an expression. “My purse?” she said, this time her tone firm, with a question in it, as though she really thought he hadn’t heard her the first time.

  “Not yet,” he said, his eyes returning to the road. No tail.

  “I need her meds,” she said through clenched teeth. The woman had a temper. What was fascinating was watching her win the struggle to control it. She drew a deep breath, tried to lower the window, and couldn’t. “Please put a crack in the window.”

  She said please as though she meant it, without irritation or sarcasm. Pete glanced at Sebastian. Sebastian nodded, and Pete lowered Skye’s window about an inch.

  She lifted her face to the fresh air, breathed deeply, before refocusing on him. “Thank you. Her meds. You really should be helping me out on this,” her voice was low and controlled and barely audible over her sister’s cries. “If you want her to be quiet anytime soon.”

  In her neatly organized purse, Skye had another handgun, just like the one that she’d pulled on him earlier. He unloaded it and slipped it into his backpack. A cell phone was in a zippered pocket. He found a clear plastic bag with a zipper and prescription bottles. He studied the meds, recognizing most of the meds in Spring’s name and knew the symptoms they treated—anxiety, attention deficit disorder, headaches, sleep aids. Birth control pills were in Skye’s name. Great. That was one piece of information he didn’t need to think about. He handed the medicine bag to Skye, who met his gaze with a glare at the invasion of privacy.

  He took out Skye’s cell phone and dialed Ragno’s direct line. A glance in the visor mirror, positioned so he could see those in the backseat, as well as the road behind him, told him they weren’t being followed. When Ragno answered, he said, “This is the one that you’ve been tracking, correct?”

  “Yes,” Ragno said. “That belongs to Skye. Can you even hear yourself think with that crying going on?”

  “Barely.” And it isn’t helping this damn headache. He’d had a headache since July. When he had made a near-fatal mistake, while helping his best friend. While each day guaranteed a headache, severity was a crapshoot. He hoped that this one didn’t become mind numbing, the kind of icepick through the brain pain that reminded him the doctors weren’t finished with him. He shrugged off that concern. There was not one goddamn thing he could do about that problem, except remind himself to embrace the suck.

  He searched the rhinestone-encrusted backpack, took out a phone that was tucked into a side compartment, and dialed Ragno again. She answered, “That one is for Spring. We’ve been tracking it. It’s been ten minutes, Sebastian. Ready for me to get Minero on the line?”

  To Ragno, he said, “Give me five more.” To Skye, he said, “Where’s your other phone?”

  She stared at him without answering.

  “Your other phone. Where is it?”

  She stared straight into his eyes with an expression that was suddenly so blank it was almost laughable. He mentally added piss-poor liar to her long list of attributes, as she said, “I don’t have another phone.”

  Pete glanced at Sebastian. He gave a slight ‘no’ headshake before refocusing his attention on the road.

  Hell. She couldn’t lie worth a damn, yet she had lived a fake life with the skill of a spymaster. She was a goddamn ball of contradictions. He sure as hell hoped that he didn’t have to figure her out in order to find her father.

  “We observed another phone. Tucked into your belt.”

  She gave him the same steady, blank look. “You’re wrong.”

  “Ragno, she says you’re wrong.”

  “Like that ever happens. It’s a Motorola Razr.”

  “Keep it up,” he said, turning into the backseat. A warning that lying to a federal investigator was going to give her jail time faded into the world of unsaid words, as he watched Skye extend her hand to Spring, with two small white pills in her palm. Still sobbing, face red and eyes swollen, Spring slapped her sister’s hand a
way. The pills flew and landed somewhere, sight unseen. Skye didn’t react to the slap by doing anything except drawing a deep, exasperated breath. Spring turned from her sister, sobbing louder as she bent to bury her face into the scruff of the shaking, whimpering dog’s neck.

  “It h-urts,” Spring said, between sobs. “It really h-urts.”

  “I know it does, baby. I’m trying to help you. Please, please take your meds. They’ll make you feel better,” Skye said and fumbled with the pill bottle.

  “N-No,” Spring sobbed louder.

  Don’t look, he told himself, when Skye gave up with the pill bottle and glanced at him without bothering to conceal the raw desperation in her eyes. Just don’t fucking look at the pathetic mess of cake and blood-splattered women, and the dog that hasn’t stopped shaking.

  He returned his attention to the front, and opened the backpack that wasn’t covered in rhinestones, figuring that the plainer one was for Skye. He tried to ignore the sound of Spring crying with the reckless abandon of a child. He pulled out a family photograph, in a frame, of a much younger Skye with her mother and father. Spring was a baby, in her mother’s arms. The mother looked like Skye-gorgeous, with long black hair, eyes that were so pretty they were the focal point in the picture, and a smile that lit up the world. So, he thought, the long blonde hair in the bikini photo had been straight out of the bottle. Fuck. Focus, Connelly. Figuring out her natural hair color sure as hell wasn’t relevant to the problem of the day.

  Inside the bag, there were two fabric pouches. The smaller one had handwritten letters to Skye from her mother. He unzipped the larger one, which filled most of the bag. Well, well. The pouch had cash, and plenty of it, bound together in clumps of five thousand dollars. A silver, metallic-zippered pouch contained a handful of gold medallions, and a small, black velvet pouch. Ten loose diamonds spilled from it, when he emptied it into his hand. Most were sizable, at least two carats. Some were larger.

  The cash, gold, and diamonds spelled a run-like-there’s-no-fucking-tomorrow bartering system. The woman was a regular Girl Scout–prepared, ready to act, and even taking irreplaceable family heirlooms with her. Was this a daily readiness, or had she gotten wind that someone was coming for her today? Who had she been anticipating?

  Had Barrows somehow contacted his daughter and warned her there’d be a manhunt, and to split before her secret location was found? Because not only had Black Raven found the Barrows girls, those goons back there had found them just as quickly. His people were the best at what they did. And yet those guys had shown up at exactly the same time. There were four scenarios, none of which Sebastian liked. One, someone was as smart as his own people. Two, he’d been followed. Three, someone inside Black Raven was working for the other side. Four, the marshals had a breech.

  He hadn’t been followed. That ruled out one of the three scenarios. He said quietly, and with leashed fury. “Check for a mole.”

  “Already working on that scenario,” Ragno said in his ear.

  Pete cast him a worried, frowning glance. None of the scenarios was acceptable, and no stone would be left unturned until he had all the answers.

  At least the crying was tapering off. Sebastian turned around. Skye rubbed Spring’s shoulders and shot him a glacial look, as he showed her the glittering diamonds in the palm of his hand. “I’m approximating I’ve got about a half a million here. You were poised to run, even before I showed up. Who alerted you, or was it just a psychic flash?”

  Cheeks flushed red, her hostile eyes held his. “It’s all for you, if you let us go now.”

  Closing his hand, he chuckled. He had worked his way though law school as a cop, using every cent that he earned for rent, tuition, and books. Overtime work helped, but there still hadn’t been enough money. He’d eaten red beans and rice, the cheapest, filling food he could find, for months on end. Even then, he had never considered taking a bribe. “Not in your lifetime, lady.”

  Spring had stopped sobbing. Her face remained buried in Candy’s fur, but one eye was visible, and focused on Sebastian.

  His eyes bounced from the younger sister to the older. In a benign tone, as though she was asking something as simple as whether he wanted a cup of coffee, Skye said, “I can get more, if that will help you decide.”

  Ragno gave a low whistle. Sebastian glanced at Pete, who gave him an arched-eyebrow look, then into the eyes of the woman who was trying to buy him off. “How much more?”

  “Name your price,” she glanced at Spring before her eyes leveled on his, “and use your nice voice.”

  ***

  “Two pieces of bad news,” Blake Dunbar said as he entered the ninth-floor, spacious office.

  “I don’t pay you to deliver bad news,” James Trask said, while thinking, idiot. Dunbar was Trask’s top adviser on Project LID, and his job was simple. Acquire LID Technology. Make it work. LID was the encryption program that Barrows used for Shadow Technology. If they could access it, they’d have access to the data the U.S. government was collecting on citizens, countries, and the world.

  Bad news was not a part of the equation.

  Before Dunbar appeared, Trask had been studying a pulsing, light-driven wall of monitors. Since he didn’t consider bad news as news, per se, he kept his focus on the display of seven continents, which revealed the global network of his holdings. Scrolling numbers measured economic activity. When his assets had reached the billion dollar mark, he’d stopped counting anything but millions. Before turning to Dunbar, he waited to see if one number in particular was going to pulse red or green in its next iteration. Red. The South American subsidiary was on his watch list for the week. Depending on what he found, heads would roll. Perhaps literally.

  Trask was never going to be bored with acquiring wealth, but his most important project of the moment—Project LID—wasn’t on the wall. It couldn’t be measured by dollars. Project LID could only be accomplished by obtaining information from Barrows, who wasn’t cooperating.

  He turned to Dunbar, a tall, fit man in his early fifties, with the posture of a military man, and full head of black hair that he was particularly vain about. It didn’t occur to him to offer Dunbar a seat. This wasn’t a social call. Since Trask stood while working, he expected all who entered his office to do the same. He and Dunbar were almost eye to eye. Most of his work involved analyzing data and telling other people what to do, and those tasks could be accomplished on his feet. Sitting led to sloth. He also didn’t tolerate uncontrolled emotions in business matters, and Dunbar’s calm manner did nothing to reveal any measure of just how bad the news was.

  Trask raised a brow when Dunbar remained mute. “Well?”

  Dunbar glanced away before answering.

  The quick action was almost imperceptible, but he knew that the hesitation and eye shift signified fear. His subordinates had good reason to be afraid to deliver bad news. It was a task that sometimes came with lethal results, and in his world, death wasn’t easy, clean, or fast. The logical part of his brain, the gray matter that fueled the public face at the pinnacle of the world he created, did not become a demon with bad news. There were times, however, when something else thrived. The demonic part of his brain had nothing to do with logic. His demonic side was as drawn to bad news as a hungry infant was drawn to suckle at its mother’s breast. Once internal fires stoked the dark side of his mind, his only release came through domination over human weakness. Torture was a game in which he excelled. He loved to touch flesh as he killed his prey.

  Several carefully-selected executive assistants were well compensated to assist him in those moments where he allowed his dark side to rule. The end goal was to make sure that the mess he created could never be traced to him or anything having to do with him. Dunbar, one of those assistants, had stood, side-by-side with him, in some of his most depraved moments. Dunbar was wise to be afraid. The negative energy that Trask so carefully channeled as he navigated through an imperfect world had to be released, and when he gave himself license to
release the molten, anger-driven energy, he amazed even himself at how much of a thrill he received. He readied himself for the news that made Dunbar hesitate.

  “Barrows’ daughters escaped,” Dunbar said, “and, in our effort to secure them, two of our men were killed.”

  Trask savored the rocket-fueled surge of fury that came with the bad news. He channeled the energy to a place where it could be released later. He turned his back on Dunbar to face the wall of windows that gave him a panoramic view of Norfolk Naval Station. Preferring dimness to the stark brightness of the clear morning, he pressed a button and lowered the sun-filtering, see-through shades on the windows. Other than the red, green, and blue lights on the wall of monitors, there was no light in his office.

  His gaze slid over the aircraft carriers, cruisers, and guided missile destroyers that were in port. Such physical displays of old-school power only made him feel more superior, because he understood something that others did not. Cyber-power was more important than military power. His gaze slid to the USS Harry S. Truman, an aircraft carrier that was home-ported in Norfolk. He would have a hell of a time stealing an aircraft carrier and getting away with it, but the U.S. government was assembling a treasure-trove of information in PRISM and other databases, and now that he had Richard Barrows, the treasure would be his. With access to the information, the possibilities of what he could do were infinite. He’d be able to hold the U.S. economy hostage.

  If he chose.

  His people obviously weren’t grasping how important the daughters were to Project LID. He swallowed back his fury and forced himself to reflect only calm on the outside, as he gripped the binoculars and scanned the naval station. “There is no risk that this will get back to us, correct?”

  “No. Fingerprints aren’t in databases. There’s no association on the corpses with our operations. Our other two men returned, did a site assessment, and disappeared before law enforcement arrived.”