by Rachel Lee
So someone had been delving into his background, which left him all but certain he was more than a blood offering. Somebody else, someone in the agency, wanted to settle some kind of score with him. Or maybe they had just been looking for some vulnerability to pass along to the guy who was after him.
The picture, far from getting clearer, seemed to be getting cloudier. He sat there blindly staring at the computer, and now a gold credit card sat beside the keyboard. He needed to be sure he wouldn’t put Julie at more risk.
“Trace? What’s worrying you?”
“I must have really messed in someone’s corn flakes.”
“Meaning?”
“It’s one thing to keep an eye on my whereabouts so a guy with a grudge can find me. It’s another to be going into my credit card files, which they would have had to do to find my VPN company. And to shut me down, they’d have had to reverse the charge on my credit card. I think it paid automatically two months ago. But I can’t go and check what happened.”
He swiveled the chair slowly, noting that tension seemed to be ratcheting up the pain in his arm. He flexed his damaged fingers and everything screamed. This time the discomfort had a salutary effect, focusing him, demanding he pay close attention. He started speaking aloud, no longer caring whether any of this might violate anyone’s security. He was past that point now. They had violated him.
“Assuming that wasn’t just some glitch because of this storm,” he said slowly, “then they must have known I had my own VPN. Either that or they discovered it by looking through my credit card statements. Now why the hell would they do that? To check where I am now? Maybe. But to look at past statements?”
She nodded. “Something else is going on.” Once again she wrapped her arms tightly around herself, a self-protective gesture that made him ache. He felt like a devil for bringing this all into her life, but now he had to just deal with it all, including what he might have done to Julie.
“So it seems.” Turning, he reached for her phone and passed it to her. “Ryker?”
She nodded and dialed. Soon she spoke. “That doesn’t sound good,” she said. “Baby still cranky? I’m passing you to my friend.” She handed the receiver to Trace.
“Hey, man,” he said. “We may have something else going on here. You got some time? Okay, thanks.” He turned and hung the phone up. “He’ll be over in about an hour.”
“Poor Marisa,” Julie remarked. “A cranky baby and a husband who keeps running out.”
Trace didn’t answer. He sat staring blankly at the room, wondering if he should just walk out of here now, steal a car and get as far away as he could.
Because hell had just taken on a new dimension.
Chapter 9
Julie checked the coffee and was startled to see how much of it Trace had drunk. It was as if it was his fuel, and he’d said something about how it kept his head clearer when he took his pain meds. He was probably wishing now he hadn’t taken even that half dose earlier.
Pulling a tube of cinnamon buns out of her freezer, she separated them and arranged them in a cake pan while the oven preheated. She suspected this night was going to require another kind of fuel as well.
She had no real idea why he was so disturbed, and hoped that when Ryker arrived she’d learn more. She was getting awfully tired of wondering what he knew, what he didn’t know, and what he hoped to do about any of this.
Getting information from agency files could help, but it could also be very dangerous to him. She got that part. And she certainly didn’t want a hack of government files being traced back to her, regardless of what might happen.
She chewed her lip as she made another pot of coffee, baked the sweet rolls, and wished she had something to compare all this to so she could evaluate it. Offering Trace a place to stay had been an obvious, instinctive thing: it would protect Marisa. The things that had been happening since were neither instinctive nor intuitive.
Crap, she was just a small-town kindergarten teacher. What she knew about Trace’s business came from books and movies, and she was swiftly discovering they were a poor measure of reality. All those fancy tools of the trade, if they even existed, had come down to her computer and a hardwired telephone. Not cool.
She was quite sure his bosses had considerably more at their disposal, and she hated them for turning it all on him. One man. One maimed man who had served them well for quite a long time. How dare they?
All along she’d been uneasy about his situation, worried for him, for herself, even for Marisa and her family. But now she was getting truly angry. She stood in the kitchen while the coffee brewed, watching Trace pace. He’d put the sling on again, perhaps seeking some relief, but it was clear he couldn’t hold still and clear he was impatient for Ryker’s arrival. This whole holding pattern was starting to wear thin, yet at least a couple more days of it remained.
He was working pieces of a puzzle. Like one of those really complex puzzles with 1,500 pieces and no picture on the box to even guide him. All he had was a vague idea, an outline. What if it turned out that the guy they’d set loose on him had no connection with his past? What if it was somebody who worked for the agency as well? What if it was one of his colleagues?
He certainly must be wondering those things now. She’d seen how fast he’d moved to back out of that log-in page and shut down her computer. He hadn’t even turned it on again. Useless for the moment, it sat on her desk and the credit card remained beside the keyboard.
Stalled again. Neither of them liked it, but she suspected he liked it even less than she did, and her stomach was already churning with acid. If she had any more coffee, she’d have to lace it heavily with cream. It felt as though she was working on an ulcer.
Finally there was a single sharp rap on the door. She glanced at Trace, then went to peer out the peephole. Ryker stood in plain view.
“Ryker,” she said as she worked the lock.
When he entered, a whirlwind of stinging snow and cold entered with him. She closed the door swiftly, locking out the night once again, then waited while he removed his jacket and gloves.
“It really sucks to be out tonight,” he remarked.
“Something to drink?” she offered.
“Coffee. I’m gonna need it.”
Trace had stopped pacing, standing in the middle of the living room near her desk. “We got problems.”
“So I heard. I checked in with Bill before I came over. A certain level of tension is growing with some folks at the agency, but he can’t localize it. So someone sure as hell is worried about what you’re up to.”
More acid flooded Julie’s stomach with fire, and she wondered if she should just drink cream without coffee.
“Bill doesn’t know I’m here?”
“No. He may guess, but he doesn’t know.”
Trace nodded. When Julie handed him his coffee, he sat at her desk. She perched on the edge of the couch, folding her hands tightly, and waited. Ryker finally settled on one of the armchairs.
“What lit your fuse?” he asked Trace.
“I tried to log in to my VPN. My account’s been locked or closed. I may have damaged Julie’s computer by shutting it down so quickly.”
“I doubt it. They recover,” Ryker answered. “So what are you wondering?”
“They shouldn’t have been able to scoop up Julie’s IP address, given that my VPN provider doesn’t record those, but...it still makes me reluctant to try again, even with a new account. And it makes me wonder what’s really going on here. ”
Ryker nodded, obviously thinking about it. “I doubt they’d go to all the trouble to try to scoop an IP address from a log-in. Anybody could attempt to log in by accident. Where’s your VPN service located?”
“Germany.”
“Good luck to them, then. Germany isn’t too ea
ger to help us out with things like this. My guess is they just wanted to shut your tunnel down so if you try to get into files, you’ll have to do it from their network.”
“Well, I’ll have to do that anyway. I just don’t want them to know where I am, and I don’t want them to follow it back to Julie most of all.”
“Easy.” Ryker frowned into his coffee mug. “They expect you to open a new account. Your credit cards and bank accounts are probably flagged. They’ll know within minutes if you spend money.”
“He can use my credit card,” Julie said. “I can open an account in my name. If he gets into files from that account, they won’t be able to tell anything, will they?”
Trace smiled faintly at her. “That’s the whole idea of VPN.”
“Then let’s just do it.”
“No,” Trace said quietly. “There’s something else going on here. Something beyond just hanging me out to dry. This is way too much effort to just allow one assassin to ease me into the next world. There’s a cover-up much bigger than me.”
Ryker blew a long breath. “It’s beginning to look like it. So what was the screwup they’re trying to hide? Does this tiger even realize he’s being used? Because I’m beginning to think he is.”
“They’re trying to end something by ending me,” Trace said. “Damned if I know what it might be. I’m not aware that I screwed up, so somebody else must have, and I’m the goat.”
Blood sacrifice. The term drifted across Julie’s mind once again. Unable to hold still, needing something to quiet her stomach, she headed for the kitchen and got a bottle of liquid antacid. She didn’t even bother measuring it with a spoon, but instead took a long swig. “Lovely,” she said as she screwed the cap back on and wiped her mouth with a napkin. “Just lovely.”
Both men twisted to look at her.
“Well, it is, isn’t it? What you’re suggesting here is that Trace’s being offered up to cover up the misdeed of someone else. Probably someone else higher on the food chain. That’s ugly, but it’s also frightening, because how the hell is he supposed to discover who’s behind it? If you catch the hunter who is after him now, then what? Another move to accomplish the same end?”
“No,” said Trace. “No. They can’t pull this again, and I don’t know about Ryker but I intend to use this as a way to clean things up afterward.”
“I’m with you on that,” said Ryker. “Okay, I got an idea. Let me at the computer.”
“Why?” asked Trace, standing.
“Because I have a personal VPN myself. Let’s see if we can reach it. If we can’t...”
“Then we have an idea if our suspicions are right,” Trace finished. “No reason they should interfere with you.”
“None at all. Unless they know more than we think they do.”
Julie was ready to bite her nails. None of this sounded good; all of it sounded very dangerous, and it was happening in her living room. Maybe she should head for Denver as soon as the snow lifted and take a sabbatical in the Bahamas. Except she couldn’t just leave her job and her students. She could almost feel the net tightening until it might strangle her.
But the truth was, she wasn’t a runner by nature. All her life she’d planted her feet firmly and faced whatever came. If she ran now, she’d never forgive herself.
“My service runs out of Serbia,” Ryker remarked. The reboot took longer than usual because the blue screen appeared to tell them the last exit hadn’t been normal. Julie feared they were about to have another one of those.
What would it mean if Ryker found his VPN shut down as well? Or if he didn’t? The two of them seemed to think this was important information.
Ryker finally tapped an address into her browser. “I’m using a proxy server this time. No one will know this came from the same IP you used, Trace.”
Then a log-in screen appeared, and he quickly typed the information. Faster than Trace had working with one hand and one finger.
Login invalid. Please retry. An instant later, her computer underwent another hard shutdown.
Nobody said anything, then Ryker reached for her phone and dialed. “Marisa, honey? I’m going to be later than I expected. Are you and Jonni okay? I love you, too. Of course I’ll wake you when I get home.”
He hung up the phone and swiveled the chair to face the two of them. “It’s bad,” he said calmly.
Julie soon started another pot of coffee just for something to do and stood in the kitchen while two men paced her small living room, filling it to overflowing. Occasionally they tossed out a word or two, and the other one would grunt an acknowledgment. She couldn’t imagine what they were thinking, but they seemed to be on the same wavelength, whatever it was.
Finally it burst out of her. “Can one of you please tell me what you think is going on?”
Trace kept moving, but this time he came around the bar and slipped his good arm around her. “You’ve earned your spurs,” he said and looked at Ryker, who nodded. “Julie? Do you think you can sit? Three of us pacing over there would create a traffic jam.”
She heard him trying to be light about all of this, but she couldn’t even summon the faintest of smiles. “Yes,” she said finally. She went to the couch and sat at one end. To her surprise, Trace sat right beside her and draped his arm over her shoulders, tucking her to his side.
“You or me?” he said to Ryker.
“You go for it. If I hear any gaps, I’ll jump in.”
“Okay.” He squeezed Julie gently. “What we’re thinking is really quite simple. We assumed from the outset that some asset wanted to get to me because he’d been burned somehow. Probably by one of the operatives working under me, but he wasn’t content to stop there.”
She nodded. “I got that part.”
“Well, to judge by this, there’s more going on. Our guess is that an asset was burned all right, but not by someone lower on the chain. Someone higher. Someone whose career and maybe life could be on the line if it gets traced to him. So he, and maybe a friend or two, are trying to cover his sorry mess by making me the scapegoat. Once I’m dead, the asset is happy and that’s the end of the story.”
She looked at him, her insides feeling hollow. “But why you?”
“Because I’m disabled now. Nothing gets broken if I die. But I was evidently working in the right area of the world to be blamed for having said or done something I shouldn’t. And they’ve got a red-hot asset who’s too important to lose, so...”
“You’re the blood offering.”
“Exactly.”
She nodded, understanding it and hating it. “But what about Ryker? Why should he be involved, too?”
“Because,” said Ryker, “they’re not entirely sure I didn’t help Trace in some way. Or that I might not be able to figure all this out and bring down someone in the process. He came to me. Of course they’d distrust me, no matter how many times I said I sent him on his way. But in my case it’s just distrust. They don’t want to drag me into this mess. There’s not much cover when a retired agent gets killed, especially one who’s been making a lot of local contacts and friends. I’m a big mess they don’t need on top of their current one.”
“But I’m no mess at all,” Trace said. “When I’m gone, I don’t even have any family to raise a ruckus. You could say I’m erasable.”
“Quit talking that way,” Julie snapped. “You’re not erasable. You’re not expendable. You’re a human being. I don’t care how many cost-benefit analyses tell them they can do without you, it’s all a lie. Don’t buy it, Trace. Please don’t buy into their calculus.”
“Their calculus,” Ryker remarked, “is even simpler—Trace’s life or their own.”
She shuddered, whether with anger or revulsion she couldn’t tell. She turned her face toward Trace. “Just tell me you’re done with this. That you’ll never
go back to this. It’s soul-killing.”
He nodded, but didn’t answer directly. “You know, Ryker, when they killed your VPN, they made a big mistake.”
“I know.”
“How?” Julie demanded.
Trace’s gaze settled on her. “They may have just been trying to keep Ryker out of the way. Sidelining him briefly in case he should try to get information for me. But what they did instead was announce themselves.”
“How?” Julie repeated. “You don’t have their names!”
“But now we know they exist, and we’ve guessed why. I’m no longer looking at this as a mistake I must have made with an important asset. Now I’m wondering who actually made the mistake and hung me out here to cover his own butt. That guy is on only one mission—to save himself. We’re going to take him down.”
Julie leaned into him even more closely and rested her arm across his waist. “How can you be so sure, Trace?”
“Because I’ve had to do harder things than this. Intentionally or not, this guy has left a trail. He started laying it when he checked my credit card statements, when he canceled both our VPN accounts.”
“Exactly,” Ryker agreed. “And I’d be willing to bet he’s a political appointee or someone else who’s never worked a day in the field. He’s sloppy.”
Sloppy sounded good to Julie. She also noticed that for the very first time Trace wasn’t trying to place a distance between them. Maybe he felt protected from her by Ryker’s presence. Under any other circumstances, she might have been amused.
“Okay, so let me see if I’m understanding this,” she said. “You think some guy higher up in the agency burned an essential asset. Revealed something he shouldn’t have revealed. And now there’s a very angry, very important asset who wants some revenge. Rather than facing the music himself, this guy picked Trace because he’s disabled and nothing else will get disturbed if something happens to him, and under the circumstances it was possible to get Trace as far away from wherever this higher-up is as possible?”