He motioned the officer to follow him.
They made it up the stairwell without giving away their position.
The sight of a gun aimed at Sadie’s head forced Nick’s hand.
He burst into the room, hoping like hell they would believe Burly was returning from the restroom. “I’m Marshal Campbell. You’re all under arrest.”
Catching them off guard gave him the advantage. Grimes redirected his weapon toward Nick, but he’d already leveled his and fired.
The officer came in behind Nick, weapon raised.
Steroids put his hands in the air, as did the other pair of men in the room.
“You think you can arrest me?” Jamison aimed his weapon at Sadie.
If Nick fired, Jamison might pull the trigger out of reflex.
Sadie would be dead.
She looked up at Nick, and he expected to see fear in her big green eyes, and he did. But he also saw anger and determination. Good. He could work with that.
If she could distract Jamison, Nick could make a move. Could he signal her somehow?
Her gaze was intent on him. He glanced from her to Jamison’s knees.
She gave a slight nod. Bent over on all fours, with Jamison standing over her, she dove into his legs.
He buckled. Nick surged toward Jamison, knocking him a couple of steps backward and away from Sadie.
Gunfire split the air as Nick landed on top of his target and wrestled for control of the weapon. Jamison threw a jackhammer of a punch, connecting with Nick’s nose. Blood spurted.
Nick counterpunched, his fist slamming into Jamison’s jaw.
Jamison bucked and rolled, causing Nick to lose his grip on Jamison’s wrist. Nick adjusted, popping to his knees. He squeezed powerful thighs to hold Jamison, facedown, in place.
Blood poured down Nick’s shirt as he cuffed the snake.
Shock overtook Nick as he realized the blood was his.
Once Jamison was secure, Nick folded over to the sounds of officers rushing downstairs. The one who’d breeched the building with him stood over Jamison, his gun aimed at his temple, as Nick rolled over onto his side, fighting the nausea and fatigue gripping him.
Damn.
He was shot? He immediately thought of Sadie. She was safe now.
The next thing he knew, she was over him, tears streaming down her beautiful cheeks.
“Stay with me, Nick,” she begged. The desperation in her voice was palpable. Almost enough to force him to come back to her.
She was safe.
What about Lucy?
As the scene in front of him played out in slow motion, he watched officers handcuff the dirtbags. One of them moved to Nick’s side and held his cell phone to his ear. “Someone wants to speak to you.”
“Nick? It’s Lucy. I’m okay.”
Relief flooded him. Sadie was safe. Lucy was okay. Nothing else mattered.
All he wanted to do was close his eyes and go to sleep.
Sadie’s voice became distant. Her pleas for him to stay awake faded.
Nick closed his eyes and allowed darkness to claim him.
* * *
Nick woke with a start.
He glanced around the stark white room. His vision was blurry. Where was he?
He tried to push up, unwilling to admit the fear creeping through his system, its icy tendrils closing around his heart.
The case was closed, and he’d most likely never see Sadie again. The thought caused worse pain than the bullet hole in his shoulder. A few stitches, a little physical therapy, and he’d eventually heal from that. Being without Sadie for the rest of his life put a hollow ache in his chest he’d never recover from.
“Nick?” the voice sounded uncertain and afraid.
Sadie?
He forced his eyes to stay open through the burn and glanced around the room. She was already to the side of the bed before his eyes could focus properly.
“How do you feel?” she asked, reaching out to touch his face.
The sight of her quieted his worst fear—the fear he’d never look into those beautiful eyes again and tell her just how much she meant to him.
“Dizzy. Nauseous.” Relieved.
“You lost a lot of blood when you were shot,” she said. “You must be in pain. Let me call the nurse.”
Of course, he just realized, he was in the hospital. But he didn’t want the nurse. He had everything he needed right next to him. Sadie.
He covered her hand with his, preventing her from pushing the call button. The whole scenario came back to him in a flood. The warehouse. Grimes. Jamison. “How long have I been out?”
“Two days.”
“You’ve been here the whole time?”
Her cheeks flushed as she nodded. “Luke sneaks Boomer in every chance he gets.”
“Tell me what happened.”
“Grimes is dead. Jamison shot you. They arrested him, and he’s going away for a very long time. So are the others in the warehouse. A few more of his men were arrested at Fair Park.”
“And Lucy?”
“She’s fine. Calls every hour to check on you, though.” Her smile warmed his insides.
“And Meg?”
“She had a little boy.”
He couldn’t stop himself from reaching out and touching her beautiful face. “You’ve been keeping track of everyone?”
“I knew you’d want to know as soon as you woke up.”
“How’s Boomer?”
“He’s keeping Gran company at the ranch. She texts me pictures of him every hour.” She laughed.
“I remember what you did in the warehouse. I’m proud of you.” His chest filled with an emotion that felt a hell of a lot like pride.
She leaned into his palm, and then kissed his hand.
“You been here the whole time?”
She nodded. “There’s nowhere else I want to be.”
He couldn’t believe the love of his life was sitting right there. It would be better if they were somewhere else besides the hospital for what he needed to say. He wished they were somewhere romantic. He needed to ask her something, and he wanted everything to be perfect.
He canceled the thought.
Fact was there would never be a better time than now. “I need you to know that I’ve fallen hard for you.”
He was rewarded with a bright smile. She leaned over and pressed a kiss to his lips. He kept her close when he whispered, “I love you.”
She kissed him again, with more enthusiasm this time.
“I love you, Nick Campbell.”
This time, he wouldn’t be stupid enough to let Sadie walk out that door without knowing exactly what she meant to him. He had no intention of repeating his past mistakes.
He knew what he wanted for the rest of his life, and he wanted Sadie.
“I’d prefer to do this on one knee, but I’m guessing that would cause a whole host of people to come rushing through that door...”
She gasped, tears streaming down her cheeks.
“I don’t have a ring to offer you right now. But I sincerely pray my heart and the promise of forever will be enough. Sadie Brooks, will you marry me?”
The minute she took to answer felt like an eternity.
She nodded through her tears. “Yes. I will marry you, Nick Campbell. I want very much to be your wife.”
“And I want to be your protector for the rest of our days.”
* * *
Keep reading for an excerpt from Decoding a Criminal by Barb Han.
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Decoding a Criminal
by Barb Han
Prologue
Click. Clack. Clack.
There was a special touch when it came to picking just the right keyboard. The mechanics were important. The sound, when heard over and over again, became melodic. Touch-type was critical. Less force made for better accuracy. Faster. More consistent. Same resistance all the way down. Keys were a little bit more uniform. Phish’s fingers danced across the keyboard. Why wasn’t the code working?
He stared at the vertical monitor directly in front of him in the temporary workspace he’d set up in the back of the late-night coffee shop he frequented. There were times in life, like this, when he preferred to be alone. No interruptions and no one looking over his shoulder.
Phish. He’d been given the nickname when he was young for his tech abilities. He’d thought it was funny. Now? Not so much, but it had stuck in certain circles no matter how hard he’d tried to shed it. Phish had lost count of how many lines of code he’d written, but the vertical monitor let him see more lines all at once. Made it easier to spot the problem. Usually.
The less scrolling, the better. He preferred to see as much of his masterpiece as possible. His cell phone to his left was parked on Google so he could troubleshoot while he wrote the key-logger program that would open the doors to the kingdom. Robbery was old fashioned, unsophisticated and for someone with an IQ of one hundred. Why go through all the trouble of physically walking into a building and waving a gun around when all Phish needed was a password? That was it. So much more…sophisticated. All he had to do was steal that magic string of characters, numbers and symbols. That was where the phishing came in; the way in which he could steal a password was through a virus that tracked all keystrokes on a computer and saved them, a.k.a. a key logger. To do that, he had to use a dummy laptop to run an operating system through a virtual machine. He used the dark café for their open Wi-Fi to hide where the data request came from. A trace would lead them to a coffee shop instead of his home network.
Once he installed the key-logger program, he could grab her passwords. That was all he needed to do to sneak two million dollars into an untraceable offshore account. The way he planned to do it made him smirk. Siphon a penny here, a penny there. Pennies added up in a large investment bank with millions of accounts. The account owners wouldn’t even notice. No skin off their noses. Account holders never balanced their financial statement anymore. No one would miss a penny. He was doing them a favor, actually. This way, no one got hurt. No one ever missed paying rent over a penny, and the people in these accounts certainly wouldn’t. Not one person would starve because they were one penny short on their grocery bill—no one’s life hung in the balance over that small piece of copper.
The storefront he’d set up via the dark web would be the perfect cover to launder money into his accounts. Bringing the cash into the US in chunks would be the easy part—well…he thought about the word easy. Easy for him. Not for others. It wasn’t his fault people were incompetent. Others weren’t smart enough to pull off what Phish was capable of. He’d been underestimated and underappreciated his entire life. Guess what? Not anymore.
A little part of him wanted to take all the money from one account just to prove that he could. He wanted to shove his victory in their faces a little bit. Show them just how capable he was.
He stopped himself from going too far down that road. He was better than that. Smarter. They’d never catch him this way. They wouldn’t even notice. No one noticed the little things. Everyone was too worried about making thousands of dollars off a trade to think about a penny.
Much like a ghost, he would be in and out before anyone ever realized what had hit them. Phish laughed, despite his eyes burning from staring at the screen too long. He always forgot to blink when he was this close to success.
Everything he had ever wanted was about to be his. He deserved this money after what he’d been through. He was owed this money. A cool two million was a good place to start for all the pain he’d endured from the bullies, from his parents. Someone might get in trouble for the missing money, but hey, as long as it wasn’t him, he’d be cool with it.
Come on. Phish snatched the half-empty cup from the tabletop. The contents were tepid. He threw back the last of the drink. He needed the caffeine to kick in. Get his brain going again.
What was he missing?
He scanned the lines of code once more, starting from the top. Everything looked solid. His temper flared, and he squeezed the cup in his hand. Think. Think.
It shouldn’t be this hard for him. This should be a smash-and-grab job without all the flair. Click. Clack. Clack.
Hold on. His gaze stopped halfway down the screen. Is that the reason?
No. Couldn’t be that easy to fix. Could it?
Phish tapped the keys, remembering how much he’d hated the piano lessons he’d been forced into as a kid and how ironic it was he was about to become a millionaire after swearing off anything that had to do with a keyboard.
Funny how life worked. How it presented opportunities for the taking if someone was patient enough and smart enough to capitalize. Being fed up wasn’t always bad.
He was getting closer. Take the bait.
No hard feelings to !qazxcde#. With a few keystrokes, Phish was in. Tomorrow night, when he came back, he’d have everything he ever wanted at his fingertips. Nervous excitement caused his hands to shake as he tapped the keys toward a better life. He was taking so little when he really thought about it, and yet, when piled together, it made so much. It was about time. He deserved this after everything he’d been through.
It was finally his time. And he was smart enough to take what was owed.
Chapter One
The FBI office was housed in a blue-glass skyscraper overlooking the Puget Sound just a couple of blocks from the Space Needle on Order Street. The BAU covered the top floor, lucky number forty-two.
“Welcome. Thank you for coming on short notice.” Supervisory special agent Miguel Peters took a seat last in the conference room at BAU headquarters. “You’ve all read the headlines by now involving our very own Special Agent Dashiell West’s sister, Layla. Some of you have already started working on the case. Dash has a few items to speak to, so I’ll turn the meeting over to him.” Miguel held out his hand like he was presenting a new car.
“Right. Thank you.” Dashiell West, known as Dash to friends and colleagues, was in no mood to waste time. He knew everyone in the room: Nicholas James, who specialized in serial killers; kidnapping expert Madeline Striker; tech guru Liam and his fiancée, Lorelai, who was the BAU’s director’s assistant. “As you are all aware by now, the media has been having a field day with my sister’s arrest.”
“Shouldn’t have gone down that way.” Nicholas smacked his flat palm against the conference table. “Hasn’t anyone heard of professional courtesy?”
“It’s not every day a hedge fund manager and sister of a cybercrime expert/FBI special agent embezzles two million dollars.” Dash blew out a slow breath as he searched the faces in the room. “A heads-up to the department before the arrest would have been nice, even though the crime isn’t exactly sneaking a few twenties out the petty cash drawer.”
“Any chance they believe you’re somehow involved or at least looked the other way?” Liam asked.
“It’s possible. You’d have to ask the boss here. I’m guessing he would be their first stop.” Dash rubbed the scruff on his chin. “But it doesn’t matter. I’m clean and it won’t take long for them to figure it out.”
“News reports said the money isn’t in any of
Layla’s personal accounts, so why do they believe she’s involved, other than the obvious fact her password was used?” Nicholas asked.
“The money was siphoned off her clients’ accounts via an IP address that leads to a coffee shop h
ere in Seattle. It’s a known hangout for programmers and offers a lot of privacy for late-night clients. It’s been tied to activity on the dark web, and everyone who knows my sister knows her hobby is cracking the dark web,” Dash said. “She also frequents that coffee shop, so employees identified her. There are ways to scour offshore accounts, particularly so early in the embezzlement, but no one can find the money. Money is missing. Her password was used. Usually, that means law enforcement has found their person.”
“I heard the cash was moved in trace amounts across a lot of accounts,” Liam said.
Dash nodded.
“Brilliant, if you ask me.” With Liam’s technical background, he would understand Layla the best, aside from Dash himself.
He couldn’t help but think the description of the crime fit his sister. The others had to be thinking it too. If Layla was going to pull something like that, she would have done it exactly the same way. A middle finger to the system. But her life was good. She’d distanced herself from her past, had a job that more than covered her lifestyle. She lived in a nice apartment on a high floor with a view of the Needle. Did she like the finer things in life? Yes. But she would never use her own password.
“Don’t you have to have the evidence in order to arrest someone?” Liam’s question was rhetorical.
“The missing money and Layla’s password is the only connection they seem to need to make the arrest stick.” Dash agreed, though.
“Too obvious.” Liam shook his head, then drummed his fingers on the conference table.
“We all know the evidence usually leads us to the right criminal. Law Enforcement 101,” Miguel interjected.
“She’s smarter than that.” And has more of a sense of humor, Dash thought. She would put a signature stamp on it. Something to make that flick off stick up and stay up.
Despite this feeling, he was 90 percent certain this wasn’t his sister’s doing. Maybe that was a lowball number. Ninety-three percent, because last month he’d accused her of speeding in the new Porsche she bought, and he’d been wrong. She’d proved it with a speeding app on her phone. Probability said he was bound to be wrong at some point.
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