by Leslie Jones
Jocelyn laughed, though it sounded a little forced to Mace. “You’re showing me up, Larkspur. Won’t be long before you steal my job. You did a little social engineering, I take it?”
She beamed, dancing a little in her chair. “You bet. And no way I’m letting you go anywhere, Joss. I need you.”
“Not for long.” The other woman sounded sad.
A ding announced a new email, which Lark quickly opened. “Yes! Let’s hear it for spear-phishing!”
Jocelyn raised her brows. “What did you do?”
“Accessed Sosa-Vega’s organizational structure. Weird what the FBI keeps track of. Anyway, I sent a very official-looking internal memo asking all the network engineers to fill out a short form.”
Several more dings had her pumping her fist in triumph. “And the cavalry rides over the hill.”
Mace scratched his head. “You’ve lost me completely.”
Lark laughed. “Any unsuspecting dweebs who filled out my form received a sweet bit of malware in return. Thanks to them, I own their system, or part of it. Now watch me work my magic.”
Mace could only stare. “You’re a menace, little bird. I’m glad you’re on our side.”
She smirked. “Don’t forget it, supersoldier.”
He lounged back in the chair, content just to watch her. She kept up a running commentary as she worked, with Jocelyn making suggestions on the side. As time passed, his eyelids began to droop.
“I did it!” Lark crowed, waking Mace from his half doze. He stretched, glancing at his watch. It was nearly four-thirty in the afternoon.
“Tell me,” he invited.
“I’ve been trolling from system to system, and I just hit their financial database.” Her fingers flew over the keyboard. “I’m running an algorithm right now to match dollar amounts with dates and destinations.”
“That large an amount shouldn’t be hard for you to spot, right?” Mace asked.
“Jeez. Believe it or not, the mob money isn’t the only fifty-million-dollar transaction. Seriously?” She peered at the screen, humming to herself as she clicked from screen to screen.
“What are you doing now?” Jocelyn asked.
“I’m following the deposits and withdrawals. Sosa-Vega uses the Caymans shell corporation to move large . . . wait, here we go.”
Mace leaned forward to look over her shoulder, but the lines and lines of numbers meant little to him. Lark bent back, rubbing her cheek against his hair. He immediately turned his head to skim his lips over her ear.
“Ahem,” Jocelyn said. “Money?”
She jerked upright, returning her attention to the screen. “Spoilsport. Okay. The money was deposited into . . .”
She froze in place, a hand half-raised to point at the screen.
“Lark?” Her unnatural stillness alarmed him. “Lark, talk to us.”
She let out her breath in a rush, probably not even aware she’d been holding it. “Elliot was right. He told me where to look. Check your own nine-to-five, he said. I didn’t want to assume, so I tracked the money from point to point, just like I’m supposed to. But he was right all along.”
“What are you talking about?” Jocelyn asked.
“I know where the money is,” she whispered, voice bleak.
“Where?”
Her lips drooped and she dropped her hand into her lap.
“Where’s the mob’s money, Lark?” Mace asked.
“Here.”
Mace shook his head, not understanding. “What do you mean, here? The United States? Massachusetts? Boston?”
She sighed, shoulders slumping, and squeezed her hands together. “No. Here. One Center Plaza.”
Jocelyn jackknifed up in her chair. “What?”
Chills slithered down Mace’s spine and raised the hairs on his arms.
Jocelyn sounded no less shocked than Mace felt. “Are you seriously saying that the FBI stole mob money?”
Chapter 29
Lark jumped from her chair and began to pace, the enormity of her findings making it impossible to sit still. Tracking down the money trail had been a thrilling adventure, no matter how serious the personal consequences if she failed. Why? Because she’d never intended to fail.
Her conclusions, however, opened the biggest can of worms in the history of worm cans. She didn’t know what she was supposed to do now. She stopped in front of Mace, crossing her arms to hide her shivers.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
She let out an unladylike snort, channeling all her anxiety into anger, just as she’d done as a child, and aiming it at him. “Of course I’m not okay. Are you the dumbest person on the planet? I guess I really didn’t believe Elliott, but it’s true. Someone at the FBI stole fifty million dollars from the mob and framed me for it. I’m about as far from okay as it’s possible to get. What a dumb question.”
To her surprise, he chuckled and reached for her, gripping her wrists lightly and pulling her gently to him. Her shivers eased as she let him, drawing comfort from his solid, calm presence. “You’re not going to pick a fight by insulting me. You’re scared. I get it; I’m scared, too. This just ballooned from dangerous crisis to calculated shitstorm.”
She leaned against him. “What do we do?” she whispered.
Mace stood, keeping hold of her hands. “First things first. We brief our bosses and kick around our options.”
Jocelyn rolled her chair away from the workstation. “Congratulations, sunshine. Very few people could have found that money so fast. Go brief Doug. I’ll stay here.”
Lark scrubbed her palms over her upper arms, barely registering Jocelyn’s sour tone. “Okay. If you think that’s best.”
They left the SCIF and picked up their electronics. Mace dialed his phone one-handed. “Need you in Doug’s office pronto. Yeah. Heading there now.”
Jace waited for them outside the special agent in charge’s office, half sitting on the receptionist’s desk. “He’s in a meeting. What’s the urgency?”
“Unless it’s the president, he’s interruptible. Lark found the money.”
Jace’s eyes narrowed just the slightest bit, but he rose and strode to the office door without hesitation. Wow. What would it be like to have someone trust you so much they’d interrupt a meeting with the Big Boss without asking a single question?
Jace pushed the door ajar and stuck his head in. “Doug? We have a priority development.”
Lark couldn’t see inside, but she heard Doug say, “We’ll continue this later, gentlemen. Give us the room, please.” Chairs scraped back, and half a dozen agents filed out, looking curiously at the three of them.
“Come on in, Jace.”
The three trooped in. Doug sat at his small conference table, shuffling through maps and reports. He looked up at them and shoved the papers aside.
“What’s so urgent?” he asked.
The two supersoldiers sat at the table, and Doug gestured for her to do the same. She did so, assailed by doubts. What if Doug knew about the money transfer? Worse, what if he had orchestrated it? She fidgeted. The odds were against his involvement, but still. Whom could she trust?
Mace. She trusted Mace. And he thought briefing the Big Bosses was the way to go.
“So what’s the new development?”
She realized with a start that all three men were looking at her. “Ah, um . . . well, I found the fifty mil.”
A smile spread across Doug’s face. “Outstanding. I knew if anyone could, it would be you. Where did it end up? Ukraine? Bangladesh?”
Well, the news wasn’t going to get any more palatable if she pussyfooted around it. She took a deep breath and spit it out. “Sir . . . the money traces right back. Here. This building. Us.”
He laughed. “Okay. Funny. Now tell me what really happened. I’ve got half a dozen agencies to coordinate, and no time to do it.”
Lark rubbed a nervous hand across her mouth. Until this moment, she hadn’t even considered that he might not believe her.
She did. “Obviously the money isn’t sitting in someone’s desk. But it is in an account this field office owns and uses. The bank downstairs, to be specific.”
When she finished, the four of them sat in tense silence.
“This information does not leave this room,” Doug said finally.
“Yes, sir.” If she’d thought she was out of her depth holding a man hostage after a kidnapping attempt, it was nothing compared to her bewilderment at the prospect of an FBI plot and cover-up.
Doug scrubbed a hard hand across the back of his neck. “This scenario just keeps getting better and better. How do we find the person or persons responsible for the theft?”
Lark brushed a hand across a pile of papers near her, wanting to either straighten them up or fling them across the room. “I have an idea about that.”
He nodded, tacitly inviting her to continue.
“The thumb drive Elliott gave me contained their banking info, sure, but it also had part of the code that the thief used. It’s kind of a long shot, but if the thief executed the hack here in the building, I might be able to find that code buried somewhere in one of our networks.”
Doug gulped from the coffee cup at his elbow. Lark stared longingly at it. She would kill for some caffeine right about now.
“Our networks are all segmented, secured, and locked down,” she continued. “No one person can touch every network as a security precaution.”
“Okay,” Doug said. “What do you need from me?”
She looked at him blankly. Wasn’t it obvious? “Access. I need access.”
“To what?” Jace asked.
Why could no one follow her trains of thought? Life would be so much easier if people could read minds. She glanced at Mace. Maybe not. She didn’t want anyone else knowing how delicious she found him.
“She needs root access to every single one of your network segments,” Mace said.
Something inside her relaxed. Mace had no trouble keeping up with the twists and turns of her brain. And he seemed to like her anyway. She beamed at him.
“I need someone in charge of granting computer access to give me blanket clearance to look at everything,” she clarified, “on all servers, at any level of clearance.”
Doug’s thin lips tightened even further. He looked as grim as she’d ever seen him. He rose and strode to his desk, slipping out of his suit coat and draping it over the back of his executive chair. Pulling his laptop from his desk, he brought it back to them and opened up a document showing a line-and-block diagram of the IT division, complete with photographs of each employee. He studied it. Lark tried to view it upside down without success.
Doug spun the laptop around so she could see it. “Do you know them well?” he asked, pointing to the three assigned to Identity & Access Management.
She thought about it. “Actually, no. I don’t know that one at all. The other two, Georgie and Oliver, hang around Jocelyn a lot, but a lot of the drooling idiots do. I mean, the very professional and respected men in this field office.”
Doug chuckled tiredly. “Yeah, but that’s a problem for another day. All right. I’ll call Georgie. He’s too new to be involved in this, whatever ‘this’ is. You’ll have access by the time you get back to your desk.”
“Thanks.”
“Keep me posted. And don’t talk about this with anyone outside this room.”
“Of course not.”
“I know, but it had to be said. Gentlemen, would you stay behind for a moment?”
Lark slipped from the room. As if on cue, her stomach growled. Now that she thought about it, she’d missed lunch. She swung by her desk to grab her purse, then headed to the elevators. There was a bagel place just outside the One Center Plaza entrance. Should she wait for Mace? Her stomach rumbled again. Nah. He was busy plotting supersoldier stuff. She could slip in and out again without anyone the wiser.
Half a dozen people waited in line, but she didn’t mind. The walk, however brief, cleared her head and readied her for her next challenge. When she reached the counter, she gave her order, then waited impatiently while a slow-as-shit teenager prepared it. How long could it possibly take to spread some peanut butter on a pumpernickel bagel? She nearly snatched the bag from him, turning to go just as her cell phone rang.
“Center of the universe; God speaking.” She unwrapped her bagel one-handed, pressing the phone to her ear with the other.
“Hey. It’s, uh, Elliott.”
Lark took a huge bite, mumbling around the peanut butter. “Hey ho. Wasn’t expecting to hear from you.”
“I, uh, wanted to know if you’ve traced the IP addresses yet.”
She ducked off to one side and leaned against a bike rack, licking peanut butter from her thumb. “Why? It hasn’t even been two days.”
“Maybe you need some help? I could do something to help.”
Her brows wrinkled, dread starting to curl in her gut. She dropped the bagel back into the bag. “What’s going on, Elliott? Is . . . is he asking for an update? Is that what this call is about?”
“Well . . . yeah.”
“Shit. He gave me more time. What’s wrong?”
“I don’t know. He wanted me to call you; I don’t know why. It doesn’t pay to ask a lot of questions.”
“He’s your father?”
“My uncle.”
“I’m so sorry,” Lark said, sympathy tugging at her. “Sometimes families just blow chunks of pig’s feet. Elliott, you seem like a nice guy. How come you don’t just bail?”
Elliott’s bitterness poured through her ear. “I’ve done things. I work for him. He owns me, Hadley.”
“Just Lark, please. And why? Just because he’s your uncle? What would he do if you just left? Like, just disappeared.”
Elliott’s voice dropped to a whisper. “He’d send Palachka after me.”
Lark recoiled, gulped, and reflexively checked her finger to make sure it was still attached. “He doesn’t even seem to like you very much.”
“Yeah, I’m not his favorite. But I’m family, and he promised my mom he’d take care of me. So we’re trapped together in this suckfest.”
“I’m really sorry.”
“The code?” he said again. “How far have you gotten?”
She started to blurt out that she’d found Sokolov’s missing money, but some instinct made her hesitate. “I’m on it,” she said instead. “I’ll make his deadline.”
“Really?” His voice lifted in surprise. “I thought, well, I mean . . . I thought you’d have it figured out, or at least be close?”
Lark settled her backside more firmly against the bike rack, shifting a leg to rest behind her on a metal rung. “Let’s lay it on the line, Elliott. You knew from the start what I would find. How?”
“Um, well, I really didn’t . . .”
“Elliott, you all but told me the FBI framed me for the theft. Come on. I’m not stupid. You’d already traced the money. You knew exactly what I’d find. Why the subterfuge? Why not just tell me and save us both some time?”
He hesitated so long she checked to see if they were still connected. “Well?”
“The theft happened on one of my accounts. He was so pissed, I just couldn’t—” His voice broke. “I try my best, but . . . he’s a monster.”
Lark felt a burn of fury, her voice rising several octaves. “So you set me up? You knew what he might do, you son of a bitch!”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m really, really . . .”
“Thanks for calling.” She thumbed her phone off, all sympathy for Elliott erased. She dropped her half-eaten bagel into the trash, making a mental note to relay the conversation to Mace.
She’d stopped shaking with anger by the time she reached her cubicle. Mace was pacing back and forth in front of it. When he saw her, his face cleared in relief, then darkened with ire. Uh-oh.
She edged around him and tucked her purse into the bottom drawer. “I grabbed a bagel.”
“Outside?”
“Well, yes. That’s where they sell bagels.”
He moved closer, settling his hands onto her shoulders. “Lark, I can’t protect you if I’m not with you. You worried me.”
“I’m safe enough, Mace. I found his money. Also, I had a chat with the asshat who gave me the thumb drive.” She laid it out for him. “The only explanation is that they have someone inside who’s been feeding them info.”
Unsurprisingly, he was pissed. When he started swearing in Cajun, she laughed, feeling better. “You’re pretty good at that cussing thing.”
“Lots of practice. What’s next on your agenda?”
“Search for the code the hacker who framed me used. And I might as well finish up the malware project.”
Mace released her, but slipped his hand into hers as they walked down to the SCIF. Something bumped in her chest. Good grief. Had her heart really just skipped a beat? She twined her fingers around his, feeling suddenly cheerful.
“Are you going to sit and watch me again?” she asked, setting her phone into the lockbox.
“Not this time, enjoyable as it is. I need to go meet Jace and the team. But I’ll be back in an hour or so.”
“Okie doke.” She entered the SCIF and stopped, leaning back against the door. She enjoyed being with him. Sure, she wanted to jump him, but beyond her hormones, the truth was that she liked him.
Familiar doubt tugged at her. Her former fiancé, Ralph Pearson, had soured her on the idea of anything permanent with a man. He had tried to change her, just as her parents had, into a useless, pampered poodle whose sole job was to see and be seen. No, thanks.
Mace seemed different. He followed her convoluted thought process, had accepted all her weirdness, and had missed her when she stepped out to buy a bagel.
Someone pushed open the SCIF’s door, bumping it against her back. Muttering an apology, she power-walked down to her workstation and plopped into the chair.