Tough Justice: Countdown Box Set

by Carla Cassidy

  “I don’t think Halpert ever really planned to release any of our stories. Our secrets.”

  “He didn’t disclose any info about you and Moretti like he threatened.” Nick shrugged. “Although none of us were sure about that entire situation since you told him to go ahead and release your secrets from the beginning. Didn’t even give him a chance to make an offer.”

  Lara sat back and leaned her head against the seat. Had that been all it was? That she’d been so quick to call him out that he’d gotten flustered? Maybe.

  “I don’t think he ever planned to spill my secrets,” she finally said. “Or make me tell them publicly.”

  “He certainly did with his other targets. What makes you think you’re different?”

  Lara thought about it some more. “Because I’m not his enemy. I may be a threat to him in terms of law enforcement, but I haven’t broken his code.”

  Nick shook his head. “What code? The man killed dozens of innocent people.”

  “Yes, and you and I can see that very clearly. But Halpert is a sociopath, Nick. He doesn’t have a conscience telling him that killing those people is wrong.”

  Nick sighed.

  “Believe me, I’m not justifying his behavior and I still want to burn the bastard,” Lara continued. “But Halpert doesn’t see himself as responsible for killing those people in his explosions. He sees the deaths as collateral damage, those who happened to get caught in the middle of a battle.”

  Nick’s grip tightened on the steering wheel. “That the targets who chose to keep their secrets are responsible for the deaths of those people. Not him.”

  Lara rubbed her temples. Getting inside the mind of a killer with no remorse or sense of responsibility was always painful. “Yes. That’s exactly right.”

  “But you don’t think he’ll tell the team’s secrets. Or yours, Lara. He may not have gone public, but he still has yours, too.”

  “No.” She shook her head. “I really don’t think he will. This has always been about his creed and his desire for greatness, and about the people who have kept him from that. Not us.”

  “What creed?”

  “You’re the one who first told me about it. It was in his computer world, right?”

  “The ‘rejection and humiliation won’t be tolerated’ one? And putting people to death?”

  “Yes. Except that mindset was never aimed at the general population. Just at people who had harmed Halpert in some way or hampered his desire for greatness.”

  Nick looked over at her, giving a half shrug. “Like the people involved in stalling the sale of his software and the directors at BrainWave who didn’t hire him.”

  Lara leaned toward him, nodding. “Yes, exactly. Halpert is not after us or the team. He has no real beef with us. Less, really, because we at least are giving him the respect he craves by coming after him as hard as we can.”

  “Okay, then why? Why go through the trouble of researching us enough to figure out our secrets. And he wasn’t bluffing about that. There’s no way he could’ve listed the names he did in that message and not know secrets behind them.”

  “Gathering info online is what he does, so I’m sure this wasn’t terribly difficult for him. And he’s brilliant.” Lara remembered the hours she’d spent looking into his face in the box on her computer. His brown hair and small beady eyes. A face that would go totally unnoticed in most situations. Just another factor that had made him the sociopath he was. “And whatever minimal effort it took for him to gather our secrets was worth it for him.”

  “Because we’ve been panicked about keeping our privacy, about our own secrets, instead of focusing on where he’s going. It tore our attention from worrying about Halpert’s true endgame.” Nick scrubbed a hand across his face.

  If that had been Halpert’s plan, he had done a great job of it. The man truly was brilliant.

  “Exactly. And his endgame is to punish those whom he sees as rejecting or humiliating him. And to make himself known. He thinks he should’ve been famous.”

  “Yes.” Nick nodded. “That’s one of the things Beckett Clarke had put in his report. We discovered that when BrainWave got their system back online and could access the records. Clarke said that in the interview, Halpert was fixated on becoming a household name. On creating something that the world would remember him for.”

  “And they didn’t want to hire him?”

  “Well, evidently it went downhill from there. Halpert mentioned some software he’d created when he was young—we now know that was the tracking software—and how it should’ve been his legacy. Clarke didn’t think Halpert would ever move past it. A shame, Clarke mentioned, since Halpert was so young. And said the kid just gave him the creeps.”

  Lara snorted softly. “Can’t blame Clarke for that.”

  Nick shook his head. “So if getting us worked into a tizzy was just a distraction—which worked perfectly, I might add—then Halpert’s endgame has been to obtain international fame while destroying those who he thinks mocked him or refused to see his brilliance.”

  “That’s what I think. He’s exacted his revenge on Victoria, William Walsh and Penelope Porterini from the software incident. Plus Beckett Clarke and Terra Mapson from BrainWave are both dead.”

  “What about Trevor Dunbar? Halpert got him, too.”

  “Not really,” Lara said. “Dunbar came straight to us. Didn’t contact Halpert, didn’t confess his bad secret—if Halpert could even settle on one. I’m sure it had to have been difficult with Dunbar. Dunbar has defended so many guilty people, I’m sure he has multiple pieces of dirty laundry.”

  They parked in the lot of the FBI building, went through security and took the elevator up to the CMU offices.

  Nick leaned against the elevator wall. “So since Dunbar never actually suffered, you think he might still be a target.”

  Lara shrugged a shoulder. “He didn’t suffer the way that Halpert planned. And then we were able to save Benjamin Johnson from the warehouse before the bomb went off, so Dunbar doesn’t have that on his conscience either. He got off scot-free.”

  “Okay, so we move forward, putting anyone involved with the initial hearing against Halpert’s software into protective custody, just in case. And we focus on Trevor Dunbar, Kai Aoki and Paul Prentice. To see if Halpert makes a move with them.”

  Lara nodded. “Yes. The game isn’t over for Halpert until those three men have paid the price. And I would argue that the emotional torture option—tell your secrets or I’ll bomb someplace—has probably been taken off the table. We’ve got both Prentice and Aoki and their families hidden, off grid. Nothing about their location can be found on any computer.”

  “So...safe.”

  Lara shrugged. “As safe as one can be from Halpert.”

  “Dunbar has a protective detail but we probably need to move him into a safe house too.”

  They said their hellos to everyone in the office. Explained their theories. A bit of hopefulness took the place of the weight they’d all been carrying at the thought of their secrets being divulged.

  “You really don’t think Halpert’s going to release our secrets to the public?” Jennifer asked.

  Lara shrugged very slowly, tentatively. “I can’t promise he won’t. But I’ve spent a lot of time talking to him and my gut is that he’s not after us.”

  “But we’re the ones who want to arrest him,” Xander pointed out.

  “But that’s not a sin to him,” Lara explained. “Disrespecting him. Humiliating him. Not appreciating him. Those are all sins. Focusing all your attention on finding him is actually a sign of respect. Something Halpert’s desperate for.”

  James grimaced. “So for the past day and a half we’ve basically just given him exactly what he wanted. Distracted ourselves.”

  Lara broke in be
cause she’d been most guilty of that. “He had us all focused on ourselves. Worried about our own problems rather than what he might be getting away with, his overall next move. I was the worst culprit, you guys. And I’m sorry.”

  She knew the words weren’t enough. That it would take time to repair the damage she’d done with the team. The tight faces around her proved that.

  But Xander broke some of the tension when he slapped her on the back. “I’m just sorry you had to talk to that asshole for so many hours. That’s punishment enough for anyone.”

  It wasn’t. Lara knew it wasn’t. But for right now at least everyone seemed committed to moving past it.

  “Okay,” Ty called out from across the room. “I hate to break up the love fest. Knowing vaguely that Halpert has other nefarious plans makes us brilliant, but it doesn’t actually put us ahead of him in any way.”

  Xander’s forehead furrowed from where he was sitting at his computer. “We’ve been scouring through any footage we could access—traffic cams, private security feeds, even cell phone videos from the scene that have been posted online—to see if we could find Halpert at the mall bombing.”

  James shook his head. “So far, nothing. But we don’t know if that’s because he wasn’t there or because we pulled everyone out early so there was no one to really rescue. We’ve been searching specifically for sunglasses because that’s been his MO, but he’s got to know we’re onto that.”

  “Again,” Ty said. “Knowing who he is, knowing what he does, hell, even knowing the rules of his game doesn’t seem to help us be able to stop him. At least not at this moment.”

  “Ty’s right, and it sucks.” Nick’s expression became harder. “The ball is still in Halpert’s court. Until he makes a mistake, we’re still just playing catch-up.”

  “He has,” Christina called out from her office.

  “Has what?” Nick asked.

  “He made a mistake.” She said the words slowly as if she couldn’t believe they were true. “I know where he is. Or I will in just a few minutes when this program finishes triangulating it.”

  Everyone rushed to Christina’s office so she could show them the three screens on her desk.

  “To trigger his bombs from a distance, Halpert has to use a detonating device that works on a certain frequency.”

  “Is it unique to him?” Lara asked.

  “No. As a matter of fact this entire program I created was just a long shot, something I figured would just help us confirm it was him in retrospect.”

  The words fired out of Christina’s mouth like a machine gun. Christina was excited and when she got excited it was even more difficult to understand her computerese.

  “Slowly, but succinctly, Christina,” Lara said. “Go.”

  Christina took in a calming breath. “Items are triggered from remote locations nowadays that have nothing to do with bombs. Houses are equipped with heating and cooling systems that can be turned on—aka, triggered—remotely from people’s phones or computers. Same is true about nanny cams and garage doors.”

  “And that’s also used for bombs?” Nick asked.

  “Yes. Basically it’s just a way of moving a switch on a circuit. Bombs. AC unit. All the same.” She shrugged. “Well, for the purposes of this program I put together they’re all the same. Anyway, I eliminated the frequencies I could. Those too weak, low or high to detonate a bomb. Again, I had only planned for it to be use in retrospect so it’s kind of complex.”

  Lara nodded. “Okay, we’re with you. Keep going.”

  “He detonated two bombs at one time. That’s how I found him,” Christina fired off rapidly again. “I never would’ve noticed it otherwise. But about an hour and a half ago, not long after we cut the feed to him in your apartment, he detonated two bombs.”

  “Then why the hell have we not heard about any explosions?” Nick demanded.

  “Oh, God,” Jennifer said. “Could he have moved out of the city?”

  “No, listen.” Christina held up her hands. “I could tell where the detonations were targeted. That’s how I found him, by reversing where the frequencies came from. I tracked it backward.”

  “You tracked the frequencies from where?” Lara asked.

  Christina turned all the way around from the screen to look at Lara. “Your apartment and the school in Long Island.”

  Lara rubbed her forehead. “But I thought mine was a pressure trigger and the other one was already disarmed by the bomb team. Did they go off?”

  “Yours had both,” Christina said. “And you’re right, they had been disarmed. But if they hadn’t been, he would’ve detonated them. He did try to detonate them.”

  “Why?” Lara asked.

  “I have no idea. But for whatever reason he tried to trigger them both almost at the exact same time.”

  “Jesus.” Nick gritted his teeth. “That’s only about three minutes after the bomb robot defused the explosives under your chair, Lara.”

  Christina’s brows shot up. “Then I would say Lara’s damn lucky to be alive.”

  Lara’s face went white. “I was in that chair for at least thirty minutes after Mercer had you cut the feed. Why didn’t he just detonate it then if he was trying to kill me?”

  Christina shrugged. “He certainly could’ve.”

  “Maybe something made him mad,” James said. “He threw a little temper tantrum—perhaps when he found out we’d gotten almost everyone out of the mall and that his latest plan had failed—he tried to blow up all the bombs he had.”

  Xander smirked. “But fortunately those were already dismantled. Bet Halpert wasn’t too happy about that either.”

  “Can you tell us where he is, Christina?” Lara asked.

  “I’m running the triangulation now. Since I knew the locations of two bombs and he sent the detonation frequency at the same time to both locations...” Christina trailed off. “Like I said. Halpert made a mistake. First one I’ve seen him make in all this time. I don’t know if he realizes it or not.”

  A few moments later a map pinged up on Christina’s screen. At the Max Sleep Motel off the Long Island Expressway.

  Everyone immediately ran for their cars, Nick and Lara making calls for backup and getting SWAT rolling in that direction.

  They had him.

  Chapter Four

  The Long Island Police Department already had the hotel surrounded by the time the CMU team hurtled in. Only four rooms had been rented. Three of those were quickly cleared. An older couple, a woman alone and an African American man. None were Halpert.

  The fourth room was empty, but Lara had no doubt it was his.

  No one did. Halpert had left them a note. Lovely day for the park, isn’t it?

  Lara looked over at Nick. “There’s something more going on.”

  He nodded. “Yeah, that’s for sure.”

  A cell phone on the bed began to ring. She and Nick looked at it, then each other.

  A few moments later her own cell phone buzzed with a text coming in.

  You’ll probably want to answer that phone. A lot of lives are going to depend on it.

  Lara stepped toward the phone. “It’s him. He just texted me and told me to pick it up.”

  Nick stepped forward, blocking her way. “Lara, don’t. It could be a trap.”

  The phone kept ringing.

  “Everybody out,” Lara yelled. She couldn’t discount the possibility that Nick was right. That Halpert planted a bomb that would go off as soon as she answered the phone.

  But she couldn’t not answer it either.

  The team grumbled but moved out. Not Nick.

  “You, too,” she said. “You could be right. This could be a trap. I know you don’t think I should answer it.”

  Nick just shook his head. “
But I know you’re going to. So this time, you go, we go.”

  Lara hesitated in reaching for the phone. It was one thing to risk her own life. Another to risk Nick’s. “I have to answer it. I know he won’t hurt me. It’s not part of his plan.”

  Nick just stood there. Solid. Logical. Calm. Like he always was. Damn him. “But you’re not one hundred percent sure. Not after he came so close to detonating the chair with you still in it.”

  Lara couldn’t deny that. She stared at the phone. Another message came through on Lara’s cell.

  Ticktock, Lara.

  It was worth the risk. Answering the phone was worth risking her life. This was going to lead them to Halpert’s endgame.

  “Please, Nick. Go out. Just in case I’m wrong.”

  Nick came to stand in front of her and put both arms on her shoulders. “I’m not leaving this room.” He looked over her shoulder and called out. “Ty, come in here.”

  Why the hell was Nick calling more people in? Was this his way of trying to get her to not answer Halpert’s phone?

  Nick’s brown eyes flew back to hers. “Lara, I’ve wanted to do this pretty much on a daily basis since the day I met you. And I might get fired, but it will be so fucking worth it.”

  He leaned down and kissed her briefly. Tenderly. Then before she could figure out what the hell was going on, he drew back and sucker-punched her in the face.

  The world swam. Lara knew she could take a hit, had certainly taken ones before, but this had caught her completely off guard. The world spun and she tumbled into Ty.

  “Take her out and get everyone away from the building,” she heard Nick say to Ty. Lara tried to keep focused, knew she’d be okay in a couple of minutes, but for right now could only stumble forward as Ty led her out.

  “What the hell happened?” James and Xander rushed up to her. “Is she okay?”

  “Everybody back!” Ty called out before moving away with Lara and turning to the team. “Yeah, she’ll be fine. Nick’s answering Halpert’s call.”

  “No,” Lara struggled weakly, beginning to process what was going on. “Not Nick.”