“But then Peter figured out what was happening—”
“He was too smart for his own good. He not only figured out what they were using it for, but he knew why. And he was going to go public with it.”
“So they killed him.”
Luke didn’t respond, but he didn’t need to.
“The man who went to see John Fuller—the one who spooked him enough that he went after Amber?—that was me.”
“No,” I said softly. “You’d been gone for nearly a year by then.”
“I was gone from your life, but not gone from Texas. I was still around watching over you.”
“Where? When?”
He shook his head. “I needed to know what his role in all of this was and what he’d told Peter. So I went to him, and I guess I spooked him. And when the people I worked with connected the dots to Amber, they went after her, too.”
“The man in the mall.”
“Cole did a number on him.” Luke chuckled. “He was pissed for a long time after that.”
“And Amber’s kidnapping?”
“We were just trying to make sure she didn’t know anything.”
“Then you were there.”
“You got my note.”
I bit my lip, tears threatening, but I managed to swallow them. I wasn’t going to give him the power of seeing my pain.
We drove in silence for a long while. When we hit the bridge, I knew where we were going. A part of me wasn’t surprised, but my broken heart rebelled at the idea of going to the place where we’d spent so many happy times when we were younger.
He proposed to me on this bridge.
“You know I’m leaving the CIA.”
“I know. That’s why we’re going on vacation this week. To celebrate.”
“But you know it means that I can get a proper job—work the old nine to five. I can provide for you.”
I giggled. “You know I don’t need anyone to provide for me. Even without my trust fund, Dragon is doing really well. We’ll be in the black in another few months.”
He reached over and took my hand. “You know what I mean, Megan. It means I’ll be home all the time. I’ll be able to be the partner that you deserve.”
I glanced at him. “I know.”
“So, I was thinking. Why don’t we get married? Why don’t we have a couple of kids and do all those things we’ve always talked about doing?”
I looked over at him, my heart in my throat. And then he pulled the car to the side of the bridge, right in the center, the Gulf of Mexico churning below us. He came around to my side of the car—horns honking around us—knelt in the dust and debris there on the asphalt, took my hand and slipped a simple diamond ring on my finger.
“Marry me, Megan.”
It was the best day of my life, the most important moment of my life. If I’d known where it would end up, I don’t know—hell, I do know. I would have said yes anyway.
He reached over and laid his hand on my knee as we passed over the center of the bridge. I knew that meant his thoughts were in the same place, on the same page, but I couldn’t…I wasn’t in that place yet.
I pushed his hand away.
We pulled up to the house a short time later. It was a lovely home my grandfather had owned since my dad was a small child. It was all wood and glass, a huge fireplace the main attraction in the living room. I loved this house. I came out here every summer with my brothers when I was a kid—usually with Luke because his mother would be in charge of keeping us in one piece while my parents stayed in Houston to work—and then when I was driving, I’d come out here whenever I could. Luke was usually with me on those occasions, too. This was our place, our refuge from the world.
I wished he hadn’t brought me here.
I opened the door, using the key on my key ring. My dad gave me the house as a wedding gift. I tried to give it back a few times, but he wouldn’t allow it. He said it belonged more to me than it ever had him.
It was cold inside. February in Galveston was warmer than it might be in points north, but it was still a little chilly. Luke went to the fireplace to set a fire, and I wandered into the kitchen, searching through the wine fridge for something warm and tasty. It reminded me of the wine I’d bought for the wedding; wine that Luke had insisted we needed. I’d finally finished it off when Dominic and Amy married, giving them everything that was waiting in mothballs from my own wedding.
It was all too much. There were too many memories, too many hurts.
I opened the bottle and wandered into the living room, watching as he stoked the low embers to try and get a good fire going.
“Haven’t been up here in two years.”
“Yeah?”
“The caretaker’s taken good care of it, though.”
Luke glanced back at me. “Why wouldn’t you come up here?”
I took a swig straight out of the mouth of the bottle. “Maybe because the person I shared so many good times with up here was gone.”
“Meg…”
I shook my head. “You don’t get to call me that. You don’t get to call me much of anything.”
“I did it to protect you. You have to know that.”
“And look where it got you.”
He sighed a little, giving up on the fire as he stood again, the full length of him filling the room like an elephant trying to fit inside a tiger’s cage. I threw myself down on the couch and sighed, my eyes moving from him to the waves crashing high on the beach outside the back doors.
“What is Campo?”
Luke came over and sat heavily on the other end of the couch, careful not to touch me.
“The software. That was the name they gave it during development.”
I nodded, remembering that word on the text message Peter was writing me when he died. Campo. I’d figured that was what it was, but…you never know with someone as secretive as my brother was.
“Why didn’t he come to me? Why didn’t he let Dragon handle the investigation? That’s what we do; that’s what we’ve always done. That was his whole conception for us.”
“He was trying to protect you.”
“He should have known that I could protect myself.”
Luke snorted. “You know Peter. He felt like he had to be in control of everything. Do you remember when we were kids and he broke his arm climbing that tree? He refused to go inside until you were safe on the ground. Even after you yelled to him that you could handle it, and I came over and offered to get you down, and my mom came outside and told him he had to let you go, he still stood there and ignored the pain. He waited until he saw you on the ground with his own eyes. Only then did he fall apart and let someone help him.”
I remembered that afternoon well. I’d been panicked for Peter, but not until after I was out of the tree and he’d stopped hiding the pain. That’s the way he was. He didn’t think of himself until there was no one else to think about.
“He wanted to keep you out of it. At first, I think it was just because he felt like it was his mistake; it was his fault that someone in the company would betray him that way. And then it was because of what he uncovered. Your job is supposed to be to uncover corporate espionage. Not to chase bad CIA agents or terrorists.”
“But that’s what it’s become these last few months.”
“In a small part, yeah, it has.” He crossed his arms over his wide chest, his muscles flexing as he did. “If things had gone the way we wanted them to, none of this would have happened.”
“You had a plan?”
“We had a plan.”
Chapter 7
Peter
Two years ago…
I watched him walk into the room, amused at the sight of this guy who was a scrawny little kid when we first met, so scrawny that I always felt sort of protective of him. But now he was twice my size and could probably crush my skull without much effort at all.
“Luke,” I said, standing to shake his hand.
“Hey, brother,” he said, t
his cocky smile that hadn’t changed after all this time slipping across his face. “How’s it hanging?”
I shrugged. “Not bad. Not bad at all.”
Luke looked around my office, his smile turning into something else as he focused on each and every trinket my mother had insisted on putting on the shelves in order to decorate.
“You need a wife,” Luke said, with laughter in his tone.”
“Yeah, well, not all of us are as lucky as you, friend.”
The smile disappeared then as a blush took its place. “I count my lucky stars every single night. I can’t believe she still wants me.”
“Of course she does. Megan has been crazy about you since the first time she saw you.”
He chuckled, but it was pretty obvious that he felt the same way. Four years old, I think Megan was on that fateful day. Four years old and she’d already found her soul mate. Damn lucky! I thought I’d met my soul mate once. But it turned out it was a one-way sort of thing, and I was completely devastated by that. I was ready to settle down and have a houseful of kids. I’d thought about it for a long time, and I knew I was ready. I just had to wait for the right girl to come along.
Someday.
“So I guess you’re wondering why I asked you over here.”
“Well, I could be hanging around Dragon, watching Megan boss around guys that are a foot taller and a hundred pounds heavier than she is.”
I laughed. “Yeah, it’s quite fascinating to watch, actually.”
Luke took a seat across from my desk, leaning back and crossing his ankle over his knee.
“Megan cracks me up, the way she always insists on being in control. She reminds me of you sometimes.”
“She’s a firecracker.”
Luke rubbed his hand over his head. “I can just see how this marriage is going to go. I’m going to be that husband that always walks a few steps behind and never argues with a thing she has to say.”
“I doubt that. But the fights will be spectacular!”
“And the making up.”
I shook my head. “Not an image I really want of my sister.”
“Sorry.”
I walked around the desk and leaned against the front of it, standing close to Luke as I tried to find the way to say what I had to say without changing everything. But there wasn’t a way.
“So…I’ve been tracking illegal sales of one of our programs.” I ran my hand over the top of my head, feeling the dark sludge of this situation move over me. “We developed a program here at Bradford that was meant to replace our aging operating system. It’s a complicated process, so we were developing it a little at a time. We started with simple functions and we’ve built up from that.”
“And someone’s selling it illegally?”
“Someone is selling the part that pertains to text messages. It’s a program called Campo. It makes it possible for a phone to send messages using everything from simple radio waves to phone lines to Wi-Fi or data. It’s still in the beta version, but it was working rather well when I last took a look at it.”
“When was that?”
“About six, seven months ago. We finished with it, mostly, and we moved on to the next phase of the project.”
Luke leaned forward. “And now you think someone’s stolen it?”
“Someone’s selling it without the proper license. Kurt Sanchez…you remember him, right?”
“That bully from high school?”
“Yeah. He works for a rival telecommunications company and he told me that someone tried to sell the program to him. So I checked it out and discovered that this microchip company up in Huntsville has been using it. But I don’t know why. Why would the microchip people care?”
Luke shook his head. “I don’t know. I don’t know how this stuff works.”
I crossed my arms over my chest. “Just trust me. The microchip people don’t care. They’re like the hardware people. The hardware people don’t really care about the operation of their parts. They just care that their parts work well enough to be operated. You know?”
Luke sat up again. “You think there’s something more to this than just some employee trying to scam some extra money on the side?”
“Yeah. I think there’s a lot more to it.”
“What can the software be used for, other than the obvious?”
My eyebrows rose. “If they did it right? They could transmit information from phone to phone in an untraceable format. It would be possible for someone to send a message to a person on the other side of the world that no phone company, no government, could trace back to either the sender or the receiver, if it were was right.”
I could see the wheels turning in Luke’s head. “You think someone is selling this to terrorists.”
“I do.”
He got up and started to pace. After a second, he turned and pressed his finger into my chest.
“Stop. Whatever you’re doing, stop. You need to stay out of this.”
“But I’m close, Luke. I can find out who’s behind it all.”
He shook his head. “If this is what you think it is, then it’s fucking dangerous. You let me deal with it.”
“I was going to call Megan—”
“Absolutely not!” Luke glared at me in a way that I’d never seen him do in the twenty years we’d known each other. “You keep Megan out of this.”
I inclined my head just slightly. “Then what? What do we do now?”
“Let me check it out. In the meantime, you stay out of it.”
I wished it was that easy. The truth was that I was having a blast investigating this software thing. The idea of doing something more with my life, other than sitting behind this desk all the time, was exciting. My brother and sister both went into the military. Even Luke was a Navy SEAL before he joined the CIA. But I was just a nerd, the one who went to college and joined the family business. This investigation was the most excitement there’d been in my life for a long time.
I watched Luke leave, knowing that I’d return to the scene of the crime and try to put a few more things together.
And spend a few hours with Amber, too.
That thought brought a smile to my lips. I liked Amber. She was young and beautiful, but there was more to her than that. She was curious and intelligent and so ready for anything I might have to say to her.
She excited me almost as much as the investigation.
***
We met at a local diner a few weeks later. I thought Luke had forgotten about the software, the investigation, and the potential terrorists. But he hadn’t.
“This is a lot bigger than you think it is, Peter,” he said from behind his menu.
“What do you mean?”
“This terrorist cell…these people are dangerous, Peter. And they know what you’re up to.”
“How?”
He lowered his menu, giving me a look that suggested he thought I was insane. “What do you think? They’re careful about their operation. They’ve been aware of your investigation almost from the moment you spoke to our old buddy, Kurt.”
I shook my head. “I’ve been careful.”
“Who’s Amber?”
I felt a tremor begin in my fingers. I could almost see her, sitting there across from me the way she often did at that tiny, dirty diner. So beautiful…
“You have to back off of this, Peter. They aren’t happy about your interference. They will cut you down if you don’t back off.”
I heard the concern in his voice, but I wasn’t really scared. I knew Luke tended toward exaggeration sometimes. I forced a smile.
“You’re getting married in a week. I won’t do anything between now and then.”
“You won’t do anything more at all, do you understand? I won’t let Megan lose her brother while we’re trying to build a life together.”
I inclined my head. “Okay.”
***
I stood in front of the mirror in my bedroom, tugging at the stupid bow tie around my nec
k. I hated wearing a tux. You’d think that since I wear a tie day in and day out in my work that I’d be okay with a tuxedo. But I wasn’t. I hated them with a passion.
Luke had wanted suits for himself and his groom’s men. I would have been okay with that. But Megan insisted, probably because mother insisted.
“Ugh!”
I pulled it off and threw it, watching it flutter weightlessly to the floor as if it were laughing at me. Then the phone rang. It was probably Luke wondering where the hell his best man was.
“I’m coming,” I muttered into the phone.
“Do you know where he is?” Megan’s voice said, so low that I almost couldn’t hear her.
“Where who is?”
“Luke. There’s nothing but this note…”
***
The emails began a week after the failed wedding. If he had been there in person, I might have put his head through a wall. But you can’t do that through the internet. Not yet, anyway.
“You opened a can of worms,” he told me. “They threatened to come after Megan—to come after me. No one I know or love is safe. And you aren’t safe. For your own good, Peter, get rid of any evidence you might have, destroy this email, and forget about the whole damn thing!”
But I couldn’t. I couldn’t stop thinking about how they were using the software I’d developed to hurt the very people I’d developed it for. It was created to lower the cost of cellphone usage for teenagers and their families, for Americans who deserved a break. I couldn’t allow that to keep happening. And I couldn’t stop thinking about Amber. I knew it was stupid, but I wanted to see her again. And again.
I waited a while until I felt it was safe. And then I went to Huntsville again and took pictures of the man pretending to be John Fuller. But he wasn’t. The things he did and the way he conducted himself…there was just something not right. There was no way he was just the CEO of a manufacturing company given the meetings he held outside the office and the people he came and went with.
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