“Those details were in the news.” Joel kept hitting that computer key. “The fraud case was pretty famous.”
“Well, living through it was not exactly a joy. Sean remembers pieces only. I had just turned seventeen. He was thirteen and his mother fed him a constant line about how the Moore family was being oppressed by jealous poor people. I was the evil stepchild from the forgettable first marriage, so I was shut out of her little us-against-the-world club.”
Pax knew all these pieces, right down to how her father spent less than two years in prison thanks to later “found” evidence implicating his assistant. They traded places and her father returned to his wife and her family money, leaving Kelsey alone.
The cycle sounded familiar. The numbness and pain. His own mother had dealt him those dual blows. Different circumstances, but abandonment was abandonment regardless of the specifics. “I understand.”
“No offense but I doubt it.” Her eyebrow lifted and her voice dripped with disbelief.
“I know about bad parents.” Knew, lived through and somehow survived them, which was all a credit to Davis. As they were passed from relative to relative, from trailer parks to shacks unfit for humans, Davis held them together.
The idea of Kelsey not having someone like Davis to protect her made Pax’s stomach lurch.
“Now I’m dying to ask about your life.” The hard edge left her voice and her eyes.
Understandable, but there was no way Pax was going down that emotional road. His past left him closed-off and he preferred it that way. “Finish your story.”
She gnawed on her bottom lip a second before continuing. “Sean wanted to believe our father, but I knew better. He had to touch every check that came into the office. There’s no way his office manager set him up. My father lied. He went to jail then got lucky. Now he’s out and that’s all the time I want to spend talking about him.”
Fair enough. She’d shared and now so would he.
Ignoring the shake of Joel’s head, Pax explained. “Sean got a low-level job at Kingston, a communications firm that’s moved into government contracting. He did some computer work and now he’s missing.”
There it was. Out in the open. Over Joel’s eye rolling and the vivid memory of Connor’s training and specific warnings about confidentiality, Pax had spilled more than he should. She had to be satisfied now.
Her head tipped to the side and her damp hair fell over her shoulder. “What piece are you leaving out?”
Apparently not. “What?”
“Why do you think he is?” Joel asked.
“Because he’s assuming Sean did something wrong rather than assuming he’s hurt or on vacation or something.... Or is my family name the reason you’re jumping to conclusions?” Her focus never left Pax. Her gaze searched his face, and her attention did not waver. “I’m wondering if you’re looking at my father’s crimes and condemning Sean and maybe me.”
“I never said that.” That wasn’t who Pax was. Not how he operated.
She traced an invisible pattern over the tabletop with her finger. “You wouldn’t be the first person to make that logic leap.”
“Stop painting me as the bad guy here.” Pax put his hand over hers and didn’t let go when she tried to pull away. “I don’t think you’re involved. I also don’t think your brother is hurt. Not yet, but his actions, innocent or not, put him in grave danger.”
“The computer logs, the same ones Sean tried to destroy and would have succeeded if he’d known about the automatic backup he’d triggered, show he downloaded proprietary corporate material before he walked out the office door,” Joel said. “Problem is the military views the stolen material as theirs, which means Sean’s actions have national security implications.”
She started shaking her head before Joel finished his sentence. “No way. He’s immature and has made mistakes—believe me when I say I get that—but Sean would never betray his country.”
“I’m not accusing him of that, but I am saying the surveillance tapes show he did everything without anyone standing over him with a gun, so we need to assume he had a reason to take what he took and figure out what it was,” Joel said.
Her hollow cheeks and vacant eyes mirrored her shock. “I can’t imagine Sean doing this on his own or at all.”
“He emptied his bank account and canceled utilities then climbed in a car and raced out of the office parking lot.” Pax couldn’t let her hope of a simple misunderstanding grow, so he rushed the words out. “Does that sound like a guy who got kidnapped?”
She blinked so fast she looked as if she’d been hit in the head. “You seem to have a lot of details. Exactly who are you guys?”
This time when she tried to move her hand, Pax let her go. “We conduct high-priority but under-the-radar kidnap-rescue missions. Our clients are the government and private industry.”
“You’re kidding.”
“We try to set up training and maneuvers to ensure kidnappings don’t occur in the first place, but people don’t always listen to us, which leads to the rescues. You’d be amazed how many times a corporation will send an employee into a dangerous situation without any prep.”
Joel made a sound between a scoff and a huff. “Pax, really. You’ve said more than enough.”
Pax held up his hand. He kept his gaze locked on hers and blocked Joel and his protests right out. “This time the government hired us. See, someone reported Sean’s behavior and missing data to the Department of Defense. No one at Kingston has filed an official report yet, but we know.”
She jerked in her chair. “What are you saying?”
Pax had come this far and refused to pretty it up now. This was a serious game, a deadly one, and the men would keep coming until and unless the Corcoran Team ferreted this out. “We don’t know who the bad guys are or how far they’ll go to find Sean, which is why I was watching you at Decadent Brew.”
“And probably why those men attacked you. You’re a link to Sean, which suggests he’s still on the run and, for now, safe. We plan to keep you and him that way.” The flat tone of resignation in Joel’s voice was tough to miss.
“And my father?”
“Our orders are to watch you and protect Sean. That’s it.” Pax guessed the FBI already had someone watching over the father thanks to his criminal past.
She looked between the men with her mouth opening and closing. It took a few times before any sound escaped. “You have to admit this is a pretty unbelievable story.”
“Is it? Look around you.” Pax had heard so much worse. Only a few months ago he watched his boat explode at the marina as someone tried to kill Davis and Lara. Terrible things happened all the time, even in a place as idyllic as Annapolis. “I mean, with what you’ve lived through with your dad and how he weaseled out of the conviction, and with what you see in this room, is it really that impossible to imagine there’s a group that does what we do?”
She pushed her chair back, putting a good foot between her stomach and the table. “Why didn’t you tell me all this before?”
Joel gave the keyboard one last loud tap. “We’re not supposed to be telling you now.”
“What does that mean?”
That was a problem for another time. Pax’s instincts screamed at him to take this step. He was willing to take the hit from Connor if it came to that. Pax loved this job, in part because the government red tape and paperwork he hated so much at the DIA didn’t bind him here. But this was one of those times he needed loose strings.
“We weren’t sure how much you knew about your brother’s activities,” Pax explained.
“Meaning, you thought I might be involved in whatever he did, whatever happened, at this company.”
There was that smart-woman thing again. Pax sensed that would trip him up a lot when dealing with Kelsey. She would not b
e easy to fool. He was starting to wonder if she’d be hard to leave.
He pushed that thought out of his head. “At the time, possibly.”
“And now?”
“I just told you everything about us and the case, didn’t I? That should tell you everything you need to know about my trust in you.”
The lip-chewing thing started again. Much more of that and she’d start bleeding. He was just about to point that out when she jumped in. “We need to go back to the shop. To my house.”
Pax sighed inside, careful not to let the noise out. He got it. It had kicked at his gut to lose the boat. It exploded with all his possessions, but he’d never cared about stuff. The loss went deeper than that. The boat was a part of him. He’d scrubbed it, cleaned it, refurbished it. Being on the open water gave him a needed sense of freedom, a break from the difficult situations he dealt with every single day, and losing it was like having that freedom snatched away.
For Kelsey the loss could be even bigger. He’d lost one thing. He couldn’t imagine walking away from his home and his work at the same time. She had to be stewing in her chair over the loss of control, but, for now, that had to happen. “Kelsey, listen. I know how important work is to you. I’ve seen you there. But it’s not safe for you right now.”
“I get that.” Her eyes looked clear, and she was calm.
He had no idea where she was going with this. “Then you know you can’t stay there. Let’s hunker down here and relax.”
“You don’t understand. I’m not talking about staying there. We need to retrieve the package Sean sent me.”
Joel jumped out of his chair and came over to stand next to Kelsey. “What?”
Pax understood the shock. It was rumbling through him from head to foot right now. “Not possible.”
“Yeah, it actually is. But now I’m wondering why you would say it that way.” She crossed her arms in front of her. Even made a “hmm?” sound.
Pax’s response was automatic. “No reason.”
She homed in on him, angling her chair to face Pax and give Joel more of a side-to-back view. “Pax?”
He could see Joel over her shoulder. His gestures mimicked his response. “Don’t do it, man.”
Pax shut down the internal mental battle and blocked Joel’s suggestion. He’d gone this far and stopping now didn’t make much sense. “We’ve monitored your mail from the beginning, within days of Sean not showing up for work.”
Her cheeks puffed in and out. “You...did...”
“Yeah.”
“That’s just spectacular.” She tipped her head back and stared at the ceiling.
“The word you want is necessary.”
Joel swore under his breath as he shot Pax an openmouthed, bewildered look. “When did you get so chatty?”
Pax refused to back down. “Do you really think we would have gotten anything done unless we told her the truth?”
“Thanks for that. I think.” She dropped her head again, looking back and forth between them, as if analyzing to see the best way to get the answer she wanted. “Now that you shared, I will. The package came with an inventory delivery but didn’t have a carrier tag on it. I thought it was weird at the time but figured something had gotten mixed up somewhere.”
Pax tried to figure out where they had a hole in security and couldn’t picture it. He’d hand that one over to Connor to ferret out. “What was in the box?”
“That’s just it. I didn’t open it.”
“You weren’t curious?” Joel asked.
“Sean and I aren’t close. I made the choice long ago not to race around after him.”
“I still don’t get it.”
Pax appreciated Joel saying what they were both feeling.
“He’d sent stuff before. Stuff to make me feel guilty, about our father and his health. Stuff from our childhood.”
Pax was starting to hate her family. Thinking about her in that house, with her mother dead from cancer and her father immediately remarried to a younger woman with obvious social-climbing expectations, made everything inside Pax squeeze and tense. He wanted to hit something. “Sounds like a great guy.”
“Yeah, well. He is in trouble now, isn’t he?”
That was enough family talk. Pax needed her mind back on the box. “You think the delivery could mean something.”
“Now that I put the timing together. It came a few days before you started showing up at the shop.”
Joel threw his hands in the air. “There’s your answer.”
She ignored him and pointed at Pax. “And before you start issuing orders and throwing your weight around on that bad leg, I’m coming with you to retrieve it.”
She’d clearly lost her mind.
“No.”
“You dragged me out of the shop. Now you’re stuck with me.” She glanced at his leg. “Besides, I think I can run faster than you at the moment.”
Pax didn’t realize he’d been rubbing the injury until he followed her gaze and looked at his thigh. Great, he now massaged it without thinking. “Those are fighting words.”
“You take me or I scream loud enough to bring the police running.”
A trickle of unease sliced through him. “I thought you didn’t want to escape.”
“I don’t, but you’re not escaping me, either.”
He could live with that.
* * *
SEAN RAN THROUGH the series of dark parking lots scattered under the Whitehurst Freeway. The Potomac River sat off to his left and the noise and traffic of Georgetown ran a few blocks up to his right. He’d been on the move long enough he didn’t care about either.
As the humidity slammed into him and sweat soaked through his jeans and drenched his tee under his backpack, his entire focus centered on how he’d messed up. Ending up in the one part of Washington, D.C., without Metro access proved to be a huge tactical mistake. So much for the theory of using the computer lab at George Washington University and getting in and out and finding the information he needed on who was screwing him over back at Kingston. That’s where he’d started but he was nowhere near there now.
He’d bypassed the security by swiping some student’s access card and then lain low until the classrooms shut down one by one. He’d even used the password workaround he set up in the Kingston system for emergencies, the one that couldn’t be traced back to him, but the echoing footsteps in the hall and the two guys walking around who looked more like they could lift a garbage truck than that they were part of the late-night cleaning staff ruined everything.
He’d been ducking, hiding and running ever since. And now it was getting dark, which would help hide his presence but make progress even tougher.
Instead of heading toward Dupont Circle as he should have done coming out of GW, he’d made his way to Georgetown and now he was stuck. Kelsey wasn’t answering her phone, and he didn’t have the cash for a bus ticket or a car to get to Annapolis.
No way could he use anything in his name. Credit cards and ATMs were out and the money he withdrew at the beginning of this mess weeks ago was running out. Getting more wouldn’t work because the transaction would be tracked in a second.
They were everywhere, watching and following.
But there was one other place he could go. One person he could trust. Not the guy who dragged him into this mess with big promises. Someone else. It would take the last of his cash to get there, but he didn’t have a choice.
Chapter Seven
Kelsey doubted her decision to tag along with Pax almost from the second she suggested it. More like, insisted on it. So much for his comments about her being so smart. Now, two hours later, she stumbled around at dusk as she stalked her own building.
Yeah, this was a normal evening.
They walked down th
e street, starting several town houses away from her storefront and scanning the area as they went. She grabbed a fistful of Pax’s shirt from behind and wedged her body under his arm, hoping the move looked loving to anyone who might be watching, but really she just wanted him close. He’d proved to be the right guy to have around when the bullets started flying, though she hoped they were done with that...forever.
When he zigzagged to shift out of the shine of the overhead flickering streetlamps, he took her with him. They were far enough from the City Dock to avoid most of the tourist and late-dinner traffic, but people still passed by, some stopping to gawk in the windows of the businesses a block away.
Then there was his limp. Add that to the panic churning in her stomach, and she couldn’t help but second-guess every decision she’d made today. And had it really been that morning when the thugs attacked her and Pax rushed in?
No matter the number of hours, her nerve endings wouldn’t stop jumping. She kept glancing behind them just in case. It was as if her skin suddenly shrank to a size too small, and all she wanted to do was pull and tug and get someplace where she could sit down, close her eyes and not fear being shot.
She hated the twitchy, panicked feeling rolling over her. But she had no one else to blame. By mentioning the box to Joel and Pax, she’d all but guaranteed a trip back to her house. It sounded like a great idea when it first rolled off her tongue. Now, in the growing dark with hidden corners everywhere, not so much.
Ignoring the sticky heat, she cuddled in closer to Pax’s side, stretching up to whisper in his ear. “Retrieving this box was a fundamentally terrible idea. I’m sorry I even mentioned it.”
“You said that already.” He slipped an arm around her and rested his palm on the small of her back. “Three times, actually.”
“Maybe the fourth will convince you.”
He treated her to one of those warm smiles that had his eyes twinkling. Man, she loved that look. It managed to be sweet and hot at the same time, and it wiped away a good portion of her growing dread along with her common sense.
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