by Jami Alden
“She’s been too busy breaking into Gemini’s network. She hacked Kramer’s security logs.”
Toni pulled into Kramer’s driveway and checked her watch. Based on the security logs, Kramer had left the house several hours ago. If he worked a normal day, Toni didn’t expect him home for another several hours, giving her plenty of time.
She would have been there sooner, she thought with a pull of annoyance, but it had taken her longer than she’d expected to get into Gemini’s network so she could make sure Kramer was out of the house when she showed up. Whoever did their security was good.
But Toni was better. It gave her no small satisfaction that only a few hours after Ethan had booted her out to have his “confidential conversation about home security protocols” or whatever bullshit, she now knew all of the modifications as well as every household member’s personal PIN.
She slung her oversize purse over her shoulder. It was big enough to hold everything she needed, but not as official looking as her computer bag. She didn’t think Manuela would blink twice, but you never knew.
Toni rang the doorbell and rocked back on her heels, fiddling with the shoulder strap of her bag. She wondered what Ethan was doing right now. Probably counting the big pile of money from Jerry while he trolled for another bed partner.
Manuela opened the door, and Toni pasted a smile on her face as she shoved Ethan’s brutally gorgeous image from her mind. “Hi, Manuela, I was driving by and wanted to see if Kara was back yet.”
Manuela shook her head and regarded Toni with a frown. “Not yet. Mr. Kramer says she’s not coming home for a couple more days.”
“Really? I could have sworn he said later today,” Toni said, feigning confusion. “I wanted to stop by, you know, see for myself that she’s okay.”
“Maybe she can call you when she gets back?”
“Sure,” Toni said and shifted awkwardly from foot to foot. “Umm, is it okay if I use your bathroom?” Toni barged past without waiting for an answer. “It’s really an emergency,” she called over her shoulder and started down the hall at a fast trot.
She ducked in the powder room across from Jerry’s office and opened and closed the door in case Manuela was listening. Toni waited a few seconds and darted across the hall, praying Manuela would keep herself busy on the other side of the house. With luck, Toni could get everything done in the time it would take a reasonable person to use the bathroom.
Luckily for her, Jerry had a separate computer that didn’t go with him to work. She needed to get into his work system as soon as possible, but for now she’d settle for finding out what Jerry was up to in his off-hours. Working fast, she pulled an external hard drive out of her bag, along with a CD. Within minutes, she’d copied his files onto her hard drive and installed both keystroke tracking on his computer and network sniffer software. When she got back to her desk, she could monitor all of Jerry’s computer and network use.
She shoved the hard drive and CD back in her bag, did a quick check to make sure everything was exactly how she’d found it, and pulled the office door to the exact same partially ajar position.
“Just bring it to my office, Manuela.”
Toni felt her blood form ice crystals at the sound of Jerry’s voice. She scrambled into the bathroom and quietly shut the door. Heavy footfalls sounded down the hall. Maybe she could wait until he was busy and sneak out. No, he would have seen her car out front. She flushed the toilet, briefly ran the water in the sink, and sucked in a deep breath, preparing herself to brazen it out.
She waited until Jerry’s footsteps were almost to the door and stepped out, nearly colliding with his bulky form. His thick eyebrows pulled tight and that vein started going in his forehead.
“What are you doing here?”
Toni pulled her mouth into a tight smile. “I forgot something earlier.” She brandished a small notebook she’d pulled out of her purse, praying he hadn’t noticed that Toni never wrote anything down but made all of her notes directly into her BlackBerry or laptop. The knot in her stomach loosened slightly when he didn’t question it.
“Hope you don’t mind that I used the bathroom. I had a Big Gulp on the way over and was headed for a major accident.”
Jerry’s nostrils flared at Toni’s oversharing.
“When do you expect Kara back, again?” Toni asked, watching for any tics, any tells, any indication that he was lying.
“She’ll be back in a couple of days. Now, if you’ll excuse me…”
“Will you have her call me when she gets back?”
“Why? What do you have to discuss?”
“I’ll just feel better when I talk to her myself.”
Jerry didn’t bother with a reply as he stepped into his office and shut the door.
Jerry couldn’t stop his hands from shaking as he sat down at his desk and took a thick folder out of his briefcase. After his meeting with Ethan and Derek Taggart, Jerry had gone to the office, working alone in the lab, testing out the modified prototype he planned to pass off to Connors.
He reviewed the data again, praying this would work. It should work. All tests indicated it would. He knew Connors wouldn’t blindly take the chip without a demonstration, and Jerry had fashioned this version so the demo would go off without a hitch.
But a slight modification in the manufacturing process meant that in a short time, the valves of soft silicon polymer would lose their airtight seal. Microscopic openings would allow condensation to collect, ruining any future samples, ruining any future experiments.
All Jerry had to do was make it through the demo, get Kara, get Kyle, and get the hell out. His money had already been transferred, he had fake documents prepared for himself and the kids.
He could pull this off, escaping with his children, his life, and the peace of mind that came from knowing he hadn’t put the next generation of bioweapons into the hands of the world’s terrorists.
As long as nobody fucked it up.
His thoughts strayed from the data to Toni Crawford. He didn’t trust the woman, didn’t believe for a second that she had come over to retrieve a lost notebook. He surveyed his office, studying it for signs of disturbance. His computer was on as he’d left it, the monitor black as it hibernated. He jiggled the mouse and was prompted, as always, to enter his login and password.
Everything was as it should be, but Jerry couldn’t shake the troubling sensation he was being watched. By Toni. By Connors. He logged on, clicked open his computer security software and ran a diagnostic check, weighing the likelihood that Toni could have somehow bugged his computer. Nothing showed up in the log, and Jerry’s computer knowledge was too limited to dig any deeper.
He couldn’t take any chances, not when his life and his children’s lives were at stake. Should have thought of that six months ago. Jerry shoved the thought aside. There was no time for regrets or second-guessing. Toni Crawford and her cybersnooping were a problem, one that needed to be dealt with no matter how uncomfortable Jerry was with the idea.
He unlocked his desk drawer and pulled out a phone, a disposable prepaid unit he’d purchased at Target specifically for communicating with Connors. He knew Connors wouldn’t be happy to hear from him, and he prayed that Kara didn’t suffer for his fuckups. But Connors was better equipped to deal with the situation than he was. Connors wouldn’t feel one speck of the nausea and dread Jerry was feeling as he dialed the phone and entered in his key code.
He pressed pound to send the page and sat back to wait for Connors’s call. Guilt was already twisting his insides. He didn’t like Toni Crawford. She’d caused him endless trouble and cost him millions of dollars in the past year. But he knew she genuinely cared about Kara and that everything she did was with the goal of getting his daughter back safe. She didn’t deserve to die.
“Fucking amateur,” William Connors, né Wilhelm Ulbricht, barked in German. His brother, Karl, raised his blond eyebrows in inquiry.
“That was Kramer,” Connors said. “Whining to
me about that Crawford woman. He’s afraid she’s going to uncover something.” He’d wanted to tell Jerry that it didn’t matter. Regardless of what the woman discovered, Jerry wouldn’t be around to suffer the consequences.
But if she was good enough and dug deep enough, Toni Crawford might be able to connect the dots back to him, and he couldn’t have that.
“What do you want me to do?” Karl asked. Unlike Wilhelm’s lean, wiry build, Karl’s was a beefy five eleven, his complexion florid from too many years of hard drinking. The brawn to his brother Wilhelm’s brains. While under the guise of William Connors, entrepreneur and investor, Wilhelm could move among the highest echelons of the corporate landscape, Karl looked like exactly what he was. A thug spawned in the streets of East Berlin.
But he was Wilhelm’s only family, and loyal enough to take a bullet for him. Or several, as he had three years ago in Amsterdam. Through the years, Wilhelm had had several identities and several operations of varying profitability. When it was time to go underground, he took his money and left everything and everyone behind. But not Karl.
Karl always stayed with him, moving behind the scenes, taking care of whatever needed to be done.
As he would now. “Take care of it.” He printed out Toni’s picture and home address and motioned for Karl to take it. “No later than tomorrow. And make sure it looks like an accident.”
Karl nodded and left the room. William didn’t concern himself with details of who would do it or how it would be done. All he cared about was that the job couldn’t be traced back to him.
His fingernails dug into the mahogany surface of his desk as he thought again of Kramer. That man’s ham-handed attempts to manipulate him and those stupid investigators who were now sniffing around threatened to ruin everything William had worked to build in the past three years.
In the years since he and Karl had left Berlin, William had had his hands in everything from drug running to human trafficking to arms dealing. He excelled at building partnerships, bringing two interested parties together to help them run their operations more efficiently. He hooked drug smugglers up with distributors and Russian girls seeking a better life in Western Europe and America with pimps in every country. He liked that he earned a hefty cut without ever getting mired in the details.
Then three years ago he’d seized on the opportunity presented by the innovations that seemed to pour from Northern California’s technology companies. A well-paid source, a calculated phone call to the right person with a big grudge, and William had brokered technical innovations to various interested parties, from competitive companies to foreign organizations who would use the discoveries to make war on the western world.
He figured it wasn’t treason if he had no loyalty.
He’d even made a few legitimate investments of his own, giving start-up companies seed money, a layer of legitimacy that allowed him even more access to the products he brokered.
In only three years, he’d tripled his fortunes, and he’d only scratched the surface. Now Jerry Kramer’s stupidity threatened to bring the whole operation crashing down around him. He wasn’t afraid of getting caught. He’d gotten so good at disappearing over the years it was almost second nature.
But he wasn’t ready to close up shop yet, and he wasn’t about to let Jerry threaten his enterprise.
He grinned, thinking about how Jerry must be squirming, sweating, at what lay in wait for his daughter. William would be sweating, too, if pretty Kara Kramer were his own.
William had ceased dabbling in prostitution years ago, but he still worked for a select few parties with special interests and deep pockets. His job was to get people what they wanted, whether it was virginal bed partners or cutting-edge product prototypes.
It had been a stroke of divine luck that Kara Kramer fit the profile for one of his most discerning customers, precisely when her father was so sorely in need of a lesson.
He picked up a small red phone and dialed. “Did you receive the pictures?” he asked when the man answered on the other end. “Yes, luscious is a perfect way to describe her. Yes, the other two you requested are on their way.” He paused, listening. “Five hundred thousand, to this account.” He read off the number. “And then another five hundred after delivery.”
The man made a half-hearted protest at the fee, but William knew his client, knew the man wouldn’t let such a lovely prize slip through his lustful fingers.
“Come, my friend,” William said. “You know as well as I anyone can hop a flight to Thailand and fuck a twelve-year-old, but we are talking about something much more special. And for that you and your friends have to pay.”
As Jerry Kramer would pay in the last few moments of his life, knowing that in trying to cross William Connors, he’d sentenced his daughter to her fate.
CHAPTER 11
T HE POUNDING ON her door shocked Toni from a sound sleep. She pushed herself up on her elbows, disoriented as she came face-to-face with the upholstery of her couch. Voices sounded in the apartment, and it took her a moment to realize they were coming from the TV.
She must have passed out last night when she’d sat down to take a breather and eat something. She’d spent several hours going through Jerry’s files before fatigue and hunger had finally taken their toll. So far, the files from his home computer hadn’t revealed much, and she’d found herself wondering several times if maybe she was simply letting paranoia get the best of her.
Then she’d remembered how he was siphoning all of his assets off, and she kept slogging through. She’d only meant to take a short break, grab a snack, and get back to it.
But apparently she’d taken about two bites of her peanut butter sandwich before succumbing to the accumulation of stress and sleeplessness. The last thing she remembered was flipping on Conan O’Brien and leaning her head back. She straightened her glasses and looked at her watch. It was already nine-thirty in the morning.
The pounding on her door stopped, and she breathed a sigh of relief. She was in no shape to talk to anyone yet. Her still-heavy lids drifted closed, just as her BlackBerry began to shriek. Mumbling a curse, she staggered over to her purse where it sat on the kitchen table, but the call went into voice mail before she could get it. As soon as the ringing stopped, the pounding on the door started again.
“Keep your pants on,” she muttered and flung the door open. Bright morning light pierced her sleep-graveled eyes as she took in the sight of Ethan Taggart. Sunlight brought out rich highlights in his hair and gave his tanned skin a burnished glow. She imagined it also did a damn good job of emphasizing her own pallor.
“What are you doing here?” she asked, hoping he couldn’t hear her heartbeat, which had suddenly doubled its pace, or see the way her nipples jutted under her tank top at the sight of his sensual lips.
Lips that were devoid of his usual charming smile as he replied, “I thought I’d come check on you, see how you’re doing, since you won’t return my calls.”
He shouldered her aside and walked into her apartment as she stood there trying to jump-start her sleep-fogged brain. “I’m fine. Everything’s fine. You didn’t need to come all the way over here.”
“Want to tell my why you hacked into Gemini’s servers to get Kramer’s security logs?”
Busted.
“How do you know it was me?” Way to cover, Crawford. But it was the best she could do without caffeine in her system.
Ethan cocked an eyebrow as if to say, “Are you fucking kidding me?”
“Fine,” she said around a yawn. “I wanted to make sure he was gone when I went over there. I left something there yesterday morning.”
“Bullshit. You wouldn’t have spent the time and effort I know it took to bypass Derek’s system—he’s very impressed, by the way—just to pick up something. Try again.”
She watched as he filled the carafe of her coffeemaker and spooned grounds into a filter as if he owned the place. She pulled off her glasses and rubbed her eyes. “Since when do
I have to answer to you?”
“Since you hacked into my company’s network and broke into my client’s accounts. I could press charges, you know.”
She shot him a glare. “You’ll never be able to prove it was me.”
“You’re probably right. If you’re good enough to get through our system, you’re good enough to cover your tracks. But if you’ve found out anything about Jerry, I need to know.”
“Why? So you can tell your client he needs to watch his back?”
“No. Because I think you’re right, and Jerry’s hiding something. And if you had returned one of my half dozen messages yesterday, I would have told you that.”
The revelation threw her off-kilter like a blow upside the head. “Do you mind? I’m not even close to awake enough to have this conversation.”
“Fine,” he said. “Take a shower, get dressed. Then we’ll talk. If you’re not out in ten minutes, I’m coming in after you,” he said, with a wink.
A surge of heat washed through her, pooling and concentrating between her thighs. She hurried down the hall to the bathroom, eager to get away from him and the way every erogenous zone in her body seemed to perk up whenever he was around.
Then she caught sight of her reflection. Thanks to her awkward sleeping position, the imprint of the couch upholstery decorated her right cheek, and her hair had fallen mostly out of her haphazard ponytail. In the harsh glare of the fluorescent light, her complexion looked so pale it had a bluish undertone, and her hazel eyes were nicely accented with giant, puffy bags. Yeah, she didn’t think there was much risk of Ethan chasing her down in the shower anytime soon.
She jumped under the cold spray, determined to jolt her brain from its muzzy state. Afterward, she swiped on some mascara and a little blush to save herself from looking like a corpse. With Ethan waiting, she didn’t want to take the time to blow her hair into its razor-sharp style, so she left it to wave around her face. She slipped on her robe, grimacing at its tattered state and the thought of Ethan seeing her in it, then scolded herself for caring. Having sex with Ethan had been a Very Bad Idea, and the more he saw her as unsexy and unappealing the better.