The small bungalow home he shared with her in Culver City was dark as he pulled into the driveway. He unlocked the front door and listened. Clicking sounds came from the side bedroom and he headed that way. A muted light flickered around the slightly ajar door, and he stuck his head around it to see Carrie playing an online role playing game. Headsets blocked any sound he made as he walked over to her, to just in her line of vision, waving. She gave a shriek and promptly got killed in the game.
Carrie tore off her headset and glared at him. “You made me die.”
“Would you rather have encountered me snoozing away in bed?”
She snapped her fingers. “I know! We can install a light and when you come home after a long meeting, you can signal the little light.”
“Like how Speakeasies used to signal that the FBI was on its way?”
“Exactly, except we don’t need to dump the bathtub gin.”
He opened his arms and she rushed into them, squeezing tight. As soon as she snuggled against him, everything became right in his world. She grounded him, centered his spirit, and made all the shadows go away.
“Missed you,” she murmured into his shoulder. “I take it your mission was successful?”
“Yes and no,” he replied with sigh. “Got the bad guy, but Lee quit.”
She pulled back, shock and confusion lighting up her delicate features. “What? What do you mean he quit?”
“Exactly that. Stayed back with his girlfriend. Chose her over JD.”
“Wow. I’m … speechless. I thought Harlan Securities was his life.”
“I worked with Lee for twenty years and never suspected he was something more than his killer instincts. But something shifted with him. He … smiled. I’ve never seen him do that before.”
“So what happens now? Lee did all the special assignments, heavy emphasis on special.”
“I don’t know,” he admitted. “Guess I’ll talk that over with JD on Monday.”
“So you haven’t told him yet?”
“Couldn’t get in touch with him. Left him two messages.”
Carrie frowned. “That’s weird.”
“I agree, but he’s probably out banging some random chick and is too busy to answer the phone.”
Carrie grinned and placed her hands on his shoulders. “Talking about banging … wanna do some of our own?”
“I love it when you talk sexy.”
She giggled and spun away, darting out the door and toward their bedroom. Ginning, he sprinted after her, catching her at the foot of their bed. He was dirty and needed a shower, but damned if his dick didn’t want to be buried inside her right then. It was always like that, from the first time they met when she began working for JD as a hacker … he’d had a perpetual hard-on, intensified by his feelings. Their affair had quickly turned into love and now, he couldn’t imagine life without her.
Their lips met in an explosion of desire so intense it threatened to buckle his knees. Deciding to kill two birds with one stone, he maneuvered them into the small attached bathroom. Reaching for the shower knobs, Carrie began giggling through their kisses, although she didn’t let go of him. It became a game of how to adjust the temperature and get naked, while not letting go of one another. In seconds, steam rose from the shower, turning the air thick with moisture.
They stepped into the shower and hot water sluiced over their skin, drenching them instantly, but Mason didn’t care. He wrapped his arms around Carrie and ran kisses over her cheek, down her neck and giving little love-bites. Bending, he caught one nipple between his teeth, sucking hard before easing the sting with a swipe of his tongue. She moaned, arching into him.
“Fuck me, Mason,” she panted. “Please.”
He swiped a hand between her thighs and teased her clit. “Are you wet for me?”
“I’m always wet for you,” she said. “Every time I’m near you I want you.”
He tested her claim, and discovered she spoke the truth. Already wet, and not from the shower, she humped his hand as he finger fucked her, pumping through her swollen pussy lips. She was his drug of choice, an addiction he never wanted to get over. Withdrawing his hand, he turned her around and she placed her hands on the shower tiled wall, her ass thrust out. He kissed his initials tattooed on her shoulder, loving that she’d marked her body with his possession. Wet pink hair hung in long strands down her back. She was forever changing her hair color, but he didn’t mind one bit. It was part of her charm and personality. Only a few years younger than himself, age hadn’t yet caught up. Her skin was firm, supple and their sex always blew his mind. Holding onto her hip, he palmed his dick and lined it up with her pussy. Pushing forward, he slid in, her heat enveloping him and robbing him of breath. It felt like coming home. Everything righted in his world. A little movement against him brought his attention back to her and he moved, pulling out and pushing back in.
“God, you feel like heaven,” he muttered, lust coating his voice.
“I love it when you fuck me like this,” she said.
“I don’t think I can last long,” he admitted. “You feel too good.”
“Then don’t. Do it fast. Do me hard.”
He let go at her words, thrusting in deep, hard strokes. Revving up his speed. The water hit his back, partially shielding her body. Between that and her cries of pleasure, he couldn’t contain himself. The orgasm rose sharply and he came with a shout, glad when he felt Carrie’s pussy pulse with her own release.
When the tremors subsided, he pulled back enough so his softened dick slid free, and he turned her around to hug her tight.
“God, I love you,” he murmured at her temple.
“Ditto.”
Chapter Two
Monday morning, Mason figured it was okay to come in late. Holding his coffee mug, he stepped through the doors of Harlan Security trying to think of the right way to tell JD that Lee was gone. The asshole should’ve done it himself, but he was no longer answering his phone. Lee had always been a hard man to track down and understand, but now the chameleon had truly disappeared.
“Mr. Lake! Oh, Mr. Lake!”
Mason looked over his shoulder to see one of the replenishment supervisors. He thought the man’s name was Abercrombie.
“Mr. Lake, my secretary hasn’t shown up today.”
“You don’t have a secretary,” he reminded the man, not bothering to halt his progress to his office.
“Right, right,” Abercrombie muttered, hurrying alongside. “But Mae has never missed a day of work and she promised to type up a contract for me on Friday. It’s gone. She’s gone. Mr. Harlan’s gone—”
Mason abruptly stopped causing the shorter man to almost crash into him. “What do you mean Harlan’s gone?”
Abercrombie blinked behind his large eyeglasses, reminiscent of an owl. “He didn’t show up today.”
Mason looked around the foyer to the securities office, but saw nothing out of the ordinary. But the absence of JD suddenly put a pall over the workplace. Unease settled on his shoulders.
“Keep trying to reach her,” he told Abercrombie, then turned and hurried to the door that led to the back offices and laboratories. He punched in the code and hurried inside. This side turned the company into a completely different world. A few people worked around computers, developers and engineers, who nodded their greeting. He made a beeline toward Carrie’s office and saw her sitting behind her cornucopia of computer monitors. “Hey.”
She glanced up at him. “Hey. I’m glad you’re here. There’s been—.”
“Is JD here?” he asked, interrupting her.
Carrie frowned. “No. But we’ve had a—”
“Fuck. He’s always here first thing Monday morning. I’ve never known him not to come to work. This place is his wife.”
“Listen to me! We’ve had a security breech, Mason.
“What?”
“That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.”
“How the hell did we get hacked?”
“Why didn’t you say something earlier?”
“Because I wanted to find out who it was. Let him or her create their own noose.”
He ran a hand over his face. “Something’s wrong and I don’t like it.”
Carrie typed up a file full of data he wouldn’t even pretend to understand. “I began monitoring subtle inconsistencies for the past few months. Nothing blatantly obvious, mainly backdoor stuff, and had I not been looking I wouldn’t have noticed. But my job is to notice so there you go.”
She pointed to some line of numerical gibberish. Carrie was the only person he didn’t mind admitting was far smarter than he was when it came to understanding code. .
“I’m going to pretend that I know what that means because it makes me look manly and important,” he said. “But if I was a layman who didn’t know shit, what would I be looking at?”
“Someone got through our firewall from the inside,” she replied.
That he understood very well. “A traitor. That I can deal with. Start determining who, and you might begin with a woman named Mae who works in the ordering department.”
“Why her?”
“Because she seems to have disappeared, too, along with JD.”
Carrie tuned back into her computer. “On it.”
“Let me know when you find something.”
She nodded, already lost in her computer world. Mason headed toward JD’s office, punched in the security code and entered when the door unlocked. Setting his coffee down, he sat behind the desk and booted up JD’s computer. He immediately went into the back-up servers and pulled up the security feed from Friday night.
Nothing, which was blatantly wrong because not only it did show that nothing happened, it also revealed that JD never left. And clearly, he had left. Everything worked on a double locking system, that if one door remained unlocked for more than two minutes, it automatically reset. JD’s door had reset and had not reopened. He traced through the log when it auto-locked and got a time stamp of Friday after the office had officially closed. The video footage didn’t show JD leaving, however. So he went to the independent servers, the back-ups of the back-ups. JD insisted everything was traceable, and one way to do that was blind-spots. Only he, Mason, and Lee had access to them, so he logged onto the server and watched as his friend and boss was knocked out and taken.
The video feed started out with the company closing for the weekend. Then men dressed in military black swarmed in, heading to the access pad to punch in the authorization number. Then they backed up, guns raised, as they waited. Mason knew JD had to be on his way, having been alerted that someone entered the code after closing, and sure enough, a moment later, JD appeared.
Then a woman ran forward, practically throwing herself between the gun and JD. She went down with a thud and lay unmoving. JD fought, catching one assailant off-guard and bringing him down, before another one shot him. Mason thought for a moment he was watching his friend die, but JD twitched and that’s when it dawned on him that he recognized the gun. It was the prototype harmonics interceptor they were currently developing. The men in black picked up both unconscious forms and they departed frame. Mason switched cameras and saw them loaded into a dark van. The men jumped in and off they went, without leaving any identifying marks behind. Not even a fucking license plate caught on camera.
Mason looked through every feed and watched the abduction several times, and not once did he catch anything else. JD and the woman … Mae? … had been taken Friday night near nine in the evening. It had been a very bold and strategic kidnapping, and he hoped to God that Carrie had more answers.
He walked back to her desk and pulled up a chair next to her to sit down. By then, several others had come in to start the workday, and each began to notice that something was very wrong.
“Tell me you got something,” he muttered in a low voice.
“I got something, but answers aren’t one of them,” she muttered back. “Mae Sawyer was really a bust. Been working for the company for a while. Her background check revealed absolutely nothing.”
“I think she was taken with JD.”
Carrie looked at him incredulously. “What do you mean taken with JD?”
He held out a flash drive. She plucked it from his fingers and plugged it into one of her computers. “As you can see, militant dressed men broke in. No features to identify. They had our fucking stun gun, Carrie. Shot JD with it, took him plus a woman who tried sacrificing herself to save him by jumping in front of the fucking thing. I’m guessing that woman is our missing Mae Sawyer.”
“Oh God,” Carried whispered as she scanned through the images. “That explains some things.”
“What things?”
“Like I said, this has been an ongoing situation for some time, Mason. Data was hacked. Prototypes were taken. Background personnel files on you, Lee, and JD were deleted.”
Mason remembered Lee’s chase through the Kentucky countryside. “Lee mentioned he was targeted personally with history shit no one else knew about, and his vehicle was disabled with our localized electromagnetic pulse wave.”
“Fuck,” Carrie said. “How did they get our prototypes?”
“If the bad guys were working from the inside, no telling how deep they got into the system. Is anything else stolen?”
“Not that I saw. I can do another inventory.”
“Do it on everything. Including our scrapped ideas. We don’t know what these assholes are capable of. And then come into JD’s office and start doing a comparison on the redundant servers.”
“Redundant servers?”
Mason nodded. “JD didn’t trust anything, you know that. If it’s traceable he wanted multiple eyes on it.”
As he stood, she grabbed his arm. “What if we can’t find him? Shouldn’t we call someone?”
“No, we’re going to think this through calmly. We will find him,” he assured her, with a confidence he didn’t believe in. But he had to stay positive. “We just got to think logically, keep a level head, and figure this out. In the meantime, I need the company to run as if he were still here, Tony Starking it.”
“That is so not a verbal noun,” she said.
“And I think it’s sexy that you know what a verbal noun is.” He gave her a wry smile. “Okay. You get to work doing what you do best, and I’ll keep JD’s disappearance on the downlow.”
“What are you gonna do?”
“What I always do. Keep this place running smoothly.”
She saluted him and turned back to her computer. Mason had damage control to run.
Chapter Three
Carrie decided to inspect JD’s redundant servers first. She brought a laptop into his office and plugged it in, although it took her a few minutes to figure out the passcodes to enter the databanks. JD was nothing if not predictable, and of course, he’d used the name Jarvis to safeguard everything.
Nothing on his bank accounts, social media, or even his home security cameras. She slowly expanded the search, branching out into his work accounts and clientele. Even interrogating his own home computer system. Having worked for JD for almost fifteen years, she knew his movements pretty well. He was surprisingly predictable since he lived his life through technology, so when she came up with nothing, that’s when shit got real.
Gathering up her stuff, she headed back to her office, taking a moment to stretch out her muscles. Living a life behind computers could lead to an unhealthy lifestyle, and she tried her best to make smart choices as she got older. At some point, she was going to have to scale back on her work, but not when her boss was MIA. Carrie rolled her sleeves up before sitting down again and logging back into her three computers. Deciding to take a different approach, she traced the black SUV that had taken JD and Mae through the various traffic cameras as it wound its way through the city. The cameras jumped between the three monitors as she trac
ked the movement of the vehicle. Eventually, it pulled up to the airport where she had to access different servers, bypassing firewalls and stepping through multiple security protocols. It took time, and when Mason sat a lunch bag next to her, she jumped. Her stomach growled at the scent of her favorite, Italian sub with oil and vinegar and provolone cheese.
“Oh, I love you,” she muttered as she grabbed the bag and dug out her sub.
“I know,” he replied smugly. He pointed to the monitors. “Any leads?”
“Well, I know how they smuggled JD and Mae Sawyer out of here.”
“But you don’t know where he’s at?”
She pealed back the wrapper and took a bite, talking with her mouth full. “I can tell you he’s in a country. Just not this one.”
“What?”
She swallowed the bite. “Did you bring me a soda?”
Mason reached into his own sandwich bag and pulled out a cream soda, holding it out. She smiled and grabbed it, taking a long drink after opening it.
“What do you mean he’s not in our country?” he asked patiently.
“I tracked the SUV through traffic cams, lost them for a time in various airport security feeds, but discovered that two bodies were sent back to England after apparently dying here.”
“Bodies? Wait, JD isn’t dead, is he?”
“Of course not,” she said. “The people didn’t really die, but certificates were drawn up for two fake deaths. Wait … let me pull up what was recorded … here you go. See?”
She brought up official looking papers that had been scanned at the airport terminal.
“I don’t get it.”
“Think about it,” she said. “Who’s going to inspect two caskets? And even if they did inspect two caskets, all they’d find are two apparently dead people. My bet is some type of paralytic agent to keep them in a state of zombieism.”
“So JD is a zombie? In England?”
She shrugged. “They did have Shaun of the Dead, but I haven’t been able to track the caskets.”
Reckless (World of Danger Book 3) Page 2