“It’s not a configuration mistake.” His words came out clipped, bringing her out of her thoughts. He was so laid-back, the hint of temper actually made her look up from her screen to see him sitting straight in his chair, his spine stiff with tension. “I know my work, and we’ve checked it over once and again. I’ve gone along with this thus far, but we’re going to need to start considering other causes before we’re faced with a situation we’re not prepared for because we spent too much time hunting for what isn’t there.”
She sighed. “What else could it be?”
She’d expected him to scowl or give one of his saucy grins and say something witty. Instead, he studied her with a neutral expression. His gaze was steady, somber. “We’re looking for a mistake. There was no one on the property, nothing, not even a stray cat or squirrel. Because there was no incursion, we’re assuming there was something wrong with the system. I say we’re asses.”
“You’re not making sense.” She came to her feet though, restless. Something. Something wasn’t right. He had a point there. A feeling of being blind and stupid had been riding her all day, and it wasn’t because of anything he’d said or done.
“This mission hasn’t been what we’d expected from the start.” Adam stood as well, but he simply moved to snag a dry-erase marker in the study they’d appropriated to do their work. Sparingly furnished with sleek desk surfaces and ergonomically optimal chairs, the walls were painted in bright colors with the kind of paint that allowed the entire wall surface to be used with dry-erase markers. The room had been designed to be a think tank, and they’d decided to make use of it. “Security was the key objective in the original contract.”
As he spoke, Adam reached up and wrote the word on the wall, beginning a mind map. The long-sleeved shirt he wore was close-fitted, the soft fabric clinging to him like second skin. His muscle rippled across his back as he wrote.
“But there’s different kinds of security, and it’s not privacy Roland wants, it’s safety.” More words went up on the wall. “Let’s start thinking about who he wants to be safe from instead. He’s not worried about paparazzi the way celebrities would be.”
She decided to go along with his mind map. He was thinking in a different direction than she’d been and it wasn’t a bad thing.
“No. He was afraid this morning. People can get irritated or angry about invasions of privacy, but they’re not afraid the way he was.” She considered the sweaty, disheveled appearance. Roland had leaped out of his bed when the alarm had gone off and freaked out inside his own house waiting for them to arrive. He hadn’t gone out to his security team.
Adam wrote the word fear. “People are afraid when their well-being is threatened. Stalkers. Death threats. He didn’t say he’d received those.”
“Safeguard would’ve asked when scoping the contract.” She made herself a note to ask Gabe more about both the initial talks and this morning’s addendum. Gabe was better at reading people than she was. She didn’t connect with clients well.
“The security team didn’t mention any either. Dante, at least, would’ve been aware of any.” Adam wrote the word threat on the wall with question marks. “So there is a threat, but we don’t know what it is, other than life-threatening. And we don’t know how Roland knows there is a threat.”
She stared at the words on the wall. “If we believe him and don’t consider him delusional, then there is an external threat. Immediate and serious.”
“Jay thinks Roland is delusional.” Adam’s voice turned grim. “Ray and Brian just plan to do their jobs well, regardless. So to them, it doesn’t matter.”
“It should.” She drew her brows together, continuing to look at the words fear and threat. “It’s not just about doing what you’re paid to do. What do you think about Jay’s assessment? You’ve worked with him in the past, right? How good is he at judging these things?”
“I meant to talk to you about him earlier, but there were other priorities.” Adam shook his head. “My experience with the man could be biased, and not in a good way.”
Victoria raised her eyebrows. “He seemed friendly toward you.”
“Yeah nah. He’s that way to anyone he comes into contact with, really. Problem with him, you can’t tell if he’s on your side ever. He always seems to be but you’re always left wondering. To be fair, I could be bitter. I’m not overly fond of anyone from my last unit.” Adam paused, then scratched his jaw. “I’ve never seen him make particularly good use of his people skills. I don’t think he’d be sensitive to Roland’s concerns. He’s more likely to cast his employer in a negative light on principle. He’s the type to resent the hand that feeds him, if you know what I mean.”
“Ah.” Victoria considered. She could see it in Jay. He had a way of staring after the other men around him, seething. If something was done well by anyone else, he made it out to be less of an achievement than it was. Small, petty, and a tendency she would mark as someone not to work with voluntarily in the future.
Adam stepped back, drawing her attention to him and tapping the dry-erase marker against the palm of one hand. “If one of us was planning an attack on this place, what would we do?”
Easy. Planning an attack was easier in her mind than planning the defense of a place. She immediately ran through any number of possible approaches to gather information about the defenses and security.
And his point hit her right in the chest. “The alarm. It wasn’t to check to see if there was an alarm. It was to time the response from the security team and local police.”
Possibly, it was to time how long it would take for Victoria and Adam to arrive on site.
Adam turned to face her. “There is an impending attack in the works. We have no idea what the scale is or even why. But Roland is not delusional.”
Suddenly, this mission was a whole lot more serious, and Adam, to her eyes, was looking incredibly dangerous.
“Let’s get back to setting up the layered defenses then.” Before she jumped him, right against the wall.
* * *
Adam opened both doors of the refrigerator and stared at the contents with a sigh. Decently stocked with vegetables, he didn’t see a single treat or piece of junk food anywhere. There was no sign of Chinese or any of the lunches from the earlier days in the week either. There was no beer, no soda. Roland ate healthy and apparently had a thing about disposing of leftovers.
A whine caught Adam’s attention, and he looked down to find Tegan sitting at his feet. The corgi was quiet, unexpected on the stone tiles of the kitchen.
“Sorry, bro, Roland says the house rules are no treats for puppies.”
Big brown eyes stared up at him. Adam looked away. He’d withstood the pleading of grown men and children, women even, but somehow a dog had him taking another look in the refrigerator for some sign of something tasty. Maybe it was because Tegan at least was a genuine soul around the place.
Roland was hiding things. Hard to protect a man who didn’t tell them what they were supposed to keep him safe from in the first place. The men on the security detail weren’t particularly suspicious, but everyone had something in their past. Skeletons, ghosts, mistakes. Victoria was online with the Safeguard databases running deeper background checks on all of the security team members, including Jay. Adam had some insight on Jay’s past military experience, but he’d add those details to whatever files Victoria pulled up. But Adam’s gut told him whatever was going on wouldn’t be as simple as a background search to turn up their threat.
Victoria had issues haunting her too. She wasn’t sharing, and he’d have been surprised if she had. In the short time he’d known her, he got the impression she was more a person of action than a person for sitting down and baring one’s deepest, darkest thoughts. Even to herself.
“You have a good life,” he told the dog. It was a simple life. Live, eat and ca
re about the people in the household. Maybe love his master.
Adam had long since noticed not every pet loved its master. Oh, they were capable of unconditional love, but pets didn’t always bond that way with their owners. An owner could buy all the toys and pet beds and food in the world, but a pet gave its love on its own.
From what Adam had observed, Tegan liked Roland plenty. But the dog’s jovial attitude was about the same with Roland as he was with Adam or Victoria or even Dante. Tegan didn’t shower Roland with affection and definitely didn’t keep track of where Roland was every moment of the day. Take now, for example. Tegan was in the kitchen with Adam, not lying outside Roland’s room.
A dog in love with his master would not only know where his master was every minute of the day, but would do his best to have a clear line of sight on his master at all times.
That, to Adam, was just one of many things that were off about this household and this mission. Too many puzzle pieces seemed to be missing. He and Victoria couldn’t get a good picture of the situation.
Tegan let out a sort of groaning growl and flipped onto his back, paws waving in the air. Adam looked down at the dog’s long torso and comparatively short legs. “You are ridiculous. I can see why you don’t get treats. You’re heavy for such a short dog.”
Heavy was bad for dogs and people. Too much weight was rough on the joints. Even if he’d found something for the dog, Adam would’ve respected Roland’s rules about feeding Tegan for the dog’s own health. It was amazing how chubby the corgi was.
“C’mon, dog. Let’s sit and drink water. It’s probably the only thing in here we want and need at the same time.” There was plenty of health food in there, but Adam rarely wanted veggies in their raw form. There’d been times in his deployments when he’d been tempted to kill for a sip of clean water.
Tegan got to his feet readily enough and followed Adam. Adam poured some water from a water bottle into Tegan’s bowl and then slid down the wall to sit beside it. The dog lapped up some water, then proceeded to sit on Adam’s foot. He was a really genial canine.
“You’re trusting me not to boot you across the room. You sure about that?”
The corgi twisted to look up at him and panted at him with a doggie grin, butt firmly planted on his shoe.
“Well, fine. Trust me. But you know, people take trust for granted. They meet people with a sense of entitlement, expecting strangers to trust them. More people give a basic level of trust to absolute strangers than respect.” Adam sighed and leaned his head back against the wall. “We trust people immediately, at least so far. Then if you burn us, we make people earn our trust a second time. But the damage is done, trust is a hundred times harder to earn after it’s gone the first time. Probably doesn’t make sense. But it’s damned easy to undermine trust anyway, so I guess it doesn’t matter.”
Tegan sighed and lay down, his torso warming Adam’s foot.
“All it takes is some gossip, a whispered word or two. Suddenly people are giving you the side eye. You know, the things I had to learn when I first started working with people weren’t about trusting my teammates. It was about managing perception so my team would trust me. It’s not about truth or what’s reality. It’s about perception, what people think of you.”
Adam took a sip of his water and wished it were beer, maybe something stronger. Victoria seemed to have a thing for scotch. “Now, Victoria, she doesn’t give much trust. I like that about her.”
They’d been good together. Really good. Scorching hot and fun. But she hadn’t stayed with him, even though he’d extended the invitation. It hadn’t bothered him either. He’d guessed she wouldn’t be able to sleep with a man she’d only recently met, even if she’d had much more carnal relations with him. Victoria had a pure quality about her. She wasn’t heartwarming or snuggly. But she was genuine. With her, there hadn’t been any pretense, only mutual enjoyment.
Her perception of him mattered. Safeguard’s perception mattered too, but from a more objective perspective.
He was certain he was on the right track with his brainstorming. Once they’d continued to consider the issues with the triggered alarm from the angle of a real external threat, the alarm made more and more sense.
What he hadn’t discussed with Victoria was the relief he’d experienced when she’d followed his lead. A knot in his chest had eased when their investigation had no longer been about proving or disproving whether the mistake had been his. He was confident he hadn’t made a mistake. But it had been a slow, twisting knife the entire time they searched for a cause.
Even now, he was in the kitchen on his own. She hadn’t followed him. It spoke of several levels of trust. She wasn’t keeping an eye on him, for one thing. Or at least when her gaze was on him, it wasn’t out of suspicion.
He grinned at that.
For another thing, she trusted him to take a reasonable break and come back to rejoin the work. She hadn’t felt the need to admonish him to come back quickly. And as far as he could tell, they’d gotten past her initial tactic of sending him off elsewhere so she could do the real work by herself.
All good things as far as he was concerned.
He wanted to know more about Victoria. Curiosity drove him to figure out what made her tick and what he could do to surprise her into unguarded expressions. He liked watching her take pride in her work and gain satisfaction from a job well done. She was adorable when she was caught up in solving some difficult issue, and she was truly impressive when angry.
She had a range of emotions and he wanted to explore them all.
In order to pursue that, he had to gain more of her trust. In return, he found himself wanting to give her more of himself too.
And it’d been a long time since he’d been tempted that way.
Chapter Ten
Victoria stood and paced the length of the study, eyeing the wall with their scribbled notes. They’d need to erase it soon. It would be better for the thoughts of fear and threat to remain between her and Adam. They had a better idea of what they were up against.
If they had opponents here on the property, those opponents didn’t need to know what she and Adam were thinking.
She’d tried to refute their suspicions from a variety of approaches. Despite having checked the installation and video feeds on the ferry this morning, she’d gone over them again. Had to. She needed to have absolute confidence they hadn’t overlooked something. She needed to know she hadn’t missed something.
For his part, Adam had taken it with grace. Having your work checked over was never easy. She hated it, personally, but recognized the necessity. He’d been tense but aside from his initial defensiveness in the car, he’d been taking it with much better aplomb than anyone she’d ever partnered previously. And he could’ve made it harder for her, less comfortable. Instead, he’d constructively applied himself to other work and then taken himself off to the kitchen for a break.
Honestly, she couldn’t say she’d have handled it better.
Here she was, finished yet another check and having to stare at the wall again. There was something seriously wrong with the assumptions they’d had going into this project, and it didn’t bode well for their success. In her experience, and she had years of it in any number of dangerous situations, the best outcomes arose from missions with the proper scoping and planning at the outset. Every good team had the flexibility to meet changes on the fly head-on and adapt their plan to fit. But it was a grim truth that the measure of success changed along with the other variable on the mission. It didn’t take much for mission objectives to go from clearly defined goals to simple survival.
Here, on domestic soil, it was harder to imagine the worst-case scenario. But if she didn’t, and Adam’s expression as he’d written on this wall told her he had considered it too, then they were likely to lose lives. The fear in Roland’s ey
es had been real. A threat did exist. If they underestimated it, their client or his security team or they could pay the price.
Whatever this was, it was the opening move of an unseen player. She didn’t like it one bit.
“Hydration is a good thing, I hear.” Adam entered the study, Tegan trundling close at his heels on short legs. His claws must be well-trimmed because she didn’t hear him at all now and had only ever heard him on the tile floor when he was in a rush to get somewhere. Come to think of it, Roland walked quietly as well. Victoria wondered how the man had developed the habit. Most people tended to move comfortably through their own home. Footsteps, random knocks and bangs happened all the time as people picked things up or set them down on various surfaces. Since Roland had retired to his room to rest and leave them to their work, she hadn’t heard him.
Odd.
Adam wiggled the water bottle in front of her. “Think hard, drink water too.”
She shot him a quick glare and took the water bottle. “Thank you.”
He turned to assess the wall and his words. “Thinking on these things.”
“Yes, and taking them a step further.” She rose and took the dry-erase marker in hand. She wrote the word quiet and explained her line of thought to Adam.
He nodded. “You’re right. He’s not trained silent. You can hear him moving around from the kitchen. But the man definitely doesn’t make much sound for a civilian. Could be he’s scared, but I think he has some practice staying hush.”
She pressed her lips together. “How long has he been afraid? How long has he been hiding inside his own space?”
The contract negotiation had gone quickly. It hadn’t been much time for someone to develop mannerisms like the ones they were observing in their client.
“While it’s good to take note, I’m not sure how long is immediately important to know.” Adam made the suggestion carefully. “We’ve got resources who can research that off-site. With us here, now, our time might be better spent taking active steps.”
Contracted Defense Page 9