18. Ben
In the six days since the team party at Kat’s house, things had gotten weird between Savannah and me.
I blamed it on having most of my time consumed by all-hands team meetings and special cram sessions with Bloom to teach me all things HEAT, and physical training sessions led by Wheeler, who was determined to break my ass. Of course, I’d kept up with the rigorous requirements of Ranger duty with no problem, but there’s a special kind of hell you go through in basic that pushes you to the breaking point. It seemed Wheeler was hell-bent on pushing me to that knife’s edge all over again.
Which, of course, meant I couldn’t show the toll the grueling workouts were taking on me.
Mai sent me daily encouraging texts, but her arrival kept being delayed. She did tell me Lang was on the same mission she was, which explained his continued absence but annoyed the hell out of me when I found out he was supposed to have overseen my PT instead of Wheeler.
Savannah had her own demanding schedule, now that the IT team was helping her spy on her own company. She was assessing the damage Devlin had caused, devising workarounds, writing business recovery plans, and making confidential calls to suppliers, financiers, and a handful of trusted employees. Due to the long, slow process of getting warrants to allow Pasco to dig into Devlin’s personal records and accounts, they still didn’t know what, exactly, they were dealing with, and that, in turn, made it harder to get warrants. The IT team described their frustration as trying to do their jobs with both hands tied behind their backs, their feet nailed to the floor, and their heads encased in shatterproof helmets.
All this information came to me through Pasco because Savannah and I barely talked.
That’s not to say we avoided each other. We spend at least part of our nights together. Most of the time, I went to her door. A couple of times she came to mine. We fucked. Sometimes fast and furious, other times slow and savoring. We took out our frustrations and pent-up emotions on each other’s bodies.
But we didn’t discuss them.
Something had shifted the night of the party; some invisible line had been drawn, and I was pretty sure I was the asshole holding the pen. I’d almost asked her for more. Maybe she’d sensed it and had put up a wall to protect herself. Maybe she’d sensed my hesitation when I’d realized I was wishing for something I couldn’t have. I was no Gage Halifax. I wasn’t a long-term guy. Or maybe that realization had me building the walls between us. Hell, it was probably some combination of all the above.
The cause didn’t matter, though. It was the effect that was killing me. Sav and I had benefits, awesome fucking benefits, but we’d stopped being friends.
Monday night, the night before the 0700 start of my hours-long obstacle course/fitness test, I stood outside her door. I squeezed and relaxed my fists, willing my hands to behave themselves long enough for me to have a conversation with the woman. I drew on the steely resolve I’d learned from my training and field experience of the past seven years. Girded my loins like I was going into a fucking battle, which I was, although the fight was with myself.
I blew out a breath and knocked on her door.
She opened and pulled me inside, then pushed me back against it. She slipped her hand under my T-shirt and ran it up and over my chest. How the hell could I want her so badly when I’d left her bed less than twenty hours earlier?
I put all my hard-won discipline to work. Instead of running my hands over her body, I pulled hers off mine and held them chastely between us.
“Oh, sorry,” she said. “I wasn’t thinking. You need to save your strength for your fitness test tomorrow.” Her beautiful gold eyes sparkled as she smiled. “I think Ryan plans to put you through your paces.”
“Wheeler hopes to kill me. I won’t be sorry to disappoint him.”
She arched an eyebrow. “Cocky.”
I let that one slide.
She stepped back and invited me into the living room. On the coffee table, neat stacks of papers surrounded the laptop Pasco had set up for her. A nearly empty glass of whiskey sat on a coaster. A notebook with hand-scribbled notes lay open on the sofa.
“Can I get you a drink?” she asked. “Probably not alcoholic. Water?”
“No thanks.” I sat on the upholstered chair. That was a first. The little bit of time we’d spent in this room we’d been on the sofa. And we’d only been sitting if she’d been straddling me. I rubbed my hand over my face, making a piss-poor attempt to erase the vivid memories so I could focus on words. I pointed to the table. “This looks intense.”
She sat on the sofa. “It is. It’s like trying to crack a code. Following Devlin down rabbit holes, trying to figure out what the hell he’s been up to. It doesn’t add up. There’s something I’m missing.”
“Tell me. It might help to talk it through.”
She probably already had, with Pasco and Jensen and who knows who else, but I wanted to learn the details. I wanted to be let back into her confidence. I wanted to hear her voice.
She started piecing the story together for me. She walked me through the changes in the corporate accounts, the odd income and payouts. She slid onto the floor as she talked, and I could tell that’s how she’d been working before I’d come over. It reminded me of how she used to study when she and Mai holed up in our basement before finals. Mai would spread out her stuff all over one of my dad’s old desks and sit in a straight-back chair to work. Savannah would set herself up at the coffee table with cushions as her seat. I’d forgotten how much I enjoyed watching her work, seeing her quick thoughts translated into action as she worked through problems.
“Unrelated question,” I said. “Did you work like this when you were setting up your business plans and starting the company?”
She glanced at the coffee table. “I did. I’d moved back in with my mom to save money before moving to California. Why?”
I remembered her mom’s apartment, and I could picture Savannah working there. I smiled. “No reason. You were saying?”
She furrowed her brow at me but didn’t pursue it. She pulled out a list of calendar printouts. “I found something else in these. I knew about the trips he was taking, but honestly, I didn’t think much about it until I saw in black and white just how many trips he took to New York.”
“Do you have any customers in the city?”
“We do, but that’s not where he went. He always said he was flying to upstate New York. Pasco is waiting for the warrant on his credit card activity so we can see where, exactly, he went.” She pointed to last month’s calendar. “And there’s this. Every day, he had a meeting from one to three p.m.”
“Every day? Like a team meeting?”
She shook her head. “It happened during the workday, but no one else at the company was attending. I didn’t keep track of his daily activities, so I didn’t notice—other than a couple of times I tried to schedule late lunch meetings, and he said he was busy. And it goes back seven months.”
“Two hours a day, every day, for seven months?”
“Including weekends.” She sifted through a pile and pulled out another sheet. “They actually go back more than another year, but they were more sporadic.”
I sat back in the chair. “As in, around the time of your mother’s death.”
“Before that.”
She pursed her lips and stared at one of the calendar pages. I knew that look from back in high school. She was piecing something together. I stayed silent so as not to interrupt her.
“Things did change, though, when I moved east for those six months.” She shuffled through the papers. “More meetings, a handful of trips I knew about… Who knows how many I didn’t? And remember, he replaced our accounting firm.”
“He brought in accountants who were loyal to him, not you. So, a good old-fashioned embezzling scheme?”
She shook her head. “Pasco and I looked at the possibility from all angles. That explanation didn’t align with the money movement, which looks a hell of a lot like money laundering. We just can’t figure out where the hell it’s coming from or going to. There has to be something here I’m not seeing.”
I stared down at the calendar page in my hand. “I think there is.” I pointed to a block on the calendar. “Before and after work hours, he has these blocks marked as personal.”
She looked at it. “Well, he had workouts, maybe other things.”
“Two hours every morning and another two every night? Sav, that’s six hours a day, on top of being CEO of a business, and flying to upstate New York, what, twice a month. Was the guy exhausted?”
“Come to think of it, he was. And stressed and on edge. We looked for evidence of a gambling or drug problem, but couldn’t find either.”
Something had taken six hours of Devlin’s time every day, plus two weekends a month. His time. The company’s money. Someone was controlling him. As preparation for our ops, we’d be trained on psychological aspects of our enemy combatants. Basically, why they did what they did. Sometimes they were mercenaries or following orders for the homeland. Sometimes they were zealots for someone or something. True believers. They were groomed, broken down bit by bit. Rebuilt to give their all to the leader or the cause.
“Sav, think back, even before you moved east for those six months. Did anything weird happen with Devlin? Did he seem off in any way? Did you have any strange or disturbing interactions?”
“No, not that I remember.” She furrowed her brow. “There was one thing. We’d both been on the East Coast for some meetings, and he talked me into taking a weekend-long business seminar with him.”
I sat up straighter. “And something weird happened?”
“It was supposed to be three days long. I barely made it through the first day. Over dinner that night, I told Devlin I was bagging the rest of it and heading home. I assumed he would have the same reaction as me and do the same, but he didn’t.”
“What did you react to?” I asked.
“It’s hard to describe. It was just off. The instructors were presenting some pretty basic management principles to us, but they’d given them different names and acted like they’d discovered some secret key to success. And the way they went on about the guy who’d founded the training company. I jokingly told Devlin it was like they’d found the second coming of Christ. He said he agreed it was a little strange.”
“But he stayed for three days.” I knew from my training that everyone had a breaking point, and there were more ways to break someone than torture. “Three days is plenty of time to start the process. Next, they probably invited Devlin for a week-long training, and then more and more.”
“Maybe. He mentioned it a few times after that, but I shut him down. And then everything happened with my mom, and when I finally went back to California…” Her voice tapered off.
“Sav, what is it?”
She licked her lips, then threw back the last bit of her whiskey. “He was different. Over-the-top concerned for me, taking care of every little thing. I was flattered. And then he started bringing me lunch and dinner, and the next thing I knew,” she looked away from me, “we were dating. It only lasted a couple of months.”
“Oh.” Of course, she’d had a life in the past seven years. I knew that. And I knew that asshole Devlin would make a move eventually. I was surprised it took so long. Then again… “He was waiting until you were at your most vulnerable. Did he mention that group again while you dated?”
“Not that group, but… Maybe. He mentioned an executive consulting company he wanted to bring in for a week-long staff training. It sounded like a different kind, of course, so I assumed it was a different group. But I did remind him of our previous experience with the people who treated their founder as the second coming. I think I laughed. And then”—she widened her eyes and looked at me—“and then we argued. That argument ended our dating relationship.”
“What was the name of the group?”
“Um…” She pressed her lips together for a minute, then shook her head. “I don’t remember. I didn’t make the reservations, and I didn’t take it seriously. I would have the information somewhere at home, but… I don’t know!” Tears filled her eyes. “This could be the key to everything. How can I not remember?”
I set down the calendar page and took her hand. “It’s okay. You know, the location was in upstate New York. You’ll build a timeline of when you attended, when Devlin took any long trips, everything you can remember. Pasco can run with it, try to match the times to trainings and training companies in the area.”
“You don’t think it’s really a training company, do you?”
“Could be a scam or a pyramid scheme or even—”
Our eyes met, and we spoke at the same time. “A cult.”