CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Since we had lunch with my parents, a little weight seemed to have been lifted off my shoulders.
I still didn’t feel ready to sleep until I was exhausted—thank God for Ethan for helping me with that—and my pain was still very much present. But that I was able to visit my parents with minor issues was nothing short of a miracle.
Another point for Ethan.
It was getting hard to pretend I wasn’t developing feelings for him. It was even harder to justify why I was fighting them.
I put those confusing thoughts and feelings on the back of my mind and got back to work on the pieces of evidence in front of me, as Ethan’s fingers danced deftly over the keyboard of his computer.
As odd as it might sound, his click-click-clicks were comforting, and I dreaded the day I wouldn’t hear them anymore. We worked so well together that most of the time I forgot our professional arrangement was only temporary.
We’d managed to scan most of the files about the cartel’s recruitment and Ethan was working nonstop on finishing the software about the organization. Even without the final touches, it had already worked wonders for us, and it made my life a lot easier when looking for specific data.
As he worked across from me sharing my desk, I scrutinized the new files and audio we’d got from the program he’d installed in the Alacráns’ system. I was bored out of my mind and talking myself down so I wouldn’t throw my laptop against the wall.
“You’re rubbing your left hand again.”
I was startled by Ethan’s worried voice. “What?”
“You’re doing it again. What’s going on?”
“Nothing. I’m fine.”
“Is your head okay? Maybe we should take a break. ”
Rubbing my eyes beneath my glasses, I took a deep breath. Maybe taking a break wouldn’t be so bad after all.
“I’d like that. How about—”
That was when a new message pinged in my computer from Ethan’s software. Forgetting all about my needed rest, I opened the program and felt my eyes round.
“Spitfire? What happened?”
I stared at him with a mixture of wariness and excitement. “I think we’ve just figured out their next attack.”
I called Aaron as soon as I told Ethan our findings.
We gathered with Benny and Danny in the conference room, waiting for Aaron’s arrival. I paced the room, unable to contain my eagerness.
“I still don’t see how we can use that to our advantage,” Benny argued.
I tapped my legs as I walked, letting the many thoughts flow through my mind until a good one would stick. “We can find a way to force Salazar and Keyes out of hiding. It’s a way to get the girls we’ve been looking for and force Salazar’s hands.”
“Or we might end up making them hide even further,” Danny countered.
I gazed around the room, not looking at anything. “Not if we play this right.”
Ethan clicked on his laptop, gathering more information, not once looking up from his screen. “Whatever it is, we need to be precise, no mistakes allowed because this might be our only shot.”
“Just another reason why maybe we shouldn’t rush into doing anything.”
Benny was starting to piss me off. I fished a quarter from my pocket and handed it to him. “Here. Go buy yourself something pretty and stop bumming us down.”
He squinted his eyes and pursed his lips in annoyance, but thankfully our animosity from months before seemed to be gone.
Before anyone else could rain on my parade again, I heard tires scrunching gravel. “Good, that must be Aaron.”
I was sure his arrival would come in handy and help my case. He was stoic and severe, but he trusted my judge— what the fuck ?
I pointed at Mr. Dawson getting out of the passenger seat. “ What the hell is he doing here? You never told us you weren’t coming alone.”
Aaron raised one finger to the jerk, asking him to wait, and called me aside. Once we were a few feet away from the man, Aaron tried to placate me. “I know this isn’t ideal, but he’s still a superior. We need to make this work. ”
“Are you out of your mind? After all the shit he’s done and said—including about Zach!—if you expect me to welcome him in my company with open arms, I’m going to throw up.”
“I expect you to welcome him.”
“Then I’m going to throw up! I’m throwing up right now, hand me that garbage can!”
“He just wants to be around—”
“I wonder why.”
“In case we need something.” I raised one brow at him, and he inched closer to murmur. “I’m not comfortable with this either. But we depend on his approval, we need him to be on our side. Come on, Mia. You learned how to work with Ethan.”
“Well, I doubt Robbie is pierced and I’m not sleeping with him.”
“What?”
“What?” Damn .
The jerk in question approached us, grinning in obvious elation at my displeasure. “Thank you for having me here. Don’t worry about my presence, though. Just pretend I’m not here.”
“Are you going to act like you’re not here?”
Ethan, Danny, and Benny walked out to see what the commotion was about and cursed under their breaths at the sight of the man testing my patience.
“Come on, Ms. Bryant. We’re all aiming for the same results, aren’t we? Stop the cartel once and for all.” He threw me a phony smile I wanted to slap out of his face. “Now why don’t you invite me in? I must say, you have a lovely space. It’s almost like it never exploded and killed people.”
Danny jumped in front of Benny to keep him from jumping into Mr. Dawson’s throat, Ethan turned red and marched to the jerk, while Aaron stepped in front of him, with a hand on Ethan’s chest, torn between who he needed to control the most.
But that was my fight to deal with.
As Mr. Dawson tried to walk past me into the company, I palmed his chest with more strength than necessary—if his grunt brought me any satisfaction, I wouldn’t admit it—and stepped closer. I couldn’t even care that I had to lean my head back to be able to look at his face.
“Let’s make a couple of things very clear. This is my company, it’s my turf. You can think all you want that you’re a big shot in the agency, but at the most, you’re a high-ranked employee . You can get easily canned once you’re no longer useful. Something that will never happen to me in this place.” I pointed up. “Do you see the name at the top of the building? That’s mine. Whilst yours will always be a bad memory in the agency until it’s soon forgotten.”
I touched his tie as if to fix it and pulled the knot a little tighter until his eyes rounded slightly bigger. “Make no mistake. You’re wearing the suit, but I’m calling the shots. This has been my investigation since way before you came around to piss on it. So, if it bothers you that I’m leading this, and you feel emasculated, go buy a better car. Pay a better hooker. But you don’t get to jeopardize the investigation and disrespect me in my place while I’m saving your ass.” I said through gritted teeth. “If I say go, you go. If I say run, you run. If I say jump, you ask ‘On whom?’ Am I clear?”
He slapped my hand away and pulled the lapels of his suit to straighten himself. “I supposed it’s been a long time since you were fired from the agency. But let me remind you: no one has ever talked to me like that.”
I smiled with all the coldness I could muster. “Well, big day for you then. Now, why don’t you come in? It’s a pleasure to have your silent presence.”
I stretched my arm in a silent offer for him to go inside first. I loved how he tensed when he walked by the guys into the conference room. Haley looked at me in concern, but I just smiled and shook my head to let her know everything was fine. As if.
Once we were all inside, Danny closed the door behind us, and we all settled around the table.
Aaron took charge, not only to be professional but also to keep us from arguing again. “What did you find?”
They were there for a reason, and even though I liked Aaron, I wasn’t fond of spending more time than necessary with Mr. Dawson. So, I didn’t beat around the bush.
“They intend to hack into the DEA systems.”
He frowned. “For what? Erasing evidence? Looking for snitches?”
Ethan shook his head. “To send a message. Quite literally.” At Aaron and Mr. Dawson’s quizzical expressions, he explained, “They intend on hacking not only the DEA but other agencies as well. They want to leak information about their operation, who within the high ranks are helping them, names of the congress members, big corporations, businessmen, everyone who somehow funded the cartel but aren’t in their good graces anymore. They plan on revealing everything the government has been trying to hide.”
“They want to discredit us,” Mr. Dawson sneered. “Do you have any idea what will happen if they go through with it? Our federal agencies will be doomed, our credibility will tank, our international relationships will suffer. They need to be stopped.”
“That’s exactly why we’re all here,” Aaron assured him but stared at us in search of a white rabbit inside a magician’s hat.
Mr. Dawson interlaced his fingers over the table. “So how do you plan on stopping this?”
“We should do it,” I blurted .
They all stared at me in confusion, and I could swear Aaron was pleading with me with his eyes not to do anything stupid. Well, if he didn’t want anything stupid, he shouldn’t have come to me. It was solely his fault.
“We should do it before them. We should do it as if we were them.”
Mr. Dawson squinted at me. “Please, tell me you’re not suggesting what I think you are.”
“We know most of their secrets, we also know a lot of big names who work for them.”
“Their recruitment,” Ethan whispered in understanding.
I straightened up in my chair, feeling the excitement flow through me. “Exactly. We anticipate their attack and take away their advantage. They won’t risk doing it to the people who are funding them. They’ll do to those who turned their backs, the ones who aren’t useful anymore. So, let’s take their bigger names out.”
“That will cut their money injection,” Ethan concluded, already on board. “And ruffle feathers inside the cartel. They’ll waste time trying to solve the blow.”
“And that’s when we force Keyes and Salazar out! We can—”
“That’s preposterous!” Mr. Dawson exclaimed. “We can’t leak that kind of information.”
“Why the hell not? ”
He looked at me like I’d lost my mind. “Years of hard work and dedication lost over a rushed decision. It’d hurt all these agencies’ prestige.”
I leaned over the table and stared into his eyes. “The agencies’ prestige or yours? You can either protect the community or you can protect your ass. You can’t do both.”
Appropriately scorned, his face turned red as he scoffed at Aaron. “I can’t believe we’re working with this woman.”
I beamed at him. “If it’s any consolation, you’re also paying this woman a crazy amount of money.”
“I have half of mind to leave—”
“So many zeroes,” I whispered dramatically, as Ben and Danny smiled, and Ethan threw daggers at the jerk.
“You listen—”
“Enough!” Aaron boomed before composing himself. “Sir,” he cleared his throat, “their suggestion is valid. The cartel has been one step ahead of us this whole time. It seems like a good way to take the Alacráns’ advantage away and lead the narrative. We can take some very dangerous people out of the streets in the process, or at least hurt their business, and even force Salazar and Keyes out of hiding.”
“And how do you propose to do that?”
We stayed silent, and I wracked my brain on a way to get them. My head was starting to get dizzy again, and my left hand and arm were driving me crazy with their tingling. But I pushed through the discomfort. We needed a breakthrough.
I looked at Ethan across from me, and we stared at each other, searching in each other’s eyes for a way to make our plan work.
He rounded his eyes and gifted me with a huge grin. “We announce their strategies as well. We know how they operate; we know where most of their hiding spaces are. So, instead of letting them seek refuge in their bases—”
“We take their safety places away,” I completed. That man was a genius. And that was why I’d been sleeping with him every night. That and other reasons. “We can send the messages as if they were announcing their next steps. So, of course, they won’t be able to do that.”
Danny frowned. “What do you mean?”
“We know how they usually deal with their business; we can anticipate their next step. Let’s say they’d likely close a business and transport their commodities to their base near the state border. So, that’s what we’re going to announce as if they were admitting to that to taunt the police. They’ll be forced to do something different.”
Ethan tapped the tip of his index finger on the table to enforce my point. “If we do it with their normal routes and customary modus operandi , they’ll have to find a new way to assure their deals are met. We can corner them into doing what we want and going to somewhere we have complete control over.”
Mr. Dawson scowled. “How do you know all that? About their operation, their bases, their plan to hack the systems?”
We couldn’t let the agency know about Ethan’s software and my investigation. So, I shrugged. “I had an in with a chatty member. He was happy to help. But I have the feeling one of us will have to sleep with him.” I touched the tip of my nose with one hand and raised the other. “Not it!”
Aaron peered at me and Ethan. “How long do you think you need?”
Ethan pushed his glasses up his nose and squinted his eyes in concentration. “We still have a few days until the day they plan on doing it, but the time is tight. We need to establish their pattern first before hacking into all the agencies' systems. Because once we start, there’s no going back.”
Ben drummed his fingers on the table. “Why not just release a statement with our findings?”
I rubbed my hand to alleviate my discomfort. “Because that would be us accusing them. They could just stay quiet and let it die down. They could hire the hotshot lawyers in their pockets and make it all go away. But if we hack it into the feds’ systems and announce their dirty deed as if we were them, it’ll seem like their admission. They’ll be under scrutiny and with no idea we were the ones to do it. They’ll most likely believe one of their competitors did it. ”
“We could have a war in our hands,” Mr. Dawson countered, but with worry and not venom this time. Which surprised me.
“A war they’re not ready for,” I assure him.
Mr. Dawson took in a deep breath and looked down, shaking his head. I was ready to defend our case again when he gazed up at us. “This can’t leave this room. If you think this will work, I believe you and I’ll even endorse this madness. But you can’t tell a soul about it.”
“How about our safety?” I asked. “I know this might look…out of the ordinary. But I want assurance we won’t be penalized for it. Especially Ethan since he’s the one who’ll hack into the systems.”
Mr. Dawson rubbed his eyes and sighed, as his shoulders dropped. That was the first time I noticed he looked exhausted.
“Scott and I will come up with a memo about it, exempting you from all legal responsibility. This is part of the investigation, and I’m endorsing it. I can’t believe I’m endorsing it,” he murmured.
Aaron nodded and stood up. “Let’s start the clock.”
“Tomorrow, we rest.”