Chapter Twenty-Two
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T urning the woman in his arms around to shield her from the rotor wash of the helo idling behind them on the rooftop of the luxury hotel in San Francisco, Jordan drew a fingertip down her cheek. This was their third time together, and he already wanted more. “Miss me.”
“I will.” Jana twined her arms around his neck and plastered her body—perfected by the best plastic surgeons money could buy—against him, a seductive smile on her shiny red lips. “When can I see you again?”
“Soon.” Just as soon as they could figure out how to make it work without raising suspicion. The level of planning needed to pull off the sneaking around made the affair almost as hot as the sex. “Be good.”
She smirked. “Never.”
Chuckling, he put his arm around her and led her across the helipad. He opened the rear door of the helicopter and helped her inside, enjoying the view when the long slit in the two-thousand-dollar red silk dress he’d bought her parted to reveal the entire length of her leg. High enough to give him a flash of the smooth skin between her legs.
He looked up to find her smiling at him in satisfaction, that familiar, hot gleam in her eyes, her nipples hard points against the thin fabric of her bodice. She never wore a bra or underwear when she was with him. To torment him as much as for easy access.
“I’m almost tempted to roll the dice and stay another night,” she said over the roar of the engine.
“Too risky.”
“I know. And you love it as much as I do.”
Grinning, he shut the door and walked across the rooftop to the steel access door where a bodyguard waited. Jana was stunning and an incredible fuck, but that’s not why he kept seeing her.
Fucking a rival’s young trophy wife right under the asshole’s arrogant nose got him off in a way sex never could.
His bodyguard escorted him down the freight elevator to the private vehicle waiting in the underground parking garage. Twenty-five minutes later, he was climbing the short set of steps into his private jet. A little more than two hours after that, he disembarked at a private airfield outside of Portland and got into another waiting vehicle for the drive to his estate, answering messages on the way.
But once he was finally seated at his desk in his locked office to do some work, his good mood evaporated when he saw the message waiting on the encrypted chat program.
Call me. Urgent.
“Goddammit,” he muttered. It meant the intel leak was even worse than he’d feared, and closer than he’d ever realized. No matter how much he wanted to deny the possibility after all the money he’d poured into making his part of the organization secure, it was now glaringly obvious that someone close to him had betrayed him.
Time to cull his inner circle.
Fuming, he called the IT guy back using an encrypted phone. “What’ve you found?” he demanded. It better be good. He was sick of not having answers, and throwing more money at the problem hadn’t gotten him any closer to a name. For all the good it’d done him, he might as well have put the money in a pile outside and set it on fire.
“The files in question were definitely copied. I’m still trying to figure out whether it was done remotely or not.”
Jesus Christ. A wave of cold swept through him. “How could someone have accessed my system? How ? I pay you an ungodly amount of money to make sure no one can.”
“I know, I’m not sure how this happened. I—”
“Find out. Find out now, and fix this. If you can tell me who it was, you’ll get a substantial reward. If not, we’re done.” And Jordan would be forced to have him killed because of what he knew.
“But—”
“You’ve got six hours. Not a minute more.” He ended the call and tossed his phone onto his desk in disgust. “ Fuck .”
His IT guy was the best money could buy. Some young prodigy only a handful of people in the world could afford, and Jordan kept him on personal retainer. The system shouldn’t have been hackable, let alone his most sensitive personal files. If anything in there was leaked, he was as good as dead.
Someone knocked on the door. “Go away,” he snarled, trying to think.
“It’s me—”
“Goddammit, I said go away!” He dismissed Jon, accessed the program he wanted on his computer and changed the passwords. Probably an exercise in futility at this point, but he was desperate to stop anyone else from getting the information he had. Including the most recent video of him and Jana, taken last month.
As soon as he was done, Jordan sat back and eyed the rug on the other side of the room that hid the access point to one of his safes. The one where he kept all the hard copies of his ammunition in the form of leverage. It was so damn ironic it would have been funny if it wasn’t so fucking scary.
For years he’d been diligently compiling material on anyone who might pose a threat to him, making digital copies of everything and storing it on his state-of-the-art system as a backup in case anyone managed to find and crack his safe to get the originals. And that accidental mistake could end up being his undoing.
His gaze caught on the far corner of the hand-woven Persian silk rug. The edge of it was crooked.
He got up, walked over and crouched down, his pulse beating faster. It was slight, but the corner wasn’t straight. As if someone had pulled it back and then hurriedly tried to fix it.
The exact part of the rug that needed to be moved to access the secret panel in the floor.
He stared at it, a sinking feeling taking hold. It wasn’t the cleaners. They weren’t allowed in here. The only people who had access were him, and the few people he allowed inside with him. People like Hawk. Angel. Jon—
The phone on his desk rang, shattering his concentration. He grabbed it and saw his lawyer’s name come up on the display. “Roger. You need something?” he said brusquely, not in the mood to deal with any more headaches. Someone had moved that rug. Someone he trusted.
“We’ve got a potential problem.”
His mood soured further. “What kind of problem?”
“I got an emergency call first thing this morning from my new client. He’s currently in jail for breaking and entering and assaulting a man in Crimson Point last night. He's been telling everyone he works for you.”
Jordan’s blood pressure jumped, his hand tightening around the receiver. “Is that right?”
“Everyone at the jail knows. I think it’s his way of trying to protect himself from the people on the inside.”
“What’s his name?” He would have the idiot dealt with. “Never heard of him,” he lied when Roger told him.
He recognized it as one of the men who had accompanied his inside man Mark at the hospital in Crimson Point to the meeting there last night. The one who was supposed to take care of the surprise fucking DEA agent Jordan had just found out about from a trusted source within the network, and make him disappear to protect that part of the operation.
Moving product in and out of the hospital was surprisingly easy, and lucrative. Losing that conduit would impact business in the region until another stable place could be set up.
“What do you want me to do with him?”
“Nothing.” Both problems needed to be eliminated immediately. The inept assassin, one, for having the colossal stupidity to publicly link himself to him and the organization, and, two, because he clearly didn’t know how to keep his mouth shut and posed a security risk. Then the DEA agent, for obvious reasons.
But that still didn’t tell him who the leak was. He stared at the crooked edge of the rug, fury welling up. Who would dare, knowing the leverage he had against them, and the price of betrayal?
“What’s the address of the place he broke into?” Jordan typed it into his computer and a map popped up with a red pin marking a small house on a residential street. “I’ve got it. Let me know if there’s any more information.”
The instant he disconnected he called his IT guy again. “Find out who owns the property at this address in Crimson Point.” He could do it himself, but he had a lot on his mind at the moment, and things like this were what he paid this asshole for. He gave the street and number.
“All right, give me a minute. Accessing county property records now.”
Jordan drummed his fingers on his desk, mind racing as he planned out his next steps. Thinking about all the people he’d allowed into this room the day before he’d left for Seattle.
The guy in jail was a dead man walking. But if Jordan didn’t find and stop whoever had accessed his files, so was he.
“The property’s owned by a construction company in Crimson Point.”
“No individual name attached to it?”
“Not that I can see. Do you want me to keep digging?”
“No.” It was enough to know the DEA agent had been there last night. Surely there would be some thread to pull on now. “But I need you to find and hack any potential security cameras facing that address. See if there’s footage of anyone coming or going from there last night from seven p.m. onward.”
He ended the call and wiped the sweat beading his upper lip, debating his options. This mess was partly his own fault. He shouldn’t have risked sending someone else to kill Barros. He should have had Angel deal with it in the first place.
And Angel had also been in this room the day Jordan left for Seattle.
He shot off a brief message to him. New task for you. Critical.
Angel called back within five minutes. “What’s the job?”
“New target. DEA agent named TJ Barros. I’ll send you a picture. He was last seen at a residential address in Crimson Point as of six hours ago.”
“Usual procedure?”
Meaning locating and eliminating the target. “No. Find him and bring him to me.”
“That’s it? Nothing else?”
“No. I want to question him in person. I need whatever intel he has. Then you can finish up.” By sending Barros to his maker and giving the DEA a clear message.
That he wasn’t afraid of them, and anyone who fucked with him would die.
Then he would deal with Angel.
“Got it. I’ll be in touch when I find something.”
Jordan battled to keep his voice calm. “This is time sensitive. Handling this quickly will be to your advantage.” Angel was motivated by money. Jordan understood and respected that. He might even let him live after this job—if it turned out he wasn’t the source of the leak.
“Understood.”
He set his phone down, struggling to curb the rage burning inside him. First, he would meet individually with the handful of people who made up his inner circle. Once Angel brought Barros in, Jordan would squeeze the bastard for intel on all his CIs using whatever means necessary. Then he would track all of them down individually if necessary.
One of them had to be the leak. And someone had stolen his files.
When Jordan found out who was responsible, he would kill every last one of them to protect himself.