Chapter 43
forty-three
Natalia
We’re running out of time.
The realization sits heavy in my belly with each passing second.
Bee, Sylvia, and Jake remain calm into the night.
They settle in as the hacker attempts to crack the drive, content to watch trash TV and eat takeout until the sun is long gone.
At some point during the night, Bee goes back to her office.
Jake and Sylvia form makeshift beds on the floor of the living room, chattering about what to get Aaron for Christmas before drifting into easy sleep.
I can’t as much as relax into the loveseat in the living room.
The peanut butter and jelly sandwich Sylvia made for me taunts me on the coffee table, two small bites taken right from the middle.
I should eat more. Work hard to get my strength up.
But the bread tastes like sawdust, and my stomach is filled with something I can’t name.
Something uneasy and restless that makes it impossible to eat.
Something between guilt and longing for a man I may never see again. Whatever I’m doing right now, it’s not enough. Sitting here just feels like a waste of time.
The carpeted floor creaks quietly as I tip-toe around a snoring Sylvia and Jake, moseying down the hallway until I’m standing in the doorway of Bee’s office.
Blue light from the monitors washes over her skin and hair, a soft yawn escaping her as she watches the computer in front of her. A different twinge of guilt blooms in my chest—that one of a guest being completely inconsiderate of the person helping them.
“You can go to sleep, you know.” I say quietly, apologizing when she jumps. “You don’t have to wait up for that. I can watch it.”
Bee waves me away. “You know, even if I lay down, I won’t be able to sleep. The curiosity will keep me up. It’s what makes me so good at this.” She says, sighing. “I hate a problem I can’t solve. It becomes all I can think about.”
I hum, walking into the office and plopping down on her chair.
“I feel like a terrible guest.”
“Don’t worry. You can’t be worse than Jake.
Last time he crashed here between missions, he used up all my expensive face wash.
It took me three months of saving for it, by the way.
Turns out he thought it was just ‘fancy body wash’.
” She says, snorting. “He has no idea how close he came to dying that night...”
I smile at the image, inspecting the scattered case files I left strewn all over her office. “I should clean these up, at least.”
Bee glances over at them from her desk. “Did you find anything good on those?”
“Nothing that makes sense.” I look at the stacks of paper dubiously, putting them back in the file box in front of me and sliding the lid on top.
“Reynaldo died on the way to supermax, but the convoy was intercepted by his men, who tried freeing him and killed him in the crossfire. It doesn’t make sense, though.
Matias told me he took over after Reynaldo went to prison—he wouldn’t have risked his life and that of his men to get him out. ”
Bee glances over at the files. “Didn’t the guy get shot in the head?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s some rescue squad.” She whistles. “More like they hired a hit squad to take the guy out, eh?” The hacker snorts—but something about those words nag at me.
“Did Jake ever mention if they arrested anyone that day?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Anyone else die in the crossfire?”
“Nope. Just Reynaldo.”
I sigh, an uneasy thought forming in my head. “Does that sound like a squad that’s bad at their job? Or one that knew exactly what their orders were?”
Bee stops typing and turns to face me, her brows pinched. “Shit. Matias got this drive from Reynaldo?”
“Yeah, he took it with the rest of Reynaldo’s things when he was arrested.” I sit up. “Why do you ask?”
“It’s got some serious level encryption. My computer’s barely made a dent on this, Natalia. I’ve got some serious computing power, and all I have so far are some folder names and metadata.”
I amble over to the computer, skimming a few vaguely worded folders that don’t tell us anything.
“Can you see what’s in the ones labeled Inventory?” Bee acquiesces and opens the folder, and a list of random numbers materialize in front of us. Each entry four digits, the list goes on in no particular order.
“Well, that’s anticlimactic.” Bee blows out a breath, scrolling through the random assortment of numbers. “Anything jump out at you?”
I take a closer look, biting back a frustrated sigh. “No. Why couldn’t he just put names instead of—” The words fall off my tongue when I note an emerging pattern. “Does that say two-seven-one-four?”
“Yes. Why?”
Why does that number feel familiar? It doesn’t mean anything to me, and yet…
I pace behind Bee’s chair, wracking my brain for a connection.
2714.
2714.
2714.
The answer smacks me like a brick wall. I stop mid-step, turning on one foot to face the hacker.
“That’s the number of the shipping container Sylvia found the girls in.
” It takes three paces to reach the file box, and then another two seconds to confirm it.
“Here’s a few more containers they found in the warehouse, are these on the list?
” I read them out and Bee scans the screen in front of her, eyes narrowing as they fly over the screen.
“Yes. They’re all here, at the end of the list.” She points at the monitor. “Is there a twenty-three thirteen in there somewhere?”
I tear through the files, scanning every page that catalogues the contents of the warehouse.
“…No. No mention of it.”
“It’s the very last entry.” She says, tapping the desk. “It should’ve been the last container delivered to that warehouse. Where could it have gone?”
I press my lips together. “It’s not like the FBI could have lost an entire shipping container.”
Bee slides me a sideways glance. “Unless…they didn’t want us to find it.” She sighs. “Look, when your sister was in witness protection and her location was leaked, we all assumed it was because of someone on the outside with a lot of money greasing the right palms. But…”
Just the mention of everything that happened that summer makes cold sweat break out on the back of my neck.
“‘But’ what?”
“Jake…Jake had a suspicion that it wasn’t that simple. That someone was…misusing information from the inside out. He suspected the FBI wasn’t…safe. When Reynaldo died, everyone just kind of moved on. The data leaks never happened again, so we had no reason to look into it.”
I drop into the oversized reading chair in the office, clutching the old files with clammy hands. The hard drive was supposed to give me leverage—something good enough to free Matias—and now all I have are more questions than before.
“So…someone sent kill squads after my sister while she was in witness protection. And then again, another squad to try and ‘free’ Reynaldo from prison.”
“Except he got a shot to the head. In the crossfire.” Bee adds dryly.
“And now, there’s a part of the seized assets that day that disappeared. Completely unaccounted for.”
Bee and I give each other a look. Because as much as I hate to admit it, it sounds like Reynaldo was more of a tool than an evil mastermind. “We need to find out what that shipping container had.”
I couldn’t agree more. “Any chance you can get a glimpse from that drive?”
Bee turns back to her computer and shakes her head.
“Not unless I get access to an NSA-level supercomputer in a basement somewhere. This drive…whoever encrypted it had access to some serious technology. Like, my type of technology. And I’m a government asset.” Bee purses her lips, tapping her fingers together as she thinks about our next move.
“Okay. Let’s try this. Jake had a USB on there with all of the digitized files. There’s a chance we could just be missing the file for that shipping container—or maybe Jake walked off with it and lost it or something, right? I can search the digitized files for any records.”
Good. Yes, that’s a good plan. I fumble through the box until I spot a nondescript black USB stick sliding around the bottom and hand it to the hacker.
“Are we supposed to be reading FBI files?”
She snorts. “If a tree falls in the woods, and no one is around to hear it…”
Bee jumps into action, a small black window flying with commands as she searches the drive with industrial fervor. She’s good. Really good.
“How did you become a…government asset?”
She purses her lips, watching her computer as it parses through the files.
“I…my mom got cancer when I was in college. She was one of those people that believed in others just being…good people. But she got shafted by her insurance company. They paid for as little as they could get away with. She had to put a second mortgage on our house—she worked so hard to buy it. The stress of the debt killed her, and the insurance company—they didn’t give a fuck.
In fact, when I was crying over her body at the hospital, the CEO was on the news announcing record profits.
” She swipes a glass tumbler from her desk and takes a sip.
“So…I hacked into their servers. I made every scrap of dirt I could find public knowledge. I let people see exactly how that scum used the money of poor, hard-working people just trying to stay alive. The CEO and everyone on the board had to resign. But it wasn’t enough.
” She says placidly, watching the screen like she’s talking about the weather.
“I hacked into the medical debt company, too. And I erased as much debt as I could get my hands on. Thousands of people. I was in jail for a while, until my handler read my file and decided to give me a try. I’d do it again, though.” She says with a sly grin.
I meet her grin. “Sorry about your mom.”
“It’s okay. She would’ve hated to see how my life turned out.” I laugh humorlessly at that—because that’s a sentiment we can both agree on.
“Oh, look—the OCR search is done. Let’s see,” she says, cracking her knuckles. “Nothing in the written reports. But—there’s an image search result.” She opens the photo in question on one of the screens to her right, and we both peer at it in silence.
Somewhere in her parking lot, outside, a car rolls down the street, dog yipping as doors close.
“Look—here it is!” She points at the screen, and it’s blurry, but it’s there. At the very edge of the photo, a navy blue shipping container labeled:
2313
“It’s so hard to see.”
“I know, let me see if I can improve the resolution.” Bee messes around with the image until she can zoom in on the dark corner of the picture, and the enhanced results?—
“Is that…hey look, someone was coming out of that container.”
I bite my lip, breathing through the sudden bile pushing up my throat. I know the person walking out of that shipping container.
“Yeah…that’s agent Bryce.” What are the chances?
Like Bee’s late mom, I want to give the benefit of the doubt to people, too. But there’s just something about the look on Agent Bryce’s face coming out of that shipping container that sends shivers down my spine.
“Bryce? Let me check something…”
The hacker slides to the other end of the desk, clicking her tongue as she checks something on Matias’ hard drive.
Bee fingers slow over the keyboard, then stop. She pushes away from the desk…her eyes widen.
“I think we’re going to have to wake Jake.”
“Why?”
“Because there’s a folder here named ‘Bryce’. The parent folder is named ‘Handlers’, Natalia.” My heart skips a beat, ice flickering up and down my spine. We give each other a wide-eyed look, soaking in the silence before the inevitable storm.
Bryce is dirty. Is he the person Matias has been searching for for years? Defenseless in prison, with his enemy plotting just a few feet away from him?
I dart for the hallway, intent on waking everyone in the house.
And then the sudden rip of bullets in the silence of the night air sends Bee and I to the ground.