Chapter 2
Chapter Two
Seth woke with a start, gulping air and sweating profusely. He whipped the covers back and lay in the dark, staring up at the ceiling. Why did he keep having this dream? Why now, after all this time?
He got out of bed and went into the bathroom, splashed water on his face, then headed for the kitchen to turn on the coffeepot. It was a little before five, but he could hear his housemate moving around downstairs. If Ghost hadn’t turned on the coffee yet, then he would.
When Seth entered the kitchen, the overhead light was already burning. Ghost looked up from where he stood by the counter, the coffee just starting to gurgle. “Rough night?”
Seth dragged a hand over his head and shrugged. “You know how it is. Wouldn’t be an operator if we didn’t have nightmares sometimes.”
Ghost arched an eyebrow and nodded. “Truth, brother,” he said before grabbing two mugs from the cabinet.
Truth . Precisely what Seth hadn’t admitted.
He didn’t dream about missions and mistakes. Didn’t dream about the brothers-in-arms he’d lost or the civilians whose lives were cut short by terrorists and tragedy.
Not usually.
What he dreamed about was closer to home. His own life. His own mistakes. The choice he’d made that haunted him to this day.
All he’d lost. All he didn’t deserve and would never have.
“Got a message last night from DC,” Ghost said.
Seth perked up. Anything to shift his attention somewhere else. Dwelling on all the things that made him a shitty person never got him anywhere except more convinced he was only on this team, close to these men, because they didn’t really know him. If they knew what he’d done, what would they think then?
Especially Blaze and Chance, two men who’d found women they adored—and would die for—since moving to Alabama. Chance had a baby on the way with Rory Harper, and Seth had never seen his friend so happy.
Blaze was ridiculously besotted with Emma Grace Sutton, the town doctor, and Seth wouldn’t be surprised if they had an announcement of their own one of these days.
He envied them. Hell, even Kane was hung up on Daphne Bryant, One Shot Tactical’s uber-competent receptionist-slash-assistant. Not that he’d admitted it to himself, let alone anyone else. He treated Daphne like the little sister he never had while the rest of them could see that, deep down, he wanted her to be more.
Seth hoped he figured it out before it was too late, considering Daphne was seeing Warren Trigg, the manager of the Piggly Wiggly. Or the Pig in local vernacular. Trigg from the Pig. The alliteration was lowkey hilarious in Seth’s opinion.
“There was a fire at Griffin Research Labs. Lab Two was destroyed. Lab Three sustained serious damage,” Ghost said.
Seth frowned. Lab Three was the secure lab where Chance had switched out a couple of normal cables with spy cables only a couple of weeks ago. “We should have rigged the place with cameras.”
He, Kane, and Chance had spent a week at GRL, going over their security while also gaining access to the inner workings of their secure network, thanks to USB cables with a Wi-Fi signal and a keystroke logger onboard. Indistinguishable from a normal cable, but they’d allowed Seth to see everything being worked on in the secure lab where the command and control system for the Athena Project was developed. Who accessed it, who worked on it. He hadn’t checked the feed this morning, but he probably needed to. The connection was wonky sometimes because he’d had to rig them to connect to the building’s wireless network, and outages affected reliability. Also why he’d put two cables in instead of one. A failsafe. But if they were down because of the fire, he wouldn’t be receiving anything.
“Those weren’t our orders, Phantom.” Ghost sighed. “But we should’ve and fuck Auerbach.”
Ronnie Auerbach was the president’s chief of staff. He seemed to have it in for Ghost Ops on some level, though if he wanted them shut down, Seth was pretty sure he could talk President Willis into it. Maybe it was that the president wanted Ghost Ops, and he thought they were a liability. He was the one behind the policy that they weren’t going to be acknowledged or saved if they got themselves in trouble. To protect the president’s reputation and legacy and give her deniability. It made sense, but it was also a shitty thing to do if you asked him. Nobody had.
“On the other hand,” Ghost continued with a sigh, “with the FBI sniffing around, we didn’t need to leave anything anyone might find. Rigging Royal Shipping with surveillance was one thing. A top-secret lab is another. The computer hack is enough. Or was.”
The coffeepot beeped, and Ghost poured two mugs, handed one to Seth. He took a swig of hot, black coffee, thanking the powers that be that Ghost liked it strong, too. Just what he needed.
“Guess I should power up and see if we still have access.”
“That’d be a good start. Caroline Crowell was in the lab when the fire started.”
That stopped Seth in his tracks. He’d been heading over to the table to open his laptop. Instead, he turned to look at Ghost. “You think she started it?”
“I don’t know. We need the badging records for the labs, see if she exited at any point before the fire started. If she went into Lab Two and then returned, it could have been her.”
Seth’s gut churned. “She could have wiped the records. She’s a programmer. She’d probably know how to do it.”
“True. But she nearly got herself killed from smoke inhalation before the sprinklers activated.”
Seth pictured the woman he’d only spoken to a couple of times. She’d been standoffish, cool. But she’d also seemed young, maybe a bit scared. He’d attributed that to her fear of getting caught. She was also pretty in that soft way nerdy girls could be, with long brown hair, green eyes behind the glasses she wore when working, and pale skin that told of long nights in the lab or hunched over a computer.
“Maybe she did that too. Made it look like it couldn’t possibly be her.”
Ghost took a sip of his coffee. “Maybe so. See what you can find out.”
Seth sat at the table and opened his computer. “I’m on it.”