Chapter 22
Chapter Twenty-Two
Callie hopped in the truck and belted herself in, then fixed him with a look. He could see that she was fighting panic. “What happened?” she blurted. “Is it Nikki? Did they get to her?”
“Nikki’s fine.”
He should have thought to tell her that when he’d called her, but he’d been so focused on shifting the plan that it hadn’t occurred to him that’s where her mind would go. It should have, though. He swore to himself for not thinking of it and putting her through needless worry.
“Oh, thank God,” she breathed, leaning her head back against the seat as he navigated the parking garage and headed for the highway. “When you said you’d tell me in the truck, all I could think was that Nikki was in danger.”
“I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking. I should have reassured you.”
“It’s over now. But something happened. What?”
There was no easy way to tell her, so he ripped the Band-aid off and said the words. “Somebody broke into your house. I got the alerts and checked the cameras. Two men with ski masks. Looks like they tossed things around a bit. They were looking for something. Any idea what?”
Her jaw hung open, her eyes wide. “I… No. I have no idea. Wh-what about Charlie? They didn’t hurt him, did they?”
“No. He’s in his stall, eating hay. I looked at him through the feed a few minutes ago.”
Seth flexed his hands on the wheel. He was trying to maintain his cool here, but he was also pissed that these guys had gotten the jump on them. Whoever set the meeting never had any intention of keeping it. It’d been a distraction, and none of them had seen it coming. They’d been focused on this asshole trying to get to Callie.
“You’re hiding something from me, Callie. I asked you if there was anything you were doing that nobody else could do. You said no. Your body language said the opposite.”
He was done tiptoeing around. Ghost Ops hadn’t been able to infiltrate Griffin Research Labs to look for surveillance equipment, or install their own, because the facility was occupied twenty-four hours a day while they worked to open up again.
But he’d installed the cameras at Callie’s place yesterday, the window and door alarms, and he’d set up a script to filter all her input on the computers at Griffin Research Labs. It had filtered a lot of material so far, but none of it made sense to him. He had a good understanding of programming languages, and he could do a lot with a computer, but he didn’t know enough to figure out what she’d been doing.
His queries on the bulletin board had only been partly answered. Dima Smirnov was also SVR, no surprise, but there was no word on whether Cyril Dyka, the Polish student he’d been impersonating, was dead or alive.
Seth still didn’t know if Callie was tied to Smirnov or Fedorov in any way. He hoped not but he wasn’t going to operate on assumptions, especially when she was keeping something from him. He needed cold, hard information.
“It’s not something I can share,” she said, her voice stiff. “It’s sensitive information. I’m not authorized to talk about company projects if you aren’t cleared. And you aren’t.”
“Don’t tell me about the project. Tell what you’re doing that somebody’s interested in.”
She was silent, her head turned as they flew down I-565. Her arms were folded over her chest, and she’d slumped down in the seat as if trying to make herself smaller.
Seth bit back a growl. “Callie. I’m trying to keep you safe. Somebody just trashed your place looking for something, and you won’t tell me what. Doesn’t that strike you as more than a bit stupid here?”
She whirled on him. “I don’t know what they want! I don’t! I don’t work on the project at home because it’s not a secure facility! There’s nothing they could want. Mikhail asked questions, tried to get me to talk about what we were doing, and then he gave me that cable. Maybe they want it back. You ever think of that?”
He had, but it was a lot of trouble to go to for something that any hacker worth his salt could buy on the internet. They weren’t proprietary. There would be no identifying information about who wanted her to tap her government computer. All it did was give them a back door into the secure servers the way the Ghost Ops team had installed.
“Nobody cares about the cable. They’re easy to buy if you know where to look. There’s no identifying information on it. It doesn’t record anything. All it does is create a conduit.”
She folded her arms and threw herself against the seat again.
“Maybe they don’t know that.”
“Then they’re fucking stupid. And I don’t think they’re stupid.” He was growing angrier by the second. Frustrated as fuck. “You know what? You obviously think you’ve got this figured out, so maybe you don’t need me after all. You can keep the alarm system and I’ll send you a bill. But unless you start talking ASAP, I’m out. I’m not risking my ass for you when you can’t even give me a straight fucking answer.”
She dropped her head into her hands and shook it. “I hate you.”
The sound was muffled, and his heart squeezed a fraction at the despair in her voice. He hardened it because he couldn’t afford to feel anything except fury.
“It’s okay. You aren’t the first.”
Mandy’s parents had certainly hated him. Not that he could blame them. He’d gotten their seventeen-year-old daughter pregnant. He’d only been seventeen himself, and it took two to tango, but in their eyes he’d been a mongrel who’d defiled their princess.
Seth shoved those thoughts away. They weren’t productive or useful. That time of his life was miles in the rearview.
Callie didn’t speak again until he exited the highway and started down the country roads that led to Sutton’s Creek.
“I write code,” she said into the darkness between them, her voice soft. “We’re working on a satellite. It’s top secret so I can’t say more than that. But I’m writing the command instructions. Our whole team is, I should say—but there’s been trouble with the code, things not working the way they should. I fix it, tweak it, write new instructions. Dr. Robbins knows. If anybody else does, they pretend they don’t.”
Holy shit. A chill slid down his spine. Callie wasn’t just part of the team writing the code for Athena’s command system, she was the one actually doing the work. The instructions that, if compromised, would create a back door into a system that could change the world.
Or end it.
“Why would you be the one to write the instructions when you have a team? And why in secret?”
“Because I’m good at it. I pretend to everyone that I don’t know as much as I do—but writing code is like speaking another language to me. One I was born knowing. Of course I wasn’t born knowing it, but that’s how innate it feels. I just… can .”
The goosebumps on his arms were still there. “And why don’t you want your team to know?”
She snorted. “You already said it once before. I’m twenty-six, Seth. I’m female. You’ve never been mansplained a day in your life, but if I had a dollar for every time…” She shook her head. “Well, I’d be pretty well off. Men, especially older ones, think they know everything. And computer programming is a science, which means men have always dominated the field. They think they’re better at it and, believe me, they have no problems letting me know it. One of the senior programmers has made it his mission to question everything I do. Leo Spinner has been with Griffin Research since they were founded in 2001. He doesn’t like Dr. Robbins either, but she’s his boss so he takes it out on me. Dr. Robbins is female so she gets what it’s like. She’s in her forties, so she’s had to fight harder than I have. She’s a good person. A good boss. The other men on the team resent her sometimes because they all think Leo should be the one leading them. I see it. She knows it, too. How could she not? So, with her permission, I fix what the other programmers do if I see a better way, tweak it, make it work. Usually. Lately it’s not working, and I don’t know why.”
“Did Mikhail know you were writing the code?”
Her body slumped a little lower in the seat, her head turned away from him. “Yes. I didn’t tell him what I was working on, but in the early days when I was excited about the job and my promotion to the team, yes, I told him. I shared more than I should. Not classified things. Things about me. The more I told him, the more he wanted to know.”
“Jesus,” he muttered.
She swung around to look at him. “I was stupid, I know. I was skirting a line telling him that much, but I thought he was a friend. He’d helped me when I needed it. By the time I realized he wanted me to tell him everything, it was too late.”
“He knew what the project was about, Callie. Or suspected it anyway.”
He could hear the shock in her silence. “I don’t see how he could.”
“His contact. Somebody at Griffin Research Labs knows what they’re working on, and they told Mikhail. Not the technical aspects, because then he wouldn’t need you, but enough.” He thought about it for a minute. “It’s more than that, though. It was you specifically. He knew about your facility with programming languages, didn’t he?”
“I told him, yes. We were dating in the early days in Poland, and I wanted to impress him. Plus all that stuff I said before about thinking we had a lot in common with immigrant parents. I thought, back then, that maybe he was the one. There weren’t sparks, but there was a comfortable companionship kind of thing going on. He didn’t push me for physical intimacy—or, hell, for anything back then. Maybe that’s why I was so unprepared when he started pushing about my job.”
Seth’s anger simmered. “He was grooming you, Callie. He picked you out of the crowd and he groomed you. My guess is he already knew about your ability.”
She was quiet as she thought about it. “That fucker,” she swore when he’d nearly given up hope of her responding. “Meeting him was never by chance, though I thought it was at the time. We met in the bar one night when I went with my students for a drink. He was there because of me. Because he already knew. I was teaching programming to Polish soldiers. He could have gotten my CV from any of them. I didn’t say how easy I found programming, but my accomplishments were there. But how could he know months before it happened that there would be a job in Huntsville on this program?”
“He probably didn’t. He just knew you were somebody they could use.”
“They?”
“Whoever he worked for.”
The Dashevsky Group. The Russian government. The Polish government. Whoever it’d been.
“I don’t have anything anybody could want. I don’t understand this at all.”
He believed her. She was too shocked—and too disillusioned with Volkov—not to.
But it didn’t change the fact two men had busted into her house, regardless of the alarm that would have been blaring, and took the time to turn it upside down. They wanted something and they’d known she wouldn’t be there because they’d planned it when they’d set the meeting at Bridge Street. They hadn’t known her sister wouldn’t be home, which chilled his blood—unless they did somehow.
He’d checked for bugs. Cameras, audio. He’d deployed a signal jammer and then swept for equipment. There was nothing. But they knew where Callie lived, and they’d probably been watching. Which meant they also knew about him even before they’d gone inside and seen his duffel.
Sonofabitch.
He wished that Luna would have been there. Then again, not, because they might have shot her rather than be deterred by her bark. He wouldn’t want that on his conscience. He’d insisted on the dog because he knew she’d be a good deterrent to ordinary criminals.
Not to determined ones looking for something they desperately wanted. Hell, it was like the Ringwraiths had descended to search for the One Ring. They wouldn’t let a dog or a teenager stand in their way.
Thank God neither had been there.
When Seth reached Callie’s house and turned to go up the long drive, he knew he’d find Ghost, Blaze, and Chance already there with the police cruiser still flashing its lights. Ethan and Kane were behind him, on his six, making sure nobody tried to attack Callie while they were on the road.
Overkill? Maybe, but considering what she’d just told him about what she was doing at work, he didn’t think so. Callie had gone from curiously interesting to vitally important to the mission in the space of a heartbeat.
And he was going to have to tell his team what she’d told him. There was no question of that.
He parked by the house, and they got out. Callie’s Toyota was nearby, the driver’s side window shattered. All the doors were open. The alarm had given up already, or it’d been disconnected. Callie made a distressed sound at the sight of it. Seth braced because he suspected that wasn’t the worst of it.
“Come on, let’s get inside. Nothing we can do about the vehicle yet.”
Blaze stood in the doorway as they approached, looking pissed. Seth knew it was bad by that look. He reached for Callie’s hand and stopped her. Turned her to him and put his hands on either side of her face.
“Listen to me, Callie. They were in a hurry. They would have upended everything trying to find what they wanted. It won’t be good.”
She already looked shell-shocked as she gazed up at him. “Okay.”
He pressed a kiss to her forehead, just because, and then took her hand again and led the way.
The living room was a disaster. Callie gasped beside him, her free hand flying to her mouth. It was like something from a movie where the furniture had been upended, cushions sliced open, and carpets dragged back. Her knickknacks, which were few, had been tossed carelessly onto the floor. Frames had been ripped open, the photos discarded before the frame was dropped, the glass shattering.
The dishes were broken on the floor, the cabinet doors open. The bedrooms hadn’t fared any better.
Callie’s reading journal was ripped apart on her bed, the mattress slashed. There was paper everywhere, probably from her other journals. He could see by the look on her face that she was angry and devastated at the same time.
It was part willful destruction and part search mission. They’d been looking for something but also sending a message.
She’d texted Mikhail’s number back at the bookstore but hadn’t gotten a reply. He expected she would soon.
Her eyes shimmered as she turned to face him in her bedroom. “I don’t have anything . I don’t take my work home. There’s nothing here. Why would somebody do this?”
Seth tugged her into his arms. He didn’t know why he did it other than she looked like she needed comforting. She wrapped her arms around him and stood with her face pressed to his shirt. He figured she was drying her tears on him. He didn’t care.
“They think you have something. A memory stick or a computer chip maybe.”
“I don’t. I’d be arrested if I took something like that and the company found out. Prosecuted and thrown in jail for divulging classified information. Why would I do that?”
She wouldn’t. He knew she wouldn’t. She wouldn’t do anything to risk her sister’s life being completely uprooted by losing another family member.
He didn’t say what else he was thinking. That what was in her head was also valuable. She probably didn’t have every line of code perfectly memorized, but there were chunks in there. He’d bet on that.
If these people couldn’t get a memory stick, they might decide to come for her instead.
“I don’t want to stay here,” she whispered against his shirt. “But I can’t leave Charlie.”
“We can stay somewhere tonight, then come back in the morning and feed him. Then we’ll clean up.”
She tipped her head back to look up at him. She looked lost, alone, and scared. He hated that for her. After all she and Nikki had been through, he fucking hated that somebody could make her look this way. Like she’d lost something precious all over again.
“I want to say yes, but I also feel like I need to stiffen my spine and refuse to let these assholes make me leave my home.”
“It’s okay to leave for one night, Callie. It’s dark, the police will leave and so will my guys. Then it’ll be you and me. And while I’m not in the least worried about my ability to protect you, I am worried about how you’re gonna jump at all the shadows and have trouble sleeping.”
She seemed to think about it. He could see the relief in her eyes, the yes that hovered on her tongue. But then she shook her head. “No. Nikki lost her home when my parents died. I lost it too because it was the one I grew up in. I won’t let anybody force me to feel that way again, and I won’t let her come home to a mess. I can work on cleaning up as much as possible starting tonight, plus we’ll have Luna back and she’ll let us know if anyone is coming. You’ll be here, like you said. Tomorrow night won’t be any different, so why not start now?”
Fucking hell, she was something. Brave, even when she was scared. Fiery, though she wanted to melt into a puddle and let somebody else take the reins.
“If that’s what you want.”
“It is. When you get thrown off the horse, you get right back up and get on again. You can’t let the horse win, because if they know they can buck you off and you won’t get back on, then they’ll do it every time because they don’t respect you. I spent my childhood getting back on even when I was scared. This isn’t all that different.”
“Nobody would fault you for walking away for one night.”
She huffed a breath. “I know. And I want to. Badly. But I won’t. Not if you’re here with me.”
“I’ll be with you.”
“You swear you’re as good as you say? If they come back, you’ll keep us safe?”
“Listen to me, Callie. I’ve got you. Nobody’s getting to you while I’m still breathing. I promise you that.”