Chapter 33
Chapter Thirty-Three
Callie dropped into the vacant chair and waited for someone to speak.
She was trying not to freak out. They were on her side, whoever they were.
Weren’t they?
Seth dragged a round stool on wheels over and sat beside her. Then he tapped some keys on his laptop and the display appeared on the overhead. “We need to ask you some questions.”
Callie’s heart sank to her toes. The edges of her vision grew black as panic hovered there.
“That’s my code.” She whipped her head to Seth. “How did you get my code? What’s going on? Who are you?”
“You’re working on the Athena satellite project,” Alex said, and her head whipped to him next. “We’re here to protect it. And we need your help.”
Her heart was hammering, and her brain was in overload. She had to think, had to process all the information she had and make a decision. Athena was top secret . She didn’t even know what it was supposed to do when it was done, but she knew what she had to work on.
The ability to maneuver the satellite in orbit, to send commands that told it when to link up with other satellites, and the failsafes that had to be put in place were critical. It was a surveillance system intended to provide early warning capabilities to Washington. Nothing new about that except that it was going to be faster and better than anything they had now.
“I… I don’t know what to say.” She looked at Seth once more, her heart warring with her head again. Only this time her head had the upper hand because he’d clearly lied to her. “All this time, you knew about Athena. All your questions about what I was doing…”
He looked contrite. Or maybe she just wanted him to be. “I couldn’t tell you, same as you couldn’t tell me. Like Ghost said, we’re here to protect the project. It’s clear there are bad actors trying to steal it or sabotage it. We can’t let that happen. You can help.”
“Are you even military?” Tears pricked her eyes. “Has any of this been real?”
His gaze shuttered. That told her all she needed to know. He’d never cared about her. The sex? That was something he’d done because he could. Because she’d wanted him to. Oh, she believed he cared about protecting her. He hadn’t lied about that. But the rest of it?
Not real.
She believed Mia was real, but he’d probably told her to elicit sympathy. To make her care much quicker than she would otherwise have done.
Except that didn’t make sense, not really.
Still, she was too angry to let go of the theory. The hurt.
“It’s real, Callie,” he said, his voice rougher than usual. “We’re a team of special operators on a mission from Washington. We report to the highest levels.”
“Which I’d prefer we didn’t have to prove by making a phone call. Bringing you into this room has painted a giant target on our backs,” Alex—or was it Ghost?—drawled. “My ass is so fucked these days it’s a wonder I can even get out of bed most mornings.”
Callie stared at him. What he did with his face might or might not be termed a smile. She thought it was supposed to reassure her though.
“Not literally,” he said. “I love these guys like brothers, not boyfriends. Think they feel the same for me.”
“Amen,” the rest of them echoed with varying notes of no way in hell in their voices. It would have been funny if not for the whole betrayal-of-trust thing.
Callie pulled in a deep breath and huffed it out again. “Okay, fine, whatever. Based on this room, and that secure phone, I’m going to accept this isn’t an elaborate hoax. Not to mention you’ve got my code up there. Which, how the hell did you get that?”
“The security assessment at Griffin Research a couple of weeks ago,” Kane said. “We might have hacked into the system while we were there.”
Chance raised his hand like a reluctant student. “I entered your lab.”
“I remember.”
“I may have replaced a couple of connector cables.”
“So you knew what Mikhail’s cable was when I gave it to you.” She did not look at Seth. “Because you guys already smuggled your own inside the lab.”
“I’m sorry, but yes,” Seth replied. “We needed to know what was going on in there. It was the best way to find out.”
“Oh my God, I can’t believe this.” She put her hands over her eyes and shook her head. “Did you know about Mikhail? Did you target me?”
“We didn’t target you. And we didn’t know anything about Mikhail Volkov until you told us. Which was helpful,” Alex/Ghost said. “When we said we would protect you, we meant it. I’m gonna be blunt here and say that if you hadn’t come to us, you’d be in enemy hands by now. Or dead. That’s a possibility too.”
Her pulse throbbed with hot anger. And maybe a little guilt for saying they’d targeted her. But it was a path she’d started down, so she had to finish it.
“I’m thankful for your help. But I also have to wonder if maybe you didn’t engineer that fire to get me here in the first place.”
“Jesus,” Seth said. “We’re the good guys, Callie. I get you being pissed that I kept the truth from you, but I wasn’t at liberty to say, for fuck’s sake. Nobody in this room would ever go after a civilian that way. An enemy combatant, a terrorist, a foreign agent? Sure. But not you. There was nothing to indicate you were involved. We checked.”
She whipped her gaze to him. “You knew who I was, knew everything about me, before I ever walked in here the other day, didn’t you?”
His eyes snapped with anger. And something else?
“Yes. It’s my fucking job. I background check everyone who comes within spitting distance of us or this project. Now, are you going to help us with that code or what?”
Their gazes tangled for a long moment. Long enough that she heard somebody whisper, “Is this what I think it is? Because they haven’t stopped staring soulfully at each other yet.”
“Yep, I’d say so.”
“ Our Seth? Really?”
She didn’t know who said any of these things because she was still glaring at the man glaring back.
A banging sound made her look away. Alex/Ghost had dropped his forehead to the table. Repeatedly. “Why? Why me, Lord? What have I ever done to you?”
“Is he going to be okay?” Callie asked, looking across the table at the men sitting on that side.
Kane shrugged. “Probably. Maybe. It’s a thing. Don’t ask.”
“It’s a fucking pain in my ass,” Alex/Ghost said, sitting up again. “What is in the damned water in this town? Think we need to be investigating that shit too.”
“Please, Callie,” Seth said. “Just help us out. Tell us what this code does.”
“You’ve got computer skills. You figure it out.”
“I’m not a programmer.”
“But you do know more than you let on, don’t you? The way you fixed Colleen’s computer that day.” She shook her head. “I was too focused on my own problems to really think about it, but you had to have hacked into it. You can’t just bypass the setup screens that easily. You know code.”
His eyes flashed. “Yes, I know code. I don’t write it like this. I hack into systems. I don’t create them.”
He was a hacker. Of course he was. Nothing about the time they’d spent together was real. Nothing.
He’d been hacking into her, finding her weak spots. Exploiting them.
“Fine, I’ll tell you what’s in it.” Her throat ached. She didn’t have the energy to fight anymore. And though she was hurt and pissed, she believed these men were trying to keep Athena safe. “How do you want me to do this? What you’ve got there is only a section, a big section, but still not the complete code. I can talk you through it or whiteboard it. You tell me.”
“Talk us through it,” Alex/Ghost said. “If we need something more, we’ll address it.”
She pointed at the screen. “This section is the initial sequence. I could have made it more obvious, but considering the sensitivity of the project, it’s standard procedure to make it obscure. The instructions aren’t complicated, but the code looks like they are. Less easy to hack into. Which is exactly what you want with something like this.”
She talked them through sections, explaining the process of how she came up with the code for the instructions. A part of her was riddled with guilt for talking about it, but mostly she was relieved. Like when she’d initially come to One Shot Tactical for help. She wasn’t carrying the weight on her own anymore.
She was still angry with Seth for the deception. Still hurt. He hadn’t needed to make her care about him. He could have just brought her to the SCIF in the first place. If they’d briefed her then, she wouldn’t have gotten her stupid heart into a tangle.
“These are your inputs. Is this the full code?” Alex/Ghost asked.
“No. If Seth isolated my inputs, these are the parts I worked on. And I remember a lot about the full code, but I don’t have it memorized. I bet you have a copy. You’d have been stupid not to steal it while you were inside the system.”
Seth exchanged a look with Alex/Ghost. Nobody said anything.
Callie folded her arms. “It won’t do you any good. As a whole, it doesn’t work. Yet. I was trying to figure out why the night the fire started. I ran a diagnostic for ghost code, but it returned a negative result. It should be impossible anyway since we have version control systems in place.”
“Can you fix it?” Seth asked.
“Maybe. I just need the time and the tools. I might have found the problem if the fire hadn’t started and I could have kept working.”
“What do you need to work on it here?” Alex/Ghost said.
“At least two monitors. A whiteboard. And I’ll need a code editor. But I’m not sure I should be doing this. How do I know you aren’t planning to take this code and bypass the company, give it to NASA or MDA? A lot of people depend on Griffin Research for their livelihoods.”
“Callie, we’re not thieves,” Seth said. “This is bigger than you realize.”
“Okay. So tell me. What is Athena really? Why is it so damned interesting to everybody? We were told it’s a network of defensive satellites. That’s nothing new. Why do you care about it? Why was Mikhail trying to get me to give him access to our code? It’s an advance, but it’s not revolutionary tech.”
“That’s where you’d be wrong,” Alex/Ghost told her. “It is a defensive satellite. But it’s the most technologically advanced system this world has ever produced. Once the component parts are finished, Athena will create a net over this country that makes us impervious to nuclear or EMP attack. It’s a shield, basically, that deactivates weapons. It doesn’t rely on destroying them with lasers or shooting them down. It repels them and then destroys them with their own onboard systems. Can you understand why we’re concerned?”
“That’s not… How?”
“Yeah, I don’t understand it either, but it’s obviously critical that we protect it. There are a lot of important parts, any one of which would be a target for spies. Your company is writing the instruction code to control the system. Mikhail’s employer, whoever that might be, could sell the technology to the highest bidder. Or, if his employer is actually a rival nation, they could use it to take control once Athena is live. There are a lot of possibilities here, none of them very good.”
A chill worked its way through her system, making everything numb. “You’re saying Mikhail was a spy.”
“Probably. Does that surprise you?” Alex/Ghost asked.
Hurt crawled its way into her heart again.
“Nothing surprises me anymore. You never really know anyone, no matter that you think you do.” She swallowed the knot of tears in her throat. “Everybody lies. Especially when they have an ulterior motive for getting close to you.”