Chapter 7
CHAPTER SEVEN
Harper nearly sent the incoming call from her mom to voicemail. It was a few minutes after midnight and she’d had a long, stressful day. But there was no more work to be done tonight, and the sound of her mom’s voice might trigger some memories.
Earlier, she’d created an algorithm to modify the teams’ facial recognition program to locate a plate number and vehicle instead of a face.
Then she not-so-legally accessed all of the city’s available CCTV footage between the time the Mercedes was stolen and the explosion.
And now, there was nothing left to do but wait and hope for results.
She hadn’t felt like facing the team, so she’d changed into comfortable plaid flannel pajama bottoms and one of her favorite oversized tees.
Then grabbed the hotel pillow, already encased in her pink satin pillowcase she never traveled without—a little bit of home on the road—and parked herself on the bed.
“You know it’s after midnight here, right?” Harper answered.
“How could I know that when I don’t know where here is,” her mom pointed out. “And you sound awake. So, why are you up?”
“Big meeting tomorrow. I have a deadline.” And a terrorist to stop.
She hated lying, but what choice did she have? It was a necessary evil to keep her family safe. And the heavy weight of her thoughts struck a nerve. If Roman did have a secret, was it to protect her?
“And you can’t tell me where you are?” Her voice dipped in the middle from concern.
Her mom, who Harper never referred to as her “adoptive mom,” was a worrier.
If Harper had her way, she’d never tell her when she had to leave town.
But God forbid Harper didn’t answer her phone or the door when she was supposed to be home.
Her mom would have the fire department or police at her place within the hour.
Harper briefly glanced back at the painting over her bed, a watercolor image of men and women with linked hands dancing in a closed circle. “I’m in a beautiful city.” One Roman seemed to despise. And the second the wheels of the plane had hit the tarmac, A.J. and Finn also picked up on that fact.
Chris, a lover of history, had mentioned that Barcelona’s recorded history had begun with the Romans, which, of course, A.J. had found amusing and hadn’t stopped making “Roman” jokes to somehow try and lighten Roman’s foul mood.
Okay, see, I already remember more and more. Keep talking, Mom.
“Which beautiful city? Any good-looking men there? Did Roman come with you?”
“Yeah, he always works security detail when we meet with big tech clients out of the country.” The lie was a familiar one, so she assumed she’d spun it before. Her mom believed Harper ran the cyber division of Scott & Scott alongside Jessica.
“That man kiss you yet?”
She was glad she didn’t have her on speakerphone. “Roman? No, of course not. Just—”
“Friends. Sure, sure. Jackson says that man has it bad for you.”
Jackson was the oldest of the five kids.
Her parents, Paula and Mike Hanover, had adopted four other children before taking on Harper.
Harper was an unexpected addition. Her father had been roommates with Mike back at NYU, and they’d been friends ever since.
Her dad chose Paula and Mike as her godparents, but they never believed the “just in case” situation would happen where Harper would lose not one but two parents.
But at nine, Paula and Mike took her on as their fifth child, and she knew they loved her, same as her siblings.
“Jackson should worry about his own love life. He’s not one to talk.”
“I didn’t raise my boy to be some forever bachelor, but I’m wondering if he might end up having babies before you do.”
Her stomach turned at the thought. Babies. Do I want babies? The disappointment she’d felt at the sight of the single pink line on the pregnancy test suggested she must’ve, right?
“I’m just super busy with work. I’ll slow down one of these days.”
“Just because it didn’t work out with you and Brandon doesn’t mean you can’t form a relationship with another man you work with.”
Brandon? She frantically tried to find the memory, but the only Brandon she could recall working with had been a CIA officer in France when she’d been stationed there. She wouldn’t have dated someone she worked with, would she?
“Brandon and I weren’t meant to be,” was all she managed since she was still drawing a blank and couldn’t exactly poke for details.
No way was Brandon important if she didn’t remember him. Hell, maybe she’d even invented him to keep her mom from pestering her about her loveless life. Yeah, that’s probably it. She allowed her shoulders to relax at that idea.
“Maybe next time before you say yes to a proposal, you’ll let your father and me meet him first. He didn’t even ask your dad for your hand. It’s no wonder it didn’t work out.”
Harper swung her legs off the side of the bed and stood. Shock grabbing hold of her.
No way would she have gone that far with a lie.
I was engaged? No, no, no.
“I’m sorry, I know you hate when I bring him up. I . . .” Her mom paused. “Aunt Janelle has been on my case all week about you never liking any of her Facebook posts.” Her deflection tactics were horrible.
“I, um, don’t have a Facebook account, and you both know that,” she answered in a daze while fighting like hell to remember a fiancé. Fiancé!?
“You know how forgetful she is.”
Welcome to the club.
Aunt Janelle was the kind of aunt that shared highly inappropriate memes and had Harper been allowed to have Facebook, she would’ve unfriended her.
“Did you see the article I sent you?” Attempt at deflection part two, but maybe they needed to stay the course so she could learn more about Brandon. “It was a riveting piece on how women over thirty—”
“If that sentence ends with something along the lines of weddings or babies, you know I didn’t click the link in your text.” Harper winced, still drawing a blank.
Your subconscious might be the greatest threat to your recovery, the doctor had said to her that morning. It may want to take advantage of this chance to forget any past traumas, including the car bomb.
If that was the case, why hadn’t she forgotten about her mom dying? Her father killed by terrorists in Nairobi? Or the time she was shot in Monaco in 2018 while assisting Bravo Team when that corrupt former Teamguy, Will Hobbs, ordered a hit on her before she officially joined Bravo and Echo Teams?
Why was she only losing hold of some traumatic memories, like breaking up with Roman?
“And didn’t we just establish I don’t want to talk about my love life?” Harper added when her mom had yet to say more.
“I thought only Roman was off-limits in conversation.”
God, you have no idea.
“Brandon, too, of course.”
Before she could say more, a match popped up on her laptop, and she snatched it from the bed. Jackpot. “I have to go. Call you later, Mom.”
“Your parents would be proud of you, you know that, right?” her mom tossed out, stopping Harper from hitting the end button. “And you know we’re proud of you, too, right?”
“I know,” Harper returned in a soft voice as tears welled in her eyes. “Thank you.”
“Love you. Goodnight.”
“Love you.” Harper ended the call, did her best to rip off the Band-Aid of emotions as quickly as possible, and got back to work.
She scrolled through the footage, waiting for someone to approach the Mercedes, which was parallel-parked by a row of homes in the city.
At twenty minutes before ten p.m. yesterday, a man walked up to the vehicle and opened the trunk. “Got you.” She uploaded his photo to her program for an ID, then went back to the surveillance footage to zoom in on the trunk. “Ezra?”
He was never in the passenger seat of the car, was he? He was in the trunk.
The driver’s well-built frame blocked most of the view, but there was definitely someone in there. She saw a pair of legs with rope bound around the ankles.
“You son of a bitch,” she muttered just as her computer beeped with an alert for an ID, which was fast. She pulled up the man’s file to locate his current address.
Aerial footage of his home was a match to the car’s location on the surveillance footage, too.
He must have been leaving his own place before he went to the hotel.
“I found him,” Harper announced a few minutes later as she entered the living room, “and he was at his house before he left for the hotel.”
Roman came out of one of the bedrooms and Finn out of the other. A.J. and Wyatt were still in the living room working.
“Nice work. Who is he?” Wyatt joined her where she stood and took the laptop.
“His name is Mauricio Romero. He has no suspected affiliations with any political group, but he was arrested ten years ago for manslaughter. A bar fight turned ugly. Served a nickel and got out five years ago for good behavior.”
“It’s possible he learned to be a criminal inside the joint,” A.J. remarked, standing from the couch.
“What’s his address?” Roman set a hand to the wall off to his side by his bedroom. Was he still struggling with his balance? Not that she could blame him. He should’ve been in bed. Maybe he had been.
She doubted he was taking medication aside from a couple of Advil, though. That bladed jaw of his was most likely sore from grinding down on his back teeth, attempting to fight through the pain.
Whenever she had a headache or neck pain from looking down at her screen too much, she tended to clench her teeth and woke with a sore jaw the next day. The only other time her jaw ever got sore was after she went down on Roman. His size was—
Abort.
Control, alt, delete.
3.1415926535. The first ten decimals of Pi usually pulled her thoughts out of the gutter. And wow, okay, so I can remember Pi but not the fact that I was engaged.