Chapter 3
THREE
The war room was already pulsing with tension when Ash took his seat. One look at the maps plastered across the wall told him shit was about to go down, and in a big way.
Though he’d slept badly, tossing and turning, and only got three hours, he was ready to lock and load at the first signal.
He leaned forward, forearms braced on the table, chair angled just enough to keep every screen and every person in his line of sight.
That included their new accountant, who sat near their intelligence team comprised of Dante, Elin and Sophie. Ash had yet to figure out why she was still here. Unless she kept Cipher’s personal books, it seemed the intel she brought to the table could be gained many other ways.
Besides, she looked entirely too alert for the pre-dawn hour. Her hair was too bouncy. Sophie hadn’t been wrong—like a shampoo commercial. And when she turned her head to look at the screen, it did that swishing thing again as if the wind was blowing.
Everything about the woman was overtly sensuous in a way that his body noticed.
He picked up his steaming mug of coffee and brought it to his lips, using the moment to study Ellory. Besides her shiny, bouncy hair, as Elin had called it, she wore her own cardigan buttoned all the way to the neck. And those tortoiseshell glasses.
He knew if he slipped them off her, he’d find little bite marks on the stems.
His gut clenched for no good reason, and he set his coffee down with a little too much force, causing it to slosh onto the table.
Con entered the room last, bringing all of them straighter in their seats. Without pause, he strode to the front of the room. “Dante.”
Dante pushed to his feet and positioned himself in front of the screens filled with maps. From his tight posture and the dark circles carved beneath his eyes, Ash guessed the poor bastard had worked through the night.
Elin looked to be in the same shape.
Dante cleared his throat. “Elin and I had intel come in late last night. It didn’t look like much at first, but once we started digging…”
He trailed off, and Elin tapped the keys. The main screen lit up with a bland corporate logo—gray, forgettable and deliberately generic.
Ash’s jaw tightened.
“We traced a new shell corporation tied to Daniel Sheen.” Dante swept the room in a look. “Same structure we’ve seen before, but when we dug deeper, we saw the scope of reach this particular fake company has.”
Elin swiped, and the image fractured into a wide map of the United States.
Dots appeared, one by one. Soon dozens of them marked the map.
Ash felt the entire room zero in.
“That same shell rents safety-deposit boxes,” Elin said. “Multiple states. Different banks.”
“Storage,” Ash muttered.
Ellory’s thick eyelashes lifted as she darted a glance his way, and he hated that he noticed it.
“Exactly,” Dante continued. “Documents, assets. Anything he doesn’t want to be found. If it’s digital, we hack it. If it’s physical…well, he only has one recourse, doesn’t he?”
“Blow it up.” Ash flexed his fingers around the handle of his mug but didn’t drink.
He studied the map, trying to find connections between locations but there didn’t seem to be any pattern. Which was smart.
And more dangerous.
Dante and Elin continued sharing their data.
They expanded the map and marked clusters.
They flagged states with heavier concentrations of the safety-deposit boxes in bright yellow.
They all looked on as the skeleton took shape in real time.
It was obvious the only way to take down Cipher, once and for all, was to seize every asset he held.
Cut the purse strings, stop funding the terrorism.
Ash suddenly realized why Ellory was here.
“I might have something that helps narrow it down further.” Her voice cut through the room, clean and confident, proving she knew the value she offered the team.
Con gestured for her to continue.
She pushed back from the table with the grace of a dancer. His gaze dropped to her bottom half and he realized he hadn’t prepared himself for the sight of her jeans clinging to her hips like a second skin.
He filled his lungs with air and held it, SEAL style, until his senses stopped rioting and his nervous system calmed down.
“I’ve been cross-referencing Daniel Sheen’s tax returns with the locations you uncovered. There are purchase records that lead back to some of these banks.” She picked up a tablet that lay on the table in front of her. New data populated the screen.
She laid it all out for them—money transfers pointing to rental properties and even some holdings. “It looks like the corporation has brick-and-mortar offices, but my guess is most of them are probably empty. He’s buried money to fund his activities in legitimate-looking businesses.”
She glanced up. Straight at Ash.
The look was brief, but it was entirely too pleased with herself.
And it set off his body like an alarm.
She tossed her hair over her shoulder. Several of the guys shifted in their seats, glancing away from her like they didn’t want to notice just how damn sexy she was. Ash ground his teeth.
Dante drew a circle around a location, a big red beacon on the screen. “This one stands out.”
Ellory nodded. “It’s an office rental with a short-term lease. Paid six months in advance through the shell. No utilities in the company name.”
“But consistent after-hours usage,” Elin supplied for the next layer.
“That’s our entry point.” Ash didn’t realize he’d spoken until all eyes swung to him.
The room shifted immediately. Chairs scraped back and bodies leaned forward.
Con paced in front of them, barking directives as the analysis turned into an op.
Ash forced his focus back to the map as routes were debated, his mind already breaking the location down into access points, blind spots and timing windows.
Ellory stayed in the flow, adding data when asked, answering questions before they were fully formed. Every time the plan tightened, it did so because of something she supplied.
She wasn’t just background support. Now he saw why Con ordered Ash to bring her to the base.
An accountant was an asset to Blackout—one they’d make sure to use carefully and protect accordingly.
Ellory wasn’t going into the field, but the operation didn’t move forward without what she brought to the table.
That meant Ash wouldn’t be able to escape her sexy cardigans and her habit of nibbling her glasses stem.
* * * * *
As a kid, Ellory wanted to become a veterinarian. She loved animals, like any other kid. But when she got straight A’s in math without even trying, numbers started to be more interesting than learning about animal habitats.
She won the math award every single year. In high school, she joined the math club and wore the nerdy sweatshirt with pride. She won scholarships and finally achieved her dream of attending college on a full ride, something her parents and four brothers were proud of.
What she didn’t anticipate was how she would use her degree.
She never planned to land a government job. Or to uncover patterns and discrepancies that earned her a reputation with agencies she’d never dreamed of working with.
This wasn’t her first time working with the military—she was often an asset. But being in a war room with a ghost ops team was one of the highest levels she’d achieved.
The room hummed with quiet energy. Sophie pushed a laptop across the table to Ellory, and she began cross-referencing financial transactions associated with the shell corporation with various bank records.
Dante sat nearby, his fingers flying across the keyboard. Elin was hunched over her own screen, muttering about layers and security. Sophie bounced between all of them and Con, a natural link between intelligence and the leader of the team that would act on it.
Ellory peered at the screen for a long beat, then pulled off her glasses and tapped the stem against her lips.
A low sound, almost a groan, came from one of the guys seated around the table, but she didn’t look up to see what they were doing. She filtered transactions by a new date range, and a new list populated. She scanned it methodically, leaning in to study the results.
She sucked in a small breath.
Sophie hurried to her side. “Did you find something?”
“There.” She pointed to the screen. “Another rental payment. Same shell, different property. And there’s a transaction for a safety-deposit box too.”
“Good catch.” Sophie hurried back to her own system and a moment later, the transactions appeared on the big screen for the team to see.
Ellory placed her glasses on again and nudged them up her nose. Down the table, a chair gave a loud creak, as if the man seated in it was torturing the screws holding it together.
Paying it no mind, she continued to work and flagged three more transactions, each one fitting the pattern she’d identified. Empty offices with short-term leases and payments structured to look legit while hiding something far more sinister.
Like moving money in order to fund terroristic activities.
Low chatter continued around her, but she tuned it out as she worked. She was about to flag a fourth transaction when the air in the room shifted.
Conversation dropped. The keyboards went silent.
Ellory looked up from her screen to find Dante, Elin and Sophie all staring at her. And she guessed if she were to glance around the room, she’d find all the others were staring at her too.
Their expressions were serious, almost grim. Her stomach did an uncomfortable flip.
She looked down at herself, wondering if she’d spilled coffee on her cardigan without noticing. “Did I miss something?”
Elin exchanged a look with Dante, then turned back to Ellory. “We’ve been going through the security protocols for the office location. The one Ash identified as the entry point.”
“Okay…” She drew the word out. She’d worked with enough agencies to guess she wouldn’t like where this was headed.
“There’s a computer system in there.”