Chapter 54
Daniel
Lydia and I sat on my couch with my laptop open, watching the split screen with the camera feed from Mickey’s chest harness beside the voice feeds from Terry and Jake.
Terry was able to remotely hack into Langford’s security systems to allow easy entrance while Jake and Cole waited in a van a safe distance away.
I focused on the screen, though a part of my attention was always on Lydia. I didn’t know why I was always worrying if she was okay when she constantly proved that she could take care of herself.
She sat beside me quietly, even more focused than I was.
Mickey’s camera feed showed him standing in an office. He walked straight to a cabinet behind the chair and opened it to reveal a small black safe.
“This too easy, guys?” He whispered.
“Just open it,” Jake’s annoyed voice responded.
Mickey fumbled with equipment we couldn’t see clearly, but the sound of the safe opening a few minutes later was unmistakable. He lifted his chest to angle the camera and show us a short pile of manila folders and a phone.
“Take them out, carefully. Show us the documents.” Jake was the only one on comms with Mickey.
Mickey took the pile and spread the four folders out on the desk. He opened them one by one, lingering on each of the first few pages with the camera before moving on to the next. None of them were relevant—they were all contracts with Condukt’s high-profile clients.
He put the folders back in the safe in the order and angle they were in before, and was going to close it when Terry’s voice took over comms.
“Mickey, take the phone out of the safe. You wouldn’t happen to have a cloning device on you?”
Mickey laughed. “Nope. Nothing on here though—just two phone numbers in the call log.” He held the screen up to the camera.
“I’ll run ‘em.”
“We done here?”
Jake took over comms again. “No. That’s not what we were looking for. There’s either another safe somewhere else, or we need to try his office.”
Mickey closed and locked the safe quietly. “Bedroom’s usually the next place people hide their shit.”
The camera moved with him up the stairs and through three rooms before reaching the master bedroom—the room was pristine and nearly bare, with only one large bed and dresser.
Even the walls were bare. Mickey did a quick search under the bed and touched the walls to see if anything ‘sounded off.’ A door beside the dresser led to a bathroom, which was spacious, modern, and equally bare.
The only other door was beside the bed. Mickey opened it and walked into a closet stuffed with shelves and hangers, all filled with black and dark blue clothing.
He moved some of the hanging jackets aside and tapped the walls.
“There’s something here, guys. Hold on.”
After a few seconds of shuffling sounds, the screen showed Mickey moving clothes on a shelf to reveal a keypad on the wall.
“Something is behind this wall, and we’ve got a keypad here. Might take me a few minutes to—”
“Zero, eight, two, five,” Lydia whispered. We weren’t connected to Mickey’s comms, but Jake could hear us.
He repeated those numbers to Mickey.
A hissing sound, followed by Mickey’s voice mumbling ‘nice’, had my heart pounding.
“Fuck.” I stood up and started pacing.
Lydia’s phone buzzed. She opened Kernel’s app to respond to a message. I was going to take out my phone to look at what it was, but Mickey let out a long whistle.
“Damn, this must have cost him half a mil. You guys seeing this?” He spun around, showing us the spacious bar, flat screen, kitchen, bookshelves—
“Stop!” I froze. “Jake, tell him to go back to the shelves. Blue book at the top left.”
Lydia leaned closer to the screen to get a better look as Mickey moved to the shelves and pulled out the book.
‘Politics Among Nations’ by Hans Morgenthau.
Fuck, it’s hers.
“That’s Natalia’s, Jake.”
Lydia looked up at me and back at the screen. Mickey held the front cover to the camera so we could see the tattered book more clearly. It had a little flower doodle on the cover that Natalia drew with a red pen.
She had that book with her for most of her college years. If Langdon had it, Lydia was right—they were an item. There was no doubt about that now.
Mickey opened the book.
“There are a bunch of folded documents stuffed between the pages.”
“Take them out one at a time. Put each page back where it was before moving on to the next.”
Mickey followed Jake’s orders while we all watched the feed in silence. There were fifteen pages in total tucked throughout the book’s pages. Together, they were the full mission report of the op that resulted in Natalia’s death.
Nothing was redacted—my teammate’s names, my name, were all there. Details with the location and our reports on what went wrong, including the fact that Natalia was alive when I got to her.
Once Mickey put the book back on the shelf, Jake told him to get out, and the feed went dead.
“Daniel…” Lydia’s voice trailed off. She looked up at me with her usual poker face.
“You were right.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I can’t think. I’m… why did she hide this? Did he know she was with the Agency?”
“Maybe or maybe he found out when he started digging after she died. Either way, he knows it wasn’t a car accident.”
I shook my head. This was too much. Everything about that op and Natalia hit me in places that had never healed, and I was quickly getting overwhelmed with the same feelings of guilt and anger I felt all those years ago.
The laptop rang, and Lydia opened a window with Cole, Jake, and Terry on video.
“The line is secure.” Terry mumbled.
Jake and Cole were still together in the van. “Mickey’s gone home, or wherever that dick goes.”
I wanted to sit beside Lydia and face the screen with her, but I couldn’t be still, so I kept pacing behind her.
“Danny.” Cole’s voice startled me.
“I’m fine. I just need to understand this.”
He grunted in response and leaned back to let Jake take over their end of the call. “We’re still speculating here, but it looks like Langford and Natalia were together. She died, he found out about the mission to save her, and now…”
“Say it, Jake.”
“He blames you for her death.”
Lydia shook her head. “Why? If anything, Kernel’s to blame, or the guy that hired him, or the people who took her, the guy that fucking shot her, or even your commanding officers who took too long to plan and approve the rescue.
Why would he blame the one person who did everything to save her and disobeyed a direct order to bring her body back? ”
Cole leaned forward again. “Langford’s a coward, little one. He took the easy way out. He can’t get back at the people who deserve it, so he’s blaming someone he can.”
“I am to blame. We should have gotten there sooner,” I said, trying to keep my voice from shaking.
“Fuck you, brother. If you’re guilty, so am I. I was there,” Cole sneered.
I shook my head. I knew the guilt wasn’t logical, but this wasn’t a logical emotion, especially when it was corrupted by grief.
Terry cleared his throat. “The numbers on the phone were easy to track. One of them was Brad’s, so we can decide how to use that if you want to go the legal way on corporate espionage. The other… I don’t know who it belongs to, but I know where they are.”
Cole’s eyes practically gleamed. “Send me the location, I’ll take care of it.”
Terry nodded. “We need more information before we make another move.”
The call disconnected, and Lydia closed the laptop before turning to me.
“You blame yourself for Natalia’s death?”
“It’s complicated.”
“Simplify it.”
I sighed and kept pacing. “It’s not just the op. She shouldn’t have been there, out in the field.”
“How are you responsible for that?”
“She started as an analyst and got wind of a joint op I was on with the Agency. She would have stayed behind a desk if she didn’t try to—”
“Stop. Whatever it is, stop. Everything I heard from you, Becca, and even that roommate about Natalia was that she was perfect field agent material and that she wouldn’t do anything she didn’t want to.
She died because a bunch of people did bad things that got her killed, which I’m sure she was smart enough to know was part of the job. ”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“It does, but right now we need to understand what this all means.”
“I don’t know.”
She shook her head and walked up to me, forcing me to stand still in front of her.
“Maybe he doesn’t blame you, and Becca was just a painful reminder of the woman he loved. Turning into a competitor that was actually a threat just made it worse. If all he did against her was that attempt to bring her company down—”
“We confront him.”
“Maybe even reconcile. Maybe it can be fixed. But Daniel… if he sent those guys after her, that can’t be forgiven.”
“Terry’s right—we need more information.”
She pulled me to the couch and sat beside me with her head leaning on my arm.
“Kernel wants to meet me. I told him no. I told him that meeting me would be the last thing he ever did, because you’d kill him.”
I smiled, despite the anger making my head pound. “Cole would, too.”
“He’s responsible. I know he was young when he did that job, just a kid trying to make a name for himself as a hacker, but people died.”
“Things might have ended up that way anyway. Someone else would have taken the job if he hadn’t.”
“You’ll still kill him though.”
“Yes.”
“Mmm. Who else is to blame? The people who killed her are dead. What about whoever took her or bought the information?”
“Hunted down years ago—all dead.”
“So that leaves Kernel and whoever hired him.”
I let out a long breath and picked Lydia up, surprised at the complete lack of resistance in her body. “Come on, it’s late.”