Chapter Eight #3
wasn’t even sure she was supposed to hear them. “So you are going to read
through these and tell Damon which one he make mistake on?”
“That’s basically the instructions Mal gave me,” Vivian
replied. “I’ve been going through cold cases on my own and can’t get a single
one through. Mal seems to think there’s one in this stack that Damon will
accept.”
“So in the end the one you are pleasing is Damon.”
Vivian shrugged. “He’s got the final say.”
Sosa seemed to think for a moment. “I watch you present
cases. You are well organized and good at laying out the facts, but I think you
are asking the wrong questions. You’re looking for something that catches your
sense of justice. You want a case that will make you feel good.”
Well, she wasn’t wrong. “Probably.”
After the long talk with Sophy and the breakdown with Mal,
she could admit that part of this whole investigations obsession was about feeling
stuck. She was probably looking for a case that would make her feel better, not
necessarily a case that needed to simply be solved.
What question was she not asking?
“I’ve thought a lot about it and worry that Damon doesn’t
want me working on cases,” Vivian admitted. “So I think I might have to try
something else.”
“Or you can listen to your Dom,” Sosa replied, putting her
hand on the stack. “He thinks solution is here. And I don’t think Damon is
trying to hurt you. I think he is testing your resolve because he won’t use
other methods to train you.”
“Other methods?” She hadn’t heard about Damon’s methods
beyond physical training and mentorship.
“Yes, there are effective methods to ensure you will always
do your best.”
“Do these methods involve violence and humiliation?” It was
how Sosa was trained.
She nodded as if they were talking about the weather and not
her hell of a childhood. “Like I say, they are effective. You don’t have
military training.”
“Neither did my mother, but my dad would take her into the
field without a thought.”
“And he would protect her with his life. She’s also had lots
of training. She was FBI agent. I know she was profiler, but they train her.
Your aunt…” Sosa’s head shook. “Your aunt’s training was closer to mine, which
is why Charlotte is never treated like fragile roses. Sometime the test is
patience. You are failing this part of test, and don’t say it is unfair to test
you.”
Vivian held up a hand. “I know. I know.” She paced, the bass
of the music making the walls slightly tremble. They needed to work on the
sound system, too. She was fairly certain someone would try to drag Mal into
that. He was rapidly becoming everyone’s fix-it guy. He’d fixed Damon’s chair
the other day before the boss had come in and all he’d said was Damon had a lot
on his plate with the Sosa situation and he didn’t need to fall on his ass
first thing in the morning.
Except he’d said arse. She wasn’t
going to be that British.
Damon had a lot on his plate with Sosa.
Trying to identify the organization that took Sosa and
turned her into an assassin at the age of eight was consuming a lot of Damon’s
time. She knew Uncle Ian and her parents were working on mapping out the
organization, but the investigation started in France so Damon was closer. He’d
recently taken a trip to Paris to talk to some intelligence agents he knew
there.
She looked at the stack of cases. None of them involved
France and none involved trafficking. There were a few missing persons but none
of them were children, and that was what this group preferred.
She was supposed to find a case where Damon missed something
critical. Something he couldn’t turn down.
She didn’t know a lot about Sosa’s case beyond the basics.
But she knew that Sosa hadn’t been the only victim brought in. Once there had
been three young women. Sosa, Gabby, and Claire. Gabby and Claire had been
taken into MI6 custody, but the safe house they’d been at had caught fire and
everyone died. The Chateau had known where they were and had managed to get to
them. It was why they worried so much for Sosa.
“You weren’t merely an assassin, right? They taught you
other things.” As long as Sosa was here, Vivian could ask a few questions and
hope to find some answers amid the sarcasm.
“Yes, they teach me all kinds of things,” Sosa agreed. “I
learn toilet water tastes like you would think it would and yet somehow it is
better than the moldy bread they would toss at us when we didn’t behave
properly.”
“I’m talking about skills.”
Sosa took a sip of her soda. “Yes. While everyone else learn
math and reading, we learn how to put together a sniper rifle in under thirty
seconds. I was taught how to hack a security system and how to build bomb on my
own. That part can be fun.”
“And the other girls were focused on other things, right?”
“Some became masters at poisons, some learned medical
skills, many of us learned a bit about computers and how to hack real systems,”
Sosa explained. “I was never good at anything beyond a security system, and
honestly, even then I use protocols created by another.”
“Another?” This was the most she’d gotten Sosa to talk about
the inner workings of The Chateau.
“Gabby,” Sosa said and then stood and walked to the trash
can. She spit in it and frowned as she looked back up. “I am not allowed to do
this on the floor. Penny has asked me to find bin to spit bile in. She was
traitor. Why are you asking this? I hope she rot in hell and all her vodka is
warm.”
“Gabby was the computer expert?” She knew that Damon was
trying to figure out who Gabby had been before she was brought into The
Chateau. So far, he hadn’t had much luck.
Could she be a missing person? But she would have gone
missing as a child, and all the missing person cases were adults.
“She was also expert in being traitorous bitch, but yes,
this is her greatest skill beyond being horrible.”
“Who would she hack?” Vivian moved back to the conference
table.
Sosa took a long breath like this would take a while.
“Politicians, syndicates, corporations—anyone that the bosses want. She mostly
gets information but sometimes steals money.”
Information. That might be presented as corporate espionage.
“Do you know which corporations she hacked?”
There was something playing in the back of her head.
Something she read in a file. Something about the Dallas team. Or the Dallas
office. She flipped through the files, pulling out the corporate cases.
“Anyone they tell her to,” Sosa replied. “We did not talk
much about what we do. Even amongst ourselves. It was frowned upon.”
One case had been refused because of lack of evidence. Damon
noted that he believed the corporation was setting the accused up to take his
vesting stock.
One hadn’t had any real evidence at all. It had been a mere
query. The thinnest of the cases. The company’s representative wanted to hire
MTK to do a full audit of their systems. Which wasn’t a service they offered,
and they had nothing to go on but a feeling. They thought someone had been in
their systems. Nothing was taken, but the CIO was certain someone had been
inside.
Another case was refused for what Damon called extreme jackassery. She put that one aside. He was right about it.
She slid the files to Sosa. “Do any of these names ring a
bell?”
Sosa gamely opened the first folder. “Like I say, we do not
talk much about the things we are forced to do, but I can look.”
Vivian sat down and waited. Sosa closed the first folder and
reached for the second. After a moment her head came up, and Vivian knew she’d
found it.
Sosa turned the folder her way and pointed to a list of
names. “Here. This name is one I recognize because it is used by the handlers
often. Charles Martin. See. He’s here on the visitors’ logs.”
She was looking at the case that didn’t have enough
evidence. The one where they were certain someone hacked their system. “That’s
a common name.”
“Which is why he use it.” Sosa’s accent was thicker when she
was excited. The young woman could sound like she was from several other
countries, but she always came back to her Russian accent. “But see. He signed
in a secondary person but only lists her as a daughter. Aged twelve.”
Vivian sat back.
She had her case.