1. Michael
“And that wraps up last week’s tactical training. I’ll have more on the applications and background checks for the new hires in a couple of weeks. Link, does your team have anything to add?” Logan thrums his fingers on his file folder as he finishes his update into the speakerphone while all seven of us shoot glances at each other around the conference table.
The news that Hunter was Maxwell’s mole hit our team hard. We trust each other with our lives, and knowing he worked among us while he was prepared to sacrifice one of our own at any time is distressing.
Hunter’s position unofficially opened up, but no one else wanted it. Most of the guys here are happy to keep their heads down and do what they do best, so the added responsibility didn’t appeal to them.
I threw my name in and ended up taking on the role, mostly because it gave me more access to locating Dana.
While Eagle, Grey, Waldo, and Tex are invited to these calls, they usually sit them out. It’s mostly dry stuff, but today is different. Today, they are joining us silently around the table, waiting for one agenda item in particular to come up.
“I—no, I think we’re good. Anything to add—Penny?” When Link says the name, Jack’s lips twitch at the corners.
Penny is Jessa’s new code name, much to Link’s disapproval. He wanted to call her “Jump Scare” because we never saw her coming, and when she was done with us we didn’t feel right.
To the outside world, Jessa died last year. She died a hero among those of us who fought to end Maxwell for so long, but she also died a target in the eyes of the Sparr family and their allies.
Since then, she’s been working under the table with Link and his team, and we are lucky to have her. Her presence opens Link up to provide more tactical support to our teams, and there is no one who knows computers like she does.
I’d be lying if I said those are the reasons I’m happy she’s here. No, I’m happy to have her on our team because she has chilled Jack right out. Knowing she’s safe and nearby has settled his obnoxiously cranky demons.
But we’re currently experiencing the downside of having her around.
The hesitant glances are obvious, and the unspoken apprehension hangs thick in the room. Everyone knows why we’re on this call. Everyone except Jessa, and the anxious tone in Link’s voice is unnerving all of us.
So far, there is no change in Jessa’s tone.
“I closed up the security issues on your bank project, Logan. Other than that, I want to confirm I have the next few days off, but I’ll be available through regular channels.”
Jessa requested a break a day ago to continue her search for Dana, and it was quickly granted. She’s put in more than enough time with our team, and she’s earned a short vacation—if you can call it that. It’s more of a staycation, as there is nowhere for her to go where she won’t risk exposing herself.
As far as we know, no one is looking for her, but all it takes is for some facial recognition software to tag her and the deception would be discovered.
“Affirmative.” Logan pauses before exchanging looks around the table. “We all wish you luck in finding her this time, Penny.” He looks uncomfortable as the white lie spills from his mouth.
It’s a half-truth.
Jessa has been spending all her spare time searching for Dana, and I’m grateful for her hard work. We did hope she’d find her.
The part that’s a lie: we’ve received our own intel. We might have found Dana ourselves, but we need to talk about it before we involve Jessa.
This whole situation is bittersweet.
Jessa and Dana have a deep friendship, and I’ve seen the pressure Jessa placed on herself this past year to find her. She carries all the responsibility on her own shoulders. Her need to protect her friend drives her.
While I haven’t shared this with anyone, I understand the guilt she lives with. Dana went missing on my watch. My focus was on helping my team that day, and I failed to take into account the fact that she had nothing left to keep her with us, so she took the first chance she could to run. It was a knee-jerk reaction, the kind she and Jessa had ingrained into themselves for years.
If Jessa learns of Dana’s location, she may take off blindly after her, and we can’t allow her to put herself at risk. Jessa’s skills make her an invaluable asset to those who would go to great lengths to use her should they find out she is still alive—including Matteo Sparr.
Word on the street is Matteo Sparr is out of retirement and working to repair relations with as many associates as he can in the wake of his son’s death.
“Thank you.” Jessa’s response cuts through the speaker, and Logan continues as if everything is normal.
“Okay then, the only item left is our team budget for the next month.”
“Jekyll, may I hang up? I’d like to get a few things wrapped up before I leave for the day,” Jessa asks from her end, and the tension we held is released in smiles and movement as a few of us shift in our seats.
Jessa has consistently asked to skip this part of our biweekly calls. I don’t blame her—team budget talks are boring as hell, but we need to do them. Logan moved them to the end of the meeting a few months ago so those who didn’t want to listen in could leave early.
“Yes, that’s fine, Penny. Send me an email when you’re clocking out.” A beep on the phone indicates her line has disconnected. The room is silent as we wait for Link to confirm we are now secure.
“Okay, she’s off the phone. She’s left her area. I’m locking channels so no one else can join. I’m showing only two lines on the call now. Yours and mine. We can speak freely.” Link updates us in an excited whisper.
“Link. You okay?” Logan raises his brows in concern.
“Yeah. It’s just—she makes me nervous. Nothing gets by her. Playing it cool is freaking me out over here.” Everyone around the table chuckles at his confession, and I don’t envy him.
Link is right to be on guard. Jessa is smarter than all of us, and we underestimated her once.
“Let’s make this quick then. Tell us what you know.” Logan lifts his pen to his notepad, and the rest of us follow suit.
This conversation just went off record. There will be no recording of it anywhere, and Link, like the rest of us, will destroy his written notes once we are done.
My body hums with enthusiasm as Link shuffles papers on his end of the line.
This is what I’ve waited for: Dana’s new identity and location.
I’ve set my guilt aside and focused on finding her. I’ll deal with her and everything that happened between us once we have her in our custody.
Link starts talking, and we scribble in silence as each of us write our own version of what we understand. We’ll compare notes later.
“Okay. This is such a fluke. I can’t believe I found it. So, how Jessa set up the alternate identities was really brilliant but not helpful. She programmed close to fifty different names and included backgrounds for each of them. When the system was prompted to let them go, it would give them a random identity, along with access to cash and some other things, including a backup of Zane in case Jessa might need it, but Dana doesn’t know she has a copy. It would look like an ordinary file to her. And knowing Dana’s new identity wouldn’t help anyway, because Jessa taught her how to ditch it and create a new one. So, after trying to find her on the grid for so long, I began to search offline, which was no easy task considering my search area was all of the continental United States.” Link’s words come out at a rapid pace, and my shoulders lift with a growing tension. He hasn’t given us anything yet.
“Link? We know all of this. The point.” Jack is curt when he cuts into Link’s long, drawn-out thought, and Link pauses for a second.
“Right. Sorry, Phoenix. Last week, Jessa made a comment in passing that it was her deathday. It had been one year since she died to the outside world, and it made me realize I was treating Dana like someone on the run—but she wouldn’t think like someone on the run. As far as Dana is concerned, it’s all over. Her best friend is dead, and we aren’t looking for her. So I figured if Jessa remembered her own deathday, then a friend as close as Dana would be mourning that day too, so I began to look at ways Dana might honor her friend. The farmhouse where we picked them up has since been swept, cleaned, and sold to a retired couple through a management company, no doubt set up automatically by Jessa. So that was a dead end. On a hunch, I checked Jessa’s family’s gravesites, and there was a delivery of flowers on the anniversary of Jessa’s death. I contacted the groundskeeper, who confirmed the delivery and gave me the florist’s name. I contacted them, and they told me the flowers were bought with a credit card belonging to a Stan Teckler, last name Tango-Echo-Charlie-Kilo-Lima-Echo-Romeo, age forty-six. He’s living outside a little town in the Rocky Mountains, on the Montana side of the border.”
My heart thuds rapidly into my rib cage as I scribble down this information. It’s more than we’ve gotten in a whole year, but at the mention of a man’s name I become frustrated. I don’t know if I’m prepared to weather another impasse.
“How is a middle-aged man a lead?” Unable to mask my annoyance, I catch the attention of Logan and Jack.
They know Dana and I talked when she was with us last year. But they weren’t aware of just how close we got. After she ran, I had to come clean and tell them that we spent the night of our downtime together in my room and I had more than a friendly interest in her.
To say they were shocked would be an understatement. They had paired me with Dana on many occasions because they were sure the secrets I’ve been carrying would have created a wedge between us.
It wasn’t something I planned on, but the more I got to know her, the faster I fell, until I realized she was actively searching me out when she entered a room, and I liked it that way.
In the end, I let her down, and I lost her.
Her friend is alive, and I’m grateful to the two of them, who gave up so much to take Maxwell down. But I have my own horse in this race. Ruining Matteo Sparr settles a score for me too, so I owe Dana and Jessa both for putting everything on the line like they did.
“I’m getting there. I decided to start searching the area based on what we know about Jessa and Dana, and I think I found something. About nine months ago, a little coffee shop opened up in a small town about thirty miles away from Teckler’s listed residence. The company who owns the shop is listed under a numbered name. Being up in the mountains, the area is cut off from the internet, and cell service is spotty at best. It’s a good place to go if you don’t want to be found.”
Jack cuts in, glancing in my direction as he speaks. “This lead is the best we’ve had, but it’s still really weak. Tell me you have something else.”
He knows we need something tangible before we deploy.
“Let me finish. Here is the rest of it. I don’t know if Jessa will be back soon. A coffee shop without internet is tough to track online, but I found some reviews.” All of them refer to a female owner. One has a picture of the inside of the shop. You can see here that there isn’t anything to it.” An image comes up on our monitor, and my eyes scan the blurry photo before returning to my notepad. “The person who posted the review indicated the woman behind the counter is the owner.”
My pen freezes on the page as my eyes snap back to the photo with new interest. The glare from the light pouring in from the front window softens the details of the woman’s face, but that isn’t what has me feeling a sense of loss. The woman behind the counter has dark hair. She has one arm on the counter, and half of her face is hidden as she leans into the display case to help a customer.
It might be Dana. It also might not be.
“The name of the coffee shop is JD’s.” The cherry on top of all the information Link gave us cuts into my thoughts.
“Okay, that’s enough for me.” My head whips around at the sound of Logan’s voice, and he nods in my direction.
I’m not sure I’m hiding my surprise.
It still isn’t a lot, but he is giving the go-ahead to check this lead out, and I won’t argue.
“That’s not all, Logan. The guy at the cemetery told me I wasn’t the first person to ask about deliveries to the family gravesite that day. Someone else has been looking for her. This morning I was scanning some open channels, and I picked up a contract hit offer on Dana. It’s under her real name, and there’s a good chance the buyer is Matteo. I’m not sure yet why he would be looking for her or wanting her dead, unless he knows about Zane’s program. The contract is sealed, so there isn’t a lot of information to go on. I’m monitoring it, and so far there are two takers. The hit is open, and the value is higher than average.”
This catches my attention.
Matteo had someone close to me executed to prove a point. While I won’t lose sleep over ending his son for his own sins, I won’t rest until Matteo loses his freedom for taking the lives of so many innocent, good people—like my father.
“It’s only a matter of time before Jessa finds this information out herself, if she hasn’t already. I’ll update if the hit gets picked up. Okay, now that is everything I have.” Link ends his speech, and the room remains silent.
A hit.
My heartbeat in my ears is the only sound I hear.
Link is right—Dana thinks no one is looking for her. She’s walking around with the base code to start Zane up again, and she thinks she’s off everyone’s radar.
She’s a sitting duck with no one to protect her.
My blood boils through me, and my face warms with anger. Looking across the table, I catch Jack and Logan looking right back at me as Logan ends the meeting.
“Okay, you heard Link. That’s all he has. Link, we’re disconnecting.” He reaches over the phone, ends our call, looks around our table, and continues, “It’s lunch; we’ll meet back here at 1300 hours to talk about this. Grizz, stay behind.” I nod as the guys leave their notes on the table and walk out of the room.
I wasn’t going anywhere anyway. I’m bracing for a discussion.
When Jessa and Dana were first captured, Logan removed Jack as the mission’s lead. But I’m not willing to step down from this op. Crossing my arms in front of my chest, I lean back in my seat, waiting for them to tell me I’m out because of my history with Dana.
Jack swivels his chair in my direction.
“Logan and I spoke briefly before the call. If this ends up being Dana, we need you to take the lead on this with me.” I’m ready to counter him when his words register, and I drop my shoulders in confusion. Jack holds up his hand, asking for time to explain. “We know you and Dana were close while she was here, and it’s no secret that Logan brings out the best in her.” I snort as Logan shifts in his seat with a smirk, and Jack continues, “Our best chance at getting close to her and gaining her trust is you. If I’m too close, she’ll talk about Jessa, and I’m not sure how easily she’ll read me. She can’t know Jessa is alive until we have her out of there and safe. The hit on her escalates everything. Any information divulged out there can put her, Jessa, and all of us at serious risk. Will you take the lead with my back?—”
“Yes.” My response is out before he finishes his sentence.
Logan grabs his papers off the table and stands, ready to head out the door. “Great. We need to lay out our plan. We’ll meet up with the team after lunch and prepare to move out later today. We’ll work out everything en route. And Grizz, both Jessa and Dana are to know nothing for now. Link will coordinate. I’ll give him a call back from my office.”
Dana is out there alone, and she has no idea what she is carrying around with her.
The good news is it’s a professional hit.
They’ll stay in the shadows, and we should be able to keep the death count to a minimum if we find them before they locate her.
Unfortunately, that is also the bad news.