CHAPTER NINE
For the tenth time, I deleted and restarted the message, struggling on how one went about initiating a plea for help without getting a distant acquaintance tossed in some cell in Guantanamo.
Brock released a near-silent sigh as he heard me hold the backspace down to start over. I couldn’t blame him either.
“Du?o,”Brock growled from my left as he flipped through a magazine plastered with a sweaty, fierce man silently screaming at the photographer with his muscles on display. A bold font shouted out that it was a fighting publication of some sort. “You’re overthinking this. Petrov’s already shown he has a soft spot for you. Just be straight with him.”
“But I don’t want to exploit him. Don’t I owe it to Natasia to keep her biological father away from my messes?”
His focus shifted up to my dyed, platinum blond locks for a second as he lowered his volume. “Natasia died doing her job, Callie. Every agent is aware of the risks when we sign up. You owe her nothing more than anything you elect to do in honor of her memory.”
My lungs collapsed as his words punctured through the tension. “You’re right.”
Besides, I was pretty sure Natasia had known of Tarasovich, as Meatgrinder anyway, and had mentioned her father would send her away anytime he was near.
So we had that going for us, didn’t we?
Without giving myself much time to think about it, I hammered out a quick letter, explaining the situation, the risks, and what I’d need from him if he was interested.
I didn’t proofread a thing before hitting send.
A breath of tension eased out. I sat my computer aside and gathered my legs up beneath me on the cot. The laminate flooring of the classroom was chilly. “How long does everyone have to stay out and about?”
Brock frowned, tossing the magazine on the foot of his bed, and curled upright. He briefly hesitated, glancing toward the room’s corner before remembering the sound dampener we had activated. “We discussed this. They’ll be gone until lunch when we’ll have an excuse to regroup. The whole point of which will be to discuss any progress, but we can’t do that until you send Petrov the email.”
I patted the closed computer. “Oh, I already did.”
“Wait, you did?”
“Yeah, you were right. I was overthinking it.”
He glanced at his wristwatch. “That was less than a minute ago.”
I shrugged.
He snorted. “Du?o.”
“What?”
“Nothing,” he said, but he climbed to his feet and approached my cot.
“B-Brock?”
“Hmm?” His voice dropped an octave, and his winter sky eyes darkened to rumbling, encroaching storm clouds on the horizon.
“Shouldn’t we be doing, uh… something?” I gulped at the way his mossy green tee clung to his form, mesmerized by the roll of his steps as he approached.
He smirked. “I’m open to suggestions, du?o. Do any ideas come to mind?”
Was it just my burgeoning perverted self or had he emphasized one word in particular?
I glanced at the door. It was noon, and despite our living situation, this was both a workday and workplace. At least when Aleks snuck into the showers, he did so long after we would have been stumbled upon. “I thought Duane w-was the exhibitionist.”
Brock hadn’t slowed his predatory prowl, and I nearly flipped head over heels when I tried to put more distance between us, just to remember how narrow the mattresses were.
Stupid cots.
Warmth had steadily been growing, and pretty soon I wouldn’t be able to ignore the need for friction if I didn’t… change… the subject!
Focus, Callie!
“Your name!” I cried.
“Yeah, you’ll be screaming it,” he murmured, his knee bending up onto the bed as he reached for me.
This time, I allowed myself to roll backwards, managing a halfway athletic landing earned from long, arduous hours of grappling on the mats with Yolo. The French woman embodied the same, fictional Black Widow that CJ refused to admit he harbored a crush on.
My maneuver didn’t deter Brock in the slightest, and he’d already used the flimsy cot to vault himself clear of the only obstacle I’d put between us.
I held my hands out to ward him off as I retreated, but the others’ cots kept hindering my progress. Whenever I looked away to check obstacles in my path, Brock seemed to teleport closer, eating the precious distance that diminished in sync with my remaining rational thoughts.
“N-No, I mean, your real name. What was it again? I’ve forgotten.”
He’d told me once.
“You? Forget something with languages?” His skepticism was valid, but for the life of me, I couldn’t recall it—not while pinned beneath his intense gaze while my circuits fritzed across the motherboard.
“Mm-hmm.”
“Borko Jovanovic,” he cooed, his native accent not helping deescalate matters at all. “Jovan is Serbian’s version of John, and the ending ‘ovic’ means son of.”
“Ergo, Johnson.”
He hummed a dismissive noise, clearly focused on this one track.
“And Borko! You switched to Brock, b-but w-what does, uh—” My back hit the wall. He crowded closer but never touched me. “What d-does Borko mean? I know you were young, but did your parents ever tell you—”
“It’s derived from the Slavic element ‘borti’ and means fight or battle.” He leaned over and ran his nose up the column of my neck. “And that’s a dirty trick, du?o, bringing up my parents. Did Aleks teach you to do that?”
I gasped. “Oh, I didn’t mean to—”
“Bring up my dead family and kill the mood?”
I winced. “No. Honestly, I didn’t.”
Our faces were close enough that our breaths mixed. After a minute of scrutiny, he nodded. “I believe you. You understand what it’s like to be without a family.”
That was true. My stepfather had betrayed me, and I’d been forced to kill him to save Natasia—which Ivanov had lied about anyway—and my mother had killed herself. While I had a biological father, and possibly a half-sibling out there somewhere, I couldn’t claim them as family.
Heck, I’d only gotten a vague mention of “my kids” plural in my last correspondence from him. I assumed he meant me and another person, but he could have an entire brood running around for all I knew.
“Yeah, I do.”
He tucked my hair back. “Which is why I won’t hold that against you. What I do plan to hold—”
Whatever he’d been about to say was interrupted by the door flying open. Just under half a dozen men in uniforms filed in before the Director of the CIA herself, Madam Ruth Rollins, strolled inside with her high heels clacking an ominous staccato.
“We need to talk,” she demanded without fanfare. “Gather your team.”
Less than ten minutes later, we were sitting in a boardroom with five men in penguin suits spread throughout the perimeter and Madam Rollins at the helm.
The woman paced, her movements brisk and jerky. She’d seemed ageless when I first met her. Her makeup had been stark and impeccable, her auburn hair wound in a tight bun, and the smart power suit fitted perfectly to her slim frame helped lend her an air of untouchable authority.
Since I’d known her, she’d been suspended pending a hearing and had aged in her absence. Where before I would have struggled to name a number, now I could pinpoint her somewhere in her mid-fifties thanks to the increased wrinkles and streaks of white in her hairdo.
The previous time we spoke, she had been overjoyed because successfully dismantling Nikolai Ivanov and his operations had resulted in the incarceration of several of their most sought-after criminals and solidified her position as director—even if it meant accepting a temporary truce and collaborating with Petrov.
She looked a lot less happy this go-around.
Our team slowly trickled in, and she’d yet to acknowledge our presence.
Payton arrived last, and the second the door shut behind him, Rollins jumped into action.
She slammed the heels of her hands on the tabletop. “He killed eight of my men!”
I blinked, taken aback by the abrupt turn in behavior. Brock slipped his hand over mine in his lap.
Payton paused, rolling up his shirt sleeves to his elbows. “I’m sorry, Madam Director, but you’re going to have to elaborate more than that.”
Her eye twitched. “Don’t give me that, Emerson. You know who I’m talking about. You all do!”
He glanced around, but our confused expressions assured him that her accusations had come out of nowhere. “Director—”
“What’s the meaning of this?” Paride Coppola strode in with Greg Miller close behind. “You shouldn’t question a Delta team without their liaison, Madam Rollins.”
“Watch your tone,” she snapped. “And just who the hell are you? Is Delta hiring recruits from a midnight beefcake show now?”
Ourdirector reached out and put a stilling hand on Paride’s arm. “What’s going on here?”
The cautious question had been posed to Rollins, but Paride angrily interjected, “I had to find out from our security desk that Director Rollins stormed into the place, demanding to know where Callie was.”
Greg glanced at Rollins, his eyebrow arched as if verifying the truth of Paride’s statement.
Rollins scowled and resumed pacing.
Apparently Paride wasn’t done yet. His dark gaze tracked the CIA woman’s movements. “No warning, no courtesy call, nothing!”
Rollins scoffed through a bitter laugh. “Oh please! I’m the Director of the CI fucking A. I don’t send courtesy calls. Don’t forget your entire agency works for me!” She thumped her chest to emphasize the last word. By some miracle of physics, a couple strands of her hair worked themselves loose from the punishingly tight updo, lending the woman a slightly unhinged look.
Greg shook his head as he pinched the bridge of his nose. “Okay, you know that’s not entirely true, Ruth.”
She directed her ire his way. “Don’t you ‘Ruth’ me, Greg!”
“Hey, in case you’ve forgotten, you orchestrated this ruse of musical leaders and landed me here. If you disagree with my approach, blame yourself.”
“I’m beginning to regret that decision.”
“Tough,” he retorted. “Now let’s all talk this out like rational, trained government agents. What’s going on?”
Rollins’ cheeks dimpled at the corners, which usually meant she was amused or happy, but it sent shivers down my spine. “You want to know what this is about? I can show you.”
I wanted so badly to glance at Payton but stamped down the cliched action of obvious worry and guilt.
“Jones,” Rollins snapped.
The man in question unfolded a laptop they’d preconnected to the projector, since a computer screen appeared the second the light warmed up.
“Yesterday, at approximately oh eight hundred, the King Team began acting strangely.”
Paride climbed to his feet. “You were actively surveilling them? What right—”
“Sit down.” Rollins’ lips pursed when the Italian refused to do so until Greg gave him a nod. “As they are well aware, the King Team knows we’ve been searching for both Bokaryov Tarasovich and Vasily Petrov. While they’ve landed on Tarasovich’s case, my agents are still attempting to track and capture Petrov.” She hissed his name. “He’s proven himself to be quite elusive.”
“So you turned to the only solid lead you have,” Greg surmised. “Callie King.”
“Yes, he did seem rather grateful to her when she bartered an allowance on his behalf to visit his daughter’s grave on U.S. soil.” Rollin’s stony gaze settled on me, as if weighing my worth.
My hands shook, and Brock squeezed the one he’d yet to relinquish.
Paride jumped in before Rollins could ask me a question. “As employees, we have a reasonable right to privacy. They’ve been relocated here because of their assignment, and you took advantage of that.”
Her smile was condescending, as if to say, “Duh, CIA, remember?”
What she said was, “Yes, that is true, but only if there’s a reasonable expectation of privacy, such as bathrooms. If you’ll allow my agent to play the footage, I think we’ll all agree they held no such expectations.”
While an agent dimmed the lights, our team glanced at each other, trying not to show the worry we felt.
Had “bathrooms” been a dig? Had someone seen Aleks and me?
The feed played, displaying us huddled, but the audio was missing. I relaxed into my chair first, earning an inquisitive expression from Brock.
I couldn’t reassure him though, because Rollins continued showing the feeds as they tracked our various team members throughout the halls at Delta. Of course, that was unnecessary. The feed in the gym glitched quite obviously, a blatant sign of tampering.
“So what?” Greg asked. “Something was up with the technology. Even the audio wasn’t working.”
Rollins crossed her arms. “Oh, it was working all right.”
“Then where is it?” he argued.
She narrowed her eyes on me. “My agents noticed it was distorted.”
“Distorted how? Like a voice changer?”
Exactly like a voice changer,I replied mentally, loving how clueless Greg was with technology. He hadn’t even known about the cloud.
“We weren’t sure, but after further examination by our tech people, they discovered separate audio and visual data when there should be one single file. When they investigated, every action they took to correct and isolate the desired frequencies only brought more distortion. They described it like a Chinese finger trap. The more they tugged, the further they got entangled inside this hidden wormhole that continuously changed—”
“Uh, actually, Madam Director,” the agent with the tech interrupted, “we actually said it was behaving similarly to a polymorphic virus where—”
She gave him a deadened stare. “Do I look like I care?” Satisfied that her underling had been thoroughly cowed, she continued. “The malware changed the pitches until sound waves became nothing but a whistle too high for the human ear to detect.”
I glanced at CJ who was beaming at me.
Rollins caught the exchange. “Oh, I wouldn’t congratulate your girlfriend too soon, Mr. Tate. Our technicians didn’t realize the acoustic was still playing after it left human ranges. The wormhole—” She stopped and dared her agent to correct her again. “Continued to do its job until it shattered all the glass in a twenty-foot radius. Windows, glasses, computers… We had to order fifteen replacement consoles! Hundreds of thousands of dollars in damage.”
More than one pair of eyes widened, but only Paride’s and Greg’s turned in my direction.
“Callie,” Greg began. “Did you do that?”
Brock squeezed my hand hard.
I licked my lips. Did I set out to destroy that particular computer lab at the CIA? “No.”
Greg seemed reassured, but Rollins’ smile transformed into something frightening as she stared me down, leaning over to prop her hands up on the table. “You’re getting good at lying, Miss King. Does that come with the territory of not officially existing?”
“Hey!” Paride protested at the same time Payton stood, mirroring the CIA director’s stance. “You asked her to take that role to continue to help you out. Is your memory so short that you forgot who helped solidify your position as director after you were already on shaky ground?”
Greg stepped between them—figuratively since a table stood between them. “Whoa, hey. Calm yourselves! There’s no need to get in a spitting match. We have physical files. Let’s go check those. I’m sure we’ll all see this was a big misunderstanding.”
Rollins kept her gaze glued to Payton in their stare down. “What a good idea, Greg. Oh, except those copies seem to have vanished.” She didn’t wait for a reply, instead addressing Payton. “Keep your team in line, Emerson. They are treading a dangerous path.”
Payton didn’t back down.
Rollins shifted her attention to me. “Callie, if my technicians—of which I have many—can pin the encrypted email you sent out this morning to Vasily Petrov, and you failed to step forward with that information, I’ll no longer consider us on pleasant terms. And trust me, you won’t enjoy being on my bad side. Do I make myself clear?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Brock squeezed my shaking hand once more.
Rollins’ eyes narrowed. “Nothing to confess? Are you really so confident that you can outsmart an entire department of computer engineers?”
I held her gaze, on the verge of puking, but proud of how steady my voice sounded. “I have nothing to share.”
Rollins snorted in disgust, signaling to her agents. “Fine. Rot with him in Gitmo for all I care. Maybe you’ll be neighbors and talk about how Natasia turned out to be both your collective demise. The clock’s ticking, Callie King. Enjoy your freedom while you still can.”