Chapter 27
TWENTY-SEVEN
Raleigh, North Carolina
“I’m gonna have to purge my whole system and reboot.” Marina sat back in the passenger seat, running her hands through her hair, and stared at the laptop on her knees.
Noah looked over at her. The traffic around them wasn’t going anywhere at this time of the morning. “Anything I can do to help?”
She shook her head. “I’d rather be back in Idaho. My setup there is more robust, but if this program had gotten into that system?” She blew out a breath. “That whole setup would have been toast.”
“You work on separate networks?”
“Want me to explain it?”
He half smiled. “I’m good.”
“I compartmentalize what I use to connect with the team, and we have our data spread across multiple servers that don’t talk to each other. That way no one gets all of it. They’d have to hack each separate server. It’s a longwinded way for me to work, but it’s more secure.”
“Good to know.”
She slammed the laptop down and lifted her phone out of the cupholder. “Dan has Adam back at the castle. He’s gonna get him stitched up. Ice and Steph went after Kai, but they haven’t checked in yet.”
Noah glanced at the GPS map on the dash screen.
Forty minutes, and they’d be at the house—the last known residence of Matthew Haserford.
He’d studied the file Division Chief Kraus gave him cover to cover, and there wasn’t much there beyond a basic dossier.
The guy was a CIA psychologist for years.
Since Noah didn’t even know if his parents really had been agents, he wasn’t even sure they’d known each other professionally.
They could’ve been neighbors, or Matthew Haserford could’ve been his father’s college roommate. Noah intended to find out which it was.
Marina glanced over from her phone. “Did you tell your brother we’re going to see this guy?”
Noah shook his head. “If I find out anything, I’ll pass it to Caleb. But it could turn out to be a wasted trip, so there’s no point getting his hopes up.”
“He didn’t seem as interested in finding them as you are.”
“He hides it well, but he doesn’t want Tessa to get her heart broken. She wants a big family. Grandparents for their baby, not just her dad and Pops, but whoever she can pull together.”
“I like that for her.”
Noah heard an almost sad note in her tone. “We’ve worked together nearly seven years now. I don’t think I know anything about your family.”
Marina put her laptop on the back seat and grabbed the paper cup of coffee from the cupholder, sipping it even though it was probably cold by now. Noah’s was long gone, and he was ready for another.
“What’s to know?” she said. “My parents live in Key West. My cousin was killed in a suspicious accident. I don’t have siblings.”
“Do you get to see your parents much?”
“I’d have to want to see them.” She sighed. “They aren’t bad people, they just like their life. Soon as I moved out for college, they cleared out my room and turned it into a meditation space. My dad sends me an email occasionally, but other than that I don’t hear from them.”
“I didn’t see Caleb for a long time, and last year was the first Christmas I had at the ranch in years.”
“So why try to find your parents so badly if they don’t seem to care about you?”
“I’m not convinced they don’t,” Noah said. “I think they can’t contact us or it’ll put everyone at risk, and I’d like to know enough to understand the threat.”
The GPS filled the silence, instructing him to take a right up ahead.
Noah continued, “I guess part of me is still the little boy who watched them drive away so many times.”
“That isn’t a bad thing. They broke your heart. I know what that feels like.”
“I guess we’re destined to be sad together.”
“Speak for yourself.” She chuckled. “I hope you find them, but I figured out early on that I’m nothing like my parents and they’re never going to understand the difference.
The sad truth is that they don’t care enough to try.
They just want to go to the country club and vacation in Tuscany with their friends.
The housekeeper would make me sandwiches.
Eventually, I proved I could make them myself, and no one bothered me until I hacked a government server when I was twelve.
After that, I was offered an um…internship.
I went legit, and I’ve been trying to prove I’m worth noticing ever since. ”
“On that we can agree.”
“I’m not neurotic, I just want to be impressive enough that people appreciate me.”
Noah chuckled. “Why do you think I went to BUD/S?”
“Pretty punishing exercise that leads to an anonymous career, where most people can’t know what you do. How is that being noticed?”
“The right people know what I can do.”
“You could always get a Navy SEAL tattoo. Then everyone would know.”
“Are you going to get a tattoo that says ‘I hacked the US government’?”
She grinned at him. “How do you know I don’t already have one?”
Noah cleared his throat. “Call me intrigued.”
“Hi, Intrigued. I’m Hungry.”
He shot her a smile. “We ate breakfast.”
She shrugged. “I was distracted. Now I’m peckish.”
“We can stop for something after this meeting.”
“Yeah, the grocery store. I want sushi.”
He made a face. “Sushi in the morning?”
“Sushi is good anytime.”
Noah pulled into the driveway of a farmhouse—not that he could see it, but he’d looked up the street-view map online. Set back from the street behind a swath of tall oak trees, the grass all brown and dry. The gravel-and-dirt trail overgrown with weeds.
“This place looks uninviting. Kind of like my house in Albuquerque.”
“How many places do you have?”
“Five. No, six. The seventh is fluid and too complicated to explain.”
Noah turned the car left and parked in front of the house. “And you think I’m not going to want to ask any further questions?”
“Ask him questions.” Marina pointed to the ramshackle house. “Isn’t that why we’re here?”
Noah sighed and climbed out of the car. Getting to know her better was proving to be more of an exercise in frustration than anything else. She had gone beyond being hard to read. Though, he thought maybe he understood the range of her moods better now.
The two-story house had a porch that started halfway across the front and stretched right around the corner of the house, with the garage on the left. Peeling white paint with red accents that had faded to a peach color. Cloudy windows and white net drapes.
The unmistakable ratchet of a shotgun had him ducking down before he even realized what he’d heard.
“Find cover, Marina.” Noah slid the pistol from the holster on his hip and spied the open front door, the occupant of the house in shadow behind the screen. Holding a shotgun.
“What do you want?”
“My name is Noah Rourke.” He walked around the back of the car, moving slowly, motioning for Marina to get back in. “We spoke on the phone.”
Instead of doing what he’d told her to do, she tucked herself behind him, grasping his hips and moving with him.
“That supposed to mean somethin’?” the man inside said.
Noah stopped at the edge of the porch steps.
“Years ago, you knew Elaina and Mitch Rourke. You worked with them, or you were friends with them, but they disappeared. Nearly twenty years ago now.” He froze, and for a moment it felt as if his whole life was riding on this conversation.
“I’m trying to find out what happened to them. ”
The man on the other side of the screen door said nothing.
“You’re Matthew Haserford, the CIA psychologist.”
“Did they send you?” he called out. “Are you here to kill me?”
Marina’s hands tightened on Noah’s shirt, gripping the material over his hips.
Still behind him. Trusting him to protect her.
He wanted to believe it was some kind of gallant, knight-in-shining-armor moment that could turn the tide of what wasn’t yet happening between them.
But he was pretty sure it was more about the fact he was big enough for her to hide behind him—and he would be out an overwatch officer if he lost her.
He just needed her to not explore too much and discover the scars on his lower back.
“No one is killing anyone. We just wanna talk.” Noah lowered his gun. “Put the shotgun down. I’m not here to hurt you.”
“Got nothin’ to say. I’m not part of that world now.”
He hardly sounded like an Ivy League government psychologist these days, but maybe that was the point.
Even psychologists had lives after the CIA.
The further a person could be from who they’d been, when they were in their retirement years, the less they’d be a target of anyone turning over rocks they shouldn’t.
“I’m not interested in who you are now,” Noah said. “That’s not what this is.”
Kraus had given him this guy’s information. That meant the CIA knew he lived here. If Haserford knew anything about Noah’s parents, the CIA probably did as well or they wouldn’t have sent Noah. That meant the CIA weren’t looking for his parents, but they did know more than anyone had told him.
Question was, had Kraus sent him here so Haserford could kill them?
“Elaina and Mitch Rourke are my parents. Years ago they left and never came back. I’d like to know what happened to them.”
“Rourke?”
“You remember them?” Noah felt it then. A flicker of hope like a candle igniting.
He stood at the bottom of the steps of this ramshackle house, wondering who he would be when he left here. And if the person who felt so close he could almost reach out and touch them was who he had always been meant to be.
Who he was now would be a thing of the past, and hereafter he would be a man in possession of the thing he’d always wanted to have—answers.
The shadow behind the screen door shifted. “I remember them.” After a few seconds of silence, Matthew Haserford said, “You should come in.”
Noah got the sense he’d moved back, deeper into the shadows inside the house.
He took half a step and realized Marina still had a hold on him, and it didn’t seem as if she was coming in. “You’re staying?”
“If you don’t mind.”
Noah waited until she lifted her chin. “I’ll be right back.”