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I can’t talk now, but serious shit’s going down and the company’s involved.
Her brother’s final words to her replayed in her mind as Jaia strode quickly down the top floor office hallway toward the elevator. She’d timed this carefully, waiting until her boss was in another meeting before making her exit. She was anxious to get out of here, a mental clock ticking with each passing second.
She was fifty feet away from the elevator when a door opened behind her. She didn’t slow. Didn’t dare look back.
“Leaving already?”
Alarm shot through her. She froze, took a split second to compose her face into a serene mask before turning to face the speaker.
Her boss, the company COO stood in his office doorway, hands in pockets as he watched her with a scrutiny that made her pulse race. Robert couldn’t know what she’d done. Not this soon. She’d been too careful.
Or...did he? The way he watched her made her not so sure.
“Unless you need me for anything else, yes,” she replied, her voice calm in spite of her elevated pulse. The company’s CEO was in Robert’s office right now. She didn’t like or trust him.
Robert’s face softened in a grin, and he waved her off. Well into his fifties, he was still in good shape and carried himself with the proud bearing of a former military man. “Nah, just messing with you. Have a good weekend and I’ll see you Monday.”
“Thanks, you too.”
Her knees felt weak as she stepped into the elevator, but she dared not show any sign of relief or weakness with the security camera capturing her every move. Just like at the funeral, she held herself together. Composed. Concealing her true thoughts and emotions from everyone else in this world she no longer trusted.
She managed a smile and a wave at the security personnel manning the desk in the lobby and flashed her security badge to the man standing guard at the elevator down to the underground parking garage. He checked it, nodded at her and stepped aside to let her enter. Security was tight on a normal day, but with the CEO here for meetings and an undercurrent of unease in the air, things were more strict than usual.
Her car was parked in its usual spot two rows away from the elevator. Only one other car was still in the row, everyone else having gone home for the Easter weekend. She slipped inside, allowed herself a mental sigh of relief. But even here she couldn’t afford to let her guard down. Cameras covered every inch of this level.
And she couldn’t be sure that someone hadn’t planted a microphone or tracker on her car.
She felt nauseated and elated all at once as she pulled out of her spot and wound her way up through the garage to street level. She had passed the official point of no return. There was no going back now. All she could do was hope for the best.
A storm front had moved in from the Gulf during the afternoon. The moment she exited the parking garage and pulled into Tampa rush hour traffic, fat raindrops beat against the windshield. All around her, the spring sky was completely blotted out by ominous, purple-tinged clouds.
She kept careful watch around her, looking for any sign that she was being followed, but the gridlock made it impossible to tell. The rain got heavier as she inched her way to the freeway onramp and merged into the slow-moving traffic, finally becoming an angry torrent. Even at a crawl her wipers could barely keep the windshield clear. Jagged bolts of lightning tore through the sky, the boom of thunder loud enough to rattle her windows.
It took almost twice as long as usual to make it to her neighborhood along the bay. But when she got close, she spotted a gray van a few cars back that might be following her. It didn’t make sense that her boss would order someone to tail her home. He would simply just send someone to her house.
Unwilling to leave it to chance, she took several right turns in a row, completing a square to make sure. By the third turn, the van had disappeared.
A little rattled, she took a long, winding route toward her house, paranoia nagging her the entire time. But there was no further sign of the van, or anyone waiting for her when she finally reached her street.
She opened the automatic garage door, drove straight in and closed it behind her. Instantly the sound of the rain became muffled, the relative silence of the interior closing around her.
Drawing in a deep breath, Jaia let it out slowly, forcing her tense muscles to relax and letting some of the nervous energy drain away. She got out and hurried into the house, disarming her security system on her way through the door that led into her combination mudroom and laundry room. A system that likely gave her a false sense of safety considering the people she worked for could easily hack or bypass it without her ever realizing.
Considering what she’d been working on lately, it was possible they already had.
Shoving that disturbing thought aside, she dropped her purse and workbag on the kitchen counter and went straight to her office just off the living room. She woke her computer, suppressing another tingle of alarm before opening the program she needed.
This still felt surreal. She was a top-notch executive assistant, not a tech wizard. It had taken her six weeks to research how to do this and get the equipment she needed using a fake name and a PO box. Then another week to finalize her plan and work up the nerve to actually plant the devices.
An audio feed popped up. Pulling in a determined breath, she hit start.
A live conversation was happening in her boss’s office. She quickly put on her headphones to listen in, checking to make sure the program was also recording a written transcript of what was being said. She recognized the two voices instantly. One was her boss.
The other was Douglas Lawrence, CEO of the company that had formerly been known as Graystone.
She listened intently. The audio was grainy in spots, the transcription garbled, but it was a lot better than nothing.
The meeting went on for another twenty minutes before the men left the room. She switched feeds to access the tiny microphone she had managed to plant in her boss’s vehicle. It began transmitting as soon as he got in.
All that came through was the sound of the radio and her boss’s off-key whistling mixing with the rapid swish of the wipers as he drove. He was alone.
Jaia removed her headphones, left the program running to continue monitoring the feed, and opened a secret folder she had buried within her email program. There was only one message in it. A response to the email she’d sent to a man almost two weeks ago.
Who are you?
She had another message already composed and ready to send. But she’d been holding off on sending more, unsure whether she was being monitored. Unsure whether it was safe to reach out again. Unsure whether she could afford to trust the man she had contacted from an account that she hoped would be difficult to trace.
A flash of lightning turned the room white for a heartbeat. Thunder boomed seconds later, rumbling away in the distance. Her gaze strayed to the long table positioned under the window overlooking her backyard, and the framed photo she cherished.
Her brother was in his dress uniform, clean shaven, his arm around her and a big grin on his handsome face. Veterans Day, four months ago. Just weeks before her world had all come crashing down around her.
Every time she looked at that picture it galvanized her. Sukhi deserved justice. At this point, she was the only one who could make that happen.
Turning back to her computer, she clenched her jaw and hit send.
****
Graystone. Tell us what you know!
Brandon jerked awake with a ragged gasp in the darkness, his heart a staccato beat in his chest, breath sawing in his ears as the ghostly memories slithered through his mind.
He sat up, wiped a hand over his damp face and glanced at the clock on the nightstand. Not quite six. Travis’s house was still and silent around him, the distant roar of the sea seeping through the closed window across the room.
Forcing the demons from his mind, he put on a clean T-shirt and padded downstairs through the pre-dawn light into the kitchen. The timed coffee maker was already percolating, filling the room with the rich, roasted scent of his sister’s favorite French blend.
He helped himself to a cup as soon as it was ready, adding a generous splash of half-and-half. Quiet footsteps sounded overhead in the upstairs hallway.
He leaned against the counter at the sink as his sister appeared around the corner, a fuzzy pink robe wrapped around her, her long blond hair mussed and her eyes half-open. “Morning.”
“Morning,” Kerrigan mumbled, walking past him to the coffee machine.
He raised a teasing eyebrow. “Long night?”
She shot him an alarmed look. “Why, did you hear something?”
Oh, God. Suppressing a grimace, he handed her the creamer. “No, thank God.”
“Thank God what?” his best friend and fellow PJ Travis asked, walking through the living room toward them.
“Nothing,” Kerrigan said quickly, fully awake now. But there was no mistaking the blush in her cheeks. “You want coffee?”
“I’m assuming that’s a rhetorical question.” Travis crossed the kitchen to accept the mug Kerrigan handed him, then wound his arm around her waist and kissed the top of her head before facing Brandon. “Sleep okay last night?”
“Not bad.” A lie. He could count on one hand how many times he’d slept through the night since his capture and imprisonment during a mission in Yemen a few weeks back when he’d volunteered to be embedded with a SF unit. But it was what it was, and he was dealing with it as best he could.
“Feel like hitting the range for a while later?”
“Sure.” As Air National Guard Pararescuemen they were part time military and trained constantly in their free time to keep their skills sharp.
“Don’t forget we’ve got dinner at your dad’s place at six-thirty,” Kerrigan said to him. “Mom and Dad are coming down,” she added to Brandon.
“Are they?” That was news to him.
She frowned. “Didn’t I tell you?”
“No.”
“Oh. Sorry.” Her frown dissolved into a blissful smile when Travis bent his head to nuzzle the side of her neck.
Brandon looked away and busied himself getting some bread in the toaster oven, feeling like an interloper. It was great to see his sister and best friend so happy together, but sometimes he felt like the most awkward fifth wheel in the history of fifth wheels.
Now on stress leave from the fire department he worked for as a paramedic in Portland, he had a good chunk of savings put away and had recently been looking around for a place of his own to rent in the Crimson Point area. He loved living here, but Travis and Ker were new and deserved some privacy without him being constantly underfoot.
With the toaster oven ticking away, he picked his mug back up, raised it to his lips. A loud bang made him jump, sloshing scalding hot coffee all over the front of him while his heart rate skyrocketed.
“Sorry!” Kerrigan exclaimed in a quiet voice, as if afraid of startling him again. “I forgot the soft-close mechanism on that cupboard isn’t working. Are you all right?”
The cupboard. It had only been the cupboard slamming. Jesus.
“Fine,” he muttered, running his scalded hand and wrist under cold water in the sink.
A kitchen towel appeared over his shoulder. He turned around as he dried off, all but cringing at the identical looks of concern on his sister’s and best friend’s faces. His heightened startle reflex was just one of the things he’d been battling since coming home.
“Gonna go change,” he said under his breath, hurrying from the kitchen and retreating upstairs to his room.
He stripped off the stained shirt and reached for another, glancing down at himself. The cuts were gone and almost all the bruises had faded, except the area around his nearly healed cracked ribs that remained a faint bluish-green. At least his face no longer looked like he’d gone twelve rounds with a heavyweight fighter.
No one who saw him now would be able to tell he’d been beaten to shit by his captors. On the outside, he looked fine. As for the inside...
He was working on it.
But his hellish experiences in Yemen had fundamentally changed part of him forever. Accepting that was proving to be the hardest part of his healing journey. Along with all the unanswered questions.
His gaze stopped on the closed laptop sitting on the desk on the far wall. That cryptic email containing a secret document about Graystone kept tormenting him.
Heard you were looking for proof. This is the start. Will send more when I can. Be careful and don’t tell anyone you have it. I’ll be in touch with more when it’s safe.
He still didn’t know who had sent it, only that it had been signed with the cryptic words An ally. There had been nothing since. Not even after he’d replied demanding to know who the sender was.
He hadn’t told a soul about it. Not even Travis or his sister. Because he still didn’t know what the hell he was dealing with here and refused to endanger them in case things were as bad as he feared. Kerrigan had been through her own hell two weeks ago, nearly dying at the hands of a madwoman involved with the law firm she and Kerrigan had both worked at—that was somehow involved with Graystone.
Until he knew it wouldn’t put his loved ones at risk, he was keeping all this to himself.
Most of his free time since coming home had been spent doing his own digging, trying to find answers. Only to hit a brick wall each time. Every single guy he’d reached out to who used to work for the security firm either hadn’t responded or didn’t want to talk.
It left him more convinced than ever that his captors had been telling the truth. That Graystone was involved with major criminal activity in Yemen, and someone with a lot of power was doing everything possible to cover it up.
Pulling out the chair, he sat and opened the laptop. A quiet ding sounded as his email populated, showing eleven new messages since he’d checked it at midnight.
His heart skipped a beat when he saw one from a familiar sender address.
Pulse thudding in his throat, he opened the message, his eyes skipping over the scanned document to the note below.
Another piece of the puzzle for you. Don’t tell anyone.
An ally.
