The Captain was having none of their bullshit today.
Snow had begun to kiss the windows of the conference room, a blustery cold having set in that was hindering the efforts of Christmas shoppers…not that Jace was among those. He didn’t have anyone to buy for, except maybe the people sitting in this room, and none of them gave a shit, either. But he found himself zoning out while watching the white stuff fall outside.
It had been snowing in Cambridge the day the Captain had walked into the room at MIT where Jace sat, dejected and destroyed after learning of his dreams being flushed down the crapper, and made the offer that would change his life. For better or worse.
You have a set of skills that caught our attention, Mr. Adams. We’d like to put them to the test. Would you be interested?
Sure, what the fuck else did he have to do with his life? He thought he’d actually said something like that.
And found himself hacking the Pentagon a few weeks later in a bug-bounty program.
The Captain was a shrewd man, no-nonsense and stern. Cold, even, yet every one of them sitting here would put their life on the line for him. And had. The gray peppering his dark hair more heavily with each passing year did nothing to reduce the severity of his appearance. If anything, it somehow enhanced it, as if age was doing nothing but sharpening his edges.
He was the only father figure Jace had ever known. He didn’t know how Cap had pulled this thankless job—leading their misfit ex-military group of ethical hackers—but he was damn glad to have him in control. Ethical hackers. There was a misnomer. But it was their job to outthink the criminals, to find and fix the weaknesses in government and sometimes corporate IT systems before worse people could find and exploit those weaknesses first.
To defeat your enemy, you must first know your enemy.
“Got anything you care to contribute, Jace?” The voice brought his head around. It was cool, always controlled, but commanded attention and respect. Jace racked his brain, trying to sort through the bits and pieces of conversation he’d picked up while he’d been staring out the window like an idiot.
“No, sir.”
“Something on your mind?”
“No, sir,” he said at the same time Helix piped up, “Yes, sir. Ask him to tell you about it.”
Now all eyes were on him. The Captain folded his hands calmly in front of him and waited without a word.
“You have been oddly absent for this entire meeting,” Drake pointed out. He was the malware specialist of the Nest, having created viruses that brought down financial institutions, governments, satellites, and cellular networks all over the world and beyond. And Jace didn’t even want to know the things he’d done back when he wore a black hat.
Ignoring the remark, Jace turned instead to Sully, their resident cybersecurity engineer. “Has our network been compromised lately?”
She scoffed and ran a hand through her short, messy white hair. “Like you wouldn’t have heard about it yet. Besides, anyone who can crack this wall deserves an engraved invitation to join.”
“That’s what I thought.”
“What’s this about?” the Captain asked.
“I had a visitor the other day,” Jace said, leaning forward and staring at a neutral spot on the table. “I’m not sure how she found me. Everything seems to be sound, but she showed up, and she claimed to be the twin sister of the woman who got me kicked out of MIT. She’s the mirror image of her, to the point that I thought it was her.”
A collective silence fell across the room. Every one of them had heard his Lena sob story, and he didn’t feel like recounting much of it now.
“And she’s the reason you ended up here,” Sully pointed out. Jace shrugged.
“Sure, if you want to look at it that way.”
“What did she want?” Drake asked.
“All I got out of her was that her sister—Lena, the one who set me up—was in trouble. She was asking for my help.”
“Does she know who you are?” Who you are in this context went far beyond name.
“Whether or not she’s made me, I don’t know.”
“Don’t you think you ought to find out?” Sully looked around at them all. “If someone can find one of us, they can find all of us. We need better security—physical security—in this building. I’ve been telling you and telling you.”
“We’ll address that,” the Captain said. “Is that all that’s concerning you, Jace?”
He considered his words for a long moment, then shook his head, glancing at Helix. Helix nodded, encouraging him to go on. “Not just the how but the why. Why me. To help her. I don’t get it.”
“Why didn’t you ask?” Sully asked.
I was too busy kissing her brains out wouldn’t be an acceptable response. “I guess it didn’t occur to me,” he said, letting his voice drip with enough acid to discourage further questioning on the matter. “I just didn’t.”
Sully, as unfazed by his tone as always, scoffed at him. “The next time strange women show up at your door, call me.”
“Can I watch?” Helix asked, grinning lasciviously until the Captain put the kibosh on the subject. Yet again having none of their bullshit.
“She’s also a competent coder,” Jace continued once everyone had heeled to the Captain’s command. “Goes by Meerkat.”
“So you got that out of her but not her reasons for coming to you?”
“She wrote it on a note and stuck it under my door. I thought it was Lena fucking Morris standing in the hallway of my building. Forgive me for not being exactly rational.”
“Some of the most high-stakes military operations in the history of the Air Force,” Sully said, “and he’s scared of a girl.” She tsked at him but winked to take the sting off the words. He loved Sully as much as anyone, and she loved getting under his skin. She was just so damned good at it, too. He scratched his nose with his middle finger in her general direction, and she laughed while the Captain sighed.
“Children,” Helix called, holding up both hands.
“Thank you, Helix,” the Captain said with a rare note of sarcasm. “What do you propose, Jace?”
From the time he was a kid, no one had listened to him. Not his parents who abandoned him. Not the foster parents who ignored him. Teachers hadn’t known what to make of the troubled kid with brilliant computer skills. Professors had begun to somewhat understand him. But the Captain—he was the first person in Jace’s life to listen to him, to value his opinion, and he did not take that lightly.
“I propose to forget about it. My distinguished colleague, however”—he indicated Helix—“does not agree and wanted to bring you all into the loop because of the vulnerabilities this incident might have exposed. Once those are addressed…” He fumbled with his words, trying to be respectful and failing miserably. “I really couldn’t give less of a shit about Lena Morris. Or her sister.”
Cap turned to Sully. “See if security has been compromised. Run a comprehensive check. Overturn every rock.” She nodded, suddenly serious. Then Cap’s piercing dark eyes turned to Jace.
“You do need to determine why this young lady approached you.”
I was afraid of that, he thought. “Yes, sir.”
“This could have been something she was instructed to do, if her sister is being held hostage. We need to know why and by whom. It might not be anything that serious. Hopefully it isn’t. But we can’t know that.”
“Makes sense.” Even if he didn’t like it one damn bit.
The meeting then turned to other Department of Defense cases, and the heat was off him, thank Christ. He hadn’t liked sitting under the scrutiny of his team members while they no doubt picked apart every move he made or word he uttered. Like being naked under a spotlight. He breathed a sigh of relief when Cap dismissed them, but then he asked Jace to hang back.
Jace watched his team file out with sympathetic glances back at him. He wanted to tell every one of them to kiss his ass.
Cap got up and moved to the coffeepot, where he poured them both fresh mugs. Jace accepted his gratefully and downed it, scalding his throat in the process.
“Now. Tell me everything you wouldn’t tell the others,” Cap said, spearing him again with that assessing gaze.
“That’s really all there is. I sent her on her way.” He knew the man could smell a lie like a bloodhound. “I might have…kissed her.”
A laugh from the Captain was a rare thing. “You might have?”
“I definitely did. The woman makes me crazy.”
“That’s obvious, Jace, but let me caution you against letting her get to you. We need you levelheaded.”
“You don’t have to caution me. I’ll get to the bottom of this if you need me to, count on it.”
“I believe you. But let’s not seek revenge on this woman, either.”
Jace met his gaze head-on. “Believe this, sir. If I wanted to do that, it would already be done.”
Cap looked at him for a long time, then sipped his coffee. “Understood.” He set the mug down and wiped at an invisible speck on the table. “You still have a lot of bitterness. But if I haven’t said it enough already, your contributions to this team are invaluable. Frankly—selfishly—I’m glad you’re here, whatever it took to get you here.”
What it took was the singlehanded destruction of his future, but he supposed he could understand that viewpoint. It still made him grit his teeth.
“I didn’t scrape you from the bottom of the barrel like some of my past recruits,” Cap went on. “You had a bright future ahead, while some of the others had nothing, and you had that stolen. I understand the anger. You have to leave it behind, son. There’s no place for it here.”
Jace laced his fingers together and exhaled long and deep. “In the end I was facing what they all were, though, wasn’t I? Jail time. That’s why we’re all here. We didn’t want to do time. You saved us all. So, thank you. I guess I seem like an ungrateful asshole sometimes.”
“The main reason I want you to look into this situation further…” Cap produced a nondescript manila folder from his high-security briefcase and slid it across the tabletop with the tips of his fingers. “…is this.” Jace lifted his gaze from it and cocked an eyebrow at the older man before reaching forward and drawing the folder to himself. He flipped it open to find a picture of Lena staring up at him from—CIA credentials?
What?
“The fuck?”
“Apparently, there is a missing CIA agent.” Cap drew a long breath. “One special agent Lena Morris.”
It was all Jace could do, considering their conversation a few minutes ago, not to explode from his chair and throw the table across the room. Instead he said, very calmly, “You’re shitting me.”
The Captain let that go without comment. “I didn’t want to drop this information on you in the presence of the others. Let them do their jobs, but I want your special attention on this.”
So everything Lindsey had said was true.
“It’s quite possible, actually likely, that the sister who came to you has no idea her twin is CIA. Jace, I’m telling you this with utmost confidence that, if you have further contact with this woman, you won’t blow any cover Special Agent Morris maintains.”
“Of course I won’t.” His pulse felt ragged in his ears. Lena Morris. CIA. It explained so much. Yet…
“Do you have any questions?”
“Yeah. How did she pass the goddamn psych eval?” The Captain gave a long-suffering sigh, and he quickly added, “Any other intel I should be aware of?”
“I’m afraid this is all we have at the moment, which is precisely nothing. She was undercover and hasn’t reported for days. That’s all we know. I’m hoping you can change that soon.”
“Yes, sir. So you were about to put this to the team before I opened my big mouth about my visitor the other day?”
“I actually wasn’t, not yet. I was waiting until we had more to go on.” One corner of his mouth tilted up. “But then you opened your mouth.”
Yeah. That had gotten him into trouble more times than he could count.