Chapter 27

Chapter

Twenty-Seven

PATCH

I nstead of being able to turn Remy around quickly as I would have preferred, we had to let the gambit play out. Whoever wrote the code to keep track of Stone, had used an elegant format. Adding my own lines to it would trigger alarms if I didn't do it exactly right.

By the time night fell fully, Remy was in the Dallas area. He'd followed Stone to a five-star hotel, where the former general had checked in and then gone straight to the bar for a drink. He'd been there for the last—I checked my watch—hour.

McQuade and Locke were running into issues at the location we'd tracked using the GPS in the program. It was a ranch property, large house, bigger barn and a few outbuildings. They were empty.

Worse, there were definite signs of equipment movement with heavy tire treads going in and out. Had they begun the evacuation that fast? Or was it already in progress when Stone confronted McQuade?

I rubbed at my tired eyes. The buzz from the earlier orgasms had long since passed due to my frustration with all of this. We needed a break. Just one—and Stone seemed to be it and yet, here we were running into a salvo of distractions, half-clues, and worst of all, dead ends.

After a brief consult, they'd all decided that McQuade and Locke inspecting the location was vital as was Remy sticking with his target. Grabbing my mostly cold coffee cup, I grimaced. It didn't have much left in it, but I needed more caffeine and I didn't like cold coffee unless I ordered it that way.

One more sweep of my screens and I pushed the chair back. Stiffness invaded my muscles after having sat still for so long. The earlier boneless relief brought on by McQuade's touch and Remy's kisses, not to mention the fact Locke had heard everything—heat rose through me just at the memory—was completely absent now.

More was the pity. Interruptions of all types had demarcated my days for years. Particularly after I left my job. Building my life as an operator meant rigid controls, with checks and balances at every stage. That provided safety, but it also meant I didn't have fail safes or coverage when I needed downtime.

Better to not need it, so I learned to adapt. I slept when I could and worked the rest of the time. It kept me alive and my mind stimulated. Maybe it hadn't been the best existence, but it had been one. At least until…

No sooner did I try to think about what happened before I woke up after the bullet creased my forehead, than the memories slipped away, Spilling through the cracks like water sluicing away.

Irritated, I stared at the empty coffee pot. I'd made straight brew earlier. With as much work to do as I'd had, it was just easier than making a new espresso every couple of hours.

Now the pot was empty, because I'd filled my mug the last time and then shut it off. I'd meant to start a fresh pot, but then nothing.

Sighing, I stared at the pot, then at my cup. My stomach protested. Had I even eaten? The idea of food wasn't that appealing. Fine, I'd get the coffee started, and make a sandwich. That would be enough to get by on, surely.

The cold unit didn't offer us frozen, but the fridge was more than enough. The water tank was designed more for showering or washing. Probably not the best for drinking. We had bottled water in gallons for coffee.

It didn't take long to get the new pot brewing. I had my headset on, and I'd hear if any of them wanted me. It didn't take me long to build a sandwich and I'd eaten half of it by the time the pot finished brewing.

A part of me wished I'd just gone the espresso route or a flat white, but the fresh brewed coffee tickled my nose delightfully. I made myself finish the sandwich though, because after a full pot of coffee, I was just asking to strip my stomach by adding more without food.

No sooner did I finish the food and claim the coffee cup than my bladder made its protests known. Not for the first time since boarding this lovely moving office, was I grateful for the fact that they'd also installed a bathroom. It was a limited tank and they had to deal with it, but I didn't ask any questions and they offered no details.

That worked for me.

That really worked for me. I returned to my desk, swept my gaze over the three monitors and all the camera angles. I was keeping one eye on the town, and the other on the boys. While Remy had taken our SUV, Locke had gone to lift another vehicle. It didn't have the cameras already installed, but we'd rigged something up.

I could see the buildings they were clearing and all the signals were reading strong. No movements grabbed my attention, so I checked their links. All live and connected, just muted.

Good. Pee break time. I snagged my phone which would give me a smaller monitor if I needed it and hurried to the little privacy room they'd curtained. Eyes closed, I tried to think through the code I'd been working on amending. I needed to be more subtle than the original author.

Each call would need to be embedded in a command function they had already created. That would help to avoid setting off any traps that would quarantine the additions and let me use their own tools against them.

The fact that someone had created something quite so elegant annoyed me on a very primitive level. It was also something of a personal challenge. When I finished up, I did a quick wash of my hands using sanitizer then headed back to my desk.

A beep in my ear alerted me to the incoming call.

"Talk to me," I said as I connected us and slid back into my chair.

"I'm starting to think being here is where I needed to be," Remy said by way of greeting. "Connect the boys so I can brief you all at once?"

"Standby." I hit two buttons on the keyboard, sweeping the camera angles by matter of habit as I chimed into both Locke and McQuade's comms.

"Here," Locke said.

"Online, Sugar Bear. Missing us already?"

"Of course, I am," I answered with a grin, then connected the separate lines into one, so that the four of us were on the same call. "Remy is also online and needs to debrief. Are you secure?"

"As secure as can be at a completely abandoned facility." Irritation discolored every single syllable of McQuade's statement.

I sighed. "We'll gather what we can. Maybe we've forced them to move and that's not a bad thing." If their operations were being delayed, it meant we had them on the back foot. Maybe it was petty of me, but I'd spent enough years hiding from them.

"Will do," Locke said. "What do you have for us, Remy?"

I switched my view to the hotel he was at. One nice thing about the location— lots of security cameras. Lots of them. It took me a minute to find the bar they were in. I zeroed in on Remy first, then did a sweep of the room.

The cameras didn't move, so I had to toggle from camera to camera to find the right angle.

"Stone is in a meeting. He's been in a bar since we got here and he's about six bourbons down. I half-expect him to stumble, stutter, and slur, but he seems to be flushed and that's about it." Mild disgust filled Remy's voice.

There they were. He wasn't wrong, Stone did appear if not ill, at least vaguely off. His face was damp. The cameras were all in black and white and the zoom was a joke. When did they install these? The early aughts?

"Who is he meeting with?"

"Working on that," Remy said. "I want some confirmation. You got them yet, Patch? If you need a better angle, I can move. I'm also sending you a couple of pictures."

"Oh good. The hotel's cameras are terrible. They pixelate before I can bring them into focus. Send them over?"

"Already sent." The few second lag felt far longer than it was, but then I wanted to see now and in our high-speed world, any delay was too much delay.

The first image loaded via my phone's connection and I switched screens to pull it up. The first one was an angle of the back of the heads of two men greeting Stone. He looked less than pleased to see them.

"Not a friendly meeting."

"Not as far as I can tell," Remy agreed. "I can't tell if these are partners or bosses. But they are not happy with him. Guy on the left is Peter Anton. He's a little older and he has a couple of new scars but he's definitely the same guy and when I knew him, he was ASIS."

Australian Secret Intelligence Service. We didn't hear about them as much in the States or even in Western Europe. FBI. DGIS. MI-6. Them we heard about.

ASIS was far more subtle.

"How long since you last saw him?" I asked, already pulling up a screen to try and tunnel ASIS. I wanted more information on Peter Anton.

"Ten years," Remy answered. "Let's just say, we were not friendly then, we're definitely not friendly now. I didn't like his work ethic and he didn't like that I was a better shot."

"Good to know," McQuade said. "We got pictures of him yet?"

"Coming in now," I told him as I tabbed back to the screen then matched the second photo to the ASIS profile. They really did look like the same person.

I forwarded both images to Locke and McQuade. The soft dings over the line told me they'd received the images. McQuade let out a little grunt.

While the third photo downloaded, I rolled back to the ASIS connection. It was going to take a moment to get in. They had some nice encryption. Very nice, in fact. They'd definitely invested in it.

Unfortunately for their programmer, tunneling through these was my bread and butter. I wanted his ASIS file and—there we went.

"He left ASIS seven years ago, while it doesn't say he left in disgrace, he left in the middle of an investigation into abuse of power and position. Reading between the lines here, he was asked to resign and they made the investigation go away."

That happened sometimes. If they didn't want the egg on their face or if they didn't have quite enough to force the issue.

"That's three years longer than I think he should have been there."

"Hmm… I'm seeing a psych hold on his file dating back a decade during recovery time. Remy, it sounds like he had a hard time getting over you."

"If he'd died that would have solved the issue." The bland response made McQuade laugh and I had to admit, I grinned. "So, seven years ago, he takes a walk and now he's in bed with Stone. Who is our third man?"

I flipped back to the screen and stopped cold on the man staring back at me. That was a face I'd never wanted to see again.

"Sugar Bear?" McQuade prompted but I couldn't find the voice to answer them, not yet.

The man staring back at me stirred up a tempest of memories, all better forgotten. I licked my lips and then did a quick search, looking for a photo to match it too. Maybe I was remembering him wrong.

It had been a few years…

No images were prompted by my search and I had to drill down. He'd been scrubbed. That made sense. We had created sniffers, search and destroy protocols, when necessary, to eliminate public data on our operatives.

It protected them from accidental search and the whole world was connected these days. Those types of programs were exactly how I scrubbed myself, my history, everything about me.

Those programs were how I became nobody. It kept me safe for a long time.

Now that same type of system was protecting him. I didn't think so. I had caches of data on the dark web, set up and accessible via IP address and pass code phrases that only I knew the answers to. They were a combo of pop culture and associated candy flavors.

The system made sense to me, and would likely fuck with anyone else. You only got two shots to get it right and then the info would self-nuke.

I found the file I wanted?—

"Fallon," Locke said softly. "You still there?"

"luv?" Even Remy prompted me, the worry in their voices breached the barricade I erected around myself. It was like the water coming over the storm wall.

"One second," I managed and it even came out in an even, and grounded voice. "Just verifying."

The challenge popped up with a Taylor Swift song lyric accompanied by a photo of a woman from the Real Housewives of New Jersey.

The answer was Bruce Springsteen.

The files opened immediately and I paged through them to find the jpegs.

Marty Cartwright stared at me from his identification badge. He'd been my direct report supervisor, and the man who gave me all my instructions. Comparing the photo to the one Remy had sent, I lined them up side by side.

"I know him." No matter how hard I tried, I couldn't keep the tremble out of my voice. "I worked for him. When I left Section Five—when I walked away, he was my boss. His name is Marty Cartwright. Or at least, that's who he went by. That could have been an alias. He certainly doesn't exist anywhere now."

The rather generic name returned a lot of possibilities, too many to parse right now. But even using matching data to filter the search didn't turn up anything with him in it.

"I've got a direct line on him," Remy said, the offer was there. If I wanted him gone, all I had to do was say the word.

"Tempting," I admitted.

"Do it," McQuade said. "If he's in bed with Stone and this Aussie bastard, then we're better off scratching all of them off. Maybe it doesn't kill the body, but I've always found that cutting off the head can do a lot of damage."

"But if they aren't the head," Locke interjected. "We may be open?—"

An alarm went off and I jerked. Then flipped the screens back. The alarm was an intrusion on my system.

"Patch," Locke said in a tight voice. "Talk to us."

"Right. Now." McQuade's order cut through the chatter and anxiety. "We're on our way to you."

"Standby, we've been on an open-line between us and someone is trying to tag my system. Pretty sure it's coming from where you are." Remy was in a hotel. McQuade and Locke were at that facility.

"What do you need?" Locke was already thinking.

"Kill the power out there." If they had a generator… I couldn't focus on that right now.

"Grenade," McQuade said and I blinked as my fingers froze mid-keystroke.

An explosion echoed over the line as I made myself type. The screen in the corner showed the flash of whatever he'd detonated. The intrusion hiccuped, but it was still going.

"They have a generator," I said.

"Got another grenade?" Locke asked, almost idly.

"Of course, I have another. Got a target?"

Locke's answer washed over me. The banter. The coordinates. Through it all, Remy was quiet, but my screen showed him still connected. I blocked the next intrusion and shut it down.

"Grenade," McQuade called out again. This time the explosion was a lot further away, but the flash was no less intense.

The intrusion ceased.

I blew out a breath. "That did it."

Remy's long exhale echoed my own relief. "Good. Get back to her and move the damn truck."

"Agreed," Locke said and then another alarm sounded, this one was not for my system but for the truck.

"Patch?" McQuade's voice dropped. "Tell me you're armed."

I flipped the screen to see the car parked behind the truck and the two men getting out of it. It was dark out there and they were all in black.

They were also armed.

Yanking open the drawer next to me, I pulled out the gun and slid the full magazine into it to load it. I was not a fan of guns. I never had been. Having one right here was practical.

"I am."

"We're already on the way to you." They didn't give me an ETA.

They didn't have to.

They were too far away to help me in the immediate future. I was on my own.

"I'm here," Remy said into my ear. "Shut off the internal power. Set the spotlights to the access points. It will blind them when they open. You go for center mass, luv. You go for the largest target and you don't hesitate. You just fire."

My heart slammed against my ribs. The gritty taste of fear soured in my throat. This was—brutally familiar. Sweat prickled my skin and icy hot chills cascaded through me.

"You can do this, luv. Trust me."

I'd give anything if they were the ones here. Two keys and the internal lights were off. I left the desk and shifted to where the room divider was. On one side, the door near the cab. On the other, the ramp that slid down when the back opened.

They'd been coming up the sides. I could see my screen still. It was dark, the movement outside hard to detect. But they were going to the side.

"Breathe, Fallon," Locke said. "Deep breaths. You don't want to hold your breath or hyperventilate."

That was excellent advice. Back door or side?

Where were they coming in?

"You have those assholes in your sights, Remy?" McQuade asked.

"Yep. Just one word, and three shots. They'll be done."

"Good."

The silence stretched excruciatingly. The sound of something burning echoed into the rig. They were cutting into the side door. I closed my eyes a split second before the lights targeted the door as it opened.

Then I opened them as I took aim.

And I fired.