Chapter 26

Twenty-Six

Doctor Thana proved both kind and swift. His name tag was rather long and complicated. When I asked, he just said call him Thana. He also didn’t ask for my name.

Understandable.

I didn’t envy his working under the cool gazes of Locke and Remy. Though neither man stared at him, one of them had eyes on him at all times. Remy’s gun was also resting in his palm. He was seemingly ready for anything. As unsettling a thought as that was, it offered an odd kind of comfort.

No one was going to throw open that door and cut into me again. No one was going to beat me up or starve me or pump me full of drugs until I drooled. Remy would kill them first.

So would McQuade. While Locke wasn’t a huge fan of violence and it was never his first choice, he was also not opposed. That kind of security could not be purchased. If I hadn’t already decided to trust them, I would have in this moment.

Doctor Thana kept a steady conversation going as he used lidocaine to numb the bottom of my foot before he examined and cut into the soft tissue. Unfortunately, the tracker was actually in an area that had begun to heal. Scar tissue would form over it and tighten it up.

Rock steady hands and a conversational style told me a lot about Doctor Thana. He was a good guy and his interest here was purely clinical. As he worked, he seemingly forgot about Locke and Remy. Good for him, he didn’t need to feel the pressure of their glares.

If the guys were planning to kill him before we left, I was going to ask them to change their minds. We hadn’t had to bribe or blackmail the doctor. He’d been inclined after one look at me.

That made him a good doctor.

With a pair of tweezers he worked on extracting the hateful little device. It required a deep sensation of pressure before he tugged it out. There was blood dripping from it.

More blood and flesh they’d taken from me.

Doctor Thana’s dark look spoke volumes for his thoughts about the device. He surrendered it to Remy when the assassin held out his hand. With care, Thana returned to my foot and wrapped it to apply pressure.

“We’re going to shoot another couple of images, I want to make sure there’s no more surprises.”

“Thank you,” I murmured and he nodded once.

The x-rays of each foot revealed no more foreign objects. Relief spilled into me as the doctor returned. He added some small sutures to the incision he’d made then treated the rest of the injuries before he wrapped it again.

Without comment, he also treated my other foot. “I’m going to give you some pain meds, as well as medical supplies. You need to keep these wounds clean and dry. It’s hard because of where they are located, but just dry and apply fresh bandages so you can keep it clean. The stitches will dissolve on their own. I did it loose because that area moves a lot. If you can stay off your feet…”

He trailed off a little at the end of that.

“Thank you.” The fact I would not be able to walk a lot was—aggravating. But we’d manage.

“I’m also going to give you a number to call me on.” He was already writing it down.

“Why?” I wasn’t upset, but the guys were shooting him narrow-eyed looks, I was more curious than anything else. His focus was clinical, his manner kind, and his attention? It had been on the right things.

“Call me when you’re safe,” he said as he handed me the sheet of paper, “and I’ll answer that sometime. If you can give me five minutes, I’m going to get you the meds and supplies. You don’t need to be stopping at any pharmacies.”

“Thank you, Doctor Thana.”

“You’re welcome.” He left, stepping out briefly with Locke right behind him. Remy closed in and I slid the paper with the doctor’s number into my pocket before I let him help me pull socks over my bandaged feet.

He glanced down at them then at me. “We’ll sort it out.”

I believed him.

“Do you want to change your clothes?”

I glanced at the scrubs he gestured to. “Yes,” I said, blowing out a breath. “But later. Not right now. I have a feeling the doctor will be back soon and we still have to deal with the tracker.”

He nodded once. Then helped me off the table and back into the wheelchair. He’d just tucked the blanket over my legs when the door opened to let Thana and Locke back in.

Locke’s expression was far more relaxed and he gave Remy a nod. So whatever they were worried about, it was fine.

Good.

Once Thana had given me the supplies and the instructions for the meds, he turned to hand a card to Remy.

“The amount for my student loans. I’d have done this for free, but you offered.”

Remy’s expression bordered on genuine amusement. “I did.”

“Take care of her, and remember what I said about staying off your feet as much as you can.” Then the doctor left and this time, Locke didn’t follow him.

We couldn’t really linger. The doctor had done us a favor but that tracker needed to be dealt with and we needed to link back up with McQuade. Remy handled my wheelchair. We left with as little fanfare as we arrived.

“Pick me up near the street,” Locke said before he jogged off. I stared after him a beat but Remy didn’t slow down. Instead of the SUV we’d arrived in, he helped me into a new car. This one was far more luxurious and it had a huge back seat. More like a limousine than an SUV.

Where did they keep getting these cars? And had they moved our stuff? Well, their stuff, I didn’t really have any stuff.

Once I was secure and tucked in, he didn’t make me put the helmet on, though Remy did suggest I could lay down if I needed it. Not once did we discuss the kiss or the fact I’d fallen asleep with my cheek pressed to his thigh.

Maybe later.

That made sense.

Remy climbed into the driver’s seat and he opened the divider so I could see him. Five minutes later, he idled near a curb until Locke climbed into the front passenger seat.

“Taken care of?” Remy asked and Locke nodded.

“It’s all loaded.” He pointed to a cleaning truck that was pulling out of the lot. He’d dealt with the tracker.

“Good.” Then Remy turned away from the truck and took us in another direction all together.

Curled up in the back, I wrestled with every piece of what happened. The danger. The torture. The injuries. The risks. Their arrival—them.

“You ready to trust us yet?” Locke asked and I glanced up to find him watching me.

Was I?

“My real name is…”

The words seemed to stick in my throat as though they would choke me. It had been so long since I said my name aloud or even let myself think it. Training yourself to not be yourself took a lot of mental effort.

How strange to think that my name had become something alien to me.

“My name is Fallon Amanda Brady.” Saying it was surreal. More than surreal. Tears burned in my eyes as I shook my head to fight them back. “Sorry, I—I’ve been Patch for the past five years if I’ve been anyone. That’s why when you called me Fallon…”

“It threw you.” The rough sympathy inhabiting Locke’s voice provoked more tears. I rubbed a hand over my face. I’d gotten so used to the bruised feeling that I didn’t really notice until I added pressure. No wonder Doctor Thana seemed so worried about me.

I was a mess.

“Yes,” I said. “More than I expected or could have predicted.” I swallowed, or tried, but all the moisture had fled my mouth.

“Here,” Locke said, twisting off the cap on the water bottle and passing it back to me.

“Thank you.”

I took a long drink. It was pitch dark outside, leaving only a dance of shadows as the city lights flashed over us. I couldn’t see Remy, because he was driving, but Locke’s focus never seemed to wander far from me.

“I was recruited by a cybersecurity arm of the NSA when I was still in college.”

“A?” Locke asked, his brows gathering tighter together. “Not the?”

“No, there are different areas and different focuses. Not everyone knows what everyone else is doing. It’s very compartmentalized.”

“Okay.” He accepted it so simply. But then, why not? Government agencies, especially the more secretive ones didn’t exactly list every department or job title on a website. No matter how transparent they might seem.

Another swallow of water. “I interned for a summer between sophomore and junior years. Then by senior, I was interning full time. I graduated early and with honors. They offered me a position. Also paid off all my student loans.”

The minute they told me they were going to do that, I’d been shocked. My supervisor at the time had merely smiled.

“The lack of incurred debt helped with my security clearances. Made me less malleable to monetary incentives.” How painfully naive I’d been at the time. “I got to work in a field I loved, while also paying off all my debts? It was amazing. I had to move, but I was fine with that. I also couldn’t tell anyone what I did.”

I’d had a cover story to tell my family and friends. Looking back now, I saw all the questions I should have asked. It wasn’t like I accepted it all at face value. No, I’d asked plenty of questions. I just hadn’t asked the right ones. Then I was installed in my new position in a new city, where the only people I knew were the people I worked with.

Isolated.

Dependent.

Buried in work.

“Patch?” Remy’s gentle inquiry pulled me back to the present.

“Sorry,” I said. “It’s been a long time since I thought about any of this. I had top secret security clearance. I worked specifically on securing computer systems at various secure facilities and bases. It was my job to investigate and track any incursions. Particularly those performed by agents of foreign powers. It was a great game of cat and mouse. Sometimes…sometimes I helped out agents in the field when we needed to locate the operatives in question.”

To assassinate them, although occasionally they had been recruited. The latter was far more common than I’d been led to believe. I sighed. So much I hadn’t understood and the only people I could talk to had been others either in charge of our “discretion” or others in the same boat as me.

Looking back now?

“Anyway, I was with the department for almost four years. Eventually, I was tasked with running my own series of operators—a team who could back me up but also did similar tasks. They kept us in groups of five. The people on my team only reported to me. I reported to my supervisor. That supervisor reported upward—everything closely guarded and compartmentalized. A team working one floor up or down might be doing exactly what we were, but we would never know. It was just another form of compartmentalization.”

Not always the most efficient. What happened if we doubled up on work? That wasn’t something I was supposed to be concerned about, according to my supervisor. If two teams were gathering information on the exact same thing, they could serve as a check and a balance because you never knew what the other team was doing.

Absolutely rational. Pragmatic even.

And another lie.

“I was dedicated to my job. In fact, so dedicated that I didn’t take a vacation, or see my family for almost two years. I can’t even excuse it as they overworked me—I loved the challenge of it. The puzzles to break, the hunts to go on…” No, there were no excuses for the choices I’d made then. “That’s not really important. My fifth year on the floor, I noticed actual patterns in the assignments. Not just what my team was given but the other operators. We weren’t just hunting down cyberterrorists and hackers, we were hacking our own operations. Sometimes changing orders.”

How could I have been so stupid?

“Clearly we shouldn’t have been doing this, but it was presented as a test for another operations group… We would play the part of the intruders, sift information, and lift it. They were tasked with identifying the intrusions and stopping them. Every time we won, we got points then we were put on countering their incursions—allegedly.”

“How long did it take you to figure it out?” Remy offered no comfort or sympathy, just a kind of understanding. He didn’t make excuses for me or try to make me feel better about it, just wanted more facts.

That was better.

“That I was working for a shadowy government contractor with political and military ties that went far too deep for comfort and operated outside of the law?”

“Yes,” he said and I could feel his gaze even if it was dark and I couldn’t quite make out his eyes in the mirror.

I downed the rest of the water and then handed the empty to Locke. Then he handed me another bottle of water and what looked like a protein bar. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

“Seven missions,” I said, opening the wrapper with slow, deliberate motions. “Seven incursions, including one into the Pentagon and two separate military installations.”

“Holy shit,” Locke said with a slow exhale. “Patch…”

“I know. It was treason. I committed treason because I broke their security encryptions and duplicated the files.” There had been worse… “Three days after I accepted what was happening, I recognized that there was no exit plan. No way out. All this time I’d been convinced I was working for a sanctioned NSA division and I wasn’t. Some of the information we lifted was being sold to the highest bidder. The rest?”

I shook my head. Wherever it had been going, couldn’t have been good.

“I had to build my own exit. So, I wrote the protocols that would begin cleaning out my own files, my own footprint. It took me a while, but I managed to mark every piece of intel I’d taken. Most of it was four layers deep in encrypted files, but the worm I developed could go in and tag them. Then it began to shuttle the files out, one or two at a time. It took me almost a month to get everything in place.”

I took a bite of the protein bar, it was tasteless and dry. Yet the very act of chewing ignited all the grumbling in my stomach. They waited while I finished the bar, then washed it all down with water.

“The chances they would recognize what I was doing existed. Every single day that I went into the office, that I played the part, I knew it could be a day they figured it out. But I kept working, I needed to make sure I left nothing behind. When I left, it had to be scorched earth.”

So I had. I’d taken everything and left them meaningless gibberish in its place. The terabytes of information funneled out by the worm had been stored in stacked servers all over the world. The worm wouldn’t replicate, once it was done, it destroyed itself in their system. No trail was left for them to track electronically.

The files were out there in so many disparate packets they would never find them. Not without the encryption key. Not without knowing what to look for specifically, cause if they weren’t recompiled in the correct order?

They would get nothing.

“You strip-mined all their data?” Locke sounded impressed and worried.

“Yep. I emptied their servers, leaving them nothing but trash data in its place. I infected their systems with a half-dozen viruses that would be kicked off when they started searching for what I’d done. Then I finished erasing myself before I got up and left. I left the building, I left my life, I left everything.”

I’d begun building a bolthole for myself the day I decided to put the plan into action.

That was the day I’d died.