Blowback (The Black Cipher Files Book 1) (19 page)

“Million?”

Lucas tapped his pen on the table. “So why did she work?”

“What else would she do?”
Sit around all day?
“She does, did, charitable work over in Afghanistan.”

“You realize that was probably a cover.”

Yeah. I knew it, but I hadn’t been going to bring it up. “What else is on there?”

Lucas punched at the keys. “Besides the townhouse in Virginia, she owns a house on the Cape in Massachusetts and a beach house in the Bahamas.”

“Bolt holes?” Pretty nice ones.

“Probably investments. If she has a bolt hole it would be hidden a hell of a lot better.”

Lucas pulled up the specifics of Staci Grant’s portfolio. Although her amounts were much higher, we’d invested in almost the exact same companies and funds.

“What?”

I hadn’t made a sound. Hadn’t moved. And yet he could tell something about Staci’s portfolio struck me. “Let me get a closer look.”

My investments were layered in pretty much the same manner. I had a balance between individual large cap and small cap stocks, stock funds, real estate investment trusts, bonds and bond funds.

As I trailed down the list, a growing sense of disbelief buzzed through me. With my index finger, I started at the beginning and scrolled down slowly. The list was alphabetical and long.

And identical to mine.

Identical.

My salary was decent. I had no real expenses. Most of the time I was on assignment. I drove an unremarkable car and lived in an unremarkable apartment.

Most of my money went into a numbered account and was then invested. In the event of my death, I’d instructed Carson to give everything to Bella, anonymously. Invent a long lost relative who’d died and ascribe the bequest to them.

As my life expectancy was never considered long, I liked to look over my expanding portfolio and hope that Bella would be able to do something wonderful with the money.

Lucas started to clear the screen. I put my hand over his. “Wait.”

“What?”

Should I tell him? The hard strength of his fingers felt solid beneath mine. “It’s exactly the same as mine.”

He didn’t insult me with platitudes. “Exactly?”

“My quantities are smaller.”

“That goes beyond coincidence.”

I agreed.

“Where do you get your advice?”

I hesitated. Here it got tricky. Carson’s financial advisor invested the money for me. Carson had started the portfolio after my parents had died.

He’d also been lying to me. An insidious thought slithered into my mind like a snake.
What else had he lied about?

“My handler takes care of it.”

“His name?”

I couldn’t give up Carson’s name. I shook my head.

“I didn’t think so.” Lucas crossed his arms over his chest and tipped back in the chair. “So your handler advised Staci Grant as well.”

I remembered Carson’s seeming familiarity with Staci. At the time the sadness in his eyes had surprised me. Now I realized he’d known her a hell of a lot better than he’d let on.

I couldn’t let go of the similarity. “Check when the account was started.”

His chair dropped back down to the floor. “The trust fund comes from her grandparents and was started right after they were killed.”

A cold chill knifed down my spine.

“What about her parents?”

“Died when she was a little girl.” Lucas did some finger work. “She was raised by her paternal grandparents.”

And right after they were killed, this account was opened.

Lucas pressed another button but I wasn’t watching. I was remembering. I vaguely recalled Carson discussing this with me. He’d opened the account while I recovered in the hospital.

The annoying buzz of the fluorescent light pressed in on me, piercing my eyes. “How did they die?”

He glanced over at me sharply. “Her parents?”

“Grandparents.”

“Coming home from a play on Broadway. Mugged and stabbed on the street.”

Different but still as effective. Both dead at the same time. My blood chugged sluggishly through my veins. If anything, my heartbeat slowed. I forced the question through lips that felt numb, frozen. “Year?”

“1995.”

I was afraid to ask but I needed to know. “Month?”

“Late October.”

Same as my parents. The light bouncing off the glass window swirled, making pretty patterns in my eyes.

“Jesus, you’re pale.” Lucas hand came up to my neck and forced my head between my knees. “You gonna tell me the significance of that date?”

“What?” My head hung down, my gaze staring straight between the metal legs of the plastic chair as the blood rushed back in. I’d forgotten he was there. Forgotten where I was.

“What is it about late October?” His fingers, still clasped around my neck, soothed.

Everything within me tightened. I couldn’t tell him. “It’s nothing. I’m just trying to figure out the portfolio thing.”

“You okay?”

“Yeah. Must be low blood sugar.

“Must be,” he said derisively.

I lifted my head back up, my thoughts swirling in confusion and agony. Everything was upside down. I huffed out the breath I’d forgotten to exhale.

The rasp of our breathing in the little room was strained. I lifted my gaze to see his steady on me. As if he could hold in all of the bad stuff, keep it at bay.

He twisted toward me, framing my chair with his arms, caging me in the hard plastic. He curled one hand around my neck and pulled me closer.

The kiss was going to be a mistake. I knew it.

Even he knew it.

Awareness shaded his eyes as he drew me in. I could have pulled away, should have, but in that moment, I was so cold and so alone. I needed contact.

Human.

No. Sexual contact. I couldn’t afford to need the comfort of human contact. But I would let myself feel through sexual contact.

Except when his lips touched mine, his touch wasn’t hard or demanding but...gentle. He licked at my lips wetting them, inviting me to lick back.

I had to wrest back control, change the embrace into something I was comfortable with. I opened my mouth but instead of pressing harshly as I should have, I sucked lightly.

His teeth nibbled at the corner of my lips and I acquiesced, hoping for the violent thrust of his tongue. He confounded me again by softly tracing the outline of my lips then light as a butterfly kiss, he curled his tongue around mine.

I melted.

There was no other word for it. Desire puddled low and heavy in my body in an exquisite rush.

My hands gripped the rough edges of the plastic seat to keep from reaching for him. But my traitorous body shifted, my legs fell open bonelessly, inviting him, urging him to lean into the shelter of my thighs. Invoking promises of something I had no intention of delivering.

I wasn’t a tease and yet I couldn’t stop the acceptance, the reaction of my body.

His left hand slid along the outside of my thigh and up to the curve of my hip, anchoring me in the chair. His fingers squeezed into my flesh.

His assault on my senses kept going. He swept me closer, his knees scraping along my inner thighs. Though I clung tightly to the hard plastic my body betrayed me by straining toward the sheltering, all-consuming heat of his embrace.

His hands came up to cup my breasts, thumbs brushing against my nipples through the cool linen blouse while his mouth devoured mine.

He yanked me on top of his lap, my legs draped over his and my breasts crushed against the hard plane of his chest. The heat of his erection throbbed against my core. Blood rushed to fill my senses.

Oh, God. I wanted more.

I wanted to break the promises I’d made to myself and kept for all these years. Tempted beyond reason to relinquish my principles, the foundation of my existence, for the hot, slick slide of him into my body.

For Lucas, I just might let go of those promises and damn my ‘one time only’ rule.

That rogue thought shocked me.

I forced my hands to push him away, but my reaction was sluggish, slow, almost drugged. “No.”

He stilled. His breathing harsh in the quiet of the room as his chest moved in slow, deep inhalations. His eyes burned, but not with the anger to which he was entitled. “No?”

“I...can’t.”

He freed me and I scurried back to my chair, refusing to think about how close I’d come to breaking my rules. And how much I’d wanted to. The yearning, for his touch, for his comfort, for surcease from my worries, was unbelievably strong.

He leaned his head back awkwardly against the chair and spoke without heat, “Damn your rules.”

Again, he seemed to understand. Physical was easy. Sex was simple.

His understanding of me was at once terrifying and tempting. Someone who understood me.

The truth was in his words, making me yearn to deepen the connection he insisted we had. For him to understand me, that was the scariest thing of all.

TWENTY-ONE

We’d each gone back to our own little partition to work. About five minutes later, Lucas scooted back his chair. “I have a proposition.”

My eyebrows rose.

He gave me a ‘Not that kind’ look.

“I need to get into Staci Grant’s files to see if she has information about Johnny.” Lucas said calmly, “I believe you can get in her head and figure out the password.”

“What makes you think so?”

“You got into her attic room.”

“True.”

The only lead I had right now was the connection between abductees. The mysterious 5491. Staci had a file on 5491. If I could break her password, I might get the answers I was looking for. But Lucas didn’t need to know that.

If I helped him I wanted something in return. If his program could find out that much information about Staci Grant, then he could use it to find Donald Christian. Worry about Bella had started to nag at me. Carson hadn’t been honest. Which meant that I had to distrust everything he’d told me recently, including the status of Bella’s safety. No matter how painful that discovery was, my first loyalty was to Bella.

“Okay. I want to....”
Need to.
“Find the right Donald Christian.”

“Fair enough.” Lucas clicked away at his keyboard. “I’ve already put in requests from another more extensive site, DMV pictures, any fingerprints, that kind of thing.”

Excellent.

I had one other favor. I hesitated, weighing the stupidity of asking for advice against the strong need to get a second opinion.

Lucas drummed his fingers on the laminated desktop. “What else?”

Bella had indicated our parents had been arguing about a tie company. But I’d been thinking about her comment and wondering if she’d assumed it was a neckware provider.

There were several variations on the word tie. And then I’d been struck with the idea that maybe it wasn’t a tie company but some sort of compensation or comm, communications.

“You ever heard of a communications system with the word tie in it?”

“T.i.e.?”

“Not sure.” When I had asked Carson, he’d run a hand over his tie. A clue or misdirection? “It could be t-y, or t-I, or t-y-e, or t-h-a-i, I suppose.”

“Tiecomm, tycomm, ticomm, tyecomm, or thaicomm.” Lucas punched letters into his laptop. “No hits,” then he paused. “Until I typed in ti comm.”

“You got something?” I peered around the divider. The search engine asked if he meant TICOM.

“TICOM. Why is that familiar?” Lucas murmured far too close to my ear.

“TICOM stands for Target Intelligence Committee. It was created during World War II to capture German codebreakers and cipher machines.”

“Right. The German codebreakers. We found their secret headquarters in the castle before the Russians, and snapped up the machines and personnel, effectively snapping up all that lovely Russian code at the same time.” Lucas cocked his head. “If you knew that, why’d you ask me to google it?”

But I wasn’t interested in TICOM. My parents weren’t old enough for World War II. Yeah, my father was older but he was only ten when the war started. My mother hadn’t even been born until the mid 50's. They couldn’t have anything to do with German codebreakers, WWII, or the NSA.

“That isn’t what I’m looking for,” I said calmly, shaking off my unease.

“Huh.” He leaned back. “Does it have anything to do with Staci Grant?”

“No.”

“Then let’s get back to work,” he murmured. “We need that password.”

Right. Staci’s password.

“I’ve got to get into her head.” I punched up Google. “I’ll google Islamic Fundamentalist groups.”

“Charities and churches.” Lucas said, “Most terrorist groups’ funding in this country is going to be under the guise of charities and mosques and sometimes churches.”

“Yeah. I know.” Up until September Eleventh, the government had hesitated about investigating charitable organizations. Because of our country’s policy of separation of church and state, religious organizations had mostly been left alone.

Not anymore.

Holy.... “Over sixty thousand hits.” I blew out a breath and glanced at the computer clock. I had about two hours until my appointment with the department shrink. “This is going to take awhile.”

“We knew it wasn’t going to be easy,” he murmured into my ear. Something in his voice affected me at the cellular level, my body reacting every time. Lucas’s scent floated over the smell of newly installed industrial carpeting and warm computers.

Nothing was ever easy. I scrolled through the articles looking to see what kind of results I’d gotten, searching for anything to decipher Staci Grant.

We had the room to ourselves with an almost nonexistent possibility of it being bugged, so we tossed out ideas.

“Staci Grant understood what Islamic militants wanted.” If I wanted to get in her head, I had to understand too. “Let’s talk it out.”

Lucas got up and stretched. “Fine.”

“There’s a lot of articles about Muslims denouncing the September 11
th
attacks and defending Islam.”

“Of course. Islam is a peaceful religion. Most Muslims don’t want warfare.” He prowled around the room.

“A lot of American citizens don’t believe that.”

“Yeah. The difficulty in explaining Islam from an American perspective is that it truly combines religion and politics into one.” Lucas rubbed a hand over his mouth.