Cooper Security 06 - Secret Intentions (21 page)

“General Ross refers to him as a hacker,” Shannon said, “but from what he describes it sounds like he’s actually a cryppie.”

“A what?” Isabel asked.

“A cryptographer,” Evie said before Shannon could answer. “Someone who hacks cryptography programs. Not necessarily illegally,” she added quickly. “If Endrex is who I think it is, he may have done some work for the Marine Corps a few years ago.”

“You know who this Endrex is?” Jesse asked.

“I knew a guy who went by that handle,” she said carefully, not sure she was right. “Complete computer genius. He was at Quantico when we were stationed at the base there. I was fifteen at the time. He tried to teach me how to program, but I didn’t have the instincts for it.”

“Not a Marine?” her father asked.

“No, a civilian. He’d have never made it as a Marine. He wore his disdain for authority on his sleeve, but he was brilliant at code breaking.”

“You sound as if you had a crush on him,” Jesse murmured.

She couldn’t read his masklike expression, but his tone was light enough. “Maybe a little one. I thought he was cool and transgressive—that’s kind of a big deal when you’re fifteen.”

Jesse grinned at her then, and she gazed back at him, feeling utterly helpless against her attraction to him, no matter how certain she’d become that a relationship between them could only end badly.

“Do you know where we can find him?” Rick Cooper asked.

She dragged her gaze away from Jesse. “Physically? No. He left Quantico shortly before we did.”

“But can you contact him?” Shannon asked. She patted the laptop’s keyboard. “On here?”

Evie thought about it. “Maybe. He showed me a few places on the net where he and his friends hung out.”

“What was his real name?” Jesse asked.

“I don’t know. He called himself Endrex, and everyone he was working with at Quantico did, too. I don’t even know if he was working with the Marines or with the FBI academy. Or the Air Force Office of Special Investigations, for that matter. Lots of secret things go on in Quantico.”

“I can make some calls,” Ben Scanlon suggested. “I’m still on good terms with the Bureau. Agent Brand may know who Endrex is.”

“And if he doesn’t,” Delilah Hammond added, “he’ll know who to ask.”

Ben glanced at the other Cooper Security agent. “You worked with Brand when you were with the Bureau?”

“Some,” she answered noncommittally.

“I’ll make the call,” Ben said.

“Wait.” Evie spoke up to be heard over the hum of discussion beginning to take over the conference room.

Everyone quieted down, turning to look at her.

“Endrex may have been working with the good guys, but the man I knew won’t make it easy to find him if he doesn’t want to be found,” she warned. “He sees himself as an outlaw, even if he wasn’t really. If he has evidence of the Espera Group’s crimes, he’ll know he’s in danger. If you try to go through official channels, you may chase him underground.”

“So what do you suggest?” Jesse asked.

“Let me try to contact him online,” she said. “Like I told Shannon, I know some of the places he’d go. If I can reach him that way and regain his trust, we might be able to get him to meet us.”

“If he has evidence that can bring down the Espera Group, we have to get our hands on it,” Jesse said flatly. “You can’t let him hold on to his cards. Understand?”

She nodded. “I can do this.” Her voice came out strong and sure, far more sure than she actually felt. Her gut muscles quivered with unease as she started to feel the full impact of what she’d just agreed to do.

Endrex was wily and smarter than she could ever hope to be. He knew the internet as intimately as a lover, and there was no way she could catch him there if he decided to run.

They’d stayed in touch for a few years after he left Quantico and she and her family had relocated to Alabama, but by the time Evie was in college, life and constraints on her time had gotten in the way of their virtual friendship. They hadn’t communicated in over a year, and that had been a brief, unexpected “Hi, how are you” instant message initiated by Endrex.

Thinking back, she wondered now at the timing of his message. Her father’s retirement from the Marine Corps had made the news, mostly because of his high-profile involvement in later years with the politically volatile peacekeeping mission in Kaziristan. Endrex had contacted her shortly after the retirement hit the news.

Had he wanted something in particular? He’d seemed guarded, although for a guy like him, a hint of paranoia wasn’t unusual.

“I’ll need to go to my apartment,” she told Jesse. “He’ll be able to trace my location, so it’s better if I’m on a computer that tracks back to me.”

“I’ll take you there,” he said with a short nod.

“I want to go with you,” her father said.

Evie smiled at him. “Dad, Jesse will protect me. You and Mom are still targets. You really need to stay here and let Cooper Security protect you.”

“It’s hard for a Marine to do that,” he grumbled.

She crossed to give him a fierce hug. “Okay, then you stay here and protect them. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

As she and Jesse left the conference room, the buzz of renewed discussion cut off abruptly with the closing of the door, leaving them alone in a silent, semidark inner corridor.

Evie’s steps faltered to a halt, and she leaned against the hallway wall, her knees trembling.

Jesse moved closer, concern darkening his eyes. “Are you okay?”

“What am I doing?” she asked. “I’m not a secret agent. I just made everybody in there think I know what I’m doing.”

His brow furrowed. “And you don’t?”

“I don’t know.” She covered her face with her hands. “I didn’t lie about knowing Endrex. And I do think he’ll talk to me. But you all think I can make him turn over the evidence to you just because I mooned over him when I was fifteen and he indulged me, and I don’t know if I can.”

Jesse gently pulled her hands away from her face and tilted her chin up, forcing her to look at him. “Everybody in there knows you’ll do your best. That’s all you can do. Do you think we don’t screw up sometimes? You know we do. I blew the surveillance of Gamble back in D.C. I should have known there was a possibility we’d run into the guys who kidnapped you. I mean, we went to D.C. to find out who’d sent them, so I should have known there was a chance Gamble would be meeting with them instead of his girlfriend. We were too exposed. I never should have let that happen.”

“You couldn’t plan for every possibility,” she protested, closing her hands over his where they rested on her shoulders.

“I should have planned better,” he argued. “But my point is, we know you’ll do the best you can. That’s all we could possibly ask of you.” He tugged one hand free from hers and brushed a lock of hair out of her face. “You’ve already gone so far beyond the call of your duties here, I don’t know whether to sack you or give you a bloody promotion.”

“How about you just hold me a minute?” she whispered, her heart squeezing into a painful knot. She hated herself for being so needy, so unable to distance herself from him once and for all. But she couldn’t regret it when he wrapped her in his arms, molding her body against his until she felt as if she was irrevocably a part of him.

The tearing sensation when he finally let her go was more painful than she’d anticipated.

“Let’s get out of here.” Flattening his hand against the small of her back, he guided her toward the underground parking garage where Cooper Security kept its fleet of company vehicles.

* * *

I
T HAD BEEN A LONG TIME
since he’d thought of himself as Nolan Cavanaugh. That was a normal name. A little upper-crust. A better name for his real-estate-mogul father and his day-trader brother than a guy like him.

He was Endrex. Single name, like Cher or Elvis. In his neck of cyberspace, he was bigger than either.

He used to get a kick out of the notoriety, especially when he thought about how appalled his father would be at the idea. His son the subculture net head. The old man had never understood him. Never really tried.

It had been years since they’d spoken, although he kept track of his family on the net. Checked Drake’s emails now and then to make sure he wasn’t gambling away his fortune. Tapped into his father’s business to make sure everything was going well. His parents were still together—he knew that much because he’d recently listened in on the email conversation between his brother and his mother regarding his parents’ fortieth-anniversary party at the country club in November.

Good for the old folks. That kind of commitment was rare in the world these days.

Dawn was a rosy hint in the window across the room, a reminder that he hadn’t slept at all the night before. He never got close to the windows these days. Way too risky considering what all had been going down for the past few months.

He’d been smart. Taken precautions and prepared for this day. He’d known it was coming.

Breakfast would be dry cereal and milk he’d made from powder. Lunch would be something out of a can. So would dinner. He’d streamlined his life to the basics since he’d read the news about Edward Ross’s death online a few months ago.

He wondered if the other two generals had any idea who he was. General Ross had promised to keep his existence their little secret, but the general had been establishment to the core. People like him weren’t nearly as good at keeping secrets as they thought they were.

He’d taken the place in Birmingham because it was safely anonymous. He didn’t stick out much here in Southside, among the artsy iconoclasts and sloppy college crowd. Nobody gave him a second look. And even the people who’d heard of Endrex couldn’t have picked him out from a crowd.

He should get some shut-eye, but he couldn’t shake the feeling he needed to stay awake. He’d been taking some chances over the past few days, sniffing around some areas of the net where he might not be the biggest, baddest dog on the block. It was a chance he’d felt he had to take after the mercs had gone after Marsh’s youngest daughter. He needed to know if anyone out there knew who he was or what he had in his possession.

He hadn’t turned it over to anyone yet. General Ross had agreed with him that it was too soon. Even the old soldier hadn’t known who the good guys and bad guys were. That’s what he’d been working on when the bastards got him.

So Endrex was still sitting on the files he’d stolen off a handful of government networks. Really, the idiots should have better info security these days. The Chinese would never put up with this kind of crummy security, but they’d sure as hell exploit it.

He wondered if there were Chicom agents out there with their hands on the same stuff he’d found. He wondered what they were doing with it, who they were putting pressure on right this very minute.

A pinging noise drew his attention back to his computer screen. Someone had just entered an old chat area he hadn’t visited in years. It had fallen into disuse after some cracker idiot tried to use the room for an illegal bank hack. The feds had swarmed the place and run off all the legit hacks. He didn’t know who’d have stumbled into that place again after all this time.

Curiosity nudged at him, and he pulled up that program. There was a lone screen moniker listed in the user box. Leatherbrat.

He released a huff of disbelief. Little Evie Marsh? After all this time?

Or was it a trick?

Text popped up in the chat area.
Long time no type.

His lips curved. Little dork. Couldn’t even come up with an original opener. But his smile faded quickly. It could be a trick. Her father had said he didn’t know where she was, although the police view was that she’d disappeared under her own steam.

But what if they were wrong? What if she was with her captors right now and somehow they’d learned about him?

What if they were using her to smoke him out?

Chapter Seventeen

“He’s just sitting there.” Jesse was growing impatient as they waited for Endrex to answer her overture. “Are you even sure it’s really him? Couldn’t anyone call himself Endrex?”

“He wouldn’t put up with identity theft for long, and anyone with half a brain and even passing knowledge of the hacker world would know the kinds of things Endrex could do to their lives without even breaking a sweat.”

Text popped up on the screen suddenly.

Safe word.

“Safe word?” Jesse asked aloud, his gaze snapping away from the screen to search hers.

She laughed, her eyes widening. “Not that kind of safe word. He’s asking for verification that I’m who I say I am.”

“You barely said anything at all.”

“He’ll recognize the screen name. He’s the one who gave it to me.”

“Leatherbrat?”

“Leatherneck’s Brat.”

“Well, yeah, I figured that—”

She just smiled at him and typed in a word.
Snickerdoodle.

Jesse leaned closer, laying his hands on her shoulders. As her muscles trembled beneath his fingers, he tamped down a surge of raw male triumph at her feminine reaction to his touch.

When this was all over, he and Evie Marsh were going to have to have a long, serious talk about what was happening between them. Work through all the obstacles between them that she seemed to think were immovable. Because there was no way he was going to let her walk out of his life the way Rita had. He’d make any sacrifice, give in to any demand she might have, to keep her around.

His hands trembled as the full meaning of his thoughts hit him like a brick bat. He’d never been willing to make those concessions for Rita. All she’d asked of him was to find a different job, and he couldn’t do it. But if Evie asked him to sell his shares of Cooper Security and follow her across the globe doing charity work, he’d do it without hesitation, just to be with her.

Oh, my God,
he thought.
I love her. I really love her.

“Here we go,” Evie said.

Jesse looked at the laptop. Words had popped onto the screen.
Are you okay? Heard about your ordeal.
“Which ordeal?” he asked. “The attempted kidnappings or the accident in D.C.?”