Hard to Come By (29 page)

In that moment, Emilie was so perfectly relaxed, so perfectly sated, so perfectly at peace that all she knew was the intense gratitude and awe and emotion she felt for this man. “I love you, Derek.”

She gasped, the reality that those words had just left her mouth dispelling the haze of lust from her brain.
Oh, my God! Oh, my God!
What the hell had she just done?

And why wasn’t he saying anything?

Oh, God
.

Derek withdrew his cock and lifted off of her. And then he flipped her onto her back, straddled her belly and braced his hands by her ears, his handsome face just visible right above hers. “Say it again.”

Her stomach flipped as she met his gaze. And it was absolutely blazing. “I love you, Derek.”

“Again,” he rasped, lowering himself until his forehead rested on hers. “Please.”

Her arms surrounded his shoulders. “I love you, Derek.”

He shuddered out a breath. “I have waited thirty-two years to hear another human being say those words to me.”

Her head spun at the admission. How could anyone
not
love this man? She would make sure he heard it every day from here on out.

He stroked her hair. “And I’m so fucking glad it was you, Emilie. Because I love you, too.”

“You do?” she said, the impossible goodness of this moment making her sure she must still be asleep. “Say it again.”

His grin was immediate and huge. “I love you, too, Emilie.” He kissed her, a soft, soulful meeting of lips and tongue that made her chest feel too tight to contain her heart. After a few moments, he slid down on his side beside her, and hugged her into his chest.

She’d returned to her senses enough to recall all the things she’d wanted to forget. And the pain of her loss was as ever-present as it had been all day. But the amazing, powerful, transformative thing about love was that it gave you the strength to persevere, the will to fight, and a soft place to fall when the world became too much.

He’d given her everything she needed to walk through this grief and make it out on the other side. Eventually, at least.

“I love you,” she whispered against his chest.

He hugged her tighter, and then drew in a deep breath. “And Iiiiiiiiiii-ee-iiii will always love yoooooooou,” he sang, or rather butchered, the old Whitney Houston song.

Impossibly, Emilie burst out laughing. “Oh, God, that’s horrible, Derek.” She pushed out of his arms, grasped one of the pillows from the edge of the bed, and planted it over his head. He continued to warble from under the cotton, and Emilie couldn’t stop laughing.

Their playfulness quickly escalated into a pillow fight, and then a wrestling match, and of course she ended up underneath him.

Win-win in her book.

“I’d been trying to figure out all day how to make you smile, because it’s the most beautiful fucking thing to see.” He stroked her face. “I know things aren’t okay right now, Emilie. And I know things might yet get worse. But I will be there for you and protect you and love you every step of the way.”

“I know you will. And I will, too,” she said, amazed at the adoration in his eyes.

“Thank you for loving me,” he said, and there was a note of pain in the words that nearly broke her heart.

“Oh, baby,” she said, pulling his head down to her shoulder and wrapping her arms around him tight. “It’s the easiest thing I’ve ever done.”

W
asn’t it funny how life could give you your best day ever the dawn after you’d had one of your worst?

That was exactly what it felt like to Marz.

That Emilie loved him was a miracle beyond any he’d ever expected to experience. And it filled him with a sense of hope, a sense of invincibility, and a sense of strength he’d never really felt before.

Because, no matter what, he wasn’t alone.

He hugged his arms around Emilie’s waist, where she sat perched on his left leg. After what they’d shared, he hadn’t wanted to be apart from her even a little.

They were all gathered at Marz’s desk in the gym, a little before six in the morning, watching the key search count down its last several minutes. He was strung so tight with anticipation, that he literally couldn’t watch the clock anymore. And thus Emilie had landed in his lap.

Would this chip provide them with any of the answers they needed? Would it give them a way to regain their stolen honor? Would it allow them to find redemption for their fallen friends who could no longer find it for themselves?

“Three minutes, Marz,” Charlie said from a chair at the desk beside him.

“I can’t look,” he said, his voice muffled against Emilie’s back.

Someone smacked the back of his head.

“Ow, motherfucker,” he said, wrenching around to find Beckett grinning behind him. Well, as close as Beckett got to grinning.

“You did all this hard work. Watch it.”

Emilie kissed him and got up. “Do what you need to do. I’ll be right here.” She stepped back next to Becca and Katherine.

Ding, ding, ding
.

At the sound of the computer notification, Marz’s gaze cut to the screen. “Holy shit,” he said. The running numbers had turned into just one number. One
long-ass
number framed by a box. “Nobody move,” he said.

Charlie chuckled, but Marz could feel the tension and anticipation rolling off of him, too.

Marz grabbed his phone and took a picture of the screen, then grabbed a piece of paper and hand wrote the key, with Charlie double-checking him as he went.

“We’re all dying here, Marz,” Nick said from over his shoulder. “Translate for those of us who don’t speak geek.”

Minimizing the key search, Marz clicked over to the external drive containing the chip. “If we’ve all been good boys and girls this year, Santa Marz is going to bring you presents in juuust a minute.”

A login box popped up for the external drive.

Moment-of-truth time.

“Check me, Charlie,” Marz said as he typed in the key. Finally, he’d keyed in the entire string.

And then Marz pressed Enter.

A spinning icon appeared in the center of the screen and then it transformed to a directory listing. At the top it said,

USER NUMBER: _

PASSWORD: _

Blinking cursors appeared after each one.

“Does that mean what I think it means?” Beckett asked.

Marz wanted to smash something with his fists. Five days invested only to hit another brick wall.

Charlie stood and rifled through the papers on Marz’s desk. “Where are the binary numbers from Becca’s bracelet?”

“Stop!” Marz said. Charlie’s hands flew off. “There’s a system.” He reached across the desk. Second pile over, all the way at the bottom, because it was a smaller sheet of paper he didn’t want to lose. “Ta-da!” he said.

“Do it, Marz,” Nick said.

They had two numbers because Becca’s line-and-circles charm bracelet could be read from left to right and right to left. There was no indication if one way was the right way. But if these
were
the keys to this username and password, the lack of guidance on the bracelet made sense. This required two numbers, and the bracelet gave them two.

USER NUMBER: 631780

PASSWORD: ******

All Marz could hear was the low hum of the processors and fans on the machines, as if everyone was holding their collective breaths. He hit Enter, and his stomach dropped. Incorrect login. Please try again.

Fine. He’d reverse them this time.

USER NUMBER: 162905

PASSWORD: ******

Blowing out a long breath, he hit Enter again. Long pause, and then a directory of file folders and file names popped up in a huge and scrolling line.

“We’re in!” Marz said, shooting from his seat with his fists in the air. He and Charlie hugged. Cheers and whoops and shouts of
good work
filled their corner of the room. And Marz felt like he was fucking ten feet tall.

“Proud of you,” Emilie mouthed to him.

He put a hand to his heart and let those words sink in.

And then he was back in his seat, his head one of about six all crowding in.

“Is it just me or are there a shit-ton of documents here?” Nick asked.

“Shit ton and a half,” Marz said, his mind already organizing the huge job that lay ahead of him. “It’s gonna take some time to go through it all, but let’s play a little
What’s behind Door Number One
, shall we?”

“How ’bout the one called Investigation?” Beckett suggested, pointing to the line on the screen.

“Why not?” Marz clicked the folder icon, and a series of files named by dates appeared. He clicked on the earliest date, almost three years before the ambush that had ended their careers, and it launched in Microsoft Word.

Mission Needs

Required Afghan Contacts:

Farmers

Warlords

National Police

Border Police

Special Narcotics Force

Ministry of Counter Narcotics

Minister of Defense

Port Authorities

Buyers

Mission Needs?
What mission?

“Anybody else following this?” Nick asked. A rumble of no’s. “Open another one.”

Marz clicked on a file from about three months later. It seemed to be a log from a regional counternarcotics task force responsible for destroying captured opium and heroin, and it listed amounts captured and amounts destroyed by date.

“They don’t match up,” Marz said, drawing his finger across the screen. “There’s always more captured than destroyed.”

“Two guesses what was happening to the difference,” Shane said.

“Merritt kept records for the smuggling business?” Beckett asked. “What kind of sense does that make? And why would he send them to Becca?”

Nick shook his head. “Keep going, Marz.”

Scrolling down, he chose at random. One file seemed to be an inventory of farmers in one particular region, with notations next to each. They didn’t have the key to it to know what those notations meant, though. At least,
not yet. Another file was a list of Afghan warlords, not by real name but by nickname. Marz recognized a few from the counternarcotics work their SF team had done. Notes next to each warlord’s name included things like: “French, 18-” or “American, 24-” or “Japanese, 18-”. One read, “American, 18-, blond.”

“Are those notes the warlords’ fucking preferences for girls?” Shane asked, disgust plain in his voice.

“It’s like a goddamned menu,” Easy said.

That was when it struck Marz—those dashes after the numbers weren’t dashes at all. They were minus signs.
Eighteen minus. Twenty-four minus
. Meaning, that age or younger. His stomach soured.

Marz switched back to the directory and chose a document with a date exactly six months after the initial file. It was a heavily redacted letter with all names, places, or other identifying information blacked out, but Marz’s eyes tripped on one word:
deniable
.

In the special operations world,
deniable
usually referred to covert operations in which operators often worked out of uniform to perform certain tasks so their government could deny any involvement if the whole thing went south.

“What is this meaning to you?” Marz asked, pointing at the word.

“Paired with the phrase ‘assignment evaluation’ at the top there,” Beckett asked. “Sounds to me it’s talking about a deniable covert operation.”

“Look at the last line of the third paragraph,” Easy said, nodding. The unredacted part read, “reaches into the command structure.”

Marz’s instincts were starting to set off alarms. Something was just feeling off here. He opened another document, which seemed to be a list of code words
relevant for interactions with farmers. But what did the code word indicate to the farmers to do?

Sighing, Marz went way far down the list, to the next-to-last file, dated about six months before the ambush that ended their careers.

It was a Request for Reassignment. Frank Merritt appeared to be asking to be removed as commander of their Special Forces team and reassigned to SAD as a solo operative.

“What the hell is SAD?” Marz asked.

“I’m putting my money on the Special Activities Division—the CIA’s covert paramilitary operations unit,” Nick said.

“Merritt wasn’t involved in an illegal black op,” Shane said. “He was involved in a clandestine assignment on behalf of . . . somebody. Go back out to the file listing and scroll to the bottom.” Marz did. “He requested this transfer and then almost immediately sent these files in a hidden, heavily encrypted chip to his daughter a half a world away.”

The Earth’s plates were potentially moving under Marz’s feet here. If Shane was right, that meant—“He was working undercover?” he rasped.

Nick stood bolt straight, his fist pressed to his mouth. “Yeah. And this was his insurance policy. In case something went wrong or his cover was blown. That first document was about thirty months before the transfer request. This is looking like he’d gone undercover, knew he was being made, and tried to”—Nick swallowed, hard—“tried to get away from us before it blew up in his face.”

Merritt . . . wasn’t dirty.

The room went deathly quiet, and then Nick turned around and made his way to Becca. “I was wrong,
sunshine. He wasn’t dirty. He was exactly who you always believed him to be. I’m so fucking sorry. All this time . . .” He shook his head.

She sucked in a halting breath and threw her arms around Nick’s neck.

Marz pushed up from his chair and laced his hands on top of his head. Merritt had tried to protect them. Their commander hadn’t betrayed them as they’d believed all these long months. The only man Marz had ever respected as one might a father had, in fact, cared. About him. About all of them. Looking at each of his teammates’ faces, Marz saw that they appeared as shell-shocked as he himself felt.

Charlie stood with his arms crossed and his eyes to the floor. He’d been as convinced as the five of them of Merritt’s corruption. It was like they’d had a 1000-piece jigsaw puzzle nearly fully assembled and it had gotten knocked to the floor. They had to put the pieces together again from the beginning.

From a beginning that started with Merritt as innocent as the rest of them.

“Jesus,” Marz said. “This changes everything.”

Nick turned from Becca to face them again, and he didn’t try to hide the wetness around his eyes. “We rethink everything we know, starting now. And we go through these files with a fine-tooth comb, because Merritt was a master strategist, and he wouldn’t have included what he did here unless he thought it important to revealing the other players and their activities.”

Marz dropped back into his chair and went out to the directory again. He started at the top and slowly scanned downward. He clicked one labeled Accounts, which took him to a subdirectory with more files—as he
opened some of them he realized they represented different parts of the exchanges Merritt must’ve tracked.

At the bottom of the Accounts files was one listed WCE. “Guys,” Marz said, “a file on WCE.” God, they’d been looking for information about who or what that acronym represented from the beginning. In fact, it was Charlie’s search for that acronym on the Web that had apparently brought him to the attention of the Church Gang, and his interest in WCE was part of the reason he’d been abducted, interrogated, and tortured.

A lot of the documents in the WCE file recounted the Singapore bank account information they already had from Charlie. But one document gave them something new.

It identified Merritt’s WCE contact as GW.

It listed a phone number in the 703 area code—Northern Virginia.

And it recorded a seven-digit code.

Holy shit
. Marz’s heart raced in his chest. Now they were cooking with gas.

“Charlie?” Marz said, pointing to the code. “Didn’t you say the bank account required a seven-digit code to access the funds?”

“Yeah,” he said, stepping closer.

“Check it,” Marz said, “while I look up this phone number.” Fingers flying over the keyboard, Marz brought up a number lookup, but it said it was unlisted. No big surprise there. So Marz followed a hunch and opened up the webpage for Seneka Worldwide Security.

And . . . bingo.

“This number in the WCE file almost definitely goes to a SWS extension. The specific number is unlisted, but the public number shares the same first seven
digits: 703-555-4000 for the main operator, and 703-555-4264 for the direct line,” Marz said, turning to Beckett. “Grab me a burn phone?”

Beckett went to where their supplies were stored along the wall in front of the desk and retrieved one of the disposable—and more importantly, untraceable—phones. “Here you go,” he said, “but I bet it doesn’t work.”

“Let’s see.” Marz dialed the direct number, feeling like they were so much farther along than they’d ever been before.

It picked up on the very first ring. “This extension is no longer in service. Please hang up and try again or press zero for the operator.” He pressed zero. Two rings later, a woman’s voice came on the line. “Seneka Worldwide Security. How may I direct your call?” Marz disconnected. “Definitely Seneka. They’re the key to all of this.”

“Shit,” Shane said. “So Seneka was involved in what happened to us
and
connected to WCE, who deposited millions into a secret bank account for Merritt. Money which he appears never to have touched, it’s worth noting.”

Murmurs of agreement all around. More proof that Merritt hadn’t been corrupt. Bad guys didn’t just leave twelve million in an account for several years without ever making a withdrawal.