Midnight Secrets (5 page)

Months ago, she’d have vomited if her plate was too full. Now she’d learned to nibble at the blandest, most tasteless things possible. Dry toast, small bowls of plain rice. Nothing with taste and color.

Right after the Massacre she’d completely lost her desire to cook. Cooking was recently reintroduced in her life, thanks to Joe. He helped her so much with things she couldn’t do that she knew she had to do something in return, something she did know how to do.

Crazily, cooking for Joe didn’t make her dizzy or nauseous. She could cook the most elaborate dishes and as long as she didn’t have to eat a bite of them, she was okay.

Like now, putting together the ziti dish, delicious smells coming from the stovetop, and all she felt was pleasure.

She’d often toyed with the idea of actually inviting Joe over for dinner, instead of leaving something on his doorstep like the cooking fairies. He went out of his way for her so much that cooking a meal and serving it was the least she could do.

The thought even gave her a crazy kind of pleasure. She’d started over completely here in Portland, getting her furniture from IKEA and her linens from Bed Bath & Beyond. But she’d shipped over all her culinary equipment and her Limoges dinner service and the Delvaux silver cutlery. She could wow him with an elegant meal as a thank-you.

It was so incredibly tempting. Not spending an evening nursing a cup of lukewarm milk, with the TV on to a show she wasn’t watching, simply so she could hear the sound of human voices. So she wouldn’t feel at the bottom of a deep well, the only person in the world. Having Joe over would be fun. He was an interesting guy and, well, there was that hotness factor.

But...she wasn’t an ordinary woman. She didn’t do well in company. The days of bursting into tears with people around her were over but that didn’t mean she was back to normal. She could throw up. She could become so dizzy she’d faint. She could lock herself in the bathroom because she couldn’t deal with him.

They were all fun possibilities. She didn’t trust herself at all. Joe helped her because she was visibly wounded and still relatively weak. He never asked, bless him, and she never said what was wrong. Keep it like that. Let him think she’d been in an accident and was putting herself back together again.

Because the truth was much blacker and bleaker. The truth was that she
had
been in an accident that had torn her family from her but she
wasn’t
putting herself back together again. Maybe she’d be like this for the rest of her life, unfit for human company.

Missing her family like crazy, for the rest of her life.

Put like that...put like that maybe all she really was good for was to cook things for someone who’d suffered but who was pulling himself out of it.

She swiped angrily at her eyes as she finished the pan of ziti and started making naan bread.

Chapter Three

“Well?” Joe asked Felicity impatiently, ignoring the nasty look Metal was shooting at him. Everyone always treated Felicity with kid gloves. Apart from the fact that she was Metal’s love and Metal would pound anyone who was disrespectful to her, she also earned a hell of a lot of money for the company as their in-house computer guru.

And she beat everyone’s ass at video games.

“Sorry, Joe.” Felicity Ward, soon to be Felicity O’Brien, pushed herself away from his desk where she’d been using her own computer. Some kind of woo-woo piece of tech that could have been time-traveled from the future, it was so advanced. Felicity had taken one look at his laptop and sniffed in disdain. “Whoever sent you that message is scary good. I can’t identify the IP. Believe me when I say that’s unusual.”

Oh yeah, he believed Felicity. She was a computer genius and ASI had snatched her up, right after she’d unmasked an international conspiracy. An international
nuclear
conspiracy no less. She was smart in everything but she was off the charts smart when it came to IT. If she couldn’t track down the sender of the mystery message, no one could.

“Whoever sent it must be as smart as you,” he said.

Felicity smiled and waved Metal, who’d risen from his seat, down. It was a pillar in Metal’s thought system that Felicity was the smartest person on earth. “Yeah. Hard as it is to believe.”

“Scary stuff,” Metal rumbled.

“Yes.” Joe nodded his head sharply.

It
was
scary stuff. Someone Felicity couldn’t ID had sent a message about Isabel. That blew his mind. That someone knew about Isabel and that that someone knew she was connected to him. How could that happen?

“So,” Felicity said. “Let’s look at the object of the message. Isabel Lawton. Who is completely off the grid.”

Joe frowned. “What do you mean?”

Felicity was frowning, too, only at her monitor. “She almost doesn’t seem to exist. No Facebook page, no Twitter handle, I can’t find any trace of her educational or job background anywhere in the US. I’ve found plenty of Isabel Lawtons but they’re either too old or too young and no one fits what you’ve told me about her. Which, frankly, isn’t much.” She sighed and turned a serious face to him. “You’d almost think she is me.”

Hmm. Felicity had grown up in the Witness Protection Program. Her father had been a famous Russian nuclear scientist who had defected and Felicity had basically been undercover her entire life. She’d changed names several times during childhood.

“Like...a spook?” Joe asked. “Or a spook’s daughter or sister or—” He swallowed. “Someone’s wife? Maybe the wife of someone dangerous? And she’s run away from him?”

That thought burned in his chest. Isabel married to an abusive husband. It was a thought he didn’t want to have but it sort of made sense. Instead of being a woman of mystery maybe she was a woman on the run. Maybe someone was after her, which would explain how she seemed always on edge.

If that was the case, her running days were over. Joe wouldn’t let anyone hurt her. No one was going to touch her. Except him.

“Not a nice thought,” Metal said.

Metal hated abusers as much as Joe did. They’d both been sick at heart when they’d had to negotiate with a warlord in Helmand for safe passage for a convoy of marines. The warlord, who was in his sixties, had called in his pregnant wife, a girl in her late teens, to serve them. Her shaking hands had spilled some hot tea on Joe and the warlord had punched her in the face.

Joe and Metal had kept their faces bland because the mission was an important one with the lives of a marine battalion at stake, but they didn’t forget. It had been Joe’s immense pleasure to find the warlord’s head in his crosshairs after a double cross had cost the lives of fifteen marines. Pulling that trigger and seeing that fucker’s head explode had been one of the great pleasures of Joe’s life.

“What do we know about Isabel Lawton, besides the fact that she makes the best boeuf bourguignon I’ve ever tasted?”

“The best what?” Joe and Metal said in unison.

Felicity rolled her eyes. “The best boeuf bourguignon. Hello? What we had for lunch and which we all agreed was fabulous?”

“Oh.” Joe sat back. “The beef stew.”

Felicity rolled her eyes again. “Yeah. The beef stew.”

“Great stuff,” Metal said.

It had been. They’d practically inhaled it. The instant Joe had seen that message he’d invited Metal and Felicity over for a late lunch, making it clear that if Felicity didn’t come along, Metal wouldn’t get to eat.

It was a threat with bite. By now, getting a chance to eat whatever Isabel cooked was a fought-over privilege. Joe got points for Isabel’s cooking.

So they’d eaten and then Joe had shown Felicity the mystery message.

“Was she a chef?” Felicity mused, tapping on her laptop’s nearly invisible keyboard. The keys were barely raised and allowed Felicity’s hands to float and conjure up miracles with what looked like the merest strokes. “Have any chefs gone missing lately?” She briefly consulted a website then sat back. “No.”

For an instant Joe was distracted from the problem of someone stalking Isabel. “There’s a website for disappeared chefs?” he asked, astonished.

“No, dummy.” Felicity shook her head. “I consulted a list of notable chefs and wrote a little algorithm to check for people who were on last year’s list but not on this year’s lists. There were ten people missing but they were all men. Three had died and one is doing time.”

Joe slid his eyes to Metal. Felicity had done all that in less than a minute. “She’s scary.”

Metal grinned smugly. “That’s my girl.”

“Well, someone knows enough about Isabel to know that we see each other on a regular basis and that’s scary, too.” Joe ground his teeth.

“Does she see other people?” Metal asked.

“No.” Joe’s voice was abrupt. Issue closed.

Metal recognized that tone but Felicity didn’t. “How can you be so sure?”

The good thing about Felicity was her smarts. The bad thing about Felicity was her smarts.

“I just know,” Joe said, his tone chilly enough to get a frown from Metal.

Felicity’s head cocked as she studied him. She wasn’t afraid of him in any way, which was good but damn, Joe wished they were in the military and he could shut her down with a command.

Though it was entirely likely that if Felicity was in the military she’d be a general by now. Head of Cyber Command.

“You keep tabs on her,” Felicity said.

Joe sighed. “Yeah.” He made an impatient gesture. “It’s not like I’m stalking her or anything. She’s not in a good way and to tell you the truth, she worries me.”

There, that sounded normal and sane. Concern for a neighbor, no more no less.

“Plus, she is a fabulous cook,” Felicity said dryly.

“Yeah, there’s that too.”

“And probably beautiful, judging by the expression on your face.”

Busted. Joe sighed. “Yeah. She’s a looker.”

Metal rested his arm against Felicity’s seat back and she leaned into it, the movement so natural because she’d probably done that a thousand times.

Metal was a lucky guy. Felicity was a looker, too. Joe and Metal were old enough not to be attracted by looks alone. As a teenager, Joe’d been turned on by just about any girl who didn’t make dogs whine and cringe. The pretty ones had been like catnip. Experience had taught him the hard way that pretty features didn’t mean shit. He’d met some vain and vicious pretty women and his radar was fine-tuned for that. Felicity and Isabel didn’t ping any of his warning buttons.

Like Isabel, Felicity wasn’t vain or neurotic about her looks. She and Metal were lovers, but they were also a team. A pretty cool one, too.

The same with a lot of guys in ASI. At first, Joe had thought it was something in the water out here in Portland. A lot of the guys were in tight, solid relationships. Maybe because the two owners, John Huntington, aka Midnight, and Douglas Kowalski, known as the Senior, had fantastic marriages. Jacko was also engaged to a looker. They were crazy in love, too.

Weird, so many solid couples in one place.

“Someone knows you’re interested,” Metal said soberly. “Otherwise that message doesn’t make sense. You don’t tell someone to look after their neighbor unless you know there’s some relationship there.”

“And you don’t take high-level precautions to hide your identity,” Felicity added. She touched her magic computer. “This guy, or this woman, employed a lot of difficult tricks to hide his or her identity. It’s not just a question of an anonymizer. The person who sent the message had to take a number of steps to hide their identity, and not easy steps, either. That person had to work, and work hard, to hide from me.”

She said it without false modesty. Felicity was the best of the best and she knew it.

“Someone’s watching you,” Metal said. “No way around it.”

“Or watching Isabel.” Joe didn’t know which thought bothered him more.

“And you’re not catching it.” Metal shook his head. “I don’t buy it. You’ve got good situational awareness. You haven’t noticed anything, anything at all?”

Joe shook his head.

“Security cams,” Felicity said suddenly and both men turned to her.

“What?”

But she was too busy communing with her laptop, fingers flying over the keyboard. She sat back and turned the monitor so he and Metal could see. Joe’s eyes widened.

She had some kind of map of their street with an overlay of security cameras with their field of vision. His street with projected cones over several houses.

“Okay, these are the security cams on your street, including yours and Isabel’s. Someone has probably hacked into some of them.”

“Not mine,” Joe said heatedly.

“No,” Felicity said softly. “I set yours up myself and they are not hackable.”

“And I set up Isabel’s system using your equipment and software.” So nobody had hacked his vidcam system or Isabel’s.

“What about the vidcams in the neighborhood,” he asked. “Are they hackable?”

Felicity had kept up the computer patter, fingers flying. “Oh, yeah,” she said and turned the monitor toward him. He and Metal bent forward.

And shit. Sure enough, there was his front doorstep, front and center of the camera view of his neighbor across the street, Edward Crawford, a retired doctor. Isabel’s doorstep was at the edge, barely visible. But when she walked down the small paved path to her gate, she’d be visible.

Felicity scrolled, from vidcam to vidcam, and he got a choppy view of his side of the street down to the park, where security vidcams took over.

“Are these vidcams hackable by someone who’s not you?” he asked.

“Oh yeah,” Felicity said. “You’d need a little nimbleness and savvy but they are hackable. You don’t have to be me to do it.”

Again, she said that without false pride. She knew how good she was.

Joe swallowed. “Have they been hacked?”

Felicity frowned. “Now, that I can’t say. Because I’m assuming that whoever is doing this is pretty good. Good enough to cover his traces.” She gave a half smile. “Or her traces. I’m assuming it’s a guy, though.”

“Yeah.”

“You still have that same email address? You didn’t change it to Joe.Harris123 did you?”

Felicity had a thing with passwords and email addresses. All of her passwords were created using a randomizer—and she remembered them all—and her email address was impossible to guess.

“Yeah.” Joe rubbed the back of his neck. “You pounded that home to me. To all of us. So not only is this guy following me and following Isabel, he—”

“Has a stake in this. He cares for some reason,” Metal said.

“That’s the thing that has me worried.” Joe looked at his friend who was looking as grim as he felt. “Someone is watching us who cares. And reaching out and touching me. So, yeah, he’s saying I need to protect Isabel but how do I know he’s a friend?”

Felicity’s pretty face was scrunched up in thought. “I’m not too familiar with tactics, not like you guys are, but didn’t he just show his hand? For what purpose, if not to focus you on Isabel?”

“And you’re already pretty focused,” Metal said, jabbing Joe with an elbow. Metal was a strong guy and his elbow jabs would knock over a lesser man. Joe wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of budging.

“I mean, what does he have to gain?” Felicity persisted. “So I think we’re going to have to take this message at face value.” She held up a slender hand and started counting the points off her fingers. “One, he’s probably not in town. He’s at a different location and can’t make it in time if she needs immediate help. Two, he’s on Isabel’s side. I think we need to simply assume that. Otherwise the message makes no sense. Because if he wanted to hurt her, he wouldn’t have alerted you to his presence. Three, he’s been able to peg Joe as a good guy and as someone who has a stake in Isabel’s safety. To reveal himself like that to Joe, he has to have done some digging. Though Joe’s military history is probably heavily redacted as to specific missions, the facts are publicly available. He’d know you were a SEAL. And he trusts you. So I guess in a way we’re starting to get a picture of him.”