Station Alpha: (Soldiering On #1) (8 page)

“Well, that certainly makes things more interesting.”

“Take it from me,” Destiny continued. “Don’t get the police involved in this. If it’s the same Disik, then I’m sure that they’ll let their own personal vendettas get in the way of whatever is fair and just. Any other time they’ve been so invested in a person, the outcome of any case involving them has been at least a little suspect, from what I can find out.”

“I guess we are on our own with this one,” Paul joked half-heartedly.

“Sorry, boo. I wish I could be more help.”

“It’s all right. This might actually put us on the right path.”

“Call me if you need anything else.”

“Will do.”

They hung up, and Paul looked over at Christine. “Well. That certainly puts a new spin on things.”

Chapter 9

Christine was entering the last of the information into her spreadsheet—including what they’d learned from Destiny—when she heard a clatter from the next room. It was followed by a harsh groan of frustration. She set the laptop aside and went into the study to find Paul with his chin perched on his fisted hands, glaring daggers at the computer screen. The keyboard he’d been using was askew, having landed towards the edge of the desk when he’d quite obviously thrown it.

“What’s wrong?” she asked, as she moved further into the room. She hesitated a moment before placing her hand on his shoulder. It was the first time that she’d deliberately touched him. Despite the normal, casual gesture, it felt oddly momentous.

Paul didn’t give any hint that he’d noticed.

“I can’t get anything out of their systems.”

“Is their data too protected?”

He sighed, dipping his head so he could rub his eyes one-handed without lifting his elbow from the desk. “Possibly. But to be honest, I think that it is more likely that they don’t store anything of use on their servers.”

Disappointed tension filled her. “We’re back at square one?”

He turned to look at her, and her hand fell from his shoulder. His scar caught the light and stood out in stark relief against his face. “Maybe your idea of breaking in wasn’t such a bad one.”

The beginnings of a smile tugged her mouth, until she saw the serious look on his face, not a hint of teasing. “Wait, you’re serious?”

“Yeah. It looks like these guys are old school when it comes to file storage. Hard copies all the way.”

“You don’t expect me to—“

He barked out a harsh laugh of surprise. “No, I don’t think either of us would be particularly stealthy. Duncan will choose someone that’s available and capable.”

Paul immediately dialled Duncan, and Christine wandered out of the room while they discussed specifics. By the time she’d made lunch for them both, the plans were in place. Apparently, someone named Blake was going to break into the facility later that night, and Paul would monitor the security cameras from Station Alpha.

It seemed completely far-fetched, like something out of Mission: Impossible. Though, hopefully with fewer guns and lasers.

“So, what do we do in the meantime, while we wait for tonight?” Christine asked. She put Paul’s lunch down on the cleared space in front of him.

“I have to make sure I have access to their security feeds before go time, but other than that, I have no plans. Did you have something in mind?”

“I thought we might…get to know each other a little,” she murmured, feeling like she was navigating the dangerous pathway out the front. She could very well be stepping into a minefield. Or, worse, a puddle of embarrassment. She hurried on. “I mean, we might end up being here together for quite a while. It makes sense for us to be more familiar with each other, right?”

She didn’t let him know that she had ulterior motives. But how else was she meant to find out whether her attraction to him was a product of some hero complex she’d developed, or if it really meant something? Or if he even felt the same way?

Not that she was under the illusion that she was being subtle. And the dumbfounded look on Paul’s face reinforced the idea that she’d just made a fool of herself.

But, then, he smiled. Light entered his eyes, warm despite their chilly colour. “Sounds like a good idea,” he told her. His voice was even, but Christine couldn’t shake the feeling that he was pleased by her request.

“All right,” she said, unable to keep the answering smile from her face. Not wanting to.

“Why did you take the job with Disik?” he asked.

“You want to start now?” She laughed lightly, amused by his eagerness.

He shrugged. “Why not?” His eyes danced, unashamed.

“All right, then. I’ve been a PA for various companies and individuals since I left college. I like to change things up, so I mostly take jobs that require me to do one big task, or set up processes and systems, and then move on.” The truth of her job hit her like an electric shock. She’d never allowed herself to settle in and get comfortable. She had specifically arranged her life so that she could never get close to the people she worked with or for, never be at ease in her own life. She kept moving on to different projects, never settling down long enough to build something.

It must have been intentional. She thought of her friends, the ones that liked her well enough, but never gave her a position of importance in their lives. Was that partially her fault? Did she keep them at arm’s length, always giving herself the option to move on?

Paul was still waiting patiently as her revelation buried itself into her mind, refusing to be dislodged. She tried to push it aside, focus on the man in front of her. Where was she?

“So, for Mr. Disik, I was meant to digitise his old files, sort them all into an easy to understand categorisation system that he could follow, store the hard copies of the files in an easily accessible way, and then move on. While there, of course, I did other duties for him, like run errands, take dictation, write notes and letters, that kind of thing. He talked about me possibly dictating his memoirs, but I put it off, told him I’d talk about it when I’d done the other work.”

“Sounds cool. I bet you were never bored.”

“You had and have a far more interesting job than mine.”

He shrugged. “Once you’ve lived in the midst of a war, you tend to long for a less interesting life. Interesting is not all it’s cracked up to be.” His voice was gentle, wholly without judgement.

A prickle of shame slithered up the back of her neck at her insensitivity. “Of course,” she murmured.

“I like this job a lot better,” he told her. It felt like a peace offering. “It’s mostly safe, and I can live the action vicariously through the others.”

“I’m glad you made it through the war and are safe now. I can’t imagine what it was like.”

He sighed. “It was what it was. I didn’t mind it so much. Not until the last mission. That coloured my view of it, I have to admit.”

“What happened?” She kept her voice soft.

His mouth twisted into a wry smile. “I suppose I walked into that question. It wasn’t anything spectacular. Just another firefight. I just happened to take a couple of bullets that day. But one hit near the base of my spine and that was it. No more walking. And no more beauty pageants.” He gestured to his face, smiling to bypass the seriousness of the conversation topic.

She shuffled to the edge of her chair, drawn towards him. “I don’t know about that. There’s probably at the very least an eye model competition of some kind. You’d take out the championship in that no question.”

He blinked and a surprised laugh startled out of him. He met her gaze and from the intensity of his gaze with those piercing eyes, Christine could tell he was staggered.

“You like my eyes?” A hint of teasing was in his voice, but more than a little confusion.

“Hasn’t anyone told you that you have the most extraordinary coloured eyes?”

Those eyes caught hers, and Christine raised her hand as if to draw her fingers across his brow and down his cheek. His breath hitched, just at the edge of her hearing. She stopped her hand in time, it hung uselessly for a moment in mid-air before she dropped it back into her lap.

His eyes were yearning as they searched hers. She didn’t know what her expression showed, whether the jumbled mix of hope, confusion, and fear played across her eyes like it did her mind. Eventually, Paul gave a small smile that seemed to convey a trace of disappointment, and looked away, releasing her from the power of his gaze. The spell of intimacy between them was broken.

“So, what do you like to read?” he asked, and they were back on safer ground. The oddly intense moment had passed, and Christine didn’t know whether she regretted the outcome or not.

“How did you know I was a reader?”

“I saw that you were drawn to the books on the bedside table in your room, and back at my apartment.”

She nodded. Perhaps Paul had as much trouble keeping himself from watching her as she did him. “Crime thrillers are my favourites. I like to live on the edge. Vicariously. Though now that I’ve experienced the real thing, my reading tastes may change.”

“I bet you always figured out who the bad guy was before the characters did, right?”

She laughed. “It’s just a matter of putting all the clues together and then rearranging them until they fit. If it was a good writer that valued careful plotting over ridiculous shocks and twists, that is. You can’t really predict those.”

“Well, hopefully we’ll be able to do the same in real life. Find the bad guy before the end.”

“That would be nice. If only I knew what I did to send whoever it is after me!” she burst out, her frustration spilling forth in an unexpected torrent. “I live such a boring life. There is no reason for them to want to kidnap me, or hurt me, or whatever they are trying to do.”

“There must be a reason, but that isn’t on you. They decided to act this way, regardless of whatever choices you made. You aren’t to blame for this.”

He leaned forward, and Christine thought for a crazy moment that he was going to kiss her. Instead, he captured her hand in his and squeezed it tight, offering her comfort. His face still hovered close to hers.

“It’s going to be all right,” he promised in a low voice that shook with some suppressed emotion. “We’ll figure this out, and then you’ll be home free.”

Her lips kicked up into a smile as she squeezed his hand in return. “I trust you.”

Perhaps both of them were feeling the odd atmosphere in the room. Certainly, Christine felt that she needed distance, and time to digest all the fluctuating emotions of the last hour or so. Paul, too, seemed to retreat into himself.

“I’ll let you get to work,” she murmured. Paul nodded in reply and spun his chair around so it faced the computer screen. As she walked out, he was dragging the keyboard back towards himself.

Chapter 10

Christine walked into the office in Station Alpha at exactly 10:55pm. Blake was meant to start his break-in at 11pm, and she didn’t want to miss it.

She’d spent the majority of the last few hours pondering her newfound revelation about herself. Her friends, her job, her life, all of it now seemed entirely temporary. As if she could just pick up and walk away whenever she felt like it. It couldn’t be a coincidence, this she knew. But she also wasn’t entirely sure how or why she’d built herself into this impermanent world, like a house of cards that she could knock over whenever it all got too much.

Had it been her parents’ early deaths? So soon after her awkward high school years, where she’d never felt quite comfortable in herself? She’d rebelled against her parents in those years, been an unhappy teen, and that hadn’t endeared her to her peers. Then, her parents had died before they’d been able to rebuild their relationship.

Had she had a particularly bad break up that she hadn’t realised had affected her?

She had dismissed that last one, realising that her relationships with men had also been emotionally muted by her inability to let people get close to her. Sex, she could deal with. But she’d always held herself back, and anything involving deep emotions had been avoided at all costs.

Eventually, Christine had concluded that her retreat from the pain of emotional attachments had begun even before her parents’ deaths. They had both loved her, dearly, but they had also taken great pains to make sure she fit into the world that they’d always felt apart from. They hadn’t wanted her to face the same discrimination that they had when they moved to the United States from Puerto Rico, despite their good English. Having an accent and non-white skin was enough for them to be labelled as foreign—often ‘Mexican’—and therefore not American enough to succeed.

Her parents had moved into a predominantly white neighbourhood, sent her to a school with few other children of colour, and refused to speak Spanish at home. As a consequence, her connection to her family’s culture was poor at best. She didn’t speak much Spanish, even now.

She had never felt quite at ease with the white children surrounding her, but nor had she truly belonged in her parents’ world, either. She’d been lonely, torn between two worlds, neither of which she fully understood. Two worlds that both found reason to believe that she wasn’t enough. That she didn’t belong.

It became clear in her later life that the reason her parents had done this was that they hadn’t wanted her to be seen as a stereotype; particularly the fiery Latina. They had taught her to rein in her emotions, display no signs of temper. To dress conservatively. To be as white American as she could possibly be despite her skin colour and to fit into that world as much as she could. But to never let her be emotionally free, a stereotype that often plagued Latina women.

They wanted her to transcend her Puerto Rican heritage and succeed in a world that gave privilege to white skin and native English speakers. To move beyond all those negative things that people expected of her when they saw her heritage broadcast by her skin, darker than the white that was perceived as ‘normal’. That negativity burrowed into the deep corners of her mind, affecting her in ways she still wasn’t sure she understood.

And Christine had learned to be ashamed of her heritage. She’d become what they called ‘western neutral’—a person that had grown up in a predominantly white, middle-to-upper-class world, without any connection to their parents’ upbringing. But Christine would never have the experience of being completely accepted by that world, either. She didn’t feel Puerto Rican, but she also didn’t feel entirely American because of the way other people treated her.

She’d closed herself off from people, afraid to show her real self. She didn’t feel comfortable in her own body, as she was neither what people wanted nor expected from her, nor what she wanted for herself.

After her parents had died, she’d thrown herself into her studies and her work. She wanted to achieve what they’d wanted for her—success. And she’d let everything else fall by the wayside.

That was when she’d lost one of her last connections to them and their culture. Her belief in God. She hadn’t had enough of a connection to God to believe that He would do something so cruel as to take them from her for a good reason. And her faith had waned, and eventually disappeared.

Even as all this occurred to Christine, she decided that the reason didn’t really matter. What mattered was that she was going to fix it. As soon as she got out of this strange limbo she found herself in, she was going to call her friends, and find a job that she was really passionate about that she could see herself in for the long term. Enrol in some Spanish classes. She didn’t know what she’d do about the relationship situation, but she couldn’t help but think that something significant was growing between her and Paul. It couldn’t just be a hero worship thing. Could it?

Either way, she’d make that decision later, once she had time to figure it all out.

For now, there was a mission—as Paul called it—they had to complete, one that might bring her closer to figuring out exactly what whoever these people were wanted with her.

Paul was already talking to Blake when Christine entered the room.

“I’ve got eyes on you. There’s a guard in the booth at the entrance, and one inside the front door.”

“Copy,” came a crackling voice through the speakers. Christine perched on the office chair, trying to be as inconspicuous as possible.

“The back door has a sign that says it’s alarmed, so I might avoid that one, too.”

Blake laughed, seemingly amused. “No problem, dude.”

There was movement on one of the screens displaying a series of black and white images. Paul maximised that screen, and they watched the corner of the image as Blake hauled himself one-handed over the 7-foot fence, complete with narrowed tips that would be very painful to fall on. He avoided them with a surprising grace for such a bulky man. Even as he landed, his left arm was tucked in close to his body, not moving.

From there, Paul clicked between multiple camera feeds, tracking Blake’s progress towards the building. He was barely a shadow, instinctively seeming to know where the cameras were and the best place to hide from them. If Christine hadn’t known he was there, she doubted she would have noticed him.

She glanced at the two separate feeds of the security guards, but neither seemed alarmed by what they were watching. She breathed a sigh of relief.

Disik and Sons was in a sturdy, large building. Three stories high, it was surrounded by a car park and not much else. From what she could make out through the poor resolution and lack of colour on the screen, no lights shone from any of the windows. She had to hope that meant that there was no one inside.

“Is the building clear?” she asked.

“From what I can tell,” Paul replied.

“What?” came Blake’s voice in a harsh whisper.

“Sorry, I wasn’t talking to you,” Paul replied.

“You must be Christine,” Blake murmured low into what must be a communication device in his ear. It occurred to Christine that there must be a stockpile of fancy equipment somewhere for the people of Soldiering On to use.

Christine leaned forward. “Nice to meet you, Blake.”

He chuckled in reply. There was a quick movement on one of the camera feeds, and then Blake was against the left face of the building, barely visible in the deep shadows that streaked across the wall.

“I’m going for the second floor,” Blake told them. “Pretty sure I saw an open window up there.”

“Blake, I’d tell you that you’re insane, but you know that already.”

The man laughed in reply. “True enough.”

Christine pulled the office chair closer to the screen in an attempt to get a closer look. It took almost a full minute for her eyes to adjust to what she was seeing.

“Is he…climbing the building one-handed?”

“Yup,” was all Paul said in reply.

Using the strength of his legs to launch himself upwards from window ledges and small protrusions from the wall, in combination with his right hand to unerringly catch the ledges above him, Blake was moving up the wall at a surprising pace. He reached a steel rod and looped his left arm around it, hauling his legs up to a window ledge almost perpendicular to him.

“He clearly has no left hand, but you’d barely notice. He’s mad. Amazing, but mad.”

“We think he must have been a cat burglar in a previous life, but he claims he got it all from the military.”

“I also rock climb in my spare time,” Blake huffed through the speakers as he locked his left arm around the steel rod even tighter, and used his right arm to slowly pry the window up. Nevertheless, she heard the flirtatious smile in his voice.

Christine was riveted as Blake hooked his leg around through the window and slid himself inside. He disappeared from view, and she glanced at the other feeds, trying to get another glimpse of him. A security guard leaned forward, the movement catching her eye as her gaze slid past. She froze, watching him, seeing if he would raise an alarm. Paul, too, must have seen him, because he maximised the image.

A few agonising seconds passed as the man stared intently at the screen. Then, the guard pumped his fist and cheered, throwing himself happily back in the chair.

“Some kind of sports match,” she said with a relieved laugh.

Paul let out a slow breath.

“All right, Blake. Looks like no alarms were tripped. You’re good to go.”

“Copy.”

He moved then, darting through an open plan office space, using desks and cubicle walls for cover. Once again, he was almost invisible.

“Any ideas on where I’m going?” he hissed.

Paul flicked through the camera feeds. “Looks like there is storage in the basement. Lots of filing cabinets.”

“Of course it’s the basement,” Blake replied sardonically.

“The stairs are in full view of the camera. Nowhere for you to hide. Want me to cut the feeds on the stairs temporarily? Not sure the guard would notice.”

“I think you’re going to have to.”

“I won’t have eyes on you,” Paul warned.

“Just do it,” Blake ground out.

Paul did. One by one the screens went black. All was silent for a moment, and Christine didn’t dare breathe.

“Cleared camera one,” came the voice muffled by crackles. Paul flicked it back on. Christine turned her eyes to the guard, watching him watch his program and hoped to hell he wouldn’t decide to do his job anytime soon.

“Cleared two.” The image of the landing flickered back to life.

“Cleared three.” Blake was huffing now, obviously moving at quite a pace down the stairs.

“Cleared four.”

The feed flickered on, and the system once again looked normal. One last glance at the guard proved that he hadn’t noticed a thing.

“You’re clear,” Paul murmured.

Blake darted into the long room that was stuffed to the brim with boxes and filing cabinets. Christine choked, knowing that it would take her many months—even years—to organise that much information. There was no way that Blake could go through it all in one night.

Another problem occurred to her. Blake was going to be in full view when he looked in those cabinets. There was no way they could shut the camera down long enough for him to find anything useful.

“Shit,” Blake murmured eloquently, clearly realising the same thing. “Any recommendations on where I start?”

Christine dragged her chair closer so that she was flush with Paul.

“What’s their categorisation system?”

“Err…” he peered at the nearest filing cabinet. “It seems to be labelled ‘1984’.”

“Okay, so it is categorised by time first. Can you open a cabinet for me? Preferably one of the more recent ones?”

Without questioning her, Blake darted down the aisles until he found a label that said ‘2013’. Close enough. He tugged the drawer’s handle, but it wouldn’t budge. She heard his irritated huff through his mic.

Without a word, he withdrew something from his pocket. Unfolding the dark fabric, he pulled out a few pins and Christine realised it was a lock picking kit.

“Is there anything he can’t do?” Christine asked jokingly.

Blake chuckled. “Clap,” he murmured. Paul rolled his eyes, but was clearly amused.

The lock was open in no time, and Blake tugged the draw once again. This time it slid free.

“Alphabetical,” Blake grunted after a moment.

“All right. Do they have a system within the file itself?” Blake pulled out a file folder at random and flipped it open.

“Chronological again,” he said.

“Are the files on clients?”

Blake flicked through some of them. “Mostly.”

“We should find this year’s files first. Thank God they have a filing system or this would be a nightmare.”

“What do you want me to look for first?”

“Christine Ramirez seems as good a place to start as any,” said Paul, his voice tight.

Christine shivered. Having been caught up in the excitement of the breaking and entering, she’d almost forgotten why they were there.