Unintended Target (Unintended Series Book 1) (15 page)

She turned when she noticed Jack wasn’t following. “Wait here,” Jack said, as he started to pull the door shut.

“Where are you—”

“I’m just checking out the lay of the land. I’ll be right back.” He nodded toward the computer. “You go ahead,” he said, and closed the door.

The space was tiny, really no more than a glorified closet, with one ancient PC and a printer atop a melamine table pushed against the wall. Half a window, overlooking the front parking lot, made up part of the outside wall, suggesting that maybe the room had been an afterthought, carved off of a part of a larger, adjacent room.

“I can’t believe no one was in here,” Chloe muttered, taking the rolling chair in front of the computer and reaching into her bag. Terrified of losing the flash drive, she’d been feeling it inside the bag’s zippered pocket every five minutes or so since they left the car. Now she extracted it and leaned over the machine to locate the USB port. She found it and inserted the drive.

The machine whirred, working slowly to recognize the flash drive. Chloe sighed impatiently and turned to stare at the door. She didn’t like separating.

As if in answer to her thoughts, the door swung open, then closed quickly, as Jack hastened inside then locked it.

“We okay?” Chloe asked.

Jack nodded. “Is it working?” he asked, stepping to the window and drawing the blinds so that he could see out, but making it difficult to see in from the outside.

Chloe shrugged. “It’s slow. It’s still reading it.” She tapped her fingers uselessly on the bottom of the keyboard. “Come on, come on,” she softly urged the machine. Jack continued peering through the blinds.

“There!” Chloe exclaimed, grasping the mouse and clicking. “It read it.” She paused. “It’s a video file,” she acknowledged weakly.

Jack slid next to her to look over her shoulder. “Will it play?”

Chloe bit her lip. “We’ll see.”

But instead of double clicking the file to start it, Chloe just stared at the screen, unmoving. Jack looked from the screen to her face, which had grown pale.

“You can do this,” Jack encouraged, squeezing her shoulders gently. “You know you can.”

She nodded again and double clicked the file. Another window opened, and the video started to play.

* * * * *

A solitary chair set against a bare, mocha-colored wall flashed onto the screen. The chair was modern, made of black leather stretched over a shiny chrome frame, and Chloe recognized it immediately.

“I think that’s in Tate’s apartment in Miami,” she said hollowly.

The picture jiggled a bit, as if someone was adjusting the camera. Then the frame shifted so that the chair moved to the center of the screen and the jiggling stopped. Shadows fell over the left of the screen. Then suddenly, there was Tate. A long, quiet breath stole slowly from Chloe’s lips, and her frame folded inward ever so slightly.

Tate’s auburn hair was badly in need of a cut and had started to curl at the ends. Thanks to the broiling Miami sun, his fair skin was darker than she’d ever seen it. His gaze seemed to bore straight through her and for a moment she had the eerie feeling he could actually see her sitting there with Jack. Then he smiled, and the familiarity of it took her breath away.

“
Chloe,”
he said, leaning forward in the chair, propping himself up with his elbows on his knees. How many times had she heard him utter her name in her lifetime? Thousands. Thousands upon thousands. His voice washed over her, taking her instantly through a life’s worth of precious moments and memories, wrenching her heart, tearing at the hole where he used to be.

“Chloe, first you have to know that I did all of this for you. For us. It was my chance and I took it, and, well, I hope you can understand. Even though . . . even though, if you’re watching this it probably means that I’m dead.”
He looked down for a moment, summoned his composure, then looked back at the camera. “
It doesn’t necessarily mean that, by the way. It’s possible I’m hiding out somewhere, waiting for the right opportunity to hook back up with you—”
A brief, ridiculous hope expanded in Chloe like a bubble, then popped instantaneously. She had identified her brother’s remains. He was wrong. It wasn’t possible.

“But, if I am, it brings me to the second thing. Which is . . . I’m sorry. I never intended for this to happen. It seemed like the perfect plan, you know, and then, well, things just sort of spiraled out of control. But,”
he quickly pointed out, “
I’ve still got contingency plans in place and it’s looking good, so as I sit here, of course I’m hoping you’ll never see this. I’m hoping that everything will work out exactly as I’ve planned, and pretty soon you and I will have everything we always deserved but never had the luck to get. There’s just so much I’ve—we’ve—been cheated out of. So,”
he said decidedly, a guilty twitch in his expression suggesting that he was already certain she would disapprove, “
I finally came to the conclusion that
if cheating is the only way to get anything in life, then so be it.”

“Oh, Tate,” she moaned ruefully. “What did you do?”

“I’m going to tell Rohrstadt to send this to you as soon as he gets word I’ve disappeared, or . . . been killed. Or whatever. No matter what anyone has told you about how I died, whether it was a drowning, car accident, heart attack, whatever, you need to be very careful. I promise it was no accident. I was murdered. And, well, there’s a slight chance . . . although I think I covered my tracks pretty well, and they shouldn’t suspect you in the least . . . that the people that killed me are going to be coming after you.”

“Idiot,” Jack growled, and the tone was so foreign on him that Chloe looked up just to make sure he’d actually said it. “Sorry,” he said, but his eyes still flashed.

Tate continued, and she turned her gaze back to the screen.

“
So, this is all on you now. And the reward is all yours, too. You’ll just need to hold on for a few weeks—and then you’re home free. After that, go someplace safe, someplace secret. Somewhere not even I would guess. Buy a house, buy a villa, hey, buy a yacht. You’ll be able to afford it. But before then, you’re going to have to come to Miami . . . but I’ll get to that.

“For now, start using just cash. No credit cards. These people are very powerful. They have fingers everywhere. And don’t trust anyone.”

Anyone.
The word echoed in Chloe’s mind as she became acutely aware of Jack’s presence behind her. But Jack wasn’t just anyone. He was Jack. And she needed him. At least for now.

“
I’ve thought this through a thousand times. I know I’ve covered all my bases. I don’t think I’m going to need this video, but it’s kind of like life insurance, you know? Just in case. With this much money at stake, I’d be stupid not to take this precaution.”

“Money,” Chloe mumbled in a distant, knowing sort of way.

“
I guess I should start at the beginning. I’d been in Miami about six weeks when I met this guy in a bar in Bayside. I never caught his name, but he worked for WorldCore Bank’s Miami office in some kind of management position. Anyway, he tosses back one too many and gets loose-lipped. We get to talking about our jobs, and when he finds out I’m in tech security, he launches into this story about how he’s in for a conference on system security, and isn’t that a coincidence. Tells me how they could really use a guy like me because so far they haven’t been able to come up with a reliable gatekeeping system. How they’re constantly crashing, getting invaded, hackers playing havoc with accounts. And apparently WorldCore’s not the only one with the problem. He even names names for me. He’s practically on the verge of tears because he had something to do with buying their current firewall program and his job’s on the line. Well, eventually, he wanders off, and starts blubbering to somebody else. But I can’t stop thinking about it, and suddenly, I realize that the universe has dropped the perfect opportunity into my lap.”

Chloe shook her head side to side, as if trying to convince Tate not to say what she felt sure was coming next.

“Please tell me he didn’t,” Jack whispered.

“
So, I started checking out some of the banks he’d talked about. It’s me, so, you know, it wasn’t even really that hard to hack in and cover my tracks. But it didn’t take long to figure out that I would need someone else, someone on the inside—”

A light flashed from the window, and Jack’s head whipped towards the blinds. He squinted through them, and watched as a brown sedan jerked to a stop at the bellhop stand by the lobby. “Stop it!” he barked at Chloe, over Tate’s continuing monologue.

“What?” Chloe said, spinning towards him and following his gaze to the window.

“The video, stop it now,” he repeated, and moved to stand against the wall to hide his body from view. As two men leapt from the sedan, two patrol cars pulled up right behind it.

“What? What’s happening?” Chloe asked, pausing the video.

“Sampson,” Jack said turning toward her. “We’ve got to move
. Now
.”

The color drained from her face as she continued to sit, unmoving.

“Chloe, now!”

The sharpness of his voice jolted her into action. She clicked out of the video window and ripped the flash drive from the back of the PC. Her heart pounded as Jack grabbed her hand and pulled her to the door. He peeked out for a moment and closed the door again.

“They’re at the front desk,” he said. Chloe felt unsteady on her feet and Jack’s voice was starting to sound distant and fuzzy around the edges. She was having trouble focusing.

“Hey,” he said, grabbing her face with his hands. “Chloe, you hear me? Chloe. Look at me.”

“We’re dead, Jack.”

“Hey, listen to me. We’re not dead. I don’t want to hear that again, got it? I don’t think they know we’re back here or they’d already
be
here, okay? We need to go out this way,” he said, tilting his head in the direction that the hallway continued down. “You ready?”

She nodded.

“Come on, then,” he urged, pulling her hand to him as he opened the door just enough to slide out. An advantageously placed potted palm blocked them partially from view as they sprinted the short few feet to the end of the hall, where it turned left ninety degrees and out of sight of the front desk.

A resounding crash rang out followed by a chorus of sharp cries, as Jack and Chloe cleared the corner and immediately ran full force into a hotel employee carrying a tray of covered dishes above his shoulder. All three flew backwards from the impact as silver lids and china plates smashed on the blue and white tiles, clattering incessantly as they circled one another amongst splattered food and scattered utensils. Chloe slammed hard against the wall, then ricocheted back, losing her footing in the spilled food and landing spread-eagled on the floor. Jack and the waiter landed on either side of her, their clothes smeared with food.

The waiter, fumbling in the sloppy mess, cursed loudly. Jack, apparently dazed, shook his head as he stood. “Get up, Chloe,” he urged, reaching toward her and pulling her to her feet. “We’ve got to go. Fast. They’ll have heard.”

As she straightened up, Chloe shook her hand violently to sling off some scrambled eggs, leaving a gushy splatter on the opposite wall. New panic seized her as she stared at her empty hand. The hand that had been squeezing tightly around the flash drive before the crash.

To the bewilderment of both Jack and the waiter, Chloe dropped back to her knees and began frantically groping through the soggy mess of china and glass shards, eggs, juice, and potato hash.

“Hey lady, wait—” started the waiter.

“Chloe, now!” Jack barked, tugging on her arm. “What are you doing?”

“The flash drive!” exclaimed Chloe in a panic, jerking away from Jack.

“What?”
             

“The
flash drive—
I had it! I dropped it when I fell!”

Dread washed over Jack’s face, his eyes now reflecting Chloe’s panic. He moved to crouch beside her, when suddenly a well-muscled man in a dark sports coat stepped briskly around the corner. He stopped mid-stride, his gaze landing first on the mess, then on Chloe. In the same second that recognition flashed across the man’s face, Jack was on him.

Jack’s first blow broke the arm reaching for his gun. The second to the throat drove the man into the wall and left him gagging. The waiter scrambled crab-like away from the brawl as Jack slammed the man’s head into the wall. When he landed in a crumpled heap on the floor, Jack ripped the gun from beneath the man’s jacket. Chloe was still fishing through the wreckage from the tray. The waiter practically tripped over himself trying to stand, his eyes wide and hands splayed in front of him as if to wave Jack off. As soon as the waiter got a foothold, he maneuvered clumsily past Chloe while staying as far away from Jack as possible. When he reached the corner, he took off towards the lobby.

“Let’s go,” Jack growled, grabbing Chloe under the arm and pulling.

“No!” Chloe screamed as she shrugged him off. “I can’t. I’ve got to find it!”

Practically dragging Chloe up off the floor, Jack ordered harshly, “Chloe! They. Are. Coming. Leave it! Come on!”