Cooper Security 06 - Secret Intentions (20 page)

He nodded. “I can’t sleep.”

“I’m going to give it a try,” she said, although she doubted she’d be doing much sleeping, even as tired as she was.

The sparks flying between Jesse and her sister moments earlier had made her chest ache. Had those sparks been the natural result of spirited conflict? Or was there a lingering, underlying sexual passion that neither of them would ever get over?

And if that was the reality, what chance did Evie have of making Jesse realize that she was the Marsh sister he really belonged with?

* * *

I
T FELT STRANGE
not having Evie by his side, Jesse realized as he crossed the bridge to the main office building. She’d been with him constantly for days now, rarely leaving his presence for more than a few minutes at a time.

He missed her.

His sister Shannon and Gideon Stone were the only people left in the conference room when he entered. “Where are the Marshes?”

“Izzy and Ben took them to the dorms not long after you and the others left. They’re giving them the eastern corner suite because it’s bigger. They’ll be more comfortable there.”

“Good idea.” Jesse pulled up a chair and sat beside his sister, looking over her shoulder. The gibberish on the computer screen meant nothing to him. “Anything yet?”

“We’re into the memory card now. You’re looking at the code key itself. I’m just working through the pattern so that I can apply it to the journal.”

“You’re still missing General Marsh’s part of the code.”

“I know.” Shannon slanted a quick look at him. “Any chance you can talk him into spilling it?”

“I doubt I’d have much chance,” he admitted. “But maybe Evie will.”

“You don’t think Rita would do it?”

“Rita’s too busy worrying about her own issues.” He dismissed the idea with a wave of his hand, still feeling irritated at her earlier self-centered attitude. He didn’t remember her being so spoiled, but maybe that had been their problem in the end. She wanted things her own way, and bending to someone else’s will, even partially, had never been something she was willing to do for long.

She’d wanted him to quit the Marine Corps and get a desk job, complete with suit and tie. She hadn’t understood how much the Marine Corps had given him a sense of purpose, a feeling of being part of something bigger than himself. Being part of something important, something that mattered. She’d wanted him to throw all that away for her, and she hadn’t been willing to listen to his side of things at all. And even then, he’d loved her enough to be tempted to do what she wanted.

It had been Evie, he remembered with a faint smile, who had convinced him to stand his ground. She hadn’t known anything about her sister’s ultimatum, as far as he knew. At seventeen, she was involved in her own teenage drama, worrying about whether she’d be asked to the prom or whether her grades and tests scores would be good enough to get her into the college she wanted to attend.

He wasn’t sure why he’d asked her, of all people, whether she thought he was being selfish for wanting to stay in the Marine Corps.

“Selfish would be walking away from your team,” she’d answered thoughtfully. “You all depend on each other, right? And you’re about to be deployed to Kaziristan—it would be a terrible time to leave them.”

She’d been right. He’d known it, bone-deep. He’d just needed someone to say it aloud, to reassure him that he’d made the right decision.

“Okay, I have it,” Shannon announced. She stifled a yawn behind her hand. “If you want me to try to decrypt the journal tonight, though, somebody better brew a pot of coffee.”

“Does it have to be tonight?” Gideon asked.

Jesse shot him a look of surprise. Gideon was usually one of his most gung ho operatives, ready to get to work in a heartbeat. But he was looking with concern at Shannon, his expression so tender it made Jesse’s teeth hurt.

He swallowed a sigh. Clearly, Stone wasn’t going away. Jesse was just going to have to deal with the idea of his baby sister in love with a big ol’ jarhead lunk. “Shan, want to get some rest and start again in the morning?”

Her brow furrowed. “If I try to sleep now, I’ll just worry at it all night anyway. But we really need General Marsh’s part of the code.”

“I’ll see what I can do,” Jesse said.

* * *

J
ESSE FOUND
M
RS.
M
ARSH
alone in the corner suite. She blinked at him with sleepy blue eyes that reminded him strongly of Evie. “He got a call from Evie and went upstairs to talk to her.”

“Oh. Thanks. Sorry for waking you.”

Donna Marsh caught his arm as he started to go. “Thank
you.
”

He paused, surprise. “For what?”

“For protecting us. All of us. Bax won’t say it, but he feels it, too.”

Jesse couldn’t imagine Rita’s father having any sort of positive feelings toward him after all that had happened, but he managed a smile. “Try to sleep, Mrs. Marsh. Everybody’s safe now.”

She smiled at him and closed the door, leaving him alone in the hall.

He headed up to Evie’s room, not sure what to do next. If he knew Evie as well as he thought he did, she’d be trying to convince her father to give up his part of the code. So the question was, should he let her work her magic on her father alone, or would it help to have a partner in her efforts?

It might, he conceded, but not if he was the partner in question. The mere sight of Jesse seemed to put the general’s defenses up, like a porcupine confronted with an enemy.

He stopped short of Evie’s door, listening, instead, at the door of the room Rita and her husband shared. They were still awake; he could hear them talking quietly beyond the closed door.

He leaned closer, trying to decide whether to knock and ask Rita to help Evie convince her father to give up his secrets. But before he could lift his hand, the door behind him opened.

He jerked away from Rita’s door and turned to face Evie and her father.

“What are you doing?” Baxter Marsh asked, his expression thunderous.

“Just wondering if Rita and Andrew were still up,” he answered honestly, glancing at Evie. She gazed back, her expression as dark and pained as a bruise.

Dismay coiled like a snake in his gut as he realized what they both must think of his lurking outside Rita’s room. “Mrs. Marsh said Evie had called you to come see her.”

The general glared back at him. “You woke my wife?”

Jesse swallowed a grimace. He couldn’t win with Baxter Marsh. “Shannon has worked out General Ross’s code. We already have Emmett Harlowe’s code key—”

“So you need my part of the code,” Marsh finished for him. He exchanged a long look with his daughter. “Evie has been telling me what information your company has gleaned about the Espera Group and AfterAssets. It’s amazing how much your people have been able to piece together without being closer to the action.”

“The former SSU agents have to be stopped,” Jesse said with more overt passion than he was usually comfortable revealing. But he suspected the one thing Marsh wanted to know was just how committed Jesse was to following the clues wherever they led him, no matter how dark or dangerous a place that might be.

He was committed. He would never have allowed his family and colleagues to risk their lives in search of the SSU and the conspiracy they were trying to uncover if he wasn’t utterly convinced that letting the SSU continue their schemes unchallenged would be dangerous to individuals and nations alike.

“Too many good people have died in the service of the Espera Group’s ambitions,” Jesse added. “Too many more will die or lose their basic freedoms if we allow it to go on any longer.”

Marsh’s eyes narrowed. “Still the Marine, even without the dress blues, aren’t you?”

“Once a Marine—”

“Always a Marine,” Marsh finished with a slight smile.

Evie curled her hand over her father’s arm. “Will you give us your part of the code, Dad? If we have it, we can find out what General Ross knew about the Espera Group and the SSU that you and General Harlowe didn’t.”

Marsh stared at his daughter, worry creasing his brow. Jesse didn’t doubt the decision was a struggle. Marsh’s part of the code was all the leverage he had left against people who’d use his family against him without blinking.

He turned to look at Jesse finally. “Okay,” he said. “I’ll give you the code.”

Chapter Sixteen

“Genius, really.” Shannon’s manic grin came from too many sleepless hours, too much coffee and the giddy satisfaction of decrypting the journal they’d spent two months trying to decode. “There are six levels of code—each code has two layers.” She looked at General Marsh, who sat nearby. “Did you all come up with this together?”

Evie’s father smiled. “Edward was the code man. He worked it all out and doled out the layers to Emmett and me. We knew how the code could be broken, but I can’t tell you how it all works together.” He shot a look at Jesse. “Your sister would have been an asset to the Corps, Cooper.”

“Don’t give her any ideas, sir,” he murmured.

“Bottom line.” Rick sounded impatient. “What does it tell us?”

“A lot you’ve already pieced together,” Gideon admitted. “But we’ve come across a few things we didn’t know before.”

“General Ross confirms that Katrina Hilliard is involved in whatever the SSU is up to.” Shannon didn’t look away from the computer screen. Her eyebrows shot up suddenly. “Oh, wow.”

“What?” Jesse rounded the table to look over her shoulder.

“General Ross talked to Vince.”

Evie gave a start. Vince Randall, Jesse’s late brother-
in-law?

“We knew Vince had seen Barton Reid with an al Adar terrorist leader—Megan and Evan gleaned that from his letters to Megan.” Shannon looked at her brother. “But there were a few things we couldn’t figure out.”

“KH,” he murmured, looking across the room at Evie. “There was a letter—Megan’s husband, Vince, had hidden it inside a toy he sent home for their dog, Patton,” he explained, his gaze locked with hers. His expression was so intense that she felt as if they were the only people in the room. “He sent it only a couple of days before he was killed. There were some things we couldn’t decipher. One was a notation about a meeting in Tablis between KH, Barton Reid and an al Adar leader.”

“Katrina Hilliard knew what Barton Reid was up to.” The full treachery of the president’s chief aide hit Evie in a sickening wave.

Shannon looked equally queasy. “General Ross writes that Vince saw Hilliard and Reid in deep conversation with Malik Tahrim, an al Adar operative. General Ross calls him a ‘very bad actor’ in the region.”

“He was one of the terrorists Amanda was tracking around the time al Adar grabbed her off the street of Tablis and tortured her,” Rick said.

“Amanda?” Evie’s father looked confused. “Who’s Amanda?”

“My wife,” Rick answered. “I think you were still in Kaziristan when she was working for CIA. You’d have known her as Tara Brady.”

Her father’s eyebrows arched. “I see.”

“Did you know any of this?” Evie asked, curious.

“Not all of it. Edward was the one who spearheaded our attempts to compile the evidence. I knew MacLear was running covert operations with impunity. That was my part of the investigation—tracking their movements and figuring out if Jackson Melville knew what was going on. The Department of Defense had paid MacLear millions for troop support missions. If MacLear was abusing our trust in them, we needed to know.”

“What did you learn?”

“We were still looking into that question when the SSU got caught red-handed.” The general looked at Jesse. “Your cousins had something to do with how that all went down, I believe.”

“What part did General Harlowe have in the investigation?” As an accountant, Evie hadn’t been privy to the more confidential information that passed through Cooper Security. But she figured she had a right to know what was going on, given her own personal stake in seeing justice done where the remnants of the SSU were concerned.

“The Air Force had access to satellite images of troop movements. Harlowe’s part was to get his hands on those recordings and images and piece together any anomalies,” the general answered. “He was the one who first made Edward suspect the SSU were involved in his son’s death.” He looked at Gideon, his eyes narrowing. “Did you have any idea, Captain Stone?”

“Not until General Ross shared his suspicions,” Gideon answered. “I know there were MacLear operatives working with our unit to provide transportation and troop support, but I couldn’t tell you if any of them were SSU or not. We didn’t mix much.”

“These files don’t really prove anything,” Isabel commented, sounding impatient. “They give us a lot of places to look, but there’s not any actual evidence here. You need evidence to get a conviction.”

“What we have here may be enough to remove Katrina Hilliard from the president’s cabinet,” her sister Megan pointed out. “That’s not nothing.”

“It’s not enough,” Jesse said flatly. “If the generals are right about what they’ve compiled here, Hilliard, Barton Reid and the Espera Group have systematically used their own private army to undermine democratic reformers in several sovereign, oil-producing nations to push forward their own plans for a transnational regulatory commission to control oil production and revenue. It’s heinous on every conceivable level.”

“Jesse’s right,” Evie’s father said quietly. “Removing Katrina Hilliard from office isn’t enough. Convicting Barton Reid isn’t enough. We have to bring down the whole damned conspiracy. Edward Ross died trying to make sure these people got the punishment they deserve.”

“We’ve decoded the journal and we’re still not any closer to making that happen?” Megan’s husband, Evan Pike, sounded incredulous.

“Wait a sec,” Shannon said, looking intently at the computer. “We may be closer than you think.”

Jesse crossed to where she sat and looked over her shoulder at the laptop screen. “What’ve you got?”

“A name. Endrex.”

Endrex? Evie shook her head. It couldn’t be the same guy—

“Who the hell is Endrex?” Jesse’s brow creased with frustration.