Encrypted (75 page)

However
,
he wasn’t staying for long. Just enough time to get his house packed
up and
then head to Quantico. Sure
,
they had scooped up some of the Hidden Hand’s lieutenants in the field, but the real brains and financial backing of the cult?
They
were still at large. As it turned out
,
Lino
had been nothing more than a page of sorts
,
r
unning errands for the Hidden Hand. Until they tracked down the true power brokers
,
another bioweapon attack loomed on the horizon.

And no one was better suited to finding the bastards than Zach. He funneled every ounce of frustration into making the Hidden Hand pay for his loss.

Jamming the last of his personal belongings into a satchel, Zach took a look around the room. Too few desks were filled. Too many
were
left empty. Besides Ronnie, Zach had lost so many fellow agents. Either from
Lino’s
savage attack or the plague
,
most of the men he worked with were lost forever.

Perhaps it was best
that
he was moving on.
W
ay too many memories
were
here. Like Grant and his stupid smirk. That was one bastard he was not going to miss.

He headed to the exit when Danner came out of his office. “Hunt, can I have a word?”

Zach sighed as he followed Danner. He’d hoped to get out of there without any awkward good
-
byes. Zach had let the upper brass take care of his transfer.
N
othing personal against Danner
.
I
t was just
that
the last time he saw his supervisor
,
he was holding a gun to his head.

Fortunately
,
Danner didn’t ask Zach to sit down
,
nor
did he seat
himself. “On the behalf of all the men
who
survived that night, I just wanted to thank you.”

“No worries,” Zach answered
,
point
ing
his feet to the door. Most of what happened after that night was classified. Extremely classified.

“And…” Danner’s lips pursed
,
and
then relaxed. “I am sorry
that
I didn’t trust you more.”

Zach chuckled. “No, sir. You had every right to doubt me. I was carrying on an off-the-books relationship with a known felon.”

“Still,” his supervisor said
,
far more reflective than Zach had ever seen him
,
“I wish it could have turned out better for you.”

Cheeks burning, Zach shook his head,
the
ache in his chest throbbing. “Nope. I pretty much got exactly what I
should
have expected.”

“Well
,
then,” Danner said awkwardly, “I guess I just wanted to say that you will be missed.”

His supervisor put his hand out. Before Zach could take it, Warp burst into the office. “Sorry to interrupt
,
but are we taking our own cars or driving with the vans?”

“The moving company is taking care of everything, Warp.” Zach replied. “We are flying to Virginia later tonight.”

“Oh!” the techie said hitting his forehead. “Should have read the entire memo. Okay, we’ll go pack our motherboards.”

As they watched the techie’s lanky frame rush from view, Danner chuckled. “Him or should I say
,
‘them’
?
Probably not
gonna
miss them.”

Zach understood why. Warp had one of the most grating personalities in the world. However
,
Zach knew what they were up against in the Hidden Hand. He witnessed firsthand the extremely complex electronic security they employed. If he couldn’t have Ronnie
—
and it still felt like a kick in the gut to admit
that
he couldn’t have her
—
he was going to need the second best in the world
,
and unfortunately that came in a package bundled full of neuroses named Warp.

“I should get going,” Zach said as he made his way to the door.

“Take care,” Danner replied with a curt wave.

Taking care was about the last thing on Zach’s mind as he got into the rental car. His own car was probably stripped down to the
chassis
somewhere in Mexico. So strange how something like that didn’t bug him at all anymore. What a shift in priorities.

He gunned the engine and pulled out into a nearly deserted street. People were still leery about going outside and resuming their normal
lives
. A normal life? Zach seriously doubted any of them would get back to “normal” any time soon.

It took half the time to get to his house than it used to
,
and sure enough
,
the movers were already at work. Zach gave a nod as he made his way into the house. He really should be paying attention to what they were packing and what they weren’t, but he was way too amped to care.

“This came for you,” one of the men said, handing him a package marked with the seal of the FBI. The box originating from Quantico.

Zach ripped open the package to find a new tablet. They had been promising him one. He pressed the “
O
n” button to find all of his files from the last two weeks already preloaded. Great. He could go down into the basement, get in one last workout before they flew back east and caught up on his reading.

Trying not to care that this might be the last time he went down
those
stairs, Zach made his way to the basement. The crew had pretty much packed up everything but the stationary bike. That was okay. That was all he wanted
,
anyway.

Zach propped the tablet up between the handlebars and started cycling. Maybe he could load his music from the cloud. Sure enough
,
it only took a few touches to the screen. He popped in his earbuds as
Ratt
began to play.

“Hey
,
sexy,” a very familiar voice purred.

“Hey there, yourself,” he answered with a broad smile.

* * *

Ronnie soaked in Zach’s every feature. It had possibly been the longest two weeks of her life. She watched as his head bobbed from side to side as he cycled hard. But what in the hell did you say to the guy you
fibrillated
?

“You are certainly looking better than the last time I saw you.”

On
-
screen
,
Zach’s
strong hand came up to his breastbone. “Yeah, you could have warned me exactly how badly that was going to hurt.”

“Or what?” Ronnie said starting off playful but getting doubtful toward the end. “You wouldn’t have done it?”

He stopped cycling and stared straight into the camera. “I would do it again
right now
if I had to.”

It was her heart’s turn to flutter. Ronnie’s cheeks blushed as she felt his stare. Even though he was half a world away
,
she could still remember the heat of his embrace. Damn the stupid United States
G
overnment
!
How long would it have taken them to figure out
that
Ronnie was on their side
—
well at least
regarding
the Hidden Hand?

They didn’t have time to have Ronnie arrested or Zach investigated and up on charges. They needed to be chasing down the Hidden Hand
—
ASAP. So convincing the CIA, FBI, and probably NATO that Zach
was
going to arrest her was the only way
that
they could make sure he was in the position to head up the Hidden Hand task force.

And she, of course, had to play the part of the selfish hacker, only out for herself.

“So
,
what have you been up to?” Zach asked, getting serious about his cycling again.

“Oh, you know,” Ronnie said
,
leaning back in her chair. “Running around the world, tracking down clues that you leave us in dead drops. Developing a truly untraceable point-to-point communication device capable of video conferencing.”

Someone cleared
his
throat behind her. She turned to find Quirk’s hand on his hip while the other hand held a paint can. “
You
developed an untraceable what?”

“Fine.
We
developed
—
” Quirk’s glare made her correct herself again. “
Quirk
developed, with very minimal help from me, your tablet.”

Her assistant
was
apparently satisfied that credit had been given where credit was due
, and
returned to painting the walls pure white. And somehow he had talked the pilot into helping. Ronnie left the two
men in
overall
s
to their task.

When she turned back to the screen, Zach was watching her intently. “Are you sure you didn’t leave something out?”

Ronnie frowned. Did he know about the pesticide consortium she was going to hit next week?

“Nothing about a stash of plague vaccines finding their way to the front door of the World Health Organization?” Zach coaxed
.
“And a check for nearly three
billion
dollars to fund vaccinating underdeveloped countries? The Francois Foundation? Sound familiar?”

“Oh
,
yeah,” Ronnie said biting her lip. “That.”

“What happened to your island, Miss-I-Hate-People?”

It turned out that wanting to be left alone was only fun if it was your idea, not because the rest of the population had been wiped out.

“So I went on a little shopping spree for pharmaceuticals?” Ronnie joked. “A girl’s
gotta
be true to herself.”

But Zach didn’t seem like he was buying her flippant attitude. He knew her that well. “Francois would be proud, Ronnie. I can’t think of a better way to honor him.”

Tears sprang to her eyes. This was not how this was supposed to go. And not just because it reminded her that she had spent nearly every last penny creating the fund. It reminded her of why she needed to forgo her island paradise.

Luckily
,
the music, if you could call it that, gave her
a
reason to change the subject. “Tell me that isn’t
Ratt
playing?”

“What? What’s wrong with ‘Round and Round?’
”

“Um, just about
everything
.”

As Zach tried to defend his dubious musical taste, Ronnie moved the window of the streaming video to reveal her desktop. The golden symbol from the Hidden Hand’s castle glistened. She still had no idea what it meant. Which was why she put the gilded script where she could stare at it every
day.

Alongside
the screen
,
an IM box scrolled. No matter what she and Quirk tried, the script couldn’t be stopped. They had changed monitors, video cards,
and
cabling, but each time they
re
booted her
computer
, the symbols scrolled down the edge.

Whether Ronnie liked it or not, the angels were still talking to her.

# # #

Afterword

Thank you so much for reading
Encrypted
!
I hope you loved readi
ng it as much as I loved writ
ing
it
.

If you
enjoyed
Encrypted
,
I would lov
e to ask you a little favor.
Go
back
to wherever you purchas
ed this book (
Amazon.com
, etc.
), and please leave an honest review.

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