Marked (Hostage Rescue Team Series) (2 page)

At first she’d thought he might have a crush on her and maybe that was his way of hitting on her, but that wasn’t it. She wasn’t sure if he was mentally ill or not, but she knew she wanted nothing to do with him.

Already suspicious that he might have been in here snooping some more, she went over and refreshed the screen. A document relating to one of her most recent projects appeared. Her lips thinned in irritation.

Quiet footsteps approached from behind and then Brandon’s voice reached her from the doorway. “He just wanted to see some more of your work.”

Straightening, she whirled to face him and folded her arms across her chest, struggling to hold back the anger boiling up inside her. She didn’t like the feel of this. Not at all. “Tim?”

Now her brother looked slightly apologetic. “Yeah. I didn’t think you’d mind.”

Seriously? “Well I
do
mind. I can’t believe you’d let him into my laptop!”

She was outraged that Brandon would allow a relative stranger he
knew
she didn’t like to violate her privacy this way, no matter how “interested” his buddy might seem to be in architecture. It wasn’t like her brother to do something like that. They had a good relationship based on trust and respect, they rarely argued, and his behavior today shocked her. He was trying way too hard to fit in with the crowd and win Tim’s approval, though why he’d want it in the first place she’d never understand.

“What the hell, Brandon?”

He shifted his weight from one foot to the other and rubbed a hand over the back of his neck. “Sorry. He’s just so interested in what you do, and he likes hanging around us because there’s no language barrier. He told me he’s thinking about switching into architecture too, after seeing some of your stuff.”

She didn’t care what Tim was thinking of choosing as a career path, he creeped her out with his too-intense stare, weird interest in her and her career, and the radical anti-government rhetoric she’d heard him spouting off about. And even without all that he had no business looking at her personal files.

She pushed out an annoyed breath, struggling to rein in her temper. As soon as this conversation was over with, she was kicking Tim out and she didn’t care what her brother thought about it. “What else was he looking at?”

“I dunno. Jeez, would you calm down?”

“Uh, no, I
won’t
calm down. Roles reversed, you’d freak if I let one of my friends look at your coding files for one of the video games you’re developing.”

Unable to curb her anger and resenting that his friends might be able to overhear them arguing, she gestured impatiently for Brandon to come in and close the door behind him. When he did she gave him a hard stare for a moment then shook her head as disappointment settled in her chest. “Again, why are you guys hanging around with someone like him?”

Brandon rolled his eyes, his sullen expression reminding her of a moody teenager. Which annoyed her even more. He was about to freaking graduate from college, not high school.

“I told you, he just transferred here from Beijing for the spring semester a few months ago, so he doesn’t have many friends or anyone to hang out with. And he’s not a bad guy if you’d just give him a chance and get to know him a little.”

Her eyebrows shot upward at that. “Are you kidding me? Why would I want to get to know him? Have you not heard some of the things he’s said?” And had he not noticed how weird Tim’s behavior around her was?

“Whatever, he was only joking around.”

She snorted. “Joking about terrorism and making stupid-ass comments about it isn’t funny. I can’t believe the others put up with him. Ray was totally embarrassed the last time Tim went off about how the U.S. government is ‘the biggest terrorist organization on the planet and deserves whatever payback it gets’.”

She shook her head again, letting him see her frustration, feeling like a parent scolding her child instead of a seven-years-older sister trying to make her brother see straight. Why wouldn’t he listen to her warnings? Surely his internal radar was sharper than that. “Mom’s paying for your degree and she sent you over here to study, not get mixed up with people who could get you into trouble. And if he’s even half the hacker you say he is, he definitely could. You’ve got enough sense to know he’s not someone you want your name to be linked with.”

Brandon sighed and crossed his arms over his chest, mimicking her stance as his expression closed up. “Are we done?”

His belligerent tone shocked her as much as it made her bristle. They’d had this same fight once before, with similar results. “No. I’ve told you before I don’t want him here and—” She broke off when her gaze snagged on the laptop again, specifically on the empty slot on the side of it. She looked back at her brother, a sense of dread coiling in her gut. “Where’s the flash drive that was plugged into this?”

He scowled at her, his expression turning militant. “I dunno, I didn’t touch it.”

“Well it’s not there now.” Her heart gave a little flutter of panic.

He shrugged. “You must have dropped it or something.”

“I didn’t drop it, Brandon,” she snapped, crouching to scan the desk and floor.

When she didn’t find it, Rachel turned her stare on her brother once again, her frustration and anxiety growing by the second. She had a feeling she knew exactly where it was. Dammit, her
work
files! “Go get it back from him. Right now, or I will.” The hard look she gave him guaranteed that she was prepared to cause a scene if he didn’t man up and take care of this himself.

Brandon narrowed his eyes in offense. “What, so because you don’t like him Tim’s automatically a thief now, too? Jesus, maybe you should take a look around first to make sure it’s actually missing before you start accusing my friends of stealing stuff.”

She sucked in a calming breath even as she frantically tried to remember exactly what she’d put on it. “It’s not here, it’s not on the desk or under it, and aside from you, he was the last person to have access to it.”

Brandon snorted. “You’re crazy. What the hell would he want with your work files?”

“I don’t know, but can you say for sure he
didn’t
take them?” When her brother didn’t answer, just continued to glare at her, she changed her tone and let him see how upset she was. “There were important documents on there. Designs and contracts, things confidential to our clients. Do you understand how much trouble I could be in?”

If she’d have thought her brother would bring his friends over and let them access her laptop, she never would have left it out in the open. But breaking client confidentiality wasn’t what concerned her the most. Her instincts were screaming at her that something far more serious was potentially going on here. Tim’s past behavior triggered too many internal alarms for her to ignore the warning.

“What if there
is
a reason he took them?” she continued when Brandon just stood there. “What if he’s involved in something? Something illegal? He could be planning a robbery at one of the buildings and looking for the floor plans or something.” She didn’t trust Tim, hadn’t from the first moment she’d met him, and she hadn’t been shy about telling her brother so. Add in his extremist views, and hell yeah, she had every right to suspect he was up to no good.

Brandon shook his head, making a sound of disgust as though he couldn’t believe what she was suggesting. “Screw this. You know what? I’ll find somewhere else to stay on the weekends from now on so you won’t have to deal with me or my fucked-up, criminal friends anymore.” He stalked over to the bed and grabbed the duffel he’d placed at the foot.

She couldn’t believe he would dare play the victim here, when she was the one whose privacy had been violated.
“Come on! Brandon, just listen—”

“Forget it. I’m gone.” He grabbed the bag and slammed the guestroom door in her face when she tried to follow.

Fuming, she stared at the back of the white plastic door and forced herself to take a deep breath to keep from storming after him and continuing this fight with an audience. From the other room she heard Brandon telling the others they had to go. Making her the bad guy.

Just as she wrenched the door open to go after him, the front door shut with a resounding bang. Rachel sighed and pushed a hand through her shoulder-length hair, fighting to get a grip on her anger. Her brother was stubborn—even more stubborn than her, if that was possible—and if she went after him and confronted Tim in front of their friends she risked pushing him away even more.

The resounding silence in the suddenly empty condo was anything but peaceful. But at least now Tim was gone too.

You wanted the place to yourself and you got it. Careful what you wish for, Rachel.

“Perfect end to a perfect frigging week,” she muttered, throwing open the door and marching down the hall to her room, unzipping her pencil skirt as she went. As she tossed her clothes in the laundry hamper, her cell phone rang. She glanced at the call display and groaned at the sight of her mother’s number, calling from Shanghai.

There was only one thing she could say right now.
Hey, Mom. Brandon’s being a little shit and I’m worried he’s hanging with the wrong crowd, but he won’t listen, and now one of his friends stole some of my work files. Brandon just took off in a huff and probably won’t talk to me for the next week at least. So how’s your day going?

Yeah, that wasn’t a conversation she was up to at the moment. Deciding to call her mother back in the morning, she headed for the master bathroom for a much needed bubble bath in the hopes that it would help her unwind.

It didn’t really help.

Later, while soaking in the tub, she mentally catalogued all the files she remembered being on that flash drive. She didn’t think she’d lost anything vital, since all the files were saved on the firm’s well-protected server at work, but she still felt violated and uneasy that someone had been digging into her work, let alone one of Brandon’s friends.

She couldn’t
prove
Tim had taken them, of course. All she had was knowing he’d been on her computer and a gut feeling that said he’d done it, plus the suspicion that something more was going on than she realized.

She sank deeper into the water, thinking about everything that had led up to this blowout with her brother. When he’d moved here from Beijing two years ago to finish his degree in computer sciences, Brandon had been desperate to fit in and make friends.

She’d never once told him he couldn’t bring people here with him on the weekends when he’d wanted to get away from campus life. In her opinion he tried too hard to fit in, and his unflagging loyalty—one of the things she loved most about him—extended to even those “friends” who didn’t deserve it. It drove her crazy to think that he could feel that insecure, but there was nothing she could do. She couldn’t control the choices he made.

After the bath, she did a thorough search of her place and found yet another USB drive missing from her desk, this one also containing work files from some older projects a few years back. Just how the hell long had Tim been looking around in the guest room without supervision? Her bosses weren’t going to be happy with her when she told them about this.

Furious, she tried calling her brother, then texting him. Of course she got no answer.

She paced the length of her condo, from the kitchen to her bedroom and back. Tim hadn’t taken the flash drives for kicks, she knew it. Something on there must have interested him enough to warrant stealing it, but damned if she could figure it out.

Hours later, staring up at the patterns of light on her ceiling that seeped through her blinds from the streetlamps, she realized there was no way she was getting to sleep. Too upset about everything to shut her brain off, she got up a little after midnight and went into the living room to watch TV. She settled on a documentary about anti-terrorism operations involving the U.S., thinking of one man in particular from her past. Where was he now? Probably carrying out the same kinds of missions she was watching right now. When the show finished she picked up the remote, aimed it at the TV and had just started to press down on the power button when the FBI’s Most Wanted list came on screen.

She almost dropped the remote when she saw Tim’s picture for a split second. But too late. She’d already hit the button and the screen went dark. She jabbed the power button again, frantic to see the picture again, but when the screen came back to life the list was gone.

“Dammit,” she muttered, then shut it down again and hurried to her laptop in the guestroom where she pulled up the FBI’s website to look at the list.

Her eyes narrowed as she stared at the screen. Yep, she was ninety-five percent sure that was Tim. His hair was longer in this image, but the shape of the face and the mixed-Asian features were right.

Heart thudding, she searched for more information about him. Xang Xu, the name read beneath his picture. Wanted for computer fraud and various other cyber crimes. By the freaking FBI and god knew what other agencies.

Holy. Shit
.

She shot up from the couch and rushed to the bedroom to grab her cell. Then she hesitated.

Didn’t matter that it was the middle of the night. Brandon was too mad to answer her call right now and she was pretty sure if he did, she wouldn’t get to the part that “Tim” was wanted by the FBI before he hung up. She tried calling anyway, got no answer, and rather than leave a voicemail she sent a text.

I know you’re mad, but call me right away! Got something important to tell you.

She thought about calling the cops too, but on the off chance she was wrong about that picture being “Tim”, there was only one person she could think of to go to with her suspicions. Only one person she was comfortable sharing this with.

A mixture of nerves and butterflies buzzed in her stomach at the thought of re-establishing contact with the sexy Army Ranger officer she’d met in college, right before he’d joined the FBI.

Well, maybe
comfortable
might be the wrong word, since it had been around six months since she’d last had contact with him and over two years since she’d last seen him. She wasn’t even sure if the e-mail address she had for him would even work anymore. And due to a certain…tension between them when they’d last been in contact, he might not want to see her in person now.