Marked (Hostage Rescue Team Series) (5 page)

But he could now, if she was willing to accept that his work had to come first. That was non-negotiable, and a sacrifice he’d been prepared to make when he’d tried out for the team. Would she accept that? Accept him after all this time?

That distracting thought kept looping through his brain as they talked on the drive over to the field office. It didn’t take long. A little disappointing, since he wanted more time alone with her, but if he had his way he wouldn’t be taking her back to her car until after a leisurely dinner at a romantic restaurant.

Inside, his contact met them at reception and took them back into a private office at the rear of the building. Rachel repeated the information she had on Xang. She didn’t seem nervous while she gave her statement, but Jake could see how fast her pulse was beating in her throat and he made sure to stand in her line of vision in a silent show of support. Her poise was something he admired as much as her gentle heart.

When she mentioned the anti-government language “Tim” had used and picked out his photo on the Most Wanted list, the agent’s brows lowered in apparent alarm. Jake straightened, watching the man’s reaction closely as he picked up the landline and made a call. Within minutes three more agents were in the room, gathered around the desk as she repeated the story.

At the look they exchanged as she fell silent, she shot him a nervous glance and Jake stepped nearer, close enough to her side that he could feel her body heat and smell her clean, sweet scent.

“What?” she asked them finally when nobody told her what was going on.

The agent Jake had called initially, Travers, dropped into the chair behind the desk and leaned back, holding her gaze, his pale blue eyes intent on her face. “Any markings or tattoos you can recall on him?”

Her brow furrowed as she thought about it. “There’s a tattoo of the Mandarin character for justice on his left shoulder. And on the inside of his…right forearm there’s a kind of crescent moon, I think.”

Travers, a senior agent with the domestic terrorist division in his mid-forties, looked at the other two men and Jake folded his arms. They knew something important. “What’s up?”

The agent shifted his gaze to him. “That’s Xang, without a doubt. And you say he’s been going to the University of Maryland, College Park?”

She nodded. “For the past few months or so, yes. Why?”

When Travers didn’t answer right away, Jake spoke up, his instincts on alert. “She’s with me,” he announced, setting a protective arm around her shoulders—and yeah, he knew it was a possessive gesture, he just didn’t care what the other agents thought about it. “I’ve known her a long time, so unless you need her to leave the room because of security clearance issues, say it.”

“He’s been linked to an Islamic terror cell backed in Western China. In Xinjiang,” one of the other agents said flatly.

Rachel sucked in a sharp breath, drawing Jake’s gaze to her. At the shock on her face, he tightened his arm, registering the tension in her slender frame. It was obvious she knew of the region and the terror attacks that had happened there recently. “Rachel?”

She was staring at the other agent. “Is he a Uyghur?”

Jake’s attention sharpened when the agent nodded, confirming that Xang belonged to the ethnic group descended from Turkic origins and now living in eastern and central Asia. The majority of who were Muslims.

“Partly, anyway,” the agent continued. “He’s got some family members in Xinjiang. Spent a few years in his teens living there with an uncle who was known to frequent a radical madrasa, before Xang moved back to Beijing at the insistence of his grandfather.”

“But what about his tattoos?” she asked. “I thought that’s against Islam. Isn’t it considered desecrating the body?”

“Yes, but Xang’s not your average Islamist. He’s half Uyghur and half Chinese, and he uses that to his advantage so he can mesh with either culture.”

Jake looked more closely at the Most Wanted list photo. Now that he was paying closer attention, Xang’s features definitely weren’t classical Chinese; they had more of a Eurasian look to them. And the crescent moon tat Rachel had noticed made all kinds of sense now, since it was the symbol of a terror group Jake had been briefed about a few weeks ago when he’d been working with Alex Rycroft’s handpicked NSA team and the Titanium Security crew.

He looked back at Travers, trying to put the pieces together but nothing made sense. Why befriend Rachel’s brother just to steal building plans? If this asshole had targeted Rachel for whatever reason, if she was in danger, Jake needed to know. Now. “So what the hell was he doing stealing documents from Rachel’s place yesterday?”

Rather than answer, Travers turned his pale gaze on her. “Exactly what was on those USB drives?”

“I can give you a list of what I remember. For the rest, we’ll need to access my server at work.”

Travers stood. “And we’re gonna need to talk to your brother and find out what else Xang has been up to.”

Rachel accessed the main server in her office at Edge Architectural Firm and searched through the stored files while Jake and two other FBI agents stood by. Because of the kinds of contracts the company took on, the server had all kinds of layers of protection on it so she couldn’t access it remotely.

She’d already spent the past couple hours compiling a list of the things she remembered being on both stolen USB drives, but she was worried that she might have forgotten something important. Since they didn’t know what Xang wanted with the files, they had to examine everything that might be in them in case it gave investigators important clues. She suspected they already had several theories but so far no one was telling her anything. And everything she came up with made her blood run cold.

“Here,” she said to Agent Travers, pushing her chair back to let him have a better look at the computer screen. “This is the list of potential files I copied over the past few months.”

She stood and gave him her chair, rounding the desk to join Jake. He stood leaning against the wall as he watched the proceedings, thick arms folded across his chest, his jeans and black T-shirt hugging his muscular frame. His deep brown hair was cut short but that heavy scruff on the lower half of his face made him look a bit dangerous. Six-foot-one of tall, dark and handsome right there in front of her. In any other circumstance he would have proved a huge distraction. Right now all she cared about was helping the agents find her brother and help them get a break in the case.

“Your brother respond to your texts yet?” Jake asked as she came to stand beside him.

Someone back at the field office was tracking Brandon’s cell phone to try and find him. “No, but my bosses did. They’re coming in the next hour to talk to them.” She nodded at the agents surrounding her computer.

He nodded. “Good. In the meantime, keep trying your brother.” He turned to the others. “You guys good here for a while so I can take her home for a bit? I’ll need a crime scene team and one of your tech people.”

“Yeah, we’ve got the warrant, so go ahead,” Travers answered, not bothering to look up from the monitor as he ordered a male agent named Kim to go with them and told someone else to send the crime scene team over there.

Jake took her elbow to lead her out of the room and the feel of his strong but gentle fingers wrapped around her arm caused a shiver of sensation to cascade through her. He was even more built now than he had been back in college and the memory of how much his nearness affected her didn’t come close to the reality. The strained awkwardness she’d feared from him when she walked into the diner hadn’t lasted beyond that hug and now it was as if that long separation had never happened. They still clicked, the same as they always had.

Just being next to him like this made her feel delicate and feminine, protected and cherished. Knowing he was single made her imagine all over again what it would be like to be with him. But they’d only just reconnected and she wasn’t even sure he’d be interested in her that way anymore. Besides, he was here to help her with the situation at hand and she knew him well enough to realize he wouldn’t be anything but professional while he was here on official business.

Jake ushered her back down to his truck, helped her in, and drove her to her place while she gave directions. Pulling into the underground parking garage with the team following them, a stab of disappointment hit her when she didn’t see Brandon’s red compact in any of the visitor’s parking spots.

“His car’s not here,” she murmured, wishing she could go back and do things differently yesterday. She might have unknowingly put him in danger by making him mad enough to storm out last night.

“He’ll call you,” Jake said, sounding totally confident even though he’d never actually met Brandon. He’d only ever heard about him and their complicated family dynamics from her. “The kid worships you, there’s no way he’s gonna ignore you for long, no matter how mad he is.”

Being that she was the only relative he had on this side of the Pacific, that didn’t console her much. Still, she knew Brandon loved her and continued to look up to her in a lot of ways, even if he’d never admit it. “Hope so. Well, come on up.”

They stopped first to talk to security. Once Jake showed his FBI badge, things moved quickly and the guards accessed the surveillance camera footage from the previous day to see if they had any footage of Xang while the crime scene team headed up to her condo with Agent Kim. She and Jake followed a few minutes later.

After shutting the door behind them, she was overcome by a moment’s unreality that Jake was actually standing inside her place. His size and the intensely masculine energy he radiated made the place feel so much smaller all of a sudden. All of her senses were hyperaware of him.

He looked around, taking everything in, and stopped when he caught her staring at him. “What?” he asked with a hint of a smile.

“I can’t believe you’re actually standing in my living room,” she confessed.

For some reason the smile faded, replaced by an almost guarded expression. “Your laptop in one of the bedrooms?”

The abrupt transition in mood caught her off guard. Had she made him uncomfortable or something? “Wait, I meant that as a good thing. As in, I’m so glad you’re here.” She didn’t know why he’d taken it differently, unless he was feeling more for her than he wanted to and had decided to close up.

The change in his expression was instant. His face softened and warmth returned to his dark eyes as he smiled. “Oh. That’s good.”

She grinned, shaking her head at him. “My laptop’s in the guestroom, back this way.” She led him down the tiled hallway to the guestroom. Kim was already at work on the laptop, still on the desk where she’d left it, so she guessed they must have already dusted for fingerprints. She could hear the crime scene team talking out on the balcony outside. “I looked through all the drawers yesterday and checked my room too, but nothing else is missing besides those two USB drives,” she said to him and Jake.

Jake sat in the desk chair while Kim worked his magic on the keyboard. “Do you know if he copied anything off your hard drive as well?” Kim asked her without looking up from what he was doing.

“I’m not sure.”

He grunted. “I’ll be able to tell. Do you have a backup of the files that he might have been looking at?”

She verbally instructed him on where to find a couple of the designs in question—preliminary AutoCAD drawings for a new project she’d been assigned, a high-end luxury condo building on the outskirts of D.C. popular with the political elite. “This project isn’t even close to being finished yet,” she said, indicating the next one Kim pulled up. “The only reason I even brought these designs home is because I was going to work on it a little over the weekend.”

Jake shifted behind her as Kim started going through the file. There were only a few notes, mostly just the bare outline and some measurements. He accessed her browser history next. “This look right to you?”

Putting a hand on the desk, she leaned forward to read the list of sites, trying not to be distracted by Jake’s crisp, clean scent. God he smelled good. Focusing on the screen, she frowned. “Scroll down a bit.”

Kim did, revealing more sites relating to architectural magazines and online articles. When he clicked on one it only took a moment for her to recognize a piece a local reporter had done on her at the grand opening of a local luxury hotel she’d helped work on.

“This was last year?” he said.

“Yes. Brandon said he’d been showing Tim some of my work, so I guess this was what he meant. What’s the next one?”

Another article relating to a completed project she’d worked on two years ago. The next three links were all similar in content, all featuring something about her work on a particular building. She straightened, struck by the realization of how proud Brandon actually was of her if he’d been showing Tim all this. Even if he saw nothing wrong with Tim’s weird obsession with her and her work. What was the connection between Tim and the plans though?

Jake and Kim exchanged a telling look. Then Jake straightened and looked at her, those espresso-brown eyes searching hers. “You sure he’s never come onto you?”

She searched her memory, shook her head because while the way Tim—Xang, she corrected herself—stared at her was unnerving, he’d never tried to touch her or say or do anything sexually inappropriate. “I’m sure.” Though the continued interest did seem like borderline stalker-type behavior.

Kim powered down then shut the laptop. “I’m gonna take this into the office and let the guys go through it. Prints already verified that Xang was on it yesterday, so now it’s just a matter of figuring out exactly what he accessed and go from there.”

“Sure.” She’d feel better once they figured out what Xang wanted with the information he’d stolen.

“And where was the other USB drive?”

“In here.” She pulled out the top left drawer of the desk and let him look through the contents. “There’s nothing else missing. I wouldn’t even have noticed the second drive if I hadn’t been suspicious and started checking through my stuff.”