Promises in the Dark (5 page)

“Are we enjoying the view?” Mace, his Delta teammate spoke into the mic in his ear with a drawl, something Cael had never understood, since Mace had spent his formative years in upstate New York, not North Carolina. His friend had been yanked from that state when he was ten and sent to live with his grandparents. That’s where he now owned the inherited bar and land, and where Cael spent much of his free time.

Cael didn’t answer him directly, but didn’t stop looking at Vivienne either. “What are we supposed to do? Watch her for the next twenty-four hours in hopes someone from DMH stops by for coffee?”

“Nope,” Gray piped in, Cael’s other teammate, who waited in the car down the street with Mace. “Just got word we’re supposed to bring her in. Kind of in the unofficially official capacity.”

Mace started swearing and Cael just sighed. They’d do their jobs, of course, because they trusted their immediate superior, who’d issued the order, but the unofficial missions always held a good deal of risk.

Cael had known this particular job would prove to be shitty, had felt it the instant Mace briefed him on it this morning. Before he’d had coffee. Or actual sleep.

No, he’d spent the past days in a prison called SERE, where he survived, evaded, reconned and escaped with the best of them, and had a split lip, a severely bruised sternum and a qualification for continued service checked off in his file to show for it.

He took immense satisfaction in that, because damn, training was fucking brutal. You were beaten and frozen and yelled at; every attempt to break you was made.

Gray had taken the worst of it—he’d been sick the week before and it had gotten worse during SERE. IV antibiotics had taken care of it quickly and now he had only a hoarse voice—and multiple contusions.

Before SERE, he and Mace and Gray and the rest of their Delta team had been chasing their tails for weeks, running from one location to another as Army Intelligence attempted to find the next U.S. location DMH—aka Dead Man’s Hand—planned to hit with one of their attacks. And just as Cael left SERE and headed to his evals and the doc, Mace called him with the breaking news, straight from Noah’s mouth.

“
We have reason to believe that DMH received a software program that was supposedly designed to protect nuclear facilities, but can be used to disable existing systems and render the facilities susceptible to sabotage.
”

Reason to believe
meant chatter from Homeland Security. And things that sounded that big usually panned out
.

Mace continued to give him the information gleaned from the report. “Vivienne Clare—she goes by Vivi—hasn’t received any recent payment for the program that we’ve been able to track. It hasn’t been confirmed as to whether or not she knows the software was taken from her.
”

“
Wait—she?
”

“
Yes, she. Remember women, Cael?
”

Cael sighed, because he remembered. Mainly, they were trouble. Always wanted more than he could give. And really, there was only so much a man in his position was willing and able to give
.

Not just willing—a woman needed a major security clearance before he could even think about revealing his Delta status to her
.

Sex was easier. “So we don’t know if she’s in danger—or if she
is
danger.
”

“
Right. It’s undetermined if she sold this program or if it was stolen. Gray said that if her computer was unprotected, someone could’ve gotten in and copied the program without her knowledge. Here’s the background—Homeland Security’s had an eye on her for a while because of her father. Lawrence Clare
used to work for the government as a software developer. Apparently, one of his programs was hacked, causing a major problem with the electrical grid on the West Coast. He claimed that a co-worker sabotaged the system, but was never able to prove it. He was fired but, according to our sources, continued to create security programs for private companies. Vivienne was twelve at the time the hacking occurred—when her mother and Lawrence divorced, Vivienne stayed with her father. At the time of his death, he was working on a program for a private company that owns nuclear power plants. Never finished it, but somehow it’s been leaked.
”

“
And we think Vivienne sold the program her father was working on to terrorists?
”

“
She worked in private security software development with her father. In order to live up to the agreement on this contract with InLine Energy, she’d have to finish the program—at least that’s what she’s on record as telling InLine. She took over the responsibility of finishing the program since, apparently, her father had been paid over half the money on the contract. If she can’t finish the program, she’s supposed to return the money. Her house is in foreclosure, her bank accounts are desolate and it’s six months later.
”

“
A desperate woman in desperate times,” Caleb said
.

“
And get this—her most recent security system that she’s developing is targeted for use by the U.S. military.
”

Would she then have the balls to attempt to sell one system to the U.S. military and another to a terrorist organization?

No one was that stupid—or that smart.

Hell, he guessed they’d find out soon enough. And while he hated to scare a woman the way he was about to, he reminded himself that she was a possible traitor to her country.

Years ago, that wouldn’t have seemed right at all, thinking this fresh-faced woman could be responsible for helping a terrorist organization, but times had changed.

He tuned out Mace and Gray’s conversation with their other teammates, Reid and Kell, and focused on their soon-to-be non-virtual prisoner.

Vivienne, their great white software hope, was five feet five inches tall. Curvy.

She wasn’t classically pretty. Her face was a little too angular, almost asymmetrical, her hair was in a messy blond cut, heavy bangs, and the ends of her blond hair were dyed bright blue.

He couldn’t see her eyes—the file said they were hazel—but from the picture he had, they were catlike.

If Cael were sketching her, he knew it would take him a while to catch the nuances of her face. She hadn’t broken a smile yet, not even the hint of one. She seemed agitated, angry almost, and if he drew her, he wouldn’t get the animation correct without concentrating hard.

And still, it wouldn’t do her justice.

She was on the phone now, cradled between her shoulder and ear. She talked with her hands, didn’t even notice she did, probably, but tying her hands could effectively render her mute.

“She doesn’t trust,” Noah had told him earlier, right before they’d left to find her. “Consulted attorneys about her options with InLine Energy and her possible contract with the military. Looks like she put her own program on hold to try to deal with her father’s.”

She’d been smart to consult with attorneys. In today’s climate, separating yourself from the terrorists wasn’t always easy for those involved in the fight. Suspicion ran high—security was tight as hell and everybody could be the next traitor, especially when she was dealing with such sensitive, and potentially explosive, matters that InLine Energy handled.

“So the program she’s been working on for the military hasn’t been leaked?” he asked.

“As far as we know. Right now, the InLine software is of major concern because it has a much greater potential to harm than her own program does,” Noah answered. “In the right hands, it will provide intense security. Vivi’s father was some kind of genius. He was also a conspiracy theorist. She got his gift for numbers, but not the crazy theories,” Noah had continued. Basically, Vivienne was raised unconventionally, and what was happening to her was her father’s worst nightmare.

But damn, she was young—looked like she belonged at a rock concert, not hacking computer systems.

The house was run-down, but there were some flowers planted along the front porch. The windows were clean and the lawn was mowed.

Someone was trying.

He recalled the picture he’d seen of how the house had looked just a few years earlier, when Vivienne had gone off to college and her dad had been left all alone. It had been in a state of total disrepair and Lawrence had been issued multiple citations.

Instinctively, as if she felt Cael’s eyes on her, she reached for the hoodie that was thrown across the back of the couch and pulled it on. Three laptops held court on the large coffee table. Several cell phones were strewn about as well, and Cael figured he’d have to take all of that when he took Vivienne … whether or not she wanted to go.

No, this had long stopped being about choice.

“Who’s going to break the bad news to her?” Gray asked.

“I’ll do it,” Caleb heard himself say.

Reid and Kell, who’d remained mostly silent in his ear until now each gave a quick, “Roger that.” Both men were the more taciturn ones of the group, loners, and somehow best friends who half the time could barely stand each other’s company, let alone any of the others’, who they deemed too damned talkative. They were listening though, Caleb had no doubt, both of them in the truck, Kell working on the crossword puzzle and Reid reading the Westerns he liked so much.

They’d sweep her house efficiently while Caleb and the others escorted Vivi the few hours to post.

Now Caleb slid the binoculars into a pocket of his cargo pants while debating between explaining first or simply taking her and dealing with her fallout later.

When he saw her move toward the back door with a watering can in hand, phone cradled against her ear, he figured
now
worked better than later.

Dressed in black, he moved silently around the house toward the back and struck pay dirt with the complete privacy of her enclosed backyard.

It was time to get some answers.

“I wasn’t talking about you guys,” she said, as if to appease the fickle beasts, hoping to mollify their tricky motherboards into submission.

She’d deal with the credit card mishap later, because she’d paid that bill—the minimum anyway. She had more important things to do, most especially dealing with the software her father had been working on for InLine Energy. If she couldn’t produce a working program, they’d demand their money … and she didn’t have it to give them. She’d lose the house for sure.

And, judging by her lack of progress over the past months, it looked like that might happen sooner than later.

She’d begun to split her attention so she could finish up the code for the new software prototype she was designing with the Army in mind, a hybrid of her ideas and her father’s, taken from memory, because in the end, he’d been so paranoid he’d refused to put anything in writing.

The contract should come through any day now, the lawyer representing her side of the deal had promised. It was hard for a civilian to break in, but her lawyer had some pull, knew a general who knew another general who’d downloaded a sample of her newest security system and had thankfully been impressed.

Her father’s notoriety—and now hers—certainly hadn’t hurt, as the FBI had been quietly trying to recruit her into their cyber crimes division. Truth was, if she was to continue to create this type of software, she needed security. But when the offer had been extended last year and then again two months ago, she hadn’t been ready to think about working for the FBI.

God, her father must be rolling in his grave at the mere thought of his kid even considering working for the government after his experience with them. And even though she never bought into his conspiracy theories, jumping into working for Big Brother didn’t sit comfortably with her.

She threw the phone down on the couch. It missed, fell to the floor and the back and the battery fell out, and no, exercise hadn’t helped her shitty mood one bit.

She opened the sliding glass door and stepped outside, stomped around the back deck, pouring water over the stupid, stupid plants that mocked her by dying every single year.

Normally, it didn’t bother her that much. It had been the family joke when she was growing up—
Vivi kills living things
.

Yeah, ha-ha.

This spring, however, making sure these damned things lived meant something.

She almost added,
if it killed her
, but couldn’t stand the irony. “Live, dammit,” she muttered as she poured water onto the still green plants she’d bought last week, a yearly ritual that Vivi re-created in hopes that she could change her luck.

Didn’t matter that she could program software better than any Ivy League–educated man or woman in the country. The fact that she could kill a cactus was what would end up on her gravestone.

At the thought of gravestones, a chill shot up her spine and she instantly chided herself for her silly superstitions. Step on a crack, break your mother’s back, black cats in her path and Friday the thirteenth were things she took seriously. It didn’t make sense in her otherwise logic-filled, live-by-the-numbers life, but she’d had them for as long as she could remember.

She shivered again, feeling the sensation she’d had earlier of being watched. She finished watering and then, thoroughly spooked, turned to walk back into the house, when a hand clamped firmly over her mouth. An arm wound around her midsection, pinning her arms to her sides, and the watering can clattered to the wooden deck.

The hold left her legs free to kick. Which she did, but barely made contact before she was tilted on her side, suspended in the air and carried away along the side of her house, down her driveway and into the backseat of a waiting SUV.

It took off as soon as the door shut. At that point, the grip eased—she jerked away from her captor, stunned and scared, heart pounding.

She expected to see a gun pointed in her direction. Instead, she found herself looking into the calm face of a handsome man dressed all in black.

He was all dark hair, with even darker eyes. Piercing eyes, like finely polished stones, but somehow not cold. And he was broad—so very broad and ripped.

So very military.

Had she breached something? Sometimes, during development and testing and implementation, her father would accidentally go too far. Given his government background, she’d been privy to the soldier-at-the-door scenario happening in varying forms. CIA or FBI agents. The police. But it had always ended easily, peacefully.

Her father had never been taken from their home in secrecy.

She opened her mouth to speak, to yell, to do something, but the man held up his hand. “Vivienne, we’ll explain everything shortly. You will not be harmed. This is for your immediate safety.”

Then again, the times she’d been escorted out of her home in the past, the men had always identified themselves immediately. Not like this.

These men could be the ones who’d stolen the program.

She wanted to yell. Kick, scream, throw herself out of the car, which wouldn’t happen, with two men on either side of her. There was nothing stopping her from leaping into the front seat and trying to disable the driver, though.

Never let yourself be brought to a secondary location. Do whatever you need to stop that from happening
.

Maybe her self-defense classes had actually paid off.

Without waiting, she lunged over the seat and grabbed for the driver’s head. The car swerved, the driver cursed a blue streak and hands like iron grabbed her.

In seconds, she was back in her seat and handcuffed to the man next to her, the car was on the correct side of the road and all three men were deadly silent.

The man she was handcuffed to was the one who’d taken her from her house. He’d handcuffed his wrist closest to the door to hers so she was basically leaning across him, unable to do anything but attempt to balance as the car took a sharp turn.

“That was really stupid,” he muttered.

“Who are you people?” she demanded, because really, she had nothing to lose at this point. “Where are you taking me?”

No answer.

She attempted to shift and his hand went to the back of her neck, touching a pressure point that left her unable to do anything. She felt dizzy, but it wasn’t uncomfortable, and then she was vaguely aware of her head falling forward into the man’s lap as her eyes shut in induced sleep.