Seek and Destroy (43 page)

    Her lights flashed, signaling an IP shift. "David," she called again. Still nothing. With a put out sigh, she stood up and poked her head out of the room she'd turned into her office. "David!"

    "He's on a satcom call with the director," a rather large man buried behind a newspaper stated. As he spoke he lowered the corner and peeked over the top. The man had absolutely no hair on his head, tiny little eyes and a crooked nose. He'd obviously broken it more than a few times. "He told me to have you use the radio if you need him."

    She stepped back into the room. If she jumped on the radio, she wouldn't be able to hear the conversation between Surreal and the poor woman who had no idea she was about to open the door to disaster.

    
"Can you walk me through booting it up? Since this is something one of my male coworkers usually takes care of, maybe I'm not doing it right," the woman said.

    
"Not doing it right?" Surreal repeated, astounded.

    Yeah. Tell me about it. She rolled her eyes. Did this woman really just play the chick card? Seriously? And, come on, did she really have to sound like she sucked helium before talking?

    
"Well," Surreal chuckled. "I'm sure I can work with you, Marie. Why don't you have a seat? We'll get started."

    
"How did you know I was standing?"

    She whipped around to the monitor just as Marie sank down in a chair. He'd already tapped into their feed. Why hadn't she seen it? She could hardly type, her hands shook so much. Having already hacked into their system to monitor the traffic, she traced their hits for any foreign IP addresses.

    "Where are you?" she whispered to the data. "Where are you?"

    
"I'm new," she giggled. "So I'm going to need all of you."

    Oh, you've got to be kidding. That little comment sent women's lib back about sixty years. Charis scanned the IPs scrolling down her screen. So far all had the same DNS so to balance the load of the hits. They were all from within Image Techno-Gadgets.

    Damn. Now what?

    "What a time for a phone call," she muttered.

    Phone call.

    That's it! She'd trace the IP on his phone number. She'd bet dollars to donuts he used VoIP. And with any voice over, they all had their own IP, just like a phone number. She'd use it to pinpoint his address.

    This could work.

    
"I will give you exactly what you need," Surreal oozed into the line. "Don't worry, Marie. You've got my full...ahem...attention."

    
She giggled. Surreal had successfully charmed her into forgetting he'd known she'd been standing. "What's your name?"

    
"Thomas. And you're Marie. Are we having a moment?"

    She rolled her eyes. Oh
pahleeez
. This conversation made her ill. Jumping to her feet, she hurried toward the door again, poked her head out. "Can you please get David?"

    The man next to the paper-reader looked up from the TV. She glanced at the TV.
The Food Channel
? A man the size of a barn, big and bald and with an equally crooked nose as his paper-reading partner, watched the Food Channel? Well, will wonders never cease? She would have figured him more for the World Wrestling Federation than the
Pillsbury Cook-off
.

    "He said for
you
to contact him, not us. We're here to be your babysitter, Agent McKoy, not your secretary. If you want him contacted, do it yourself. You've got two hands."

    "Thanks for your help," she shot back wryly. It didn't matter. She had enough to know Surreal's next target. If they got to Image Techno-Gadgets before Surreal...

    They'd be able to stop him. She picked up the radio. Holding the heavy thing in her hand, she frowned. Did NASSD use the same radio etiquette as ICE? It didn't matter. He needed to know this new information so he could put a team together and deploy them to Colorado.

    "Uh, Charis to David." She paused, hoping she didn't do it wrong.

    "Snyder. Go ahead."

    Her heart flipped at the sound of his voice. "I know Surreal's next target."

    The pause on the other end had her nerves on edge. Why didn't he answer? Holding the radio up, she pressed the key to ask him to say something when his velvety baritone sounded behind her. "Talk to me."

    Spinning around in her chair, she gaped up at him. When he widened his eyes and motioned at her monitors, she nodded and spun back around. "Listen to this." She played the call for him.

    "When was this?"

    "About thirty seconds ago."

    "Hot damn! Angel my love, you just made my day." He kissed the top of her head and ran back out of the room, barking orders at the two monster-sized men sitting in the other room.

    Smiling, she sat back and twirled in her chair. "And having you call me that just made mine," she commented to herself.

    

    

    David couldn't hear anything over the grinding of his teeth. Being stuck in the communications van was even worse than being stuck in Charis' house for days. And this time, she wasn't with him.

    He rested his chin on his hand, his elbow on the narrow counter inside the van, and stared at the screen. When he came back into the folds of NASSD, he expected a little more excitement than this. He wanted to be the one on the inside, not Charis.

    The monitor blinked and sent his pulse up. If they lost their video feed, he'd have no way to monitor her, no way to make sure she remained safe. "Why does it keep doing that?"

    Rich Neely, the bigger and more computer literate of the two gigantic Neely brothers, looked up from his station. "McKoy said it might blink as it jumped from feed to feed."

    His pulse settled back into the pace of bored-as-hell. The van they parked across the street from the Image Techno-Gadgets Building felt cramped with the three of them in the back. The Neely brothers were both six and a half feet at the very least, and close to two hundred and fifty pounds a piece. His six foot three inch frame balanced his two hundred plus just fine, but he still looked small compared to these two goliaths.

    "When is she going to look around?" Ron Neely asked in between shoving pretzels into his mouth. He offered some to David, who shook his head, then to his brother Rich. He, of course, took a handful and started munching loudly.

    "She is," David answered. She sat at the station in the center of the room, the back of her head to the camera as instructed. If he didn't already know it was her, he would have been fooled. "She's checking out the system. And turn your mic off when you eat those goddamn things. I can't hear shit."

    "Sorry," they both stated in unison and clicked off.

    "You know," Rich said to David, "she could have monitored the activity from the safe house."

    No shit. A valid point and one he fought tooth and nail to pound into her thick skull. Let him pose as the technician and have her walk him through the install remotely. Wardrobe could transform him into anything from a dirty old homeless man digging through trash to an Italian Count. He hated the makeup they'd cover him in. It itched like hell. It was also part of the job. Regardless, the makeup job always fooled even the keenest eye.

    He prayed it would be enough to fool Surreal.

    But she insisted he wouldn't know what to do if something went wrong. True, but he didn't give a rat's ass. Things went wrong on ops. And when they did, he adapted.

    Rolling his shoulder to stretch it out, he curled his lip. Yep. Adapted just fine.

    When HQ jumped in and sided with her, he had no choice. Now he sat in a tiny van with the two bottomless eating machines, forced to stand on the sidelines while the woman he loved put her life on the line. She wasn't a field agent. This felt wrong.

    
WrongWrongWrong.

    Her normally rich coffee colored curls were now a Marilyn Monroe blonde, and perfectly straight. He had to hand it to wardrobe. The wig looked like her real hair. But even with her disguise, he still didn't like the scene. One slip up and Surreal would know it.

    Why hadn't they let him go instead? He knew how to stay hidden from the camera. He would be the one in the danger zone and not Charis. This was too dangerous. Too fucking personal.

    He flipped on his mic. "Remember to keep your face away from the camera, baby."

    "I know," she sang. So it might have been the fourth, okay, fifth, time he'd reminded her of that. He couldn't help it. She brought out his protective streak. "And whoever keeps crunching in my ear? Stop it. It's making me hungry."

    He threw the Neely brothers a sharp look. Ron smiled sheepishly and shrugged. "What? I'm a growing boy."

    "Me too," Rich added.

    Ignoring him, he went back to the monitor. "Tell me what you see."

    "You see what I see."

    She'd been able to successfully tap into his feed for them. Not only could they now control what Surreal heard and saw, they were also only hours away from breaking down his damn door and dragging his sorry ass in.

    All thanks to Charis. The son-of-a-bitch was cooped up in another shack in Montana, not too far from where he perched his ass the last time. She'd tracked him. She did it.

    NASSD had given him a choice. Go after Surreal or stay and monitor her. He'd wanted to personally be there and drag Surreal in kicking and screaming, of course after he had a little conversation with the punk. Whatever he left for them, he'd bring in.

    But he wanted, no,
needed
to be there for Charis. He needed to ensure her safety. If something happened and he hadn't been there, he'd never forgive himself. Hell, he wouldn't survive.

    "Any sign of a bomb?" He spoke into his headset. He had to admit, the wired devices definitely picked up more than the lip mics. And he didn't think anything picked up more than the lip mics.

    "Nope. Not that I would know what one looked like." She flipped her hair back off her shoulder.

    Another reason why NASSD should have let him be the one to go in. He knew the symbol, had memorized that symbol the first time he'd ever seen it. "Look for something with a bright red heart, split in half."

    "A broken heart? Seriously?" She tried to sound so calm, so easy. But he heard the underlying quiver in her voice. He wanted to reassure her, to tell her she was doing fine.

    He stole a quick glance at the Neely brothers. Rich and Ron both seemed involved in their duties, but he knew they listened in. He'd never known them not to listen in, to know exactly what's going on. Even in Colombia they knew Weber needed them before the call came in. He didn't know how they knew what they knew, he was just grateful they'd been on his side. They were huge and could easily snap a man's neck with one hand.

    "This..." Charis' voice rang in his ears. "This isn't right. David, this is wrong."

    His neck hairs spiked. Oh shit. "What do you see?"

    "It's what I
don't
see. I ran a scan on the hard drive of this server. It's got about one-third the hard drive space it should have, and even less memory. A server of this size should have at least several terabytes of space."

    He nodded at the Neely brothers as they looked to him for confirmation. Not that he had a clue what the hell a terabyte was, let alone how many should be in a server, but he didn't want them to know that.

    After Riverside, NASSD confirmed the bombs were being delivered and detonated via the server. Another reason why he didn't want her anywhere near the server room. With the missing terabytes, it also confirmed his worst fear.

    She sat next to a bomb that, if detonated, would kill her. He wouldn't risk it. Surreal was too goddamn unpredictable. If he so much as sniffed them there, he'd detonate the device and he'd lose her forever.

    Screw that. He'd find another way to get the son-of-a-bitch. "Charis. Get out of there."

    "Why? What about me finding the bomb?"

    "You did," he informed her. "It's the server. You confirmed that when you noted the missing terabytes." He watched the monitor as she stiffened.

    "Are you sure?"

    He'd never been surer of anything in his life. "I want you to stand up and, keeping your back to the camera, casually walk out of there."

    Instead of listening to him, which pissed him off but didn't surprise him in the least, she started to type. Fast. Faster. "I can't."

    "Charis-" God
damn
it.

    "I need to disconnect this server from their system before Surreal hacks in and detonates the device. It will only take me a few minutes."

    
You may not have a few minutes.
"Get out of there! If he suspects anything, he'll blow it."

    "Not if he can't connect to it." She shook as she spoke. He knew she wouldn't leave until she had the server disconnected. By then it would be too late.

    He needed to get her out of there. Now.

    Throwing down his headset, he ignored Ron and Rich's protests as he jumped out of the back of the van. His only thought was on Charis and he made a beeline for Image Techno-Gadgets server room.

    

    

    What happened to Marie? Not that he minded. The new girl they brought in was equally as easy to look at, and a hell of a lot smarter. But he missed Marie's dark hair. Surreal never really had a thing for blondes. Or those with straight hair.

    No, he preferred brunettes. Curly-haired, sassy brunettes with amazing blue eyes. The blonde had... Well, he didn't know. She still hadn't turned around so he could catch a glimpse of her face to see what color her eyes were. It didn't matter. They wouldn't be anything close to the blue eyes of his lover.