Stolen (3 page)

“We haven’t connected. My hours are erratic.”

“Are you okay? You sound down.”

Lucy was perceptive—Sean should have known better than to call her. He forced a smile into his voice. “I’m only depressed because I had to cancel on you, princess. I miss you.”

“Miss you, too. Since you’re busy, why don’t I fly up to New York next weekend and we’ll have dinner?”

“Sounds extravagant.”

“I planned on spending the night.”

He laughed, even though he realized he could never allow Lucy to visit him in the city while he was still working for Colton. It would jeopardize everything, and he couldn’t risk her finding out what he was doing.

“I’ll see if I can swing it,” he said. “But I should only be here for a couple more weeks.” He hoped it was shorter than that. It might be over after Thursday. Or that operation might be just another move in the game.

“Talk to you tomorrow?”

“Same bat time, same bat channel.”

She laughed. “I love you, Batman.”

“Love you, Batgirl.”

He hung up. His chest was tight and his eyes burned.

You didn’t lie to her.

Not lying didn’t mean he was telling the truth. He didn’t want to deceive Lucy, but he couldn’t avoid it. Not now, with so much at stake. He had to give Lucy a clean slate. He had to make amends for his past. All of it, the good and the bad.

He leaned over the dresser, his palms on the cool, glass top, and breathed deeply. Ten years ago deception had come easily for him. Even now, when he shouldn’t be committing a crime, the thrill was electric. The danger drew him in; bigger and harder challenges enticed him. He’d grown bored with RCK long before he quit. Even opening his own office in D.C. with his best friend, Lucy’s brother Patrick, had become predictable. Sean feared there was something wrong with him that he only felt he was valued when he did the impossible—when he hacked unbreakable systems, when he manipulated situations to obtain information that was unobtainable.

He had always lived larger than life because that’s what gave him his edge. But now? It might be his downfall. He had thought he’d put this life behind him, that when he came back he’d be no good at any of it.

He was better than when he was twenty. Smarter. Sharper. More focused.

And there lay the biggest problem. He craved the adrenaline rush that came after a successful job. He didn’t hate living on the edge. And that terrified him. Because he loved Lucy more and didn’t want to jeopardize the amazing relationship they had.

But today he had no choice.

He pushed back from the dresser and avoided the mirrors in the room. He double-checked his equipment and secured the small cloning device in his pocket. Anyone would think it was a cell phone.

He left his doubts and fears in the hotel room and went to do the job. Calm and focused.

And no small bit excited.

He took the elevator down to the ballroom level and mingled with a wedding party through the foyer until he reached the tunnel-like hall. He glanced at his watch. Right on time. He dropped a jammer behind a potted plant, which would disrupt the nearby cameras so he could slip in and out without being detected.

Once in the tunnel, Sean used an employee badge Evan had swiped to access the private hall that led to the museum. Sean moved smoothly through the museum foyer toward the restrooms, where Evan palmed him the PBM badge as they passed and left without a word.

In a bathroom stall, it took Sean only four minutes to clone the badge and verify there was no hidden security code.

He pocketed the badge and walked back through the foyer. When two patrons smiled at him, he returned the smile and pretended to admire a horrendous metal sculpture. People paid good money for
that
?

When the couple moved on, so did Sean, heading toward the coatroom. The coatroom was between the main entrance and the tunnel access, but the employees could access it through the rear corridor. There were no cameras there, only security on individual doors.

When they’d had the final planning meeting for this operation, Evan had told Sean that the museum used a standard digital card-key system for their employees that worked on all private doors. So when Sean lifted the badge to the panel—the badge that had already opened the door from the tunnel to the museum—he expected the lock to pop open.

It didn’t. He scrutinized the panel and realized it was different from the panel he’d accessed earlier. It appeared to have been upgraded. He glanced at the other doors on this wing, and they all had the same security panel, which was different from the panels in the public parts of the museum. Why didn’t Evan know about the two layers of security?

Sean examined the panel and realized that the equipment was built by a small, elite company called Hawk Electronics, who worked almost exclusively for RCK. No doubt the security on this door was an RCK system and there was nothing “standard” about it except its appearance.

One of the key components of RCK security systems was that every access was logged—there was never a hidden back door. Even admins would be logged. Sean had an admin clearance; even if Duke had locked him out, he had his own backdoor admin account. His brother would get an email that indicated that an admin had bypassed security—when, where, and how.

There was only one way around it, and Sean hated to do it. But he had no choice—there was no other way into the secure coatroom without being caught on-camera. And they couldn’t risk Skye being caught putting the badge back in Joyce Bonner’s purse, since Skye had already pickpocketed her once.

Sean entered the nearby employee elevator, which had no cameras. He stopped the elevator as soon as the doors shut and took out his small palm computer. He logged in through the RCK back door that he’d created, maneuvered directly to the RCK server, and wrote a program that would manipulate the admin e-mail system. Instead of messages going to Duke and the RCK webmaster, all admin e-mails would go directly to Sean for the next ten minutes. The breach would only be found if someone sharp was specifically looking for it, and then they’d only see that the admin system had been compromised—they wouldn’t see Sean’s blind e-mail, because it would self-delete.

He unlocked the elevator, checked the halls, and went back to the coatroom door. He used his admin code to get into the room and slipped to the side as the coat girl came in with two more jackets. She hung them up and left, not noticing Sean standing in the corner.

He didn’t dare breathe heavily. Skye had sent him Bonner’s coat-check number—81—and Sean found her long brown mink in the proper slot. Since Bonner was left-handed, he slipped the badge into the left pocket.

Sean was out in less than two minutes, but he’d exposed himself to the one person who might catch him—his brother.

Evan was going to pay for his screwup.

CHAPTER TWO

FBI Special Agent Deanna Brighton once had a career that was headed for the stars. She’d graduated from Quantico when she was twenty-six, after four years as a CPA. When she was twenty-eight, she’d developed a state-of-the-art tracking system to trace illegal financial transactions over the Internet, pooling her unit’s resources with the cybercrime unit to create what she’d billed as an impenetrable, foolproof net over child pornographers and terrorists, all in one tight, brilliant program.

“I had everything,” she muttered to herself. “Until you.”

She stared at the thick, worn, unofficial file that she’d been building for years. The official FBI record—the portion that wasn’t sealed—was thin.

The faded tab mocked her:
ROGAN, SEAN TYLER.

Sean Rogan had hacked into her program and destroyed her
life.
The arrogance of his actions, that it was
no big deal
for him to destroy sixteen months of hard work in one day, should have been enough to put him in prison. But he had walked away after a couple of days in jail and a slap on the wrist. That she’d managed to get him expelled from Stanford was no real consolation for the damage he’d done to her career.

Deanna’s boss had been furious with her because he’d backed her claims that the system was ready to go wide. After Rogan hacked it, her boss had shut down her program and disbanded her task force. Her colleagues ostracized her because the failure had been public and embarrassing to their unit. She was lucky she hadn’t been fired.

That was twelve years ago, and she’d hated Sean Rogan ever since.

Deanna had no idea how thick Rogan’s sealed files were. That’s the benefit of having friends and family in high places—your crimes were erased. That he also had high security clearance unnerved her, because she’d never have approved him to empty the garbage at FBI headquarters. That his clearance was higher than
hers
hurt, a twisting hot pain in her gut that the agency she had dedicated her life to trusted a criminal more than her.

She’d spent the last twelve and a half years, since she’d crossed paths with him, building her own file on Rogan. It was largely conjecture and most of it had no legal meaning. But she was learning everything about him. She
would
catch him breaking the law and it would be so obvious that not even the director of the FBI himself could keep Sean Rogan out of prison.

And if she had to, she’d turn to the media.

She’d tracked Rogan from California to Boston and back to California, but getting the FBI to transfer her had proved difficult. She was always a year behind him. When he moved to D.C. last year she asked for a transfer; the closest she could get was New York City. She took it.

It was fate that Rogan was now in Manhattan. And good news for her that her informant told her something big was about to go down with Colton Thayer’s gang of cyberthieves. She’d been tracking Thayer because he was a connection to Rogan. This was no coincidence. Her gut told her Rogan was going to make his big play—and she planned on being there to slap the cuffs on him. She couldn’t wait to read him his rights—again. Because this time, he would face serious charges and she’d have cause to open an investigation into everything he’d done in the last twelve years.

Her partner, Steve Gannon, walked by her cubicle, briefcase in hand. “Go home,” he told her. “It’s late. It’s
Saturday.
”

She smiled thinly and shook her head. “I want to get this done.”

“You’re not still going over that security tape?”

“Two days before Sean Rogan arrives in the city for an undetermined stay, my informant tells me he’s working with Colton Thayer again and something big is in the works. Then we catch him on tape during a routine surveillance? That’s no coincidence.” They’d caught Rogan entering the stock exchange even though he had no business there.

“Nothing went down at the exchange that day.”

“But there’s no record that he’s living here. No apartment, no utilities in his name or in the name of RCK East. He’s
here,
but he’s off the grid. What’s he doing? I guarantee it’s not legal.”

“We have no tangible proof that Colton Thayer is breaking the law, and no proof that Rogan is involved if he is.”

Steve was right, but just because there was no proof didn’t mean they weren’t guilty. They were guilty of
something.

She had to keep Steve on her side. She and Steve had been working together on the white-collar squad since she’d been transferred earlier this year. Though she had four more years in the Bureau than he did, he was the lead agent. He was well liked among everyone in the division and others in the building, while she had continued to make enemies among her peers. She tried to be likable, but she was smart and tenacious and confrontational. And White-Collar generally attracted the type of agents who didn’t want to make waves, who didn’t want to go out into the field, but preferred to catch bad guys the old-fashioned way—through the paper trail.

She was different. Driven. Bureaucrats didn’t like “different.”

“Look at these.” She slid over a file of pictures she’d taken of Rogan over the last month. “Rogan has met with Colton and his team multiple times.” Colton’s house, a couple restaurants, walking in Central Park with the blond woman. “If I just had the resources for full surveillance—”

“You pitched your idea and lost. Can your informant get you more? Something tangible? A location or plan?”

“I’m working on it.”

Colton Thayer had been on the short list for a myriad of thefts, but nothing stuck. Sean Rogan had been the computer genius behind Thayer when they were at MIT, and though they had hardly spoken in nearly ten years—at least that Deanna could find—that all changed two months ago. Something was going on, and she was going to catch them. She’d turn Colton Thayer on Rogan in a heartbeat—she didn’t care about Thayer; he was an ideologue, a hacktivist who wanted to make a political statement. Rogan was far more dangerous.

He was going to pay for damaging her career.

“Deanna—”

“Go home, Steve. I’m fine.” She forced herself to relax and smile. “Really, I won’t be here more than an hour.”