White Dawn: A Military Romantic Suspense Novel (18 page)

Minnie hid her smile. Duardo would not
even consider that she carried a girl. It had to be a Vistarian
male ego thing. She leaned over and kissed his chin. “It had better
be your first time, buster. Although you’ve sneaked into Vistaria
lots of times since you got back. Don’t think I don’t know.”

He looked startled. Then he smile
reluctantly. “It’s not the same as this…operation.”

“A bullet is a bullet,” Minnie said
flatly. “The Insurrectos would
love
to shoot you,
particularly Serrano. You step onto Vistaria with a target on your
forehead every time.” She picked up his hand. “Just promise me
you’ll come back.”

He hesitated. “I can’t promise that,” he
said flatly. “Things happen in war, Minnie. But I promise I will do
my best to come back to you.”

It would have to do. Duardo was very
good at being a soldier. She had picked up hints and more gossip
about his skills from other soldiers. Rubén had been particularly
admiring. He reported directly to Duardo.

If Duardo promised he would do his best
to ensure he came back, then she would do her best not to load him
down with worry or concerns. “You’d better kiss me again,” she said
lightly. “I have to store them up for a while.”

Duardo kissed her and it was no light
peck. His hand slid down to cup her breast and she moaned into his
mouth.

There was a knock on the door and she
groaned her frustration. Duardo grinned and got to his feet and
threw on the robe hanging on the back of the door. “There are ten
hours yet,” he reminded her and opened the door an inch or two.

“I’m so sorry to interrupt,” Calli said
from the other side of the door. “But Nick isn’t back yet and
you’re the most senior army officer I can find. And this is
directly related to you. Could you come to my office? Minnie, too,
please.”

Minnie rolled off the bed and reached
for her jeans. “Five minutes!” she called to Calli.

“Ten, if I must put my uniform back on,”
Duardo amended.

“Civilian clothes would be better,”
Calli said softly.

There was an armed non-com outside
Calli’s door and Minnie glanced at Duardo. He frowned and shook his
head. He couldn’t guess either. He nodded at the private and rapped
on the door. “Señora Escobedo?” he called.

“Please come in,” Calli called back. She
hadn’t used Duardo’s rank.

Duardo held the door open for her and
Minnie stepped into the office, her curiosity roused.

Callie was behind her big desk. There
was another woman sitting on one of the chairs in front of it.

Duardo pulled out the second chair for
her and Minnie sank into it gratefully. She always felt vaguely
tired these days and knew that the drain of energy would only be
worse before the end. Duardo took up his post at the corner of the
desk, to Minnie’s left.

The woman turned to look at both of
them. She was a very young black woman and the way she was looking
at them made Minnie think that she was absorbing every little
detail, that nothing escaped her notice. Her hair was long and
straight, hanging past the back of her shoulder blades. Her eyes
were large, almond-shaped and very beautiful. Her skin was light,
almost coffee colored.

“This is Chloe Masters,” Calli said.
“She arrived in Acapulco this morning. From San Francisco. Chloe,
this is Minerva Bennings Peña and Eduardo Peña y Santos.”

Duardo nodded his head and Minnie smiled
at her.

Chloe looked at Duardo sharply. “You’re
Cristián’s brother?” she asked.

Duardo glanced at Calli for
explanation.

“You don’t have to worry,” Chloe told
him. “Your security isn’t breached. I know my way around the
Internet. But Cristián stopped talking to me three days ago, so I
had to come down here and make sure he’s okay. Is he?”

Minnie held up her hand. “You might need
to back up and explain a few things. Who is Cristián?”

“I know you have to make sure about me,”
Chloe said, “but really, I’m not interested in the Insurrectos or
your war. I just want to check on Cristián. I can’t go to Vistaria
myself, so I figured that as he’s a Loyalist, then the Loyalists
camping in Acapulco—you guys—would be able to tell me if he’s
okay.”

Duardo cleared his throat. “This
Cristián…he told you he was a Loyalist?”

Chloe smiled. Even her smile was quite
stunning. She really was a gorgeous woman. “Of course he didn’t
tell me that,” she said. “I didn’t know who he really was until
around eight last night. We never gave any details about ourselves.
Cristián insisted on it and I had already figured out the open code
on the IWU Facebook group, so I knew why he was insisting. But when
he stopped talking three days ago, I went digging for facts. That’s
when I found out who he really was.” She bit her lip. “I know
where
he is, too. Pascuallita is crawling with Insurrectos.
If you’re his brother, then I don’t have to tell you how risky his
position is.”

Duardo and Calli exchanged glances. “How
did you dig up the real information?” Calli asked, making it sound
like a casual question.

Chloe unzipped a leather briefcase
sitting on the chair next to her hip, and reached inside it. Minnie
saw Duardo stiffen to full alert from the corner of her eye. He
wasn’t armed. He was wearing jeans just as Calli had suggested. But
that didn’t mean he wouldn’t do anything if Chloe was pulling a
weapon out of the briefcase.

What emerged was a memory stick on a
black lanyard. Chloe held it up so it swung like a pendulum. “I’m a
hacker, just like Cristián,” she said. “I’ve been working on this
for nearly a year and when Cristián disappeared, I spent twelve
hours finishing it, so I could go looking for him.”

“What is it?” Calli said.

“It’s a….” Chloe shrugged. “I could give
you the technical specifications but I don’t think they’d mean
anything to you. No offense.”

Calli gave her a stiff smile. “Try
describing it generally, then.”

Chloe shrugged. “Okay. The Internet is
one giant open network. Anyone can get on it and anyone who knows a
little bit about hacking can find all sorts of information about
people. There’s not much security on the Internet, although the
Facebook group was a good idea. Open code is unbreakable unless you
have reference points that let you figure out the rest.”

“You had those reference points?” Minnie
asked.

“Not until last night.” She lifted the
memory stick again. “This is an application I built. It lets you
move around the net without leaving any footprints. When you use
it, no one knows you’re there unless you’re silly enough to say
you’re there, so that means you can hack into just about anything
you like. It makes you invisible.” She grinned. “I call it Harry’s
Cloak.”

Calli smiled.

Minnie held up her hand. “I’ve been
learning a lot about computers in the last few weeks. I work with a
would-be hacker. So let me ask a dumb question. If you have Harry’s
Cloak and someone else had Harry’s Cloak, could you communicate
with each other privately?”

“More than privately,” Chloe said.
“You’d both be completely invisible to anyone else, including the
best hackers out there. Harry’s Cloak doesn’t just mask your
signature. It stops your signature from even forming. It’s as
perfect a disguise as the real cloak was.”

She leaned forward and placed the jump
drive in front of Calli. “You can have it,
gratis
,” she
said. “It’s my way of proving I’m not an Insurrecto spy.”

“If the program does what you say it
does,” Calli began, “then you could sell it for a small fortune.
Why give it to us?”

“Like I said,” Chloe replied, “It’s good
will, so you can figure out I’m not here to undermine your war.
Besides, if you install it, then you can talk to Cristián directly.
Then I’ll know he’s okay.”

“If we knew who this Cristián was, what
makes you think we wouldn’t pick up a phone and call him instead?”
Duardo asked.

Chloe grinned. “Calls can be traced.”
She pointed to the jump drive. “Nothing can track that.”

“You would give up the potential
earnings you’d make from your program, just to make sure that
Cristián is okay?”

Chloe’s amusement faded. “I would,” she
said firmly. Then she smiled again. “Besides, I can write another
app anytime. I’m not hurting for cash, you know.”

Duardo held up his hand. “Excuse me for
a moment.” He stepped to the door and opened it, then spoke to the
guard outside. He pushed the door open. “Ms. Masters, would you
mind stepping out and keeping Private Juarez company? I would like
to speak to the Chief of Staff for a moment.”

“Sure.” Chloe got to her feet and Minnie
saw that she was tall, like Calli, and lithe, with a dancer’s body.
If Cristián really hadn’t shared any personal details with her,
then he was going to be overjoyed when he finally met her in
person.

Chloe stepped out into the corridor and
turned to face the guard. She began to speak a slow but passable
Spanish to him.

Duardo shut the door and came back to
the desk. “If this application does what she says it does, do you
realize what it means?” he asked Calli.

“A completely secure way of
communicating with anyone else who has the program,” Calli said.
“Perhaps we should keep Ms. Masters around for a while. She might
be useful, given the upcoming operations.”

“Exactly,” Duardo said.

“Employ her,” Minnie told them. “Give
her a job deploying the application and maintaining it. She’ll want
to hang around, anyway, just to ensure Cristián is all right. If we
employ her, she is accountable to us and we can control her
movements. I don’t like the idea of her going back to the States
and telling anyone what she gave us.”

“A high security position?” Calli raised
her brow. “I’ll want to do some background checks first. We have no
idea who she is.”

“Ask Cristián,” Minnie said. “He might
not know her first name, but if they’ve been talking via email or
something, then I guarantee he’s got a good read on her
personality. They’ve obviously got a strong enough relationship
that she’s rushed down to Acapulco just because he’s stopped
emailing.”

Duardo picked up her hand and kissed it.
“You are as clever as you are beautiful.”

Calli smiled and leaned back in her
chair. “Colonel Peña, do you agree we proceed with this? Employ
Chloe and use the application?” She had switched back to Spanish,
making it formal and official.

“I agree,” Duardo said. “And I would
like to install this application, this cloak, as soon as possible.
It would be of enormous benefit to us.” He straightened to
attention. “With your permission, I will share this news with
General Flores. He will find it very interesting.”

“Thank you, yes, Colonel Peña. Please go
ahead. Send Chloe back in on your way out.”

Duardo nodded and turned to leave and
Minnie realized with a jolt that just like that, Duardo’s twelve
hour leave was over.

But now, there was a chance she could
still talk to him, no matter where he was.

Nemesis slid into the camp at dawn the next day and
only the close proximity guards were alerted. He had slipped right
through the outer ring of sentries.

Garrett swore and muttered when he
realized that there were holes in his defense line, but Nemesis
shrugged it off. “I’ve been climbing Vistarian mountains and hiking
through the bush since I was very small, plus I’ve got sneakier
with each passing decade. The Insurrectos have barely any bushcraft
at all. You’ll hear them coming a mile off. Don’t worry about it.
Your inner guards were alert enough.” He shrugged off the heavy
backpack and put it on the ground at his feet. “I’ve brought
another present for you.”

“Another radio?” Carmen asked dryly. She
had spent the last twenty-four hours learning Morse Code and
swearing mightily over it. “Typing is faster,” she had pointed out
to Garrett while sweating over long and short taps. “Can’t we rig
up some sort of keyboard to send the stuff? It’s crazy-making.”

Garrett had tapped out his answer in
Morse, his finger on the desk, proving that he had picked it up
with lightning speed.
Get back to work
, he’d told her.

She had scowled and poked her tongue at
him.

He’d just smiled and gone back to
studying the code book.

Now, with Nemesis in front of them,
Garrett crossed his arms. “A week’s supply of groceries would be
better than another radio,” he said, “but I don’t think you could
fit them all into that backpack. Even though it’s a monster.”

Nemesis grinned, his blue eyes
twinkling, and pushed the toe of his boot up against the pack.
“This has everything I need to survive. It lets me stay one hundred
percent mobile.” He bent over and unzipped a side pocket and delved
into it. Then he held out toward them a small plastic model car,
shaped like a Ferrari.

“Huh?” Carmen said, flummoxed. Nemesis
had really gone out of his way to find them, to give them a
toy?

“What is it?” Garrett asked. He didn’t
sound puzzled at all.

Nemesis tugged the car between both
hands and the hood and front wheels separated from the back end,
revealing a USB connector. “It’s a memory stick. There’s a program
on this that will self install. Once you’ve installed it, you can
use any network, including the Internet, with complete impunity.
You’ll be invisible. No one can trace you, or see what you’re doing
on-line.”

“We can talk directly to the big house?”
Carmen asked.

“You can. You can use the camera in the
laptop and video chat, too.” Nemesis grinned. “It means the radio
and the code books are redundant, but that’s war for you. New
technologies every thirty seconds.”

“Thank heavens,” Carmen said heartily.
“Morse is a complete bitch.” She took the USB drive. “I’ll do it
now.”