Wicked Sexy (Wicked Games Series Book 2) (13 page)

“About one in seven hundred trillion.”

It’s Connor, from the doorway, holding a flashlight in his hand. The yellow beam sweeps across the room, landing on O’Doul’s scowling face. He adds, “The guards at the security desk downstairs confirmed the power outage isn’t anywhere else on the local grid or the rest of the studio campus. It’s only in this building. And it’s not the circuit breakers either.”

Someone says, “I’m sure the backup generators will come on any second—”

“Those will be disabled too,” I say. “He’s hacked into the servers of the local power station, along with the studio servers. Consider the power out in this building for good.” Smiling broadly, I add, “Except for over here, of course,” and make spokesmodel hands at my computers.

I can tell O’Doul is trying to decide if he should arrest me on the spot and ask questions later, so I throw him a bone.

“How about this? While I get busy winning my hundred bucks from Rodriguez—”

“I never said we were betting a hundred bucks!” protests Rodriguez.

“
Two
hundred bucks from Rodriguez, why don’t you get Professor Alfredo Durand in the Computer Science department at MIT on the horn and ask him about the Bank of America incident in 2007. He and other professors at the school can confirm the existence of Søren Killgaard, even if all the records of his attendance have been erased.”

I look at my watch. It’s glow-in-the-dark, and therefore easy to read. “It’s after three a.m. in Massachusetts, but I’m sure Professor Durand won’t mind assisting the FBI, no matter the time. He’s a good sport like that.”

O’Doul cocks his head, his sharp eyes studying me. He says to one of the agents standing nearby, “Special Agent Chan.”

A young Asian man with glasses and unruly black hair, says, “I’m on it, sir,” takes a cell phone from his shirt pocket, and walks several feet away to make a call.

I point to my computer. “May I?”

O’Doul growls, “You’ve got five minutes, Miss West, and not a second longer. Don’t make me regret this.” He throws a shady look at Rodriguez, who I can tell he doesn’t particularly like.

I sit down in front of the computers. Everyone gathers around me, including Connor, who asks, “What are you doing?”

His voice is suspicious, but even more than that, it’s worried. I don’t look at him when I answer. “Oh, just this little thing called a bitch slap. It’ll only take a sec.”

Behind me, there are snickers. Ignoring them, I log onto my computer and begin.

For a full minute, there’s silence. The only sound is my fingers rapidly tapping the keyboard. Over my shoulders, everyone raptly stares.

At two minutes, a hushed voice says, “There’s a vulnerability in the web server.”

Still typing, I chuckle. “There always is.”

After another interval of silence: “Holy shit. Is that the remote login for the…
crime database
?”

“Yep,” I say cheerfully.

The agents behind me are getting restless, starting to mutter to each other.

“There’s no way she can get into the mainframe. They fixed all the holes after the Trilogy software disaster.”

“She’d need an administrator password—”

“Forget about passwords, she’s already at the Unix shell!”

I say, “Oh look, the mainframe directory listing. Tsk. Your system architect should be tried for treason.”

Shocked silence. After typing for another few moments, I ask no one in particular, “Should we add Darth Vader to the Most Wanted list?”

Nobody answers.

Finally, Connor says, “Four minutes, twenty-six seconds.”

“Hold on, I’m looking for the president’s cell phone number. Let’s text him a dick pic—”

O’Doul slaps the laptop closed, cutting the connection.

I swivel slowly around in my chair, look at the stunned faces staring down at me, and smile. “Any questions, ladies?”

Connor’s flashlight provides enough light that I can see how pale Rodriguez’s face is. He says, “That was pure luck.”

Connor is the one who responds, in a voice like silk. “No. That was pure talent.”

Our eyes meet. He gives a slight, annoyed shake of his head, chastising me for showing off, but I see the admiration in his eyes.

O’Doul snaps, “Posell, coordinate with studio security to find us another space to set up. Rodriguez, get all this shit ready to be transported. And you,” he says, jabbing a finger in the air in my direction, “come with me.”

He spins on his heel and heads for the door.

I stand and follow, Connor right behind me. Over my shoulder, I call, “When I get back, you better have my money, Rodriguez!”

I’m gratified to hear a low, aggravated, “Fuck.”

T
he elevators are out
, so we take the stairs to the ground floor. The yellow beam of my flashlight leads the way. Harry doesn’t ask why I’m following along, but he doesn’t tell me not to, which is good because I don’t want to have to knock him on his ass.

From now on, wherever Tabby goes, I go. Hearing her tell Harry that Søren had “eliminated” people activated every protective cell in the caveman part of my brain. Which would account for my decision to corner her in the women’s restroom and start demanding answers and trying to renegotiate our agreement.

Damn, this woman gets to me.

We pass through the darkened lobby. An armed security guard unlocks the doors for us, letting us out into the night. It’s cold. The air is a bracing snap in my lungs, a welcome broom to sweep the cobwebs of jealousy, desire, and frustration from my head.

Whatever Søren did to Tabby, I’m going to make him pay for it.

In spades.

“Where are we going?” Tabby pipes up as we pass between two buildings along a red brick path.

“Coffee,” growls Harry, and keeps going.

In a few moments, we round a corner and enter a courtyard lined with palm trees. A patio is filled with tables with umbrellas, and through a wall of glass behind them I see a brightly lit cafeteria. I’m surprised it’s open all night, because the lot is deserted. We must have the FBI to thank for that.

Tabby groans. “Food! Thank you, baby Jesus!”

Once inside, we get coffee and sandwiches from a sleepy-looking young girl behind the counter and find a nearby table to sit down. The place is empty except for us. Tabby starts wolfing down her sandwich as if she hasn’t eaten in weeks, while Harry just drinks his coffee and watches her, his gaze contemplative and deeply unsettled.

A look I’m sure I’ve worn many times myself.

Deciding to keep my trap shut to see how this plays out, I take a bite of my sandwich.

Harry says quietly, “Tabitha Anne West, age twenty-seven, five-foot-six, one hundred thirty-five pounds, verified IQ of one hundred ninety-eight.”

Ah. So while his boys were searching for Søren Killgaard’s name in databases, Harry searched for Tabby’s. It doesn’t surprise me. He’s one sharp son of a bitch and damn good at his job. He wasn’t really cut out for the corps—lotta guys aren’t—but he’s a perfect match for the FBI. He’s a no-nonsense straight shooter with just enough balls to make him dangerous.

He continues, “No known religious or political affiliations, no history of substance abuse, no outstanding traffic tickets, property and income taxes never paid late. Mother Laurel, father Christopher, no siblings, grandparents on both sides deceased. Went to live with her uncle Scott in Boston after her parents’ deaths in a plane crash when she was eight. Graduated high school at fifteen, accepted to MIT on full scholarship. At seventeen, she discovered Uncle Scott with his face in a bowl of cereal at the breakfast table, dead from acute arsenic poisoning.”

I freeze.
Poisoning?

The file I read listed her uncle’s cause of death as heart attack, and that it happened a year later, when she was eighteen. Stunned, I glance over at Tabby. She’s pale and unmoving, her eyes downcast, her gaze on her plate.

“Due to the presence of a note and her uncle’s history of depression, the death was ruled a suicide. Department of Children and Families was brought in to choose a guardian, and the minor was placed in foster care…for a period of one month, until she disappeared. School records show she continued attending classes, but officials were never able to locate her—”

“They never looked,” she says quietly.

“Wait,” I say, an odd tightness growing in my chest.

“—and when she became legally an adult at eighteen, the case was closed. Address records show residences for every year except 2007.” Harry gazes at her, long and hard. “So my first question is this. Where were you for that missing year?”

She raises her head and stares at Harry. When she speaks, the floor drops out from under my feet.

“Living with Søren Killgaard, of course.” Her laugh is low and bitter. “Actually, that’s a gross misuse of the word ‘living.’”

Shocked past words, I stare at Tabby. An interval of four heartbeats passes before Harry turns his hard gaze to me. “You said you vetted her.”

“I…I did…there was no missing year, there was nothing to indicate—”

“It’s not his fault,” says Tabby. “The FBI are the only ones who have the accurate data.”

My head is swimming. My heart is hammering. She
lived
with Søren. She told me she wasn’t in love with him. She led me to believe she hated him, but she spent a year of her life under the same roof with the man.

She fucking lied to me.

Anger turns my vision red. I’m trying to get my thoughts straight to ask a coherent question, but Harry beats me to it.

“You’ve made it obvious you can bypass our firewalls without even breaking a sweat, Miss West. Which means you can just as easily access any other database. So my next question is, why would you change those few details in public records but leave the truth for the FBI?”

She looks at him first, and then turns her eyes to me. “Because I knew someday I’d be having this conversation.”

Through gritted teeth, I ask, “What does that mean?”

She holds my gaze for a moment, her expression unreadable. She’s searching my face for something, but the only things I’m feeling are fury and betrayal, neither of which seem to satisfy her. She finally abandons her search and looks to Harry. “You’re familiar with Stockholm Syndrome, I assume.”

“Capture-bonding,” comes the immediate reply. “Where hostages express empathy for their captors, to the point of defending or sympathizing with them.”

“
Or falling in love
,” I hiss, hackles raised.

Tabby ignores me. “It’s a form of traumatic bonding—”

“You’re saying he held you hostage?” I interrupt angrily. “For a year? While you attended school during the day?”

She ignores me again and keeps speaking to Harry in a cool monotone as if discussing the weather. “An adaptive psychological defense built into our DNA. Identifying with an abuser is one way the psyche defends itself, especially in women.”

Harry’s calmly nodding. I want to tear out every strand of hair on my head.

“When my uncle died, I had no one left. No one. The government put me into foster care. The first week I was there, my foster father came into my bedroom in the middle of the night and tried to rape me. He didn’t succeed—he was a fat fuck, and I’ve always been strong—but my foster mother didn’t believe me when I told her. Neither did anyone at the DCF. I was denied transfer. The family had been fostering for years with no problems, they said. It must be me, they said.”

Her pause is fraught with anger. “He tried to rape me again a few weeks later.”

Listening to her speak, my rage turns to horror which then turns to a violent urge to take her into my arms. I don’t know if I’ve ever felt as helpless in my life as I do right now.

“But that time was different, because someone was there to help me. Someone had been watching me carefully, and when my stepfather pulled the covers off my bed and I screamed, he got a very unpleasant surprise in the form of a baseball bat to his balls.”

Into the silence I say, “Søren.”

Tabby swallows, and then nods. “He came through the window and beat my foster father to within an inch of his life, and I crouched on my bed and watched him do it. And did nothing to intervene. There was…” She clears her throat. “A lot of blood. Afterward, Søren told me that he saw me in class, that he knew something bad had happened to me just by looking at my face, and that he wasn’t going to let anything bad happen to me ever again. Then he left.”

Her voice grows quiet. “It didn’t occur to me until much later that I might not have been placed in that foster home by chance…or that my uncle’s death might not have been a suicide.”

Horrified, I lean forward. Harry murmurs, “Go on.”

As if gathering her strength, Tabby inhales and then lets the breath out slowly through her nose. “From my first memories, I was used to being different, which meant that I was used to being looked at oddly. That was a disadvantage. For all my precociousness, I never learned to recognize when a strange stare in my direction was dangerous. I was naïve.”

Lost in some dark memory, she closes her eyes. “When I later investigated my foster parents, I found that they had multiple complaints against them which had somehow been erased from the DCF’s files. When I further investigated my uncle’s death, I found it troubling that there was no arsenic found in the house, and the level in his blood indicated he’d been ingesting relatively small quantities for a long time. Which—if you’re going to kill yourself, why do it slowly? He owned several handguns, could have shot himself, jumped from the roof, any number of options seemed more logical than poisoning himself over a period of months.”

“But there was a note,” Harry points out. “In his handwriting.”

Tabby looks at him. “And some people can forge a painting so perfectly not even an expert can tell it isn’t an original.”

I say in disbelief, “You’re saying Søren met you at school, became obsessed with you, murdered your uncle so you’d be put in foster care, manipulated the system so a rapist would get you, and then waited for his chance to rescue you so you would then feel…grateful to him?”

“Pretty sophisticated for a teenager,” says Harry doubtfully.

“He was twenty-one,” replies Tabby. “And already a multimillionaire from stock market speculation. And yes, I think that’s exactly what he did, though I have no proof. All I know is that Søren is a master manipulator. He can make people do things and convince them it was their own idea.”

There’s something strange in Harry’s face that I can’t put my finger on, something darker than doubt. Studying her, he tilts his head in thought. “Or maybe the master manipulator is someone else.”

Suddenly, I’m out of breath.

I look at Tabby with wide eyes. When she sees my expression, she looks as if she’s been slapped.

We stare at each other. My brain says
No, no, no
.

And then, more faintly, something not so unequivocal.

Into our silence, Harry says, “I have no proof this person Søren exists, except for your insistence that he does. I
do
have proof that you’re perfectly capable of breaching extremely sophisticated network systems, because you’ve given me a lovely demonstration. I also know you recognized me the minute you saw my ugly mug, which strikes me as incredibly coincidental. Too coincidental. And judging by the way our boy here keeps staring at you, I’m guessing there’s a lot more going on between you than could be considered strictly professional.”

When he pauses, I look at him. He says, “Which may or may not also be coincidental.”

I cut my gaze back to Tabby.

She whispers, “Connor. You can’t believe that.”

I stare at her, remembering how upset she was when I kissed her against the wall at the hotel, only to show up in my room half an hour later, demanding sex. My brain is recoiling in horror from the idea that…she…

“
You
came to
me
for this job!” she cries.

You knew I would
, I think, but can’t bring myself to say it.

Harry muses, “I also find it interesting that Victoria Price, your employer from the time you left MIT until she disappeared under mysterious circumstances three years ago, left you everything in her will. Including a twenty-five-million-dollar penthouse in Manhattan.” As an afterthought, he adds, “Her body has never been recovered, correct?”

A crackling pause follows.

In the moment before Tabby jumps to her feet, time is suspended. I see her lips flatten, see outrage flare in her eyes, see the exact moment her opinion of me goes from “not sure if I like you” to “wouldn’t spit on you if you were on fire.” Then, with a lightning-fast unfolding of limbs, she’s up, and then I’m up too, and my hand is wrapped firmly around her bicep.

Stiffening, she bites out, “Lay another uninvited finger on me and you’ll lose the whole goddamn hand.”

Looking back and forth between us, Harry says, “Well. At least I know one of you isn’t in over your head.”

I growl, “Tabitha—”

Before I can finish the sentence, someone calls Harry’s name from the other side of the room.

He rises. I turn and see one of his agents, the one named Chan, at the entrance to the cafeteria. He’s holding out a cell phone.

“It’s Professor Durand from MIT.” His gaze skips to Tabby. “He’d like to talk to you, sir.”

Harry waves him over.

As Chan walks closer, Harry says calmly to me, “You got your cuffs on you, Connor?”

Staring at Tabby, I nod once, a curt affirmative.

“Excellent,” he says, taking the phone. He smiles at Tabby. “Because depending on what the good professor says, you might need ’em.”