At least the physical barriers anyway.
He dropped his head and captured her lips. Her mouth opened beneath his, their tongues joining, stroking and teasing as their bodies began to move together. It wasn’t the fast, furious fuck he’d expected it would be. It was, as he’d said to her before he’d entered her, lovemaking. You didn’t have to be in love to make love, so he wasn’t freaked out by the fact. It was more than fucking, less than being in love. It was slow and hot and beautiful and intense all at once.
It was not quite everything, but under different circumstances it could be. They kissed deeply and moved slowly, but then their desire grew too hot and they moved faster, panting and kissing and rocking across the bed. Fortunately the headboard was bolted to the wall or they’d have slammed it repeatedly against the sheetrock.
Bliss gripped his ass as she shoved her body up to his, meeting him at the top of every stroke. And then she ground against him, riding him with short, quick jerks, throwing her head back as she came with a sharp cry.
He let her ride the wave all the way to shore before he found his own release. It didn’t take long—a couple of quick thrusts and he was done, pouring himself into her with a low groan that bordered on feral.
Sky waited for that ennui that often came after sex to hit him. It was boredom and disappointment rolled together. The feeling he’d been let down after all the excitement that led up to that moment when he came.
Bliss yawned, her hand going lazily to her mouth. He studied her face, let his gaze drop to nipples that were still stiff and ready for attention. When she realized he was watching her, she smiled up at him. His heart thumped and writhed, fighting the feelings that were still there. Still beneath the surface.
“That was lovely,” she said.
He was still inside her. Still hard. “Lovely?”
She lifted her head off the pillow and kissed his jaw. He turned her face with a thumb against her cheek and kissed her lips. It was several moments before they broke apart again.
“Okay,” she whispered, her fingers gliding over his cheek, into his hair. “More than lovely. You’re right.”
He rolled to the side and took her with him, wrapping her in his arms. They fell asleep that way. Soundly, contentedly. He wouldn’t think about tomorrow. Or the trouble it might bring.
He didn’t have to wait that long, however. The blaring of his phone woke him. He’d left it in his room when he’d followed Bliss to hers. He didn’t know how long it had been ringing, but he jumped out of bed and sprinted for the bedside table where he’d left it.
“Kelley,” he said, his voice rough with sleep.
“We’ve finished analyzing the code,” Kid said, sounding far too awake. “Better get back here.”
Chapter Fifteen
Bliss was groggy as hell after the night she’d had. She sipped her coffee and tried not to let her eyelids droop as they waited for everyone to gather in the conference room.
Sky’s phone had gone off about an hour after they’d fallen asleep the second time. She hadn’t even heard it, but Sky had. He’d jumped out of bed and run through the adjoining doors to answer it.
She’d dragged herself from under the covers and followed him, not bothering to put anything on. When she’d stumbled into his bedroom, he’d looked up at her, his expression telling her that something had happened before he even said it.
“You’ve broken the code? … Yeah, be there in ten. … Gotta get Bliss moving.”
It had taken her ten minutes to wash off the smell of sex and twist her hair into something presentable before she’d dragged on underwear, a pair of leggings, and a T-shirt. Her Chucks finished the ensemble. She’d met Sky outside in the hall, her heart turning over at the sight of him. So gorgeous. So sexy. And sooo good in bed. She wasn’t sore, thank you dear purple Big Boy for keeping things limber, but every nerve ending in her body tingled as she remembered what Sky had done to her. How he’d made her respond.
Sky had cupped the back of her head and kissed her thoroughly before taking her hand and leading her down the hall. There really hadn’t been time for any conversation as they’d headed to the secure area. He’d let go of her hand when they’d passed into the more trafficked areas of the building. It was just before eight in the morning. Not early, but early enough when you’d barely slept a wink in the past couple of nights.
They’d badged in and then gone to join the IT guys and gals who’d been awake all night, analyzing code. They didn’t have the whole program done yet, but they had most of it. Enough that an emergency meeting was required.
Kid was there, but he’d only gotten there about half an hour before them. He and Sky retreated to a corner and had a hushed conversation. She was curious, but she knew she’d find out soon enough.
Right now she was just tired. They’d filed into the conference room to wait for Mendez and Ghost, and Bliss had collapsed into a chair with the coffee Sky had brought to her. It was creamy, just the way she liked, and she sipped it gratefully.
Mendez and Ghost entered the room and the buzzing of conversation cut off like someone had turned off all the sound. It was the oddest thing.
“As you were,” Mendez said. He’d said the same last night. She wasn’t used to working with the military, so she didn’t know what that meant. Whatever it was, it made the people in the room relax again.
Mendez was tall and imposing in his uniform. Today he wore camouflage with black eagles on his lapels. Ghost was no less imposing. He had silver oak-leaf clusters on his lapels, and he was also the tall, silent, and deadly type.
Ghost dragged out a chair and sat. Mendez did not. He stood with legs spread, arms folded across his chest. “Tell me what we’ve got.”
Kid and Sky exchanged a look. Kid was the one who tapped on his keyboard. The window with Martin’s code popped onto the screen. They’d narrowed it down to one single program instead of the several that Martin had in his Visual Studio.
“It’s Stuxnet code, sir,” Kid said. “But Martin—or somebody—modified it. We’re still looking at it, but this is what we know so far—and it’s important.” He pointed the cursor. “These lines. These are the ones that send the commands. It appears to be a very specifically targeted flaw. This code, if deployed, would exploit a vulnerability that exists across networks.”
“And what does it do, soldier?” Mendez asked.
Sky took over. “Sir, the worm only has to hit one power grid before it replicates and spreads very rapidly across the network. Every single grid connected to the internet will be affected. Doesn’t matter where it is in the world. If it’s connected, the potential is there to shut it down.”
“All power grids the world over?”
“Yes, sir. All of them. The worm could ripple through the world like a shock wave. Stuxnet had a fail-safe written into it, but this worm does not.”
“That doesn’t seem possible. There is no interconnected world grid. They operate independent of each other.”
“No, sir. But whoever wrote this code figured out how to get around it. Hypothetically. The only way to know for sure is to deploy it.”
“Which we can’t do.” Mendez unfolded his arms and shoved a hand through his hair. “So what we have here is a potential global catastrophe. We can’t test it or let it escape into the wild. And someone has Martin’s laptop, which means it’s out there. Somewhere. And we don’t know where.” He shot a look at Ghost. “What’s our information on Martin?”
Ghost looked down at his laptop. It was a huge thing, clunky in appearance, but that’s because it was a combat computer meant to survive the harshness of a battleground. “Martin was single. No kids. Bit of a conspiracy theorist, a coder but not necessarily a brilliant one. He was working on a group project at BBS. They were looking for vulnerabilities in the power grid—mostly because it’s an area that needs study. The Russians have targeted grids, most notably in the Ukraine, but they’ve not managed to shut off the power for any length of time. Brighton w
as contracted to the NSA on this one. Their mission was to discover the vulnerabilities in the grid system and plug the holes, at least in this country. There were several programmers working the project. Martin was one of them, though not the lead.”
“They’ve found the vulnerabilities across the whole system, even when they aren’t connected,” Sky said. “And there’s no plug that we know of. Without power, it would be damned hard to deploy a patch, which means the power outage could be indefinite.”
Mendez was frowning. “Not a good scenario, that’s for sure. Backup power would work for a while, but if the various nations couldn’t get their grids back up and running, things could go from bad to worse very quickly.”
“A matter of days,” Sky said. “We’d be looking at global anarchy.”
“Survival of the fittest,” Kid replied.
“Jesus, it sounds like a goddamned superhero-movie plot.” Mendez looked angry. “So Martin took what is essentially a top secret project meant to fix a huge problem and tried to sell the worst of it on the dark net. Who were his potential buyers? Do we know that?”
“There were a few people interested, but we don’t know the identities of any of them yet. Or who he was planning to meet at Starbucks the day Bliss hacked his hard drive.”
“Holy shit,” Sky said, drawing their attention back to him. He was staring at the lines of code. So was Kid.
“Fuck,” Kid breathed. “Is that—?”
“I think it is,” Sky replied. “Those motherfuckers. There’s a piggyback component to this thing…” He tapped his keys, zooming in on lines of code, highlighting them. Studying them. Kid stood and walked over to the screen, head tilted back as he read what was there.
“Could you two enlighten the rest of us?” Mendez said.
Kid whirled. Sky jerked his gaze toward the colonel. But not before Sky and Kid exchanged a glance.
“I’m not sure,” Sky said. “Not entirely. But I think it’s more than just the grid going down, sir. This worm could trigger reactor meltdowns by impacting switches and circuit breakers. If this thing works as written—if we’re right about this part of it—it won’t just be a power crisis, sir. It’ll be a nuclear crisis.”
A chill ran through the room. Sky still wasn’t sure if he was right, but if the NSA was involved then it seemed likely they’d have pushed to make the malware as terrible as it could be so they could plan for it and fix it before it became a reality.
Nobody had counted on Bill Martin trying to sell it though. If he’d wanted to commit suicide, he could have just deployed the damned thing himself. Many would die when the world’s reactors melted down. Those who didn’t would die later, either from starvation or fighting over resources. It was an ugly, ugly scenario.
So what was the point of selling it? Unless he’d intended to modify if somehow before turning it over?
“Can we patch it?” Mendez asked. “And how long?”
“Anything can be patched, sir,” Sky said. “But it will take a lot of hours to write—and then we have to deploy it.”
Mendez nodded. “We’re going to need to call the NSA. This was their damned project in the first place, and I’m turning over the patching to them. We need to concentrate our resources on finding that laptop before this thing gets loose—and figuring out who broke into Miss Bennett’s house.”
Beside him Bliss stiffened, as if she’d been thinking about something and her name brought her jolting back to the present. “I have cameras in my house,” she said.
Mendez smiled. “I know that. And we’ve got the feed. Ghost.”
Ghost pulled up a file, this time displaying a photo on the screen.
Bliss gasped. “How did you get access? I’ve got everything locked down tight.”
“Not as tight as you think. Not when HOT’s involved,” Mendez said.
She turned to Sky, her eyes snapping fire. “Did you know about this?”
Sky held up both hands. “No, I swear I didn’t. But why are you pissed? You wanted to know who he was, right?”
She frowned. He wanted to kiss the worry off her face, but that wasn’t happening here in this room full of people. “I do, yes. I just didn’t expect my system to be compromised without my permission.”
“You gave permission when you involved my operator in your dilemma,” Mendez said. “We can’t help you without knowing everything.”
“So that’s the guy?” Sky asked her.
“Yes.”
The shot was damned good, not grainy. It was a still taken from the video.
“His name is Robert Mayes and he’s a contract mercenary for hire,” Ghost said.
Sky’s hackles went up. Mendez must have known what he was thinking—what all the HOT operators in the room were thinking—because he chuckled. “Not an employee of our friend Mr. Black. But he has done work for government agencies in town. Most typically the CIA, sometimes the FBI. He hasn’t done any work for either of them in over a year though. He seems to play a little too loose with the rules. We were able to hear the conversation he had in Miss Bennett’s house, but not the other end of it. The phones are burners, so no idea who he was talking to.”
“I shot him,” Bliss said. “And I hit him. But I don’t know where.”
“Yes, and you definitely connected. He was seen in a private clinic on the night this video was taken. One gunshot wound to the arm. You didn’t kill him, but you definitely gave him some pain.”
“Dammit,” Bliss growled. “I was aiming for his heart.”
“It’s not easy to hit a moving target no matter how simple the movies make it out to be—and especially not when you’re emotionally compromised. You’re lucky you hit him at all. Unless you practice for hours a day and learn to make your shots blind, you’ll never be as accurate as you think you will in a combat situation. Still, you hit him—and that’s good because you bought yourself enough time to get away.”
Sky could feel her vibrating with anger beside him. And maybe fear. He didn’t look at her for fear of what his reaction might be in front of his teammates and commanding officer, but anger surged through him. He wanted to shoot Robert Mayes himself for daring to target Bliss in the first place.
“You said we need to figure out who broke in,” Bliss said, pointing at the screen. “But you already know.”
“Right, but we don’t know who hired him. He left the clinic and hasn’t been seen since, though I’ve got assets looking for him. How many people knew you were hacking Bill Martin that day?”
Bliss frowned. “I don’t know. The CIA. Nobody else should have known.”
“Tell me about your contact.”
“Jones? There’s not much to tell.” She told Mendez what she’d already told Sky about Jones.
“Maybe it’s time to get in contact again,” Mendez said, and Sky’s gut tightened. He didn’t like that Jones had been pushing her so hard, but that wasn’t anything out of the ordinary for a CIA agent, especially not if Ian Black was representative of that class. Though Black was technically disavowed and not quite an agent anymore, HOT had plenty of experience with his methods.
“I can do that,” Bliss replied.
“Set up a meeting. Jones knows how Martin was found, and he knows the laptop is missing. So let’s see what he says about it all.”
“Sir,” Sky interjected, his heart beating a little faster. “We don’t know anything about this Jones. What if he’s dangerous? We could be sending Bliss into an ambush.”
“She’ll have backup, soldier. I’m not sending her alone.”
Bliss turned to him, a smile on her face. “It’s okay. Jones is on our side. I’d bet my right arm he’s a true-blue American to his core. He’s pissed at me right now, but it’ll be all right.” She looked at Mendez. “He’s going to want the files.”
“So give them to him.”
Kid was shaking his head. “Sir, we can’t—”
Mendez held up a hand. “Relax, Kid. I didn’t get this far in life by being an idi
ot. We aren’t giving him the real files. Get me some decoys. Stuxnet code. Everybody in the fucking universe has that by now.”
It was true. The source code, most of it anyway, could be downloaded off the internet.
“Yes, sir,” Kid said. “On it, sir.”
“And let’s get to analyzing those other files Martin had. Maybe this one wasn’t the one he was planning to sell—unless he had a death wish.”
“Yes, sir,” Kid replied.
“Hacker,” Mendez said, and Sky turned his attention to the CO.
“Sir?”
“Echo squad goes with her. Let’s get this thing set up and find out what Jones knows about Martin and the code. I can’t get any fucking answers out of the CIA on this one, so we’re gonna go stealth about it.”
“Yes, sir. What about the laptop, sir?”
Mendez’s brows drew down. He looked troubled. “I’ve got feelers out everywhere. So far no reports of any illicit programs or equipment. Doesn’t mean it’s not out there and someone isn’t jumping up and down in glee that they’ve got their own doomsday device. But right now I’ve got no evidence it’s in the wild. All we can do is follow the trails we know. If we’re lucky, we’ll find others along the way.”
Mendez stood, and Sky knew this meeting was at an end. He scraped to his feet along with everyone else in the room. Bliss glanced at them all standing at attention and stood as well. She was confused by the military protocol. He’d have to tell her about it sometime. She’d been targeting Major Tucker four years ago, but she’d never had interaction with him when he was at work. Otherwise she might know this stuff a little better.
“Let me know when the meeting is set,” Mendez said. Then he turned and walked out of the room with his deputy commander on his heels. Nobody said anything for a long moment. The tension in the room ratcheted down by a factor of a hundred. Which was saying something since they were still pretty fucking tense.
“I guess I better message Jones,” Bliss said.
HOT SECRETS: A Hostile Operations Team - Book 13 Page 14
