by Paige Tyler
Shaw regarded her thoughtfully again and Kyla had a vision of metal pen tips scratching back and forth on rough paper as he put her through a mental polygraph exam.
“He didn’t work for the CIA,” Shaw said suddenly, as if he’d decided she wasn’t lying. “Not directly anyway. I never got to work with your father, but as I understand it, he was more of an independent contractor, doing white hat work outside the agency’s normal mountainous layers of bureaucracy.”
She was a little surprised Shaw was so forthcoming. Didn’t the CIA handbook demand he respond with the patented I can neither confirm nor deny that?
“Is being an independent contractor a common thing in the CIA?” she asked.
He shrugged. “It happens more than you’d think. The agency looks at it in terms of plausible deniability. If one of their contractors uncovers something that might discredit the agency, they can simply disavow all knowledge of that person since there’s no direct connection to the CIA.”
Wasn’t that convenient—and crappy? It made her wonder about all the stuff Nesbitt said about someone else hiring Stavros to murder her father.
“Is that what happened to my dad?” she asked. “Did he uncover something he shouldn’t have and the CIA disavowed any knowledge of him or his death like it never happened?”
She expected Shaw to get defensive, but instead, he looked chagrined. “We don’t know what happened to your father. According to his handler, who’s since moved to a new assignment overseas, your father never mentioned he was working on anything he thought would be dangerous. Like everyone else, we bought into the theory his murder was related to his job for the city. It’s only recently we realized there was more going on. When you called our classified operations desk, we came to the conclusion you might be someone we should talk to.”
Kyla bit her tongue to keep from telling Shaw to go screw himself. If she hadn’t called that number on the card, the CIA would never have told her that her father had been working for them and probably been murdered because of something they asked him to do.
“Do you know what my dad was working on before his death?” she asked, forcing herself to stay calm instead of demanding why the CIA hadn’t cared enough to even look into his murder.
Shaw shook his head. “We were hoping you could tell us. Like I said, your father was an independent contractor. He did some hacking at our request, but for the most part, he followed his own leads wherever they led. If he found something interesting, he’d send it to us, but he didn’t send anything to his handler for weeks prior to his death.”
Kyla remembered the thousands of encrypted files she’d found on his computer. Could something in there tell her who’d killed her dad?
“Do you have any idea where your father did his hacking?” Shaw asked, interrupting her thoughts. “We’ve been looking for where he did his work for a while now so we can recover his files. You wouldn’t happen to have any ideas, would you?”
She had a vision of a bunch of men in suits descending on her dad’s Bat Cave, callously ripping cables from the computers and stripping the hard drives out to make it easier to bypass his passwords and encryption programs. They’d dig through the files, keeping what they thought was interesting and destroying anything that was beneath them—or might lead to uncomfortable questions. And what if they found information about who killed her father? Would they do was was in his best interest or their own?
Kyla met Shaw’s gaze. “Sorry. I don’t know where dad did any of his stuff for the CIA. As far as I know, he did everything from home or his office at work.”
Shaw nodded thoughtfully. “We checked both those places and didn’t find anything.”
She forced herself to not flinch at the thought of the CIA searching her parents’ house without her or her mom’s knowledge. It made her want to punch Shaw in the nose.
Shaw stayed a little while longer, asking more questions about her father. Like where he went and what he did when he wasn’t working. When he didn’t get anything useful from her, Shaw started asking her about personal stuff, such as her college program, her hobbies, and how she knew SEAL Team 5. Shaw probably though he was subtle, but it didn’t take long for Kyla to realize he knew she was a member of The People and that she was a hacker like her dad. The CIA agent didn’t make it blatant, but it seemed like he was trying to recruit her. Though whether he actually wanted her in the agency or as an expendable freelance asset on the side like her dad wasn’t clear.
Kyla didn’t commit one way or the other. She could play this game, too.
“If you don’t mind, I’d like to come talk to you again in a few days after you’ve had a chance to think over our conversation,” Shaw said as he left.
She shrugged. “Sure.”
Kyla forced herself to wait a full thirty minutes after Shaw walked out of her dorm before grabbing her car keys and walking casually to where her Prius was parked in the lot next to the building. She felt naked without her cell phone, but it was too easy for the CIA to track her if she’d brought it. As soon as she was off campus, she drove across town to a car wash, spending an extra long time cleaning the undercarriage of her vehicle in case Shaw had put a GPS tracker on it. Then she took the long way to her dad’s Bat Cave, pulling up in front of the building and going inside only after making sure no one was following her.
It took a few hours to figure out the pattern her father used for his file encryption passwords—a rolling number generator based on the formula for wind loads with Kyla’s and her mother’s birthdays taking the place of the key coefficients of pressure, drag, exposure, gust response, and area.
Yeah, her dad had been a complete and total geek.
After several more hours of skimming through files filled with information he’d dug up while hacking, Kyla came to a far more important conclusion. Her dad had been up to his eyeballs in terrorists, criminals, corrupt politicians, influence peddlers, arms dealers, cold-blooded killers, ruthless dictators, and mega-rich people with psychotic agendas. The people he’d been snooping on were flat out terrifying.
Now all she had to do was figure out which one of them had murdered him.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
WES STIFLED A yawn as he drove to Kyla’s dorm. Thanks to all the aches and pains from his run-in with that white van, then the packing crate that fell on him, he hadn’t gotten much sleep the past two days. The long bumpy ride from Puerto Quetzal to the airport in Guatemala City in the bed of a pickup truck hadn’t helped, either. But as bad as all of that had been—and it had been bad—it didn’t compare to the mission debriefing he’d gone through when they arrived in San Diego. Actually, debriefing wasn’t the right term for what he’d experienced. Interrogation was definitely a much better word for it.
The moment they landed at the North Shore Naval Air Station, he, Holden, and Sam had been separated and taken back to the Imperial Beach facility in different cars. From there, he’d been grilled for six nonstop hours from every federal agency that had a stake in this mission. The CIA had been the worst, blatantly accusing him of leaking information on the raid directly to Chapman. The fact that Wes had almost gotten killed in the ambush was an inconvenient tidbit of information not worth considering.
Wes tried not to get pissed at the accusation. Two of their operations had gone bad, and the CIA was taking that embarrassment out on him and his SEAL Teammates. Wes was a big boy. He could handle a little heat.
But then they’d started asking about Kyla and suddenly, the situation had gotten very real, very fast. During the questioning, he said he’d been with her when he’d gotten the call to go wheels up, mentioning he hadn’t told her anything about where he was going, especially since he hadn’t known at the time. He expected that to be the end of the conversation.
It wasn’t.
They wanted to know how long he and Kyla had been seeing each other, and whether they were sleeping together. Had he initiated the relationship or had she? Who’d pushed for it to transition from friends to lovers? They broug
ht up the stuff with Nesbitt, poking, prodding, and questioning his involvement in the councilman’s death. They even implied she was only sleeping with him to gain access to classified information. He’d almost vapor locked when the jackasses asked if Kyla knew the location of the Guatemalan mission, terrified they already knew she’d hacked into their computer and called his motel room.
But somehow, he’d kept it together and didn’t give anything away, even when the CIA had gone well beyond the point of reason with their asinine questions. Finally, he’d simply stopped answering them. Why bother when they seemed to have all the answers anyway? Chasen and Commander Hunt had showed up a little while later, demanding they either bring in a polygraph or end their silly game.
That’s when the CIA had let him go. Thank God. Because if it had come down to a lie detector test, he would have been beyond screwed.
Wes called Kyla the moment he’d gotten out of the debriefing, but she hadn’t responded to any of his calls or text messages even though he knew she didn’t have classes today. Part of him worried the a-holes at the CIA had already swooped in and picked her up for questioning. Which was why he was doing almost twenty miles over the speed limit. If she wasn’t at her dorm, he’d try her mom’s place. If she wasn’t there, then Owen and Andrew were next on the list. From there…well, he wasn’t sure.
He breathed a sigh of relief when he spotted her Prius parked in her usual space in the parking lot, practically running the two flights of stairs and down the hallway to her room.
Wes slowed when he heard Kyla’s voice coming from inside. A moment later, he picked up a man’s. He knew most of her male friends and it didn’t sound like any of them. Was it someone from the CIA here to confront her?
He resisted the urge to kick in the door, instead knocking a few times like a civilized person.
Kyla opened it almost immediately. She stared at him, eyes wide, then threw herself into his arms, squeezing him so tightly he had to hold back a groan of pain. He injuries were better, but the bruises were still there. Kyla wouldn’t be happy when she saw them.
But she was happy now. That was enough.
“I missed you,” she said as she buried her face against his chest. “Why didn’t you call when you got back?”
“I did,” he said. “You didn’t answer.”
Wes cupped her face in his hands and kissed her long and hard. It had only been a few days, but damn, he’d missed her, too. Slipping his hand into her hair, he pulled her even closer. He was ready to take her up against the nearest wall in her dorm when he heard a man clear his throat. Crap, he’d forgotten she had a visitor.
He lifted his head and immediately froze as he recognized the blond guy standing there.
Shaw.
Wes had only met the CIA agent once briefly at a SEAL team cookout, but he was sure Shaw was the same guy who’d been part of the joint SEAL/CIA operation down in Mexico half a year or so ago that had put Chapman on the radar.
Now, he was standing in Kyla’s dorm room. That couldn’t be a coincidence. Was he the agent the CIA had sent to question her?
“Petty Officer Marshall. I was wondering when you’d show up,” Shaw said. “Good to see you survived your mission. I heard rumors it didn’t go well.”
Kyla stepped out of Wes’s arms to close the door, then moved over until she stood halfway in between him and Shaw, curiously looking back and forth at the two of them. “You two know each other?”
Wes hesitated, trying to figure out what he’d walked in on. It didn’t seem like an interrogation. But then what was it?
“Not really,” he said, looking at Kyla. “Shaw was involved in a mission with Nash a while ago. I didn’t realize you two were friends.”
“Friends?” Kyla snorted. “That would be a no. Shaw is here to make me an offer.”
Wes got a sinking feeling in his gut. He had a hard time thinking of any offer Shaw or the CIA might make Kyla that he’d be down with. If he had to guess, Shaw was here to either offer her some kind of deal if she confessed to hacking the Navy’s computers or a job at the agency so she could hack for them.
He wasn’t thrilled at the prospect of either of those things.
“What kind of offer?” he asked.
Kyla started to answer, but Shaw cut her off.
“The exact nature of the offer I made to Ms. Wells is classified. And while you might have the clearance, you don’t have the need-to-know.” Shaw gave Kyla a hard look. “What we talked about isn’t something you can share with anyone. Not even your boyfriend.”
Kyla’s mouth tightened, but she nodded. The look of frustration in her eyes was something he was familiar with. He’d experienced in many times himself. At the same time, Wes hated there were things going on in her life he couldn’t know about. The shoe being on the other foot sucked ass. He didn’t like the idea of her keeping secrets from him.
“I’ll check in with you in a few days so you can give me your answer,” Shaw told Kyla before giving Wes a nod. “Petty Officer Marshall.”
Wes glared at the CIA agent as the man left. He seriously didn’t like the guy.
The moment the door closed behind Shaw, he pulled Kyla back into his arms, and for a long time, they were too busy touching, kissing, and reveling in the sensation of being back in each other’s arms to say much of anything.
“Are you really okay?” Kyla asked when they came up for air. “And I want the truth please.”
He nodded. “I got a little bounced around and picked up a few more bumps and bruises you aren’t going to like, but I’m okay. Really.”
Before she could say anything, he wrapped his arms around her and buried his nose in her hair. Damn, she smelled good.
“So,” he said slowly, “you and Shaw?”
She sighed. “You know I can’t talk about that. Like he said, it’s classified. Which are two words I never expected to hear coming out of my mouth. At least when it comes to me not being able to talk about something.”
He winced, hating the sound of that. But he couldn’t expect her to behave and follow the rules if he wouldn’t.
“Okay, you can’t talk about Shaw. I get that. What can you talk about? Because I can tell there’s something bothering you.”
Kyla didn’t answer right away and when she finally did, her voice was so soft, he could barely hear her.
“It’s my dad. He was working for the CIA as an independent hacker.” She looked at Wes, her eyes glistening with tears. “And I never knew.”
Whatever Wes had expected her to say, it wasn’t that. “Um, okay. How did you find out?”
Kyla took a small step back, like she needed space to breathe. “I stumbled over his hacker’s nest. One thing led to another and Shaw showed up and told me everything. Without saying anything classified, I can tell you that he’s hoping certain skills run in the family.”
That confirmed his assumption about Shaw wanting Kyla to work for the CIA. But before he could ask if she was considering taking the job, she spoke again.
“You want to know the worse part out of all this?” she said. “It looks like Nesbitt was telling the truth. The CIA had my dad snooping around some really dangerous people. Stavros was probably working for one of them when he killed my dad.”
Wes was exhausted, so his head was probably a bit fuzzy right now, but he should have been able to keep up. “How do you know what your dad was investigating?”
Kyla gave him a sheepish look. “Remember that part where I said I’d stumbled over my dad’s hacker nest? Well, I never got around to turning it over to the CIA because I don’t trust them to do right by him. I’ve been digging through all of it and discovered Dad was going after some seriously bad people. If they realized what he was up to, any one of them could have had him killed.”
Wes stared at her, the implications of that hitting him. Not only was she playing the CIA at their own game and keeping secrets from them at the same time she was considering their job offer, she was also digging up dirt on the
people who might have murdered her father. It was brilliant—and terrifying—and he wanted to tell her to back off before she got herself killed, too. But he knew saying the words would be a waste of time. Kyla wasn’t the kind to woman who’d ever back off even if he was the one to ask her to do it.
So, he decided to ask her for the next best thing.
“I’m not going to even try and ask you to stop, but I am going to ask you not to do anything that will get you hurt,” he said. “Don’t go anywhere or do anything without letting someone else know. And if you run into anything serious and need backup, ask for it, okay?”
Kyla draped her arms around his neck with a teasing smile. “What’s your definition of stupid?”
Wes didn’t bite. “Kyla, I’m serious. If you’re right, one of the people your dad was looking into figured it out and had him murdered. I won’t let the same thing happen to you. I’ve just found you. I can’t lose you.”
The mere thought of something happening to her about made his heart stop.
The smile disappeared from Kyla’s face. “Nothing stupid. I promise.”
He kissed her, so grateful she wasn’t fighting him on this. It was crazy, but hearing her promise made breathing seem a little bit easier.
“You look tired,” she said. “Do you want me to fix you something to eat or would you rather just go to bed?”
Wes chuckled and nibbled her soft perfect lips again. “Bed sounds good. As long as you’re okay with not getting any sleep for a while.”
Giving him a smile that lit up the room, Kyla took his hand and tugged him toward the bed.
* * * * *
THAT’S IT?” OWEN asked, staring up at the twenty-two names displayed on the large monitor mounted on the wall on the far side of the Bat Cave. “These are our suspects? You really think one of the people on this list are responsible for your dad’s death?”
Kyla looked up from the text messages records she’d been digging through for the last twenty minutes. They were from a small-time director in Hollywood, and while the texts were salacious, creepy, and made her want to take a bath, there was nothing indicative of some master scheme to take over the world or even commit a crime. It made her wonder why her dad had wasted his time looking at the guy. Tossing the stack of texts aside, she focused on the monitor full of some of the scariest people her father had been spying on.
