An Aria for Nick (Christian Romantic Suspense) (Song of Suspense)

by Bridgeman, Hallee

  He closed his eyes and gave a brief shake of his head, as if to clear it. When he opened them again, all the depths of emotion she'd seen just seconds before had vanished. "Yes. Don't forget; give me only until about six-thirty. You won't be able to stay here by yourself, and the more of a head start you get, the better."

  "What if you're on your way?"

  "If I can't make it back in time, I'll head for the train station and meet you in D. C." They walked back toward the living room. Nick's duffel bags were packed and standing by the door. He pulled an envelope out of his pocket and handed it to her. "This is what you'll need to put on Jen's windshield. Don't open it or she'll think it's been tampered with."

  She looked at the envelope, recognizing his handwriting. She watched him pick up his bags, slinging one over his shoulder. Somehow she felt calm, not panicky or scared at all. He put his hand on the doorknob, then turned back to her. "Aria —"

  She moved closer to him, stood on her toes, and gave him a hard, quick kiss on the mouth. "God be with you, Nick."

  He said nothing more. He opened the door and walked to his car. Aria watched him load the bags into the back seat, then she shut the door, locking both locks and latching the chain. She went back to the kitchen where she had set up her computer and sat down, typing out all the possible passwords Peter might use.

  Opening up her compiler, she started constructing a script to automate her attack. She had a few password cracking programs from her college days back at her house, but she didn't have them with her. Instead, she was going to have to attempt to brute force her way through and a script would speed things up. All the while, between humming and whistling nonsense music while she coded, she whispered prayers for Nick's protection and for her mental acuity.

  ¯¯¯¯

  Chapter 16

  IT took Nick an hour to reach Portland. He stopped on the outskirts to wash the car. In the event that he had to dump this car he didn't want to leave any evidence of where Aria might be hiding. The soil from the dirt road leading to the cabin would shed light on her whereabouts like a neon sign pointing the way. It was nearly eight and completely dark now, with a light mist falling. He felt grateful for the mist, knowing how much more cover it would provide when he reached his objective.

  He found Harrington's house easily, and parked down the street, just close enough so that he could watch the place. He shifted in his seat until he felt comfortable and sat back, prepared to wait for two hours. There were still lights on in the downstairs windows. If Harrington wasn't in bed by ten-thirty, he wouldn't be able to take the time he needed to do a thorough enough search.

  He took a quick look around, looking for movement or anyone observing him. His scan was as second nature to him as breathing. All the cars in sight of the house were empty, and seemed to belong. If this house was being watched to see if Nick showed up, nothing he could see pointed to it. Good. That would just make it easier for him. He could break in under surveillance, and not be seen, but felt glad that he didn't have to worry about that this time.

  With some time to spare, he pulled a pen light from his pocket, and pulled his worn Soldier's Bible from the cargo pocket of his pants. It was falling apart, with loose pages and dust from countries all over the world but he didn't have any desire to replace it. He just handled it with care and taped whatever needed to be taped.

  Using the pen light, he opened the Bible and started reading. Forgive your enemies…

  With a sigh, he closed the Bible and leaned his head back. Raymond Williams was sober and had found God? What was Nick supposed to do with that information? Could he actually pray for the man who had fathered him?

  He looked at his watch. Ten-fifteen. The lights in the downstairs went off, and an upstairs light came on, then blinked off again. Nick waited ten more minutes, then started his car and drove around the block. An apartment building was on the other side and he backed the car into a space, then got out, locked it, and put the keys behind the front tire. His black fatigue pants had several pockets, and he already had what he needed on him. He transferred his duffel bags to the trunk.

  He cut through the back lawn of the apartment building, and came to the fence surrounding Harrington's back yard. Alarm companies did not wire every window, and homeowners felt safe with the mistaken thought that second floor windows provided a more difficult entry. A petty thief might be dissuaded by the signs in the lawn advertising the alarm company, but a professional would know how to get in, what windows were wired, and in the case of an empty house, how to disable the alarm in the ten seconds he had once the door was open. He climbed the fence and crouched on the top so as not to silhouette himself, balancing for the jump.

  He landed perfectly and quietly on a low part of the roof, and ran silently across, up and over to the other side. He crouched on a particularly steep part of the rooftop on the front side of the house facing the street and examined a window that led into the kitchen. The window was a double hung double pane vinyl job with a vinyl clad steel frame. He checked the frame and the glass and saw no evidence of alarm wires. Using a titanium lock picking chisel that was almost paper thin, he quietly and very quickly worked the latches open, and then lifted the bottom sash. He counted to ten and no alarm sounded. He went in leaving the window slightly cracked behind him.

  He moved through the house, and at the door to the office, he stopped and checked for wires. Just as he suspected — this room had added security. It was quick work to disable the door alarm, and he pulled his goggles out of his pocket and switched them to infrared just to be on the safe side. He could see no further evidence of security from where he stood. He stepped through the threshold and looked at his watch. Eleven — he had one hour.

  ¯¯¯¯

  ANOTHER bleep sounded from her laptop sitting on the table staring at her, announcing that Aria once again had input the wrong password. If it bleeped at her one more time, she was going to toss the stupid machine through the window.

  Despite her frustration, an outside observer would be amazed she had gotten this far in this short amount of time. In moments of elegant activity and ingenious if not inspired hacking, she had already captured his hashes. There were programs that could have cracked the password from those hashes in seconds flat. She was using a homemade script she had written a little over thirty minutes ago coupled with her knowledge of the algorithm.

  Aria took a deep breath and leaned back, trying to come up with another possible word. She'd tried everything she could think of. What could it be? It would be something obvious. She remembered Peter complaining about NWT's rule that passwords must be changed every thirty days. He said he always had a hard time coming up with something. His home computer was new. She'd helped him set it up, and had turned her back when he put in his password. Inspiration struck. She leaned forward and typed in "ariasuarez" as a possible password. No bleep.

  She was in. She breathed a sigh of relief and looked at her watch. It was already eleven-thirty.

  ¯¯¯¯

  HARRINGTON obviously didn't think he needed to cover his tracks in his own home. He had copies of everything. Nick had struck gold. There was so much he didn't even have time to go through it all, so he started digitally recording everything without reading it first. They would enhance the film later, blow up the details of the papers, and maybe Aria would know what it all meant. It took him forty-five minutes to complete the film, and he looked at his watch. At NWT they conducted a shift change at midnight, then again at two. He needed to be in by twelve-thirty to have the time to do everything he needed to do there.

  Nick put the office back in order exactly as if he had never been there, then reconnected the alarm to the door. He made his way back through the house and out the window, carefully levering the locks back on the window sash. He couldn't close them all the way because he didn't have the angle from the outside. Still, the window was closed and locked. Unless Harrington was looking for signs of a home invasion, or until he opened or cleaned the wi
ndow, he would never suspect.

  He jumped from the roof to the ground and climbed back over the fence. A dog somewhere in the neighborhood began to bark, so Nick was careful to stay in the shadows of the trees cast by the streetlights as he cut back through the lawn of the apartment complex and got back to the car. Another glance at his watch told him he was right on time.

  He started the car and pulled out of the parking lot with the head lights off. Once he turned on the street, he drove about fifty yards, then stopped, waiting to see if another vehicle followed him. Nothing moved, so he turned on the lights and drove on, turning in the direction of NWT.

  ¯¯¯¯

  PETER obviously felt safe leaving things unsecured on his home computer. That was a common error. Simply disconnecting the computer from any outside internet and locking it down to a VPN only connection would be enough security for most people. All the better for her right now, she thought, and went to work.

  He had another meeting arranged to hand over some more information. Aria wasn't able to trace where the message came from, but she copied the file and the headers and saved it on her computer to show Nick. He'd said they needed to see information actually change hands. She kept looking, finding copies of years' worth of correspondence stored in his old work folders.

  Oh Peter, you foolish, foolish man. If nothing else, he should have encrypted the files or saved them onto a self encrypting backup and erased his hard drive. The first thing the authorities would do if he were arrested would be to search his computer.

  Aria looked at her watch. Twelve-fifteen. She felt comfortable staying on for another half-hour at the most. She didn't want to leave too many traces in the logs, in case Peter actually checked them.

  ¯¯¯¯

  NICK aimed the grappling gun and fired, the hook traveling the distance and sinking into the wall exactly where he needed it to, burying itself eight inches into the steel reinforced concrete wall. He waited for five minutes, making sure there wasn't an alarm on the outer walls, and when there was no movement around him, he secured the other end of the cable to the fence and pulled on it with all of his might. It didn't budge. He secured it to a turnbuckle and cranked the tension until the fence began to give. Good enough.

  He put on a backpack, hooked himself to a makeshift harness, and climbed onto the cable, wrapping his legs around it and hanging upside down. He hooked the harness to the cable, and used a pulley to quickly propel himself along it like a reverse zip line. The problem with feeling secure about infrared sensors was that you could go above them or below them, and no one would be the wiser.

  He reached the building, switched his goggles from infrared to starlight, and looked up. The ledge on the window a story above him was made out of concrete block and about six inches thick. He hoped that the block would retain its integrity after being speared with a steel hook, and aimed the grappling gun. It went through the block, about half of the hook coming out of the top. Nick pulled on the cable, then hung from it while still secured to the other cable. The block held, so he released from the first cable and climbed hand over fist to the ledge, then perched on the ledge and etched into the old glass. He reached his hand in and had to break through the paint that had been coating the latch for who knew how long, finally able to unlock the window. He raised it up and waited another five minutes, his legs starting to cramp from his unnatural crouching position. No sirens sounded, and no lights flooded the yard, so he entered Peter Harrington's office. Information from Aria had saved him having to search through any of the other buildings.

  Nick needed to know how Harrington got the information out. Lighter security for administration or not, there had to be a place Harrington stored the data before he transported it; a kind of digital staging area. From what Nick could glean from the snatches of information he retained of the files in Harrington's home office, this had been going on for years. The fact that he had not been caught yet told Nick that everything was carefully plotted out and executed. That meant that there was a place where things were kept. Where else would he keep it but in his realm? Harrington struck Nick as the kind of guy who would only feel comfortable locating the stash somewhere he could check on it constantly, make sure it was still there and okay.

  The glow of the security light was enough to enable his goggles to do their job, and he could see perfectly in the office. The desk revealed nothing; neither hidden compartments nor secret drawers. Next, Nick searched the filing cabinets, still coming up empty. Frustrated, he looked at his watch. He needed to move soon, needed to not be on the property during the next shift change. He went back to the desk and knelt to look under it. When he shifted his weight, he felt one of the tiles under his knee move.

  Nick pulled a dark commando knife from the sheath at his ankle and pried the tile loose. Got you, he thought, and began to film the contents of the cache. If Nick were a betting man, he would have bet that there was some sort of storage closet underneath him, and unless some major renovations were going to be done to the building, no one would be aware of the foot of space that was missing from the ceiling height. The shape of the hole in the floor was about that of a closet opening.

  He finished filming and put the tiles back in place. As he stood, a bright flare blinded him, and he ripped the night vision goggles off to see Balder shining a flashlight in his direction. He stood in the corner of the room, near a closet opening. Nick cursed himself when he realized he should have checked the room with the infrared before he started searching, to make sure no heat sources were in the vicinity.

  Keeping an outward calm, he put the first strap of the backpack on one shoulder, and acted as if he were reaching behind him for the other strap, while he greeted the assassin standing in front of him. "Hey, Balder. Murder any innocents on your way over?"

  The agent code named Balder was a tall, thin man from Columbia. His real name was probably only known to some dead drug cartel members currently enjoying unmarked shallow graves in an anonymous South American jungle. He'd been sickened by the drug empires that sprang up around him in his lifetime, and had moved to the United States, trading information for citizenship. Because of him, several drug lords were taken out of the picture, most of them by Balder's own hand, and he had proven himself capable for the job the government had in mind for him. He'd been with NISA for ten years and had never failed in a mission.

  Nick couldn't stand the man, knowing how much pleasure he derived from every assignment he completed, and personally thought that he must have figured out how to cheat on the psychological evaluations they endured annually. No one who took that much pleasure in killing could qualify as sane.

  He had always respected Balder's partner, Hecate. He didn't understand how someone who consistently remained on the up-and-up could partner with such a sociopathic killer. Over the years, Nick realized that Kate balanced Balder and, in a strange way, restrained him somewhat.

  Balder ran his finger along the thin mustache gracing his upper lip and smiled a wicked smile. "Not as many as I should have my friend." He flicked off his flashlight so Nick could see the pistol he held pointed in Nick's direction with a long suppresser attached to the end of the barrel. "Perhaps if not for your interference, I would be in a better mood this fine evening."

  Nick had a grip on the handle of the knife that he wore strapped to his back, and saw that Balder hadn't realized it yet. He also wondered why Balder hadn't just shot him already. It would be consistent with his style. Obviously, he did not have orders to take Nick out, only the girl. Nick searched his mind for a way to use that information. "Why don't you tell me where the girl is, Nighthawk? I'll make it quick and painless for her. Then perhaps I'll leave you for Charlie to deal with and not kill you myself."

  The suppresser would nullify most of the explosive noise of the gunshot but it would still be noisy. The main reason NISA used .45 caliber rounds instead of say, nine-millimeter, was that a .45 caliber slug traveled at less than the speed of sound. The noise of any supersonic round c
ould not be suppressed despite the ridiculous gadgetry Hollywood paraded past popcorn munching audiences.

  "Leave me for Charlie to take care of? You mean the guy whose life I saved three times already? Better get your facts straight, amigo. You know I don't like you, but you also know me well enough by now to know — with certainty — that I wouldn't even be here without orders. When's the last time you checked in?" Nick asked. If he could get the suppressed pistol or use his knife, he could take care of Balder in a relatively quiet fashion.

  Balder didn't like the question. Nick saw a shadow of doubt cross the man's face. "I communicated with HQ two hours ago."

  Nick nodded. "So you know the girl took sixty grand out of her bank and fled. Did you also know the evidence against Harrington actually panned out? He's going to meet up with the girl and get his payout sometime tomorrow."

  Balder took careful aim at Nick's face. "You're lying."

  Nick shook his head. "Sorry to disappoint you, hero. They sent me here to retrieve the meeting time and place. It's all right here." He gestured at the hole in the floor using the long commando knife in his right hand.

  Balder waved him backward with the barrel of the pistol. "If you're lying, I'll kill you slowly."

  "In your dreams, hot shot." Nick taunted, then slowly laid his knife down with his right hand, making a big show of it while backing off two steps.

  Balder took three steps forward. When he turned his flashlight back on to peer down into Harrington's cache, Nick struck. He simultaneously drew his backup knife from its sheath in the middle of his back with his left hand while he locked Balder's gun hand with his right hand.

  With three downward tearing punches, Nick opened up Balder's neck and chest with the knife. He then very quickly blocked an incoming stab from Balder's left hand — in which a knife had replaced the flashlight — and pried the gun from his fingers.