Stolen

by Allison Brennan

  “But you still helped him.”

  Gannon shrugged. “I guess. He told me to find a way to partner with Deanna. That wasn’t hard—no one wanted to work with her.”

  “Why?”

  “She’s short-tempered, arrogant, and not a team player. She cuts corners. Don’t get me wrong—Deanna is real smart, and she sees connections faster than most people. She just gets frustrated by the system.”

  “Did Senator Paxton tell you why he wanted you to work with Deanna?”

  “Not at first. But last month he said that Sean Rogan was in New York and he wanted Deanna to find a reason to arrest him.”

  “And you didn’t find that suspicious?”

  “I already knew about her obsession with Rogan. She doesn’t make it a secret, at least not in our unit. I helped her create a file that showed Colton Thayer was involved in a mortgage fraud scheme so that we could get the time and resources to pursue Thayer, knowing that Rogan was working for him. But Thayer is clean, at least with regards to financial transactions. Cybercrimes had a file on him, but they’d never been able to build even a minimal case. Torres gave us some leeway. But Deanna let everything else suffer.”

  “Why did the senator want Rogan arrested?”

  “He didn’t want him working with Thayer.”

  “Do you know why Senator Paxton hired Thayer to steal information from a pharmaceutical company?”

  Gannon was surprised Noah had that information. “You know about that?”

  “Obviously, so do you.”

  “I don’t know details. All Senator Paxton said was that his longtime friend was getting cold feet and he was in too deep to back out. I think—I don’t have any proof—that Joyce Bonner had something incriminating on him. What, I don’t know.”

  “Do you know what Joyce Bonner was getting cold feet about?”

  “No.”

  “Did you give Deanna Sean’s address?”

  Gannon shook his head. “I couldn’t find him anywhere; Paxton wanted Deanna to detain him. I couldn’t follow him—I was doing the work of two agents because Deanna was solely focused on Rogan.”

  “When you followed him, how did you do it?”

  “The only place I knew he would show up was at Colton Thayer’s. But he must have the subway map imprinted in his head, because he always lost me in the subway system. To be honest, I gave up.”

  Someone else—someone who knew Sean would go to Colton’s eventually—could have followed Sean. Or put a GPS on him. Someone inside Thayer’s criminal family. Or Thayer himself.

  And then given the address to Deanna and set her up.

  Noah put a tablet in front of Gannon. “Write down everything you just told me. If you’ve forgotten anything, include it. Everything that you know about the information Paxton wanted you to get, everything about Deanna’s obsession with Sean Rogan, everything about PBM. I’ll be back in an hour.”

  But an hour later it was nearly eleven and Noah got a strange message on his cell phone:

  Plan moved up 24 hours. Hurry.

  It had to be Sean. Noah almost texted back, except that the number was unrecognized and he didn’t know if someone else had access to it. He called Rick. “Sean just made contact. They’re at PBM now. I need a SWAT team ASAP.”

  “You got it.”

  But even so, they wouldn’t arrive at PBM for at least forty minutes.

  “I’m going now.”

  “Not without backup.”

  “Dammit, Rick—” Noah stopped. In a calmer voice he said, “I got Sean into this.”

  “I’m not going to let you go solo into an unknown, high-risk situation.”

  “I won’t be alone.” He hung up, feeling sick. He was a soldier at heart. He never disobeyed orders.

  Unless the life of one of his men required it. In war, tough choices had to be made.

  And Sean was one of his men now. Noah wasn’t going to sacrifice him.

  Noah took the risk and sent a text message back:

  Trust no one.

  Immediately he received a message that the text had failed.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Breaking into a secure pharmaceutical company was not an easy task under the best of circumstances, but Sean didn’t trust anyone on his team and that made watching his own back just as important as not getting caught.

  There had been no opportunity for Sean to contact Noah to tell him that the operation had been moved up until Colton distributed the burner phones as they got in position outside Pham-Bonner Medical. The phones were programmed not to send or receive messages from any number not programmed into the chip, but Sean hacked the SIM card and added Noah’s number to the send list.

  But there was no way that Noah would get here in time. Sean and his team had it planned down to the minute and should be in and out in twenty-two minutes.

  After? They would regroup at the van or, if there was any problem, at the safe house. But Sean was increasingly nervous.

  He’d broken into numerous facilities, many more secure than PBM. But most of those assignments were part of his job at RCK, where he was hired to break into a business and identify flaws in security. There was no real threat, though getting caught was never fun.

  This time, the guards had real guns, and so did his team. Noah wasn’t on the perimeter to make sure that if things went south no one died.

  Worse, one of these four people knew Kurt LeGrand and Sean was certain LeGrand was responsible for killing Hunter. Maybe LeGrand hadn’t pulled the trigger, but it was no coincidence that Hunter had died right after he updated Colton’s security system. And Hunter had been scared, which meant he either knew who Kurt LeGrand was or knew who LeGrand was meeting with. He’d called Sean, not Colton.

  Was Sean wrong about his friend? Colton had always been an ideologue. He believed in what he was doing, and while he broke laws, he’d never hurt anyone. His idea of an attack was destroying someone through cyberspace. At worst, he might screw with their finances or steal their identity and make their life hell. But murder? No. Colton didn’t even carry a gun—he was the only one unarmed tonight.

  The guns were another problem for Sean. Sean hadn’t wanted to carry, but both Skye and Evan were, and Sean wasn’t going on an operation defenseless if the person he least trusted was armed.

  Carol was monitoring from the van, and she had an open line into everyone’s burner phones, which they were also using as radios. If Sean had a way of sending Noah the frequency, he could eavesdrop on the conversation. If he arrived in time.

  “Time,” Carol said.

  Colton nodded and kissed her, then motioned for the rest of the team to leave.

  It was eleven o’clock on Wednesday night.

  They’d discussed the plan for weeks, run through drills, and initially everything worked better than Sean could have predicted.

  They entered through the employee doors in the back. They could have used Bonner’s badge, except that Security would be alerted that she’d entered the building. It was safer to hack into the server and take it down for the minute it took them to get inside, then bring the external security back up. Her card could be used on any of the internal doors. While her access would be logged, Security wasn’t automatically alerted when internal doors were opened.

  The system was fairly sophisticated, but not perfect. They had two guards at all times, one who manned the cameras—the easiest system for Sean to replace with a false feed—and one who roamed. Before Hunter was killed, he had monitored rotations. The guard on foot during the week rarely deviated from his route—that’s why they had chosen Thursday night. The weekend guard—Friday and Saturday nights—was unpredictable and seemed to go wherever he felt whenever he felt. But Wednesday should hold the same predictability as Thursday.

  They didn’t need to talk. Carol was with the van out of camera range monitoring silent alarms and police activity. Skye and Evan split off to obtain the records on the bio-weapon, and Sean and Colton went to Bonner’s office t
o crack the safe and get the information Senator Paxton wanted. According to Paxton, the real records of the leukemia trials that had killed Travis Thayer were also in Bonner’s personal safe.

  Sean didn’t believe they were. He didn’t know what Colton was going to do when he found out that Paxton had double-crossed him. Because that was the way Paxton operated.

  They had thirteen minutes before the guard would be in this building, seventeen minutes until he had a 50 percent chance of walking this floor. But they were all responsible for getting out and meeting at the car in twenty-five minutes. They’d started a clock from the point they left the vehicle.

  Sean usually preferred to work alone, but this time he didn’t trust anyone. He didn’t like that Evan was off with Skye. Sean had tried to warn her earlier that he didn’t trust Evan, but she’d dismissed him.

  Colton worked on Bonner’s computer while Sean cracked the safe.

  The safe was in the wall behind her desk. The standard electronic lock wouldn’t be difficult to break with his equipment, but it would take time. He immediately hooked up his handheld computer and ran a custom program. While he did it, he sent Noah another message, taking care that Colton didn’t see what he was doing:

  Find radio frequency to track our progress.

  “I’m in,” Colton told Sean.

  Sean quickly sent his message to Noah through his handheld computer and then said, “Good. Copy and get out.”

  “She has access to everything.”

  “Shh.”

  “There’s a hidden drive here—”

  “C.,” Sean warned again. He really wished he was alone.

  It took his program two and a half minutes to crack the code. He still had nine minutes and thirty seconds before the guard was in the building. There were only two files in the safe, and Sean used a small digital camera to photograph each page. There were also several CDs that Sean copied on a special drive before putting them back. In the back there was a VHS tape.

  “C.,” Sean said. He held up the tape.

  Colton nodded. “Paxton said if there was a tape to get it.”

  Sean had no mechanism with him to view the tape. There was no label and no way he could copy the data, but he was not going to give it to Paxton without viewing it first.

  Then Sean saw the television with a VHS drive on the credenza.

  He walked over and put in the tape.

  “What are you doing?” Colton demanded.

  “We have to know what’s on it before we give it to him.”

  Sean turned on the television and put in the tape, impatiently waiting for it to play.

  It was a black and white recording in a private residence. The room was a well-appointed personal office or library. It had an older, grainy feel to it. The recording could be twenty years old, more or less. The camera had been mounted in the wall behind the desk. He could see only the back of the head of the man working at the desk. A younger Joyce Bonner walked in. She came over and started yelling. Sean had the sound off, so he didn’t hear what she said.

  The man came around the desk and slapped her. She fell to her knees. It was her husband, Thomas Lynch. She tried to get up and he kicked her down. She crawled away and he kicked her again. Sean’s stomach roiled at what he was witnessing.

  The library door opened and two men came in. One was Jonathan Paxton, and the other Sean recognized from photos as Joyce’s father, Randall Bonner. The two men pushed Lynch to the floor and kicked him like he’d just kicked his wife. Lynch said something to Jonathan, who then pulled out a gun and shot him.

  “Holy shit,” Colton whispered.

  Sean took out the tape and said, “No fucking way we’re giving this to Paxton. This is our leverage.”

  “Sean, we have to give this to Paxton so he’ll give me Travis’s documents.”

  “You said they were here!” Now Colton’s secrecy made sense. Paxton held the trials back to get Colton to do anything he wanted.

  “Shh!” Colton glanced around. “Paxton has them. It’s an even trade.”

  “Shit.” No way was Paxton going to give Colton anything. Sean doubted proof of the tainted leukemia trials even existed. It could all have been leverage Paxton used to force Colton to steal this tape.

  Colton grabbed the tape from Sean and put it in his own satchel.

  “This is my operation.” He glanced at his watch. “We’re late.”

  “This conversation is not over,” Sean said. But first they had to escape.

  They walked out of Bonner’s main office, but before stepping into the hall Sean took out his computer to track the guards.

  “Carol is tracking—”

  “I’ll do it myself,” Sean snapped. He flipped through the cameras and found the guard still in the adjoining building. He’d probably come through the underground tunnel because the night was frigid, but they still had an extra couple minutes.

  Sean continued to flip through the security cams—he saw the live feed while they’d routed a static recording of the facility to the guard station.

  He spotted Skye down the hall but couldn’t find Evan. “Okay,” Sean said, and Colton opened the door. They rounded the corner at the same time Skye came to them. She gave Sean two thumbs-up.

  “Where’s Evan?”

  “Shh—the guard will be back any minute. We need to go.”

  Sean grabbed her wrist and pulled her close to his face. He said in a low voice, “I warned you he was up to something. What do you know?”

  Her eyes darkened in surprise and maybe a little fear. Good. He wasn’t fooling around. This wasn’t a game, and Evan was dangerous. She needed to understand that. “Let go of me!” She pulled her arm away. “Shit, Sean, you’re being a jerk.”

  “I told you I didn’t trust him.” Sean flipped through the cameras again and realized that something was blocking his feed into the bio-lab. He decoded it and up popped Evan leaving the lab—with a backpack. He hadn’t had a backpack when he entered, or if he did, it had been folded in his tool bag.

  “What’s he doing in the lab?” Colton asked.

  “He’s not in the lab.”

  Sean said, “I hot-wired a live feed. He just left the damn lab.”

  Skye glared at him. “Now’s not the time. If you have a feed, where’s the damn guard?”

  Sean flipped to where he thought the guard would be. “Basement. He’s coming up the stairs toward the first floor.”

  “I’m outta here.”

  Colton looked confused.

  Sean said, “Stick close to me, C. Something’s up—with both of them.” As much as he hated to admit that Skye was involved with whatever scheme Evan had going, it was clear she was part of it.

  Sean wanted to take Evan down now—but Skye was right; they needed to bolt. And Sean needed to know what was in that backpack.

  Sean monitored the cameras. As soon as the guard entered the second floor, Sean said through his mic, “Guard is on two.”

  Sean, Colton, and Skye took the stairs down to the first floor and went out the way they’d come. They waited for Evan to the right of the door in a break area set up for smokers.

  “What’s Evan up to?” Sean demanded of Skye.

  “He’s not up to anything.”

  “Skye, I don’t want you to get hurt. You know something.”

  She smiled. “You do care.”

  “I just don’t want to see you in prison.”

  “How thoughtful.”

  The door opened and out came Evan.

  “Let’s go,” he said.

  Sean waited until they were outside the camera’s range before he grabbed Evan and slammed him against a tree.

  “What the fuck were you doing in the lab?”

  Evan looked at Sean like he was an idiot. “Let go of me.”

  Sean pushed him into the tree again. “Tell me what’s in that backpack.”

  “Sean, later,” Colton said. “We need to go.”

  Over the radio, Carol said, “A car is com
ing down the main road. Two people inside. I can’t make out anything else.”

  “Sean, Evan, now,” Colton said.

  “Get the backpack, Colton. He took something.”

  Colton hesitated, then reached down for the backpack.

  “Don’t touch it,” Skye said.

  From the corner of his vision, Sean saw that Skye had a gun aimed at Colton. “It would have been easier to do this later, but plans change,” Skye said.

  Evan made a move for the gun Sean had under his jacket, and Sean put him to the ground, a fist in his face. As Sean reached for his gun, Skye said, “I’ll shoot him, Sean.”

  Sean glanced at her and saw Colton was in her direct line of fire. She had a silencer on the end of her barrel. Evan jumped up and tried to hit Sean, but Sean ducked and Evan lost his balance.

  Sean turned to Skye. “Put the gun away! What are you doing?”

  “It’s now or later,” she said, and shot Colton twice in the chest.

  Colton fell to the ground and Sean ran toward Skye, not thinking about being shot. She wasn’t expecting him to attack and looked startled.

  A bolt of electricity hit him in the back. He fell to the ground even as he tried to fight the charge. He’d been Tasered before; he’d forgotten how painful it was.

  He looked up at the sky, but his vision was blurred. Skye came into rough focus. She was still holding the gun. He tried to speak, but nothing came out.

  “I told you Evan would do anything I said,” she said. “You were just naïve enough to believe he was in charge.”

  “Who’s there?” a guard called.

  “Go!” Skye ordered.

  “Ne-ne-nev—”

  “Save it, Sean.” Skye kissed him. He wanted to spit in her face, but his body refused to respond to his commands. “You’ll do exactly what I want once you see who’s waiting for you.”

  Evan pulled Sean up and half-dragged him down the slope toward the rear of PBM. The opposite direction from where Carol waited with the van. Sean could hear Carol’s frantic voice over the radio.