Secret Contract

by Dana Marton

Whoever had tried to take her out had to be connected somehow to what she was doing. She stopped typing and scrolled up the screen, her focus one hundred percent. When a dark shadow appeared at her bedroom door, she nearly jumped out of her skin.

  “You scared me.” She pressed a hand to her chest, to her heart that beat against her palm.

  “They say people who have a guilty conscience are easily startled.” Nick leaned against the door frame, his voice teasing.

  Since they’d been on the island he had traded his black camouflage cargo pants and black T-shirt for “tourist wear”: khaki shorts and print T-shirts. He had let his hair grow, too. He looked like a vacationing businessman.

  “They say people who sneak around in other people’s apartments are intruders,” she said.

  “I knocked twice. Said hello.”

  “Maybe.” She hadn’t been paying attention. “Come up with anything?”

  “No. Came over to see how far you’ve gotten with the bank.”

  “Not very far.” She’d made a ton of progress, but the breakthrough eluded her. She wanted the guy, whoever he was. He’d tried to get to her twice. Why?

  She would find out. At least now they knew where to look.

  “Did you get to the DMZ Web servers?”

  She smiled. Nobody in prison had said stuff to her like that. God, she’d missed being around people who knew what she was about.

  “Beyond the DMZ.” The Demilitarized Zone, the area between the two firewalls that protected most systems. “I’m through the second firewall and in the UNIX servers inside.”

  “Then what’s the problem?”

  “I should have the client list soon.” Because of online banking, client data was connected to the Internet, a straight path right to it. “I can’t find any employee data.”

  “What’s stopping you?”

  “I think it’s on a stand-alone server somewhere. Happens sometimes when companies merge. Not everything is integrated. And HR data is the kind that doesn’t strictly have to be.”

  “So how do we get to it?”

  “We can’t. Would you like a doughnut?” She offered him the half-empty box next to the laptop.

  He shook his head. “Don’t you have some obscure statistics on how bad those are for you?”

  She glanced around with a blank face. “What? Did someone say bad and doughnut in the same sentence? I didn’t hear anything.”

  He grinned and came over, squatted next to her chair and looked through the data on her screen. Even at thirty minutes past midnight, he vibrated energy. When he reached for the mouse to scroll down the screen, the side of his arm brushed against her breast for a split second. He didn’t seem to notice.

  She scooted away. The strong line of his jaw was covered with a day’s growth of stubble. He slept less than she did, if that was possible.

  He typed something on her keyboard, the light of the monitor reflecting in his eyes.

  “Hey—” she started to say, but as she looked at the code, she realized he was right. That could be another way they could try. “If you do that, you have to change the last four lines, too,” she said.

  She watched his strong hands and long fingers. Hands that could kill, she used to think when he’d been training her. In the past couple of days, she’d realized that they were hands that could also protect. It wasn’t wise to contemplate what else they could do.

  “There,” he said as he hit the enter key and looked at her.

  His face was just a few inches from her shoulder. He had nice lips, masculine and sharply defined, his blue-gray eyes bottomless. For a second, she could swear there was something between them, a crackling awareness intensified by the low lights and their nearness. Then the computer beeped and broke the spell.

  “Almost, but not quite,” she said as she glanced at the error message on the screen, relieved to have something to focus on. God, she was a jittery idiot. She couldn’t start thinking of him in any other way than as a teammate. No. No, no, no. She had got over being scared of and intimidated by him at the beginning. Although, she still disliked him on occasion—like last night. Still, they had seemed to arrive at a nearly comfortable, “we are working toward the same goal, we understand each other” kind of place. She liked that part a lot.

  If she started to think of him as a man, an attractive man, he would know. It would be embarrassing—woman fresh out of the can going after the first man who came close enough to grab.

  He looked at her as if he was expecting something. Then he seemed to refocus. “Almost doesn’t count.” He stood up and stepped away. “You okay?”

  Oh, God. He was noticing it already. She stared at the screen. “I’ll be fine just as soon as I can figure this out.”

  “I meant, you know, in general.”

  Oh, a personal question. She looked at him. It was the first one he’d asked. Bad timing. Really, really bad. They didn’t have a personal kind of relationship. She liked it that way. He was too overwhelming up close and personal.

  “Adjustment can be hard,” he said.

  “I don’t have time to worry about it.”

  He nodded. “You work day and night. Then some crazy bastard is after you. It must feel like you got the raw end of the deal. We do what we’re here to do, and things will get better. Must be hard to be out and still not able to visit anyone you knew before.”

  Not as hard as he thought. “My mother passed away while I was in jail.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  He’d probably known that already. It had to have been in her file. She shrugged. “We weren’t that close.” She hadn’t taken well to the idea of her only surviving child choosing the criminal life. “She wasn’t terribly happy with me. I was a disappointment to her.”

  The words hurt to say. They shouldn’t have. She thought she’d made her peace with all this in prison. What would her mother think of her now? What would her father, the college professor? Would they be proud that she was using her intelligence for something worthwhile, working for the benefit of others? He used to tell her not to worry about fitting in, that she would some day find her place in life. Was this it?

  “Welcome to the club,” Nick said. “I was a disappointment to my mother, too.”

  She had a hard time picturing that. He probably had a drawerful of medals at home. He seemed the kind of son mothers bragged about to their girlfriends. “Why? What did you do?”

  He shook his head.

  “Right. Can’t tell me anything about yourself. Top-secret operative and all that.” It was a good reminder that they weren’t friends, not even partners, really. He had a whole other life, probably all glamorous—double-oh-seven and all that—and definitely mucho mysterious.

  He watched her without saying anything.

  “Doesn’t seem fair, considering you know everything about me, including the brand of toothpaste I use.”

  He gave her a flat look. “My mother had a hard time getting over my choice of a military career.”

  Wow, a nugget of personal information. His military career seemed to fit him to a T. She couldn’t help the urge to dig. “What did she want you to be?”

  His response was long in coming, his expression odd as if he couldn’t believe he was telling her this, his voice almost inaudibly low. “A writer.”

  For a moment she thought he was joking, but the earnest—and embarrassed—expression on his face said otherwise. She couldn’t hold back her spreading grin, no matter how hard she tried to clamp her lips over her teeth.

  “Not funny,” he said, but a smile played over his lips.

  “It is from where I’m sitting.”

  He turned stone serious. “You realize, of course, that if you tell anyone, I will have to kill you.”

  “Why a writer?” she asked, not feeling particularly threatened.

  The mock severity in his face shifted into a seriously somber expression. “It doesn’t matter,” he said, but then added, “My father was a writer.” He waited a beat then sai
d, “It doesn’t matter,” again.

  She knew him well enough by now to know that part of the conversation was closed and he already regretted what little he had revealed. Had he been as bad a fit with his family as she had been in hers? Had he struggled against expectations as fiercely as she had?

  “So who will you get in touch with first when you get the chance?” he asked, neatly changing the subject.

  “My friends…” She hadn’t made many friends at college. She’d spent most of her time at the computer lab. Then when she’d landed her first job, she’d been too busy with her projects. “They’ve kind of drifted away.”

  Her real friends had been online, but since she hadn’t been allowed computer access in prison, she had lost touch with them, too. She’d signed on the boards a couple of times, was overwhelmed by the sheer number of new names, found a few old pals, but it wasn’t the right time to catch up with them just yet.

  “You got a raw deal.”

  It felt incredibly nice to hear another person say that, to know that he felt that way. “Bad timing.”

  He nodded.

  By the time she was twenty-three, she’d been one of the best hackers out there, having mastered over a dozen programming languages. She’d been long past the stage where she could still learn from books. She’d learned from others, through the vast network of like minded people, and by testing herself against increasingly complicated and difficult systems, seeing what she could learn from them. She’d been ecstatic when she’d broken into the CIA’s mainframe. She’d done no damage, just looked at their system to see what she could learn. She’d been arrested two weeks later.

  “If the trial didn’t fall right after 9/11 you would have got off with a couple of months jail time and a few years of probation with community service,” he said.

  She wished, but that hadn’t been how things had worked out. The country had been in panic mode and paranoid about national security. The judge had made an example out of her. She’d recieved the maximum sentence allowed by law, something no hacker had ever gotten before—ten years in a federal penitentiary.

  “I never saw this side of the issue before.” She used to think it bitterly unfair that she had been punished at all for something as innocent as seeking knowledge.

  “What side is that?”

  “That while the CIA and the FBI were trying to figure out who hacked into the system, they were diverting resources from finding people like Tsernyakov.”

  He smiled at her as if she’d given the right answer to some unasked question. “You’ve paid your dues.”

  “I used to think the whole trial and sentence was bogus and unfair to the extreme.” She pressed her lips together. “I shouldn’t have done what I did. I was young and cocky and wanted another trophy. My father had been a college professor—linguistics. He studied disappearing languages.” Even took her and her mother to Africa once; her little brother hadn’t been born yet. She’d enjoyed the wilderness as only a child could. Her mother had been sick the entire time.

  “He was way into good grades and school performance,” she said. “When I brought home a good report card…his face just lit up, he’d give me anything. I think even after he died, I kept wanting to prove how smart I was. Hacking into the CIA wasn’t the right way to go about that. I did deserve to get my hand slapped.”

  It felt good to say those words, to take the responsibility and to feel as if she could move on at last. How odd that she would think that more than anyone, Nick Tarasov would understand. Perhaps because he already knew all the sordid details. He probably knew her file inside and out.

  “So.” She nodded toward the screen. “Any other suggestions?”

  His knowledge of programming had surprised her. She’d expected him to be a muscle man through and through, but he had a brain as sharp as anyone she knew, his intelligence his most formidable weapon. And he had a fair knowledge of computers. Seemed they had something in common after all.

  “Nothing that you wouldn’t have thought of already.” He fell silent for a moment, then said, “Back to the CIA business. One last thing. Don’t be too hard on yourself. Everybody makes mistakes.”

  The way he said it made her look back at him. His expression was shuttered, his body language closed.

  “Not you. You do important work. What you do saves people.”

  “Or gets them killed.” The look on his face turned dark.

  “Oh.” What could she respond to that? “You lost someone you protected?” Curiosity made her ask, then she wished she could take the question back. It was none of her business. She didn’t really expect him to answer, and he didn’t say anything for seconds. Then he shook his head.

  “Six months ago, I signed off on a group of trainees before they were ready. Four of them were killed on their first mission.” He looked down. “There was pressure to move the teams through fast. I had some doubts, but you always do. Everyone could always be better. I thought they were good enough. They had the confidence and it obscured the lack of experience.”

  For a split second there was a haunted look on his face that allowed her a glimpse of the feelings he kept locked up inside, and she felt herself respond to that, a new and not entirely comfortable sensation. Then he schooled his face back into its hard shell and the moment passed.

  They were both silent for some time. It seemed odd to think of him as just a regular guy with mistakes and regrets in his past.

  When she’d first met him, she’d thought him a military machine. But she hadn’t for a while, she realized all of a sudden and tried hard to think of something to say, something comforting, which was ridiculous because he was a thousand times tougher than she was and what did she know about his emotions anyway?

  And he had emotions; they deepened the blue of his eyes, stretched the skin tighter over his jaw just now. She hadn’t always thought that the women they’d recruited meant anything to the three men beyond tools they wanted to use and were willing to sacrifice. But at this moment she knew, without doubt, that the people he trained meant something to Nick.

  “I—”

  “I better go. I should talk to Law before I turn in, see if he has anything new for us,” he said and stepped away, taking with him the opportunity to make that connection.

  “He’s looking into Alexeev?”

  He nodded. “I’ll leave you to your work. Don’t stay up too late.”

  She filled her lungs. “Okay.”

  They both knew she was lying. Most nights she stayed up until she felt cross-eyed from staring at the monitor. She liked working in the complete silence of the apartment. And nobody at work minded if she went in late.

  He nodded and disappeared into her bedroom. The “secret door” in her closet scraped as he closed it behind him. She really was trying not to like him beyond the impersonal—she realized there was no point in it. They would not be friends beyond the mission, would be allowed no contact most likely.

  And things that went beyond friendship…Some statistics on how thirty percent of all marriages grew out of friendships popped into her mind. She blew the air out of her lungs. The pictures that came with that thought were as counterproductive as they were dangerous. She couldn’t afford to think like that. It was just her deprived body talking.

  She was smart enough to know what was good for her—not to think of Nick at all beyond the job.

  She was failing spectacularly.

  Chapter Seven

  They really did not need the cops just now. They had to get rid of them, Carly thought as she smiled her best smile. Get them out of the office before the two men made any connections.

  “So you were all gone for the day?” Officer Mayen looked at Anita, Sam and Gina, who all nodded. “And you worked late?” He was watching Carly now, his brown eyes red-rimmed but sharp.

  She wondered what case he had worked all night. “I got so involved in writing a new program that I completely lost track of time. Occupational hazard.” She smiled.

&
nbsp; “The night guard said you walked out just a few minutes before the disturbance.”

  She’d been afraid the security guard might have seen the man trying to grab her and would finger her, but either he hadn’t been able to see the street from his desk or hadn’t been looking at the right moment.

  “I was hurrying home. Must have happened just after I left.”

  “Did you see anyone suspicious loitering at the entrance of the building?” The other officer, Hoffman, asked. He was shorter than Mayen, pudgy with an unpleasant face that scowled all the time.

  “No.” She shook her head. “I wasn’t really looking. I was tired. It was dark.”

  “If you remember anything—”

  “I’ll call immediately,” she said.

  Hoffman looked her over one last time. “Thank you. And thank you, ladies.”

  “Wish we could help,” Gina said. “Terrible that something like this should happen here. Makes me nervous.”

  “Nothing to worry about. They were probably some bad elements who met up with each other outside their part of town. We make sure security is tight in the business district and in the tourist areas.”

  “Thank you, officers.” Anita smiled. “We really do appreciate the work that you do.”

  The phone rang just as the door closed behind the cops, who were canvassing the office building for witnesses.

  Sam walked to the reception desk to take the call, although these days it was usually Gina who was sitting there. The reception area was the only open workspace. The rest were glass-walled offices. “Brant Law wants you,” she said to Anita, and punched in the numbers necessary to transfer the call to her phone.

  Anita went off to handle Law; Carly and Gina stayed where they were, in the middle of the main area of the office where all four women had gathered when the police had shown up.

  “What do you think he wants?” Gina asked.

  Carly shrugged. “We’ll know in a few minutes.”

  They didn’t have to wait long.

  “Good news.” Anita came out of her office, smiling. “We are about to get company cars.”

  “All of us?” Sam perked up behind the stack of printouts she’d been organizing for Carly.