Secret Contract

by Dana Marton

  “Absolutely.”

  Gina gave a rare grin. “What kind?”

  “Our choice. Within limits.”

  “How come?” A car sure sounded good, although public transportation was quick and easy in the city, designed for tourists. Carly used it if she needed to go anywhere else but work, which was close enough to walk to. She suspected that the reason they hadn’t gotten cars right at the beginning was to slow them down in case any of them had ideas about taking off.

  “The men in our lives, aka Mr. Law, Mr. Moretti and Mr. Tarasov, apparently decided that we would make a faster-moving target in a vehicle.”

  “So far, we’re not a target, only Carly is,” Gina corrected her.

  “Rub it in,” Carly said.

  Anita shot them a quelling look. “I argued that just because the rest of us haven’t been attacked yet, it doesn’t mean we won’t be in the future. This is a dangerous mission.” She glanced at Sam more than once as she spoke. She had that whole earth-mother, nurturer thing going on and since Sam was the youngest, Anita’s tendency to watch out for people seemed the strongest there.

  “Thanks,” Gina said.

  “Yes. Thanks, Anita.” Carly was warming to the idea and grateful that Anita had thought to negotiate. She would have felt uncomfortable if she were the only one getting the extra level of protection.

  “When can we pick out our cars?” Sam was almost grinning. She had a brand-new license she’d gotten while they were at Quantico after Nick had helped refine her driving skills, adding to the sketchy knowledge of traffic laws she had picked up on the streets.

  “Whenever you’re ready.”

  Carly thought of the beat-up Chevy her mother had sold for her after her sentencing. Then her mind switched to those energetic Mini Coopers that zipped in and out of traffic and navigated the island’s narrow streets with finesse. Yeah, this could be fun.

  “Did you know it costs more to buy a new car today in the U.S. than it cost Columbus to make his three trips to the New World? Equipment included,” she said to no one in particular.

  “Did you know spouting trivia can get annoying after a while?” Gina asked.

  “Want to know how many police officers die each year as a direct result of lack of humor?” Carly kept her face deadpan.

  There was a moment of stiff silence, then the tension eased.

  “You know, Jones, you’re all right.” Gina grinned as she walked away.

  When Carly got back to her desk, the message box on the bottom of her screen said she had new mail. From Nick. She opened it and noted that the message had been sent to all four of them. Nick was sending a police sketch of the man who had tried to grab her on the street the night before, asking them all to keep a sharp eye out and let him know immediately if they saw the guy again.

  She opened the attachment and was stunned by the uncanny similarity. Nick must have given the description to a sketch artist over the phone. She hadn’t even thought about doing that.

  Anita knocked on her open door and came in, looking agitated, Sam and Gina following close behind.

  Carly turned her back to her keyboard. “What is it?”

  “I’ve seen him before,” Anita said and pushed her own copy of the sketch into Carly’s hand.

  Gina moved forward. “Where?”

  “I can’t remember.” Anita squeezed her eyes shut for a moment, hesitated, pressed her lips together. “I don’t know.”

  “You saw him here on the island?” Gina asked.

  “I think so.”

  “That would make sense.” Carly thought out loud. “If the man were pre-island, someone from Anita’s past, he’d be going after Anita, not me.”

  “Right.” Gina turned to her. “You’ve hacked into several systems since we’ve gotten here. Any chance that someone could trace you back?”

  “None,” she said without thinking. Nick had already brought that up. She’d been careful to the extreme. “Can’t be done.”

  There were a few seconds of silence, then Anita said quietly, “People do impossible things every day.”

  “If someone told you the day before we were offered the deal that by October you’d be getting a tan in the Caribbean, would you have believed it?” Sam drove the point home.

  Carly looked from one to the other. What did they know about hacking? “Okay. I’ll look into it.” Somebody was trying his best to kill her. She couldn’t afford to leave any stone unturned.

  As soon as they left her, she posted a message on the boards that were frequented by the best hackers she knew. Not that she expected anything to come of it.

  System got broken into. I’m trying to write something that could track the intruder. She described what someone tracking her would have to overcome. Anyone working on anything similar? Would appreciate a share.

  Within an hour, she had a dozen responses, half-baked suggestions she knew weren’t the answer.

  On the women’s insistence that nothing was impossible, she went back to looking for a way into the HR server at Banca Internationale. She was still at it when Nick called around noon.

  “Any progress?”

  “The query on people we know are involved in money laundering, all of T.’s suspected associates and the bank’s clientele is still running.”

  She’d had a tough time writing the query that morning and then debugging it, putting the enormous amount of data into a format that could be worked over. It wasn’t an easy case as people hid behind companies that were owned by other, bigger companies. She had millions of lines of data from the IRS’s corporate returns database alone.

  “The cops were here this morning,” she told Nick. “They were asking about the shooting in front of the building last night. Told them we haven’t been around.”

  “Do they know anything?”

  “Didn’t look it. From what they said, it all happened too fast and by the time anyone on the street realized what was going on, the perpetrators had left.”

  “Good. We don’t need the island police meddling. I want to find our man quick and with as little fanfare as possible. He’s probably not a client at the bank. Clients don’t have access to side doors, especially not after hours.”

  She knew that, of course, and that was why her inability to get to the HR server was doubly frustrating. “I hate to sound defeatist, but I really don’t think we can get to the employee database from the outside.”

  Silence stretched on the other end of the line.

  “Then we’re going in.”

  She didn’t think she heard him right. “I’m sorry?”

  “We’re going in,” he said. “I’ll get the blueprints by tonight so we can make a plan.”

  She kept staring at the phone even after the line went dead. Did he just tell her they were going to break into a bank?

  “NICE CAR,” NICK SAID as Carly let him into her apartment through the front door. “Am I the first to get here?” He put a long roll of papers on the kitchen table.

  “Anita called ten minutes ago that she was leaving.”

  “So, how does it drive?”

  The electric-blue Mini Cooper was like a dream. “Great. You should see Sam’s black Celica with the red leather seats. It looks like the Bat Mobile.”

  He grinned. “I saw it.”

  Of course. He split his time shadowing them all, making sure they were safe.

  “Gina went for serious power,” he said. “Range Rover. Not bad.”

  No, it fit the woman. Anita’s LeSabre was a good fit, too, a steady car, classy.

  He rolled the papers out and held the corners down with water glasses.

  Her gaze slid to the muscles on his arm that stretched the sleeves of his T-shirt. He was like the Pied Piper of female hormones. They bubbled up in her body at the sight of him, waves and waves, trying to drown all intelligent thought in her brain.

  She liked the time they shared on a regular basis, working with him, how comfortable it felt, how they could talk about computers or
cars or regrets and understand each other. It would be a shame to let lust destroy all that. But, of course, now that the damned thing reared its ugly head, she had a hard time stuffing it back into the bag again.

  “Where did you get these?” She refocused on the blueprints.

  “I have my sources.” He looked at her, paused, his left eyebrow sliding up a fraction of an inch. Then he went back to the drawings and pointed to the top sheet. “This is where we go in.”

  “You weren’t kidding.” They were going to break into a bank.

  “I never joke about work,” he said, his gaze returning to her. “Nervous?”

  He didn’t know the half of it. And it didn’t all have to do with her misgivings about this harebrained plan they were hatching.

  “Hey.” He put a hand on her shoulder, his face serious. But the seriousness couldn’t distract her from his sexy lips as he said, “If anyone can get that data it’s you.”

  Any other time, she would have appreciated the professional compliment. At this moment, her brain was playing a private little movie of the erotic-fantasy genre where his hand wasn’t on her to offer support. It pulled her to him so he could kiss her dizzy.

  She stepped back, looked away. She was an idiot.

  “Carly?”

  “Sorry. I’m a little distracted. First time robbing a bank and all.”

  “We’re not going in there to steal money.”

  “No, we’re stealing information. Not much of a difference, is there?”

  A knock on the door interrupted.

  “I’ll get it,” he said.

  She rubbed her tingling palms down the side of her leg and took a deep breath as Anita walked in.

  “Did I miss anything?” She wore long silk slacks, white with huge fiery-red topical flowers, a sleeveless blouse with ruffles around the neckline, high-heeled sandals.

  Carly glanced down at the blue shorts and green tank top she’d changed into for comfort after coming home from work and, for the first time, envied Anita’s easy style. That was the kind of woman men looked at and noticed. She watched Nick and her as they came straight to the kitchen, to the blueprints. His gaze didn’t seem to linger over any of that silk. Instead, he kept looking back to Carly, his eyes slightly narrowed as if he was trying to puzzle something out.

  “Haven’t missed a thing,” Nick said. “We’re waiting until everyone gets here.”

  They didn’t have to wait for long. Sam and Gina were only five minutes behind Anita. Apparently, they’d spotted each other while circling for a free parking space and came up together.

  Carly handed out a round of soft drinks once they were all seated around the table, aware, for the first time, of the women as more than accidental teammates. Were they all attracted to Nick? It wouldn’t have been that strange. They’d spent more time with him since their release than any other man.

  Nick paged through the sheets of paper. “We have the blueprints for every floor. There shouldn’t be too many surprises.”

  None of the others looked at him admiringly or talked to him with anything but business in their voice. Okay, then, suspicion confirmed. Carly looked down. She was the team idiot.

  “Electronic surveillance?” Gina pulled the top page closer.

  “The best,” he said, then pointed at the multitude of red dots. “Cameras everywhere.”

  “So how do we get in?” Gina asked nobody in particular while staring at the drawings.

  “We could try through the roof. There’s a hotel across the road that’s two stories taller than the bank. We pick a dark night, dress in black. I can shoot over a wire and we roll in,” Nick explained.

  “Then what?” Sam was asking.

  “Disable the motion detectors in the venting system. They’re all on one circuit, unlike the cameras. We crawl to an empty office as close to our target as possible.”

  “Do we know where our target is?” Sam asked.

  “Here.” Carly pulled out the blueprint that had caught her eye as Nick had paged through them, pointed to one of the many squares, which indicated various rooms and offices. The blueprints were detailed, with markings for the electricity grid. It wasn’t hard to pick out the server room.

  Nick was hanging back, watching them, almost as if he were waiting for something. If she wasn’t so super-aware of him lately, she wouldn’t have noticed. What game was he playing now? Then all of a sudden, she knew. He was waiting for them to take over, to make the plan their own, to start acting like a team.

  “I say we go in when it’s busy,” she said.

  All eyes were on her. A hint of a smile hovered over Nick’s lips.

  “More people to catch us?” Sam asked in a smart-mouthed way.

  “Better to blend in.” Gina gave a slow nod.

  “When I was looking around their Web server, I scrolled through some recent e-mail messages on their intranet. There’s a software upgrade rollout Sunday night.”

  “Bankers work nights and weekends?” Sam’s eyebrows slid up.

  “Programmers do. It’s the best time to take systems down. The least number of customers doing online banking,” Anita said, then added, “My first job out of college was at a bank. If we could get contractor security IDs somehow, we could go in with the rest. There are always contractors in a business this size, especially in IT, and since they come and go, people are used to seeing new faces among them.”

  “If we get a contractor ID, can we get copies made with working magnetic strips?” Carly asked.

  “Theoretically. If we were in the U.S., yes. Here, I don’t have the connections. So not by Sunday, no.”

  “Might not work anyway.” Gina tapped her fingers on the table. “I worked a case at a bank a couple of years ago. The way they had it set up was, the employees walked in, ran their card through the slot right on the security guards’ desk, it brought up their picture file on the guy’s computer. We go in, the card pulls up a different picture, we’re caught.”

  “I’ll go in and ask the security guard for a job application form tomorrow morning when the employees are coming in and see if that’s how it’s done,” Sam offered.

  They all agreed on that.

  “And if that doesn’t work? What’s the backup plan?” Carly asked. She liked having options. She’d learned in hacking that your first idea was rarely the best. It was when you were on the eighth or ninth possibility that your brain started to get creative.

  “Right,” Gina said. “And we have to figure out how to do what we need to do once we’re in.” She looked at Carly. “The rest of us have only one goal—get you to the server room and give you enough time to get the data we need.”

  Carly shifted on her feet. A lot rode on her. “It’s probably a stupid question, but couldn’t the FBI or the CIA get a warrant for the information we need?” Now that the idea occurred to her, it seemed like a simple, elegant solution.

  “Say the guy who attacked you twice so far is linked to someone in the bank who’s ultimately linked to T. We get an official warrant, word gets around in the bank that they’re being investigated for something. News of it gets back to T. He’s out of there before we have any hope of finding these links and tracing them to him.”

  “Plus, to get a warrant, people at the agency would have to be involved. Each new person who knows about this could be someone on T.’s payroll,” Gina said.

  “Okay.” Carly nodded. It would have been too easy.

  “But why not send in a professional team?” Gina asked Nick. “Special ops?”

  Exactly. That made a hell of a lot of sense. Carly, along with the rest of them, looked to Nick for the answer.

  “It’s been discussed,” he said slowly.

  Oh, yeah? He hadn’t told them that.

  “Carly has to be there to work her magic on the data,” he went on. “We could have sent her in with a special-ops team, but the decision was made that this team needed the experience.”

  “You’re going to risk us messing everything
up just to teach us a lesson in teamwork?” Gina’s voice was heated.

  “It’s a good first task to see what you can do together. You don’t want to go into some warlord’s compound that’s guarded by his private army and find out the team doesn’t work all that well,” he said.

  He had a point there. “And if we get caught?”

  “The FBI will extradite you to the U.S. We’ll come up with a different plan.”

  “And if we get shot?” Sam asked.

  Nick looked at her and waited a beat. “Don’t. If you come up against a security guard, put your hands in the air and let him slap the cuffs on.”

  Easy for him to say. “Are you coming with us?” Carly asked.

  He grinned at her. “Wouldn’t miss it.”

  So there was that. Still, only two days to prepare…The whole plan was insane.

  “How many people are we talking about?” Gina asked. “Do we know the number of security, the number of IT people who’ll be around that night?”

  “About a dozen in IT, plus for building security, another two dozen.”

  “Cleaning crew?” Gina asked again.

  “They’re out by ten or eleven o’clock. I watched them last night,” he said.

  “Okay, so we need to come up with more ideas on how to get in, then how to get me to the server room unnoticed. By the way, server activity is monitored. I can’t just download stuff without anyone knowing.”

  “Plenty of details to work out,” Nick said. “Let’s get to it.”

  Gina started to toss out ideas from high-level, professional break-ins she’d come across in her career. Anita brought up a few objections based on her bank experience. Sam added her expertise on how to move without being visible.

  Carly glanced at Nick as he hung back and observed. He was making a team out of them, or the beginnings of a team in any case. But were they ready for this? Was he rushing them through training the way he had rushed those men who had died?

  She was scared, for herself, for the others. This was big—beyond anything any of them had ever done. Easy for him to feel all self-satisfied. He, more than anyone in the room, knew what he was doing.

  He expected them to figure it out, to pull off a perfect operation. They were lucky if they didn’t get killed.