by Cara Carnes
“It needs work, but I was thinking maybe once it’s overhauled and polished it might be an add-on you’d consider for HERA,” she said nervously. She wasn’t a brainiac graduate of MIT who’d spent her entire life kicking ass in covert operations.
Everything she’d learned was from trial and error and more a patchwork style of hacking and coding than the intricate perfection Vi and Mary used. Heck, Zoey had learned more from watching nineteen-year-old Jacob work when he came to The Arsenal to help out when he could than she’d ever learned from her community college education. A couple months with the Quillery Edge was a damn doctorate degree given in the trenches—where a few keystrokes kept good men and women breathing.
“So we wait,” Marshall said.
“That’s one option,” Zoey said as she sucked her bottom lip into her mouth.
8
Zoey had grown comfortable in her newfound world since her arrival. Gage smirked as he watched her drag her lower lip into her mouth. It was one of the many tells on her expressive face. Everyone in the room chuckled at the way she dragged her response out.
“What’s the other?” Dylan asked.
“Bastards like Cherling need more than a slap aside the head. Hitting below the financial belt not only sends a serious message, but it cuts him off at the knees,” Zoey said. A list of accounts appeared on the display. “These are his dark web accounts and all the overseas accounts he sends money back and forth from.”
“You’ve searched him before,” Jud said.
“Only enough to get this,” she said. “He hadn’t pissed me off. Hiring a team to get Sara did more than piss me off.”
Everyone chuckled, but Gage noted the tension in Zoey’s body as her gaze slid to Vi and Mary. She wanted their permission to take action.
“Do it,” Gage said softly.
“You don’t even know what I’m gonna do.”
“You’re going to drain him dry. You’ve kept that network of yours funded from dark web accounts. I’m thinking everyone in this room is more than ready to enforce whatever message you want to send,” Gage replied.
“He’s right,” Mary said. “Do it.”
One by one everyone around the room affirmed the call. Zoey entered a variation of a passcode she’d used earlier. D0bbyRu^z. She punched a key and looked around. “Done.”
“And Weathers? Are we sending the same message to his crew?” Jud asked. “I’m thinking he needs a more up-close-and-personal approach.”
“I agree,” Gage said. “Thinking it’s time I pay him and his crew a visit, warn them what’s coming their way if they don’t back down.”
“Do it.” Marshall looked over at Jud, then Dallas. “I’m thinking the Collective personnel working for him would get a firmer message with you two present.”
“I’m in,” Dallas said. “Jud’s all that’s needed though.”
Jud’s lips upturned into a smirk. “When do we leave?”
“I’m all for kicking ass, but let’s hit pause long enough to plan the fallout.” Riley’s voice was low as her gaze swept the room. “We go after Cherling’s money, and he’ll hit back. He’s connected, right? How could that hit The Arsenal?”
“Appropriations committees,” Nolan answered. “But there’s months of red-tape involved.”
“There’s the alphabet soup who could show up and try to cause problems,” Rhea said. She glanced at Dallas. “Is TJ secure?”
“Fuck.” Gage shifted as the curse escaped him.
TJ was a hell of a kid who’d somehow kept himself and his little brother safe in the wilderness cabin Dallas had found them in. It’d taken weeks of scouring the most rugged and remote regions imaginable. Dallas and Kamren had done a hell of a job giving his two sons a new home—one where they’d be safe and loved. One where they could be little boys and enjoy a happy life.
“They won’t mess with him,” Dallas declared. His jaw twitched.
“So, about that.” Zoey’s sing-song voice redirected everyone’s attention. “I know he’s as legally yours as it can get until the formal adoption happens, but I’m a nervous nelly about those sorts of things and kind of have a contingency plan in place, just in case.”
“How so?” Jesse asked as he leaned back in his chair.
“I sort of gave TJ the past we couldn’t find,” Zoey admitted softly.
Fallon and Addy chuckled at the shocked expressions around the table. Gage couldn’t help but mutter, “Of course you did.”
“Walk us through it,” Dylan said.
“It’s really not a big deal. We’ll never need it,” Zoey hedged.
Gage suspected it was a big deal because knowing Zoey, it wasn’t only a falsified birth certificate. There was no small or half measures for Little Bit. When she went in, she went all the way in.
“Consider it an education on your network or whatever,” Nolan said.
“Okay, okay. I suppose that makes sense.” Zoey called another screen up. “When I take an asset on to protect, the first thing I do, if necessary, is scrub their past. If they had a police record, it disappears. If there was a child born, the child vanishes. I erase as much of the past as physically possible. In most cases, I can get everything.”
“Everything?” Addy asked.
“As in they never existed?” Bree clarified.
“Yes. Sara was the exception because of her notoriety. Credit histories, educations, careers. It’s remarkably simple to erase a person’s footprints.”
“I thought it’d be harder with the electronic records alone. Once on the internet, always on the internet,” Fallon said.
“We aren’t really purging every scrap of evidence of a person’s identity. We’re simply fuzzing the data up so it’s either not searchable or won’t appear to be about the person. We’re redacting. Sometimes that’s deleting altogether, sometimes it’s merely blurring it out.” Zoey shrugged.
Gage glanced at Vi and Mary and smirked at the startled looks of wonder on the women’s faces. Apparently, Little Bit had more wicked skills than the two women had realized.
“That’s brilliant. You use the crawler,” Vi guessed. “Then what?”
“I scrub the electronic footprints. HERA will do it way faster than me manually hacking my way into whatever database it was and doing it. But once the electronic records are purged, that leaves the physical ones. Those are a bit dicier but have gotten easier as my network expanded.”
“Physical records?” Dallas asked. “You purge those, too?”
“Well, yeah. Otherwise it’s pointless.” Zoey looked around. “It’s not a big deal. I find someone in my network near the area and go from there. Many times I have to recruit someone in a city hall or something.”
“And then you do the same thing in reverse for the new identity,” Gage guessed.
“Yeah. In TJ’s case I only had to build, not purge,” Zoey said. “I used Wyoming as the starting point since that’s where he was found and his mother had ties to a small town outside Jackson. One of my network assets in the area, a nurse, has worked at the local hospital for twenty years.”
“Jesus,” Dallas breathed as a perfect-looking birth certificate appeared.
“Little Toren was born to his rather memorable mother and father during a snowstorm a week before Christmas. The momma wasn’t too thrilled they were having the baby in a hole-in-the-wall hospital since she had a doctor up in Jackson, but the daddy was ecstatic his son would be an American citizen.” Zoey halted the story as she looked at Dallas. “Toren Senior was a former Mossad officer recruited into the Collective by TJ’s mother, whose relationship as his handler took a lean toward the more intimate shortly after his arrival stateside. She pulled lots of strings to get his citizenship papers in order, a feat accomplished mere weeks before little TJ’s birth.”
“Holy shit,” Bree breathed.
“Immigrations documents and memorandums about the covert approval process that involved the CIA and DOD and a whole mess of other agencies is all on record
in highly classified databases. All the data Toren Senior supplied in return is also on file.” Zoey shrugged. “It was all rather simple. A cut and paste job.”
“A cut and paste job,” Cord repeated, his gaze on the documentation she’d just referenced, which appeared in sheaves of images on the screens.
“The hard part was hacking into Israeli intelligence.”
Vi and Mary both coughed. Dylan reached over and thumped his wife’s back a couple of times as she set the glass of ice she’d been munching from down.
“You hacked Israeli intelligence?” Vi asked, eyes wide. “Why?”
“Well, I couldn’t exactly have Toren come overseas without a paper trail in his country of origin, could I?”
“Of course not,” Nolan replied, sarcasm evident. He looked at Jesse. “Heaven forbid anything be done half-ass by the women around here.”
“Exactly!” Zoey called up another database, and a massive amount of paperwork appeared. “Voila. Toren Senior. And his father, also Toren.”
“That’d make TJ third generation, not a junior,” Rhea commented helpfully.
“Crap. I need to fix that,” Zoey said.
“How about we leave things as they are and not mess with Israeli Intelligence today, Little Bit?” Gage asked with a chuckle.
“It needs to be fixed, Gage. I should have realized that.”
“I think it’ll be okay for now,” Vi said helpfully. “So TJ has a birth record.”
“Yeah. Then things went bad for him after that. Toren died in a horrible car crash at the local pass three weeks after Christmas. TJ’s mom never recovered. She moved away from the area and swore she’d never return. Lots of locals remember it,” Zoey said with a heavy sigh. “The local paper covered the tragedy for weeks.”
Addy laughed outright as a sheaf of newspaper clippings appeared, complete with pictures of the once-happy couple and their newborn son. Gage shook his head and looked across the room at the shocked Dallas.
“When the hell did you do all this?” Fallon asked.
“Erm…” Zoey shrunk inward a bit and put her hands on her lap. “It took a bit longer than I expected, and I may have gone a bit overboard on the whole newspaper article writing. My muse got out of control because I sort of spackled in a few of the holes in DJ’s past, too. You know, the birth certificate and all that. He was an eleven-pounder like his daddy. Momma was not happy.”
Everyone laughed.
Addy was laughing so hard she swiped her eyes. “How do you know how much Dallas weighed?”
“Erm, Momma Mason may have helped fill in some holes in that regard. She didn’t exactly know she was helping. It was organic.”
“Anything else we should know about my nephews and their new pasts? Are there cousins and aunts and uncles?” Dylan asked.
“Well, of course. What kind of family tree only has one branch? That’s just sad and lazy,” Zoey spat angrily.
“And we laugh, but since we’re pretty sure the father really was Mossad, this is a seriously strong background,” Jud said.
“It’s brilliant,” Bree said. “You can go online and make stuff go away? Like really bad prom pics or class photos or…”
“Let’s keep focused on the problem at hand for now,” Rhea suggested.
“Oh, right. Good point. You couldn’t scrub Sara?”
“I didn’t want to take the risk,” Zoey admitted. She turned in her chair and looked up at Gage. “I’m going with you when you confront Weathers. I want to be there.”
“No.” His jaw twitched. “My arm barely survived your talons from the past flights. There’s no reason for you to go.”
She averted her gaze and scraped her teeth over her lower lip. Fuck. She had a reason for going. One of the guys laughed, but Gage didn’t bother figuring out who. The man recognized a dead man walking when he saw one because Gage was finding it harder and harder to say no to Zoey.
“What are you thinking?” Cord asked.
“I want access to their system from the inside. It won’t take but a minute, maybe two, to hack in, dump everything, and go. One potty break and I’m done.”
“Even a cut-rate group like Weathers isn’t going to let you just walk up to one of their computers and access it,” Gage said.
“Of course not. That’s what the drones are for.” She folded her arms and glared up like he’d just said the dumbest thing possible.
Totally adorable.
“Okay, I’ll tag in next because the drones have done a lot of wild things, but how can they hack systems?” Fallon asked.
“Well…” Zoey glanced over at Bree, whose eyes lit up like she’d just gotten ten years of Christmas gifts at once.
“No.” Gage shook his head. “Fuck no.”
“You don’t even know what it is.” Zoey’s gaze narrowed.
“I know that look.” He pointed at Bree. “And I know her and her inventions. You anywhere near a first-draft field experiment isn’t happening.”
“I can handle myself, Sanderson,” Zoey argued.
“No doubt that’s true, but you aren’t getting anywhere near this if there’s new tech Bree made in play. The last time she did a live test, she blew up half an acre of property with an energy cannon.”
Zoey looked back at Bree. “Really?”
“Kinda.” Bree shrugged. “Bullets were flying. Jud was cracking necks and severing jugulars, and I got a smidge nuts with the cannon.”
“There’s really a cannon?” Zoey looked up at Gage. “Okay, let’s forget the previous kerfuffle. This is a good idea, and it’s been tested. Kind of.”
“The strength of a team is in accepting we each have our weaknesses,” Jesse said. “A smart team protects them while enhancing strengths. We need you here more than in the field.”
“I’ll go,” Cord said. “It’s time I start getting back in the field anyway.”
“Good. You two with Jud and Dallas,” Marshall said. “Let the rest of us know what we can do to help.”
“For now, nothing,” Vi said. “We might need to disperse teams to protect these assets at a later date. We’ll have to test and vet a few things once we’ve gotten all the data.”
“And the money we just took will have blowback,” Mary said. “As much as I hate to do it, we should curtail any operatives of their carousing time.”
“Carousing time?” Nolan grinned. “Is that what we’re calling it?”
Zoey shrugged. “It’s better than some of the things we could call it.”
“Let’s break and grab some chow,” Jesse said. “I’m sure Brooklyn’s ready to hand over Sara and Ariana by now.”
“Please. That was done long ago,” Riley replied. “Momma heard talk about a baby and was all over Logan for information before you all even arrived.”
Gage wondered how the Masons’ mom kept getting intel—sometimes before the operatives themselves. Heck, the woman had even intercepted a phone call from Gage’s sister and counseled her on her man troubles.
It was one of the multitude of reasons The Arsenal had become more than a job the day he’d arrived. Somehow the people gathered around him had entrenched themselves in Gage’s life in a way he hadn’t even realized went way beyond trust.
They were family.
“I’ll let Mom know Bree and Rhea are point for Sara and Ariana. She’ll want to help however she can,” Riley said.
“I’m thinking the best education that girl can get is some one-on-one time with a mom who successfully raised seven of the best people I’ve ever met,” Gage commented.
Chairs shifted as the Masons all regarded Gage. None made a comment, but most offered a chin lift in acknowledgement.
“Right.” Zoey knocked the table beside her laptop. “Chow time. Let’s do this.”
Zoey glanced at the clock. Despite her protests, everyone had agreed the message needed to be delivered quickly and efficiently. Less than six hours had passed since they’d disbanded the meeting and eaten a breakfast of pancakes and bacon.
Then Gage, Jud, Dallas, Cord, and Levi had boarded the jet and headed to Boston to confront Josiah Weathers before he left for the day. Weathers Enterprises was on the sixth floor of an office tower owned by a group with very shoddy security. Zoey had hacked her way into the building’s surveillance cameras, which would help them with initial recon.
Everything on the sixth floor was an entirely different story. A cursory glance at the mercenary’s system via the elevator cam when it opened to the sixth floor impressed Zoey. They might be bastards, but they weren’t cheap when it came to security.
“Don’t forget to dispatch drones in the stairwell before you hit the sixth floor landing. Their system starts monitoring before the door.”
“On it,” Gage replied.
Zoey squeezed her eyes shut when she noted the humor in his voice. He wasn’t going to mention she’d said the same thing at least four times.
She was a wreck but couldn’t put her finger on why. Her gut was screaming that this was a very bad idea. There was no reason to worry, though. Jud, Dallas, and Gage were some of the very best operatives around. Levi and Cord weren’t slouches, either. One of them alone could clear the entire building if necessary.
So why couldn’t she calm her brain?
Because you’re worried about Gage.
Ugh. She couldn’t deny the voice in her head. She always worried about the stubbornly unshakeable man, but it’d intensified. Sooner or later she’d have to work through her attraction to him before it became a problem.
The layout of the office building itself was innate in its simplicity. Thousands of buildings like it sat in squat dullness within cities across the country. So why was she worried?
She looked over the records she’d accessed via HERA. Everything about Weathers Enterprises, on the surface level, broadcast them as glorified guns for hire. Not even decently qualified ones at that.
Yet they’d actively recruited Gage. He was way better than average. Weird. Their firewalls had proven more sophisticated than a merc group of their caliber should have, but that was easily explained by an over-diligent tech geek wanting to make a name for himself—or herself—as the next coming of The Quillery Edge.
