Dangerous Protector (Aegis Group Book 5)

by Sidney Bristol

  “I didn’t do this.” Goon #1 flung his hand toward the machines.

  “Out! Everyone, out.” Scott held up his hands.

  “What’s going on?” Brat—Fiona—stepped out of her cave, dark circles under her eyes. She wasn’t sleeping, which had pleased Scott but no longer mattered.

  “You. Sit.” He pointed at the chair next to him.

  They’d been going nonstop at the data. The NueEnergy servers had kept everything orderly and filed correctly. A glitch in their hacking parameters hadn’t nabbed file folders, which meant linking files by hand using cookies and file references. It was time consuming, but they’d made some headway.

  Brat stared at the monitor, her nose scrunched up.

  “That’s not right,” she said.

  “Log in.” Scott stood, hands on his hips, and watched her.

  Fiona typed in her password.

  BadassBrat2020.

  Scott knew it because he’d run a password breaker on it while she was crying her eyes out in the other room.

  The screen blipped, and a red X appeared over the input field with the words LOCKED under it.

  “What?” Brat’s voice rose in pitch.

  Yeah, that was his reaction as well.

  That fucking soldier boy did this.

  “Move.” Scott shoved Brat out of the way. He brought up a DOS prompt and began trying to work his way into the laptop that way, but even the simplest commands didn’t work.

  Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

  Would this nightmare never end?

  Why couldn’t these idiots code a goddamn thing right?

  The files should have been organized. This should never have happened. It should all be over. And yet it was dragging on, and on and on. He was trapped in some sort of nightmare where he had to watch over Brat instead of kill her outright.

  Goddamn her, and her soldier boy, he was going to kill them all.

  20.

  Fiona stood in the kitchen, too scared to cross the living room back to her cave of a room.

  Scott was seriously pissed.

  All she’d been able to figure out was that they were somehow locked out of not only her computer, but all of the machines connected to the network they had remote access to.

  The phone calls had started rolling in a few minutes after Scott threw a tablet against the wall. The shards of glass and bits of the external casing had been worked into the carpet by the other two guys going back and forth. Apparently, they weren’t the only ones who could no longer access their machines. If what she suspected was true, this block extended not only to their location, but whatever server system they were attached to. Thursday morning, everyone in the company would be just getting in, trying to get their email. It was a disaster.

  Fiona didn’t know a lot about the way the federal government ran their IT departments, but she knew the kind of permissions it took to just get access to their WiFi, much less a hard-line. It shouldn’t be this easy.

  Something wasn’t right. A lot of somethings weren’t right.

  Yesterday, she’d forced herself out of her heartache fog enough to pay a little more attention to her surroundings.

  She had yet to see any one of the four men produce a badge. God, she’d been so distraught over Marco she hadn’t paused to think beyond getting away from him. Had she gone from the frying pan into the fire?

  If these guys were agents they should have badges. IDs. Something.

  Marco had taken a bullet for her.

  Scott had brought the guys who fired the bullets with him.

  Fiona had fucked up. Big time. She didn’t know who Scott was, but as the moments dragged on, her doubts about the team were growing.

  Josh, one of the body guards, opened the fridge and pulled out a bottle of water.

  “We need anything? I could run out and grab a few things.” She needed to test them, figure out where she stood. How much of a prisoner was she, really?

  Josh stared at her a second, his nose wrinkling slightly as if he smelled something bad.

  “You can’t go outside,” he said, and turned around.

  Well, that solved that question.

  She meandered out the other side of the kitchen and stood in line of sight with the door.

  The nook just off the entry had a card table and an ongoing poker game.

  She’d thought they’d set up there to protect them from the men NueEnergy had sent after her in the parking garage. Now she had to wonder if they were there to keep her in.

  Fiona sucked down a deep breath and slowly wandered toward the door. The hair on the back of her neck rose. She reached for the curtain shielding the long, rectangular window next to the door.

  A hand wrapped around her wrist.

  Josh glared down at her.

  “Don’t. For your protection.” His voice was not kind. The way he stared at her, she had to wonder if he wanted her to try the door so he’d have an excuse to do more than bat her hand away.

  “Oh my goodness, you’re right.” Fiona stepped backward. “I wasn’t thinking.”

  Josh put himself between her and the door, his head bent forward as if he were some sort of bull. Ready to charge.

  How had she not seen the danger the moment she’d stepped in the condo? How had she ever taken these men for federal agents?

  “Fiona!” Scott bellowed her name.

  She’d never been so glad to hear Scott’s voice. She turned, quick-stepping into the living room.

  Scott whirled toward her. His face was red and he’d loosened the top few buttons of his shirt.

  “Yes?” She didn’t want to be here, either, but at least with Scott she was more certain about where she stood.

  “What did he do to your laptop?”

  “He, who?”

  “That soldier.”

  “Marco?”

  “Yes!”

  “Nothing.”

  “What” —Scott took a step closer, then another one— “did he do? I know he did something. What?”

  “Nothing. Marco never touched my laptop.” For every step backward she took, Scott followed her.

  She could see Josh and the others in the corner of her eye, circling like sharks.

  This was bad. Very bad.

  Fiona backed into the wall, and Scott kept coming. He wrapped a hand around her throat and squeezed.

  Randy was ready to terminate some people. Permanently.

  Clearly capturing a druggie kid was too hard a task. It was Thursday. Fucking Thursday. He’d wanted to have this whole thing wrapped up and done with by tomorrow, but the kid had eluded his guys for two whole days.

  God damn it.

  His timetable was off and the board was going to have him over a barrel with the way this was going. He did not want to have to mitigate the paranoid fucks on the board.

  If Randy wanted a job done right, he was going to have to do it his fucking self.

  Good help was so damn hard to find, and it wasn’t like he wasn’t willing to pay for it.

  He rolled his shoulders and set off down the block at a brisk jog. He tugged the hoodie’s hood up farther. The last thing he wanted to do was show up on someone’s security feed.

  Hopefully, the fuck faces in the van wouldn’t screw this up, too. They’d already lost the girl because the idiots couldn’t do a simple grab-and-run properly. The authorities were still banging the Missing Person Alert drum over Fiona’s disappearance, which meant she and her accomplices had gone to ground. The only way to get to her was to flush them out.

  Which brought him back to the purpose of this jog.

  He glanced up, checking the numbers on the storefronts.

  Here it was.

  Randy slowed, walked a circle to cool down, and pushed through the entrance of the store.

  Green, leafy plants decorated the walls and a glass case displayed the latest and greatest marijuana combinations. Pot was a growing industry, especially here in Colorado.

  “Hey, man.” The target rose from an a
rm chair in the corner. Danny Benally had none of his cousin’s bulk. The kid was lanky and emaciated-looking, but that could be from the drugs or prison. “I’m going to have to ask you to put the hood down. Security rules and all that.”

  “Walk out the fucking door and get in the van.” Randy pointed the gun at Danny’s chest.

  “Wow, wow, hey man, it’s cool. I’ve only got two hundred in the register, but it’s yours. You can take it.”

  “Get the money, go out the door and get in the van. Now.”

  If Randy took the cash, the cops might simply call this a hold up and assume Danny would show up later. If not, well, Randy didn’t mind more cash on hand.

  “Okay, okay.” Danny reached over the counter and jabbed at the buttons on the register. The drawer popped out and he scooped out the cash.

  “Out the door.” Randy ducked his head, keeping his face out of the camera’s view.

  “You can just take the cash, man. Seriously.”

  Randy grabbed Danny by the shirt and pressed the gun to the kid’s ribs.

  “I don’t want the cash, but keep a tight hold on that. It’ll make the cops think I just wanted to rob you. Now, move.” Randy propelled Danny through the front doors, across the sidewalk and into the waiting van.

  He crawled into the back after his new hostage and one of the guys shoved the door shut.

  “That is how you get a job done, gentlemen.” Randy sat down in the rear facing seat, his gaze sliding from Danny to the other two men, who wouldn’t meet his gaze. “Now, will someone tell me where the fuck Marco Benally is and how to get a hold of him?”

  Marco pecked at the computer keys with his index fingers. He’d never picked up two-handed typing, and whenever possible, he kept far away from a computer. Especially if other people were around. This was an exception.

  Ghost paused from time to time to glance at Marco and snort.

  They didn’t have time to toss the shit back and forth.

  At 10 a.m., Ghost had flipped the switch on his bit of code, locking everyone out of the Good Global network. It was time to force Fiona to come to them, before it was too late.

  They’d found Scott’s true identity.

  In an odd turn of luck, it was Marco who lucked on the trail that led him from Scott DuPry of Vernon, West Virginia to a computer tech who had fixed Scott’s laptop on a work trip to Boise, Idaho. According to data on that name, the tech had to be around a hundred and twenty years old. From there, Ghost and Marco had followed a digital trail of identities around the country.

  There was a pattern.

  Dead people’s social security numbers repurposed by someone who worked on computers, tablets and phones. They could place the guy at dozens of shops all over the country. The link between his victims and the predator seemed to be customer-dependant.

  Scott DuPry was an excellent example. Almost right out of some sort of serial killer’s playbook.

  He’d gone to Boise one week.

  Two weeks later, Scott DuPry was dead.

  And another Scott DuPry was living in Denver.

  Neither Marco or Ghost had any idea who they were dealing with, except that he was technologically savvy and he had no qualms about killing. Bodies littered his past.

  Now it was a race to make sure Fiona wasn’t one of those bodies.

  She’d spent her life hiding from people like Scott, or whatever the hell his name was. Marco wasn’t about to let her become this guy’s next victim.

  “Anything?” Ghost asked out of the blue.

  “Not yet.”

  “I’m going to—”

  Marco’s phone rang, the sound loud in what had been silence.

  “Tell them you aren’t looking for Danny again.” Ghost stretched his arms up over his head.

  “It’s not mom.” Marco frowned at the number. “Trace this.”

  Ghost rocked forward, his hands flying over the keys. He’d done…something…to their phones that now allowed him to do some sort of techno-magic.

  “Go,” Ghost said.

  Marco jabbed at the green button.

  “Hello?” He drummed his fingers on his knee.

  “Marco?” Fiona’s voice wavered.

  His stomach dropped through the floor and he sat up straighter.

  “Marco? Are you there?” Fiona’s voice broke at the end, fracturing a bit.

  “Yeah, yeah, I’m here.”

  How are you?

  Where are you?

  I’m sorry…

  So many things he wanted to say, and his throat wouldn’t work to get any of them out.

  “Scott wants me to ask you about my laptop.” Her voice was funny. Strained. Wrong.

  “Fiona, are you okay?”

  Silence.

  “Has he hurt you?”

  “Marco…” She inhaled, her breath rustling the microphone. “My laptop, did you do something to it?”

  “Am I on speaker phone?”

  “No, I don’t want to see you. Please, Marco, just tell me what you did to the laptop?”

  “No, I’m not on speaker phone?”

  “Yes, that’s all I want to know.”

  “Okay, good. Sweetheart…I…” What did he say? Did he warn her? Scare her?

  There was some muttered voices, sounds in the background. She wasn’t alone, but she also wasn’t on speakerphone.

  “Marco, what did you do?”

  “I locked down the Good Global servers.” Well, Ghost had, but that was a technicality. “Tell Scott the only way we’ll give him access is if I get to see you face to face. None of this video chat bullshit. Face to face. You might not believe me, but I’m trying to protect you.”

  “When did you do that?”

  “When you went to the bathroom, before I stitched my leg up. It was originally to make sure we got whatever was left of NueEnergy’s data, but then you connected to Good Global instead. Scott’s not who you think he is.”

  “Hold on, please.”

  The line went quiet. Either she’d muted, or was covering the microphone so well he couldn’t make out a word she said.

  “I can’t get a trace on her at all. They must be re-routing the signal or bouncing it around or something.” Ghost scrubbed a hand over his face. “This isn’t a very sophisticated means of tracking the call.”

  Marco nodded. All he understood was that he had no fucking idea where Fiona was, and she was in danger. Those two things had him almost sick with worry. He’d created this situation. It was all his fault.

  “Scott doesn’t want to meet face to face,” Fiona said.

  “Too fucking bad. I don’t see you, no one gets what they want. I’ll have Ghost nuke every goddamn thing if it comes to that.” He was yelling. Shit. He reeled in his volume. “I’m sorry, sweetheart. I’m worried about you.”

  “I know,” she whispered.

  Marco could hear the nuanced notes in her voice, but he didn’t understand them. He hadn’t had enough time with her to memorize all of her ways, to decipher all her secrets. They’d barely begun to learn each other, and if he couldn’t figure this out, if he couldn’t get her back, they might never have the chance.

  “Fiona?”

  “Hold on.”

  The silence wore on longer this time.

  Marco pushed to his feet and stalked the three paces across the room and back. It wasn’t far enough to work out his frustrations.

  “Aurora. Great Plains Park.” Scott’s voice was cold and hard. “There’s a pavilion outside the water park. Stay in your car, roll your windows down, keep your hands visible.”

  The call ended without another word from Fiona.

  “Where and when?” Ghost asked.

  Marco related the details and sat on the edge of the bed, still a little numb from the exchange.

  “Got it. The park is a high activity area, but I’m not sure we’ll see many people on a school night, ya know?”

  “Yeah.” He shoved his hand through his hair.

  “We need to g
o scout the area.”

  “Sure.”

  “Marco,” Ghost snapped.

  “What?”

  “You’re going to get you both killed if you don’t snap the fuck out of it.”

  God damn it, Ghost was right.

  “Okay. Okay.” Marco cradled his head in his hands. “We go there now. We scout the area. I stay in the car, you set up a sniper’s perch…somewhere.”

  “There might be civilians around.”

  “That’s why you set up now. If it’s too dangerous, you’ll have a better line of sight on the area.”

  “You sure about this? Someone could get hurt.”

  “No, I’m not fucking sure about anything anymore.”

  Not since Fiona had walked through those doors and looked at him. Not since he’d kissed her or stripped her bare. He’d lost his grasp on everything the moment he laid eyes on her, he just hadn’t realized it quick enough.

  Scott peered through the binoculars at the park pavilion.

  They’d gotten to a vantage point where he and the Goon Squad could see the meeting site half an hour early. And the stupid soldier boy was already in place, sitting on the hood of his car, eating a goddamn burger.

  Scott was ready to tear his hair out.

  Lila was no longer answering his phone calls. Her demanding text messages were getting shorter and shorter.

  He was halfway tempted to say screw this whole fucking plan, take Brat off somewhere remote, and get it over with already.

  Except he needed the money. If it weren’t for that, he’d be long gone and Lila would have a body on her hands. He’d burned through all his cash finding and setting up this gig so someone else would take the fall for Brat’s death and now he was on the hook for cash. There were some opportunities on the horizon but nothing that would yield a quick payday. And it took a lot of money to set up a new life, the background, all the documentation. It wasn’t as easy as it looked in movies. It was a time consuming process to remake himself into another person.

  He tossed the binoculars down and muttered a few curses.

  They knew Marco Benally was working with someone. Scott had asked Lila to look into the guy. She’d ignored that request. This morning he’d asked for more information. That was when she’d gone radio silent.