by Lisa Hughey
“You’re okay, Sunshine Smith.”
Instead of deepening the kiss, he eased away from me and turned me around to face the stove. The entire incident only took a few seconds, so the eggs were fine. “You want me to finish?” Zeke asked.
“I’ve got it.” I sprinkled the onions and peppers over half the eggs, snagged the package of sharp cheddar cheese, and drizzled some on top of the veggies.
Zeke grabbed glasses from the cupboards and filled them with ice and water. Then he set them at the table as I waited for the cheese to melt. The scene was scarily domestic and normal. Something I never thought I would experience. And I couldn’t ever remember being happier.
I plated the omelets and set them on the table.
“You ready to talk about those Venn Diagrams?” Zeke asked.
Yeah, normal sure hadn’t lasted long.
Thirty-One
A pang of remorse hit Zeke. He was going to reveal classified information to a civilian. A civilian with no security clearance who barely even existed in citizen databanks.
It wasn’t that he cared so much about national secrets. He kept them because that meant he kept his job.
He’d started his life with an innate distrust of the federal government. His grandfather had drilled that mistrust and paranoia and suspicion of everyone into him at an early age. They’d lived out in the desert or along the ocean. Grandpop usually tried to get paid under the table, wanting to give as little money as possible back to the government. So Zeke had spent his formative years being homeschooled and basically living a hand to mouth existence. They camped, sometimes illegally, in the state parks and sometimes at the beach.
He grew up in a vintage trailer that had hooked up to an even older Ford truck. The small trailer had louvered windows, faux wood paneling, and linoleum floors. A far cry from the extravagant home they were in now.
This kitchen was a palace compared to their cramped economical trailer kitchen. It had been the size of a small bathroom, with a Formica tabletop that folded down so that he could extend the bench seat into a bed. Dad and Grandpop slept in the bunk beds. They had emptied their own septic tank and carried their cooking heat which they never used.
He’d spent the majority of time either outside or, as he got older, in libraries.
His dad and Grandpop had taught him about math and science and how to survive in the wilderness. They’d been a little light on reading the classics or learning anything that didn’t have a serious practical application.
His upbringing had been unconventional at best, downright crazy at worst. And at fourteen, when he’d decided that he wanted to take standardized testing and go to college, his father had been against it but Zeke had earned his own money and set up the testing without his dad’s knowledge.
They’d never had an actual internet account. They’d tapped into satellites and cable internet or used the computers in the libraries they’d frequented. Zeke had cut his teeth on anonymous hacking before he’d gotten caught and corralled into working for the NSA.
His Grandpop would be horrified that he worked for the government and brought home a regular paycheck. Even if he had tried to honor his grandfather’s teachings by continuing to be somewhat of a rebel, he’d never done anything that would get him fired.
He loved his job too much.
But now he’d been burned. The NSA had basically disavowed him and his life’s work.
Which meant he needed to take extreme measures to try and fix it.
As he saw it they had three main problems. One: He’d been burned. Which meant he had to stay one step ahead of the people looking for him. Two: Figure out how/why he gave Susan Chen his encryption program so he could clear his name. Three: John Stanley was after Sunshine and her mother. He needed to be neutralized.
Zeke’s goals were to keep Sunshine safe, and figure out if John Stanley had any intel about who really ordered those hits. So if they found Stanley again, Zeke might finally be able to solve the mystery of who originally ordered the hit that killed his grandfather. But to get to that point, he needed to clear his name. So finding Susan Chen had to come first. Luckily he had Jamie working on Chen’s whereabouts too. Hopefully she and Lucas would get a bead on Chen now that Oliver Krychef had abducted their daughter.
Sunshine sat at the table next to him, waiting patiently. She’d distributed the omelet between them, cut into one-third and two-thirds, and given him the larger piece. “Venn Diagrams?”
“Uh, yeah.” Zeke grabbed a piece of paper and a pen from the small desk tucked into the corner of the kitchen. He drew two large circles that overlapped significantly. He labeled the circle on the left “Sunshine” and the circle on the right “Zeke.”
It was still damn hard to push the words out of his mouth. The secretive and cloistered culture he’d lived and breathed over the last six years had become ingrained.
The most obvious intersection of Zeke and Sunshine’s lives was Department 5491. And so he wrote, “5491”, inside the intersecting circles.
“What is 5491?” She sliced her omelet wedge down the middle and the cheese oozed out the cut.
“5491 designates a department at the NSA.”
She let the cheese drip off her fork. “Which has nothing to do with me as far as I know.”
“You get monthly payments from that department.”
Her gray eyes widened, mouth open, fork halfway to her mouth. “My mother does receive monthly payments. They’re direct deposited into our corporate account. Whenever I asked, she told me it was insurance money.”
“No. The money is recompense from the NSA for the deaths of your grandparents.”
She frowned. “You’re talking about the supposed sleeper thing again. But I told you before, my grandfather was an insurance salesman and my grandmother was a homemaker. She’s the one who taught me and mama to make soaps and scrubs. Girly stuff. The basis for our store.”
She still wasn’t getting the big picture. “He had a secret life before your mother was born. He was part of a group of German code breakers.”
“You really believe this. But to me it seems so fantastical.” Sunshine stared at the glass jar filled with sea shells set in the middle of the table, her gaze far away as she tried to come to grips with the idea that her grandfather had been someone, something else. She shook her head as if shaking loose her thoughts.
Zeke very precisely angled his plate and cut his portion into two equal triangles, then he aligned the points with the top of the placemat and carefully cut into the point.
“Okay. What else?” she asked.
“You don’t want to know more specifics?”
“I want the big picture before you get into the smaller details and I try to put it all together.” Sunshine shoveled another random bite of omelet into her mouth.
“Okay.” Zeke said, “So there are twelve people on the 5491 list.”
“There’s a list?”
“Yep.”
Outside their intersecting field, he wrote, “Injected with DNA-altering drug,” in his section of the circle.
Inside the intersecting field, he wrote, “Grandparents killed by sleepers.”
In Sunshine’s circle, he wrote, “Sleeper: John Stanley.”
In his circle, he wrote, “Sleeper: Unknown.”
In the middle of their intersecting fields he wrote, “Off the charts genius.”
Sunshine interjected, peering over his bicep, “Which makes sense if our ancestors were code breakers. We should have an aptitude for math.”
Zeke paused, pen poised over the paper as he ran through details, trying to find any other way they intersected. But as far as he could see it all lead back to 5491.
“Okay, so if this is really the only thing we have in common, then how did you end up following me?” When he looked at the diagram he realized she was right. Their only obvious point of intersection was 5491. But, circumstantially, they had many more threads in common.
Zeke took his time, cutting
off a piece of omelet from the left side of the triangle. “Because everyone on the 5491 list who was also in the espionage community was injected with Susan Chen’s DNA-altering drug. The three exceptions are you, Bella Holden, and one other person listed only with the initials ADA. I was sent to keep an eye on you after Susan escaped.”
Sunshine shoved her chair away from the table. “You think she was coming after me?”
“Personally, no.” Zeke chewed his bite slowly, counting ten times before swallowing. “I think I was sent here on a boondoggle to get me out of the way.”
“But then you saw Susan Chen in San Luis.”
Zeke segued into the next connection. “Which leads me to Susan Chen.”
And the only person who could tell them how she and her partner had chosen the test subjects was the scientist herself. They needed to find her and then somehow to convince her to give up the information.
Sunshine was an asset and he’d be stupid not to use her intelligence. Her unfamiliarity with the whole situation would mean she’d approach everything with a different perspective.
“Okay.”
“Chen’s test subjects were all from the 5491 list. And I gave my encryption program to Susan Chen.”
Zeke crinkled his brow. Dammit. How could he have given her the damn encryption program?
“Do you know how Susan Chen got those names?”
“No. She wouldn’t give any answers after she was apprehended.” Zeke huffed out a frustrated breath.
“What about her partner?”
“Liam? He’s dead.”
“But he’s still a piece of the puzzle. Why not do more research on her partner?” She continued to stare at those sea shells.
The idea had merit.
“How did he die?”
“That would be another mystery.” Zeke chewed another bite of omelet. “We had him cornered in a hotel suite, but before we could arrest him, someone shot him.”
“So wouldn’t it stand to reason that whoever shot him is the key?”
Zeke had been so caught up in the other things that had happened in the last few weeks that he realized that the identity of Liam’s shooter was a loose thread. He couldn’t ask Carson about it but maybe Jamie could.
“Even if you don’t know who shot him, you could still investigate the partner. There has to be a connection somewhere. Right?”
Zeke pressed his lips together as he rolled the idea around in his brain. “It’s a possibility.”
He wrote Liam on the bottom of the paper.
“Everyone receives payments.” He wrote that inside the circle even though it went along with 5491, he wanted to get as specific as possible.
“How many people?”
“There were twelve people on the original list,” Zeke said.
“Were?”
“One person is dead.”
Sunshine’s gray eyes rounded. “Do you know all of the people?”
“I know some. Besides you, Bella, and the unknown ADA, everyone else works in the espionage community.” Zeke precisely cut another piece of omelet.
“Bella?”
“She’s a college student and not affiliated with the espionage community in any way.”
Sunshine mulled that over for a few minutes. “Okay. Then what about this ADA?”
“I don’t know anything about that person.”
“And you haven’t figured out who that is?”
“No.” The patterns were beginning to take shape in his mind.
“Could anyone else on the list have given Susan Chen the encryption program?”
“No one except me.” Zeke shook his head, his curls brushed his cheek. They’d have to go soon.
“What about the mysterious ADA?”
He raised an eyebrow. “I can’t discount them.”
Sunshine had been a single name with no identifiers. The only other person on the list who wasn’t identified was ADA. So if the intersection was the 5491 list, the person who was orchestrating this whole fiasco likely had to be someone in power who actually knew who all twelve of the people were.
Obviously, the second intersection was smaller. The abducted all had relatives killed thirteen years ago, they all were receiving payments, and then a smaller subset of that list were intelligence agents who had been injected with a DNA-altering drug.
“So the only true intersection we have is 5491.” Sunshine stated as they both stared at the rough Venn Diagram between them.
“Yeah.” And that surprised him. When he purposely lost his focal point, let his mind go blurry not concentrating on one single detail, and tried to look at the situation like a big indeterminate blob, there were more connections shimmering just out of reach. “I feel like there’s a veil over my face and if I could just…rip it away, the picture would be in front of me, clear as a cloudless sky.”
It didn’t seem right. He couldn’t make a concrete connection to link them together any other way. They had several avenues of investigation. Liam, ADA, John Stanley, Susan Chen.
Maybe the connections lay in the unknowns that haunted him.
Thirty-Two
The urge to immerse in Zeke’s problems was overpowering.
I could feel my brain stretching, uncurling like a small shoot of the herbs I grew to scent the soaps and scrubs Mama and I sold. Like those starter seedlings reaching for the warmth and growing power of the sun, I could feel my cells transforming. The opportunity to use my brain to actually solve a problem other than how to maximize our store profits or dream up new combinations of massage oils and bath salts was like an addiction. While I loved the creativity and chemistry of concocting new scents, I wanted it to be a hobby, not my life’s work.
And here he was with a puzzle that included me. The stakes were high. Which ramped up the appeal about a thousand percent. I almost started rubbing my hands together with glee. But that would probably be inappropriate since his career was on the line.
I subdued the visceral thrill that tunneled through me. If we were going to work together, I needed the entire picture down to the last pixel.
“So right now you have no job, and you are at risk of losing your freedom.”
“I’m at risk of never begin seen again,” Zeke quipped.
I didn’t think he was kidding.
With his knife, he pushed the last of his omelet to the edge of the plate staring at the small yellow triangle as if it held the secrets of the Universe. “My job is all I have.”
“Explain again why you’re burned.”
“Because under the influence of Sodium Pentothal I supposedly gave up my encryption program.”
Under the influence. “I guess that makes sense.” I tapped my index finger against my lips.
“No, it doesn’t.” He shoved his plate away. “I thought I was immune to the drug. It normally doesn’t affect me.”
I quirked a brow at him. “What makes you so sure?”
“Let’s just leave it at training.” Zeke propped his elbow on the table and pressed his forehead into his palm, his posture one of abject misery.
“Okay you can’t answer that question.” I rubbed my finger over the fringe on the cheery placemat, putting his problem through my own filter.
“Arrogance,” he muttered. “I assumed that I hadn’t given away anything, even after I’d been kidnapped.”
“But if you gave away the program under duress how can they hold it against you?”
“They’re the Federal Government. They can do anything they damn well please.”
I thought about his words. Knew they were true. Mama and I had managed to stay off the radar in many ways, sifting everything through our corporation.
“Jesus, my Grandpop is probably rolling over in his grave at the fact that I worked for the government. And I had to give them the figurative middle finger whenever I could. That is going to fucking count against me.”
“Could it have been deciphered by someone?” I interrupted his worries. “Schneier’s Law: Any per
son can invent a security system so clever that she or he can’t think of how to break it.”
“Yeah. Maybe I’m not as smart as I think I am.” Zeke grimaced. “But I had my fellow hackers test it.”
I said, “Maybe they just aren’t as good as you are.”
“And my…compulsions dictated that I checked and re-checked on a regular basis for weaknesses in the code or structure of the program.”
“Okay.”
Zeke kept explaining. “I worked on the basis of Kerchoff’s Law.”
I knew this one. “A cryptosystem should be secure even if everything about the system, except the key, is public knowledge.” I stated just to make sure I was right. Even though I knew I was.
“Yep.” Zeke’s raised eyebrow told me he was surprised.
I had read about Auguste Kerckhoff as a teen. Because when I wasn’t reading young adult romance, I’d studied science heroes and heroines.
“So I don’t see any other reality.” Zeke was glum all over again.
“Like I said before. Let’s go back to Susan Chen’s partner.”
Zeke was silent. He tilted his head just slightly to the right, a sure sign he was analyzing the idea and searching for flaws, running it through his brain to see if it held merit.
And I knew this was meant to happen. Yesterday I’d been living the same boring existence feeling stagnant, static, and trapped. In the span of thirty-six hours, my entire life had been turned upside down. A strange exhilaration gripped me. I could do this. I could help him.
Happiness bubbled up as I thought about the possibilities, pushing through my body with effervescence almost like the fizz of a fine champagne.
The chance to use my brain.
“Please.” I put my palm on his forearm. The contact sizzled through me. This wasn’t like when I touched his skin this morning when he’d still been wrapped around me and I’d felt so connected that I’d threaded my fingers with his. This was different. Sexually charged and darkly erotic. “I can help you.”
Zeke’s attention dropped to the spot where my fingers touched his bare skin, his blond lashes pale against his tan face, hiding his thoughts.
