Masks (Out of the Box Book 9)

by Robert J. Crane

  Jamie’s eyes drifted to the television screen on the wall. Local news was playing, a chyron across the bottom of the screen decrying the damage done to the buildings in the attack yesterday. She took a breath, shaking her head. She saw the stunned faces of patrons and employees, still watching the coverage. There had been mercifully few deaths, but still, the events had evoked memories of a September day when the world had held its breath as New York was brought to its knees.

  It was all a little too close—too close to home, too close to memory. And far too close for comfort.

  “Ms. Barton?” Mr. Penny’s tone was mild confusion, and she looked over to see him standing at the entry to the bank, his briefcase in hand, his dress shirt missing that top button again. He wasn’t wearing a suit jacket, but that was good, because she could see the lines of his chest through his shirt and—

  Ohhh.

  She looked down, suddenly embarrassed, and said. “Mr. Penny. I was …” Her eyes flitted up to find his anchored on her like she’d made a gravity channel between them, “… I was hoping to have a few minutes of your time this morning.”

  Mr. Penny opened his mouth to say something, then closed it and a smile spread warmly over his face. “Ah—yes, of course. If you’ll—” He gestured toward his office with his briefcase. He seemed solicitous, opening the door for her, ushering her in as he tried to clear his desk, which was as messy as hers. “I’m sorry, my first appointment today wasn’t until a half hour from—”

  “I’m sorry for imposing on you,” she said, and then amended, “without warning. I just—I’ve had a problem that I—I don’t fully understand, and it has to do with banking and lending and—”

  “I would be—happy, honored—uh, ecstatic, really, to be able to help you in any way,” Mr. Penny said, shoving his briefcase behind his chair and clasping his hands together, leaning forward as she sat down across from him. “In any way possible. So …” He kept that smile up, and Jamie did not mind it at all. “What can I help you with, Ms. Barton?”

  “Please,” she said, “call me Jamie.”

  “Jamie,” he said. “Call me Jacob.”

  “Jacob.” Jacob and Jamie, she thought, that’s a—uhh, oh, “Uhm. So … since our meeting yesterday, my car has been repossessed—”

  His eyes widened. “Oh.”

  “—my house foreclosed upon, my credit cards and ATM card cancelled, my accounts locked and overdrawn,” this drew a frown from him, “basically every single financial setback you can imagine, I’ve suffered.”

  He looked utterly perplexed. “That makes … that makes no sense. I looked at your credit report myself before I sent your application to underwriting and you were current on everything—” He turned his head to his computer, a black screen hovering off to the side of his desk and stirred the mouse. He typed something in and then slid the screen around on a levering arm. “I have a copy of it right here, and it’s—it’s pristine.” He gestured to the screen, and she could see nothing but numbers and lines of readouts. “Your credit is beautiful. It doesn’t look like you’ve missed a payment for anything in your entire life. Your revolving debt is low, your FICO score is high. And we verified your assets with the bank here, you had a few thousand in savings—” He tapped the keyboard again and then paused, did a double take, and said, “This is impossible.”

  “What is it?” she asked, leaning over, trying to make sense of what he was looking at.

  “Well, this is your account,” Penny said, “which I looked at yesterday, just before coming to see you. I was trying to figure out what the underwriting department saw that I didn’t, because—well, anyway, there was plenty of cash in here then, and it’s overdrawn now, but—but there haven’t been any withdrawals at all to account for the missing money.” He threw his hands up. “This doesn’t make any sense.”

  “And yet still they’ve cut me off,” she said. “My cell phone, my car, my house, my accounts, my credit cards—” She stopped short of telling him about her humiliations in the convenience store, and of eating five stale saltines for dinner. She was still feeling lightheaded, but at least she’d had coffee this morning. “I don’t know what’s going on here, Mr. Penny—”

  “Jacob.”

  “I don’t know what’s going on here, Jacob,” she said, regretting the lie, “but … it’s almost as though someone has decided to sabotage my finances.”

  “Even your business,” he said, sounding almost awestruck before his tone switched to disgust. “Whatever’s going on here, if it’s affected you as you say, it’s probably the reason our underwriting turned down your loan.” He shook his head. “This is … I’ve never seen anything like this.” He paused, suddenly contemplative. “I wonder if this has anything to do with that cyber-attack yesterday?”

  “I—what?”

  “Oh,” he said, “the attack on Manhattan yesterday. They’re saying there was a hacker that jumped on the bandwagon looking to cause some chaos, that he messed with systems all over the area, but they weren’t very specific about it.” He stared at the screen. “At the very least, I mean—I looked at your account myself, there’s no reason for these changes with withdrawals or debits—it’s as though someone just reached in and magically changed the numbers.” He picked up a pad and started to write. “I can verify this because I saw it with my own eyes. I need to talk to my boss—”

  “Thank you so much,” Jamie said, the first dose of relief she’d felt in a day trickling through like warm water down cold skin. “I’m so glad I came to you. I honestly did not know who else to turn to.”

  “Well … uhm … we’re glad to have your business here,” Jacob said, flushing slightly, “and honored that you’d be able to come to us with a problem like this, and—and sorry that we have any part in making your experience, uh, terrible—”

  “It’s all right,” she said lightly, finally feeling, for the first time since she’d been caught in that boat explosion, like something was going right. She ran fingers through her hair, settling back in the chair. “I can’t tell how stressful it’s been, seeing everything I’ve worked for go up in smoke in a few hours.”

  Jacob stood up, coming slowly around the desk, and sitting down in the chair next to her. “I can’t even imagine. It was obvious to me just the short amount of time I was working on your account that Barton Designs means a lot to you. You’ve poured your life into building that business, and it’s an impressive accomplishment, even more impressive when you consider you’ve done it as a single mother—”

  Her eyebrows arched up. She hadn’t even thought about it, but of course he’d know about Kyra if he had access to view her accounts. Her account was paired to Jamie’s, after all. “Thank you,” she said, feeling a little twinge of that warmth that she’d felt during their interview only a couple days earlier. He was sitting there, next to her, and he looked like he was holding himself back from doing something. Leaning in closer, maybe.

  Jamie stared at him—those eyes, those lips—and she did some quite unexpected, as all the despair she’d felt in the last day lifted.

  She leaned in and kissed him.

  It was long and full and lovely, her eyes closed and the pressure returned on his end, his fingers lightly touching her face as they kissed. It had been a long time, a very long time, and she’d missed this. She could taste the faint minty aroma of his breath—

  Her eyes sprang open and she broke from the kiss, suddenly aghast. “I’m so sorry,” she said.

  He took a moment coming back from it, like he’d just wakened from a dream, and his cheeks flushed hard scarlet beneath the stubble that she found oddly rugged and alluring. “I—ah—uhm—I’m sorry, that was—so unprofessional of me—”

  “It was my fault,” Jamie said hurriedly. “I came in here and asked you for help, and then I go and—do that—”

  “I feel like I’m preying upon you,” he said, obviously embarrassed, “as though I predicated my help on you doing—doing that—that wonderful—” He sto
pped himself, and took a long breath. “I wanted to do that even absent helping you.”

  Jamie stared back at him. “I wanted to do that even if you told me there was nothing you could do to help.”

  “Well, okay then,” he said, and he smiled, a smear of lipstick making his lips look slightly pink. And he leaned back in to kiss her, and she did not mind at all.

  68.

  Nadine

  Nadine had done a lot to make sure she wasn’t being followed after she left her office. She’d gotten out of an Uber on Fifth Avenue, gone through a department store in one entrance, came out from another entirely after wandering through the sparsely populated aisles for a while. She took a cab next, to Central Park, where she meandered a while and then changed in a restroom, putting a shawl over her head to hide her hair, and big sunglasses over her face. She dumped her leather handbag, putting the contents she needed into a plastic shopping bag and packing her clothing away in it.

  She wandered out of Central Park and flagged down another cab, and this one she rode to six blocks from her destination, a building in midtown. She navigated her way down streets and avenues, taking a circuitous route until she found the building and buzzed the front door. When she said, “Henry sent me to pick up the donations,” she was buzzed up instantly. She looked at the street around her through the dark glasses, checking once to more to be certain she hadn’t been followed.

  Nadine walked up to the third floor and found the door already open. She slipped inside, checking the hall quickly. There was no one there, and so she came inside and shut the door, locking it with her gloved fingers.

  “Taking a mighty big risk meeting in person, dove,” said Abner in the darkness. The room they were in was an office of some sort, but with blackout curtains in front of the windows. He clicked a desk lamp on, and it revealed his fat face by yellowed light. He smiled. In the lamplight, his teeth appeared yellow, as though he was a copious smoker even though she knew he wasn’t.

  Nadine made her way over to the desk, staring across at Abner then smiling in calm relief. “You have no idea how many twists and turns it took me to make sure I got here alone.”

  “A great many, I hope,” Abner said, opening his desk and pulling out a bottle of something that looked expensive. He could afford it, doing what he did. He pulled the stopper and gave a generous amount to his coffee, then offered her the bottle. She shook her head with a smile. “The question is … why did you risk it?”

  “I’m growing sick of calling naked from my safe room,” she said, figuring that this revelation would put him off balance. It did; he had his coffee cup up to his lips and he almost choked on it, putting the cup down in a ring of wetness, hacking like he’d taken a gulp into a lung. “Nothing personal,” she said sweetly, “I don’t mind being naked talking to you, but … the lack of a face to talk to is … lonely.” She said the last word wistfully, as Abner got his cough under control. “I’m a little bit of a social outcast, you see.”

  “So I’ve heard,” he said, sounding quite choked. “Well … I was going to give you an update next time you called, but I think you know what I’m going to say.”

  She was fairly certain she knew as well, and that was why she’d come. “I want to hear you say it anyway,” she said, wandering over to a bookshelf at the side of the room and looking at a snow globe with some European village nestled within under a layer of white. She kept her hands fastened behind her back, though.

  “Well, you know the big job’s done,” he said, still a little choked but back to business. “All the loose ends are taken care of and everyone who could identify me are good and dead. A few little strays managed to get caught in the net cast by those heroes, but they’re of little concern since they were hired by the ops chief of the mission, and he’s dead.” Abner cleared his throat again. “So that’s done. Evidence rendered to ash, glass, and deleted disk space all around, from the SEC to the FBI to the US Attorneys.”

  “Good,” she said, turning her head to give him the hint of a smile. Her hair bristled against the restraint of the net beneath her shawl, but she ignored it. It was necessary. “And the other thing?”

  “Jamie Barton, you mean?” Abner smiled. It was an ugly expression, even absent the yellow tinge the lamp gave his teeth. “I’ve set up quite the gauntlet for her to go through. ArcheGrey did us a solid and wrecked her finances in the collateral of the cyber-attack. Our lady’s already experiencing the joys of poverty—not a dime in the bank, lost a loan her business needed to survive, and she’s had all her accounts closed. She’s even lost her phone and car to sudden, surprising nonpayment. Foreclosure to follow.” He showed a trace of regret here. “Wish I could have had ArcheGrey speed that one up, but it would have been a bit obvious if he leapt right to it. But don’t worry, the other things coming are going to be plenty enough to make this lass miserable.”

  “Oh?” Nadine asked, fishing.

  “Something’s about to happen that’s going to turn her life upside down, make what we’ve done so far look like, uhh … a day in the park.” Abner leaned back, chair squeaking under his girth. “Then once that’s done, I’ve arranged one last kick to make the lady take a deep dive into despair before her end comes, one way or another.” He took a long pull of his coffee, droplets still running down the sides from his mess earlier. “You said to ruin her life … well, I’ve done it. When this is over, I promise you she’ll be the saddest soul in cell block D, if by some miracle she lives.” He grinned.

  “And it’s all done?” she asked. “Set in motion? Because I want this bitch to suffer, no ifs, ands or—”

  “It is,” he said, reassuring. “I’ve made all the arrangements.” He lifted his watch up and looked at it. “One of the little bombshells is about to go off right now, in fact, if you’d like to stay and watch.” He picked up a TV remote and gestured to one on the wall.

  “No, I’ve been out of sight for too long already,” she said, infusing her words with regret. “I need to get back. I just wanted to … hear what you had to say, make sure the arrangements are on track.” She sighed. “You’ve been a real pro, Abner. I couldn’t have gotten out of this without you.”

  He nodded, smiling faintly. “Just take heed, Nadine, and remember … I can’t do this again, okay? We’ve buried everything they had, and there’s no connection back to you. So stay out of trouble if you want to keep free.”

  “I will,” she said with a smile. “It’s a shame you couldn’t help me again.” She let her smile turn nasty. “But it does mean I don’t have any more reasons to keep you around.”

  She raised the pistol she’d been hiding in her pocket and shot him in the face, three times. It had a suppressor on it, which made it sound like a crack, like she’d dropped something, instead of a full-blown gunshot. She stared into his face as each shot hit, watched him die, his gurgling coming to a stop relatively quickly.

  When she was sure he was dead, she walked around the desk and pulled the whiskey bottle out of the desk. She spilled it all over his paperwork and his computer, which frizzed quietly as it shorted out. She left the pistol in the middle of the spill; it was untraceable, without a serial number or her fingerprints anywhere on it. Then she took the desk lamp and broke the bulb with one good whack against the corner of the desk.

  She carefully set the broken lamp in the puddle of booze, and watched the electric current light the alcohol with a Whoosh! Nadine stepped back from the desk, watching the flames spread for only a moment before she headed for the door. She didn’t even look back, because why would she? He may have been the first person she’d actually physically killed, but who cared? This was done.

  On to the next thing.

  69.

  Sienna

  “Sienna, it’s going to be okay,” Reed said through the videoconference, sounding more than a little alarmed himself. “It’s just—”

  “It’s just your ex slept with a total skank,” Kat said, offering her two cents worth. “I mean, really? Nadine Gri
ffin? Ewww, that’s all I can say. I used to feel all special that he slept with me. Lately, I’m just feeling increasingly gross about the whole thing.”

  There was a moment of silence, and Ariadne said, “You don’t even remember your relationship with him.”

  “Yeah,” she said, like she was explaining the obvious to idiots, “but you guys told me we did it, and I felt really special about it for a while.”

  “Sienna,” Reed said, “you broke up with him, remember?”

  “I fully know that,” I said, my voice a hoarse whisper. I could feel cold chills trickling down my back, replacing the hot rage I’d felt. “And I wouldn’t undo it, either, it’s just …” I stopped, or rather, my shame stopped me, and then I realized—these were my friends. “I just … I should be over him, I know. I haven’t cared if he slept with anyone else. I assume he has. Hell, I’ve hoped—or at least told myself I hoped—that he’d find someone good, someone worthy of him. Everything I’m feeling right now …” I couldn’t put it into words, but it was like some magical cocktail of rage, sickness, envy, sweats and a little more rage. “He’s not mine,” I said softly. “I let him go. It’s been years.” My voice cracked. “So … why does this hurt so much?”

  “It’s natural, Sienna,” Ariadne said gently.

  “I thought I was past it. Past him.” I sounded hollow when I spoke, and it made me sicker.