“Yeah. Zaida Hussan. Max. He’s going to look into your computer,” Levi said.
Zaida’s brows lifted. “This is your computer guy? For real?”
“Best hacker I’ve ever met. If something’s going on in your systems, he’ll find it.”
Zaida gave Levi a meaningful look, but he didn’t take the hint. This Mr. Cameron looked like he’d just eaten a small child and was thinking she’d do for his next meal. She cleared her throat. “Is he our only option?”
Max threw back his head and laughed. Levi grinned and said, “Yes.”
“Come on in, Ms. Hussan.” Max stepped back from the front door. “I’ll show you where you can wait.” His deep voice rumbled round the big foyer.
“Great. I’ll go get her stuff,” Levi said, leaving her alone with the monster man.
Max led her from the foyer into a massive living room, one so big it needed two full suites of furniture. It had a bar in one corner. A few French doors led outside to a long patio. Stairs led up to a second floor bridge that connected the two halves of the house. Another wide set of stairs led up from the sunken living room into a long dining room.
“Help yourself to anything in the bar,” Max said. “If you get thirsty or hungry, go see the guys in the kitchen. They might keep you company while I do my thing.”
“And…what is your thing, exactly?” Zaida asked.
Max grinned, slowly and without humor. “Gonna dig around and see what you’ve been up to.”
“I haven’t been up to anything.”
“Of course you haven’t. I’m gonna enjoy this.”
Levi came back into the house carrying the bin with her things. He gave her a curious look, which she couldn’t interpret. “You okay here?”
“Yes.” No. Not at all.
“I’ll come check on you in a bit.” Levi nodded at her. “Call me if you need me. Don’t wander off.”
“I won’t.”
Levi followed Max down a long hall. Man, this place was huge. They passed a wine cellar, a kitchen, some stairs up to another wing, and then stepped into a den, which was occupied by a single man. He was in his mid- to late-thirties with blond hair and blue eyes so pale they looked like a blue shade of white. He stood up from behind his desk.
“Owen, this is Levi Jones,” Max said. “Owen Tremaine.”
“Commander Lambert’s guy,” Owen said as he reached his hand out. They shook.
“Thanks for making Max available,” Levi said.
Max grinned at Owen and nodded toward the door. “He left his terrorist in the living room.”
Owen’s brows lifted.
“I don’t think she’s a terrorist,” Levi said, “though I can’t rule out her being used by one, however.”
Owen pressed his comm unit. “Selena, I need you to keep a woman company in the living room. Be aware she may not be a friendly.” Owen looked at him. “Better to be on the safe side.”
They started toward the open closet, but Max stopped. “Hey, boss. Is Remi here today? Maybe she could get a read on Ms. Hussan.”
Owen nodded. “Not a bad idea. Ask Greer to make it happen.”
“Greer’s here with you too?” Levi asked, surprised.
“Old war dogs like us have to do something when we get out of the service,” Max said.
“Yeah, but Greer is what, twelve?” Levi said.
“No. Our baby’s grown up. He’s thirty.”
“Huh. Who’s Remi?” Levi asked.
“Dr. Remington Chase is an associate professor of sociology at the University of Wyoming,” Owen said. “She’s also seeing Greer.”
Levi grinned. “Still can’t believe he’s old enough to date.”
Max laughed. Owen almost cracked a smile. Bastard reminded Levi of Commander Lambert.
“The bunker’s down here,” Max said, leading Levi into the closet to a hidden door that opened to reveal a steel staircase. They went down two flights. Max opened the door at the bottom landing. They stepped out into a huge conference room with a long table. Two smart screens were on one wall. Several men sat around the table, reading through stacks of papers. Some Levi knew, some he didn’t. Max took the bin from Levi and made the introductions.
First one up was another tall blond Levi knew from their time in the service. He had been a sniper in the Army. His eyes were a warm Caribbean blue. “Valentino Parker. This is awfully country for a city-boy like you,” Levi said as they shook hands.
“Right? I’ve been telling the team I can work long-distance from Denver, but they’re not buying it,” Val said.
Levi greeted everyone. He knew about half the team from the times when his unit and theirs crossed paths on assignments in Afghanistan and other locations. “So is it true the Army’s shutting down the Red Team?”
“It’s true,” another blond guy said. Kit Bolanger. Levi learned he was this group’s team lead. “We’ve all gotten out ahead of that. You left the Navy?”
“Yeah. Twenty-two years in was enough for me. I’m a farmer now. And I work the odd case here and there. What are you guys doing here in Wyoming?” Levi asked.
“Chasing down a nasty cult,” Kelan—the man he’d met in the parking lot at Zaida’s—said.
“I’m going to dig into Zaida’s stuff. Come make yourself useful,” Max said.
“Be right there.” Levi looked at Rocco, the team’s polyglot. Levi took his phone out and opened it to the Arabic text that Zaida had sent from her phone this morning while they were at her apartment. “Any chance you can translate this for me?”
“Sure.” Rocco read the message, then gave Levi a dark look.
“Read it aloud,” Levi ordered.
Rocco did.
“Great.” Fucking peachy. He’d gone to bat for Zaida, then she does something like this…even knowing he’d cloned her phone. Maybe she didn’t grasp what that meant. She’d done it in a sneaky way, too; she could have sent that message at any point from the phone he’d given her. But no, she’d waited to send that message until they got to her apartment and she could use her old phone, probably thinking he wouldn’t know about it. And she’d communicated in Arabic, which he could understand some of, but couldn’t read.
He had to fight the urge to go ask her about it right then. He’d find out soon enough. Tomorrow they were going to one of her group sessions. He wondered if whoever she’d been texting would show up at the meeting. And where was this office she mentioned? It hadn’t been included in the vitae Lambert had provided on her.
Levi followed Max down a short hall to an ops room where Greer was sitting at a bank of computers. The kid got up and gave him a fast shoulder bump. “Kit told us this morning we’d be assisting on one of your missions. Didn’t know you were back in Colorado. I hear you’re out of the Navy.”
“Yup. Got a big farm of sunflowers and the odd op here and there. It works for me for now.” Levi nodded at the technology in the room. “Looks like you guys have a serious gig.”
Greer and Max exchanged looks. “That’s one way to look at it.”
“So what are we looking for?” Max asked.
“The Freedom Code worm.”
Max shared a surprised glance with Greer. “What makes you think that came through her systems?”
“It’s a theory I’m running down. Hacked content believed to have come from a database on the server the worm communicates with had info on Zaida. The hackers were in a terrorist camp in Syria.” Levi turned a chair around and straddled it. “The CIA had been following the worm’s trail through the Middle East. When one of their guys saw Zaida’s stuff, he came back to talk to her and her family. He was murdered in Denver a few days ago. They cut off his head. Zaida’s in this up to her neck, but how or why, I don’t know. There were two attempts to kidnap her last night.”
Max looked impressed. “Then let’s see what we can find.”
Two hours later, Levi leaned back, then stood and rubbed his neck.
“There’s no evidence of malware existi
ng on her systems,” Max said. “If the Freedom Code worm had come through any of her stuff, it would have left markers. If it came from her, then it didn’t come from these machines. Does she have other computers?”
“Not that I’ve seen.”
Greer was packing Zaida’s things back into her bin. He handed Levi a flash drive. “If you do come across other computers you need us to check, use this. We can connect remotely to them. You don’t have to come back up.”
“What’s really going on up here?” Levi asked as they escorted him from their ops room into a weapons room, to an elevator. “You’ve got a lot of muscle here for a little cult action.”
“Not so little,” Greer said. “It’s a big group full of home-grown terrorists doing some nasty stuff.” Greer looked at his phone, then texted someone. “Looks like my girlfriend is waiting upstairs to have a word with you.” He glanced at Levi. “Guess she had a chat with Zaida.”
Good. Levi could use all the insights he could get. He sure didn’t trust himself when it came to Zaida. She’d gotten under his skin…and, like a true poison, was working her way right to his heart.
The small elevator from the bunker opened into a bedroom on the main floor. A woman with reddish brown, straight hair and deep forest green eyes was standing there. Levi looked back to see Greer closing the gates and sliding the wall panel back into place, hiding the elevator from untutored eyes.
Levi set the bin down and shook hands with the professor as they were introduced. “So, I guess you’ve had a chat with Zaida,” Levi said.
“I have. I like her.”
So did Levi.
“She’s in a difficult spot.”
“Yes, she is. I can’t quite make out how much is her doing, and how much is just a wrong place wrong time type of deal.”
“There is a growing cultural fear of Muslims. While many of her people, like her parents, are educated and upper class, even more are not—life’s a struggle for them.”
“None of this is news to me,” Levi said.
The professor’s lips thinned. “You’re going to have to build rapport with her if you want her to trust you enough to let you in. You cannot get your questions answered from the outside. Give her the benefit of the doubt.”
“I’m not sure I can. She warned some people away because of me—people who might have critical knowledge.”
“And wouldn’t you do the same to protect people you love?” Remi asked.
Levi’s gaze hardened. “Love wasn’t involved.”
Zaida held her silence as they left Levi’s friends’ house. It had been an odd day. She’d had a nice chat with Remi, the sociology professor. Remi knew about the women’s charities that Zaida favored. She also seemed to have a sense of what was at risk, which must have come from her work with cult survivors. And yet, the professor’s advice ran counter to Zaida’s instincts.
Trust Levi.
She’d said it several times. Zaida looked at him now. They were driving south, back to Colorado. The summer evening’s sun was warm on his hard features. He’d been super quiet the whole day, laughing only with the monster hacker guy who’d crawled through her systems. She was glad they’d given her computers back.
“Levi, who cleaned up my apartment?” she asked.
“My team. I guess.”
“You guess? You don’t know who was in my apartment?”
“I don’t.” A muscle bunched in his cheek. “Our roles are highly segregated. Sometimes the less we know, the safer we are.”
Zaida squinted into the sun streaming into her passenger side window. Maybe that was her answer. The less he knew, the safer her women would be. The safer they all would be.
9
Levi’s silence continued well into the evening. They’d eaten sandwiches for dinner, then he’d withdrawn to his exercise room. Zaida had retired to her room with her laptop. The world might be collapsing all around her, but she still had a deadline to meet.
She worked well into the night. Sometime close to midnight, she heard an odd clatter outside her window. She swept the curtains aside to have a look and was surprised to see a ladder.
She slipped on a pair of flip-flops, then went to investigate. No lights were on outside so she turned them on. She didn’t get any farther than the front stoop before Levi shouted down to her from up on the roof, “Shut them off.”
“What are you doing up there?” she asked.
“Watching my crop. Shut them off.”
Watching his crop? Was that a farmer thing? She reached inside his front door and flipped them off, then went outside. The moon was high in the sky, just a few days into its waning phase. It illuminated the area round Levi’s house with crisp relief, casting sharp shadows from the tall sunflowers. She followed the pavement that surrounded his home around to the side where the ladder was.
“Why are you watching your crop?” she called up to him.
“Because of the magic.” He walked over the hip of his roof and came over to the ladder. “Come up.”
“Is it safe?”
“Is anything we do safe?”
Zaida frowned at that cryptic answer. Levi wasn’t an easy man to figure out. He was complex and nuanced. The heroes in her stories were simpler, but perhaps that was because her stories were generally more centered on her heroines. Perhaps she’d given short shrift to her male characters.
Maybe she should write one from a male POV just to explore that half of humanity.
She started up the ladder. Levi reached down to steady her as she stepped from the ladder to the roof. It was cooler out than she’d expected and utterly…magical. Silvery light spilled across the sea of broad sunflower heads. They shimmered in a way that was more mystical than their daytime brilliance, like something fairies would conjure up, more fantastical than real.
“Levi,” her voice was a whisper. She didn’t want to be jarred out of this reverie. In this ethereal place between dark and light, anything was possible. All of her dreams could be true in a blink of the eye. Even the nightmare she was in had ceased to exist in the here and now.
“I’ve never seen anything like this. They’re facing us again.”
“It’s the heliotropism. They turn during the night so they’re facing east in the morning.”
Zaida crossed her arms and looked up at Levi. “Why do they do that?”
He shrugged. “Not sure it’s really known. One theory is that facing east—and following the sun—warms the flowers, activating their scent, which stimulates bees to get busy pollinating them. They’ll do this until the flowers are mature, then they stiffen into one position, sort of middle of the way.” He looked down at a blanket he’d spread on the roof. Another one sat folded nearby. “Do you want to sit with me for a minute?”
“Sure.” She smiled, wondering if his pique was over.
He grabbed the folded blanket and wrapped it around her shoulders. His eyes bored into hers as he adjusted the blanket near her neck. “I can’t believe you came up here in flip-flops.”
“I wasn’t expecting to climb a ladder.“ She could feel waves of heat coming off him. His eyes said so much more than his mouth did. She realized she wanted to know everything about him. Had he ever been married? Probably, she thought, answering her own question. He was older than she was.
His eyes in this silvery moonlight held hers just a little too long, as if he was seeking something from her. He looked lonely. Was he? Or was he just a loner who wished to have his home and life back to the way it was before she’d gotten mixed up in it?
“Do you think this will be over soon?” she asked.
“It could be. The more you let me in, the faster I can resolve it. Remi said that I need to establish a rapport with you so that you’ll trust me. But it’s really much less complicated than that. I’m supposed to find the terrorists who are using you and end them. If you’re working with them, then I’m supposed to contain you. You have the information I need to do that. Truth is, I don’t think you’re the bad
guy here.”
Now, Zaida knew why he’d called her up here on the roof. It wasn’t for the magic of his midnight sunflowers; it was because he had her cornered. There was nowhere for her to retreat to.
Zaida looked away from him. Professing her innocence right about now would just make her look guilty…as did her continued silence. The truth was, she had people to protect, people who were innocently doing a job she’d hired them to do. She couldn’t give them up or cast doubt on them. Their family and community situations were too tenuous as it was.
“I am not working with terrorists, Levi.”
“Then why do I have the persistent feeling you’re withholding information from me?”
“I’m only trying to protect some people in my community.”
Levi waved her over to the blanket he’d laid out. He sat when she did. “Okay. That’s exactly why I need you. Your community has a healthy distrust of outsiders. An understandable one. If the people you’re protecting are innocent, you have no need to fear for their safety from me.”
“You aren’t the one who causes me anxiety. These women do my translations. Their husbands and brothers think they do administrative work for me, not that they translate my work.”
Levi leaned back on his hands. His legs were stretched out in front of him. The silvery light made talking to him easier somehow than it was in the daylight. Maybe because she couldn’t see the little expressions that crossed his features, indicating his approval or disproval.
He sighed. “A work of high profile, highly erotic fiction was widely distributed in Middle Eastern countries recently, making bestseller lists there, as it did here. Is your stuff like that?”
“No. Big names can get away with a lot, like that author. I’m not at her level. I wouldn’t be granted as much freedom as she was. Nor would my translators. I write a line of fiction better suited to women living under Islamic law. The bedroom door is often left open, but only when the characters are married to each other, and even that’s still considered very risqué. These stories really aren’t anything like Western romantic fiction. They are very conservative…but in a conservative world, they’re also quite edgy. A gentle rebellion of sorts. Young women who aren’t married need to have an understanding of what will be expected of them. I often portray young couples that eschew the practice of polygamy and husbands who help their wives achieve success in their education and professional endeavors. It’s progressive stuff—not here in the West, but it is in some Islamic countries.”
Freedom Code Page 9
