But Tucker just kept approaching without saying a word.
“Tucker?”
“What?” he finally said, a look of surprise on his face as if he hadn’t heard her.
“Is everything okay?”
He stood at driver’s-side door, staring at her across the roof of the car.
“What the hell is it?” she said, keeping her voice calm. She wasn’t going to lose it. Not now, when they were so close.
“Oh, um . . . Can you actually go back inside and, uh . . .”
“What?”
“Can you grab something for us to eat?” He started looking through his wallet, flipping through. “I forgot breakfast.”
“There won’t be anything actually edible in there,” she said. “You want junk food?”
“Yeah, can you just, um . . .”
She’d never seen Tucker act like this. He looked guilty about something. Covering, scared.
“Tucker? What’s going on?”
He put his wallet away and then frowned, looking down, away from her eyes at all costs. But she felt it right away anyway, a clear sign that he’d done something. Something . . .
“Tucker?”
He was shaking his head, swearing softly to himself. It horrified her.
“What the hell is going on?” she said.
He didn’t say a word.
And then Macy remembered her phone. She’d left it inside the car. With Tucker. She took a deep breath. “Open the door.” The words came out low and calm, her voice steadying against her growing anxiety.
Tucker finally raised his head up, and with a crooked half smile he said, “Okay . . . Let’s just talk about this for a minute.” But there was a dead look in his eyes that didn’t match the rest of him, especially that chipper voice. He laid it on too thick, like a bad used-car salesman. “Can we just talk about this first?”
“Talk about what?” Her eyes instinctively went back to the car, her gaze through the window, searching for whatever it was that Tucker had been trying so hard to cover up.
“Okay,” he said, “so, Jasper just wanted me to sync up your phone. That’s all. I should have told you, but—”
“What? Sync up my phone?” She saw it now, her phone on the seat, with wires hanging out. “What the fuck is that?”
“We had to sync it up to—”
“What do you mean, sync? What does that mean, Tucker?”
“To connect them.”
“No. You mean to steal my data. My contacts, my calls. Files. History. Is that it?”
“No . . .”
“You needed to spy on me?”
“No.”
“Yes,” she said. “Who was it? Jasper? So Jasper had you spy on me. And this was all planned out, having to use the phone, stopping here.”
“Well, you had to use the bathroom.”
“You lied to me.”
“I didn’t lie.”
“You . . .You fucking . . .”
“No . . . Macy. It wasn’t like that.”
She turned around, away from the car and her phone, and away from his goddamn face. She leaned against the door, arms crossed, watching the traffic roll by, feeling time swirl around, like a little inconsequential drop in a bucket. Meaningless. Everything was meaningless and empty now. She was alone.
She felt alone again for the first time since Luanda. Since before Tucker.
“Come on,” she heard him say, his words barely cutting through the thick cloud that enveloped her.
The door locks clicked open.
“Come on,” he said again. “Let’s get going. I can explain on the way to—”
“Save it,” Macy said, flinging open her door and getting in. The first thing she did inside was disable the wire and toss it out of the car.
“Please, Macy . . .”
“I’m only getting in this car because I . . . have to.”
Did she really?
What were her options?
The old Macy knew it was better to be alone than with someone she couldn’t trust. Especially in this country—or anywhere she’d run to.
Tucker, already on her side of the car, had picked up the wire from the ground. “You don’t have to do anything. You can do or not do whatever you want, and with whoever you want.”
“That’s not true, and you know it,” Macy said. “You know the situation I’m in right now. You know how fucked up it is . . . including this, you hacking into my phone. I can’t believe it, Tucker. I can’t even begin . . .”
“I can explain.” He slipped into the car and sat next to her. Her body instinctively recoiled away. Tucker’s shoulders dropped.
“Come on,” he said. “Please?”
“Please what?” It came out angrily. “How about you please drive? Or can I? Can we just go?”
With a loud sigh, Tucker started the car and idled out of the parking lot, driving out a one-way entrance.
And then he almost slammed into the back of the car in front as it came to an unexpected stop.
“Do me a favor,” she said.
“What?”
“Don’t get us killed, okay? Okay?”
“What are you talking—”
“—Just pay attention!”
“Alright!” he barked back, the two of them sounding to her like an old married couple. “Alright, let’s just . . .”
“Let’s just get to where we’re going,” she said, folding her arms and looking away.
“Macy, I believe you. I mean, I trust you. Totally.” He paused, but she added nothing in between. He grumbled something quietly, and then sighed again in the silence. “It was set up so that I had to prove something to them. I was doing it for you, actually.”
“How nice.”
“Jasper was . . . worried, since the attacks. He just wanted to be sure. I mean, you’re new. New people get vetted like crazy. Fuck! Macy, I just wanted to . . .” He trailed off, as if testing the waters for her reaction. But when none came, Tucker said nothing else. He drove, pulling away quickly from the gas station. She glanced his way when she finally no longer felt his gaze on her. His face was impassive, but his eyes burned, and his hands gripped the wheel so tightly his knuckles and fingers were white with the pressure.
24
Tucker
“I guess there goes the honeymoon stage,” Jasper said.
Tucker kept loading the back of the truck with sand bags, letting each of them slump down loudly against the wooden panel floor of the truck.
“She’ll get over it,” Jasper said from his spot on the tailgate. He’d been sitting there the whole time.
Whenever Tucker would walk by, sandbag in hand, he enjoyed the brief mental image of dropping one of the thirty-pound bags over Jasper’s head. Anything to shut him up. He might even be lucky and get a snapped neck out of it.
“Take it easy with those,” Jasper said after Tucker’s last toss. He’d been increasingly rough with the bags, throwing them from an increasing distance. “Hey,” Jasper said after the following toss. “They might split like that. Then we’ll have sand everywhere.”
For the next bag, and for the furthest distance yet, Tucker stayed outside the truck. After rotating his body like an Olympian hammer thrower, he swung back and then released the bag into the air. It missed Jasper’s head by a few inches as it sailed into the truck.
“What the fuck?” he cried “What the hell was that?”
“Nothing,” Tucker said, wiping the sweat from his brow. “So you’re lucky.”
“I’m lucky?”
“Lucky I’m not doing anything,” Tucker said. “I’m taking it out on the bags, instead.”
“Oh.” Jasper got down off the tuck. “You want to take something out on me?”
Tucker turned from his pile of sandbags. Jasper was taking a few slow steps toward him. “Are you squaring up to me? You sure you want to do that?”
“You’re being a real prick about this,” Jasper said. “I put in a good word about her to Jackson. Wit
hout that, she wouldn’t be anywhere near here. And neither would you. Without DARC Ops, you might still be rotting away in some Humvee in Mosul, not knowing if Macy even existed out here. And she’d be back in Angola, probably hanging in a fucking meat locker until someone could pay the bounty.”
Tucker couldn’t hold back the rage. He lurched forward and shoved Jasper against his chest, knocking him back. Jasper stumbled over the pile of sandbags, landing over them on his back. Tucker readied himself in a defensive stance, readying for Jasper to get back up and come forward again. To square up for another exchange. But he just stayed on the ground, smiling.
“Feel better now?” Jasper said. “Get it out of your system?”
Now it was Tucker’s turn to sit on the tailgate, slumping there and holding his head in his hands, seeing Macy’s disappointed face in the darkness. A horrified face. He rubbed his eye sockets with the palms of his hands, but it wouldn’t go away.
“Look, Tucker, I’m sorry it had to play out like that. I really am.”
He didn’t believe him. For all Tucker knew, it could have been a ploy to break them up. To keep him focused. He opened his eyes and fixed his gaze on Jasper, who had hauled himself to his feet while Tucker was brooding.
“But we have to take these preventative measures,” Jasper said. “We have to vet people like that. We did the same with you. You know that. We’re a private intelligence agency. It’s what we do, man.”
“It’s still a pretty shitty thing to do when you know the ramifications.”
“I understand that,” Jasper said. “But it was necessary.”
Tucker muttered, “And the ramification for me, and her. You know what I’m fucking talking about.”
“I know,” Jasper said. “And I’m sorry.”
It was hard for Tucker to accept.
Jasper brushed the dirt and dust off his pants. “So can we get along? Can we move on?”
He’d be fine with moving on with Jasper, eventually. Probably. It wasn’t the first time that they’d bumped heads, but the situation with Macy was more precarious. Since their fight, he’d become more and more convinced that she might just move on, not with him, but from him entirely.
But where could she move on to? Where else in this world could she run alone that would be safer than with DARC’s help?
“What do you say, Tucker? Can we pull this out?”
“Fine,” Tucker said. He walked back to the truck and reached out his hand for a conciliatory handshake. “Yeah, we can do this.”
Jasper pulled in a hug, thumping him on the shoulder. “No hard feelings?”
He thought for a minute. “You’ll have to ask Macy about that.”
“She’ll be fine.”
“Really? You think she’ll actually show up?” Tucker looked around at their work, the sandbags all in place next to the tripod legs of the EMP gun. A 4- by 5-inch slit carved out in the tuck door, the gun port, all ready to go. And Tucker, himself, maybe all ready to go—if he could just figure out what Macy was up to. He hadn’t heard from her since the blowup at the gas station. When they’d arrived at the compound, she’d stormed right inside, right past Jasper’s welcoming smile.
“She’s not too happy,” Tucker said.
“Want me to talk to her for you?”
“And say what? Sorry? Tried that already. It didn’t go down well.”
Jasper shrugged. Tucker knew enough about the army medic that he was at least sometimes reasonable. He must have been aware of that portion of the guy code that outlined, in no uncertain terms, to not cock-block your fellow bro. Though even Tucker could maybe admit that the conquests of his cock paled in importance to the safety of the world. Or at least he could admit that now, thinking with the right head, just as long as Macy’s firm ass wasn’t snug up against him.
Right now, he doubted any part of him would ever be that close to any part of her again.
“I can find her,” Jasper said. “I’ll talk to her.”
“And you’ll say I forced Tucker to steal your data? That I’m an idiot?”
“You want me to say that you’re an idiot?”
“You,” Tucker said. “That you’re an idiot.”
Jasper smiled. “I’m an idiot. Okay. What else?”
“I don’t know. You tell me. What other stunts have you pulled to sabotage me and Macy’s friendship?”
“So it’s a friendship now?”
“Of course it is,” Tucker said. “That’s all it ever was.” He felt the sadness come rushing back.
“Hey,” Jasper said. “Cheer up.”
The few days of friendship they’d had could be the most he’d ever achieve as far as Macy was concerned. He worried that now, since he’d broken her trust, it would just be a steady free-fall through the oblivion. Back through the gaping hole of time and place. From friends to nothing. Could something like that happen so swiftly? Their reuniting, and reignition, certainly happened quickly. A falling out might be even faster.
25
Macy
She found him hunched over his laptop, the nerdiest yet cockiest of the DARC Ops men, Tansy. The hacker. She’d first heard about him from Tucker’s explanation of how he’d found her in Luanda. Tansy, the man behind the hotel searches and the cell tower hacks. If anyone had ordered the hack on her phone, it was him. Or at the very least, it would be him who would be analyzing everything that she once thought was private.
“Reading anything interesting?” she said.
Tansy swiveled around in his office chair, torso first then followed by his legs until he was facing her square on. He didn’t say anything.
“What’s wrong?” she said.
He was still frozen, but then finally thawed with a cool shrug. “Don’t you have some work to do somewhere?”
“Oh,” she said. “Right, of course.”
He gave her an odd look before swiveling back around in his chair.
“Of course you would know all about that.”
Tansy’s head cocked to the side for an instant, then he looked back to work, to his screen, his fingers typing away.
“Of course you would know every single thing about me,” Macy said, sitting on top of the desk behind him. “Who I talk to, how I talk to them. My schedule, my day-to-day operations.”
Tansy finally stopped typing.
“I’m actually interested in your life,” she said.
“My life?”
“Your name. Tansy. What’s that, some kind of weird family tradition?”
Tansy shook his head and went back to typing.
“What the hell kind of name is that? Tansy? Sounds kind of like pansy.”
He shook his head again.
“No? You don’t like that? You don’t like Pansy?”
Tansy barked into his monitor, “Can I help you with anything? I mean, are you here for a purpose?”
“I’m just trying to learn everything I can about a new coworker.”
He stopped typing, sighed, and then reached into his pocket and pulled something out.
“I’m just a curious girl,” she said, watching him turn to face her again. He held out his hand to her. Inside it was a smart phone.
“There,” he said. “Take it.”
She looked at the phone, and then him. His expression was serious, almost sad. She really had nothing personal against him, and he was probably a pretty busy man. Though he still probably knew everything there was to know about her now.
“Go ahead,” Tansy said, still waving his phone at her. “If you’re so curious about me. Go ahead and take it. Read it, copy it. Whatever.”
“I don’t want that.”
“What do you want, then?”
She thought about the question. What did she really want? At first, it was just to be able to vent. Maybe yell a little bit, make whoever was behind her breach of privacy feel like crap. She didn’t want to do that to someone else, no matter how necessary it was.
“Do you trust me?” she said.
&
nbsp; “I don’t even know you.” He put the phone back into his pocket. “No one does.”
“Tucker knows me.”
“And he trusts you. I hope you don’t think otherwise because of what happened. Sometimes in this business, you have to do things that you hate.”
Macy knew all about that. The CIA had had no shortage of such tasks for her. “Yeah,” she said quietly.
“If it makes you feel any better, we did the same thing with all of Tucker’s data.”
“Okay,” Macy said. “So are you finished with mine?”
“Yep.”
“Then it would make me feel better if you destroyed everything.”
“No problem.”
“While I watch.”
Tansy laughed. “No problem.”
Macy watched as he pulled up her file on his laptop screen. “Here it is,” he said. “How do you want me to destroy it? Or do you want to do it yourself?”
“No, I trust your means.” She finally smiled. “But I’ll just watch you, though.”
While he destroyed her file, which consisted of the most anti-climactic and dreary task of typing commands into a black and white text screen, something changed inside her. Like a pressure valve opening up and venting, she felt lighter, looser. If anything, she might have even felt a little sorry for Tucker. The poor guy was stuck in a spot. She understood his orders, and the necessity to follow them. She’d come across many confusing and mixed orders in her time in the CIA, and especially with the St. Louis police. She’d done her fair share of questionable things there regarding Tucker, too. Things she still couldn’t forgive herself for.
So how could she ever think he would?
“Hey,” Tansy said. “You catching this? You know what this means?”
“Yeah.” She watched him type in the commands that would permanently erase all traces of her and her files. The parts that she wasn’t sure about, she relied on something foreign to her: trust.
Was she really trusting these men?
“Almost done,” Tansy said, still working, still erasing.
It felt weird, thinking of perhaps slowing down, sticking around for a while. But what would her future here be? There wasn’t very much in the way of intimate, sensitive secrets on that phone. They didn’t know too much of anything, really. It was just the invasion of her privacy, the idea of it, that she disliked so much.
Dark Lies (DARC Ops Book 6) Page 14
