Under Surveillance

by Jodie Bailey

  “I can give you some of those answers.”

  Macey blinked twice.

  She saw Trey standing in the living room at the entrance to his hallway. A familiar face. A safe face.

  A face she could trust in a sea of strangers and uncertainty.

  She was on her feet before she knew it, and Kito leaped up with her, leaning against her leg. Her muscles wanted desperately to fling her body at Trey, but she was caged in by the wall on one side and by Dana on the other.

  And by the expression on Trey’s face before her.

  She froze, planting her fists on the table for balance. He somehow managed to look like her friend and a stranger all at once. The look on his face was different, all angles and firm jaw. All business. No warmth.

  Macey glanced from him to Dana, then to Rich, who had walked in to stand beside Trey.

  They were conspiring against her somehow; she could feel it. There was danger somewhere—if not in this room, then lurking right outside the door.

  Her head turned, seeking a way out. Her gaze zipped from the front door to the back door to the hallway. She was trapped. Blocked. Someone wanted to hurt her and now even her closest friend seemed to be a completely different person. Her breaths came in spurts. Her pulse skyrocketed. The room narrowed on Trey’s face.

  His lips moved. “Dana.” There was panic in his voice as Macey’s knees weakened.

  Dana leaped up and grabbed Macey’s arm. She turned her and shoved her into the chair, driving her head between her knees. “Breathe. Slowly. On my count. In... Out... You’re hyperventilating. In... Out...”

  Fighting for control, Macey focused on the gentle voice. In... Out... Over and over until her focus returned and her body stopped rebelling. She shrugged off Dana’s hand and straightened. Humiliation and embarrassment heated her cheeks. She’d lost control in front of Trey and two strangers. What was happening to her?

  Carrying a large tablet, Trey crossed the room warily and slid into the chair across from Macey while Rich stayed where he was near the hallway, looking like he wasn’t exactly sure where he should stand.

  Macey focused on Trey, her friend.

  But was he really her friend?

  Slowly, he laid the tablet facedown on the table and let his gaze capture hers. For a long moment, he simply looked at her, a number of emotions crossing his face too fast for Macey to interpret any of them. Finally, he glanced down at the tablet, then at Dana, then sat taller, his expression an impassive mask. “Macey, I need you to be strong right now.”

  She dipped her chin and wove her fingers into Kito’s neck fur under his collar. Whatever he was about to say, her whole world was going to change. There was no doubt.

  “I need you to be strong because...” Trey pulled in a deep breath and wouldn’t let her look away from him. “Because almost everything you know about your life is a lie.”

  TWELVE

  “I don’t understand.” Macey tightened her grip on Kito’s collar and held on as though her dog could get her through anything. He protested with a soft whimper and pulled free, then walked under the table and dropped heavily by Trey’s feet with a loud sigh.

  Even her dog was against her.

  She closed her eyes and dug deep, finding an inner strength she knew was there but had half feared had fled, never to return. When she opened her eyes, everyone was staring at her. “You’re scaring me, Trey.”

  “I really don’t want to, but this is scary stuff.” He tapped his index finger on the rugged case around the tablet, then slid it across the table to Dana. “You do it.” Shoving away from the table, he paced to the front window and stared at the tightly closed blinds, his fists clenched at his sides.

  Whatever was going on, it was bad. Worse than she’d originally thought.

  With a sigh, Dana pulled the tablet closer and popped the stand out of the back, then set it between herself and Macey on the table. She accessed the device with her thumbprint and flicked open a window.

  The face of the man who’d attacked her only an hour earlier filled the screen.

  Macey turned her eyes away as a chill racked her body. When it passed, she dropped her hand to her side and snapped her fingers.

  Kito came closer and shoved his head against her palm.

  She absently rubbed the soft fur of his ear. “Who is he? And why do you have his picture?”

  For a long moment, Dana was silent. Then she clicked her tongue against her teeth. “Macey, I’m a government contractor. I consult for a military intelligence unit unofficially known as Eagle Overwatch. I do a lot of tech work and cyber investigating for them.”

  “Never heard of them.” She’d grown up near Fort Bragg. Her soldier father had moved them there and then left them behind. “Sounds like something you made up.”

  “It’s fairly new and I can’t tell you much about it, but Overwatch steps in when normal military intelligence and investigations either hit a dead end or are being surveilled themselves. We were called in to investigate someone who could be working on the inside, someone who was stealing intelligence and selling it on the dark web to the highest bidder. Someone who was working closely with a group known as Sapphire Skull.”

  Macey sucked in a breath. Sapphire Skull had once made the national news. They’d blown up a government building and supply depot. Why was Dana sitting beside her talking to her about stolen secrets and Sapphire Skull? Why was—

  The man’s words rushed her memory. Tell me where you put the intel. We paid for it in good faith.

  She gasped and turned to Dana, shaking her head violently from side to side. “No. No. No. I don’t have any intelligence. That man...” She jabbed her finger against the tablet screen. “That man wanted to know what I did with the intel. I don’t know. I mean...” She turned in the chair and her gaze found Trey’s. “I don’t know what or who, but I—Where would I even get those things? I don’t even know any government secrets. I’m a physical therapist, not a spy.” Why was she telling Trey this? He was her neighbor. Her friend. Not investigating her. Not like this Dana woman. And probably Rich, too. She poked at the tablet again and her finger slipped along the screen.

  The photo changed, and Macey jerked.

  Olivia’s face, taken from her government ID, stared back at her.

  Macey’s hand dropped to the table and she sank against the back of the chair. “Why do you have Olivia’s picture?”

  Dana pulled the device out of Macey’s reach and turned toward Trey, seeming to shoot him a silent plea for help. There was an intense, wordless conversation before he finally exhaled loudly and came to sit across from Macey. He took the tablet Dana had shoved toward him.

  He stared at the screen, then looked up to meet Macey’s gaze. “Olivia was...” He exhaled loudly and shook his head. “She was the one stealing secrets. It appears she was paid a monthly retainer by members of Sapphire Skull to pass along any data she deemed important. And she passed a lot of data.”

  Macey pressed her fingers to her lips and stared at Trey. The words didn’t compute. Her roommate. Her best friend. A criminal? She’d lived with a criminal?

  She’d be sick if everything in her hadn’t suddenly shut down and gone numb, denying the truth she was hearing. Her emotions hit a wall and landed in an icy cold place where only words existed. No feelings. Just words. “Did they use her intel?”

  From across the room, Rich spoke. “A supply warehouse in Texas. A small IRS satellite office in California. About half a dozen smaller nuisance attacks on government sites around the country have been traced back to her leak.”

  Two government employees had died in the IRS office. Several had been injured in Texas. And Olivia had sat beside her and watched the news like nothing was unusual in their lives. Like it was background noise. Just something happening in another state.

  Macey sighed and searched Trey’s face for the
truth. “She really did that?”

  He hesitated, then nodded. “She did. But there’s...there’s more.” He flicked the tablet and stared at it for a long moment. “Her main contact was a man named Jeffrey Frye. He and his brother are the driving force behind Sapphire Skull. They’re a couple of antigovernment domestic terrorists out to make a name for themselves. And...” He turned the tablet toward Macey.

  Only the man’s profile was visible in a grainy surveillance photo, but there was no doubt as to who it was. “That’s Jeff Washington. Olivia’s boyfriend.” Maybe this was all a mistake. Maybe... She jumped to her feet. “Maybe Jeff coerced her. Maybe he stole stuff off her laptop or he—”

  “We have a paper trail. Money, emails, documented meetings. But, Macey...” He flicked the screen again and a photo of Jeff with another woman popped up. Only the back of her head was visible, but Macey recognized the location. The hotel lobby where they’d stayed in Denver. He was handing Macey the purse Olivia had left behind after they’d all had dinner together on their last night in the city.

  If she didn’t move, she was going to be sick or explode. She looked down at Dana. “I need out. I need...I need out.” Dana shoved the chair in and Macey squeezed past her, pacing to the kitchen and back, then to the front window where Trey had been standing moments before. “I’m on camera exchanging something with a terrorist.” She lifted her eyes to the ceiling. “That wasn’t Olivia’s purse, was it? That was something else.”

  “Probably. Or it was an effort to make it look like you were involved.” Dana spoke up from her seat at the table. “We don’t have proof, but we do have this photo and others like it. The emails and bank accounts were all in your name.”

  “What?” Macey whirled toward Trey. He was her friend, right? Her ally? He knew her, knew she wouldn’t do something like this. “I didn’t do this. I wasn’t a part of this. I didn’t know anything.” She strode to Trey and stood over him. “You know me. You know I didn’t do this. I wouldn’t do this.”

  Trey stood and reached for her, then stopped halfway and shoved his hands into his pockets instead. “I know. We all know. As of this morning, you’re cleared.”

  “As of this morning? What happened this morning?” Cleared? She was cleared? Up until a few hours ago they’d honestly believed she could do something so heinous? Her mind spun. Her thoughts refused to gel.

  Trey pulled his hands from his pockets and guided Macey into the chair. He handed her the tablet with a video playing. Olivia and Jeff in their living room. Talking about her. Framing her. As though she was nothing more than a pawn.

  Using her and throwing her away like a dirty paper towel.

  Her roommate. Her friend. Willing to destroy her life to save her own. No, actively working to destroy Macey’s life to save her own.

  “It can’t be true.” Stuff like this happened in movies. Or to strangers on the news. Not to her.

  “I’m afraid it is.” Trey looked down at her with sympathy and maybe even a bit of pity.

  Her eyes narrowed and she stood, then took a step away from him. She crossed her arms and looked him up and down, from head to toe and back again, as though seeing him for the first time. A growing suspicion, a nagging dread, rose from somewhere behind her stomach. “You had handcuffs on you. You took down that man and you handcuffed him. And then...and then you called in someone to take him away.” Macey glanced from Trey to Rich to Dana and back to Trey. “You work with them.”

  Trey hesitated and then nodded once, his gaze never leaving her.

  She lifted a hand and held it between them, humiliated to see her fingers shake as so many broken pieces melded together to form a picture she didn’t want to see. “You. You said I was clear as of this morning. You said they thought I did these things. That means...that means you thought I did these things.”

  “Macey.” His voice was heavy and jagged with the same anguish her heart felt, cutting her deep into her soul.

  “No.” She laughed bitterly and backed farther away from him, her hip colliding with the edge of the table. “No. You aren’t my friend. You were never my friend. You were lying. All this time you were lying.”

  Trey opened his mouth to speak, but shut it and threw his hands out to the sides as though he was exasperated and angry.

  Emotion slammed Macey in the chest and hammered her heart against the boards. Everything inside her shattered into a million jagged little pieces. She’d trusted him. Liked him. Maybe even...

  No. She wouldn’t think that.

  Two more steps backward to the front door. She had to get out of there. She had to get away from the betrayal, the lies. First Olivia. Now Trey. Nothing was safe. Nothing was true. She had to leave.

  She motioned to Kito and turned on her heel. Together, they headed for the door. Macey jerked it open and made a run for the freedom of her own house. The house where Olivia had plotted her demise.

  Nowhere was safe.

  “Macey!” Trey was on her heels, his hand around her biceps before she could cross the front porch. “You’re in danger. You can’t do this. You can’t—”

  She jerked free and barreled toward her house. Danger came in a lot of forms, and the worst one stood on his front porch, calling her name.

  * * *

  Trey pounded the side of his fist against the door frame as Macey’s front door slammed shut. The pain stung all the way up his arm, but he deserved it. He deserved that and a whole lot worse. The look on her face...

  He’d broken Macey Price. He’d betrayed her in the same way Olivia had, even if the goal of the deception was very, very different.

  Not that it mattered now. She was in danger and needed protection. Racing off to her house alone was foolish. He moved to go after her.

  Rich’s firm grip on his shoulder stopped him. “Let her go. Give her some time to process. Once she cools off a little bit, Dana can try to talk to her, but you need to stay away. You know that.”

  Trey wanted to fight, to hit something, to turn around and scream his frustration into Rich’s face. Instead, his shoulders slumped. He let his teammate lead him back into the house.

  Rich was right. The last thing Macey needed, the last person Macey would ever trust, was Trey. “At least Dana has never lied to her.”

  “You didn’t lie. You did your job. Undercover is tough for a reason. Your other assignments all involved some really bad dudes. This one just happened to be someone you...” Rich opened the front door and walked into the house, then waited for Trey to enter. “Someone you fell for.”

  Trey faced his teammates. “They should have sent a woman to do this job.” A woman wouldn’t be in the mess he was in, that was for sure. When it came to his past surveillance subjects, they’d all been hard-core bad operators. Never once had he had to do anything but play the game. With Macey, things had gotten way too real.

  He might never recover.

  Dana rose from her chair and came to stand next to Rich. “Olivia was savvy. She’d have suspected a woman and would have never let her close. But a man? She never saw you coming.”

  “Neither did Macey.” He waved off any further comments from his friends and forced his mind to shift gears away from his heart. He was an investigator. This was a job. Right now, no matter how much he wanted to simply be a man, that couldn’t happen.

  Business. He had to be all business. He clapped his hands together. “So, what’s next? And how do we keep an eye on Macey when she won’t let us near her?” They couldn’t force themselves into her home, not without the proper paperwork. Not without an imminent threat outside her door, anyway.

  Rich stepped around Trey and headed for the back door. “Right now, I’ll take up surveillance of her house. Your deck gives us a clear view of front and back entry points, so we’re good there.”

  “And I’ll keep combing through these video files to see what other evidence I can dig
up.” Dana lifted the tablet from the table and crossed the room to flop into Trey’s recliner like someone who was about to binge-watch their favorite TV show. She looked up at Trey. “You take a minute to regroup, and then we need to report back to Captain Harrison what’s gone down here since you sent him a cuffed suspect and blew your cover with Macey.”

  Tough words but true words. Trey didn’t like them, and he definitely didn’t want to hear them, but Dana was right. He needed to get his head on straight and work the proper channels to move this thing forward and take down the men who were coming after Macey. Right now, they’d proved who the leak was, but so far it didn’t get them any closer to the Frye brothers or to Sapphire Skull.

  Regroup. Usually, for him, that meant doing something normal. But normal had been blown out of the water a long time ago. He wandered into the kitchen and stood between the counter and the refrigerator, feeling like a stranger in his own house. Well, his temporary house, but still.

  It was past dinnertime, but Trey wasn’t hungry. He grabbed a piece of leftover pizza out of the fridge and forced himself to eat it, then pulled his phone from his hip pocket to report in to the commander.

  An unread message flashed on the home screen. His heart beat double time at the sight of Macey’s name, and he thumbed the screen to unlock the message.

  We’ve been friends too long to let something stupid make it all awkward. Pretend it never happened?

  What was she saying? Pretend it never happened? Pretend that he wasn’t an undercover investigator and she wasn’t in danger? Walk over there to watch the Red Wings play Dallas as though they were two regular people with regular lives? People who had a chance at building something?