DRAGON SECURITY: Volume 2: The Complete 6 Books Series

by Glenna Sinclair

  And then I was suddenly just … awake.

  It was dark. Rowan was asleep in the bed beside me, snoring with his arms wrapped around a pillow. I watched him for a minute, admiring this man who’d stuck by me through this medical nightmare. My belly itched, but I was suddenly full of so much energy that I didn’t know what to do with myself.

  I slipped out of bed and made my way out of the bedroom, curious about this house I’d heard about but hadn’t seen up until now. Kevin came here with his soon-to-be wife months ago when she was set up for the murder of her sister’s fiancé. Before he left Dragon, he told us all about the adventure they’d shared out here in this house that belonged to Waverly. She was a mystery, our former tech specialist. And her house was beautiful.

  I found soap in the bathroom and a lovely bottle of that Australian brand of shampoo that I liked so much. I stood under the spray of hot water for a long time before washing up, running my hands over the sutures that were already almost completely dissolved on my belly. If I hadn’t known, I might not have guessed what my body had been through these last few days.

  Dressed in nothing but a bathrobe I found hanging from the back of the bathroom door, I stepped out into the cold of the night, walking down to the little dock that stuck out into the water. The stars were bright and the air was crisp, probably too cold for my wet hair. But I sat there on the edge of the dock, my feet inches above the water, and raised my face to the moon.

  I was alive. I was safe.

  Who could ask for more?

  And it was all Rowan. I was supposed to be protecting him from whatever was after him, but he had saved me. He could have taken off. He could have left me alone in that empty house. He could have thought only of himself and disappeared. I can’t say that I would have blamed him if he had. But he didn’t.

  Rowan not only stayed with me, but he got a friend to operate on me and then he stood by me while I recovered. Again, I was unconscious for—I didn’t even know how long—but he stayed by me, took care of me, and made sure I survived this thing. Who did that for a stranger?

  I needed to call Hayden. He needed to know what was happening here and he needed to find a way to get us back to Houston. We had to finish this thing, whatever it was. We had to protect Rowan from whatever was after him.

  I got up to go back to the house, hoping Rowan had kept the disposable cellphone I’d bought the night before everything went to hell. But then I saw him standing on the wide deck of the house watching me. He lifted his hand when he realized I’d seen him. I lifted mine in response.

  “Why didn’t you let me know you were awake?” he asked as I climbed the steps to the house.

  “You looked peaceful. I didn’t want to disturb you.”

  “It wouldn’t have been a disturbance.”

  He reached for me, drawing me into his arms. We stood facing the water for a while, watching the light slowly change as the sun began to make its appearance in the distance. His body was warm against mine, his hands gentle as they moved slowly over my forearms. I leaned back, pressing my head into his shoulder.

  “How long have we been here?”

  “Four days.”

  I stiffened a little. I was supposed to call Hayden days ago. He must have been going out of his mind wondering what’d happened to us.

  “You were pretty sick,” he said near my ear. “You lost a lot of blood before I could get you to Tallahassee.”

  “How did you get me there?”

  “Stole a car from a little community up the road from that house.”

  “You shouldn’t—”

  “It was at the back of an auction yard. They were due to auction if off for a couple more days yet. I doubt anyone’s even noticed it’s gone.”

  “It was still too risky.”

  “It got you help. And it got us here, so I think it was worth it.”

  I turned in his arms and kissed the center of his chin. “You could have run. You could be halfway to New York by now.”

  “And leave you to die? Wasn’t happening.”

  “You don’t owe me anything.”

  “No, I don’t.” He studied my face for a long second. “But I’m not that guy.”

  I reached up to kiss him again but he backed up. He reached into the front pocket of his jeans and pulled out the phone I’d been so worried about.

  “Call in. Let them know you’re safe.”

  He walked away before I could say anything, his shoulders heavy with some unseen burden as he stepped inside the house.

  I turned back to the view, my hands shaking a little as I played with the phone between my hands. What was I going to say to Hayden?

  His voice was warm with sleep when he picked up on the first ring, barking a quick demand without knowing who was on the other end of the line.

  “Speak.”

  “Hayden, it’s Amelia.”

  “Amelia? Where the fuck have you been? You were supposed to check in days ago. We’ve been searching for you all over the goddamned United States!”

  “I’m in Florida. There was an accident and I was injured—”

  “Injured? How?”

  “It’s complicated. But I’m better now.”

  “Where in Florida, Amelia?”

  “The Keys. Waverly’s place, actually.”

  There was a long silence. Then a heavy sigh.

  “Listen closely to me, Amelia. We have reason to believe you might be in danger.”

  “I don’t—”

  “Are you still with Rowan McGregor?”

  “Of course. He—”

  “We think he might be a double agent working with foreign governments to move his technology out of the United States.” There was a brief pause. “We believe he is responsible for the murder of the woman in his home. Her name was Rachel O’Bannon. She was a member of a radical group out of Ireland who, we believe, was helping McGregor steal his own work.”

  “Why would he kill her if he was working with her?”

  “We believe the deal went south, somehow.”

  “And the man who fired an automatic weapon at my house?”

  Hayden sighed. “We think that might have been O’Bannon’s people letting him know their displeasure at his actions.”

  I shook my head even as I concentrated on a seagull fishing near the shore.

  “It doesn’t make sense. They came after us. They crashed an entire bus full of people to get to him. If this was just about a bunch of computer code, why didn’t they try to get the code off of his computer at work?”

  “How do you know they didn’t?”

  “Because he got into the system. He took the code off of his work terminal.”

  “Is that what he told you?”

  “He said that he finished it. That it was more valuable now, so he moved it.”

  “Moved it how, Amelia? Where did he put it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  I could almost feel Rowan’s eyes on me. I turned. I didn’t see him, but the sun was reflecting on the windows now and they were opaque. He could have been there, but I wouldn’t have known.

  “The CIA paid us a visit a few days ago, Amelia. They believe that someone tampered with the computer systems at Johnson Robotics. They believe that someone not only took the code, but that they sabotaged the company’s security protocols. Did he mention anything about that? Do you know what he was up to before he came to us?”

  “No. All I know is that he finished his code and he moved it. I don’t know anything more than that.”

  “You’ve been alone with him for over a week.”

  “I was unconscious for most of it. I really don’t know what he was up to.”

  “All right.” Hayden sighed. “I’m going to send a team out there to pick the two of you up. Don’t tell him what we know. We’ll let the cops and the CIA and whoever else deal with him when we get him back to Houston.”

  “Is that really necessary?”

  “The evidence is what it is, Amelia. Un
less he can prove otherwise, he’s probably looking at twenty years in a federal pen before he gets himself deported back to Ireland.”

  Twenty years. I couldn’t even imagine what that would be like.

  “Stay put. They’ll be there in a few hours.”

  I disconnected the call and slid the phone into the pocket of my bathrobe. I trusted Hayden and I was sure that the evidence was showing him exactly what he said it was. But I couldn’t wrap my mind around the idea that Rowan would commit such a dark crime. It just didn’t fit with the man I’d begun to know.

  I pushed myself away from the railing and went into the house. Rowan was in the bedroom, throwing clothes into a duffle bag I’d never seen before.

  “What are you doing?”

  “They’re coming for us, aren’t they?”

  “We need to talk.”

  He chuckled under his breath, but it wasn’t a friendly sort of chuckle. He reached under the bed and picked up a shirt and shoved that into the bag with the rest. Then he opened a drawer near the bed and pulled out a gun.

  “This is yours,” he said, tossing it into the center of the bed.

  I chewed on my bottom lip, the sight of that gun setting off alarm bells in my head. But it wasn’t the ones that might have gone off. No, these were bells that told me that what Hayden had said had been wrong.

  “I need to know the truth.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you promised it to me. And because it could mean the difference between you going to prison and us maybe finding a way to save your ass.”

  “Why would you care? Your job is done once they get here. You kept me safe.”

  “Because I owe you. You saved my ass.”

  “I didn’t do it expecting favors.”

  “Doesn’t matter. This is how things are going to go down. You’re going to fucking explain to me how you got yourself into this mess in the first place. And then we’re going back to the mainland, back to a large city where we can disappear long enough to figure out how to get you out of this mess.”

  “It’s not worth it for you, Amelia,” he said, zipping up the top of the bag. “I don’t want you involved any deeper than you already are.”

  “It’s not your choice.”

  He studied my face for a moment, then he snatched the bag up off the bed and started for the door. I thought I heard him say I’m sorry as he passed me, but I wasn’t entirely sure. But I knew I wasn’t going to let him walk out that door without telling me the whole story. I had earned the right to know.

  “Stop!”

  I picked up the gun and leveled it at his head. The distinctive sound of the safety clicking off filled the room. Rowan stopped in the doorway, turning slowly to face me.

  “You won’t shoot me.”

  “Don’t put it past me.”

  He seemed to consider the situation for a moment, his eyes moving from the gun to my face. Then he dropped the bag and raised his hands.

  “Okay. You win.”

  I gestured for him to take a seat in a chair by the bed. He did, resting his hands on the tops of his thighs as he studied me.

  It didn’t feel like a win. It felt like a betrayal.

  And then he began to talk and my whole idea of who Rowan McGregor was changed.

  Chapter 14

  Rowan

  I didn’t know where to start. And a part of me didn’t want to get into it. I didn’t want to see the disappointment in her eyes when she realized I wasn’t the person she’d come to believe was innocent. However, no one is ever truly innocent.

  “I came to the United States because I’d come to understand that I would be limited in what I was able to do in Ireland. While the university that I called home had given me carte blanche on my research, they didn’t understand the implications of my work and they would never be able to utilize it the way I knew other countries would. So I began searching for job opportunities in places that would allow me to make the breakthroughs I knew I was capable of. Three years ago, Johnson Robotics offered me that opportunity.”

  I dragged my fingers through my hair, remembering the hurt in my mother’s eyes when I told her I was leaving the country. She’d never quite let go of the hope that I would settle down, have children in our little village, and eventually find a way to reconcile my ambition with my desire to have a family.

  How ironic it was that I’d finally found a woman who might inspire me to do just that after I’d given up on the very idea.

  “For the first year or two, they did give me the freedom I so desired. I made so many breakthroughs that I lost track of them all, but I had yet to catch up with most of my American counterparts. And then, last year, I published in a scientific journal and I was approached by this woman. She said she was part of an agency that was trying to uncover irregularities at Johnson Robotics. She said they were stealing their employees’ work and patenting it as their own. She said what they were doing was illegal and if I helped her uncover it she would help me patent my own work under my own name instead of having to share the credit with the company.”

  I leaned forward, aware that Amelia was still holding a gun on me, but also aware that her finger was no longer on the trigger. She was watching me closely, but her hand had gone limp.

  I’d never believed she would shoot me, but I was a little relieved to see the proof.

  “We met once or twice a month over the last year. I’d slip her information I discovered with a little computer snooping at the company and she would continue to make her promise. She’d say, ‘Finish the code and it’ll be all yours.’ But last week I began to wonder about her honesty when I saw her speaking to another of the computer programmers in my division. I confronted her.”

  I shook my head, meeting Amelia’s eyes.

  “I’m a computer guy and it never occurred to me to check her background. I never bothered to make sure she was really who she said she was. It wasn’t like me to blindly trust, but the idea of having complete control over my code? It was a fucking fantastic idea. I would be rich beyond my wildest dreams in a matter of days after the significance of what I’d done hit the industry. My greed clouded my judgement. But not after that day.

  “I uploaded a security protocol onto my work computer and began keeping track of what was going on beyond my awareness. And I began to realize that someone was very interested in my work. Someone outside the office was watching my every keystroke. And I discovered the same thing on several other computers hooked up to the network at Johnson. That’s when I realized the company wasn’t being investigated by some outside agency. It was being hijacked by some competitor and I’d helped them.”

  I sat back, wiping my wet palms on the thighs of my jeans. “I confronted Rachel and she insisted that I was wrong. She told me there was a simple explanation for what I’d found. She told me that she had reason to believe that the company was planning on selling my work to a foreign country and that she worked for an agency that was trying to prevent that from happening. She told me that she would fix everything if I’d just get her this passcode … and I was stupid enough to believe her.”

  “What passcode?”

  I shook my head. “It was a passcode to the security protocol I’d developed and put into place on my work terminal. It would allow her and whoever else to see everything I’d seen. She said that gaining access to that was the only way she could prove to me that she wasn’t the enemy, that the CEO of Johnson was the real enemy.”

  “Did you give it to her?”

  “I was supposed to at that party the night she died. But she didn’t show up, so I followed through on the secondary protocol. I slid it into an empty cigarette package and dropped it on the sidewalk outside. I thought maybe she had seen something and decided not to come to the party. It was something we’d talked about ahead of time. I wrote the passcode in a code that only she would recognize and understand. That was something else we’d discussed ahead of time.”

  “And then you went home.”
<
br />   “I went home about forty minutes later. Got ready for bed. Didn’t think anything was wrong.”

  “Did you do anything different? Did you change your routine in any way?”

  I shook my head. “No.”

  “And it was Rachel in your bed the next morning.”

  “Yes.”

  She was quiet for a long moment and I could see she had a question on her mind. I answered it for her, before she could ask.

  “No, I hadn’t slept with her before. She’d never been to my home, never been in my bed. We’d never even touched. Our every meeting was designed so that we appeared to be acquaintances who just happened to share a little small talk. It was all very professional.”

  “Then why would they put her in your bed?”

  “It was a message. A warning, maybe.”

  “Did you ever meet anyone else from her organization?”

  “No. She always approached me on her own.”

  “Did she talk about others? Mention any of them by name?”

  I shook my head. “She was always very careful about what she said to me.”

  Amelia set the gun on the dresser and wrapped her arms around her chest, pulling the bathrobe closer against her body. The wheels were spinning in her head. She wanted to believe me. I could see that. But something about what I’d said must have contradicted what Hayden told her over the phone and that was causing her some doubt. Her face … it was like reading a damn book.

  “Amelia—”

  “Is that why you wanted the computer? To check to see if someone had successfully used that passcode?”

  “Yes.”

  “But they hadn’t?”

  “No one had touched anything on my terminal as far as I could tell. It didn’t read any keystrokes, no programs were accessed. It didn’t appear as though they had figured out how to read the code.”

  “Could someone have used it after you checked?”

  “Yes, I suppose.”

  “Could they have used it to make it appear as though you’d tampered with the company’s security protocols?”

  The thought had never occurred to me, but I nodded. “The program itself might look like tampering to an outside eye. Why?”