Wicked Games: The Complete Wicked Games Series Box Set

by J. T. Geissinger

  “Love your tears, princess, ’cause I know you’d never give them to anyone but me,” he murmurs into my ear. For once, I don’t mind that he used that forbidden four-letter word.

  I let him hold me and listen to his sweet, beautiful words, wondering through my tears and hiccupping breaths if this is what religion is like for some people, all this awe and mystery and the feeling of having found your way home.

  Sometime shortly after my tears slow to sniffles, we fall asleep in each other’s arms.

  And sometime after that, I wake up sweating, with a pounding heart and an awful premonition that something is terribly wrong.

  On the table beside the bed, Connor’s cell phone rings. He’s awake instantly, snatching it up.

  “Talk to me,” he commands.

  He listens. After a moment, he wordlessly ends the call. When he looks at me, I know. I already know.

  “Søren,” I whisper, my heart in my throat.

  Connor’s body is completely still. In the shadows, his eyes shine with a strange, deadly light. “The team in Miami that went in to get him…” He hesitates. “It was an abandoned house. The place was rigged with explosives.”

  Horrified, I gasp. I bolt upright and clutch his arm. “Oh my God. How many were hurt?”

  “Nine agents went in.”

  “How many came out?”

  Connor says simply, “None.”

  27

  Connor

  On the ride to the studio, Tabby is silent. Unnervingly silent, like she might have lost the ability to speak. I keep her hand tightly wrapped in mine, but in spite of that physical connection, there’s a chasm between us. She’s beside me, but she’s a million miles away.

  I sense that somehow, with some twisted logic that only makes sense to her, she’s blaming herself for what happened.

  “It wasn’t your fault,” I say as gently as I can.

  We’re stopped at a red traffic signal only a few blocks from the studio. Her face is lit crimson, bathed in a devilish light. She doesn’t answer me. She doesn’t even blink. She just stares through the windshield into the gray dawn of early morning, her face as white as chalk beneath the traffic light’s eerie glow.

  “Tabby—”

  “I should have known it was too easy. I should have known it was a trap.”

  Her voice is flat. Empty, like she’s dead inside. I squeeze her hand, but she doesn’t squeeze back.

  When we drive into the parking structure at the studio, she’s out of the car and striding across the dark lot before I’ve even turned the engine off, leaving the passenger door wide open behind her.

  “Tabby! Wait!” I curse when she ignores me.

  She enters the open parking garage elevator, punches the button, stands mute and stone-faced while I jog across the lot, my footsteps echoing. I run through the elevator doors just as they’re sliding shut.

  I grasp her shoulders, turning her to face me as the car begins to ascend. “We’re in this together, all right? Don’t shut me out. Whatever happens, I’ve got your back.”

  Tabby stares at me like she’s never seen me before in her life. The bell dings. The elevator doors slide open. With a sharp twitch of her body, she shakes me off.

  With frost on her breath, she says, “When I told you before that Søren would end it if he found out I was involved in the investigation, I didn’t mean what Miranda thought I meant. I wasn’t talking about what he’d do to the studio.”

  “What are you saying? I don’t understand.”

  Her eyes are dark and endless, full of secrets only she knows. “I mean that all these years, we’ve both just been biding our time.”

  I’m so frustrated with this cryptic line of conversation, I want to shake her. “Tabby, what the fuck are you talking about?”

  “I’m talking about fate, Connor. About physics. About how certain events have so much weight they create their own gravity, and you can waste your entire life in orbit around their memory, caught in their magnetic pull. And there’s only one thing that can break that miserable, endless revolution.”

  I’m lost. I admit it. She’s completely lost me. I stand with my hands spread open in a helpless gesture, waiting for an explanation.

  It never comes.

  Instead, she surprises me by reaching out and caressing my cheek. Softly, with grave tenderness, she says, “You’re a good man, Connor Hughes.”

  Something about her tone of voice makes all the hair on the back of my neck stand on end. “Why does that sound like a goodbye?”

  She smiles. It’s the saddest thing I’ve ever seen. Then she turns around and walks away without another word.

  Into my mind a thought rises, unbidden.

  I have a really bad feeling about this.

  The COM center is buzzing with activity when we walk in, but as soon as we’re spotted, it falls dead silent.

  Miranda stands by the windows, her head bowed, her arms crossed over her chest, her complexion as pale and severe as the tailored suit she’s wearing. The FBI agents are broken into several close-knit groups, standing together around their computers like satellites hovering around a mother ship. Special Agent Chan is standing beside O’Doul’s desk, looking shell-shocked, his black hair standing at odd angles, his striped tie askew.

  Off by himself near the whiteboard stands Rodriguez. He’s staring straight at Tabby with an expression that can only be described as pure, unadulterated rage.

  My nerves, which normally simmer somewhere around DEFCON 3, slam up to DEFCON 1. My ears prick. My muscles tense. Every sense screams into high alert.

  Ryan makes a beeline for us from where he’d been standing at a respectful distance from Miranda near the windows. As soon as he’s close, I ask in a low voice, “Where’s O’Doul?”

  Ryan glances at Tabby. His expression is neutral. “Went to Florida to head up the tactical op in coordination with SWAT, didn’t he?”

  Translation: O’Doul is scattered in a thousand bloody chunks over some neighborhood in Miami.

  I look at Tabby, hunting for her eyes, but she keeps them averted. I feel her react to the realization that O’Doul is dead, and then force herself not to react. After a heartbeat of frozen silence, she gives off a dangerous, crackling energy, as cold as black ice and just as deadly.

  Ryan feels it too. He looks at me with his brows quirked just so, in warning.

  “You,” hisses Rodriguez into the awkward quiet, “fucking cunt!”

  Then somehow I’m across the room, standing over Rodriguez, who is writhing on the floor, clutching the bloodied pulp of his nose which I’ve just smashed with my fist.

  The room erupts. Three guys are on me, then four, then five. It rapidly devolves to a free-for-all, a half dozen FBI suits vs. the dynamic duo of me and Ryan, shoving and shouting insults and really just letting off some steam. When it’s over, we’re no worse for the wear, but the suits are looking pretty goddamn rattled. No bones are broken. Other than Rodriguez, no blood has been spilled.

  Across the room, past all of us as if we don’t exist, Tabby and Miranda stare at each other. Tabby has this weird look, this thousand-yard stare that I’ve seen once or twice before on the best military snipers.

  “Special Agent Chan. You’re in charge here now, I assume?”

  Tabby keeps her gaze on Miranda as she calmly speaks. Chan nods, rakes a hand through his disheveled hair, nods again. When he realizes Tabby’s not looking at him, he says, “Yes.”

  “With your permission, I’d like to inspect the data you pulled from the phone call.”

  His look sharpens. “Why?”

  Tabby is statue still, in full control of whatever she’s feeling. Not even a muscle twitches on her face. But I know behind that mask of placid loveliness is a storm of biblical proportions.

  “Because I think Søren fed false data points into your software. I think he led you where he wanted you to go. I think he knew he was being traced.”

  “That’s impossible,” says Chan.

>   Slowly Tabby turns to look at him. Pinning him in her icy stare, she asks softly, “Is it?”

  For a long moment, Chan says nothing. Except for the sound of a fly buzzing against the windowpanes, the room is eerily silent. Then: “I can’t trust you around a computer.”

  From the floor, still cradling his bleeding nose, Rodriguez says bitterly, “Amen.”

  When I glare at him, he blanches and looks away.

  “I’m not asking for your trust,” says Tabby, “or for anything else for that matter. I understand…”

  She falters for the briefest of moments, her voice wavering before she reins it back under that tight, frozen control.

  “I understand that what happened is because of me—”

  “It’s not,” I say loudly, stepping forward. Without looking at me, she holds up a hand.

  “But I’d like the opportunity to try to see if I can find anything that might be helpful.”

  “We’ve already looked.”

  “I haven’t.”

  When Rodriguez realizes Chan is considering it, he explodes.

  “She’s a fucking traitor, Chan! She’s a liar! She’s the reason nine good men are dead! Did you know she lived with Maelstr0m? That’s right,” he says when Tabby recoils and several agents utter disbelieving gasps. “I looked through O’Doul’s notes. This”—he stabs a finger in Tabby’s direction—“is Maelstr0m’s bitch!”

  Ryan has to physically restrain me from tearing Rodriguez in two. He pushes me back several steps with his hands on my chest while I growl and seethe, straining forward, tasting blood. He murmurs calming, rational words, but to my furious ears, they all sound like kill, kill, murder, kill.

  I wonder vaguely if I might need to spend some time on a psychotherapist’s couch when this job is over. My entire body feels like an exposed nerve scraped raw by knives.

  “As usual, you don’t know your ass from your elbow, Rodriguez,” says Chan. “And your reading comprehension skills are as shitty as ever. She was victimized by Maelstr0m, which is why she’s assisting in the investigation. She has as good a reason as the rest of us to want to catch this bastard.”

  Rodriguez spits a mouthful of blood onto the carpet. He staggers to his feet. “You’re a dope. You were only hired because of affirmative action, anyway.”

  Chan doesn’t rise to the insult. He says evenly, “Remind me, which one of us has parents who emigrated illegally to this country?”

  “Fuck you!” snarls Rodriguez.

  “No, thank you,” replies Chan, ever polite. He turns his gaze to Tabby. “Why don’t you use this computer, Miss West?” He points to the desk where Rodriguez sits.

  “Are you fucking kidding me?”

  “No, Agent Rodriguez, I am not. Miss West—sit.”

  Rodriguez storms out. In his absence, the other agents seem at a loss for what to do. A few follow Rodriguez, a few sit at their desks, most of them just stay where they are, milling around, lame ducks in a swiftly draining pond. Tabby takes the opportunity to cross over to the empty desk, pull out the chair, and sit down.

  Ryan gives me one final friendly shove, says so only I can hear, “Eyes open, brother. Pawns are moving.”

  “Don’t I fucking know it,” I say under my breath.

  “What’s the system password?” Tabby asks Chan.

  When he looks at her sideways, she says patiently, “It’ll be faster if you just give it to me.”

  He recites a list of words, numbers, and symbols that sound like some fucked-up form of haiku. Tabby rapidly types as he speaks. “I’m in. Where’s the file?”

  Chan points. Tabby clicks. Ryan and I move silently closer, watching everything with greedy, searching eyes.

  We stand behind her as she opens a series of windows across three monitors and starts a scrolling view of all the code, stripped to its bare bones. It’s like a scene out of The Matrix.

  She’s reading it. Jesus Christ. She’s reading thousands of lines of raw code in real time.

  Ryan and I share an astonished glance.

  “Here,” she says after a minute, pointing. With a click of her mouse, everything on the screen comes to a halt.

  Chan gasps. “Well, I’ll be a baloney sandwich. It’s a patch.”

  Tabby grimly nods. “Undetectable by your software because there’s no mathematical pattern. A computer sees it as completely random. It’s technically not even a program. You have to scour the code manually line by line to find it. You have to look past all the noise and focus through the code to see the picture that emerges.”

  “Did he know you’d find this?” Chan asks.

  “He knows everything,” Tabby replies without a hint of irony.

  That murdery feeling in my gut makes a reappearance. Ryan’s hand clamps down on my shoulder. I close my eyes, breathe through my nose, and silently count to ten.

  “Does this mean you can see his real location?” asks Ryan.

  Something about Ryan’s question makes her fall still. She stares in silence at the screen for a moment before saying, “No. Not yet. I need more time to go through the code.”

  Her tone is odd. Off, somehow. I want to ask her about it, but Chan interrupts.

  “A group from Washington is due to arrive any minute.”

  Right. Nine dead federal agents gets you a shit storm of attention from Washington.

  I say, “They’ll relieve you of command, debrief the group, including us, and install another team to finish the op.”

  Agitated, Chan runs a hand through his hair and nods. “Working in conjunction with Homeland Security and the DOJ. And now that we know Killgaard’s cybercrimes are international, the CIA and the NSA are involved.”

  Tabby repeats faintly, “The National Security Administration. Perfect.” She laughs softly. It sends chills down my spine.

  “There’s nothing for you to worry about, Tabby. Your involvement in this job was at the specific request of Miranda Lawson. Everything you’ve done has been sanctioned by her and a federal agent. They can’t blame anything on you.”

  She looks at me. In her eyes, I see that strange farewell again, the same expression she wore when she told me I was a good man, as if it would be the last time she’d ever see me alive.

  She turns her faraway eyes to Chan. “Agent Chan, please. Let me try to find something before they get here. Just give me a few more minutes to look through the code.”

  “Tabby—”

  She cuts me off. “Connor, I need to concentrate. Five minutes, okay? That’s all I need, and then we can talk.”

  I look at Chan. He shrugs his shoulders, agreeing. I look at Ryan, at the remaining agents, at Miranda near the windows, her back still turned to us all. “Fine,” I say, my voice low. “Five minutes. Do what you can to find this bastard, and then let it go and let the suits handle it.”

  Her eyes glimmer. She whispers, “I will.”

  She waits until the three of us have stepped away and then turns her attention to the computer screen in front of her. She bends her head over the keyboard and goes to work.

  Five minutes later, as Ryan and I are talking quietly in a corner, the door to the room bursts open. Guys in matching beige trench coats and murderous scowls swarm inside.

  Feds. Top brass, by the looks of ’em.

  And supremely pissed off.

  One of them, a tall, thin man with iron-gray hair and a voice like a bullhorn, holds up a cell phone and thunders, “The director of the NSA would like to know who in this room just hacked their fucking mainframe!”

  Gleaming under the lights as they slip out from beneath trench coats, nickel-plated shotguns appear.

  Time stops. All the air is sucked out of the room. I look over at Tabby, but she’s not looking back at me. She’s calmly looking at the man with the iron-gray hair, and she’s standing. She’s raising her hand. She’s opening her mouth to speak.

  “I’m your huckleberry.”

  It happens fast.

  Handcuffs flash. Men shout. Tre
nch coats flare around running legs.

  I leap forward with a roar, adrenaline searing my veins, but they’ve slammed Tabby down onto the desk and twisted her arms behind her back before I can reach her. I shove through the crowd—

  And get the business end of a Glock .40 caliber handgun jammed under my jaw.

  “Hello there, Mr. Hughes,” says the man with the iron-gray hair. His eyes, I note, are exactly the same color. “Now say good night.”

  The butt of a shotgun cracks hard against the back of my skull. Stars explode in my vision, flashing pinpricks of pain. The room slips sickeningly sideways.

  The last thing I see is Tabby, handcuffed, being dragged away by a knot of armed men.

  Why is she smiling?

  Everything goes black.

  28

  Tabby

  After a short flight on a C-130 military plane, I’m seated at a table in a small, cold room in a government complex in the middle of who knows where. I had a black hood over my head when they brought me in, but they took it off, and now I can observe my surroundings.

  Cement floor. Cinderblock walls. Cement ceiling inlaid with a row of florescent lights. The black plastic eye of a closed-circuit camera high on the wall in one corner.

  A glass of water sits on the table to my left. Beside it is a sleeve of Oreos, which I find amusing. Apparently, the government wants you to have a tasty snack before they start with the waterboarding.

  At least they removed the handcuffs.

  The door opens. A man walks in. Caucasian. Thirtyish. Built. He’s tall with shaggy reddish-blonde hair, handsome with the exception of acne scars pitting his cheeks. His suit is black, as is his skinny tie. I’ve never seen eyes that color, pale amber, like honey. He looks like a friendly ginger tabby cat, which I know is intentionally misleading.

  Beneath his suit, there’s a bulge on his left ankle and one on his right hip. Tabby cats who wear guns strapped to various parts of their bodies are anything but friendly.