Deadlock

by Cherrie Lynn

  “Lena, stop!” she cried. If Lindsey’s salvation was contingent on their good behavior, her sister had just blown it all to hell. Yelling sent her into another coughing spasm, which sent new waves of agony through her. By the time she managed to unclench her eyes and slide them open, Lena was over her again, smoothing her hair back, trying to soothe her. Tears leaked from her eyes.

  “Here. They brought water. I tried to get past the fuckers, but I couldn’t.”

  Lindsey drank gratefully as Lena lifted the glass and directed a straw to her mouth. It was cold and wonderful, soothing her raw throat, and she felt it go all the way down her dry esophagus and to her stomach. But Lena would only let her have small sips at a time.

  “I have to tell you something,” she said at last, her voice as unsteady as Lindsey had ever heard it. She licked her dry lips to spread the new moisture and tried to bring her twin’s face into focus. “Something I should have told you a long time ago, because I know I can trust you. You, more than anyone else.”

  “What?” Lindsey whispered.

  “This is all my fault. You’re here because of me, and I… You deserve the truth.”

  “Then tell me, for God’s sake. Tell me why I’m here.”

  “You have to understand this is nothing Mom and Dad can ever know. They would never understand, and I know how they would worry. I can’t ever tell them, and you can’t, either.”

  “Do you really think I’m going to get out of here to tell them anything?” The thought of her dear, sweet parents possibly losing both their daughters at once shredded her heart. Lena closed her eyes, and Lindsey wondered if she was thinking the same thing.

  “I’m CIA, Lindsey,” she whispered.

  At first, she wanted to laugh at the absurdity. Even in mortal danger, Lena had jokes. But the sound that came out was closer to a sob. Because the biggest missing puzzle piece that had ever existed in Lindsey’s mind clicked suddenly, enormously into place. “You?”

  “Don’t even question. It’s the truest thing I’ve ever said to you.”

  The disappearances. The unreliability. The secrets. Everything, everything. “Oh my God, Lena,” she said, her voice tiny and sick. She thought she might throw up again.

  “I sent you to Jace. I did. I knew where he was, I knew his connections, and this syndicate, these fuckers who have us… I was undercover, investigating them. The Libra Cooperative. They’ve had their hands in almost every cyberterrorism plot of the last six years, drugs, human trafficking, you name it. And Rhys is one of their newer recruits. I was connecting all the dots when I was made. They traced a code you wrote back to me.”

  Lindsey choked on her words for a moment. “What?”

  “Come on. You know you always did my computer homework for me.”

  “Stop being so fucking glib about this, Lena. All this time I was wondering how you or I could factor in to all of this, and—”

  “Shut up and I’ll explain. Remember that night about three months ago, you and I were hanging out at my place, and I got you talking about salami slicing? Penny shaving, stuff like that? I told you I’d seen it in Office Space and wondered how it would work.”

  One of the few times Lena had taken an interest in Lindsey’s prowess at the keyboard. She’d been so excited. Now she knew without even hearing the rest of the story that Lena had been serving her own purposes. Typical.

  “You sat down at my computer, and within just a few minutes you’d started whipping up a code that would round up pennies and waterfall the excess into a separate bank account.”

  “You used my fucking code?”

  “Shhh. I didn’t use your fucking code, Lindsey. At least, not that one.” She could only stare as Lena sighed and went on. “The one I asked about afterward. The one that would reverse it all. Hell, I don’t even remember what you called it. But I used that one. And they want their money back. What they didn’t know was that you wrote that code, not me.”

  All along. All along, they’d had the wrong sister for what they needed but probably figured a CIA agent was as valuable a hostage as they could get. And now they had them both. There would be time later to add this to the long list of things she wanted to strangle Lena over. She needed the rest of the story. “Then what happened?”

  “That’s pretty much it. They grabbed me. Rhys had connected dots of his own and figured out who I was. That I was the one who was basically responsible for Jace landing in the Nest. He has his vendetta against Jace, but this is bigger than Rhys, so much bigger. I always remembered how you liked Jace and how mad at me you were back then, and I thought if I could get you two working together somehow, he’d keep you safe. These guys, they would go after my entire family. They already have my partner in their pocket.”

  “Griffin,” Lindsey said softly, and Lena, who had been staring blankly at the wall, looked at her with wide eyes. She kept her voice barely above a whisper.

  “Yes,” she said. “But how did you know that?”

  “I met him at your apartment the night you sent me that text. Have you seen your apartment?”

  “Yes. That’s when I sent that text. When I saw they’d taken our picture and I knew you might be a target next. But they got me soon after.”

  “What about Mom and Dad? You’re leaving them unprotected like this? Lena—”

  “I know, I know, and I wanted to get them into some kind of protection, but there wasn’t time, and you know they won’t go, Lindsey. You know it. Dad’s had all these heart problems, and this might finish him. I was hoping these bastards would keep the focus on us and leave them out of it. But I don’t know.”

  “They could wipe out our entire family.”

  “I know.”

  Lindsey wondered if ignorance had been easier. “Were you sleeping with your partner?”

  Lena blinked at her. “Why would you ask me that?”

  A question for a question. “Because he kind of insinuated it. You said he’s dirty, but I think he cares about you.”

  “Oh, Jesus. Forget about it, and him. I don’t have all the evidence I need on him, either, but when I do, I’ll have to expose his ass, too.” If she knew her twin—and, well, after this confession, Lindsey truly had to wonder—then she thought she saw a crack in Lena’s tough exterior. She still hadn’t answered the question. But she didn’t have to.

  The fact she was remaining silent on the matter said all that Lindsey needed to know. She was tired of thinking, anyway. The room was getting fuzzy, pleasantly so. Her eyes drifted closed.

  “Lindsey?”

  “Hmmmmm?” she asked, and a giggle bubbled up from somewhere.

  “Jesus Christ. Those bastards.”

  What? This was the best she’d felt since…well, since all those orgasms Jace had given her, maybe.

  Lena kept talking, speaking nonsensical words, something about drugs—but Lindsey couldn’t be bothered to make sense of it anymore. She gave in gratefully to the numbness, to the darkness.

  …

  Her nightmares were vivid. Someone was standing over her, watching her. A dark figure blocking out the relentless overhead light burning beyond her closed eyelids, preventing true darkness. Awareness came back in fragments, but with awareness came pain. She fought it, struggling to remain where it was warm and black, where she drifted in an emotionless void. The darkness wouldn’t let her stay. When her broken leg twitched, she came awake with a cry and saw her nightmare of being endlessly watched wasn’t a dream at all.

  Also, she realized that she was no longer lying down.

  Someone had trussed up her injuries to the best of their abilities, and she sat in a chair, the unforgiving plastic cold on her back and behind. Since it hadn’t warmed to her body heat, she must not have been here long. Being upright made her head swim, but she would prefer it to being flat on her back any day. In front of her, a glaring white blur slowly sh
rank into a rectangle, finally focusing into a laptop screen as her eyes adjusted. The room around her, while dim, was vast and echoing, emptiness pressing in around her like shadows.

  She also sensed she wasn’t alone even before the dark figure strolled casually into her line of sight, standing to the side of the table in front of her, where the laptop sat waiting.

  He surveyed her distress from beneath a black hood, his face mostly hidden in its shadow from the few ceiling lights above him. She wondered vaguely if he’d cruelly kicked her injured leg to wake her up.

  “We wanted to keep you together,” he said conversationally, “but I’m afraid I’ll have to deprive you of your sister’s company for now. She’s a volatile one, isn’t she? Nothing at all like you.”

  It wasn’t a voice she recognized. Was this Rhys? “Who are you?” she asked, looking around wildly, though she nearly blacked out again from sheer dizziness. Lena was nowhere to be seen. God, how much time had passed? Where was she now? “Please don’t take her from me. I need her with me. If you’re going to let me die in here, then at least leave her with me.”

  He only gazed down at her impassively.

  She managed to find the shred of anger that still burned somewhere in her soul. “And if you’re doing this to get to Jace, you know, you’ve wasted your time. He doesn’t care.”

  “So you’ve said.” He placed a hand against her forehead, and it was all she could do not to recoil. He left it there a moment and drew away. “You don’t have much time, Ms. Morris. I suggest you proceed.”

  Lindsey blinked at the system in front of her. “What?”

  “We want our money back.”

  Arguing or playing dumb at this point seemed futile. They knew. Lena probably hadn’t wanted them to know, probably wanted to protect Lindsey with her dying breath. But it hadn’t worked out that way. “I’m surprised you don’t have people who can do this,” she said.

  “You’re a talented coder,” he said. “More so than I think you give yourself credit for. My people tried to redesign the code and back out of it, but this is why you’re here.”

  “I’m touched.”

  “You have twelve hours. We have quite a few incentives at our disposal to ensure that you work promptly to return everything that was stolen from us.”

  Stolen from them. That was rich, when the money was stolen in the first place. “What happens in twelve hours?”

  “I’m sure I don’t have to describe that to you at this point.”

  “Pretend I’m stupid.”

  He crossed him arms, and what she could see of the grim slash of his mouth tightened. “We could always bring Agent Morris back into the room, as you requested. But I assure you, you won’t like what we do to her.”

  A chill worked its way down her aching spine. She closed her eyes. “What if I can’t type? My hands—”

  “You have one good one.”

  “I’m too hurt to sit here and—”

  “Twelve hours. You’ve had adequate rest. We’ll bring you water and food and medication to replenish your strength, and my apologies for your discomfort. My associate was overly enthusiastic.”

  “Enthusiastic? I could be dying right here in this chair.”

  “Your vitals are satisfactory, except for that fever, which we’ll try to bring down.” He began walking away, everything about his steps casual and assured. “Twelve hours. Your time has begun.” With one sweeping gesture, he indicated the white, nondescript analog clock on the wall to her left. It was six thirty-four exactly. Whether that was a.m. or p.m., she had no idea.

  Lindsey stared blankly at the screen in front of her, flexing her left fingers, trying to get some feeling back into them. Twelve hours to write a code that would rip off people all over the country, even if it was such infinitesimal amounts that they didn’t realize it.

  How the hell had it come to this?

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Don’t get emotionally involved. How many times had he heard it? Too many to count. Jace scrubbed both hands through his hair, elbows on his desk, deep breathing. No one liked feeling helpless, but he hated it just a little more than the average person. For hours, he’d been poring over the information they had—which was far too little—looking for something, anything, that might trigger a plan for what to do next.

  Lindsey had been taken. His gut told him that, that it was her blood on the concrete in the parking garage, and she was somewhere, suffering, in pain, scared, right fucking now.

  He could proceed with this and remain cautious at the same time. Trap or no, Rhys was a threat that needed to be annihilated. Hell, he should have done it when he’d had the chance.

  His email dinged him, as it had been doing for the past fifteen minutes or so. He didn’t much care because anyone he needed to hear from right now had barely left his apartment over these dark hours. They were going over everything, too, looking for something he’d missed, trying to come up with a plan of attack.

  “Jace. You good?” Helix asked, apparently noticing his whipped-dog posture. Eyes sore and burning, Jace lifted his head and swiveled his chair around to face them all.

  “Good as I can be.”

  “We think the best course is paying the N-Tech building a little visit,” Drake said. “It’s our one and only lead at this point.”

  Thinking of that place made him think of her, but then, she couldn’t have been erased from his thoughts with a fucking lobotomy at this point. How she’d melted against him when he’d kissed her.

  To his team, he gave a grim nod. Nothing else to do. Ding went his email again.

  “The fuck,” he muttered. No one ever emailed him this much. He didn’t have that many contacts—

  Whirling back around to his keyboard almost before his conscious mind could catch up, he pulled up his email. Anything that out of the ordinary couldn’t be a simple coincidence. When he saw the messages were from his bank, he frowned and sat back as he clicked through them.

  “Dude, don’t keep us in suspense. What is it?” Helix asked.

  “I’m getting deposits every few minutes. They’re only pennies. I’m damn sure not doing it.” After a moment, he felt the others crowd in behind him, and as they watched, another notification popped up.

  “Who has your bank account info?” Sully asked.

  “No one I know of, obviously.” Or maybe anyone who has messed around on my computer, put malware on it, or knows how to code like Lindsey. “She’s talking to me,” he said, mostly to himself. Then, louder, “She’s fucking talking to me.”

  “Trace those!” Helix surged forward as if he meant to take over and do it himself in his excitement, but Jace knocked his hands away.

  “Out, all of you out. Now.”

  “But—”

  “I’ll call you if I need you, but I have a lot of damn work to do.” He watched as more and more pennies began falling into his account, waiting for Sully to caution him that it was a trap. She might have been thinking it, but if so, she maintained her silence.

  “Let me help you on this, man,” Helix said, the screen reflecting in his dark eyes. “This will take you hours.”

  “I know where you are if I need you,” Jace said stubbornly. This was his problem. He’d brought Lindsey in. He’d unearthed the skeletons. He’d opened them all up to potential betrayal and danger. He would be the one to figure it out.

  No matter what it took.

  …

  Lindsey was so hot, she thought even her eyeballs were sweating. Trying to move as few muscles as possible, she lifted the glass of cold water they’d left her, hand trembling as she brought it to her lips. Her eyes ached, but she knew she wasn’t dehydrated, if only because of the steady stream of tears that leaked from them.

  These things were fun to talk about in theory. But knowing she was sitting here taking money from actual people, eve
n to save her and her sister’s lives, opened an ache in her chest. She had done this, but if she could, she would do her best to make sure it was all returned.

  “Sixty-five more minutes, Ms. Morris,” that hateful voice said from behind her. He hadn’t left the room, whoever he was, but thankfully he hadn’t watched over her shoulder this whole time, either. “We haven’t yet been fully compensated. Is there some reason it’s taking so long?”

  She injected all the strength she could into her voice. “I’m sure you realize the government monitors the movement of large amounts of money since 9/11,” she said. “I’m trickling the money through multiple accounts so it’s harder to trace. It’s taking longer, but it’s safer.”

  Which was mostly bullshit. And the only account she was worried about was Jace’s. The program she’d put on his computer had allowed her in to get the info she needed to access his bank accounts. Now she could only hope that he got frequent notifications, so he could see something abnormal was going on. And that he’d be smart enough to trace it back to her.

  If he would even bother or care. It was the only thing she knew to do.

  Her body was one big, throbbing raw nerve. They’d given her something, thankfully, and at least she didn’t want to scream in agony with every movement, but it only took the edge off. She still needed a hospital. Her left eye was nearly swollen shut, and as she’d worked she’d feared the right might close, too, leaving her blind and unable to finish. Somehow, she’d managed.

  A door opening and slamming across the cavernous room jerked her from her thoughts. The shuffling of feet and Lena’s cursing injected new fury into her heart, shocking it awake like a defibrillator. A similarly garbed man to the first one was half dragging, half carrying her sister in and having a hell of a time with it, even given Lena’s bound hands and feet.

  Lindsey would have surged up from her chair. Moving her broken leg made her decide otherwise. “What are you doing?” she cried. “I’ve done everything you asked.” Because she didn’t think it was as simple as Good job, here’s your sister, you’re free to go. These people didn’t operate like that.