Burned: Black Cipher Files #3 (Black Cipher Files series) (29 page)

He shoved the pillows against the far wall and rested against them. The position gave them a wonderful view of Moonstone Beach. The owners had installed a wrought iron railing instead of a half wall and the vista was magnificent. From the shadowed interior of the tiny loft no one should be able to see them from the road.

The morning fog had completely burned off. The thick pea soup had given way to a misty Fall sunshine. Sunlight bathed the loft in blurry rays and filled the room with a hazy, dream-like filter.

Wow he was certainly waxing rhapsodic, but with Sunshine snuggled next to him so they could both see the screen, they had settled into an easy camaraderie.

The end of Sunshine’s braid tickled his bicep as she bent her head to peer at the screen. He discreetly inhaled the scent of her shampoo, somewhere between sweet and sultry, with hints of plumeria and patchouli. And damn if his body didn’t react.

He’d cracked one of the windows in the back of the house. The sound of the ocean soothed him.

Sunshine’s gaze was increasingly drawn to the crash of the waves against shoreline. He could see her longing in every sideways glance and tiny frown between her dark eyebrows.

He said, “Maybe later—”

She pulled back, shoving her spine against their cushions and nearly knocking her head on the wall behind them. “Uh, no.”

Damn, it seemed like all the progress she made before John Stanley accosted her on the beach had disappeared.

It was becoming more and more important for him to give her the love of the ocean.

“You’re tough.” Zeke derailed her argument before she could blast him. “You can overcome your fear.”

No babying her. She
was
tough.

And she needed to believe it.

“Let’s just keep the emphasis on your problems,” she deflected.

Sunshine had melted into his side, but now she straightened away and he missed the warmth of her body.

Zeke turned on the tablet, absently went through his pre-work ritual. And they spent the next few hours researching Susan Chen’s partner, Liam.

But after several hours, they weren’t any closer to figuring out a connection between Liam and someone at the NSA. Liam had grown up all over the globe. Searching backwards to before he’d struck out on his own and conducted illegal experiments, he’d been at the CDC, The Johns Hopkins Hospital and med school, Oxford undergrad, and boarding school in England.

“This is pointless. We’ve gone all the way back to The American School in London.” He’d had a long and illustrious career until he decided to throw it away on experimental research that could have destroyed the lives of everyone they tested.

“Fortunately everyone who is still alive was given an antidote.” Zeke rubbed his palms over his bare head, still trying to get used to the lack of hair. “But there’s nothing that connects him to the intelligence community. It’s like looking for an extra 1 in an entire program of binary code.”

They’d made no headway in the search for Liam’s well-connected accomplice. They’d have to focus on another aspect of Liam’s life.

Sunshine was on the same page. “So where did Susan and Liam meet?”

“She was in grad school and he did a guest professor stint at Caltech.” He huffed. “None of this is getting us any closer to solving my problems.”

Sunshine tried to soothe him. “Every piece of information fits into a pattern somewhere.”

“Susan Chen is still my best bet for clearing my name.” He quelled the urge to toss the tablet over the railing. “I hate waiting. But that’s all I can do. Until we find her and she corroborates that I didn’t give her the damn program.”

“What if we did an experiment?” She had clasped her hands together and was twisting her fingers back and forth. Her anxiety was a physical presence in the tiny loft. “I have an idea.”

He was fresh out of options. “Go for it.”

“One of my professors at Cal Poly—“

“Thought you weren’t enrolled?”

“I couldn’t register and take classes in the system.” Sunshine glanced through the metal railing, her gaze faraway. “But I managed to audit some upper level classes and I…may have been an unofficial research assistant on some studies.”

Even now with him, she wasn’t committing to anything.

If her professors were willing to break the rules to have her assist in high level projects, she must be brilliant. “How smart are you?”

“Um, I don’t know?”

“You’ve never been tested?” Zeke asked.

“Not since I was seven.”

But he had a feeling she was lying. “Ballpark it. Or give me some other bit of data.”

“Well, back then my testing IQ was around 180.” Sunshine ducked her head. “And I may have been asked to attend Caltech as soon as I was old enough.”

“You….” Caltech was even harder to get into than MIT. They didn’t ask seven year olds to come to their school, kids literally worked their entire lives for the chance to attend.

Holy shit. “What are you doing making bath salts and massage oils?”

“Hiding,” she said flatly.

He finally understood how much John Stanley had stolen from her. “We are going to eliminate this problem.” She ought to have the life that she wanted. “You
deserve
it,” he said fiercely.

The silence in the house was fraught with her gratitude and a heavy expectation.

“Thank you.” Sunshine skimmed her hand over his forearm and squeezed his wrist lightly, the contact zipping through him like a lightning strike.
She
was comforting
him
.

Zeke swallowed the sudden lump in his throat. “Tell me about the experiment.”

“You’re familiar with monitoring brain wave patterns in the hippocampus?”

Zeke nodded. He could tell already that this was going to be complex.

“So this experiment analyzes brain wave recordings using pattern recognition methods, like multiple discriminant analysis, and collapses the data into smaller dimensions.”

Complex didn’t even begin to cover what she was talking about.

“Then using hierarchical clustering analysis—“

“Distill it down for me,” Zeke interrupted.

“Okay, so basically when a brain is monitored while being put through the same event over and over there is a repeated brain wave pattern, neural cliques, that are like a memory code. Take that data and simplify it even further into binary code, using only 1 for active state and 0 for inactive state. Each series of actions is a pattern in a pyramid structure, with the most basic repeated event at the bottom, your foundation, as the base. Then each succeeding event has a pattern, and the tip of the pyramid indicates the most specific action.”

Zeke watched her eyes light up, glowing almost silver in the shadows. She’d been using her hands to mark each level as she mimed a pyramid. Her cheeks, which had been pale earlier when he’d asked about her smarts, were now flushed with excitement.

He basically understood. But he wasn’t sure how this experiment would help him. “So what do you propose?”

“Typically the analysis is used to compare patterns from one brain to another, but what if we do a control experiment with you? While under the influence of Sodium Pentothal, you start up a laptop and do some other tasks to get a baseline.”

Zeke could feel his cheeks redden. Clearly his OCD routine had been noticed.

“And then we do another experiment with you giving up the key and the details of your encryption program. Then compare the two binary code structures.”

“What will that tell us?”

“You’re convinced you didn’t give away the program, right?”

“I don’t see how. I’ve never revealed anything under the influence of Sodium Pentothal before.” Zeke squeezed his eyes shut trying to pull the information from his brain. “But I just don’t remember.”

“So what if we do the experiment and the brain wave patterns show that you didn’t give it up?” Sunshine said excitedly. “It would be evidence to support your claim.”

Maybe his odd, repetitive tendencies could help him in this case.

Sunshine said, “Except, we’d need a place to conduct the experiment.”

A place where they wouldn’t get caught. As far as he knew there was no sort of official warrant or APB out for him. Zeke assumed the government would want to quietly apprehend him rather than make a big splash. Media attention, which could mean that certain details of this supposed security breach would become public, was something they’d want to avoid at all costs. After the fiasco with Staci Grant, they really couldn’t afford another big hoopla in the press so soon.

“I need to make a phone call.”

Zeke turned on one of the burner phones they’d bought at Target. He’d missed four calls. Shit. All from Lucas Goodman. He hit redial immediately.

“Goodman.”

“Saw you called. What’s up?” He was careful not give any identifiers.

“Sec.” Zeke heard the rustling.

“Hey.” Jamie’s familiar voice calmed him. She was the best field agent he knew. With her help, they could do anything.

“Any luck finding our friend since I lost her?”

“We finally struck pay dirt by tapping in to the ex-husband’s online activity.”

“And?”

“I need you to take a look at the site.”

Zeke poised his fingers. “Hit me.”

Jamie rattled off a secured chat site and gave him the log on. “It’s in code. I could only figure out part of it.”

Zeke stared at the messages. Sunshine peered over his shoulder.

She pointed to the string of numbers. They’d used GPS coordinates, but then they’d separated the GPS coordinates with seemingly random key words and children’s riddles.

“They’ve set up a meet. For tomorrow.”

“Got that.” Jamie said, “But I’m not sure where. The riddles in between negate the actual GPS coordinates in the message.”

Zeke assessed the coordinates and the phrases that were almost like nursery rhymes. “Looks like Ocean Beach in San Francisco.”

“She’s supposed to bring everything, all the data she has on the project,” Jamie said.

Which sounded great except that Zeke was pretty sure that the government had seized all of Susan Chen’s experiments and her data.

“So he doesn’t know we confiscated her work?”

“Or she had a hidden copy that we never found,” Jamie posited.

Which might make sense. Susan Chen had continued to conduct experiments on unsuspecting agents in order to find an antidote for her daughter.

Shit. He’d love to get his hands on that information. But even more he’d love to get his hands on Susan Chen. She was the only one who could confirm his innocence. And yeah, right now he was banking all his hope on a woman wanted by the Feds.

“Damn, I need to get her.”

Jamie said, “No! You need to stay far away from this.”

“But—”

“It’s going to have to wait. We don’t know enough about the husband to know how this is going to go.” Jamie shut him down.

“What do you know about him?”

“Not much. He’s Russian. He’s a scientist. And clearly has sociopathic tendencies since he injected his own daughter with an untested drug.”

“Any idea how he got back into the country?” Oliver Krychef had been on the Homeland Security Watch List.

Jamie said, “His threat level was dropped and he is no longer on the No Fly List. He wasn’t even listed as a Selectee. Otherwise he would have been detained at the border.”

“But who did it? And who has the authority?” Zeke rolled his shoulders in disgust. “One more damn puzzle we need to solve.”

“Yeah.” Jamie didn’t sound happy. “Back to our other problem. So now, instead of kicking her ass, I have to save it.”

Jamie had no love for the scientist after Chen and her partner had kidnapped Jamie’s sister to use as leverage against Jamie.

“Okay, so in other news, we need a lab. A safe lab and a tech to administer something a little on the unusual side.”

Zeke glanced at Sunshine sitting on the bed next to him, her loose hair a slightly damp fall of silk down her back. He smiled at her, and after a moment she returned the smile, her lips curved sweetly. And in that moment, he was ridiculously happy even with everything unraveling around him.

Silence on the other end.

“You still there?”

“
We
?”

Zeke broke eye contact. “Uh, yeah, about that.”

“Oh my God, you didn’t.”

“Look.”

“Let me put this in language you understand. Dude, are you crazy?” Jamie practically yelled. “Seriously. You weren’t supposed to make contact.”

“There were some extenuating circumstances.”

“How extenuating…was your dick extenuating?”

Zeke could hear Lucas in the background laughing. But his temper was starting to rise. “Her sleeper was after her and her mother.”

That shut Jamie up.

“How could she possibly know that?” she demanded. Jamie’s family had died in a car bomb blast, everyone except for her and her sister.

“He married her mother.”

More silence as she processed what he was telling her. “And he’s after Sunshine?”

Zeke exhaled. “Yeah.”

“Wow.” Jamie hesitated. “Where’s the mom?”

“With her fiancé.”

“Okay. Okay. If we can prove that you didn’t give Chen the damn program, this will be small potatoes anyway.”

Jamie’s immediate attempt to placate him caused a burn of something uncomfortably like affection in his chest. “Thanks, Jamie.”

“Yeah well, we still have to prove it.”

And with that acerbic comment she pretty much shut him down again.

Sunshine eased off the bed and headed down the stairs to give him some privacy. “So the showdown between Oliver and Susan—”

“Ocean Beach, tomorrow afternoon,” Jamie bit out.

“Okay.”

She reiterated. “I don’t want you anywhere near that meet.”

“I’m a big boy,” Zeke replied.

“Yeah, who doesn’t always listen.”

Zeke was silent. “I just need some control.” She must have hear the quiet desperation in his voice.

“You cannot be there, Zeke.” And there it was, pure affection beneath the worry.

“I know.” Zeke had to wonder. “Why’d Oliver choose San Francisco?”

Jamie speculated. “No clear idea. Chen is from Seattle. Take her out of her comfort zone? Or maybe the Russian has contacts in the area.” Definitely possible. San Francisco had a healthy Russian mafia population.