Shadows (Black Raven Book 1) (36 page)

She drew a deep breath. “There are two places. One with a burner phone, one with the backup. For the phone, second floor, bedroom with the queen-size bed. There’s a hideaway space, under the third floorboard from the wall, back north corner. He’ll have to move the bed.”

He repeated the instructions to Zeus. “For the backup?”

She shook her head. “It isn’t in the main house. It’s in the caretaker’s cottage. Second cabinet to the right of the refrigerator. The back of the cabinet comes out, if he puts pressure at the very top. It’s a false back. There’s a metal box.”

Sebastian repeated Skye’s instructions. As he waited for information from Zeus and the advance team, his attention focused on her. He smoothed her hair, and said, “You okay?”

She nodded. The feeling that the world was spinning had passed. In its place, were numb misery and trepidation, as she waited for news from Zeus.

He looked doubtful as he studied her. “You sure?”

She nodded, realizing that the four agents were waiting, just as tense as Sebastian was, for word from Zeus’s team. Their eyes were focused on Sebastian and Skye.

After a few more seconds, Sebastian tensed, at the same time one of his agents mumbled, “Damn.”

Sharp blue eyes focused on her. “Whatever was there, isn’t. Both locations are empty.”

He stood, as she put her forehead down into the palms of her hands, not wanting to look Sebastian—or anyone else—in the eye, as her father’s world crashed around her. After long minutes, she looked up. Five pairs of eyes were on her, but she focused only on the cobalt-blue pair of the man who was standing next to her. “I need to get to Charlotte, North Carolina.”

Sebastian drew a deep breath. “What’s in Charlotte?”

“Another set of backup. The next burner phone, where my father would let me know if the cataclysm scenario is still in play. There are two safety deposit boxes, in two branches of the First American Bank. One is a downtown branch, another is about ten minutes away. I need to get there. Now.” She drew a deep breath and stood. She gripped his biceps, holding on to him, needing his solid strength. “Please. Take me there now. We can’t wait. The second one was timed for twenty-four hours. But the third one could come at any second. Hurry. We have to go now!”

He reached for her hands. “Listen to me. Breathe,” he said, his voice velvety, smooth, and calm. His tone was so commanding, so controlled, she had no option but to focus on him and watch him draw a deep breath, as though willing her to do the same.

She took a deep breath, even though her world was falling apart.

“Chances are whoever has gotten to the lake house, has also gotten to Charlotte.”

Calmness crashed around her, like glass shattering. Even though what he said made infinite sense, she shook her head as panic seized her. “It can’t be.”

“I can send agents there faster than we can get there,” he paused, his voice steady. “Just tell me whether we’ll be able to access the boxes and how.”

“There’s code, formulated off of passwords.”

“You don’t have to be there in person for access?”

“No. My father set these up so that he could direct others to access it.” She paused. “In case of an emergency, and he or I couldn’t get there.”

“The access codes,” he arched an eyebrow. “This is information that only your father would have given them, right?”

She nodded. “Or me.”

“And you haven’t given the information to anyone else, correct?”

“No.”

He frowned. “Would Jennifer Root have known the codes?”

She shook her head. “No.”

“Ragno. Charlotte, North Carolina. Where are our nearest agents?” He paused. “Check their status.” He waited for her answer. As the minutes ticked by, his eyes never left hers. “I can have agents there in under an hour, which is faster than we can mobilize and get there ourselves.”

She started to say no, but reduced the word to just a headshake.

He gripped her hands tighter, but his voice remained calm. “Look, even if I agreed to take you there, we won’t have an answer for at least two hours. We have to get mobilized here, the pilots have to file a fight plan, we have to get in the air, we have to land there, we have to have secure transportation, and we have to get to the two destinations, which have to be secure before we get you there. Even with all of that effort, it’s likely a futile endeavor, with unknown risks. If you give me the codes my agents need, we’ll have an answer in half the time, without putting you at risk.”

What he said made sense. But still, she hesitated.

“Skye? I know that this is a lot for you to trust me with,” he said, “but we have no option.”

She nodded yes, appreciating that he used ‘we’ and not ‘you.’

“Ragno. It’s a go. Alert the agents to mobilize,” he said. “Skye, give me the codes.”

“I need paper. Spring can do this kind of stuff from memory,” she said, “but I need prompts.”

Sebastian glanced away from her, to an agent who passed them a tablet and pen. She sat and he sat across from her, resuming his position on the edge of his chair, his knees on either side of hers. Her hand shook as she wrote down the alphabet, assigned numbers to letters, then wrote three words that her father had assigned to the Charlotte bank box. She translated those words to numbers, did mathematical equations, and came up with three sets of thirty numbers. She ripped that piece of the paper from the tablet, and handed it to Sebastian. “This is for the downtown branch. Where the phone is.”

She started over, formulating another code. When she had three additional sets of thirty numbers, she handed it to Sebastian. “This is for the branch where the backup is.”

As he rattled off the numbers to Ragno, he held out his hand for the other half of the paper. He took it just as she was relinquishing it. He studied it, arched an eyebrow, and shook his head.

She shrugged. “That’s how my father communicated with us, with the world. Everything is a puzzle to him. Even his words.”

“And he set this craziness in play, counting on you to be able to drive from Louisiana to Tennessee to North Carolina,” irritation evident in his voice, but also an underlying sympathetic tone, “with God knows who after you, all the while keeping yourself and Spring safe?”

“He doesn’t always think through the practical ramifications of his plans,” she said, automatically defending her father, but unable to come up with more than a half-hearted attempt.

He handed the piece of paper back to her. “What’s his end game?”

“What do you mean?” She knew exactly what he meant, but needed to buy time. She needed to collect her thoughts before laying that bomb on him.

“His end objective. What exactly is it that your father wants you to do?” He was leaning towards her, his manner calm, his voice determined. “He sent you a signal yesterday morning, which had you running to the lake house. He was going to send you another signal at the lake house. Because the phone on which he was going to send the signal is gone, we have no idea what message was left, or what instructions you were to follow. Or, frankly, if he was capable of sending anything at all. With what I’ve learned about your father, he’s a man who leaves nothing to chance. In the event that one or more of these messages was lost, stolen, or you couldn’t make it to the location in time—what were your instructions?”

She drew a deep breath. Even after telling Sebastian about the backup data at the lake house and in Charlotte, she hadn’t considered how she was going to tell him the rest of the story. Now, he was going to know the depth of her father’s paranoia, and he was going to think she was crazy for going along with it, but she had no choice but to tell him. “In Tennessee,” she paused, “the signal could have been that the cataclysm scenario was over. If that had been the case, Spring and I would have just gone home, to Covington. To our bakery,” her eyes welled with tears, “to our life.” She drew a deep breath, saw sympathy in his eyes, almost started crying in earnest, and shook her head. “Please don’t look at me like that. I’d prefer for you just to be a hard ass.”

He chuckled. One of the other agents in the room did as well, and her cheeks burned with embarrassment. She’d forgotten anyone else was there but Sebastian. She looked around the jet and realized that the four agents were riveted, their eyes on the two of them, as though they were the best show at the circus.

“Well,” Sebastian said, anchoring her with his calm manner, his words commanding her attention, “we know that if he was able to send a message to Tennessee, he wasn’t going to say that it was over. Cataclysm has to be tied to the prison break, and we don’t have him. So it isn’t over.”

“Another option is that he could have told me to secure the backup and wait.”

“Is the backup we’re looking for in Charlotte a duplicate of what was in the lake house?”

She nodded.

“So if he had told you to secure the backup, you, Candy, and Spring, were going to have to get to Charlotte?”

She nodded. “Even if he didn’t tell me to secure the backup, I was going to have to go to Charlotte, if the cataclysm scenario remained in play.”

“Why?”

“To await his next message.”

“Then what?”

She drew a deep breath, trying to escape his razor sharp attention. She shook her head, careful not to let her panic reflect in her face. It was time to tell him the ending.
Oh dear God, help me.
“What do you mean?”

“If you would have gotten to Charlotte, and the cataclysm scenario was still in play, what were you supposed to do?”

The only sounds that registered were her heartbeat and his breathing.

When she looked down, he used his index finger to lift her chin.

“Skye? Stay with me. I need to know this,” he paused and gave her a slight headshake. “We need to know this. Ragno and Zeus are listening, and they’re hanging on every word that you say.”

For a second she felt foolish, suddenly aware that his leaning into her was so that the people to whom he was tethered through the mic could hear, and not about any feelings for her. But in that moment, he tightened his grip on her hands, bending towards her ear, and said, “You’re doing great.” His lips grazed her ear as he whispered, his tone reassuring, “Thank you.”

She drew a deep breath. The huskiness in his voice had nothing to do with what she was saying, or the questions he was asking. The look in his eyes, that encouraging look that was at once soft and very, very hungry, had nothing to do with cataclysm, Shadows, or the LID. It had everything to do with how he reacted to her, that inexplicable thing that led him over a line that he had never before crossed. She knew it, even if he didn’t.

And even if he was only manipulating her, she had no choice. She still had to fulfill her father’s directive, and without Sebastian, she had no hope of doing it. “If the cataclysm scenario is still in play, I’m supposed to alert the authorities that the data collected by the United States is insecure, and I’m supposed to do that by going to the top of the intelligence hierarchy. If someone breaks through the LID, they have Shadow Technology, and they have access to all the data that the government has collected. Everything in PRISM, everything in any mass data collection program, because Shadow Technology integrates and assimilates the programs and data.”

Sebastian nodded. “So your father claimed.”

“With my father’s backup for LID Technology, you’ll have no doubt that Shadow Technology exists. You’ll be in the system. Manipulating it. You’ll not only have access to all the data the government is collecting, you’ll be able to implement anything you want Shadow Technology to do. So if cataclysm is still in play, I’m supposed to bring the authorities the backup data, which contains the codes for closing the back door access.”

He pressed his finger to his ear. “Ragno. Zeus. Slow down. Ask one question at a time.”

He studied Skye as he listened. “The backup. Is it complete?”

Please, Dad, forgive me.

She shook her head. “There are dead ends built into it. There are prompts that require input. Passwords. I can figure my way around most of it.”

He narrowed his eyes. “What kind of input?”

“Some words. Mostly numbers. It’s complicated and formulated through a system of words and the words lead to prime numbers. Code-cracking programs won’t provide the answers, even sophisticated programs that can make trillions of guesses per minute. The words that lead to the numbers are prompted by colors and the names of the colors make no sense in the real world.”

Sebastian’s eyes widened as he stared at her. Surprise turned to a hard, assessing look, as though he knew what she wasn’t saying. She was giving him an answer without saying the actual words. She
wasn’t the sister with the phenomenal memory for meaningless words to describe colors and correlating streams of numbers.

He knew everything about her and Spring, and he should know that as well. Each dead end was actually a color. Her father used colors as markers for code, and he did that by translating colors to words to numbers. Those numbers formed the codes. It was too random for anyone with a normal memory to memorize, and her father never reduced it to writing. There was no way she was going to tell Sebastian those details while he wore a mic, with others listening to every word. There were limits to her trust.