Shadows (Black Raven Book 1) (37 page)

He was a smart man. After a long silence, he nodded.

That secret, the one neither of them voiced, had to be protected at all costs.

Ragno and Zeus knew enough. They didn’t need to know the rest. She held her breath, praying Sebastian wouldn’t verbalize what he had just figured out – that Spring was part of the key to the incomplete data set in her father’s backup.

He turned, looked at the other agents, and said, “Alert the pilot. We’re headed back to Last Resort. I’m not sure where this road is taking us, but I want the sisters together. Zeus, you and your team have Firefly Island?” He paused. “Good. Give the marshals minimal information. Not the whole picture. Just enough so that later we can claim we didn’t knowingly obfuscate the truth.”

“Your father does things in threes.” Sebastian shot her a questioning glance. “Is there a third set of backup?”

“Zachary Young had a version of it, but his was an earlier version. My father was never able to figure out what Zachary did with it, or whether he did anything at all. When Zachary and his family were killed, my father assumed that someone had the backup. The problem isn’t that someone has the backup. You see,” she paused, “the problem is that someone is making sense of it. That’s what set the cataclysm scenario in play.”

“Assuming your father’s cataclysm scenario is still in play, who exactly are you supposed to take this information to? The National Security Agency? CIA? FBI?”

She hesitated, not ready to voice the answer.

“Well? The end game. I need to know your father’s end game.”

Oh, dear God. Help me.
“I’m supposed to get to Washington. Straight to the President.”

She waited for disbelief. She waited for him to lose his cool. It was outlandish, she knew, but in her father’s world, it all made perfect sense. The leap of faith into that world, though, was going to be a big one for this man who was so grounded in reality.

Instead of disbelief, he gave her a quizzical look, and asked, “Of?”

“What do you mean,
of
?”

“The President of what?”

“Of the United States.”

The President of the United States?

Of course.

All great conspiracy theories ended in the Oval Office.

Why should this one—born of one of the more brilliant minds of the century— be any different?

Skye had cringed as she said it, and he didn’t blame her. Her pronouncement prompted his brain to flood with more smartass comments than he could voice and an equal number of questions. All of which coalesced into silence, as he had backed away from her, because he couldn’t think of a goddamn thing to say. A long minute passed, when he and his agents did nothing but stare at her. She stood, glanced at him with a look of despair, and walked to the back of the jet, taking the same seat in the rear cabin she’d occupied on the way there.

He glanced at the pilots. “Let’s return to Last Resort.”

One of them nodded. “We’re on the leading edge of a cold front. Gusty winds. There might be a bit of a weather delay.”

Sebastian stayed in the front of the plane with his agents, none of whom were saying a thing. Like children who were waiting for a parent to explode, they were eyeing him, waiting for his reaction to Skye’s pronouncement that she was supposed to go to the Oval Office.

Sinking heavily into a seat, he stretched his legs into the aisle. He reached into a jacket pocket, opened a pill bottle, and took a pill that seemed to affect him more mildly than some of his others. He needed to take the edge off the headache. Popular thought in the Black Raven ranks was that there wasn’t enough blood in a man’s body to fuel both his dick and his brain at the same time. On him, at the moment, his head was pounding, and his balls were aching, because encouraging Skye to speak, leaning into her, holding her, and comforting her, had prompted another bout of unsatisfied arousal, and his body was rebelling. The dual areas of throbbing pain proved that while his dick and brain might not function effectively at the same time, the two certainly could hurt simultaneously.

Zeus and Ragno had heard every word and so far their radio silence was deafening. “Zeus?”

“I’m here. Not sure where we should go with this,” Zeus said. “Give me a few minutes to think.”

“Sebastian,” Ragno said, breaking one of the longest pauses he’d ever heard from her, “did she really say that her father’s instructions are for her to go to the President of the United States?”

“You heard it as I did.”

“How the hell was she planning to accomplish that? Was she going to stroll across the White House lawn and just walk through an open door? Current events aside, does she really think that’s how one gets in?”

If he felt that he was getting closer to finding Richard Barrows, he’d have chuckled at the thought of Skye, Spring, and the dog going through the gates of Pennsylvania Avenue. But he didn’t have the reassuring feeling that came with getting close to his prey. In fact, now that Skye had finally spilled her guts, all he could do was wonder what the hell to do with the information. “I have no idea.”

“We could have access, if we need it,” Ragno said.

“I know,” he said. “But that would require us to play some mighty big cards, and we don’t call in those cards unless we’re certain of what we’re asking for, and equally certain of the results we’re going to get.”

“In this situation it certainly wouldn’t be advisable,” Ragno said.

“No joke,” he said, watching as the pilot shut the door to the cockpit.

“I know. I’m just thinking aloud. Sorry, Sebastian,” Ragno said, “she got me with that one. Let me backup a minute. According to what she’s saying, the backup that was on Firefly Island provides access to Shadow and LID Technologies, and the person who has access will be able to manipulate the data collection capabilities of the U.S. government.”

Sebastian glanced back to where Skye was sitting. The door that separated the compartments was open. His breath caught in his throat, when he got an eyeful of her. Skye had pulled her feet up on the seat and put her head down on her knees, hugging her legs to her chest. He ignored the tweak to his heart that her posture inspired.

Dammit.

He had to think about the implications of what she’d just told him. Not about her. If she was listening to his side of the conversation, she gave no indication. Just in case, he faced forward and dropped his voice to a whisper. “So can’t the government just shut it off? If Shadow Technology is actually running, and that’s a really big if, can’t they just shut it down?”

“The programs are complex,” Ragno said, “it could take time. Skye is saying she has to alert the authorities to a breach. It seems that what she’s saying is that if someone has the code to the LID, their breach will be invisible. We now know that countries like China and other sophisticated hackers,” she paused, “like us, can get in and out without being detected. What Skye is telling us is that she needs to alert the President of the potential for a breach, and hand him the backup so he can stop it.”

“Let’s assume that someone gets in. What’s the damage?”

“Say China is behind this. If Shadow Technology does what Barrows says it does, China has now won the technological information war. Better than that, they now have the most intelligent data collection capabilities in the world. The U.S. government may be collecting everything, all the time, but all we’d be doing is handing it to China. The U.S. would have to regroup. It won’t force us back to the age before the Internet, but this technology breach could force us back into the nineties.”

She paused. “Back when we were just collecting data, without an effective method of assimilating it. Remember? The clues to the September 11 attacks were all there. Richard Barrows is absolutely correct on that. The U.S. just wasn’t assimilating the clues,” she drew a deep breath, “which proves that endless information is not helpful knowledge. We don’t want other governments, or individuals, to have the tools that we use to turn information into knowledge.”

“But you still think Shadow Technology and LID Technology do not exist, correct?” He silently debated which pain—headache or balls—was worse. The headache won. Tendrils of pain were shooting from his temple and forming an ice pick jab through his brain. He tried not to focus on the headache, thinking, instead, about the myriad of reasons why the jet might not be moving.

“Well, if I listen to the governmental officials we’ve managed to talk to since Richard Barrows escaped,” she said, “I’d have to say that the technologies don’t exist.”

“So Barrows has Skye planning on going to the White House, telling the President that there’s been a security breach on programs that might not even exist.”

“That about sums it up,” Ragno said, “and without the backup, this could all be one great big show on the part of Barrows. To prove his point that the government was collecting data without proper safeguards in place.”

“Unless the backup is in Charlotte.” Some of the throbbing in his head eased, but not because he really had any hope that the backup was in Charlotte. Thank God for drugs. Life was better with chemistry. “We’d at least know if these technologies exist.”

“I’m not very hopeful we’ll find the backup,” she answered.

“I’m betting no, and there’s no way I’m assuming that the backup—which we don’t have and likely won’t have—is what Richard Barrows led his daughter to believe that it was.”

“Well, I’m not so sure I’d agree with you on that.”

Cool. Calm. Unflappable. Ragno was all of that. Her simple statement stopped his runaway disbelief in its tracks. “Why?”

“Because he didn’t lie.”

“He believed in extraterrestrial life, for God’s sake.”

“Well, have you proven that it doesn’t exist?”

“Ragno, please don’t tell me you’re buying the man’s bullshit. You just said the technologies don’t exist-”

“No. I said the government officials say that it doesn’t exist-”

“But-”

“Calm down, big man. I’m just saying that I don’t see a basis for believing that he’d lie about this. He was too passionate about it.”

“Well,” he paused, remembering what Skye had said about the legions of people who wore foil-lined caps, “someone believes the man, because they’ve gone to great lengths to secure his backup.” He paused. “Say we buy into it all. We believe all of it. We go trucking up to the White House and tell the President our story. Does it help us find Richard Barrows?”

“Perhaps.”

“How?”

“Because if Shadow and LID Technologies exist, and we know they’re being breached,” Ragno said, “meaning we believe Skye, and she is correct, and the President orders the NSA to let us have access, we can find the breach, and try like hell to diagnose who is doing it.”

Zeus said, “By the way, I’m agreeing with Ragno so far.”

Sebastian groaned. “This just got fucking worse. Are you two listening to yourselves? I’d rather tell the President that spacemen are coming. Imagine what will happen if the systems don’t exist.”

“We will forever be the butt of jokes,” Ragno said.

“Bad ones,” Zeus added. “And we won’t be anywhere close to finding Richard Barrows. Marshals are here, and Minero is calling me. I’m out for now.”

“But if Shadows and LID Technologies exist,” Ragno added after Zeus broke the phone connection, her tone once again calm. “It is likely you will not only find Barrows; you’ll prevent one of the greatest technological security breaches of all time. You’ll be saving the world.”

“Fuck saving the world,” Sebastian muttered. “I just need to find Richard Barrows and throw his ass back in jail.”

He glanced at his watch. Almost thirty minutes had elapsed since he’d activated the agents in Charlotte. They’d know the answer to whether the backup was there soon. He glanced back, taking in the skeptical expressions of his agents who were still open mic’d to him and Ragno.

As the jet started taxiing to the runway, on the intercom the pilot said, “We have clearance to move to the queue for takeoff, but if we don’t get in the air in the next five minutes, we’ll have a brief weather delay. Whenever we get up, it’s going to get bumpy. Make sure your seatbelts are on.”

He looked behind him, past the questioning glances of his agents, to Skye. When his eyes rested on her, his heart sank. Smart ass comments and questioning arguments he was used to. Bravado when she had no right to have it? Hell yes, he admired that. Lying? Not a problem for him, especially when she broadcasted the fact. It was more amusing than irritating. The fact that she hit him? Also not a problem. He loved that she expressed her frustration with physical jabs, punches, and slaps. Each time she laid her hands on him, any way that she did, his body responded with full throttle yearning. Even absolute faith in her father’s crazy beliefs, he could handle, because a woman with that much faith in another person was rare.

So much about her was absolutely irresistible that her beaten-up posture as she sat in the oversized seat, head down on her knees, hit him like a gut punch. His woman didn’t need to look like the world had just beaten her up. No. He wasn’t going to let that spirit be crushed. Not without whatever moral support he could give her. “Ragno, I’m signing off for a while.”

“Wait. This just in. Our agents have found Biondo’s body. We’re alerting Marshal Minero now. Our field observations put time of death three days ago. Before the murder of his victim. You were correct last night, when you tried to tell Minero that the timing was odd. Someone else was using Biondo’s murder of his victim as a diversionary tactic to split the manpower.”

“Any clues as to who may have murdered the man?”

“None whatsoever.”

Fuck.

He found no enjoyment in being right on this one. “Ragno, when you talk to Minero, refrain from saying I told you so, okay?”

“Will do.”

He clicked the watch’s phone capabilities to off and unsnapped his seat belt. Moving to the back of the plane, he shut the door that separated the cabins, and sat in the seat next to hers.

“Hey.”

She didn’t lift her head. “Please don’t say that you think I’m crazy.”

He chuckled as he buckled up. “I wasn’t going to say that. I think your father is crazy. You? I still have no idea what to think of you.”

Her ponytail was loose, and on his side of her shoulders. He reached for some wayward tendrils, and smoothed them back. As he dropped his hand from her head, he placed it on the armrest. His forearm was grazing the side of her leg. He wanted that contact. It was cheating, he knew, but he wanted her. Even if he shouldn’t.

She turned her head to the side, still resting it on her knees. Her luminous, gray-green eyes were steady, focused on him. That deep inner light that reminded him of a gas lantern on a foggy New Orleans evening was gone. “I can’t make this right,” she said. “I can’t keep going. I can’t stand my father’s world. It’s all smoke and mirrors. I want reality.”

He chuckled. “Like a perfect coffee house?”

She nodded. “Reality doesn’t have to be ugly.”

“No,” he shrugged, “it certainly doesn’t.”

“My father’s expectations are,” she sighed, and her eyes welled with tears, “unrealistic for me. Always have been. I had no business being at MIT as young as I was-”

“You were certainly smart enough to be there-”