“I figured one of these days, that would be it. I was just hoping it wouldn’t be your mother to find him. I’m sorry it was you, but…” He let out a heavy sounding sigh. “I know your mom was expecting it, too, even though she held out a lot more hope than I did. You never knew him, but my younger brother, your Uncle Allen, he died of drugs, too. Same thing, got hurt in the military, came home a junkie.”
He shook his head. “Same pattern all over again. I’ll talk to your mom tomorrow about that woman at work. I think having a kid in the house would do your mom some good, give her a distraction.”
He kissed her on the top of the head like he used to do when she was a kid and followed her mom into their bedroom.
Returning to her own room, Shasta prepared. She knew she’d have to wait until they fell asleep, which hopefully wouldn’t take long as exhausted as they both obviously were. And she’d have to wait until after dark, which it wasn’t quite yet.
She’d packed everything, including the gun and extra mags, in the bag she’d been taking to work with her. If they came out of their room, she’d say she was going in to work.
Shasta had been drinking coffee all day in preparation for her night’s errand. She didn’t know how it would end up, but either she’d be in jail, or she’d have answers.
Maybe both.
She didn’t want to think about the possibility that she might not make it. She wouldn’t let her parents down like that. Better to assume the best.
She’d figure out how to clean up her tracks later, once she took care of business.
* * * *
“So is this gonna be a snoop and poop, or we gonna go in there and shake the tree?” Delta asked.
“Fuck shakin’ it,” Yankee said. “I want to turn it into a smoking crater and a bunch of toothpicks.”
“We’ll find that out after we get there,” Lima said. “I need a final sit rep with Papa first to find out if there’s any updates before we move out and do anything.”
“Man, I wanna shake a tree,” Oscar muttered. “I’m going stir crazy. I’m not programmed for this sitting around and wasting time shit.”
“We aren’t wasting anyone or anything except time without orders,” Lima said. “We have to make sure this is all connected first.”
“Awfully coincidental,” Yankee said.
“Not sayin’ you’re wrong,” Lima countered. “But we’re not in the middle of a farking jungle. This is Houston. There’s a civvie police force to think about. A lot of civvies to think about. It’s not LA and already gone to shit. We get caught with our asses hanging out, it ain’t gonna be pretty. Harder to cover our tracks here.”
“Goddamned civilization,” Oscar muttered. “What a pain in the fucking ass.”
A beep made them all turn and look.
“She’s moving again,” Ax said as he stared at the tablet in his hands. He stood and walked over to show them.
They’d followed her all day. She’d started out at work, where she didn’t go inside. Instead, she sat, waiting, and followed her coworker to the warehouse, pulled off into another parking lot down from it, and was on what looked like a laptop.
And whatever she’d done, she’d likely changed the password of the router, because later on, Lima couldn’t access it again like he’d been able to overnight when he’d pulled a data dump from their system.
Back to work.
Back to the warehouse.
Back to work.
Then home, where she’d stayed for the rest of the afternoon.
They stared at the tablet. “You don’t think she’s going to do something stupid like try to go back to the warehouse by herself, do you?” Delta asked.
From the direction her car headed, that looked exactly like what she was doing.
“Shit,” Lima said. “Scramble. Asses in gear. Move out. Now.”
Delta ran for his gear. “Thought you said we needed a sit rep with Papa first?”
“I’ll call him from the car. Move it!”
They scrambled. Ax and Lima ended up riding with Delta and Juju. Juju had ended up behind the wheel. They raced through the streets of Houston trying to catch up to her. She had a head-start on them and knew her way around the city better than they did, but her destination was obvious even before she arrived there.
Now they had to beat her there and hopefully keep her from doing something really damn brave…
But really fucking stupid.
* * * *
This is really fucking stupid.
Her fingers had been wrapped so tightly around her steering wheel that she had to sit there and flex her fingers once she’d parked where she’d been earlier and shut off the engine. There was a warehouse complex behind her goal where she could circle around and cut through the fence with the bolt cutters she’d liberated from the garage.
She’d worn jeans and a black T-shirt, with a black jacket over that.
She felt very spy-ish.
Using her laptop, she logged into their system again. The password hadn’t been changed from when she’d reset it earlier. Only a couple of files had been changed from when she downloaded the last ones, too.
In her previous jaunt through the system, she couldn’t find any external connections where the files were going. It seemed to be a self-contained system despite its connection to the Internet.
She prepared a file and got ready to drop it into the server, her finger hovering over the return key on her laptop.
Up until this point, while yes, accessing their system was illegal, downloading their files was illegal, and changing the password on their router was…okay, illegal, too, she hadn’t done any actual damage.
Once she did this, she crossed the line from the realm of grey-hat to black-hat.
Her mind flashed back to how cool Stu’s skin felt when she touched him.
“Fuck. You.” She hit the return key.
Immediately, the malware dropped into the server and started off its fun by disabling every safeguard in the system, including their antivirus system. Then it would shred everything in their system, byte by byte, file by file, including their backup system and external drives. It would overwrite the data multiple times and make it impossible to recover.
And it disabled their security system.
That now started, she pulled up their security cameras on her phone. There didn’t appear to be anyone inside the facility, as far as she could tell. She suspected the cameras wouldn’t cover the entire interior but no one had so much as walked down a corridor and the labs were all empty.
On the front passenger floorboard was her bag. First she pulled on a pair of nitrile gloves. She grabbed the bolt cutters from her bag and laid them in her lap, wiping them down completely with a tissue. If she ended up leaving them behind, she didn’t want her or her dad’s or anyone else’s fingerprints on them to identify them by. Then she pulled the gun out of her bag, uncomfortable with its heft in her hand, and uncomfortable with the weight of the full extra mags that she stuck in her pockets.
Sticking the gun inside the front waistband of her jeans, she took a deep breath and looked around. This parking lot didn’t have any security lights. There was one, but it had either burned out or been shot out.
Reaching up, she switched off her dome light. Then she pulled up the signal and camera app and looked for all traffic cameras in the area. Belatedly, she realized she should have thought about that before she drove over here.
There weren’t any cameras around this section of warehouses, fortunately. Going back, she pulled up the three closest traffic cameras she’d passed, backed them up, and deleted the footage before shutting them down.
Note to self, leave a different way and shut the cameras down first.
“I really have a lot to learn about this criminal shit,” she muttered to herself.
* * * *
“She’s there,” Lima said. “Can’t this damn thing move any faster?”
“Any faster and Panda’s ass would be in th
e driver’s seat,” Juju said. “I’m going as fast as we can without picking up every cop in the damn city in the process.”
“We’re still about five minutes out.”
“Then let’s hope our girl’s a slowpoke,” Delta said.
They got there and found the car empty, parking on either side of it.
“Give me eyes, Lima,” Juju said. “Where is she?”
“Working.”
Both he and Ax were on their laptops, their faces illuminated by their screens.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Delta muttered. He got out and walked around the back of the SUV, popping the hatch. When he returned a moment later, he wore not only a flak vest under his jacket, but a pair of infrared night vision goggles. “I’m going to go find her.”
“Shit,” Juju said over the radio, diving out the driver’s door and running around back. “Oscar, get over here and take the wheel.”
“I’m already driving.”
“Then Yankee, get your fucking ass over here.” Juju threw on a vest and jacket and grabbed another pair of IR goggles while Yankee jumped out of the passenger side of the other SUV. Then he drew his sidearm and went jogging after Delta.
“Got her,” Lima said over the radio. “Looks like she’s cutting through the fence on the back side of the complex. To our north.”
“That’s our clever girl,” Delta said, making a hard left and changing course, which allowed Juju to catch up with him.
“So fucking clever,” Lima told them, “that it looks like not only did she take over their router, she’s done something to the system.”
“What do you mean?” Delta asked.
“I mean she’s gutted it. She set something loose in it. Some sort of malware.”
“Well, stop it.”
“I’m a geek, not goddamned Superman,” Lima said.
“It’s a data shredder,” Ax added. “Good news is, she also disabled their security system.”
Delta and Juju came to a stop and stared at each other. “Very clever girl,” they said together before taking off again.
Chapter Eighteen
Shasta stopped behind the building and then pulled up an interface on her phone. She’d already logged into the router and did another quick scan through the security cameras.
Nada.
Taking a deep breath, she hit pause on all the cameras, giving anyone watching them on a remote monitor somewhere an unchanging view. If the guard in the guard shack was monitoring the feeds, he wouldn’t see anything amiss.
Every sound sounded like a cacophony as she cut through the fence in a corner behind the building and set the cutters aside. Sliding through, she skirted down the end of the building and eased the gun out of her waistband.
She couldn’t see the guard shack from that point of view. Only the panel vans were parked by the building, blocking the guard shack’s view. The only other vehicle was down by the guard shack, and she assumed the little beater compact belonged to the guard.
Contained in the server files she’d pulled had not only been a list of passwords for the computers, but also a list of key codes to gain admittance to the lab.
Every nerve on edge, she thought she heard something but then didn’t see anything amiss. As she crept up to the door, she held her breath as she punched in a door code, one that she’d memorized as having been used earlier that day.
A click, and it unlocked.
Another noise, closer, but when she looked around, still no one.
She started to pull the door open and that’s when it felt like a freight train hit her. She couldn’t scream, because someone had clamped a hand over her mouth while they’d scooped her off her feet and were pulling her away from the door and back toward the end of the building.
Trying to struggle against whoever it was proved impossible. They were handling her as if she weighed nothing.
For a brief second she wondered how strong the guy was until reality hit.
Being abducted. Focus!
Around the end of the building, they sat her on her feet and stepped back, two men, wearing what looked like goggles on their faces. One of them looked around the end of the building again.
“What the hell are you doing?” the second hissed at her.
“Me? Who the fuck are you?” She remembered the gun in her hand and pointed it at him, praying the guy couldn’t see how terrified she was, how badly she trembled. “And why the hell did you stop me?”
* * * *
Delta nearly busted out laughing, which totally would have defeated the purpose of keeping her from barging into Rev. Silo’s Kite lab, where they didn’t even know if there was just the drug or the virus, too.
They’d saved her from potentially committing suicide, and now she was pointing a gun at them.
With the safety on.
The IR goggles lit up the night as if there were spotlights all around them, and he could clearly see her hand shaking.
If she’d ever even fired the damn thing before, he’d be shocked.
But damn, she was fucking cute. Sucked about her brother, but…
He shook himself out of it. “Honey, you’re not going to shoot either of us with that.”
Juju turned around. “What? What the—fuck, dude!”
“Go ahead.”
She tried, and, predictably, nothing happened.
Delta reached out, grabbed the gun from her, dropped the mag, ejected the round in the chamber—well, she’d gotten that part right, at least—and handed it back to her. “You had the safety on.”
“Dude, fuck, you gave it back to her?” Juju hissed.
The shock on her face was making it really hard not to laugh at her. She started trying to dig into her pockets for what he guessed was probably another mag and then Juju grabbed it from her and shook it at him.
“What the hell are you trying to do, get us killed?” Juju asked.
Delta pointed to where she’d turned around and was trying to take off through the fence. “Runner. You want to catch her, or me?”
“Jesus, get her!”
He grabbed her arm and when it looked like she was trying to scream, he held a finger up to his lips. “Shh. Unless you want to get the guard over here.”
“Who the fuck are you guys?” She tried to shake his hand off but he didn’t let go. “Let me go, you dumb monkeys!”
Now he really had to struggle not to laugh. “Do you know what you were trying to do?”
“Yeah, actually, I did. And you’re messing things up!”
“Going in there and getting yourself killed won’t bring your brother back, Shasta.”
She froze, staring up at him. “There’s no one in there. I checked the video feed, and there’s only the guard, and who the hell are you two?”
He flipped the goggles up so he could actually see her, squinting a little in the dark while his eyes adjusted. “What did you think you were going to do when you got inside there?”
“Get proof that I can send to the cops about what they’re doing in there with the drugs. Or destroy it so they can’t hurt anyone else. It’s not just my brother, it’s a guy I worked with, and several other people. And who the hell are you?”
“Didn’t it occur to you that there might be more than just a drug in there? And, oh yeah, looks like you shredded their files. How you going to prove anything?”
“Don’t be stupid. I made backups.” Her jaw snapped shut as if it finally occurred to her that she had no clue who she was talking to, and maybe she was talking a bit too much.
“Let’s move,” Juju said. He’d picked up the mag and spare round from the ground, put the round in the clip, slammed it into the gun, and jacked a round into the chamber.
Then he stuck it in his waistband.
“Hey, that’s mine!” she said.
Wow. She got points for spunk, that was for sure.
Juju leaned in. “Yeah? For starters, keep the volume down. And until you can learn to use it safely and not point it at guys try
ing to save your life, I’ll hold onto it for you.”
He spun her around and pointed her at the fence, easily slipping through behind her and catching her upper arm, marching her back toward their vehicles.
Delta went through the fence after them. He grabbed the bolt cutters, following close behind them.
“You’re welcome, by the way,” Delta said as he caught up.
“For what? For screwing up my plan?”
The men stopped and made her look up at them. “Because,” Delta said, trying not to let his cock harden as he stared down into her eyes through her glasses, “if you’re that hot to get in there, then you already know they’re making Kite the drug. What you don’t know—and we don’t know either, and can’t know now because, thank you, you borked the fucking files—is if they have Kite the virus in there, too.”
She’d looked like she was about to argue with him when her mouth snapped shut. “Kite the virus?” she whispered.
“And now she lowers her voice,” Juju muttered.
“Dude,” Delta said, “ditch the fucking goggles. We got her.”
Juju raised his after shooting a glare at Delta.
* * * *
Juju would deal with Delta later. In private.
Right now, he was struggling to focus on the mission. She was either completely stupid, or adorably unprepared.
Maybe both, the jury was still out.
What couldn’t be denied was that for the first time in his life, he was having trouble focusing on the mission at hand, and that bothered him for a number of reasons.
He couldn’t believe Delta had let her keep the gun in the first place and hadn’t immediately disarmed her when she produced it, especially if he saw she had the safety on.
This was like…really bad foreplay. Like Roscoe-level bad. Like they were doing things in the wrong order, for sure. That if Delta was trying to seduce her, he was fucking things up.
But they weren’t trying to seduce her, they were trying to get her attention and keep her from accidentally stumbling into a lab that might or might not be full of a deadly virus, and then accidentally spreading said virus into a major metropolitan area, and not alerting every cop and bad guy in the area in the process.