AllFreeNovel
Share Us
His smile felt abruptly reassuring, and I could feel my blood pressure coming down a bit. Like Fox Mulder from the X-Files, I wanted to believe.
“Look, you nerds are great at computer stuff, but when it comes to breaking and entering?” Jax gestured around. “Sloppy. Very sloppy.”
“Sloppy…” I repeated.
He nodded. “I’ll bet there are a dozen ways we can figure out who did this. And when we do?”
Extending his arms, Jax interlaced his fingers and cracked his knuckles.
“Someone’s getting their ass kicked in.”
~ 42 ~
PRESTON
“Uhhh… thanks,” I said, accepting the food being slid across my desk. “I think.”
I stopped analyzing the nine different monitors on my screen for only a split-second, just long enough to glance down. A sandwich rested on a paper plate, next to a pile of ridged potato chips. The bread looked stale, and that’s because I knew it was stale. After all, I’d bought it almost two weeks ago.
“Tuna fish?”
“Yes,” Harper answered.
“Did you make this from a can in our cabinet?”
She hesitated. “Yes, why?”
“Then I don’t even want to know the expiration date,” I replied glumly.
“Funny,” said Harper, “Jax said the same thing before he left.”
I grabbed it anyway and took a bite. It wasn’t bad. It wasn’t good. But it was food, and that was something.
“Have you found anything?” she asked for the tenth or twelfth time.
I didn’t answer immediately. My eyes were still locked on a black-and-white monitor in the third row, second column. Nothing had happened on that monitor yet. But if and when it did, I needed to know about it.
“I’ll let you know,” I said again. “But as I told you, it’s better if you’re not in here. You’re not seeing any of this, remember?”
“Yeah,” Harper replied. “Sure.”
The need for plausible deniability was for her benefit, of course. I’d taken my machine to some extremely illegal places over the past sixteen hours, including a few that could send some very high-level officials’ panties scurrying up their tightly-clenched asscracks. Some of those could even bring a SWAT team down on our apartment, if I wasn’t diligent with the VPN program that covered my tracks. But that Rubicon had already been crossed.
The little glowing rectangle of night vision stared back at me, unchanged, as I realized Harper was still in the room. Without looking away, I turned to speak to her over my shoulder.
“Why don’t you go call and check on the others?” I suggested. “See if they—”
“I’ve checked on them enough,” she said bitterly. “They’re big boys. Let them do their thing.”
Her words came with a scraping sound, as she dragged one of the chairs in from the kitchen. As she sat down beside me, the intensity of her body language alone stopped whatever objection I was about to make.
“Yeah, I know, I shouldn’t be here,” she said evenly. “So let’s agree that I’m not here, but you could use another pair of eyes, and there’s no way I’m sitting on my hands in the fucking living room.”
She was right about the second pair of eyes. And her tone told me there wasn’t going to be a debate about this.
“Alright then,” I said, my voice going lower for no good reason. “This is a recording of last night’s—”
“City cameras, from NITTEC’s Traffic Operations Center,” she finished for me. “Niagara International Transportation Technology Coalition.”
