AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Stop trying to fuck with my mind!” She jerked away from Tanner. “I’m notstupid.”
“Nobody here believes thatyouare.”
“Three options,” she said, thinking aloud. “One of you is Ulysses. Alternatively, your presence here is a decoy. Or another layer of protection forUlysses?”
All excellent assumptions and perfectly validtheories.
“I’m afraid we can’t confirm or deny.” Tanner shifted in his chair, looking as uncomfortable as I felt about having to use thatlameline.
“It makes sense that Ulysses has a military background.” She kept going. “His hacks are centered on national security. He got into the Chinese government servers. He went after the Iranians and the North Koreans. Hell, he did that thing where he blew up Al-Qaida’s online presence for like threemonths…”
She really did know a lot. Too much. Which added another priority level to our plan, because we couldn’t risk letting someone as well-informed as Nina fall into the bad guys’hands.
“Oh, I see.” Her eyes glimmered with the realization. “Ulysses is not a person. Ulysses is a group. Or a project.” Her gaze swept over us as if she was seeing us for the first time. “You are a team, or part of a team, one of those cybersecurity outfits dedicated to counter cyberterrorism. It explains why you’re out here in the middle of nowhere and why you have resources to monitor aerial searches and such. And who better to fight the cyberwar than special operators who fought terror on theground?”
She was too bright for her own good. No wonder the fuckers after her wantedherdead.
“NSA?” she asked. “Homelandsecurity?FBI?”
None of us had anything to say to anyofthat.
“You guys are a classified mission, top secret,” she concluded. “You’re not going to help me. I’ve come all this way for nothing.” Her shoulders slumped and she looked small and dejected, her body barely outlined inside the vastness of Tanner’s T-shirt, her foot jittering against the baseboard. “The thing that gets to me the most is that poor, innocent clerk at the hangar, how they killed him in cold blood, as if his life wasnothing.”
I squirmed in my seat. We knew aboutthat,too.
“Well, his life was worth something to me.” Her chin came up in defiance. “His murder isnotgoing to go unpunished. Ulysses is not available to me? Fine. I’ll find a different way to do this onmyown.”
She slid off the chair and, with a little wince, stood up, spine ramrod straight. Tanner was right. She was brave and determined as hell. She was gonna go after these fuckers and get herself killed in theprocess.
The three of us stood up as well. I guess we were all bred a certain way. I was getting squirrely. Nina’s pain? I couldn’tstandit.
“Come on, man,” I muttered. “Tellher.”
She took my measure, buttering me up with that dangerous golden glow. “Tellmewhat?”
“We can’t give up Ulysses,” Tanner said. “But we do want tohelpyou.”
She squared her shoulders. “Because you think I can’t take care ofmyself?”
“No, that’s not it,” Tanner said cautiously. “We want to help because you’re Daniel Leon’s sister. He was a SEAL. We’re SEALs. We take care of our own. We also want to help you because we really like what we seeinyou.”
“You don’t know me from shit.” Her spine was going to break if she kept snapping like that. “How could you like me, let alone want to help me, when you have no idea of whoIam?”
Tanner used his smile to calm and neutralize. “We do know you, pretty well actually. We checked you out. We think your story islegit.”
“How the hell did you check me out?” It took her only seconds to draw her own conclusion, her eyes gaining glow as the realizations hit her. “My laptop! One of you broke my codes. My encryptions. It should’ve been impossible, but you got in.” Her glare narrowed on me. “It was you, wasn’t it? You broke into mylaptop!”
Her scowl sliced through me like a freshly honed Ka-Bar. She’d be hell on wheels in a firefight. But she was right. I’d broken into her laptop. Took me for-fucking-ever, but I had help and resources she couldn’t even dream about. She was good, best I’d ever seen. But I wasn’t going to admit to any of that, not when I was directly in her lineoffire.
Her laptop had yielded pretty much everything we needed to know about her and even some things we shouldn’t have known. I’d taken the lead on Nina’s cyber activities, Zar took point on the mortar and brick stuff, and Tanner concentrated on completing his comprehensive profile of her. When it all came together, we knew we were dealing with someone formidable in her own right. We still had questions, but the basics were clear: Her work was top notch. Her intentions were pure. She’d been to hell and back in the last three days. She was onherown.
So this conversation hadn’t been so much about the facts. It had been a test of her character. So far, she wasacingit.
I watched Nina fracturing into tiny little pieces right in front of me. I traded a worried look with the others, because although we could, none of us wanted to break her. We liked the person she was too much to let it happen. Plus, we were running not one but two concurrentmissions.
Nina’s face drained of color. “So you knoweverything?”
“We know a lot,” Tanneradmitted.
