Hard and Fast (6 page)

“No,” Alex replied firmly and unflinchingly.

He lowered his arms to plant them on his hips.

“Alex, I know it’s hard to look at the people you work with every day suspiciously,” Lucas added softly. “But I need you to be completely objective here. Are there any risks among your other engineers?”

His tone felt patronizing and hit all of her buttons. She could not hold back a snarky response.

“What exactly makes you think I’m not being objective?” She took a step forward.

She waved her hands in front of him. He raised that annoying brow again.

“Is it my height?” Alex demanded.

“Alex—”

“Ahh,” she cut in dramatically, snapping her fingers. “I know! It’s the breasts, isn’t it?”

“That’s—”

She ignored his exasperated sigh.

“These damn boobs! Always interrupting my rational thoughts. Forcing me to get all emotional and incapable of logical reasoning,” continued Alex in a tone dripping with sarcasm, stepping even closer to him until they were only an arm’s length apart.

The mounds of flesh referenced were bound and secured behind a heavy-duty sports bra, and well hidden in the baggy, heavy cotton overalls, but she noted with satisfaction that his gaze fixed on them like they were naked. Until she forcefully crossed her arms in front of her chest, and Lucas raised his eyes again to meet hers. Finally, there was something more than calm amusement in his dark brown depths.

“They are very distracting, but I’m sure you manage just fine, Lex,” he retorted in a bland voice. “Now, just answer the question. Or have you forgotten it already?”

Alex glared and clenched her jaw hard as she stepped right up beside him, until her side was almost brushing his. He towered her by a good ten inches, but she refused to be bullied by his size and pretty-boy charm.

“There is no risk that someone on my team could have leaked information. They didn’t know anything of value until this morning. All they knew is that we were working on a hybrid to win at Sea-to-Sky Highway,” she snapped in clipped words. “And my name is Alex.”

Done with him, Alex made for the conference room door in long, firm strides, but was stopped abruptly by a firm grip on her upper arm. She gasped in surprise and spun around in reflex to attack him with her free arm, but Lucas swiftly and easily caught that one as well. He pulled her up to him until their bodies were almost flush and his head was bent low next to hers.

“Lex suits you much better,” he whispered into her ear before abruptly letting her go.

She shot him a final, scathing glare then marched out of the room.

CHAPTER 6

Lance, Ned, and Michael arrived at the Toronto Island Airport on Tuesday morning. They had hitched a ride on a cargo flight, needing room for several large aluminum cases with the equipment required for the Magnus job. Lucas met them on the tarmac with a large black SUV that he had rented last night, and ferried over from the city.

The men greeted him with wide grins and hand slaps.

“Raymond looked pretty disappointed that he wasn’t coming along,” Ned stated as they worked to load up the back of the truck with their cases. “I think he’s bored out of his mind on Sam’s bodyguard job.”

“Yeah,” Michael piped in. “The client’s daughter is a real piece of work. She’s barely eighteen and all over Sam like a cheap suit. Maybe Ray’s worried that once she finally gives up on Sam, she’ll set her sights on him.”

The guys all laughed. Raymond was a brilliant tech wizard and decent as an agent in the field, but he was a classic introvert and not at all equipped to deal with an aggressive crush-obsessed adolescent girl.

“Poor guy,” Lucas sympathized. “He’s probably having nightmares about it.”

“Or maybe his disappointment has more to do with what he’s missing out on here, huh, Luc,” Ned speculated. “Based on the pics in the case folder you sent last night, Alex Cotts is pretty easy on the eyes. Maybe they had some kind of connection when he was here in Toronto last fall.”

“Nope. Cotts was out of town when Raymond set up their network security,” replied Lucas in an easy voice. “And she’s definitely more than our Raymond could handle.”

The other three men raised eyebrows and looked at each other speculatively.

“Sounds like a handful,” scoffed Michael.

“And then some,” Lucas muttered, more to himself than anyone else. “I’ll fill you guys in on the drive to the auto shop.”

They quickly finished loading up the truck.

“What about customs and our weapons?” Lance asked once they were all seated and Lucas was driving away from the runway.

“All taken care of,” Lucas told them. “Fortis is a registered private security and investigation firm in all ten provinces and three territories, and a specialized contractor to the Canadian government. I arranged your clearance in advance.”

“Nice!” Michael replied. “I guess Secret Service contacts are still useful.”

“Occasionally,” chuckled Lucas.

The ferry ride and drive into downtown Toronto took them around thirty minutes. Lucas used some of that time to review the key facts about Magnus and their Cicada engine that he had provided in the case folder. It was a few minutes to ten o’clock in the morning when Lucas drove the large SUV around to the rear side of the Magnus Motorsports auto shop. He reversed into the open spot closest to the large open garage bay, parking close to the sleek gray Porsche with matte black rims and hot red brake calipers.

“We have a room that we can set up as our control center, so let’s get unpacked,” he told the team. “I want a plan confirmed by twelve hundred hours.”

A couple of Magnus mechanics stepped outside from the shop floor with coffee cups and packs of cigarettes just as the four big men filed out of the SUV. All the agents were dressed in black with full-size handguns clipped into shoulder holsters worn over their shirts. The mechanics froze with looks of alarm on their faces.

“Morning,” Lucas said smoothly with a nod as he strode by them toward the garage bay at the center of the building, carrying two of the equipment cases. Lance and Ned followed in a single line, similarly loaded up, with Michael in the rear carrying the last case, with only their personal luggage left behind in the trunk.

Lucas could feel almost a dozen eyes following him and his men as they walked through the shop floor to the entrance to Magnus’s offices. One pair of eyes in particular felt so hot that it might singe his flesh. But he resisted the pull to look back at Alex as she stood with the other racing engineers in the right side of the shop. He had been much too distracted by her already over the last day and a half as it was.

The Fortis team was entering the small conference room given to Lucas just as Norma and Marco came through the doors to the showroom at the front of the building. Their client and his assistant stopped short, with very similar expressions of alarm as everyone else in the building.

“Marco, Norma, this is the Fortis team that will be on the ground for you,” Lucas stated in an easy, casual voice that was at odds with the armed presence now lined up behind him inside the small room. “Lance and Ned will provide security detail, and Michael will work with me on the investigation.”

Each of the other agents nodded when their names were mentioned, even as they began opening the large cases to unpack the contents.

“You’re wearing guns,” Norma stated as though she couldn’t quite understand what was going on.

“Are those legal? Are you allowed to wear them?” added Marco, pointing at the weapon Lucas had not been wearing yesterday.

“I assure you, all our weapons are licensed and very legal,” Lucas told them both in the same calm voice.

“Is this necessary?” Alex demanded as she marched up the hall with indignation written all over her face. Lucas couldn’t help but notice how cute she looked, all agitated. “You can’t just walk around strapped to the teeth.”

Lucas tried to keep his lips still to suppress a grin.

“It is and we can,” he replied briefly.

Her mouth hung open, as though his explanation meant nothing.

“Who are you people, anyway? It’s not Texas, you know. This is Canada!”

“I know where I am, Cotts, but thanks for the reminder,” he shot back quietly before turning to Marco and his assistant. “Marco, I’ll need ninety minutes with my men to get situated. Can I provide you a review of our plan by, say, one o’clock?”

“Sure, that’s fine,” Marco told him, swallowing tightly.

“I will be there also,” Alex demanded, practically vibrating with frustration.

“As you’d like,” he told her politely before he walked into the meeting room leaving the door open.

“Did you know anything about this, Markie?” he heard her asking her boss from a short distance down the hall. Marco’s response was too quiet for Lucas to hear as they walked away.

“You weren’t kidding,” Michael quipped, barely looking up from his task of setting up a high-capacity computer system at the far end of the conference room table. “She’s definitely a handful.”

The other men snickered, but Lucas ignored them. He was too busy trying to figure out how to get rid of the energy and anticipation that swept down his back every time that damn woman was anywhere near his vicinity. Sure, she was cute, and those golden eyes were captivating, but he usually preferred his women with dispositions more like his own: light-hearted and easygoing. Alexandria Cotts was proving to be as easygoing as a territorial panther.

The Fortis men worked in silence to set up all the equipment they had brought with them for the assignment, then stacked the empty aluminum boxes along the back wall, out of their way. There were two powerful, dual-core computers connected to an ultra-high-speed router with an untraceable, ricocheting IP address. They also had a storage and backup server stack, configured with a new Fortis security encryption algorithm designed by Lucas. The last couple of boxes had the latest in digital laser technology surveillance equipment, and locked cases with extra handguns and ammunition, just in case.

“Okay, we’ll work in two teams,” Lucas stated to Lance, Ned, and Michael as he stood in front of a large map of the Magnus building with schematics posted on the wall of the room. “Building security will be in twelve-hour shifts, six to six each day. Lance, you take days; Ned, you take nights with their regular security guard, Oliver.”

Lance and Ned nodded.

“You’ll follow the our standard security pattern, so each of you will rotate your surveillance position in thirty minute intervals, altered by seven minutes every four hours, reset on a five-day cycle. We’ll do a full sweep to make sure there are no bugs or listening devices planted. Then we’ll wire up the building with external and internal surveillance cameras, using sensors at night,” Lucas continued, circling the connection points on the building map. “Michael, you’ll be monitoring everyone who comes within a mile of the building, using my facial-mapping search engine. Anyone we can’t identify through social media will be tagged as a potential threat. I will focus on trying to find out who’s funding our friend Pratt, and monitoring the network for any new intrusion attempts. Questions?”

There was a moment of silence as Lucas looked to confirm that everyone was clear on the instructions, though he knew it would be. It was a pretty basic plan.

“Hopefully, this will be the easiest assignment we’ve had in a couple of years, and we’re just overdressed for the party,” he finally added.

“But you don’t think so,” responded Ned. It was a statement, not a question.

The two men had met during their time in the Financial Crimes division of the United States Secret Service. While Ned was a special agent assigned to investigative work, Lucas worked as a systems security consultant for protection against financial crimes. They had seen enough similar patterns during their careers to know when something noteworthy was in the works.

“No, I don’t,” Lucas finally confirmed. “Someone wants this Cicada technology, and they are too invested already to just walk away. Now, the only way to get the information they want is right here is this building. I’d rather figure out who it is before they show up at our doorstep to try to take it.”

Lucas walked over to one of the two computers on the table and pulled up pictures of two men.

“We have two targets to start our investigation,” he stated, clicking on the image of a tall, slender, ruddy-skinned man wearing a gray cardigan and blue plaid shirt, carrying a messenger bag strapped across his chest. “Adam North, thirty-five-year-old associate professor of physics at the University of Illinois, Chicago. He designed the battery for the Cicada engine. Since our visit to Chicago last week, we confirmed he was unaware of Pratt’s hack into his computer. We also know that Pratt pretended to be a student at the university to gain access.

“What we don’t know is how Pratt and whoever is funding him knew what North was working on for Magnus. He’s married, no children, and lives a pretty routine life from what we’ve seen so far.”

“Who’s the second guy?” Michael asked, since the details about North were already in the case file they read during the trip to Toronto.

Lucas pulled up the second image of a smaller man with wavy black hair, blues eyes, tanned skin and a boyish smile. The shoulder of his racing suit was visible in the picture, with various logos covering the front.

“Is that Jean Renaud, the race car driver?” Ned guessed, leaning forward to be sure.

“One and the same,” Lucas confirmed. “Twenty-nine years old, French-born Indy Car driver, winner of the Daytona 500 two year ago. Cotts confirmed yesterday that she was introduced to North through Renaud at a racing event, also two years ago.”

Lucas clicked on another file on the computer desktop and another series of pictures came up of a couple in various kinds of public displays of affection. The most intimate was a very deep kiss at a winner’s podium while Jean Renaud held up a large trophy.

“What Alex hadn’t mentioned was that she and Renaud had dated for over a year,” he added, zooming in on the face of the Magnus lead engineer in the arms of the race car driver. In the picture, she looked sexy and glamorous.

“You think Renaud has something to do with all this?” Lance asked.

“That’s the first thing we have to find out,” Lucas replied softly. “Based on what I found last night, I’d say they stopped seeing each other sometime last fall.”

“So, Cotts shares her design ideas with her boyfriend who’s in the racing industry, then he sells her out when they break up?” suggested Michael.

“I’ve seen far worse from an ex-lover,” replied Lucas. “And it gives us motive and opportunity. Renaud knows cars. If both Cotts and North told him about their individual work, he would definitely see the bigger potential, and he has the sponsors and contacts in the industry who would pay big for the information. If we can connect Pratt and Renaud to the same contact, we’ll know the threat.”

“Sound like a plan,” Michael summarized, slapping his hand on the table.

The other agents voiced similar confirmations.

“Good. I’m meeting with Marco and Alex now, then we’ll get the perimeter hooked up after lunch.”

“Alex?” Ned questioned with raised brows.

Lucas cringed inside, suddenly aware of his unintended slip.

“Cotts,” he growled back, ignoring a knowing light in his friend’s eyes and telling himself that Ned could speculate about insignificant things all he wanted, it didn’t mean anything.

Lucas walked into Marco’s office through the open door a few moments later and found Alex alone in there, leaning against the back window and looking outside. Her mass of jet-black dreadlocks was pulled back into a high ponytail at the crown of her head, revealing the striking contours of her cheeks and jawline. She looked incredibly young and fragile, swallowed up the shapelessness of her gray overalls.

“Sorry, I came to see if Marco was available for an update,” he stated once she finally noticed his presence.

Her shoulders straightened and her full lips flattened with annoyance.

“He’s just finishing with a customer,” she stated stiffly.

“Okay, let him know I’m available whenever he is,” Lucas told her, then turned to leave.

“Wait,” she demanded as she strode across Marco’s office. “You didn’t answer my question. Who are you people? How does a network security consultant get to walk around on the streets all strapped with guns?”

Alex stopped with her arms crossed defensively across her chest and her hip cocked to one side. Lucas decided to draw on his natural, persuasive charm in an attempt to disarm her. Getting the job done would be a lot easier with her cooperation. And he wouldn’t mind reacquainting with the sexy, playful Alex he had met on Sunday night.