Ice Cold (5 page)

He gave her an impatient glance.

Since he wasn’t shivering, she wouldn’t either, but it was stupid to stand outside when she could do her job just as well from a warm location that served hot beverages. “Unless you need me here, I see no reason to delay getting started on my end. Let’s see what we have here.”

Blowing up a bank would only stop business at the branch. Banks always had secondary backup sites away from the branch itself. However, an attack of this magnitude would certainly create a problem for several hours, if not several days. Enough time to disrupt business, cause panic and loss of funds. The point of a this puzzle was to find out who stood to benefit most from the disruption.

“Blowing up a building would be the extreme end of a cyber attack, but criminals have been known to kill a fly with TNT,” she observed, wishing she’d thought to bring a thick scarf. Not that she’d had time to do anything more than follow him when he snapped his fingers. “We’ll see. If nothing else, I’ll cross it off the list and work my way down.” Honey curled her fingers inside her pockets for warmth. She jerked her chin to indicate the smoldering hole.

“Could be the work of a disgruntled employee,” she added, desperate to keep her teeth from chattering. “Not difficult to follow the trail of breadcrumbs since we have all the bank’s access codes. If a pissed-off employee is the perp, I’ll have this tied up by dinner.”

“
We
. I enjoy your confidence, Winston, but things are rarely that simple.” Navarro rubbed grit from his fingers. “The bank wasn’t taken down by a stick of dynamite. Your disgruntled employee had to have contacts and a great deal of money and resources to pull this off.”

Taken aback, Honey tilted her head. His was a valid view, but she had to find out either way. With a quick mental health check, she realized her ire was up because he’d questioned her. She was as good at her thing as he was at his.

“I’ll know more once I get online,” Honey informed him crisply. “Are you good with divide and conquer?” Counterproductive to have them doing the same thing when there was no need. He was officially lead on the op. She’d play by his rules until he gave her reason not to.

“Sure. Save us some time.”

She liked rules, abided by rules,
lived
by the rules, but for some reason, having Navarro as her boss chafed her.

She had a mantra, which worked well.
Focus. Breathe. Do your job.

She. Would. Not. Let. Him. Get. Under. Her. Skin.

Part of her irritation was that she was unprepared for her role here. She’d been briefed, but briefing was rarely enough. She liked to have all her resources lined up before she went on an op. As a Digital Forensic Examiner, specializing in cyber terrorism, she was rarely required to fly off at the drop of a hat. She usually worked from her lab at T-FLAC HQ in Montana, or, preferably, from home where she had as many, if not more, tech toys. But she’d had to hit the ground running this time.

She walked away without bothering to wait for a “Go ahead” or a “Goodbye.” It was obvious she was leaving. As she picked her way through chunks of building and shards of glass, Honey tried to figure out what it was about Navarro that made her back teeth hurt.

FOUR

 W 
ithout further comment, Winston turned and navigated through the rubble, headed to the street. Her blond hair whipped around the shoulders of her down coat. The woman was unreal.

“Dismissed,” Rafael murmured to the space she’d occupied moments before. Who was in charge here? He watched her hail a cab, which miraculously appeared amidst the chaos and confusion of emergency vehicles, rescue teams, and police cars. The Ice Princess hadn’t made a single complaint about the cold or commented on the mass destruction. All she wanted was her precious computer.

Slavin, also watching, turned back. “Winston gives the impression she knows what she’s doing.”

“Yeah, she does,” Rafael acknowledged. “This is my first time working with her.” She wasn’t exactly a team player. Still, if she did her job and wasn’t too distracting, they’d get on well enough. “Let’s go through the sequence of events again.”

They went through the events again as they walked to the trailer set up nearby. He met with the rest of Slavin’s team and walked through the entire site, carrying steaming cups of coffee. After two hours, he had a firm picture of where the bomb had detonated. Adding that information to the additional clues, he had a direction in mind. He took his leave of Slavin’s crew, all of whom were still gathering evidence even as their boss left the site to begin analyzing what they already had in hand. The more details they had, the better. One never knew what odd bit of intel would blow a case wide open.

Freezing and unable to even
see
a damned cab, he headed on foot to the coffeehouse. He should’ve accepted the ride from Slavin. Twenty damned blocks in the snow, which was coming down in thick white clumps. The stuff was heavy and wet, dropping the temperature even further. The snow stopped falling when he was half a block from his destination, and the sun struggled to seep through the cloud cover.

The eatery was warm, noisy, and smelled of strong coffee and fresh bread. The fairly large space was crowded, mostly locals and kids from the nearby university. Everyone was still shaken by what happened earlier, and the place was filled with the buzz of excitement about the bombing and speculation as to who had done it and why.

Head down, Winston sat beside the window at the rear of the café, the wall at her back, her computer screen angled away from prying eyes. The dim sunlight, reflecting off the snow beyond the window, bounced off her pale hair like a halo and made her creamy skin look impossibly soft.

Rafe imagined he could smell her enticingly female perfume, but he knew she wasn’t wearing any. Damn it to hell.

She appeared oblivious to the people around her. To him.

Nevertheless, Rafael bet she knew where everyone was, what they were doing, and probably what they were drinking. It was part of the training. He knew she knew, because he did the same and took in each person in the place as he moved from the door and skirted chairs, tables, and people to reach her.

She was at least a decade older than most of the people there, and she should’ve blended with them in her lavender sweater, jeans, and boots, but she was just too beautiful, too sophisticated. She looked rich and pampered. He frowned.

He’d make sure she wasn’t correct with her speculation that this could’ve been a cover-up for a cybercrime, then he’d send her on to some other op. Or back to Montana. She wasn’t field op material.

Her shoulders tensed as he approached, her fingers maintaining the rapid
click
across the keyboard. He picked up the cardboard cup placed conveniently at her left hand and gave the lid a sniff. “Herbal tea? Jesus, how can you drink this crap? Tastes like straw soaked in warm water.” Replacing the cup, he kicked out the chair to her right.

“Whatever you want to drink is right over there,” she told him absently as he slid into the molded plastic seat. Without looking up, she indicated the order desk across the café with a wave of her right hand, while her left hand worked independently on the keyboard. “Knock yourself out.”

He wondered briefly what her story was, the story beyond the cold, hard facts in her dossier, which he’d read on the plane. She’d done the same and found out no more about him than he had about her. Two fucking closed books. No. More like bookends. Lots of stories between them, given their line of work, but polar opposites with nothing in common.

He didn’t give a shit how old she was or which ops she’d been on. He didn’t give a flying fuck about the accolades or the string of degrees that seemed to go on forever in her personnel dossier. So, she was a quick study and apparently had plenty of spare time. Big fucking deal. None of that told him what made Honey Winston tick.

Her parents had both been Hollywood royalty back in the day, murdered before they could snort or squander their double fortune. Honey Winston had been a multi-gazillionaire heiress at the age of fourteen. Tough to lose parents at such an early age, but clearly, she’d never lacked for anything material. It wasn’t as though she’d been in foster care or out on the streets. It wasn’t as if she’d had to lie, cheat, and steal to get a meal.

She’d had a fucking privileged life and had the snooty attitude and polished good looks to show for it. But then again, maybe losing her folks accounted for why she was so fucking cold and unemotional. Hell, she seemed to be more comfortable with a keyboard under her fingers than a man. Maybe she liked chicks?

“I’m inside the bank’s transactions logs,” she told him. “No sign of any misconduct that I’ve seen so far.” She sounded disappointed as her gaze flicked back and forth across the screen, scanning the material. “A failover to a mirror backup server occurred a couple hours before the bombing. Standard practice for financial institutions, an automated process, so all client data is there. So far, nothing indicates tampering.

“I’m only through the first couple of layers. I’ll dig deeper.” She used one finger to scroll slowly, typed in a string of numbers, then glanced up. She had the eyes of a Siberian husky. Clear, blue, intelligent, and brain-piercing. “Anything new on your end?”

“Slavin took some interesting bits and pieces in for analysis. I should have something from Bäcker in about an hour.” He leaned over his arms, crossed on the table, and ignored her cocked brow at the
I
. This I-we thing worked with everyone but Winston. He never had a problem with personal pronouns when he worked with a team.

Soft mouth a thin line, she tuned him out and went back to her keyboard.
Clickety-click
. The light filtering through the window limned her cheek. She had beautiful skin, translucent, assuming the texture and color weren’t totally due to makeup. Smoky eyeshadow; long, black lashes; glossy peach lipstick that made him want to lean over and taste it. There was no need to gild the lily; she was already beautiful.

“So we should have some idea—”

“Looks like a straight statement bombing.” Rafael’s voice carried just the eighteen inches separating them and no further. He had no fucking business thinking of Winston this way. None. Too bad his dick couldn’t read the memo.

“Nothing was taken from the vault, which was an integral part of the building. Armored walls and tightly fashioned doors closed with complex, time-release locks. Our people found it. Intact and unopened.

“We know from surveillance footage that no one went anywhere near the vault between when it was locked last night and this morning, when it was found sitting
outside
the bank.”

“Hmm…” Her head lifted, but it took several beats before her gaze followed. “So it wasn’t a robbery. Not of the money in the vault, anyway. I saw the latest broadcast about the announcement from Städtische Hoffnung on the FR app.”

“Yeah. They didn’t say much more than that they were responsible. If they
are,
I’ll know when I’ve gone through what we found at the site.”

“You don’t believe them?” She picked up her paper cup and drank. Despite her polite, non-confrontational tone and inscrutable expression, Rafael felt the pulse of her excitement like the flutter of hummingbird wings between them.

He shrugged, watching the movement of her smooth throat as she swallowed. “Anything’s possible. I’m not going to speculate until I see what we’re dealing with here. I believe we have enough bomb components from the scene to re-create the device, and I’ll be able to determine what type of explosives they used by analyzing the trace residue. I’ll go from there.”

She set down the cup, fixing him with a pointed look from those Siberian Husky eyes. “
We
go from there.”

Rafe sat back in his chair, if for no other reason than to put some distance between him and Frosty. “I don’t see any point in your further involvement. I know you were pulled away from the Venice thing. Go ahead and join the team there as planned. I’m good.”

“Wouldn’t it be great if it was your decision to tell me where to report?” Honey said sweetly, not looking up as her fingers flew over the keyboard and data scrolled rapidly up the monitor. “Nielson sent someone else to that job. Until I’m told by someone higher up the food chain where to go and when, I’m stuck with you.”

“I don’t require the services of a computer gee—”

“You requested Jack.”

“Who’s
dead
. Now it’s moot. This isn’t a complex situation. Hansen had experience he could bring to the op. You don’t. I’m better off doing this myself.”

She lifted her head and rested her hands loosely on the keyboard. “No team?”

“No need. With Städtische Hoffnung claiming responsibility. I’ll—”

She glanced up. “And you’re taking their word for it?”

Impressed by how much skepticism she could pack into so few words, he still wasn’t accepting that announcement at face value; he just wanted her…elsewhere. Somewhere she couldn’t distract him.

Honey’s fingers drummed staccato irritation on the edge of her keyboard then she paused, fingers hovering over the keys to give him a cool look. “While I respect your bomb disposal knowledge, Navarro, let me clarify that
I’m
cyber intelligence. It might
just
have been a bomb—might—but we both know that’s rarely the case. Especially given I haven’t found any cyber tampering. And yes, I heard you. The Städtische Hoffnung. Could be they did it. But even you should entertain the possibility that they’re jumping on someone else’s bandwagon.”