Stolen (10 page)

“Why haven’t you?”

“Duke. When I starting working for RCK, Duke said I had to cut ties with Colton. So I did.”

“But he still talks to you.”

“What do you want from me?” Sean asked. “Colton was my best friend during a really shitty time in my life. Yeah, he wants me to work for him. I always tell him no.”

“Tell him yes.”

“Absolutely not. You’re asking me to betray a friend.”

Noah said, “You want to take down Paxton as much as I do. Why won’t you help?”

Rick said, “You justifiably have reservations about infiltrating your friend’s group. I can give him limited immunity if he cooperates.”

“You want me to convince him to turn on Paxton? You don’t even know why he’s working for him.”

“Even after the fact.”

Sean rubbed his face. “I can’t.”

“Why?” Noah said.

Noah was staring at him. Sean said, “You said this conversation is completely off-the-record. Is anything I tell you off-the-record as well?”

“Yes,” Rick said without hesitation.

Shit.
Sean didn’t know how to avoid this conversation. He couldn’t do what they wanted; he would lose everything. “Paxton has information about my past that could land me in prison. Last month he blackmailed me into retrieving an item that was stolen from his office.”

That information was a surprise to both of them. Sean didn’t want to tell them, especially Noah, but he felt that he was stuck in a corner. Paxton needed to be destroyed, but Sean couldn’t be the one to do it. No matter how much he wanted to.

Sean continued, “There’s a crime with a ten-year statute of limitations that is currently nine and a half years old. Paxton knows about it. I don’t know what proof he has, if anything, but I can’t risk it. As soon as the statute is up, I’ll do anything you want to take down that bastard. But until March? I’m steering clear of him.”

“I never pegged you as a coward,” Noah said.

“Fuck you, Armstrong.”

“We don’t have until March! This is happening now.”

Rick said, “I can give you full immunity.”

“Pardon me from being skeptical, but I’ve been lied to in the past.”

“You know me better than that.”

“Yeah, well, I also know that promises mean shit when someone higher up the ladder wants to screw you.”

“This isn’t Stanford,” Rick said.

“Do you know what happened there? Really know?”

“Duke told me—”

“Well, Duke has a selective memory. I was told by the FBI that nothing would happen to me if I told them how I hacked into their system. I walked them through the back door I’d uncovered and how I’d mirrored the pedophile’s account over their system, and then how I controlled it remotely. It was pretty damn brilliant, especially twelve years ago. I trusted them, but dammit, I should have had a lawyer write up something ironclad, because the next thing I knew, all my computers were confiscated, I was arrested, and then expelled and put on probation.”

“The charges were dropped.”

“I was in jail for three days. I was kicked out of school. I was threatened by Boston FBI agents for years just because I was on their radar as a hacker.”

“You were a hacker,” Noah said.

“See why I don’t believe you?” Sean said. “My brother Kane doesn’t trust many people, but he trusts you, Rick, and that means something to me. But I don’t trust the system. I don’t trust your boss. You can’t protect me if this all gets out.”

Noah said, “Rick, can I have a minute with Sean?”

“No,” Sean said, but Rick left. “Shit.” He rubbed his face again.

Noah sat on the edge of the seat Rick had vacated. He picked up the picture of Sean and Lucy that sat on Sean’s desk. Sean grabbed it from Noah’s hands and put it out of reach. “Don’t go there,” Sean said.

“You say you love her, but you have this shit hanging over your head. Paxton blackmailed you? That means he can get to you again.”

“He can’t. I have something he wants.”

Noah shook his head. “It’s a game for you; I get it.”

“My freedom isn’t a game.”

“If Paxton can blackmail you now, he’ll do it again. And again. When the statute runs out, he’ll still hold it over you because he’ll threaten to tell Lucy. Or release the intel and embarrass RCK. How many people does RCK employ? Dozens? Not to mention freelance contractors? As soon as Paxton knows your weakness, he’ll exploit it until he has you under his thumb permanently.”

“Do you know this because of personal experience?” Sean was trying to deflect Noah, but it didn’t work.

Noah rolled his eyes. “I know men like Paxton, and I know men like you. Don’t give him the power. You’re better than this.”

“I’m not going to prison. But you’d like that, wouldn’t you? Give you a free road to Lucy.”

Noah stared at him. “You think I’m trying to get you out of the way so I can have Lucy?”

“Yes.” There. He’d said it. Put it out in the open.

Noah leaned back and stared at him. “The thought’s crossed my mind.”

Sean’s fists clenched. He wanted to hit Noah in the worst way.

“But Lucy loves you. I’m not even on her radar. I care for her enough to respect her decision, including keeping you in her life. But if you really loved her—”

“Don’t ever doubt my feelings for Lucy.”

“You would clean the slate. She’s going to be a sworn FBI agent in four months. What if someone else finds out this information? What if they tell her? What if she does or doesn’t do something because she thinks she’s protecting you? Secrets kill, Sean. You know it. I’m the one who wanted to bring you into this operation. For all the shit you pull, you’re one of the smartest guys I know, and you’re loyal. I can’t do this without you.”

If Noah had planned on guilting him into going along with this insane plan, it was working. Noah was right about one thing—that Paxton knew what happened nine and a half years ago meant that someone else knew about it, and there might be proof. Proof that could hurt not only Sean but also Lucy.

“You don’t even know what I did.”

“Trust Rick to do everything in his power to protect you.” Noah paused. “This isn’t going to be easy. You’ll have to make Colton believe you quit RCK.”

“That isn’t the hard part,” Sean said. “I simply need to quit.”

Noah looked surprised. “You want to read Duke into the plan?”

“No. You don’t want Duke to know. He won’t like it, and I don’t want him looking over my shoulder. But I know what to do to set Duke off and give me a reason to quit.” Sean pushed a button on his desk and his voice came out through a house-wide intercom. He hadn’t realized that he’d already decided to help until now. But Noah was right. He didn’t have a choice. He couldn’t let Lucy pay for his past crimes. “Rick, you can return.”

When Rick stepped back in, Sean said, “The hard part is that Paxton knows what I did. He won’t want me working with Colton on anything, but we’re at a standstill. If Paxton pushes, I’ll push back. I never gave him back what he hired me to steal. It’s my leverage on him, and it’s all I have.”

“What does Paxton specifically know?”

“I don’t think he has proof, but he knows enough that I’m nervous that someone has proof.” Sean took a deep breath. He hadn’t spoken about Robert Martin or Martin Holdings to anyone since he left MIT. It was still a black cloud over him.

“When I was at MIT, Colton and I created a group called Net. We were primarily an activist group that hacked into secure computer systems to expose the weaknesses and embarrass the companies and governments.”

Rick said, “Much like what you do for RCK now.”

Sean smiled. “Except now I get paid for it, we fix the security problems without publicly exposing the weakness, and they don’t call it hacking.”

“Hacking is usually a five-to-seven-year sentence.”

“We also needed money to buy and build the best computer systems. It’s not just skill, but equipment, that made us good. We took a few jobs that weren’t exactly kosher—usually stealing from crooks.”

“You’re going to have to elaborate.”

Sean had a lot of examples, but he didn’t feel the need to share everything with the feds. He gave them one. “There was a guy the FBI was investigating for insider trading. He was really good; you never would have caught him, not until he was drinking daiquiris on some island in the Caribbean.”

“Who?”

“Cyrus Block.”

“If I recall correctly, we did catch him. He was given ten to twenty.”

Sean smirked. “You’re welcome.”

Rick didn’t comment. But Noah let out a short laugh. He knew what was coming. Maybe Noah wasn’t all that bad of a guy.

Sean said, “You wouldn’t have caught him if we didn’t set him up. We learned about him after he hosted a seminar at MIT on the security of finance systems. He seduced a freshman—he was in his forties; she was eighteen—and she tried to kill herself when she found out she was pregnant. Her parents had sacrificed everything for her to go to MIT; she had a partial scholarship, but they took out a second mortgage on their house to get her there. She was in the same sorority as my girlfriend.” Sean stared at Rick and Noah. “He was a fucking asshole.”

“Sounds like,” Noah said.

“Skye Jansen, my girlfriend at the time, knew everything about finances. Sharp girl. She did some legal research and suspected that Block was involved in insider trading, but there was no proof without breaking some laws. My friends and I came up with a plan to take him down. We hacked into his computer and left a trail of bread crumbs so the FBI would be able to figure it out.”

Rick raised an eyebrow. “Our white-collar division is good, Rogan. You don’t know that we wouldn’t have caught him.”

“Some of them are good,” Sean agreed. “But I know that it usually takes a tip to alert the FBI that there’s something going on. We not only gave you the tip, but we opened the door so you could put him in prison.”

“You’d probably be given probation. Maybe fines. Lectured. I doubt you would have done jail time.”

“We peeled off one of his accounts.”

Rick looked at him quizzically. “Peeled off?”

“The FBI never even knew it existed. We rerouted it before the FBI sting. We set up a shell company to donate the money to MIT on the condition that Trina, Skye’s sorority sister, was given a full-ride scholarship. We never kept control over the money, but last I heard, the school managed the funds nicely. It pays out a dozen full-ride scholarships a year to women studying the sciences.”

“So essentially, the government would have seized the money under asset forfeiture laws. You stole from the government. That’s really a gray area, but I think the statute is up on that. I can check for you. But unless someone has physical proof, I don’t see your concern.”

“I’m not worried about the Block money. I was giving you an example of the things we did. We did a lot of things like that. I’m not going to go into everything.”

Rick looked confused, so Sean got to the point. “Ten years ago—technically, nine years and five months ago—Colton and I hacked into a bank. We’d been emboldened by what happened to Block, and I guess we had it in our heads that we could be Robin Hood, taking from the bad guys and giving to the good. Or rather, returning funds to those who were cheated. I learned a lot from our investigation into Cyrus Block. How financial scams worked, and how to identify them. I won’t bore you—”

“It’s actually not boring, but go on.”

“Colton and I decided to keep this particular job to ourselves. Partly to protect the others, and partly because we really didn’t have a plan.” This was where it was going to be difficult, Sean realized. Not just talking about Robert Martin but admitting his responsibility in what happened to him.

“Colton and I uncovered a pension scam being run by a company called Martin Holdings during one of our, um, reconnaissance missions. It took us a few days but we learned the company was scamming new retirees—they signed over their pension payments to him, and he invested the money. But we figured out it was a version of the Ponzi scheme. They paid dividends from new investors to the older investors, and skimmed the bulk of the money into offshore accounts. We thought at first it was a large group of money people involved, but eventually learned it was one guy running everything. Robert Martin.”

“Never heard of him.”

“You wouldn’t have.” Sean rubbed his eyes. This was where it was going to get hard. But if ever he wanted to believe the cliché that the truth would set him free, now was the time.

“I was twenty. Arrogant—more so then than now. I wanted to punish the guy. He was stealing from the elderly—people in their sixties and seventies who had secure pensions. He was a con artist, he manipulated them. Because of the way the wire transfers were managed, we easily cut off continued payments from the investors to Martin. And that should have been enough for us; we should have set him up for the FBI like we did with Block. But we took it a step further. We piggybacked a virus on one of his international transfers and all the money in that offshore account was rerouted back to his primary U.S. account. We repaid all the accounts with interest, then sent a letter from Martin Holdings to the investors that the company had disbanded and all funds invested had been returned.”