Sweet Seduction Stripped (27 page)

I set up a self perpetuating programme to make it look like I was trying to hack Bryan again at a different angle and crash through C&C's now newly morphed security walls, and watched with delight as the system moved to challenge the fake me, leaving Sala free and unencumbered to do as he damn well pleased.

Well, to do as
I
damn well pleased.

"I have
never
," Ric said, his voice sounding slightly awed, "seen such beauty in action before."

My gaze moved over to him, seeing Nick out of the corner of my eyes smirking, then following it up with a frown when he tried to decipher my code on the screen.

"You are beyond clever," Ric said, moving to face me completely, ignoring the Police website shot he had up on his screen. "You are out of this world. A true genius. I am... stunned, Amber. Absolutely stunned."

I suddenly felt self conscious.

"It's just code."

"Baby, it's not just code, it's utter brilliance."

I shook my head at him.

"You're biased," I pointed out.

"I'm fucking turned on, that's what I am."

"Ric!"

"Dancer!"

"Guys!" Nick yelled. "Someone care to tell me what's going on?"

My head turned to look at Nick, but snagged on Ric's screen shot again.

A name flashed at the top of the page. It meant nothing to me, other than the fact that I was betting it belonged to the man I had slept with for twenty months. A man I had known as someone else.

"Mitchell Braden Wallis," I said. "Is that who he really is?"

Ric spun back to look at his screen. "Oh, it's finished running." I assumed he meant a programme he'd started, and hadn't been aware the name had flashed up on the screen. Too busy following my "brilliance."

I watched as he stared at the screen contemplatively, and then slowly turned back to face Nick, eyebrows raised in query.

Nick looked just as thoughtful, but equally as unmoved as Ric.

"That name still means nothing to me," he declared with a shake of his head.

I stared at the screen, trying to jolt a memory, a recalled image of that name I may have seen somewhere before. It was Jaxon's real identity and it should have meant something. But neither of these men recognised it. I'd been sure we'd find an answer when we uncovered his name.

I'd been wrong.

Nothing stood out from those memories I'd already accessed on the C&C system, but I was determined to figure this out. My mind started flicked through letters, documents, files anything at all that I'd seen in passing in Jaxon's office. There was a key to cracking this puzzle, and as Ric and Nick kept talking in the background, throwing ideas around but really just voicing wild guesses, I went back through what we'd found out today.

Five years ago Jaxon had gone under cover, had his true identity wiped by the Police.

I concentrated my recollections on anything that could have referenced that date, but it was before I'd met Jaxon, so pulling that particular time-frame out of the pile wasn't possible. I decided to stick with timing being the key, and started working my way back through images trying to pick up a moment that might have signified something important in Jaxon's life.

I hit the jackpot nine months ago. A letter I'd inadvertently seen from a woman named Lillian Wallis. A relation, I now guessed. In it she spoke of someone called Roan. But who this Roan was, I didn't know.

I came out of my memories to find Ric back at work trying to dig deeper into Jaxon's profile on the Police website and Nick silently watching from over his shoulder.

"I don't suppose," I started, making both men pause to look at me, "that the names Roan or Lillian Wallis mean anything? Or that something happened about nine months ago?"

For a second I thought they hadn't understood me, their faces looked entirely too blank. But then I realised they were both a little shell-shocked and working through their surprise.

"Roan McLaren?" Nick asked eventually.

"Nine months ago?" Ric added.

"What would any of that have to do with Jaxon Harding?" Nick queried.

"Or Mitchell Braden Wallis?" Ric offered, slicing a look at the name still up on his screen.

"Well, Lillian Wallis has to be a relation, maybe his mother?" I suggested.

"Where did you see this?" Ric demanded, knowing I would have recalled an image where those names appeared in my past.

"A letter on Jaxon's desk at home about nine months ago."

Both men exchanged pertinent looks and then Ric spun to his computer and started pulling up websites searching for Lillian Wallis and cross referencing it with this Roan McLaren. It took five minutes to track down a birth certificate. Another two to bring up Jaxon's - Mitchell's - beside it on the screen.

"Same mother, different fathers," Nick breathed, clearly astounded to find a connection, let alone this type of connection, between the two men.

"So, what does this mean?" I asked, flicking glances between them.

"The motive," Nick suddenly said. "Harding started out as an undercover cop. My bet, to bring Declan King down outside of those already working the case and known to King."

Ric took up where Nick finished. "It could have been a purely professional decision, because he was good at his job."

"But it didn't stay that way," Nick added. "Nine months ago his goals changed."

"Because of who he discovered he was related to," Ric went on. "One of King's adversaries. A man who had been trying to muscle in on King's North Island territory for several years."

"A man I helped to bring down exactly nine months ago," Nick said, starting to make sense. "A man called Roan McLaren."

"Mitchell Wallis's unknown half-brother," Ric finished, but I'd already put two and two together.

"He never mentioned him," I said, feeling strangely put-out that Jaxon had kept this to himself. But then, Jaxon had never talked about his upbringing, always insisting on focusing on mine.

"It would have been too hard to hide this from the Police had he been aware," Ric offered. "He found out in that letter, when his mother informed him of McLaren being arrested. What was the letter about exactly?"

I blushed slightly. "I wasn't meant to go in his office, I was searching for a thumb-drive because I didn't have one free. I saw the letter, glanced at it, the names stood out, but I made myself look away." Both men just stared at me. "I remember everything I see," I reminded them. "So I have to make myself
not
see sometimes."

"Well," Nick said slowly, moving on from my heartfelt confession. "Now we know why."

"Yeah," Ric agreed with meaning.

"This isn't just about you, Nick," I said, surprising both men. "This is about ASI and the part this company played as a whole back then."
Nine months ago
.
Nine months ago when Jaxon Harding came to their attention in connection to Declan King. When Jaxon's goals shifted from solely bringing down King, to involving ASI in the fallout.

He slowly nodded his head.

"Fuck!"
he barked.

Yeah, but now we knew who we were dealing with. We even knew why.

I turned back to C&C's system network; every door open, every file unlocked, every nook and cranny available to me.

And I suddenly felt invincible. I suddenly felt vindicated. I suddenly felt like it all made perfect sense.

Because Jaxon hadn't fooled me. He'd truly fallen for me, whilst still on the right side of the law; a right side that was mired in shadows, but it was still right.

And then his world view changed. And his love for me did too. Twisting into something that could
not
be called love anymore. Necessity. Obsession. One blinding goal.

ASI. To bring them down. Like they'd brought his brother down nine months before.

It was easy after that. Everything seemed so damn easy. I wondered just where it would all turn wrong. But it didn't. And the further I delved into C&C's network system using Sala Lauofo's login and security clearance, the more Jaxon became a clearer picture inside my head.

Overly confident, arrogant to the extreme. I guess if your sibling is head of a mob syndicate you gain a sense of entitlement. Break a rule here, bend the law there. Doesn't matter. Big brother does far worse and never gets caught.

Yet he had been caught, and didn't that just put a spanner in Jaxon's - no, Mitchell, I had to start calling him by his real name - works.

I could see the moment his goal shifted. And it had nothing to do with the time stamp on the file I was currently downloading. Mitchell Wallis started breaking bones. Started shooting bullets from that gun he'd always worn as a prop. Started pushing the drugs, not just overseeing their distribution. Started moving the profits into an off-shore account, under several layers of protection and misdirection, which he could come and grab when this was all over. Started tampering with PaP Holdings, taking down King from the inside.

Did he plan on getting his brother out of prison? He hadn't visited him at all, in the nine months that Roan McLaren had been behind bars. No, but he'd been funding the activities of some of McLaren's men. Namely a cop named Simon Andrews and a thug named Trevor Church. Both of which were currently awaiting trial for their complicity in Roan McLaren's crimes.

Mitchell had funded those.

But there was more. So much more. Files and ledgers and correspondence and bank accounts and finally pictures. All them meticulously labelled, sorted and hidden away in the highest of security locked folders, that only Jaxon Harding and Sala Lauofo could access.

I downloaded it all. Watched numbly as the man I had thought I'd known became someone else before my eyes. Someone who bypassed even the evil I had begun to suspect and headed into vile and base. Unholy.

Oh, the images. I'd never get them out of my head.

"Why the fuck would he keep all of this?" Nick whispered from over my shoulder.

"Didn't Roan McLaren keep photos of what he'd done to that girl who used to be a friend of Abi's?" Ric asked.

"Yeah, the sick fuck wanted to brag."

"There you go then. Runs in the blood."

I found it, buried in amongst pictures of stacked blocks of plastic wrapped cocaine, money exchanges on shady street corners, smoke filled rooms in what could only be described as blackmail shots; well known men getting it off with, I was thinking disgustedly, under aged girls.

Holy, fuck. The lewd, dirty and illegal material Mitchell Wallis had on people in this city was insane.

But there it was.
The
image. The one where a man knelt on the ground with a bloody blindfold covering his eyes, while his hands were bound behind his back and a gun was firing at his head.

"That's it?" Ric asked softly to my side.

"Yeah," I said with a slow nod of my head.

"Are you going to test it?" he asked, carefully.

"I don't think I need to."

"Well, I do," he replied and I sucked in a measured breath of air.

I understood, really I did. But he didn't need to prove anything to me. I already knew that Eric Shaw was one of the best good guys you could ever meet.
The
best.

"There's no need," I countered. "I know you."

"I know you do," he said, voice scratchy and rough as though it was about to catch. "But I need this."

"Why?" I pressed.

"Because," he started, then ran a hand through his messed up dark hair. "Because it's the one thing I'm not sure I'm better than him at."

Oh, Ric. There is no comparison.

"You are so far out of his league, Eric Shaw, you're in the stratosphere. You are nothing like him. He wishes," I added. "He's obsessed with being
that
person. But he hasn't got a show in hell. It comes from inside us. It comes from our heart and soul. Even our experiences, although they mould us, never touch that part of us that is our true being. The people we are meant to be. They say getting drunk brings out the real person you are; happy, aggressive, sexed-up." I shook my head. "I say surviving hell and reaching the other side brings out the real us. And you, babe, you're good through and through. Laced with a little wicked."

"Fuck, should I leave?" Nick drawled from over our shoulders.

I smiled, just as Ric said, "Marry me."

"Er, what?" I ineloquently replied.

"Three years I've fantasised about you. Three years you've been an integral part of my daily life. And these past three days have been more than I could have expected or envisioned or ever desired.
You
. Amber, you are everything. And I can't live with the fantasy anymore, now that I've found out reality far outstrips it. I can't. Real or bust, baby. This, what we have here, isn't going to go away, it's just going to get better and better. I've loved you for the past three years. I fell in love with you three days ago when I first laid eyes on your face. Backwards? Yeah. But who says we have to follow the rules?"

He sucked in a deep breath of air, slid off his chair onto his good knee, leaving his bad one at an incredibly painful angle by the looks, and said, gripping both my hands in his, "Marry me. Please. Marry me, Amber Lane."

I stared into entrancing, bright green, fell further and further with every swirl and fleck of darker green I could see, and smiled.

It's a remarkable thing, that feeling of utter exhilaration and complete harmony, mixed with an enormous amount of fear.

The good kind.

I nodded my head as I whispered out a yes, and then Ric was off his knee and wrapping me up in his arms and kissing me deeply, as Nick laughed in the background and I was vaguely aware he was answering a call that Ric should have been answering, but was too busy tickling my tonsils as I opened further for him and welcomed him home.

Then the building shook.

Not just one shudder, but multiple shudders, and my bright, beautiful world came tumbling down.

"He's here," Nick barked out, as Ric moved to his console and started shifting camera lens angles all around the building, both outside and in.

"Secure that download, Amber," he ordered, as Nick said into his cellphone, "Pierce, it's happening now."

I scrambled to my station, brought up the still downloading file and began putting protection algorithms in place, to move the information off site to ASI's backup unit.

"I've got Lauofo," Ric advised, and I was shocked to hear his voice was steady. Level and in control. "Adam will be pissed he slipped his net," he added.

"They were expecting us," Nick countered. Then, "Brook and Koki are moving in now. I'm going to head out to meet this prick face to face."

"Alone?" I cried.

"I'll cover you from in here," Ric offered, reaching over and squeezing my trembling hand. "We'll be his eyes and ears, Dancer. Come on, you take cameras one through ten, I'll take the rest."

I followed his directive robotically, welcoming the familiar sensation of tapping in instructions to bring those particular cameras up on my screens, taking over control from Ric's terminal.

I zoomed an image up, showing a shadowed figure in one of the lower floor halls, dust making identification impossible.

"Second floor," I told Nick.

"I'll wait out in reception. If I have to fall back, make sure you activate Carmel's distraction."

And then he was out the door and heading off down the hallway toward the elevators and the emergency stairwell by Carmel's front desk.

"Carmel has a distraction?" I asked.

"Yeah, it's about as lethal as her personality. Her words, not mine."

We watched and we waited. Police cars arriving and cordoning off the street, no more sightings of masked men or shadowed figures. Returning my attention to the download from C&C, I was relieved to see I'd managed to catch everything I'd gone for. If there was more incriminating evidence on that system, it would have to wait. Right now my attention had to be for ASI and what Sala was up to. And why we hadn't seen Jaxon/Mitchell anywhere yet.

The longer we sat there in a suspended state of heightened anxiety the more I couldn't understand this move. It was suicidal. Like King's had been at the District Court. There was no way Jaxon could have thought he'd get out of here once we'd called in the real cops.

Unless of course he had control of the real cops. Not Pierce, I doubted that guy was on the wrong side. But maybe others. I checked out the images of the police cars again, noting they were all marked vehicles with the flashing lights on top. No unmarked detective sedan, all front line staff.

"Where's Pierce?" I asked.

"Still coming?" Ric offered, glancing at my screen.

"Or waylaid," I countered. Everything we'd done had been expected. This was no spur of the moment attack.

Ric hit a button on his keyboard, connecting a call.

"Pierce. Where the hell...?" Pause. "I see." Pause. "OK, we'll make do."

"Well?" I demanded.

Ric just let a slow breath out and brought up another camera view on the main screen.

My father's hospice. With flames billowing out of the front window. Somehow alarms had not been triggered here. Bryan Messing's handiwork? Pierce's car was parked just down the street, behind the fire engines and HEAT vehicles and a shiny, black behemoth Hummer belonging to Jaxon Harding, aka Mitchell Wallis.

"Pierce will get to him," Ric said quietly. "My guess, Harding's not even there. The car's a message, nothing more. The goal was to distract Pierce, tie him up, until whatever is meant to happen here goes down."

"But what's meant to be happening here?"

"I don't know," Ric replied, staring hard at his screens.

I couldn't work it out. It just didn't make sense. Why threaten my dad,
again
, and then blow me up whilst inside ASI? Because that's the only thing I could envisage, another bomb like the one at Sweet Seduction appearing here. Destroying ASI and Nick Anscombe, the reason why Mitchell's brother was behind bars.

And still, it didn't make sense. Jaxon was definitely not who I thought him, but I understood him better now. And that included his desire for, his obsession with, me. That hadn't gone away, it had just changed over the months and become something else. No less as desperate, no less as important to him, than it was in the beginning. Just different.

So, why blow up ASI with me inside?

Was it, if he can't have me no one can? No, that wasn't Jaxon. He'd just take, take, take. Never give up. So, what the hell?

"There!" Ric shouted. Then into his mouthpiece he said, no doubt to Nick, Brook and Koki, "Lauofo, leaving via the south-east side. Car waiting, black Ford Territory, heading east on Railway Street."

"On it!" we heard Brook say, followed by a similar confirmation from Koki.

I watched as their black motorcycles sped off in the direction of Sala's escape vehicle, feeling on edge and strung out and aware that this was not done yet.

"Anything else?" Nick asked from the reception area.

"Building looks clear on my side," Ric supplied. "Amber?"

"I haven't seen movement since we spotted Sala," I offered.

"All right, I'm going to do a sweep," Nick advised. "Find out what the hell he was up to."

"Hold on," I announced, watching cops in SWAT gear move out from the line of police vehicles.

"What the fuck?" Ric exclaimed. Then, "Incoming. AOS. And they've got battering rams."

Nick swore, then ducked behind Carmel's desk, pulling out her shotgun, and coming tearing back down the hall towards us. Ric released the lock on control, letting him in.

"Any weapons you shouldn't have in here?" Nick demanded.

I shook my head as Ric said, "All licensed."

"Good. I'll house this one appropriately, everything else should be above board. How long we got?"

"Five minutes," I said glancing back at the measured and cautious approach of the Armed Offenders Squad.

"This just gets more and more fucked in the head as the day goes on," Nick commented, storming out of the door again.

"Do we go to them?" I asked Ric.

"No. We wait until they knock on the receptionist's door."

"Why?"

"Because I've got a feeling they'll shoot anything that moves or surprises them. Something's got them alarmed."

"Sala," I whispered.

"Do you have any idea what he could have been doing here?"

I shook my head, closing my eyes, and then reeling at the images that flowed through my mind. All the files I'd read as they'd downloaded. All the figures and emails and memos and ledger balances. And image upon image upon image.

Including plastic covered cocaine bricks and a huge stash of what I had assumed was illegal guns. I opened my eyes and brought up more of the pictures on the screen before me, those I hadn't had time to commit to memory, those that led me to documentation of arms deals and stolen property, and a huge cache of weapons taken from the New Zealand Police.