Wicked Sexy (Wicked Games Series Book 2) (29 page)

“Søren came up to me after the speech and introduced himself. He complimented me, empathized with the difficulties I’d described. As a foreigner with an accent, he’d also faced discrimination in this country.” She adds wistfully, “Even though he was so impossibly beautiful.”

My back teeth are in danger of shattering, I’m grinding them together so hard.

“He said he found it disheartening that at thirty I’d probably already hit the glass ceiling. Although I’d achieved substantial success, my position was insecure. A few flops and my studio would be blacklisted. You have to understand, this business is brutal. The only thing that matters are the numbers on your latest release. Søren implied he’d developed software that would be able to secure my future permanently. He said he’d give it to me at no cost. All he wanted in return was a promise.”

I say sharply, “Of what?”

“I didn’t know at the time. He said it would be a favor, to be called in whenever he needed it sometime in the future.”

Downs asks, “And you didn’t find that odd?”

“Of course I found it odd! But he was so incredibly charming. And young, my God he was young. Early twenties or something like that. I had no way of knowing, I never would have
imagined
that such a sweet boy with such an angelic face would turn out to be…” She swallows. “What he apparently is.”

“Then what?” I ask.

“Then nothing. Not for years and years. I thought he might never call in the favor. Until…”

When her pale-blue gaze focuses on me, I get a chill all the way down my spine. “Until?”

Her voice is quiet. “Until one day he called me and told me to hire you.”

The chill turns to a deep freeze, all the way to my bones. “
What?
”

“He refused to say why. He just said to hire you in whatever capacity I liked, and keep you on retainer. And not to tell you he was behind it. I was happy to accommodate him, it seemed like such a nothing request in return for the software that made my company what it is today. I thought perhaps you were old friends, or someone
he
owed a favor to who needed a job.”

Downs looks curiously at me. “And that was the favor?”

Miranda drops her gaze to the desk. “The first favor.”

I flatten my palms on her desk, brace my arms, and lean in. “What was the second?”

She moistens her lips, hesitating. “The second favor was to let him pretend to hack my mainframe.”

In unison, Downs and I repeat, “Pretend?”

Miranda expels an exasperated sigh. “My God, for two men who pride themselves on being so omniscient, you’re seriously dense!”

Downs is losing his patience. “Spit it out, Miranda.”

“It was a
game
, all right? He played a game with you! With all of us! A game going back almost a decade! He knew I’d be giving that speech that night, he knew what my weakness was, he knew how desperately I wanted to succeed! So he gave me the tools and set this whole thing in motion!”

Dread makes its way along all my nerve endings, settling into a cold, heavy lump in my stomach. I straighten and cross my arms over my chest. “Explain.”

“When he told me he wanted me to pretend we’d been hacked, of course I said no. For a million different reasons, not the least of which was the high possibility of discovery. I knew the FBI would get involved, knew we’d be under a microscope. It was total madness, and I told him so. I offered him money instead. But Søren replied that if the public and my shareholders discovered that the software I’d used to achieve everything I’d achieved originated from someone of his…history…I’d be ruined anyway. And that’s when I realized he wasn’t just a talented software architect with a pretty face, because he told me all about the things he’d done.”

Her voice wavers. She looks away. “That’s when I realized he was a monster.”

“Why didn’t you go to the police?” snaps Downs.

Miranda morosely picks at the cuff of her sleeve. “Self-preservation, I suppose. My secret would be out. I’d be ruined.” Her voice drops to a shaky whisper. “But also because he said no one would get hurt unless I refused. But I did what he asked, and people got hurt anyway.”

My gut is telling me in no uncertain terms that something is seriously rotten in Denmark. There are gaps so wide in her story, not even I can connect the dots.

“This is bullshit,” I say coldly, staring at her. “What are you leaving out?”

“Nothing!”

“Oh, really? Because from where I’m standing, it looks like you’re asking us to believe that Søren somehow knew, years before you and I even met, that my path would eventually cross with Tabby’s. That I would approach her to assist me with a job for one of my clients, a woman whose company had been hacked by a supergenius hacker no one had ever heard of before, except Tabby. And that somehow, with his godlike powers of precognition, Søren knew she would agree to take the job, come here with me from New York, and become so desperate to take him down that she’d hack into the NSA’s servers, get herself arrested and taken to an undisclosed government location.”

Miranda says, “From what I’ve seen, Søren can predict Tabitha’s actions with perfect accuracy. He understands exactly what makes her tick. But the real problem you’re having working this out, Connor, is that you think I’m the only person he made a deal with.”

Silence takes the room as we all digest that.

“Everyone owes him favors. Politicians. CEOs. Religious leaders. Business leaders. People in positions of power all over the world. He bragged about it to me. Laughed about it. He didn’t know in advance who would be in Tabby’s sphere of influence when he was ready to make his play. He only had to get enough pawns on the board and bide his time.”

The skin on my arms crawls. “Six degrees of separation,” I say slowly.

Downs asks, “The movie?”

“No,” says Miranda. “The theory that any two individuals can be connected through at most five acquaintances. Søren didn’t know in advance what lever he’d have to pull to put Tabby in action, so he acquired himself an army of levers. And when the time was right, he pulled the correct one.” She looks at me.

I’m the lever he pulled to get to Tabitha?
Horrified, I take a step back.

One of the quadruplets asks, “If he was so desperate to get her back, why wouldn’t he just kidnap her like a normal bad guy? Why go to all this trouble?”

Miranda drops her gaze to the silver cuffs around her wrists. “It was important to him that it be of her own free will. He kept saying that ‘she has to
want
to come back.’ And he knew Tabitha would never come back to him unless he did something to
compel
her to.”

It dawns over me like an atomic mushroom cloud, a hot, toxic blast of pure evil.

The chess analogy Ryan and I had talked about had been spot-on. But now I realize it isn’t simple chess Søren has been playing.

It’s Capture the Queen.

Tabby didn’t set the trap for him, as I’d first thought.

He
set it for
her
.

Downs says, “Hold on. You’re saying—”

I turn and grip Downs’s arm. “Wherever you took Tabby, you’ve gotta get her out of there.
Right. Now
.”

He shakes me off, turns, and walks away a few feet, turns back with a scowl. “Let’s recap.”

“Five moves ahead.”

He looks at me like I’m speaking Cantonese. “What?”

In my mind’s eye, I’m at ten thousand feet, looking down at the game board, seeing all the pieces Søren has been moving, all the way back to the beginning.

“That’s what Tabby said about Søren. That he’ll always be five moves ahead of you, no matter how well you plan. Remember our talk about the margay? Søren
knew
Tabby would pretend to be a baby monkey in distress. He
knew
that she’d anticipate he’d come for her!”

Downs argues, “Why did he wait until now? He could’ve tried this any time over the last ten years—why now?”

Miranda shakes her head. “I don’t know. I’m sorry. I don’t know.”

“Downs, get her out of there!”

He snaps at Miranda, “Where is he hiding?”

“I don’t know! He would never reveal that to me, he’s not that stupid!”

I roar, “Get her the fuck
out
!”

Then his cell phone rings. He snatches it out of his pocket, holds it up to his ear, barks, “What?” He listens for a moment. Then he glances over at me, his eyes wide.

I already know what’s happened.

H
ours have passed
, and no one is any closer to answers.

The COM center has become government central. Representatives from the CIA, NSA, Homeland Security, the Department of Justice, and the FBI swarm around talking, arguing, theorizing, and generally holding their limp dicks in their hands. There are so many top dogs from so many different agencies, I can’t tell who’s in charge. I’m not sure they know either.

Since all the security cameras were down at the remote detainment center Tabby was taken to, there’s no visual record of what happened inside. And—big fucking surprise—the orbiting satellite was down too, so there are no visuals of what happened
outside
. All they’ve got so far are seventeen dead guards riddled with bullet holes, one unidentified man in a coma brought on by a traumatic head injury, and a whole bunch of interior steel doors blown apart by small C4 breach charges.

In other words, fuck all.

I’ve been interviewed—again—by everyone. So has Ryan. So has Miranda, who was finally taken away in tears. The entire studio has been shut down. New specialists from every agency are combing through the network and all the data from the phone call between Tabby and Søren, trying to find anything new.

And I’m losing my fucking mind.

“It’s gonna be okay, brother. We’re gonna figure it out,” says Ryan, watching me with worried eyes as I stalk clockwise around and around Tabby’s computer station like a maniac with a severe case of OCD.

“What are we missing?” I ask for the hundredth time, dragging my hands through my hair. “We have to be missing something! She can’t just be
gone
!”

Agent Chan, sitting despondently at the next station over, says, “It appears that’s exactly the case.”

I swing around and glare at him. Ryan mutters, “Great job, Chan. Wind him up a little more, why don’t you.”

“I’m sorry, but if there were any clue as to her whereabouts, we’d have it by now.” More quietly, he adds, “He thought of everything.”

“No. I won’t allow it,” I snarl, making another circle around the desk. “I won’t allow him to just
take
her like this. I won’t allow him to win. I
will not
allow him to—”

Tabby’s computer emits a soft, electronic
ding
.

I abruptly stop and stare down at it. All three monitors are dark, but I know I heard a noise.

Ryan says, “I heard it too. Sounded like an incoming email or something.”

Chan suggests, “Toggle the mouse.”

I reach down and poke the wireless mouse. The screen in the middle lights up, turning from black to blue. In the center of the screen is a big 3-D picture of the earth, slowly rotating.

“What the fuck?”

Chan rises, comes over to stand beside me. “There’s a password box.”

The three of us stare at the planet and the box beneath it with the flashing cursor inside like it’s Lazarus, risen from the dead.

“That’s not an email program,” I say. “That’s Google Earth.”

Chan nods. “Modified to remove all the noise of the home page, but yes. That is indeed Google Earth.”

Ding
goes the earth, patiently waiting, making its gentle turn.

Ryan says, “Well, the obvious thing is to enter a password, see what happens.”

“But which password?” muses Chan, frowning. “From what I know of Miss West, she’d keep the security extremely tight on her personal computer. I’d bet good money you’ve got only one or two chances to enter the correct password and then the system will self-destruct.”

“
Mission Impossible
style,” says Ryan. “Cool.”

“Not cool!” I feel like a pallet of bricks has been dropped on my stomach. “There’s no way to know what password she’d choose!”

Ryan eyeballs me. “Well, brother, if anyone would know, it would be you.”

Another cheerful ding sounds. I mutter, “Shit. Chan, didn’t you need her password to extract the data from the traceback?”

Chan shakes his head. “No. Her system was up and set to safe mode when we went in. What about Hello Kitty?”

“Yeah,” I answer immediately, nodding. But then I shake my head. “No. Too obvious.”

Stroking his goatee, Ryan suggests, “Pussy Riot?”

When I send him a sideways glare, he says, “I’m just sayin’.”

Chan cups his chin and taps his fingers on his cheek, staring at the screen in concentration. “Do you know her birthday?”

“She’d never use that. Think outside the box. Think like…like a brilliant, eccentric, independent, sarcastic female.”

Ryan repeats, “Pussy Riot.”

“It’s not fucking Pussy Riot, all right!”

“How do you know?”

“I just know! It would be something more esoteric, something only she’d know, something that was kind of a joke…”

When I trail off into stunned silence, Chan asks, “What?”

Goose bumps erupt on my arms. “An inside joke,” I whisper. I stare at the screen, remembering.

“It should be something no one else would recognize. Our little code word, don’t you think? Something that won’t give it away if you accidentally slip and say it in front of anyone else.”

Hope rises inside me like a phoenix from the ashes.

I lean over, straighten the keyboard, and slowly, with the utmost care, type in the letters L-O-A-T-H-E.

The password box vanishes. The earth gets bigger and starts to move in double-time, spinning from Africa to North America, and then flies northwest of Canada and zooms down onto Alaska, closer and closer until within several swift seconds, we’re staring at a satellite image of…nothing.

“What’re we lookin’ at?” asks Ryan. “It’s all pixelated.”

“Zoom out a little,” suggests Chan.

I use the roller ball on the mouse to pull back slightly. Now we’re looking at a vast forest of pine trees at the edge of a rocky, snow-tipped mountain range. I say, “There’s nothing there. It looks completely uninhabited. The nearest town is hundreds of miles away.”

Chan points at the screen. “There’s a hot springs.”

Ryan says, “So all the moose can go skinny-dipping? Wait, is it moose? Mooses? Moosii? What’s the plural of the word?”

“Hold on. What’s
that
?” I mouse over to the left a bit, zoom in another bit, and when I see what I’ve found, my heart stops beating and then takes off like a rocket.

Chan leans in, squinting at the screen. “That appears to be…”

“A cat.” I pound my fist on the desk so hard, the mouse jumps. “A motherfucking little white cartoon kitty cat with a bow in her hair.”

We found her. Somehow she left us a trail of crumbs, and we found her.

“But that’s literally the middle of the wilderness,” says Chan. “There’s a
tree
right beneath the cat. There aren’t any structures. There are no roads. There’s nothing.”

“Except the hot springs,” corrects Ryan.

“The hot springs,” I repeat, thinking hard. “Which would produce massive amounts of geothermal heat throughout the surrounding bedrock.”

Chan picks up my train of thought right away. “Which means if there are any natural caves in the area, they’d be nice and toasty warm.”

We look at each other. Chan breathes, “Holy guacamole. She’s underground.”

Ryan chimes in, “You think Megamind is operating his evil empire from a
bat
cave
? What about electricity? Lights? All his computers?”

“Geothermal energy
produces
electricity. He’d have to convert it with generators, but that’s easily done.” My mind is working faster and faster, keeping time with the accelerated beat of my heart. “There’s no telling how old this satellite image is. It’s probably been altered. But even if it hasn’t, he’d know to camouflage anything on the ground that could be identified from above. There might be outbuildings, a landing strip, a bunch of things he’s disguised. But he can’t camouflage this.”

I point at the series of numbers on the bottom left of the screen. “Those are her coordinates.” I look over and meet Ryan’s eyes. He’s nodding, grinning, knowing what I’m about to say next.

“It’s Hammer time.”

He hoots and pumps his fist in the air as I turn my gaze back to the little white cat on the computer screen.

“Hold on, princess. I’m on my way.”

* * *

W
ithin hours
, Ryan and I are locked and loaded in the belly of a C-130 en route to Alaska.

We’re sharing space with a team of four Marines from the Quick Response Force at Camp Pendleton, the nearest military base to the studio. We took off from there after gearing up, getting an action brief, and fine-tuning logistics.

Turns out the top dogs from all those different agencies worked together like a well-oiled machine once I presented them with a plan.