He straightened and peered out into the distance, surveying the buildings of downtown Austin. His eyes focused on the upper floors of one glass-and-steel high-rise in particular that sat a few blocks from the river.
God, what was he doing?
He’d already decided that he could no longer pretend their coffee station encounters were by chance, but relegating them to a harmless morning ritual made him seem quirky, not creepy. Did he think Samiah would find it harmless if she spotted him jogging in her neighborhood?
“She’s going to think you’re a fucking lunatic stalker,” he huffed out underneath his labored breaths.
Mentally recoiling at the chance he’d taken by coming here, Daniel fitted the earbuds back into his ears and retraced the route he’d taken. Once back at the generic sedan he hated driving—what he wouldn’t give to slide behind the wheel of his 4x4—he called in an order to Franklin Barbecue, picking it up on the way to the square box he’d called home for the past two weeks. The two-bedroom apartment in the area of Austin known as the Triangle was one of many sprinkled throughout the country that was leased by the government under various guises. Even though his supervisor had registered him for a four-month stay, Daniel had all but convinced himself that he would be out of there within a matter of weeks. A month at the most.
Talk about a misread. If the first four days at Trendsetters had shown him anything, it was that this job would be much harder than he first thought. That’s what he got for being cocky.
Shoving the key in the apartment door’s dead bolt, Daniel shook his head at his own naïveté. He could hear his Marine Corps drill instructor back at basic. So young, dumb, and full of—
“You here already? Thought you were going for a run,” Quentin Romero called from the living room sofa, cutting off Daniel’s train of thought. Sheaves of paper covered the area that wasn’t occupied by the federal agent’s stocky build. A bottle of Powerade looked perilously close to falling off the edge of the cheap Ikea coffee table.
“I cut it short,” Daniel said, rubbing at the goose bumps that had already formed on his arms. Quentin always turned this place into an icebox. “I’ve got two reports I need to file with HQ before the end of the day.”
Filing reports was always a good excuse. It was a requirement of everyone in the field, no matter which government agency you called home. And everyone hated it.
“A call just came in. I need to head down to San Antonio for a couple of days.”
Daniel paused before setting his running shoes in the closet, then turned. “Anything I should be worried about?”
Quentin waved him off. “It’s not related to the Trendsetters case. It’s an old investigation that’s been a pain in my ass.” He huffed out a laugh. “Probably since you were still in high school.”
Daniel had gotten used to the jibes about his age. It didn’t help that his part-Korean/part–African American heritage made him look younger than his twenty-eight years. It was also why the people he encountered in law enforcement were skeptical when they learned he already had a couple of years under his belt. Their assumptions that he was barely out of college often led to even more incredulousness when they discovered he’d put in four years with the Marine Corps before earning his degree from Stanford and joining the Treasury Department’s Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence.
“I’m going to grab a shower.” He went over to the galley kitchen and set the bag from Franklin’s on the counter. “I brought back barbecue for dinner tonight. It’s a lot, so help yourself.”
“I was told if I do not show up to dinner tonight that I shouldn’t bother showing up at all,” Quentin said as he closed his laptop and slipped it into a leather messenger bag. “Which means I’m having dinner with my wife. But thanks for the offer.” He gathered the papers that were scattered around the sofa, stuffed them in with the computer, and stood. “I’ll see you on Wednesday at the earliest. Good luck getting into that database at Trendsetters.”
Daniel nodded toward him. “You too. Whatever’s going down in San Antonio, be sure to watch your back.”
“I always do.” Quentin gave him a casual salute, hoisting the bag strap onto his shoulder as he left the apartment. He had his own key, even though he used the space here only sparingly as he worked on the Department of Homeland Security’s aspect of the case.
Daniel stepped into the apartment’s compact bathroom for a quick shower. He pulled on a pair of gray sweatpants and a Phillies T-shirt, then twisted open a bottled water and took it into the second bedroom—Quentin’s room, if, on the off-chance, anyone asked. Unlikely, since the only people who’d ever stepped foot inside this apartment were himself, Quentin, and a Grubhub driver who had gone the extra mile by delivering the Thai he’d ordered a few nights ago to the little two-person table shoved against the wall in the living room.
The second bedroom served as command central. They’d managed to squeeze two L-shaped desks into the eight-by-ten-foot space, along with a separate folding table, a filing cabinet, and a portable air-conditioning unit that ran twenty-four/seven to cool the computer equipment. Four twenty-seven-inch monitors rimmed the rear periphery of the desks. A fifth stood off to the side, its connection perpetually linked with a monitor fifteen hundred miles away, in a large room in a nondescript building in Vienna, Virginia.
Daniel sat and rolled his chair to the third monitor. He logged into his encrypted email—the one he wasn’t allowed to check on his cell phone, even though that was encrypted too. Some things were too sensitive to take chances with.
When it came to the US government’s handling of nefarious activity, people typically thought of the FBI and CIA. Few knew the US Treasury Department was the only government agency with its own in-house intelligence division. The extremely capable men and women out of Quantico and Langley were damn good at what they did, but when it came to financial crimes—especially those related to terrorist activity—there was no farming it out.
Daniel had just completed his second full year with the Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network—FinCEN to those who worked there. With a vote of confidence he’d damn well earned from his superior, Lowell Dwyer, he’d been assigned to work on a joint task force with DHS in Austin.
Agents within FinCEN’s Intelligence and Enforcement divisions had detected activity that led them to believe a hotel chain based out of San Antonio, with properties across the Caribbean and Central America, was using software developed by Trendsetters IT Solutions to launder money. After further digging and bringing in Homeland Security, the two agencies determined that Hughes Hospitality wouldn’t be able to execute that level of concealment on their own. There had to be someone inside Trendsetters helping them out. Daniel was tasked with uncovering the connection between his new tech employer and the hotel conglomerate.
He’d thought the hardest part would be getting hired on by the firm. Their turnover and attrition rates were practically nil due to the attractive salaries and outrageous perks Trendsetters offered their employees. Once he’d jumped over that hurdle, Daniel had assumed the complexity of the assignment would be on par with the others he’d completed since joining FinCEN.
It wasn’t.
The tech company had a security outfit unlike any he’d seen, and in this first week he hadn’t gotten close to infiltrating it. He’d barely figured out where the damn security team was located, let alone gained access to their system.
“But I will,” Daniel murmured as he read over the emails that had come to his inbox since he last checked it. He made several notes and shot off a half-dozen replies. There seemed to be more activity than usual for this late in the day, but then again, there was no such thing as a normal nine-to-five at FinCEN. When he left Trendsetters in the afternoon, he gave himself a couple of hours to exercise and have dinner. But by eight p.m. he was in front of this wall of computers, hard at work. He’d take a day off once this case was solved and the proper people were behind bars.
Making sure he found the culprits should have been sufficient motivation to put Samiah Brooks out of his head. His sole focus had to be on figuring out who at Trendsetters had given Hughes Hospitality the means to clean their dirty money.
Daniel closed out his secured email and rolled the chair back to the main computer. He logged into another secured site and downloaded from FinCEN’s cloud server the report he’d started working on last night. Hours of analysis lay in front of him. He settled his headphones over his ears, fired up his “East Coast Hip Hop” playlist, and got to work.
