He doesn’t speak again, so I give him a long moment to sit with the silence. Fear does more work when it fills the quiet.
“You tried to get my old lady to come out to you. Why her? Why were you fuckin’ stalkin’ her?”
His jaw clenches, but he doesn’t respond. I hate that he’s being stubborn.
“Look, you’re gonna tell me what I want to know one way or another. I could just beat it out of you, but I’d prefer you to just tell me.”
“I do contract work,” he mutters. “That’s it.”
I lean down and look him in the eyes. “That’s genuinely unhelpful information, Neal. I want to know what kind of tasks you normally do for REACH?”
“I find things and people. It’s not my business to know why they want her.”
“She has a name,” I say, my voice low. “Say it, goddamn it! Say her name.”
He hesitates, then states, “Christina. Her name is Christina.”
Anger coils tight in my chest. I keep it buried though because if I start being the asshole, I might never stop.
Onyx asks, “What were your instructions?”
His eyes dart to the laptop and Striker, who’s hacking his shit in real time. He swallows hard, probably realizing we’re about to find out all his dirty little secrets anyway.
“She’s a thief. My job was to find her,” he grits out. “To retrieve the flash drive she stole and bring her in, alive.”
Striker sits on the floor just inside the busted doorway, back against the wall, laptop open on his knees. He scrolls through Neal’s computer files with fast, decisive movements, muttering under his breath every few seconds.
“Mostly burner apps. Nothing useful yet.” He taps the screen with two quick motions. “He wiped some of this last night. Did a sloppy job though.”
When I turn to look at him curiously, Neal shifts in the chair. I turn my attention back to Striker because he’s the only one who can dig deep enough to get to the truth.
Striker exhales, exasperated. “Christina’s flash drive is still locked tight. Multiple layers. It’s slow going. I’ve been chipping at it for days and I’m barely through the first layer of encryption.” He pauses, then adds, “I thought I had something last night, but it was a dead end.”
The irritation in his voice tells me he hates wasting time when he knows people are at risk. He hates those rare moments when his skills don’t open doors instantly.
He finds a secondary operating system on the laptop and switches to it. His fingers fly across the keyboard as he digs through folders, and subfolders, looking for hidden material.
Then Striker freezes, his hand hovering above the keyboard. His eyes sharpen over a small line of text buried deep in thesystem. Something clicks in his expression, almost a shift in the air around him.
“There you are,” he murmurs.
Mica leans over to have a look. “What did you find?”
Striker doesn’t look up at first. He opens the file and the screen floods with strings of code. It takes him only a second to understand what they are. His mouth pulls tight with something close to satisfaction. “I found the golden ticket.”
“What the fuck does that mean?” I ask.
Striker keeps going as his fingers speed up on the keyboard. “I found an encryption key. One that unlocks everything on Christina’s flash drive. This bastard had it stored where only a system-level scan would ever find it.” He huffs a breath. “Christina copied files that were never meant to leave REACH systems.”
I stare at Neal. His face goes pale, and I can tell he is panicking on the inside. He knows exactly what Striker uncovered.
Striker links to the information he pulled off Christina’s flash drive and stored in his online cloud. He gasps as the layers start unlocking one after another. “Hold on. I’m almost there.”
A soft beep comes from the laptop. Striker lets out a short, sharp sound. “Access granted.”
He opens the new directory. The files inside populate in clean rows. Contract numbers. Digital signatures. Internal communications with metadata from REACH headquarters. A PDF marked priority. And then a set of image files.
Striker clicks the first one.
