And like him, she’d suffered, she’d been scarred. There wasn’t another woman in the world who could understand and connect with him the way she did.Fuck.
Was this pain in his heart, this fear in every cell of his body, what falling in love felt like?
Even as he shrank from the idea, part of him wanted to open his arms and embrace the joy of it. Embrace Valerie. He hadn’t been touched—not in any meaningful way—in years. Had shied away from human contact even. And now he couldn’t get enough of it. Not when it came from her.
You’ll hurt her someday.The thought sliced him like a knife to the gut, but he couldn’t deny the truth of it. He’d hurt everyone important in his life. Why would Valerie be any different? If she made him angry, would he lose his infamous cool and strike out?
With his dad, it always started with verbal abuse and escalated until The Dick snapped and beat the shit out of his mom. Then the honeymoon phase where he was remorseful and apologetic. His dad would go for weeks, sometimes months, treating her like a queen before he lashed out again, each time worse than the last.
Scott had been through endless rounds of counseling in juvie. He knew not everyone “loved” like that. He knew his dad wasn’t normal. He also knew his dad’s blood ran in his veins, and he’d been raised on brutality. He couldn’t change what he came from. Scott had loved his father—the way a dog loves the master who kicks him—but he’d still put three bullets in the man’s chest. He wanted to believe he was different from his old man, but was he?
Was he the protector Valerie took him for, or was he The Hulk, calm as all fuck…until he was pushed too far and he mowed down everything and everyone in his path?
The things she could do were incredible.Shewas incredible. He wanted her like he’d never wanted anyone or anything in his life. She filled a void in him he had denied for years. She was smart and beautiful and fun and sexy as hell, and Scott flat-out wanted her for himself.
But he couldn’t risk it.
His chest tightened like a screw in a bolt. How the hell he was going to let her go?
“Scott?” Valerie asked, pulling him back into the moment with a slight frown on her pretty face. “Did that make sense?”
Get your head back in the game, Kramer.
He took a deep breath, rolled all his messy feelings into a little ball, and mentally tossed them into space, blanking his expression as he let his eyelids drop into ambivalence. “Yeah.” He nodded. “I got the gist.”
No need to make her explain it all. He trusted her now, and this was her area of expertise. He had his own.
“Okay. I’ll start working on laying the trap for Sid.”
“Before you do that, let’s look at Hollowell’s calendar. I think we should be surveilling him in person. We need to get to know our enemy. His schedule, his habits, what matters to him, who he meets with, if he cheats on his wife…”
Her gaze settled on the scarred wood of the table. “It’s a huge risk, but I agree. If he’s selling state secrets or even corporate secrets from the companies Aggressor has been hacking into, he might have to meet his buyers in real life. There’s a lot of law enforcement lurking on the dark net. In the past they’ve even had officers working undercover as moderators on illegal forums, and confidential informants running VPNs.” She must have seen the question in his eyes. “Virtual Private Networks are a way to let users access a computer server over the Internet, theoretically in anonymity. Everything’s encrypted, so it should be a secure way to share files and communicate. Businesses use them all the time to allow employees to log in remotely.”
“Why theoretically anonymous?” Scott asked.
“Anyone working through a VPN should be untraceable back to his original location, but an unscrupulous VPN owner can monitor and log everything. In a big case a few years ago, a hacker learned about a vulnerability in a cell phone network’s computer system and used it to access the company’s user names and passwords. Remember when all those celebrity photos were leaked?”
He nodded, growing less and less enamored by the minute of the smart phone sitting in his old apartment.
“That was him,” she said. “He logged into the movie stars’ accounts to access their text message history. Anyway, he later used a well-known, hacker-friendly VPN to log into a Secret Service agent’s account to look for information about ongoing investigations and upcoming raids. Turned out the VPN was run by a confidential informant for the feds, who watched the whole thing play out onscreen.”
“Jesus.”
“Right?” Valerie laughed self-consciously. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to babble. My point was that Duncan might worry about communicating with his buyers, even on the dark web. Unless, of course, he has a VPN he trusts.”
“So we cover all the angles and hope like hell we catch a break.”
She nodded. “Catching him in the act would be great. If we can use photos to convince the feds to go after him, they’ll have to get warrants for Aggressor. Then I can tell them where the flash drive is and they’ll have enough to start investigating.”
Scott clapped his hands together, eager to finally be on the offensive. “Okay, once you put out your phishing lures, we’ll go hunting.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
McLean, Virginia
Wednesday, 8:00 p.m.
VALERIE HAD FORGOTTEN HOW BORING surveillance was. As a kid, she would bring a library’s worth of books and work her way through them while her papá sat watchful, occasionally pointing out something of interest for her to take notes on. Security shift changes, garbage pickup schedules, what time the target left work, car makes and models, and license plates all had gone into her sparkly purple notebook.
