A heavy silence falls over the tent.
My jaw tightens, yet when I lean closer, any hint of worry is buried too deep to be detected in my voice.
“So, it’s someone who knows you well,” I whisper in her ear.
Jackie looks ready to jump out of her skin, a soundless gasp leaving her lips. Her gaze works its way over me, up and down, looking a mess in my sweaty hockey gear.
I could swear a wave of relief washes over the worry lines around her mouth, until her nose scrunches with disdain.
“Thought it smelled like a locker room in here,” she grinds out through her teeth. “Go play with your stick. This doesn’t concern you.”
I wish that were true.
She smooths her features and focuses on two screens off to the side. Beyond her, I finally register the large displays. Carter’s tense profile fills one screen, and Logan’s on another, tactical gear and all, the corners of his mouth downturned. I’m not surprised that Carter reached out to his childhood friend, who now runs a military consultancy firm, for help.
Carter’s on the steps of his private jet, frowning at me. “Adam…What are you wearing?”
I exhale a laugh. “Hockey practice. Robertson canceled on me earlier.” The old codger was on his way here when he called. “Wait. Is he OK?”
“He’s at the FBI field office,” Jackie says, her tone clipped. “Nobody was hurt. It went off before the office opened.”
I breathe a quiet sigh of relief. I’d never admit it out loud, but I was happy Carter’s irritating right-hand man was still alive to keep stressing me into a small stroke.
“What exactly wasit?”
“We don’t know yet—”
The roar of Carter’s jet cuts through Jackie’s words. “Radu says there’ve been more network breaching attempts this week than all year. Why didn’t you say anything? I could’ve dealt with it.”
I bristle at his tone but bite my tongue. Just as she did when she was younger, Jackie hates it when he goes all big brother on her.
“We handled it in-house,” she says coolly. “I don’t need to come running to you every time there’s a problem.”
A beat of silence thuds inside the tent. Since meeting Eliza and moving to Silver Lake Falls, Carter seems to have gained some self-awareness, but seeing his little sister in danger has dragged the old helicopter brother back to the surface. It takes him a moment too long to realize it wasn’t the right move to scold her. Not like this. Not in front of an audience.
“I didn’t mean it like that.” He swipes a hand over his mouth. “I’m terrified. For you.”
That mellows Jackie. Barely, but she lets the moment slide, shifting her focus back to the laptop in front of her.
In all my years in public affairs, I’ve never seen anyone handle a crisis like she does. On the surface, she has the control and confidence of a seasoned general, with no trace of the inner storm she battles. Only a handful of people are privy to that vulnerable side of her.
I used to be one of them.
“We’ve already sent everything to Agent Ruiz,” she says, pointing to the woman with short hair.
The implications of all this start to sink in. “Who are these people? What do they want?” I ask.
Jackie exhales a frustrated huff. “We don’t know. They hit multiple, unrelated points on our servers. We can’t figure it out.”
That’s several notches past worrisome. Rawlings Enterprise isn’t just the largest tech company in this hemisphere. It powers government projects and infrastructure. And then there are the R&D projects nobody knows about.
A leak could be catastrophic.
No wonder the media’s already here, vans and reporters lined up on the side, helicopters circling overhead.
I’d planned to stay as far away as possible from her. Had made a sort of uneasy peace with that decision. Until Carter scared us half to death a year ago, collapsing in his office, and the ground shifted under our feet, pushing us together far more times than either of us ever wanted.
Even so, I’ve fought like hell against life’s incessant attempts to drag me into her orbit.
