ONE
Angelo Ash was used to people moving out of his path, so when he shouldered his way inside the blackened wreckage of the bank vault and no one moved, irritation ground through him.
A quick glance showed Ash a sea of black jackets with initials on the back. The small space was crawling with feds.
Made sense. When a bunch of safety-deposit boxes exploded, the government took notice.
Not only did they send every alphabet agency they could find, they sent in a special operative from a ghost ops team to determine if the terrorist they’d been hunting for more than a year was responsible.
He stepped up behind the cluster of people examining the twisted metal and the scorched contents. He was tall enough to see over most of their heads. He cleared his throat, and two people swung to look at him, their gazes colliding with his chest.
He looked down at one. “Excuse me.”
The guy shuffled aside to allow Ash to push closer to the wall of boxes.
“Who is that?”
He ignored the whisper as he squared his body to the wall so his bodycam could transmit the footage back to the Blackout Charlie team’s base.
“He’s special ops. Gotta be. Look at him.”
Ash’s lips twitched at one corner at the comment. Then he let his gaze track the damage instead of the people.
The safety-deposit boxes had been blown outward, metal peeled back like shrapnel-flayed ribs. Some doors hung by asingle warped hinge. Others were gone entirely, reduced to jagged fragments embedded in the concrete wall. It might look chaotic to an untrained eye, but to him, the blast had been as precise as a surgeon’s blade.
Burned paper littered the floor like black snow. What hadn’t been incinerated had been soaked by fire suppressant, the slurry turning documents into gray pulp. Jewelry lay tangled and warped, gold chains fused together and gemstones cracked from heat. Passports, ledgers and flash drives were melted into useless hunks of plastic.
Ash leaned in closer, eyes narrowing. The blast pattern told him plenty. Whoever had done this had known exactly which boxes they wanted wiped out—and exactly how much force it would take to destroy part of the vault without taking down the whole building.
Someone hadn’t come for valuables. They’d come to erase something.
His jaw tightened as the familiar tension settled between his shoulders.
The comms device in his ear clicked, and his commanding officer’s voice filled it.
“It looks like the work of Cipher.”
Ash didn’t need to respond. His SEAL team had been hunting for the terrorist for months. They knew his patterns, and this lined up.
Cipher didn’t steal.
Cipher erased. Everyone and everything.
Around Ash, the low chatter changed. When he looked over the group, he saw a fidgety ball of nerves in a suit and tie entering the vault. Ash caught his gaze and used a nod that acted as an order to people like this guy.
He pushed through the group to reach Ash. “Excuse me. Excuse me, please.”
The FBI and DHS—the Department of Homeland Security—stepped aside to let him through.
The older guy sporting the ATF on his back grumbled. And three members of the SWAT team glared at Ash.
“You’re the bank manager?” Ash asked when the suit neared him.
He gave him a nervous nod that made his thinning hair flop on his bald head. He moved close to Ash and pitched his voice low. “It isn’t protocol to give out the names of the box owners, but I was told to provide you with his.” He held a sheet of paper that wavered in his unsteady hand.
Ash leaned over the paper, angling his body so his team could see the names on the list.
The people around them continued to converse in low tones, giving their take on who would blow up safety-deposit boxes. Ash listened to their assumptions while memorizing the names on the sheet.
