A too-brief smile touched her eyes.
He took off down the hall, making his way downstairs to grab his satchel.
“I can let you out through the front door.” A very naked and incredibly sexy Emerson waved him over as she headed toward her front door. He wanted to stay, but he had to bolt.
As she punched in her code, he spied the tattoo on her upper back. The green snake was perfectly situated between her shoulder blades. It sat coiled and ready to attack.
“Nice tat. Is that a green snake, a pit viper, or a mamba?”
“It’s a boomslang,” she murmured.
His brain screeched to a halt. “What did you say?”
“The venomous snake is a boomslang. They’ve been called the cat of the snake world. Ever heard of them before?”
He held her gaze for an extra beat. “Yeah, I have.”
“Can you meet me at the club tonight?” she asked.
Is she the same woman from the Survivors online group?
“Stryker, hello?” Emerson said.
Snapping out of his thoughts, he unearthed his phone and checked his schedule. “After seven.”
She unalarmed and opened the door. He ducked down as if to kiss her goodbye, only, he didn’t. “You owe me one.” Then, he took off toward his car.
The early morning sun, paired with perfect May temps, beckoned. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d taken a day off. He wanted to steal Emerson away, hop on his Fat Boy, and escape into the Virginia countryside.
As he drove out of her quiet neighborhood, he couldn’t stop thinking about her tat.Is she Boomslang?His gut said yes. At the red light, he pulled up the photo Boomslang had sent of her cat. That was Emerson’s kitchen table and that crazy animal was Pima.Holy hell. It is her.
His life couldn’t get much more complicated.
He drove into the parking lot of Truman CyberSecurity. The office building that bore his company’s initials—TCS—was nestled in an upscale business park filled with technology-oriented companies. While Stryker could have placed his name on the front of the building, he preferred keeping a low profile.
The majority of TCS hackers worked late and strolled in between ten and eleven. Admin arrived at nine, so Stryker got to the office at eight. On a normal day, that gave him an hour before the mayhem started.
His eight forty-five arrival left him little time before his nine o’clock staff meeting. He swiped his keycard and yanked on the front door, but it didn’t budge. The indicator light was off, so he used his key to enter the two-story atrium.If we had a power hit, why isn’t the generator running?
First to arrive, he glanced at the company sign—TCS—located behind the large, curved reception desk. Normally backlit, it was dark.
Sunshine streamed through the floor-to-ceiling windows, but the lights were out. He didn’t expect the elevator to work, so he hotfooted it to the stairwell. Again, his keycard didn’t work, so he keyed the lock and entered the darkened stairwell. After flicking on his phone’s flashlight, he took the stairs two at a time.
The second-floor housed his commercial account teams. Large rooms with chairs and bench-style tables where pods of hackers worked. Account managers responsible for these accounts, along with leadership, worked in traditional-style offices. Using his key, he accessed the floor. The pods were void of staff and nothing had been disturbed, the offices were empty, too. The churning in his guts subsided as he made his way to the second floor.
Floor three was home to his military accounts. Its set-up mimicked the first floor with work spaces and private offices. He found no one there and nothing out of place.
His heart rate began to drop. He’d gotten worked up for nothing.
The fourth floor was home to his government agency accounts, which included the CIA, FBI, State Department, DHS, and NSA. His hackers were amongst the best in the business and the senior account managers for these agencies had earned the right to manage them.
As he bolted up the steps, dread made his stomach drop. The fire door was off its hinges. This floor had been breached. These accounts were amongst his most classified. The security alarm hadn’t gone off, so he hadn’t been alerted of the break-in.
He pulled out his Glock and headed toward the first workspace, hoping no one had been there when the break-in happened. Pod after pod lined both sides of the hallway. The glass door to the CIA pod was closed and he slowed to look through the wall of windows. Monitors were dark, laptops closed. Every managers’ office door was closed and locked. The State Department pod hadn’t been breached, nor had NSA.
As he approached the last pod, his chest tightened. The glass door to the FBI workspace had been removed. The room looked like a bulldozer had ripped through it. Computers and monitors smashed to pieces, laptops broken in two or damaged beyond repair. Mayhem everywhere.
Fuck, fuck me.
