Burned: Black Cipher Files #3 (Black Cipher Files series) (26 page)

“Then he died. And after time, the well just dried up, disappeared. I haven’t felt it since.”

I wiped my hands down the purloined apron. And realized I should have stopped after telling him about Papa’s laugh and the well of happiness. I’d gotten too intimate. But that’s why I rarely laughed. And why it was such a surprise earlier when he’d made me burst into laughter.

I missed my father. Horribly.

I continued, as if by admitting my lack of joy, I’d opened some secret fountain inside me and everything came flowing out. “When we first went on the run, I remember thinking, if Papa would just come back…things would be okay. We could go back to normal.”

I couldn’t seem to stop. “What a laugh that was. We were never going back to normal. I’d already been accepted to Caltech because of my ridiculous IQ but I still foolishly wanted my Papa back.”

I threw the whisk into the bowl full of frothy eggs. “What the hell was I ever thinking?”

“Hey.” Zeke rose from the table and came around the island. I kept my back to him, not wanting him to see the tears shimmering in my eyes. Pretending nothing was wrong, I concentrated intently on dumping the onions and peppers onto a clean plate, then I poured the egg mixture into the sauté pan.

Zeke rested his chin on my shoulder and soothed his palms down my biceps and forearms, before he draped his arms around my waist and hugged me tight. He nuzzled his nose behind my ear. He was literally wrapped around me like a boa constrictor, but for some reason my internal personal space meter wasn’t going crazy, and the embrace was comforting rather than constraining.

His chest was pressed up against me, the bulk of his body a welcome presence behind me as if he’d have my back. As if he could absorb my pain into him and melt it away.

I grabbed a spatula and lifted the edges of the solidifying egg mixture to let the uncooked liquid seep underneath the already puffing eggs. “Sorry. Sorry.”

This certainly wasn’t what he’d signed up for. Hello, my name is Sunshine and I’m neurotic, emotional mess. My fingers were white from how tightly I clutched the spatula. Zeke peeled my fingers and gently took the utensil from my hand. Then he turned me until we were face to face.

“The eggs.”

“This is more important.” He speared his fingers through my hair and tilted my head back until I was looking into his ocean blue eyes, murky with some unnamed emotion. “We make our own normal. And screw everyone else.”

He stroked my tears away with his thumbs. The gesture was unbearably tender. We both suddenly realized we were standing very close. My breath caught. The inhale lifted my breasts and I brushed against his chest. His fingers tilted my head just so.

His heat pressed against me intimately. As if my body recognized his, the resultant chemical reaction was intense. My core softened, my nipples hardened, and my heart picked up its rhythm. The ba-boom, ba-boom echoed in my ears as he slowly bent his head toward me.

He was so close I could see his pale blond lashes and the variations of blue in his irises. The darker ocean color was really a tumbled mix of pale blue, darker blue, turquoise, and a hint of thundercloud gray. I could see the burgeoning blond stubble that dusted his strong jawline and upper lip. I remembered what that bit of coarse hair felt like against my softer skin.

The light in the room dimmed.

At first I thought it was just his head, blocking out the light, but then I realized that the sky outside had gone dark. Before I could register anything else, his lips brushed mine. The slight rasp of his stubble was a delicious abrasion, as he rubbed our mouths together in the gentlest of caresses. He captured my bottom lip between his and sucked erotically. Then in his customary pattern, he licked my top lip, his tongue touched mine lightly, before he licked at the left corner, right corner and then my bottom lip.

“You’re okay, Sunshine Smith.”

Instead of deepening the kiss, he eased away from me and turned me around to face the stove. The entire incident only took a few seconds, so the eggs were fine. “You want me to finish?” Zeke asked.

“I’ve got it.” I sprinkled the onions and peppers over half the eggs, snagged the package of sharp cheddar cheese, and drizzled some on top of the veggies.

Zeke grabbed glasses from the cupboards and filled them with ice and water. Then he set them at the table as I waited for the cheese to melt. The scene was scarily domestic and normal. Something I never thought I would experience. And I couldn’t ever remember being happier.

I plated the omelets and set them on the table.

“You ready to talk about those Venn Diagrams?” Zeke asked.

Yeah, normal sure hadn’t lasted long.

Thirty-One

A pang of remorse hit Zeke. He was going to reveal classified information to a civilian. A civilian with no security clearance who barely even existed in citizen databanks.

It wasn’t that he cared so much about national secrets. He kept them because that meant he kept his job.

He’d started his life with an innate distrust of the federal government. His grandfather had drilled that mistrust and paranoia and suspicion of everyone into him at an early age. They’d lived out in the desert or along the ocean. Grandpop usually tried to get paid under the table, wanting to give as little money as possible back to the government. So Zeke had spent his formative years being homeschooled and basically living a hand to mouth existence. They camped, sometimes illegally, in the state parks and sometimes at the beach.

He grew up in a vintage trailer that had hooked up to an even older Ford truck. The small trailer had louvered windows, faux wood paneling, and linoleum floors. A far cry from the extravagant home they were in now.

This kitchen was a palace compared to their cramped economical trailer kitchen. It had been the size of a small bathroom, with a Formica tabletop that folded down so that he could extend the bench seat into a bed. Dad and Grandpop slept in the bunk beds. They had emptied their own septic tank and carried their cooking heat which they never used.

He’d spent the majority of time either outside or, as he got older, in libraries.

His dad and Grandpop had taught him about math and science and how to survive in the wilderness. They’d been a little light on reading the classics or learning anything that didn’t have a serious practical application.

His upbringing had been unconventional at best, downright crazy at worst. And at fourteen, when he’d decided that he wanted to take standardized testing and go to college, his father had been against it but Zeke had earned his own money and set up the testing without his dad’s knowledge.

They’d never had an actual internet account. They’d tapped into satellites and cable internet or used the computers in the libraries they’d frequented. Zeke had cut his teeth on anonymous hacking before he’d gotten caught and corralled into working for the NSA.

His Grandpop would be horrified that he worked for the government and brought home a regular paycheck. Even if he had tried to honor his grandfather’s teachings by continuing to be somewhat of a rebel, he’d never done anything that would get him fired.

He loved his job too much.

But now he’d been burned. The NSA had basically disavowed him and his life’s work.

Which meant he needed to take extreme measures to try and fix it.

As he saw it they had three main problems. One: He’d been burned. Which meant he had to stay one step ahead of the people looking for him. Two: Figure out how/why he gave Susan Chen his encryption program so he could clear his name. Three: John Stanley was after Sunshine and her mother. He needed to be neutralized.

Zeke’s goals were to keep Sunshine safe, and figure out if John Stanley had any intel about who really ordered those hits. So if they found Stanley again, Zeke might finally be able to solve the mystery of who originally ordered the hit that killed his grandfather. But to get to that point, he needed to clear his name. So finding Susan Chen had to come first. Luckily he had Jamie working on Chen’s whereabouts too. Hopefully she and Lucas would get a bead on Chen now that Oliver Krychef had abducted their daughter.

Sunshine sat at the table next to him, waiting patiently. She’d distributed the omelet between them, cut into one-third and two-thirds, and given him the larger piece. “Venn Diagrams?”

“Uh, yeah.” Zeke grabbed a piece of paper and a pen from the small desk tucked into the corner of the kitchen. He drew two large circles that overlapped significantly. He labeled the circle on the left “Sunshine” and the circle on the right “Zeke.”

It was still damn hard to push the words out of his mouth. The secretive and cloistered culture he’d lived and breathed over the last six years had become ingrained.

The most obvious intersection of Zeke and Sunshine’s lives was Department 5491. And so he wrote, “5491”, inside the intersecting circles.

“What is 5491?” She sliced her omelet wedge down the middle and the cheese oozed out the cut.

“5491 designates a department at the NSA.”

She let the cheese drip off her fork. “Which has nothing to do with me as far as I know.”

“You get monthly payments from that department.”

Her gray eyes widened, mouth open, fork halfway to her mouth. “My mother does receive monthly payments. They’re direct deposited into our corporate account. Whenever I asked, she told me it was insurance money.”

“No. The money is recompense from the NSA for the deaths of your grandparents.”

She frowned. “You’re talking about the supposed sleeper thing again. But I told you before, my grandfather was an insurance salesman and my grandmother was a homemaker. She’s the one who taught me and mama to make soaps and scrubs. Girly stuff. The basis for our store.”

She still wasn’t getting the big picture. “He had a secret life before your mother was born. He was part of a group of German code breakers.”

“You really believe this. But to me it seems so fantastical.” Sunshine stared at the glass jar filled with sea shells set in the middle of the table, her gaze far away as she tried to come to grips with the idea that her grandfather had been someone, something else. She shook her head as if shaking loose her thoughts.

Zeke very precisely angled his plate and cut his portion into two equal triangles, then he aligned the points with the top of the placemat and carefully cut into the point.

“Okay. What else?” she asked.

“You don’t want to know more specifics?”

“I want the big picture before you get into the smaller details and I try to put it all together.” Sunshine shoveled another random bite of omelet into her mouth.

“Okay.” Zeke said, “So there are twelve people on the 5491 list.”

“There’s a list?”

“Yep.”

Outside their intersecting field, he wrote, “Injected with DNA-altering drug,” in his section of the circle.

Inside the intersecting field, he wrote, “Grandparents killed by sleepers.”

In Sunshine’s circle, he wrote, “Sleeper: John Stanley.”

In his circle, he wrote, “Sleeper: Unknown.”

In the middle of their intersecting fields he wrote, “Off the charts genius.”

Sunshine interjected, peering over his bicep, “Which makes sense if our ancestors were code breakers. We should have an aptitude for math.”

Zeke paused, pen poised over the paper as he ran through details, trying to find any other way they intersected. But as far as he could see it all lead back to 5491.

“Okay, so if this is really the only thing we have in common, then how did you end up following me?” When he looked at the diagram he realized she was right. Their only obvious point of intersection was 5491. But, circumstantially, they had many more threads in common.

Zeke took his time, cutting off a piece of omelet from the left side of the triangle. “Because everyone on the 5491 list who was also in the espionage community was injected with Susan Chen’s DNA-altering drug. The three exceptions are you, Bella Holden, and one other person listed only with the initials ADA. I was sent to keep an eye on you after Susan escaped.”

Sunshine shoved her chair away from the table. “You think she was coming after me?”

“Personally, no.” Zeke chewed his bite slowly, counting ten times before swallowing. “I think I was sent here on a boondoggle to get me out of the way.”

“But then you saw Susan Chen in San Luis.”

Zeke segued into the next connection. “Which leads me to Susan Chen.”

And the only person who could tell them how she and her partner had chosen the test subjects was the scientist herself. They needed to find her and then somehow to convince her to give up the information.

Sunshine was an asset and he’d be stupid not to use her intelligence. Her unfamiliarity with the whole situation would mean she’d approach everything with a different perspective.

“Okay.”

“Chen’s test subjects were all from the 5491 list. And I gave my encryption program to Susan Chen.”

Zeke crinkled his brow. Dammit. How could he have given her the damn encryption program?

“Do you know how Susan Chen got those names?”

“No. She wouldn’t give any answers after she was apprehended.” Zeke huffed out a frustrated breath.

“What about her partner?”

“Liam? He’s dead.”

“But he’s still a piece of the puzzle. Why not do more research on her partner?” She continued to stare at those sea shells.

The idea had merit.

“How did he die?”

“That would be another mystery.” Zeke chewed another bite of omelet. “We had him cornered in a hotel suite, but before we could arrest him, someone shot him.”

“So wouldn’t it stand to reason that whoever shot him is the key?”

Zeke had been so caught up in the other things that had happened in the last few weeks that he realized that the identity of Liam’s shooter was a loose thread. He couldn’t ask Carson about it but maybe Jamie could.

“Even if you don’t know who shot him, you could still investigate the partner. There has to be a connection somewhere. Right?”

Zeke pressed his lips together as he rolled the idea around in his brain. “It’s a possibility.”

He wrote Liam on the bottom of the paper.