Sexy Bastards Anthology: Bad Boy, Biker, Alpha, Motorcycle Club, Contemporary Romance Collection (111 page)

Chapter Five – Nicole

Silicon Valley, California

On Monday morning, Nicole was greeted at the lobby by some unknown military security guard. Entering the building, she noticed him standing just a few feet away from the door, obviously watching for someone. He was a broad man with a clean-shaven head, wearing a black suit with a black tie and sunglasses the same color as the window tint on standard issue CIA government vehicles. Nicole wasn’t born yesterday. She could make guys like that from a mile away.

The security guards at Terratech were not such intimidating figures. They usually tried to appear as though they could handle security issues themselves rather than calling in the authorities to handle it. This guy was the real deal. The man turned and looked in her direction, and although he wore dark sunglasses, Nicole knew he was waiting for her. She was already past the point of having possibly getting away from him, so she stood where she was and waited for him to approach.

“Miss Hunt,” he said when he got close enough, lifting one of his monster hands with his palm out to stop her.

She looked up, way up at his over six foot frame to make eye contact behind those sunglasses. “Yes. How can I help you?”

“Come with me,” he said.

He pointed forward to the main floor security office, then fell in place behind her, with one of his large hands placed gently on the middle of her back to guide her.

This was serious.

They walked down the hallway past the building concierge, then past the security management offices to a door that led into a main floor boardroom she had not been to before.

He knocked lightly on the half open door. “Sir, I have Miss Hunt,” he told the gentleman seated at the head of the boardroom table in the room, apparently waiting for them.

“Thank you. That is all,” the man told Mr. Sunglasses, who turned and left.

Nicole waited to be invited to sit. She’d seen this man before, but had never had a formal introduction, on account of the fact that she was an unimportant software development nobody working on a temporary project, and he was in one of the top executive spots in the firm. Eventually, he gestured for her to take a seat near him, and she did. His eyes moved back and forth between his open laptop and a file folder that sat open beside it. She assumed it was her personnel file. Or not. She had no idea.

“Nicole Hunt, am I correct?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good. Miss Hunt, do you know who I am?”

“I do, Mr. Bernhardt,” she admitted.

Her answer seemed to please him. He grinned. He wasn’t one of the men she had seen last night talking with the three foreigners, but she’d seen him around the building and on the corporate website. He was also the official face of the TE-5X project. On paper anyway.

“Miss Hunt, you know I’m the VP of Stakeholder Relations for the TDE-5X project as, correct?”

“Yes, sir. I’m one of the lead developers for the project.”

“I know, and here at Terratech, we appreciate your work. The effort and hours you’ve contributed to this piece of technology has not gone unnoticed.”

“Thank you, sir.” She damn well hoped so, after all she’d put into it.

“I’ll get to the point, Ms. Hunt. Do you mind answering a few questions about your work on TDE-5X?”

“Not at all.”

He flipped through some of the pages in the file. “Were you ever asked or ordered to work late on this project, Ms. Hunt?”

“Yes, sir.”

“So you received approval from your supervisors for all the extra hours you’ve worked on this project, Ms. Hunt?”

“No, I’ve not…” she was about to explain herself but he cut her off.

“So you’re saying you’re been at the work location at times where you were not authorized to work on the project.”

“Not exactly.”

Nicole didn’t like the direction he was taking with this line of questioning. This was the kind of bullshit that got her guard up. She wished he just had the balls to ask her what she saw or heard on Friday night instead of going at it in this roundabout way. Her blood was boiling. She didn’t need this shit. She’d quit jobs for much less than this before. The only reason she held her tongue was she really liked the challenge of this project. Still, they were less than eight weeks away from project completion, and the truth was they needed her, not the other way around.

Fuck it.

She was going there. “Is there something specific you’d like to ask me? Because you might want to speak to Ryan Malone about the hours I’ve worked for the past eighteen months. Unless you want to talk about something that happened more…recently.”

He took the hint and said, “As recently as say, last Friday?”

“Sure. What would you like to know?”

“Have you ever seen any visitors who, from your knowledge, were not authorized to be on the project floor? Other than security, of course.”

“No, sir.”

There. She didn’t tell him what she knew, and she wasn’t lying either, because she had only heard the voices. She never actually saw anyone.

“Have you seen anything suspicious?”

“No.”

Check. If he was dumb enough to only ask about what she saw, versus what she had heard, she’d be in the clear.

Finally he said, “Excellent, and if you do see anything out of the ordinary, you are aware of your obligation to report it immediately, correct?”

“I am.”

As if.

“You know you are not authorized to investigate any suspicious activity on your own.”

“Yes, sir.”

Mr. Bernhardt closed the folder, flipped the laptop down, and tucked them both under his arm as he stood to leave.

“Thank you for your cooperation, Ms. Hunt.” He stretched across the table and extended his arm for a handshake. She took it and gave a confident shake before releasing his hand. “Do be careful when working after hours, and thanks again for your contribution to this crucial technology project.”

Nicole nodded, and gave him time to leave the boardroom before finding an exit. She’d been around the block long enough to know this wasn’t good. Whatever she overheard was probably exactly what it sounded like, and if anything went wrong, they would probably think she knew too much.

At the moment, she had ‘some exposure to risk’, as her father would say.

It was time to protect herself and mitigate some of that risk.

Chapter Six – Nicole

Silicon Valley, California

To avoid suspicion, she went back to work as if nothing happened. What she did at lunch was a different story. She left the building and walked six blocks away to mall, where she purchased a pack of cigarettes, a lighter, and three burner phones with their own internet access. She stopped in at the nearby Starbucks, bought a Tall cup of their strongest brew, and hid out at a table in the back with one of her new phones. She needed to know why the name Delta Shandong was so familiar to her, and there was no way she would research it on her personal phone or at work.

Opening the tiny browser in the phone, she did a Google search. It yielded very little, mentioning only an economic zone in China. That was no surprise to her, as many Chinese websites and servers were blocked from the west. She went to Yandex next, and found a few more articles, and a company website. What she saw made the blood drain out of her face.

Closing the flip phone, she opened the back and pulled out the sim card. She dumped the used burner phone in the trash can before grabbing her bag to get the hell out of there. In an alley a few blocks away, she pulled out her pack of cigarettes and lit one up. She didn’t smoke it. That was for show. Instead, she used the lighter to burn that sim card and ensure no one could track down what she had just discovered.

It was much worse than she thought.

She hurried back to her workstation, packed up a few things, and moved two workstations down to strike up a conversation with a junior programmer names Milton. She didn’t need a thing from Milton, but the kid happened to work beside Sherman, the only non-manager on theTDE-5X team with a higher level clearance than her.

Lucky for her, Sherman was still at lunch.

She sent Milton away to the server room to check on some arbitrary task that would keep him busy for at least a few minutes, and took the opportunity to log in on Sherman’s desktop using his credentials, naturally.  She accessed the company’s security logs and pulled this morning’s visitor log.

Shit.

It was them.

This was now a life or death situation. With her breathing out of control and her stomach doing nervous somersaults, Nicole pulled an encrypted thumb drive from the pocket of her blazer.

She had to do this.

She had no choice now.

If overhearing that conversation put her in danger, copying these TDE-5X specs would kill her for sure. She took what she needed, covered her tracks by wiping the activity logs, and left the building.

She used the next burner phone to phone her dad once she was inside her apartment.

“Hello father,” she said to him. Just from that, he would understand this was not the usual check-in call, and that he needed to pay attention. Her dad was a retired U.S. Air Force Brigadier General. He had put an emergency plan in place for the two of them for years. He’d forced Nicole to practice it once a year as though they would need it, and every year since she was ten she would roll her eyes and go through the motions. Today, she was glad he never let them stop, even after his official retirement.

“Hello my daughter. How are you?” he asked, confirming he already knew something was wrong.

“I’m okay, but I think I’m coming down with something.”

“Well, take it easy, dear. Let’s hope it’s not going around.”

“I think it is, and it’s pretty rough from what I can tell.”

“Use the eye drops. You’ll be alright, love.”

“Yes, sir,” she said. “Thanks father.”

She disconnected the call and dumped that burner phone. ‘
Use the eye drops’
was her dad’s code for
get to the safe house in London
, a place he’d secured when he was on active duty, which happened to be near the London Eye tourist attraction. There were five such rendezvous points he could have told her, and he chose London. That meant he had some idea what the problem was, and it was bad enough to warrant leaving North America.

She booked a last minute same-day flight, called a cab, and spent the next twenty minutes packing the carry-on backpack she would use for the trip. No extra frills. Just two outfits, underwear, a toothbrush, stick of deodorant, her passport, laptop and that thumb drive. While she got organized, she couldn’t stop thinking of what she had learned about Delta Shandong.

She’d been betrayed, and the treachery had taken place over eighteen months ago. The one friend Nicole had made while in Shenzhen had just pulled the rug out from right under her.

Mei-Ling Zhang.

She turned out not to be her friend at all. That rebellious, purple-haired, down-with-China, freedom-for-all, social media manager of the Chinese gaming software firm where Nicole had worked may not have been any of those things. The five minutes at the back table in Starbucks had shown Nicole the truth—that Mei-Ling was some kind of double agent.

Delta Shandong turned out to be a Chinese cyber-security firm—and Mei-Ling’s father ran Delta Shandong.

Her taxi was waiting when she made it outside. She got to the Mineta San Jose International Airport, used a check-in kiosk to get her boarding pass, and headed to her gate. When the flight announced it would begin boarding, she used the last burner phone to leave a voicemail for Ryan, telling him she came down with the flu and needed to take off for the rest of the day. The taking off part was true, but it was not only for the rest of the day. The truth was she was never going back to Terratech, and she would probably never return to California after she flew out of LAX tonight.

Chapter Seven – Nick

LAX Airport, Los Angeles

The plane touched down at LAX, and Nick woke up from a restful sleep. After he disembarked, he found a spot with a good vantage point and waited for further instructions.

It had been some time since he was on US soil. He wondered whether this assignment would be long enough to allow him to check in on his adoptive parents. He hadn’t seen them in a few years, and although they were used to his constant traveling, even he was starting to miss them.

Nick got comfortable, and made use of the time by pulling out his work phone to see what else he could find out about this Nicole Hunt. The 4x6 photograph of him with Nicole showed her in a white blouse and blue jeans. Her blonde hair hung down just past her shoulders, and those light brown eyes drew him into her face, even in the photo. She was a looker, and probably the youngest person he’d ever been assigned to. It was a shame she was one of his assignments. She might not have been an immediate target to get rid of, but chances were that was where she would end up.

He looked at the search results on his phone. More pictures of the woman on her social media profiles, and in front of her Silicon Valley condo. There was a link in her profile to her current job, working as a software developer at Terratech. Now he had a pretty good idea why she was being followed for intel, and they specifically assigned him to monitor her.

He shook his head.

He knew where this was going now.

The company wanted to wrap a nice, neat bow over every link they had between Terratech and Delta Shandong, and this unsuspecting young woman was tied to both. She and whatever information she had with her was suddenly an international threat. He was sure now this would turn into another cleanup job, which wasn’t good for little Miss Hunt. Suddenly, tracking this young-looking twenty-something year old became a pretty serious job.

He scrolled through prior years of her Facebook posts. SAT scores showed she was borderline genius. Graduated from MIT at the top of her class. Some tidbits of information on her father – retired USAF Brigadier General. Nothing about her mother at all. It wasn’t much information, but for him, it was enough.

A string of coded messages came into his phone as he checked a few more of her photos. She had boarded a plane, was already here at LAX, and was headed to London via JFK. She definitely had some data on a thumb drive or other storage device. His instructions were to intercept her at LAX, use any measure of choice to acquire the data, and hold her at JFK. The Company had already secured a seat for him on the same flight. She would be directly beside him on the plane. The way the instructions came in, he was sure there was another operative who had tailed her up to San Jose Airport.

Nick found her easily in the terminal. She had made her way to a seat near the gate for her flight to JFK, and was trying to look inconspicuous.

Trying, but it wasn’t working.

He decided to hold off on making contact for a while, opting instead to cross her path a few times, just to see what he was up against and possibly find an opening before the flight took off. She was even more striking in person than in her pictures. He almost couldn’t take his eyes off her. It was a shame he was assigned to track her for work. In another time and place, he would have done it for pleasure any day.

With about an hour left before their flight took off, he put his plan into motion and found a way to get next to her. He watched her get up and head for a coffee shop, following at a safe distance behind to keep her in view. She wore a black tank top and tight-fitting jeans that hugged every curve of her ass and cover her long, sexy legs that seemed to go on for miles. Her shoulders and arms were bare for the moment, probably because this part of the terminal was warmer than usual. In any case, she didn’t look like someone who was trying to avoid prying eyes. He had to wonder whether she may have intentionally been inviting attention. It was definitely one way to keep operatives like him at a distance. They would be the only warm-blooded heterosexual men
not
to look.

Damn.

This woman was not one to underestimate.