Betrayed

Chapter 3

“Nothing like relaxing with a beer after almost getting shot,” Shane said as he kicked off his shoes and put his feet up on the scarred table in the Rockfort offices, conveniently located in an industrial park not far from S&D.

“I guess you weren’t counting on a nutcase trying to take down the HR department,” Max Lyon said dryly.

“Not hardly. But like I told Bert Iverson, all’s well that ends well.”

“You don’t think you were taking a chance rappelling down the building and crashing through the window?” Jack Brandt asked.

Shane took another swig of beer and gave Jack a pointed look. “You mean like you were taking a chance invading a nut-ball militia group a few months ago?”

“I wouldn’t do it now,” Jack said.

“Because you were redeemed by the love of a good woman,” Shane shot back.

“Is that bad?”

“It worked out okay for you. I got burned by my ex, and I’m not looking to repeat the experience.”

“That doesn’t mean all women are bad.”

“It means I’m not going to get fooled again,” he said, punching out the words.

When he saw Jack open his mouth, then close it, he was relieved his friend had decided to drop the subject.

Max jumped into the conversation. “Lincoln Kinkead owes you one for stopping that lunatic before he shot anyone else.”

“Kinkead wasn’t exactly happy about my methods. I thought he might fire me before Bert Iverson pointed out that I’d saved a bunch of lives.”

“You did. What was Kinkead’s objection?”

Shane laughed. “He doesn’t like what he considers hotdogging. Plus I don’t think he liked my calling attention to myself.”

Max shook his head. “So you won’t climb the outside of his building again.”

“Let’s hope.”

“We haven’t talked to you in a couple of days. Are you making any progress on your main mission?”

“There’s nothing new.”

S&D developed software for the business and financial community. Their biggest product was an office software package that was giving Microsoft a run for its money. But they had something in development that was rumored to be a blockbuster.

Lincoln Kinkead had come to Rockfort after one of his employees, a man named Arnold Blake, was murdered. Blake had worked in the IT department, and Kinkead suspected he’d been trying to steal the specs for the new hush-hush product. It was something called Falcon’s Flight. Shane had no idea what it was, and Kinkead had kept the information to himself.

Shane was working on the theory that Blake had been murdered because he refused to turn over the material he’d stolen to the people who had hired him.

But that wasn’t the end of it. Kinkead was sure that whoever wanted Falcon’s Flight was making another try for it, substantiated by evidence that someone had recently been poking into the company’s product files without authorization.

“Do you think today’s events are related to the Arnold Blake murder?” Max asked.

“It doesn’t seem like it, but I guess I’d better check to see if there’s any connection between Blake and Duckworth. The only thing I know now is that whoever’s tiptoeing around in the development files again is very skillful and very careful—and you couldn’t say that for Duckworth. His style was more like clomping around in jackboots.”

“You said you don’t think it’s someone in development.”

“They’re all squeaky clean.”

“But that woman who saved your butt—Elena Reyes. Isn’t she one of your suspects?” Jack asked.

“Yeah.”

“Interesting that she got herself into the middle of that mess.”

“She says she was in the HR department on business and didn’t know Duckworth was going to come in waving a gun.”

“You’re sure there’s no connection between them?”

“What would be her motive for walking into danger?”

“To get to know you better,” Max answered.

“She didn’t know I was going to show up.”

“She probably had a good idea you weren’t going to leave a bunch of innocent people twisting in the wind.”

Shane shrugged. He wouldn’t discount anything, but he wasn’t going out of his way to manufacture a devious scenario for Elena. Or was he?

Elena’s stomach was in knots as she pulled up in the driveway of her parents’ modest ranch house on a dead-end street in Germantown. When she saw one of the front curtains drop back into place, she knew her mother had been looking out the window, watching for her to arrive—sure that she was coming over as soon as she could get away from the media.

She had thought about going back to her apartment and changing her clothes first. Then she’d told herself that her parents would be worried and would want to talk to her.

Still, she couldn’t keep her nerves from jumping as she climbed out of her car.

The front door opened as she hurried up the walk, but nobody came out. After taking a steadying breath, she stepped inside, and her mother closed the door.

Both her parents had been in the living room, which was furnished with a love seat, two low-slung side chairs, and a flat-screen television on a chest at the side of the room. It was tuned to CNN. Elena glanced from the TV to her parents. Both of them looked old for their years. Her mother’s dark hair was streaked with gray, and her father had lost most of his hair, so that only a thin fringe clung to the back of his skull.

He’d been a newspaper reporter back home, and he’d been able to write some articles for a local Spanish language paper here. But he’d supported the family by taking on janitorial duties for the local school system and had worked his way up to supervisor before retiring.

“You were on television,” he said in Spanish as Elena walked into the living room. “Local and national, too.”

He had been careful to learn English when he came here, but he was always more comfortable with his native language.

“No mucho,” she answered, speaking in Spanish for his benefit.

“I taught you to keep your head down. Now everybody knows you were in that office where the man shot that girl. Then he was killed.”

She wished she could simply turn around and walk out of her parents’ house. Instead, she crossed to one of the worn easy chairs and lowered herself to the seat.

It was tempting to ask, “Would you have been happier if I’d gotten killed?” but she kept the question locked behind her lips as she said, “I was at the wrong place at the wrong time.”

Unable to drop his original theme, her father said, “Everybody knows who you are.”

“Papa, this isn’t San Marcos. Nobody’s coming after me.”

“You can’t be sure.”

“I had no choice. I was in the office. I had to help the man who came to rescue us.”

“Shane Gallagher?”

“Yes.”

“He was on the TV, too. What does he do for the company?”

“He’s head of security.”

Her father sucked in a sharp breath before speaking. “Like the secret police.”

“No.” She looked toward her mother. “I came straight here. Could you get me a glass of water?”

Her mother looked toward Papa. When he nodded, she went into the kitchen and came back with the water.

Elena took several sips, then cradled the glass in her hand, grateful for something to hold on to. “I’m all right. I came by to tell you.”

“You stay away too much.”

She struggled not to make a cutting remark. She stayed away because coming here was never pleasant.

“Alesandro was here,” her mother said.

“How is he?”

“Bien,” Momma answered, but there was something in her voice that made Elena wonder if her brother was truly fine. As a boy, Alesandro had been happy to come to America. He’d liked the freedom and the standard of living here, but he hadn’t been able to make the most of his life in his new country.

He’d had trouble learning English, and his grades in school had been poor—not good enough for college. He’d worked a bunch of low-paying jobs. The best one was at the service desk of a rental car company. Usually he was short of money, and sometimes he tried to borrow from Elena. After she had lent him cash a few times, and he had never paid it back, she’d vowed never to do it again. That was something else her parents held against her. She should be willing to help her brother.

“Do you want to stay to dinner?” Momma asked.

“Gracias, pero no. I want to go home and lie down. I just stopped by to reassure you.”

Her father jumped into the conversation with the kind of comment she’d grown to expect from him.

“That gunman could have been politically motivated, and the government could be watching you now.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Don’t get lulled into a false sense of security. You remember I thought we were okay. Then I got a tip that government agents were coming for us, and we had to get out of the house. We had to leave almost everything behind.”

Elena nodded. She’d heard this story many times.

Her father began to ramble on about how they’d traveled north by car, then crossed the border.

She’d been young, but she still remembered the soldiers inspecting their documents, and her father lying and saying that they were going to visit relatives in Mexico. She didn’t want to listen to the story again, but he was her father. He had saved her by getting her out of San Marcos, so she settled into her chair to hear the tale one more time.

If anyone had a right to be paranoid, it was Eduardo Reyes. But listening to him was exhausting, and by the time she left, she was almost too tired to think. Her father had gone on about government spies. She was more worried about the press. Had some reporter dug into her background and figured out that her parents also lived in the area? Was someone from a local television station or newspaper outside waiting to ambush her? Pausing just inside the door, she looked out into the darkness. There seemed to be no activity on the street. Perhaps the reporters had finished with her. Or they hadn’t tracked down her family.

With a little sigh of relief, she crossed quickly to her car and got in. When she pulled away from the curb, she thought she saw another car pull into the street behind her, but the driver had left the lights off.

A car with its lights off at night? A reporter following her? Or what? She sped up, thinking maybe whoever was back there would let her go. Or was she seeing things because she was too tired to think straight? If she felt more comfortable in her parents’ home, she might have gone back and asked to spend the night. But then she’d have to tell them why she was nervous, and she certainly didn’t want to explain about the car.

After taking off his bulletproof vest, Shane made a show of relaxing with the other guys, but he probably wasn’t fooling them. He knew he was too keyed up to unwind, and he was sure they did, too.

He left after an hour and headed home, his mind replaying the events of the hostage takedown. He was willing to bet that Duckworth was just a sideshow and had nothing to do with the reason Lincoln Kinkead had hired Rockfort Security. But he kept coming back to Elena Reyes. She might have saved his life when Duckworth had whirled around, but that didn’t mean he could trust her.

He felt his chest tighten as he tried to sort through his feelings about her. She’d been in the perfect position to help him out. At the very least, that was interesting, although he wasn’t sure there were any sinister implications.

He lived in one of the high-rise apartments that had been built in the first flurry of modernization in Rockville. The red-brick building was showing its age now, which was why he’d gotten a good deal on the sublet.

He parked in the garage and stopped in the lobby to get a bunch of circulars from his mailbox. Then he proceeded to the fifth floor where he unlocked his apartment and stepped inside. He’d rented the furniture—a standard sofa and a couple of chairs, plus a flat-screen TV on a stand in the living room, a small table and chairs in the dining room, and a dresser and king-size bed in the bedroom. All of it sat on oatmeal-colored carpet that had seen better days.

He usually paid no attention to the furnishings. Maybe because he’d almost gotten killed today, he stopped in the living room and looked around, trying to see the place from the point of view of a stranger. It looked like the abode of a man who didn’t give a shit where he lived. Which was an accurate summation of the situation.

His previous apartment had been an entirely different matter—filled with trendy furniture, sheets, towels, and knickknacks carefully chosen by his ex-wife. If he’d wanted to take any of them, he supposed he could have. Instead, he’d let her have all the booty and all the wedding presents because he didn’t need any of it around to remind him of past mistakes.

He cursed under his breath as he flashed back to the day a year and a half ago when he’d told Glenda that he knew she was cheating on him and their marriage was over. He’d been deployed to Afghanistan when the affair with Larry MacMillan started. And she hadn’t even had the sense to break it off when he got back.

She’d claimed that MacMillan didn’t mean anything to her. Shane had said that the cheating meant something to him. He’d walked out the door and never saw her again except for some mandatory appearances at lawyers’ offices.

More than that, he’d changed his life around. He could have volunteered for a war zone. But he wasn’t going to give Glenda the satisfaction of sending him into harm’s way. He’d been up for reenlistment, but he’d mustered out. Then he’d taken some time to figure out his next move.

Annoyed that he was thinking about her now, he stomped into the bedroom, pulled off the running suit he’d worn for the surprise attack, and dropped the jacket and pants into the hamper. He took a quick shower, then put on jeans and a dark T-shirt, and wandered into the kitchen where he opened the freezer and examined his stash of frozen dinners. It wasn’t home cooking, but it was convenient, he thought, as he pulled out a chicken and pasta dish, stripped off the wrapper, and put it into the microwave. While he drank another beer, he booted up the computer in the spare bedroom he used as an office, then brought the food to the desk.

He was tired, but he was too wound up to relax, and he might as well get some work done.

He’d told the other Rockfort agents that he couldn’t help suspecting Elena Reyes. He had no proof that she’d done anything illegal, but with her access to the whole company’s operations, she was in a perfect position to steal information from S&D. Not only that, but she had the skills to cover her tracks.

Or was he digging into her background so relentlessly because he was obsessed with her—and investigating her gave him the perfect excuse to get to know her better, at least in the abstract?

For a moment, he let his mind zing back to the scene in the ladies’ room when he’d held her in his arms. He’d felt protective and at the same time vulnerable. Maybe crashing through that window and getting shot at had affected him more than he wanted to admit.

With a rough sound, he stopped thinking about his reactions after the takedown and went to the file he’d compiled on Elena, skimming back through the notations he’d made. Her father was a political refugee from San Marcos. He’d come here legitimately, but did Dad still have ties to his country of origin? What if he was involved in something illegal and had dragged his daughter into it?

And what about the brother, Alesandro Reyes? Elena had a well-paying job at S&D. Her brother had had the same opportunities in his adopted country, but you wouldn’t know it to look at him. He worked for a rental car company where the pay couldn’t be anywhere near what his sister was making. But he did have unexpected luxuries like a top-of-the-line Buick and an apartment in a high-priced building. Did he have other sources of income? Or was he forcing his sister or his parents to subsidize his lifestyle? And if so, how?

Even as Shane made a note to dig further into Alesandro’s background, his thoughts went back to Elena.

Did she have a secret life that she was keeping hidden from everyone at S&D? A relationship she was hiding? And what would be the significance if she was? Could she be seeing someone who was influencing her behavior?

Was she under stress—with signs he could pick up, like moodiness and paranoia? Was she hiding financial transactions or extreme views?

He laughed. Maybe if he’d investigated Joe Duckworth for those tendencies, today’s hostage situation could have been avoided. But Duckworth hadn’t even been on his radar screen. He hadn’t been investigating former employees.

Once again, he went back to Elena because he’d rather investigate her than Joe Duckworth. And it was too late to do anything about that bastard, anyway, besides bury him.

Shane had several pictures of Elena. One must have been from her high school yearbook. And some were snapshots that he’d gotten off the Web, like the one that went with her S&D employee bio.

He studied one of the head shots, admiring the waves in her long, shiny dark hair and the thick lashes that framed her dark eyes. She was a beauty, even though she didn’t do much to enhance her looks.

Not like Glenda, who had always spent a good deal of time at the makeup table.

He clenched his teeth, wondering why he had dragged his ex-wife into the evening again.