Page 48 of Broken Trust
The lab glowed, the monitors casting shadows over the walls and painting Elin’s hands in watery blue. Dante was hard at work at his station, his fingers working the keys in spurts before he’d lean close to the screen to peer at the code there like it had secrets to tell.
Elin folded her legs beneath her and tugged her cardigan tight around her middle as if it could hold in the sensations still buzzing through her system.
Work should have settled her. Instead, her brain ran sparked a live wire, and her traitorous body still hummed from the way Liam coaxed her past the point of all thought and into the forbidden territory offeeling.
She forced her attention back to the email headers. Charles Silverton’s inbox was just a landfill of normal work correspondence. But one thread…that was the diamond found in the trash.
She isolated the path. Then she went still. “I got it.”
Dante rolled his chair over until his shoulder nearly brushed hers. “Pentagon.” The word came out as murmur.
She puffed out a breath. “He mentioned the Pentagon.”
“So he did.” He reached for her keyboard, then stopped himself before taking over her job. “Mind if I?”
She pushed the keyboard his direction so he could set his fingers to the keys. Sure enough, Dante uncovered the same pathway she had—an email account leading directly to a man who worked in the Pentagon.
The room seemed to hold its breath with them.
After a long beat, Dante exhaled, slow and even. “Wouldn’t be the first time a businessman was moonlighting as a villain.” His mouth tipped at one corner with a smile that was absolutely humorless. “Cipher wasn’t born under a rock. He was CIA beforehe took the job of worldwide terrorist. It’s a classic comic book villain story really—mild-mannered analyst meets radioactive classified file, wakes up convinced he’s the new manager of global chaos.”
Against her will, a corner of her mouth twitched. “You’re not wrong.”
He gave her a brotherly nudge. “If there’s a thread, you’ll find it. Let’s keep at it.”
They jumped back into their work, and the deeper she dug, the more she began to see the situation with the handlers was as instable as a gas pipeline built on top of a volcano.
The clock rolled past 0100. She should have been yawning after the long day she’d already put in. But her mind was too alert to shut down and her skin was hypersensitized from Liam’s thorough, mind-blowing touch.
She needed some distance, not only for the op, but for her heart. And so far, he hadn’t given her any indication that they weren’t just falling into bed for old time’s sake.
Sex was just sex. Except her chest ached in a way that called her a liar.
Focus.She split the thread she’d been working to unravel, losing herself for endless minutes before she let out a gasp.
Dante spun his chair to look at her. “What ya got?”
“The Pentagon contact. He’s the handler of all the handlers.”
He whizzed his chair over to her station to stare at her screen. “Or the hand that feeds the handlers.”
“You think it’s Cipher himself?”
“No. He’s too smart to put himself in the line of direct fire that way. Who is this guy?”
She typed in a hasty search that brought up his government ID. “Name’s Adrian Douglas Kent. Only the bare basic of socialmedia accounts. Doesn’t look like he posts anything but the occasional photo of an office picnic.”
“Clean. Too clean. Any ties to Daniel Sheen? Cipher’s real name.”
For long minutes, there was only the clack of the keys as Elin searched under hidden layers. Finally, she shook her head. “Nothing on record.” The hair on her nape prickled anyway. “That doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.”
Dante leaned back in his seat, arms folded. He stared at the wall of feeds as if the answer might pulse on the monitor if he looked hard enough.
“What are our options?” she asked.
“Ping this Kent guy and see who answers.”
“That could set off a chain of events we aren’t prepared for.”
