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She looked up at me. “For a security company headed by a paranoid man, Hayes did shockingly little to make these files secure.”
“Really?”
“I mean, they’re encrypted,” Nataliya said, “but Anton made it harder for me to get into his files, and he wanted me to figure it out. This—” She gestured to the screen. “It’s almost pitiful in comparison.” She shook her head in disgust and went back to work, mumbling to herself as she did. “Not like I wanted it to be harder,” she grumbled, “but really, idiotka—have some self-respect.” I settled myself back on the bed and tried not to smile as I watched her. I was just telling myself that it wouldn’t be a good idea to get further involved with her…but I couldn’t look away. She looked so goddamn beautiful. Calm down, man, I told myself. She was just working.
Nataliya
It didn’t take Drake long at all to decrypt the files and send them back to me. Fear pooled in my stomach as I read through the email I’d just opened. It was clearly from Ian Hayes to my brother. Anton had helped him to organize the sale of AR-15s, and the message was a reply to one where Anton had given Hayes information on the shipping. Smuggling, I thought grimly. I knew that Anton was a criminal. Even if I’d never known the details, what we’d found on his cloud account was damning.
But there was something worse about things being so clearly spelled out.
“So this proves he was smuggling weapons,” Adrian said, reading over my shoulder.
“And more,” I replied. “Just like you said. Antiquities, drugs…”
“People?” Adrian asked, stepping back as he checked something on his phone—probably a message from Gabe or Zach.
I scrolled through more files, and my stomach churned. “Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, that’s here too.”
I felt Adrian as he came back up behind me, and then his hand was on my shoulder. “You can take a break,” he said gently. “You don’t have to keep reading.”
I turned away from the screen, and in need of comfort, I leaned up and brushed his mouth with mine. “I can do this,” I said.
Adrian pulled me out of the chair, and I sighed when he wrapped me in his arms. It wasn’t a good idea, to seek comfort in his arms again, but it felt good to have him wrapped around me. It made the violent churning in my gut calm a little.
We stood, entwined, for a moment, but ultimately, we needed to go through the files. Once it was done, Adrian could do whatever he wanted with the information, and I could go home to Elias. Adrian seemed to understand that, because he stepped away after a minute, pulling up a chair so he could sit down beside me.
Together, we kept scrolling through the files, and it didn’t take long for Adrian to stiffen in his seat. “Stop.” He put his hand over the mouse and scrolled back up. “Read that.”
I did, and my chest hurt for him. Hayes had records of the movements and current locations for a number of US military groups. That on its own might not be suspicious—after all, he worked directly with the military in some of his operations, and it made sense that he’d know where some troops were stationed. But from the way the information was arranged…
“Are these what I think they are?” I asked.
“Hayes has been gathering details on US military operations and selling them to the highest bidder,” he said, sounding strained. "Look at this—the date of our mission in the RoW. Hayes made a trade. He told this gun smuggler where he could find stockpiles of military weapons…in exchange for the smuggler and his men attacking our unit during the extraction and making sure Anton didn’t get out alive. He used US weapons to buy off the men who gunned my team down.”
This wasn’t entirely surprising information, obviously, but it didn’t answer the one question I knew Adrian had: who had told Hayes about the mission to extract Anton in the first place? We kept digging, and my eyes went wide as I opened the next file.
Beside me, Adrian had stopped breathing.
“This can’t be right,” he said.
On the screen, there were communications between Hayes and multiple high-ranking members of the US Department of Defense, including more than one Navy admiral. Hayes was reminding the members about their agreement: they would feed Hayes the information that he wanted and keep lobbying to continue his contract with the military, and he would keep the information that he knew to himself. It didn’t say what he knew, but the threat was clear.
“Adrian.”
He shook his head. “Tell me this doesn’t say what I think it says,” he said, and his voice was harsher, sharper. The expression on his face—a mix of horror and anger—hurt my chest.
I wrapped my arm around him and held him to me. “It’s going to be okay,” I said.
He didn’t relax. “This goes against everything I believe in,” he murmured, more to himself than to me. “I enlisted in the military the second I could, and I only left because it was the only way I could think of to get justice for Cuddy. I believed in the military—believed that the people whose orders I followed were on the side of justice.” He reached out and shut the laptop. “That’s…that can’t be right.”
I didn’t want to call him naive. He didn’t deserve that after such a nasty shock…but it was hard to bite my tongue. Maybe it was being born in a country that largely recognized its own corruption, maybe it was the unrest, but it wouldn’t surprise me to learn the RoW was doing things like this all the way up the ranks into the highest reaches of the government and the military.
But Adrian didn’t need to hear any of that right now. Instead, I kept my arm around him as we opened the laptop again and read further into that particular file. It only got worse. A US congressman, a Representative Jackson Hilty, was also on the take from the Hayes Group. Hilty had lobbied hard for the Hayes Group over the years, constantly talking up the advantages of sending in private security instead of US soldiers—ensuring that Hayes had access to an endless pool of unstable situations all over the globe that he could manipulate to his own ends, cozying up to criminal elements for fun and profit, and stealing everything that wasn’t nailed down.
Anger was vibrating from Adrian’s body. “What can I do for you?” I asked. “What do you need?”
“Besides wiping Ian Hayes off the face of the earth?” he shot back.
