Page 42 of Jonas

“Damn, woman, you’ve got a mean left hook.”

“Sorry. I didn’t…” I started to apologize again but stopped when I noticed it was dark outside.

Not only dark but very dark, and we were parked in front of a charming old farmhouse, complete with a long porch across the front that wrapped around to the right. The lights shone from all the windows and there were a lot of them.

Nostalgia tugged low in my belly. The good kind. Memories of growing up in a house much like this one. Times when my father wasn’t home and my brother hadn’t turned, we’d spend hours on the porch playing with our cousins. It wouldn’t be until I was older that the memories turned to shit. There was never love in the house I grew up in, there was never affection or cuddling or soft touches from my parents or aunts or uncle, but there were fun times.

Until there weren’t.

“Hey. You didn’t hurt me,” Jonas said, pulling me out of my thoughts.

“Sorry.”

“Sweetheart, stop apologizing.”

Another sweetheart.

Sigh.

The front door opening snagged my attention. Zane Lewis appearing in the threshold sent the nostalgia fleeing, and the warmth in my belly turned into a block of ice. He didn’t look happy and from what I’d read about him, an unhappy Zane made for an unhappy life, and sometimes that life was shortened. After meeting him in person, I’d learned that there wasn’t a report I could read about Zane Lewis that would properly convey all that was the man who owned Z Corps. There was no way to describe his menacing presence or the way his mood filled a room. You didn’t have to be an empath to feel his aura. The atmosphere crackled around him.

“Your boss looks less than pleased,” I noted.

Jonas didn’t bother looking over his shoulder when he responded. “That’s just his resting bitch face.”

I rolled my lips in to stop the smile. Jonas’s gaze dipped to my mouth and I saw the muscle in his cheek tic.

“Ready?”

I wasn’t sure if I was ready to face a pissed-off Zane but I sure as shit was ready to put some much needed space between Jonas and me.

A few hours later, I would learn I would get no such space.

After that, introductions were made, and there were a lot of them. Not just Jonas’s immediate team: Theo, Easton, Smith, Cash, and Layla. But also Layla’s husband Kevin and two of his teammates, Myles and Gabe from Blue Team. Kira and Cooper were also there and a woman named Nebraska who was with Easton, and if the huge rock on her finger was anything to go by they were either married or engaged.

Those introductions were made in the basement—a huge space that looked more like a bunker than a cellar under a beautiful farmhouse. There were two flat screen TVs on the wall—one had a map of DC on it, the other had a picture of two men. Both in tuxedos, and I didn’t need to be a fashionista to know they were expensive. But if the cut didn’t give away the price tag, the drapery, finely dressed tables, and crystal chandeliers in the background would’ve paid testimony to the fact they were wealthy.

When we were all seated around a gigantic, beat-up table that looked like it was made from reclaimed barnwood, Jonas took the lead filling in his team—something I appreciated—and by the way he was casting his gaze in my direction every few minutes, he knew I needed it.

When he was done, it was Layla who commented first. “He gave that up quick.”

“Jonas mentioned Z Corps,” I reiterated what Jonas had already explained. “After that, Daryl turned pale and the bravado disappeared. He wants no part of Zane.”

“I bet,” Layla mumbled.

“Normally,” Zane started with a smirk, “I’d take time to gloat but since we don’t have time, I reserve the right to remind you all that it’s good to be me at a later time.”

“Of course you will,” Kevin said from his place down the table.

“Why are we all here?” Jonas asked as he looked around at the others.

“Derrika was right,” Kira launched in. “I found sixteen reports in the last six months of not only cargo ships but oil tankers reporting possible cyberattacks. Two were close calls; a tanker called the Betsy lost control and nearly collided with the Louisiana Offshore Oil Port. She was able to resume propulsion fifteen miles from LOOP. The other was a near collision between a crude oil tanker and a cargo ship thirty miles off Galveston. Both ships were headed into the Houston Shipping Channel when the tanker sent out a mayday call and their system went down. The call went out by the ship’s captain; he reported all computers were down including navigation, geolocation, cameras, and echosounder. At the same time the cargo ship’s generator went down, the backup came online, but shut down moments later. The number three gen set the cargo back on track and the tanker’s shore-based IT helped get the computers back online. Those were vessel-related attacks. I also found more than twenty cyberattacks at the port level.”

“Test runs, or is that in the blueprint as well?” I asked. “Two gigantic ships colliding would make an impact; that collision at the mouth of a shipping channel would cause major delays or rerouting to offload.”

“I’d say both. Test the security protocols on the vessels and how quickly the auxiliary generators take to come online. A backup is on standby, that powerplant would start automatically. The true test would be to see how the different sized ships handle their gensets. A smaller Panamax might be slower than the larger Neopanamax which has to run two at once—one to handle electrical systems, pumps, refrigeration, toilets, things like that, while the main engine would handle the ship’s movement. They could also be testing which shipping line is utilizing which technology. There are a lot of variables when it comes to ships.

“We didn’t think the blueprint for the attack would include planes or airports—it’s too obvious. But I did find two airlines with ransomware attacks that came from internal computers, meaning it wasn’t a phishing attack. Someone had to have had access to plant the virus. There was also a software update that was pushed through a small regional Florida airport that took down their system, including air traffic control. Homeland found the update contained a virus.”