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She swooped around, familiarizing herself with the controls. Good feedback, and the drone was steady. She brought it to the front of her house and sure enough, there they were. Two men in an SUV, just sitting there. Switching to IR, she saw it was just the two men, no one else.
“And, gentlemen, here’s our surveillance team.”
Jacob Black was on the phone, quietly giving someone the license plate number to check.
The driver buzzed down his window and stuck his head out for a moment. Pierce got up and moved close to the monitor, then swore. “Goddamn.”
Riley put a hand on his shoulder. “You know them?”
“Yeah.” She could feel him almost vibrating under her hand. “Him. The driver. Son of a bitch got a recruit killed during Hell Week. Knocked a teammate off course to get ahead and the man fell and hit his head on a rock. The trainers only found out by accident because it showed up in footage. Some guy was making a documentary about SEAL training. His name is Harry Dutton.”
Jacob Black heard and looked more carefully at the monitor. “Son of a bitch is right. And he’s with the right company, the Sommers Group. Staking out the apartment of a young woman. About his speed.”
They were focusing really hard on this guy, which she understood. But they needed to focus on her getting her computer.
Riley coughed and the three men swiveled their heads. “About me getting my laptop …”
“No,” Jacob Black said.
“Not advised,” Nikolai said.
“No way in hell,” Pierce specified.
“I need—”
“What part of two operators staking out your house do you not understand?” Pierce tried to make his voice reasonable but the stress came through. His voice cracked.
Riley sent the drone around the perimeter of the house. “Do you guys see anyone else?”
Pierce shook his head. “No. So?”
“So …” She circled the perimeter of her house with the laser pointer. She lived in a leafy part of Alexandria. “If we park the car here, two blocks away and one block down, we can come to my building via back lots. There are no dogs along this route and we would be invisible to the two guys staking out my building.”
She traced a path from where they’d park the car to the side of her building.
Pierce cocked his head. “They cover the front entrance. How do you get into the building?”
This was tricky. She had to tell a … not truth. She was terrible at lying, truly awful. Usually her voice changed pitch, and shook. But she had to remind herself she needed her laptop to get out of the mess she was in, and there was only one path forward.
“Can’t see it because shrubbery is in the way, but there’s an entrance to the basement, leading to service stairs. There’s only one security camera, at the entrance, and I can keep that going. I’d be in and out in five minutes.”
“Great.” Jacob Black clapped his hands and stood. “Either Pierce or I will go. Nikolai has to head back to the office to arrange logistics for tomorrow. You wait in the car with whoever isn’t going.”
“Ah…” Riley took a big breath. “That’s not going to work. I added to the security at the door to my apartment. It requires my thumbprint. Sorry. Again, not willing to have my thumb cut off like in the movies. It’s going to have to be me going up. I swear, I’ll be fast. In and out, and then we come back here and I’ll show you the underlying structure of the deepfake. Mr. Black—uh, Jacob, you’re not going to be able to convince anyone until I can break it down. This whole thing has got a momentum of its own. The Seventh Fleet is sailing to the Taiwan Strait. Right now.”
That put them over the edge. She could feel it in the room. Usually, Riley was better with data than with people, but even she could feel when something was right. She’d kept an eye on the chyrons of the news feeds and they were more dire by the hour.
Riley glanced outside the window at the gathering dark. It would take about twenty minutes to get to her place. It would be full dark by the time they got there. Great. She could navigate her apartment blindfolded, wouldn’t need any light, not even a flashlight.
She stood, quivering with tension, ready togogogo. With her laptop, she could prove her innocence, prove that the US might be going to war on a lie. Without it, she was just sinking into quicksand, deeper by the minute. “Are we going or not?”
Pierce stood too, on a sigh. “One thing has to be made clear. Black and I are the security experts. If we feel something is wrong, we all pull out. If there’s even a hint of something wrong, we all pull out. And you commit to obeying us instantly. We clear on that?”
“Oh yes.” Yeah, security was their jam. Hers was intel. If they felt there was danger they couldn’t deal with, they were all leaving. No problem.
Except—she would be left with the situation as it was. Her life in ruins, with the police and an ethically challenged security company made up of trained killers after her. She needed her laptop. She needed to make Pierce and Jacob Blackunderstand, not just agree because they liked her, butunderstandhow she was telling the truth, and understand how very dangerous the truth was.
And understand enough to explain it in terms a ten-year-old could understand.
