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“Who knew where we were?” asked Tanya quietly.
I thought for a moment. The only people who’d known we’d jumped out of the plane had been the rest of the team. I looked at Tanya, feeling ill.
“Your friends must have called the CIA, to give them an update,” said Tanya. “And the CIA told Maravic where to find me. Maravic is working for someone at the CIA! Who sent you and your team on this mission?”
“A guy called Casey Steward,” I growled. “Cal and Bradan tried to warn us. They said it was weird that the CIA would use a private security team. Guess now we know why: Steward was using us to clean up his mess without the rest of the CIA finding out.”
“If I’d let you take me in,” said Tanya, “This Steward guy would have killed me.”
I squeezed her hand, furious. “That’s not happening now.” I picked up my coffee mug and drank, thinking. I was pissed. I was remembering how eagerly I’d jumped at this mission, how excited I’d been at the chance to prove myself. I don’t like being played for a fool and Steward had played all of us. The only way to save Tanya was to expose him and clear her name. “Let me take you to my team,” I said at last.
She shook her head. “Your team think I’m the bad guy.”
“I can explain it to them.”
“We don’t have any evidence. It’s just my word against Steward’s. They won’t believe you.”
I shook my head. The team were good guys. They’d believe me…right? But she’d crossed her arms and was glaring at me stubbornly: no way was I going to convince her. I rubbed my beard. “Okay, so what do we do?”
“We don’t do anything,” she said. “You go back to your friends and tell them I escaped. I’ll go find some evidence to clear my name and hopefully track down Maravic at the same time.”
My stomach lurched. Maravic had nearly killed her, last time. “I’m not leaving you on your own!”
She cocked her head to one side and looked at me sadly. “Colton, I’m a spy. I’m always on my own.”
I scowled. “Not anymore.”
She stared at me. “You have orders!” As if on cue, my phone rang again: JD, worried about me. She waved her hand at it. “If they find out you helped me, you’ll get in trouble.”
My chest tightened. The last thing I wanted was to mess things up with the team. Those guys were the best thing to happen to me in a long time. But I couldn’t leave her on her own, either. I turned my phone off and slammed it down on the table. “I’ll deal with it. What’s our next move?”
She stared at me, incredulous. Then I saw that frozen blue in her eyes soften. “I think the stockbroker was working for Steward, too. He had some big stock market deal going on, except he got greedy and tried to make some money on the side by cutting in people like Konstantin. Steward found out and sent Maravic to kill him. But you don’t hire someone like Maravic just to kill a guy. Any low-rent thug can do that. So Maravic must already have been on Steward’s payroll, he’s doing something else for him, something bigger. If we can find out what the stockbroker was working on, maybe we can figure out their plan.”
“How do we do that?”
“I pulled some data off the stockbroker’s computer and stored it in the cloud.” She pulled out her phone and typed in a web address that was nothing but numbers, followed by a long username and password that were just as random.
“You can just remember stuff like that?” I asked, awed.
She blinked, like, can’t everyone? Then she thought about it for a moment. “It’s one of the skills they look for, when they recruit us.” The screen filled with text. “Look: it’s some sort of computer code, but I have no idea what it does. It’s full of equations. You any good at math?”
I thought for a while, then drained the last of my coffee. “No,” I told her. “But I know someone who is.”
34
TANYA
I shielded my eyes from the sun and looked up at the skyscraper, amazed. It was a beautiful old art deco building, with stone balconies and gargoyles. And here, in the heart of Manhattan, each apartment must be worth millions. “Who are we visiting, a hedge fund manager?”
“A mathematician. She’s one of this group of hackers who help us out, sometimes. And I got to know her boyfriend a little, last time I was in New York. He’s an FBI agent.”
An elevator whisked us up…and up. I realized Colton had pushed the button for the penthouse. Who is this woman?
The door was opened by a big, broad-shouldered guy in a suit. He had that sharp-eyed, always-watching look of an FBI agent but his tie was just askew enough that I wanted to straighten it for him, and his hair was tousled, as if he’d just gotten up. Or just gotten out of bed for some other reason. He shook my hand. “Sam,” he told me. “But everybody just calls me Calahan.”
