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“They want me dead,” she whispers. It’s not a question from her but a fact. One I’m not going to downplay to her.
“Yes, they do, I won’t lie to you. But they aren’t going to get what they want, are they. We aren’t going to give them an opportunity to get anywhere near you,” I tell her with all the confidence I can give her.
“But how do we stop them?”
The only way I know how.
“We disappear,” I mouth to her with no voice at all.
“What?” Confusion is all I see in her eyes.
I don’t want to talk here. I can’t trust the house isn’t bugged in some way after Rocket’s revelations just now. I’m ninety-nine percent sure there are no bugs, but suddenly, I have that one percent of doubt in my gut.
I put my finger on her lips, silencing her. I need Cassie to understand what I’m saying. “Just give me a few minutes. Then we need to go for a walk. Understand?”
She nods her head, and I know Cassie has caught on to what I mean.
I’ve been telling the department that they need to get better at cyber security, but it falls on deaf ears. Now it’s going to come back and bite them. They have no idea that for the last four weeks I’ve been manipulating all the security feeds they see from here. Which proves to me that every job I’m on, it is up to the agents to keep our clients safe, because the people monitoring our security feeds are useless.
Taking Cassie with me into my room, I leave her sitting on my bed while I go to work. The good thing about us being here for a while and Cassie not having much with her is that we have a limited number of outfits. Repeating the feeds is easy to do with the outfit that she has on today. A plain white t-shirt that fits nicely over her breasts and shows the curves of her body. She has gotten used to living in her gym leggings because they’re comfortable. Plain black is what she has on today. I’m not complaining. Her legs look awesome in them, and it’s hard to keep my hands off her. For me, I’m generally the same. Black t-shirt, tight so that it doesn’t restrict my movements, and my cargo pants. The number of pockets in them makes it easy to carry a few weapons that are concealed but readily accessible. The most adventurous I get is to change the color. Black, navy, or on a bold day, I might even wear the dark gray pair. There is method to my boring behavior. If I need to slide into the shadows, then the dark clothes make it easier.
I have a bad feeling that I might be sliding into the darkness shortly, and I'm not sure when I will resurface. For me, it won’t be hard. I’ve done it before, and no one thinks anything about it when I disappear for an extended period. You need to be detached from friends and family to do this job. You can’t be worrying about anyone else’s safety except the client you’re protecting. That is what Bull struggles with the most. He loves his family and is extremely close to them. He finds it hard to know they worry when he's gone. Although he’s doing the job he loves, his family miss him and just want him home safe with them. When I met them, I understood why he finds it difficult to leave them.
Growing up, I didn’t have what he did. My mom and dad should have split up before I was even born. But stupidly they thought bringing a child into the circus of their life drama would make their marriage better. All the arguments would stop, and of course, they would have the perfect family. They were slow learners. Two more sisters after me and still things were the same. Truth be told, they were probably even worse. By the time I was old enough to leave home, I took the first job I could to get me out of there.
It sounds cliché, but I worked in the mail room for a gun supply company. I used to see them being made on the assembly line and started to memorize how the parts went together. I wanted to be able to hold one and fire it, so I went to night school to get my security license. They taught me how to use a firearm safely and all the legalities around the security industry. But the most important thing it did was introduce me to computers, the internet, and the use of surveillance cameras.
I saved my next few paychecks, living off ramen noodles, so I could buy my first laptop. I moved around between a few hostels, but there was one that happened to be next to the local library. It was the first password I ever hacked so I could use their internet at night to learn and start refining my hacking skills. I never used it for bad things, but I soon found out that others did. The things I was starting to see on the dark web had me fearing for where this world was heading.
Before long, I had taken a security job at the gun supply company and could afford a one-bedroom dump to live in. It wasn’t much but it was mine, and it was better than living at home in the middle of the yelling and screaming. My two sisters had grown up in that environment, so now just joined in the constant shit fight that was happening. Jodelle, the youngest, asked me a few times if she could live with me, and I thought about it for a while, thinking that maybe if I could get her out of there too, then maybe I could break the toxicity.
Then the day I went over to talk to my parents about it, I found her in the house on her own, snorting coke. It turns out the only reason she wanted to live with me was so she could do her drugs whenever she wanted, and later, I learned she was selling her body to the boys in her class to pay for the drugs. My parents were too busy hating each other and blaming one another for their daughter being a drug addict that nobody stopped to try to help her. My other sister, Lucy, blamed me and said if I didn’t move out then it wouldn’t have happened.
That day when I walked away from the house, I knew I needed to get out and never look back. A month later, there was a transfer to the headquarters of the company I worked for as the head of security, so I took that. Even though I was young, they saw potential in me. One day, I heard one of the guys at work talking about applying to become a WITSEC agent, and I jumped straight onto researching it. There was a lot of training involved, and it took a long time to get to the end goal, but it meant I could disappear into another world. It held so much appeal. I applied that night, making my resume look better than it was and tweaking a few databases to make sure they matched up with what I listed in my application. I applied under a different name so there was no trace to my family history and just used one I had made up and planted all the data in the web I needed to exist. It was a risk because the background checks are intense, but my already skillful computer talents got me through, and I’m thankful every day for whoever wasn’t doing their job properly when checking.
Sure, I went about things the wrong way, but I didn’t hurt anyone in the process. I’ve never looked back and have given my life to the agency, saving many lives and serving my country with dedication and passion. I don’t regret a thing. Everything I have taught myself I’ve always used to keep people safe and make sure that certain information ends up in the right people’s hands to rid the world of the vile creatures who lurk in the darkness.
Setting the video feeds to run now for the next forty-eight hours without needing to be touched, I feel a bit more settled. This will give me time to get us out of here and far enough away that the trail will be cold by the time they discover we aren’t here. The whole time I have been programing the computer, I can feel Cassie’s presence behind me on my bed. Although I probably shouldn’t call it my bed. I haven’t slept in it for the past month.
Finishing putting the secure coding into the system, I turn to see her sitting there with her knees up against her chest and her arms wrapped around them. Pulling herself into a secure ball. It’s a common defense mechanism in a time of stress. Make our body as small as we can and protect our most vulnerable thing, our heart.
“Come with me,” I command, holding out my hand and pulling her up off the bed. If I had time, I’d take her to our room and fuck the fear right out of her, but we need to get out of here. Sooner rather than later.
Heading out the back door and off into the tree line, I take her behind the biggest tree, just in case there are any cameras I don’t know about that have been planted to trick me up. I wouldn’t put it past Rocket to have had a second agent with him that was outside planting things. I want to trust he is on my side, but I just can’t seem to gauge it right now.
“Ghost, what's happening? I’m scared.” I know she is, but I need her to be strong right now.
“To be honest, I’m not sure what is going on behind the scenes. Rocket arriving here the way he did has me second-guessing everything.”
“Everything?” Her tentative voice is a barely above a whisper.
“Don’t misunderstand what I mean. I’m just talking about the intel from the department. All my information is secure, and I don’t doubt any of what I have found. What I’m worried about is the move to bring you into the light again.”
What I really wanted to say was, there has definitely been a hit put out on Cassie, that I can guarantee. That’s why they are trying to flush her out into the open.
Not on my watch.
It’s more than that. This is no longer a job.
