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There was a man standing in the hallway, watching her silently. How had he even gotten in, she wondered, panic overwhelming her. He was tall and strong. Wearing a black balaclava and gloves. When he saw her, he took a giant step toward her.
Lisa gave a high, terrified scream. She knew she should do something – run upstairs, try to fight him off, scream louder - but her legs had turned to water and fear had paralyzed her.
Finally, too late, she turned and tried to run, tried to head for the back door, needing to get away from this terrifying, impossible presence in her home.
But those strong, gloved hands grabbed her shoulder, dragging her backward.
And then, they closed around her neck.
CHAPTER ONE
"What do I do?" Cami said aloud, again.
She'd been saying it a lot over the past couple of days. Nonstop, in fact. Not only to herself but also to Kieran, the twenty-three-year-old man whose apartment she'd moved into a few weeks ago and now, whose bedroom she was sharing.
She'd fallen for Kieran, hard. They were boyfriend and girlfriend now. And confiding in him, getting his advice, felt like a lifeline for her now. It felt as if she wasn't alone.
Kieran's face was serious as he sat cross-legged on the bed opposite her. He was holding her hand in his own, in a long-sleeved plaid shirt ready for his working day as an engineer who worked in construction and maintenance.
Her hand, with silver rings on three of the fingers, black nail polish, and a tattoo visible on her arm below the three-quarter sleeve of the dark gray top she wore, looked small in his.
She wasn't built strongly, she wasn't tall and she wasn't powerful. But on a keyboard, her fingers could be her lethal weapon. IT and hacking was where her skill lay.
"Cami, it's time," Kieran encouraged her. "You really need to tell Connor what you've found out."
Cami swallowed, hard.
She knew he was right. It was time. But the thought of doing it was petrifying to her.
"Look, he knows a lot already. Probably more than you think he does," Kieran urged her.
Squeezing his hand tighter, Cami nodded. "I guess so," she admitted.
"After all, this all started when your sister went missing, and that was what - six years ago, now?"
"Yes. I was sixteen at the time, Jenna was eighteen," Cami said, her mind going back to her sister's disappearance, the way that her police officer father had refused to believe it was anything but an act of rebellion and that Jenna was a runaway. It had been so traumatic. The FBI had been called in - eventually, and in Cami's opinion, only after her father had finished his blustering and criticism about her sister's attitude and her refusal to listen and that this was just another reason she'd never amount to anything.
Meanwhile, traumatized and confused, Cami had just wanted her found! This was urgent. Jenna would never, ever have run away without telling Cami.
The FBI case had come to nothing, and that had always rankled deeply with Cami. It was the reason why, at the end of her final year studying computer science at MIT, she'd hacked the FBI's homepage.
Unfortunately, she hadn't covered her tracks sufficiently. The FBI, in the form of agent Connor, had come looking for her, and she'd been offered an ultimatum - to avoid prosecution, work for us when we need you for a year.
The year was more than half over now, and Cami trusted Connor a lot more than she'd done at the start.
At the same time, she'd realized that the trouble in the FBI ran far deeper than she'd thought.
Liam Treverton, the ex-agent who'd been in charge of Jenna’s case until he'd been told to drop it, had recently been murdered. And Kieran's brother, FBI agent Ethan Myers, who had found out that there were irregularities within the FBI and who'd been trying to uncover them, had been shot and had died from his injuries.
That was what had originally brought Cami and Kieran together.
Since then, she'd discovered a senior agent who was still working in the FBI and who all of this traced back to.
His name was Bill Oertel.
He'd forced Liam Treverton to hand over the case.
He'd been in communication with unknown individuals at key times just before Liam and Ethan had been killed. Bill Oertel was a bad guy, and he had been pulling the strings to make sure this happened. That, she now knew for sure.
