AllFreeNovel
Share Us
But still, to keep something like this from her? It seemed extreme.
“Some other fun facts came out in the testimony, too,” Kyle added, heavy sarcasm overlaying every word.
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah. Like the fact that Arrieta threatened Nick’s lifemonthsbefore he was killed. On the one hand, Williams’s testimony cleared me and the rest of the team—no one thinks we’re responsible for Nick’s death anymore.”
Natalie’s eyebrows shot up at the unexpected good news. In an attempt to keep the investigation of Nick’s death from exposing his own operations, Williams had tried to use his levers of power to get Nick’s team charged with his murder. If they’d taken the fall, everything could have been swept neatly under the rug. When the military didn’t move fast enough at charging them, Williams had used the tabloid he owned to print lies about the team, attempting to convict them in the court of public opinion. It had gotten pretty messy. The worst accusations had been slung at Spencer, the team’s sniper, but Kyle was team leader—he took any attack on one of his men as an attack on him.
“That’s great,” she said, mustering a smile. “You must be relieved that that’s over.”
“Relieved?” Kyle barked out a harsh laugh with no humor to it. “On the contrary. Now that I know what really happened, I know how far in advance you were aware of the danger. You could have prevented Nick’s assassination. And you didnothing.”
Natalie gasped, feeling like she’d been punched in the stomach even though Kyle hadn’t moved an inch. “I-it wasn’t like that,” she argued. “I told you, when you and the guys grabbed me down by the canal. They threatened me.”
“Yeah, but that was when we thought you were just working with Becks. Now we come to find that you had the CIA behind you the whole time. You had power and authority you could have used to protect Nick, and you just stood by. You didn’t even warn him.”
“I couldn’t,” she pleaded. “I was being monitored—every phone call, every email. If I’d let even a word slip to him, it could have blown the entire operation, and the higher-ups weren’t taking any chances. Ibeggedthem to save Nick. You have to believe me, Kyle. Ipleadedwith them. I…I wanted them to make him part of the operation—have him fake his death. Then Arrieta and Williams would stay in the dark, and he’d be safe. But they said it was too much of a risk, that he couldn’t be trusted to keep the secret from everyone else—and that it would be too dangerous if all of you knew. I was still trying to convince them all the way up to the day when I was notified that he’d been killed. I swear I tried to save him, Kyle. Iswear.”
“Don’t bother,” he said, his voice low and cold. “Your word doesn’t mean shit to me.”
Tears sprang to her eyes, but she blinked them back. He’d just see them as another attempt at manipulation.
“This arguing is pointless,” she said, doing her best to sound calm and detached. “We can’t stay in here forever. Let’s just find what we’re looking for and get the hell out of here.”
“But we’re both looking for the same thing, aren’t we?” he pointed out. “So which one of us gets it?”
“Me,obviously.” Why were they even discussing it? “Kyle, I have to turn that computer over to the CIA. You have no idea what’s at stake here.”
“I knowexactlywhat’s at stake,” he countered. “Better than you do, since you’ve been kept out of the loop.”
Low blow, even if he wasn’t wrong. “You don’t have the training to handle a virus like this,” she pointed out.
“Well, I don’t trust the CIA to handle it,” he shot back. “You’re the guys who trained Arrieta in the first place.”
And that…was also true. She still thought the CIA was the best option for handling this, but it was clear that she wasn’t going to be able to convince him, and he didn’t seem all that hopeful that he’d be able to convince her.
“Look, we haven’t even found it yet,” he pointed out. “Finders keepers?”
“Fine.” She got busy digging through a pile of boxes and dusty old decorations in one corner, while Kyle took the other. She was almost finished searching through her last box when she struck pay dirt.
Sort of.
“Well, crap.”
“What’s wrong?” Kyle said, peering over her shoulder into the container. “Damn.”
There were two small notebook computers, not one. Identical.
No way to tell which one had the intel. It could be on one, on the other, on both, or on neither.
“Great.” She pulled out the first one, sat on the floor, and pushed the power button, relieved when it booted up. She scrolled through the main list of files on the hard drive, searching for the name the techs had given her to make sure she had the right machine.
Arrieta had named his virus after his mother, Rosarita. Except there didn’t seem to be anything even remotely resembling that name on her notebook.
“What the hell are you doing? Playing mah-jongg?” Kyle asked, his tone annoyed. He grabbed the small computer from her hands. “It’s not like we’ve got all night. Let me try.”
“Fine.” She hadn’t found anything useful on that one anyway. Natalie pulled the second notebook from the box and hit the startbutton. “Good luck there, Bill Gates.”
