The spread a highland ho.., p.85
Linked by Deception, page 85
Linked by Deception
A PSY-IV Teams Novel
Jami Gray
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
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The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, or events, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Copyright © 2020 by Jami Gray
All rights reserved.
Linked by Deception - A PSY-IV Teams Novel - Book 5
Revised Publication: Feb 2020
Celtic Moon Press
ISBN: 978-1-948884-32-7 (ebook)
ISBN-13: 978-1-948884-33-4 (paperback)
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Cover Art: Robin Ludwig Design, Inc.
www.gobookcoverdesign.com
Contents
Acknowledgments
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Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
The Collapse: Fate’s Vultures
PSY - IV Teams Books
Also by Jami Gray
About the Author
This one wouldn’t have been possible without Chris Roberts, who came up with the brilliant baddie hacker name, Gatekeeper!
Thank you, Chris!
Acknowledgments
For every book I write, there is an entire silent support team that keeps me going. They have infinite patience as they listen to me find my way through each book. So as always, they have my undying gratitude. So thank you to my writing crew - DeAnna, Camille and Dave - my reading troupe - Monica, Jo and Nana - and my fearless editor, Sarah. As always, my love and thanks to my boys who manage to keep me stable every time I do this writing thing.
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Prologue
RABBIT
Holy shit, I’m in! After spending nearly a week of solid eighteen-hour days dodging nasty virus-filled traps and triggers that were swimming in a deeply masked server, I stared at a neat list of incriminating files. If the original owner, Major General Garrett Hawes, hadn’t already been six feet under, this information would have locked his ass away faster than the bodies he’d left in his wake.
I clicked through the files, scanning the contents. Names, dates, and mind-boggling monetary amounts were attached to a variety of illegal vices—everything from weapons running to human trafficking. The one that had tripped him up was treasonous trading of classified information. Hawes was a greedy but prolific bastard—that was for sure. And if it hadn’t been for one very brave young woman, he would have kept rolling in the green even as he sold out my team and his country, staining his uniform with innocent blood.
“You found something.” The husky feminine voice coiled around my heart and squeezed hard. A cup of coffee hit the table next to my laptop, jerking my attention away from the screen and toward my personal frustration-temptation, Jinx.
“That I did.” As she leaned in to read the screen, the hint of spiced vanilla teased me.
I nabbed the coffee, a safer option than wrapping my arm around her hips and dragging her into my lap to further explore that tantalizing scent and how far it went. As much as I enjoyed flirting with the fairer sex, taking such liberties with my teammate was highly inadvisable. Not that my libido cared. Hell no. It was more than happy to live dangerously. I, on the other hand, enjoyed both my job and my ability to keep breathing.
“Hawes was a busy bee, wasn’t he?” Jinx snagged my mouse and clicked through the recently deciphered batch of encrypted files, starting with the most recent. “Did you see this?” She turned to look at me. Caught in the gold-streaked depths of her dark eyes, I needed a second to break free and pay attention.
I sucked back some coffee, set my cup next to her hand—which was braced against the table—and focused on the screen. Reclaiming the mouse, I scrolled through a series of messages. Jinx snagged her chair and dragged it next to mine until the armrests clashed.
I read through the exchange and clued in to the trail of breadcrumbs she identified. “He was working with a hacker.”
“Makes sense.”
“Since the information he was passing along is highly encrypted, yeah, it does.”
No way had Hawes possessed the know-how to mine the information he’d gathered and sold. No, that skill belonged to someone else, and based on these conversations, that same hacker had managed to make a pretty sum for the jobs.
“Do you recognize their handle?” Jinx was so close that if I turned to look at her, I wouldn’t be able to resist kissing her. It was best to keep my eyes on my screen.
Dammit, man, mind on the job, not on your dick.
Years of military discipline kicked in, and I focused on the task at hand. What was her question? The hacker’s handle, right. I stared at the string of characters—G8K33pr—and tried to place it.
“No, but I can do some discreet asking around.” After years of skulking through the darkest corners of cyberspace at the behest of my government, I’d collected a wealth of contacts. If anyone knew of a black hat going by the unremarkable handle of Gatekeeper, it would be those people.
“You think that’s safe?” Jinx’s question was valid, considering the fact that the files I was combing through belonged to a high-ranking military officer, albeit a dead one. Plus, we were trying not to raise any flags with our investigation.
“Probably not, but it’s a starting point.”
Hawes’s death and the true circumstances surrounding his sudden life-status change were known only by a select few, all of whom were personally vetted by our fearless leader, retired Colonel Charlene Delacourt. Her decision to keep his death on a need-to-know basis bought us breathing room—enough so that we could crawl through Hawes’s electronic life quietly. But time was running out, and I could feel the air disappearing.
At my nonchalant answer, Jinx looked at me with a gimlet eye. “And if your legion of fellow cyberheads can’t help, then what?”
“Well, then, we’ll just go to Plan B.”
“Does Plan B require utilizing your less-than-legal skills?”
Since there was only one obvious response, I didn’t bother to answer. The lackluster information on hand left us with a blurry picture of Hawes’s motives, but based on what we’d pieced together, it was safe to assume that Hawes had been working with Falcon, the mercenary group of bad-guy psychics who were the yang to the PSY-IV team’s good-guy yin. To get that picture into sharp focus, we needed solid confirmation of that connection. Tying this hacker to Falcon would be a great start, but if my contacts came up empty, it would be time to pull a rabbit out of my proverbial cyber hat. Thanks to a genetic quirk that made technology and me best buds, manipulating electronics was one magic trick I could do.
Jinx narrowed her eyes when I didn’t say anything. “You’ll be careful.” Her voice held a demanding bite.
I didn’t dare release a grin of satisfaction. Instead, I leaned back in my chair and drawled, “Always, cher.”
My reassurance didn’t ease her frown. She turned to the screen and went back to reading the string of messages. Stifling a sigh, I sipped my coffee and let her read over my shoulder. I scrolled at a snail’s pace so we could both follow along. After nearly a year of working alongside Jinx, I’d become good at ignoring the urge to hoard every fascinating part of herself she reluctantly revealed. For each piece I patiently managed to uncover, a plethora of others remained hidden deep, like an endlessly fascinating puzzle. An added challenge to my quest was the metaphysical hand she kept raised in her determination to lock me inside her neat box marked Friend. My patience and I were all but done with that situation. But I would have to deal with it later.
I needed her to step back from the ledge of worry she was pacing. Imagine my surprise when I first discovered that the frighteningly capable Jinx was, in fact, a closet worrywart. Anyway, she could relax, because the upside to this investigative clusterfuck was the fact that we belonged to one of the PSY-IV teams—an off-the-books ex-military shadow team of psychics—so the rules could be bent. Hell, even if we broke one or two, it wouldn’t earn us more than a hand slap and a frown from Delacourt.
Jinx leaned forward, focusing on the screen. “Rabbit, check this out.”
I stopped scrolling and zeroed in on the section she indicated. Hawes’s messages had lost their vague, detached professionalism and now carried a blunt desperation.
“Scroll back up to the first message for me,” Jinx said.
Following her directions, I took us back to the top so we could determine where
the tone shifted.
“Look!” She pointed to the date on the very first message. “Do you recognize that date?”
Hell yeah. I set my coffee aside and leaned in, fingers flying over the keyboard as I pulled up a file on Megan Rouser, Delacourt’s administrative assistant. Sure enough, the date of Hawes’s initial message to his contact was just after our team pulled Megan out of the warehouse where she was being held and tortured.
“Someone was trying to cover his ass.”
“Big-time,” Jinx muttered. “And whoever is on the other end of this is not happy with his excuses.”
We both fell silent as we continued to read. “Here.” I stopped scrolling so Jinx could follow.
She sucked in a sharp breath. “Tell me I’m not seeing things.”
“If you are, then we’re both seeing the same damn thing.”
“Looks like he’s trying to curry favor by offering them something they need.” She kept reading the vaguely worded correspondence.
“Yeah, but there’s something…” My mind picked up speed as I brought up another screen and flicked through Hawes’s previous messages, looking for his initial approach to Gatekeeper. “This, here.” I stopped the dizzying scroll so Jinx could read the side-by-side screens. “Look how the dates fall.”
Jinx was no slouch and put the pieces together quickly. “He wasn’t offering a thing—he was offering a who.”
“He sure was.” With the two messages grouped side by side, there was no doubt that Hawes was trying to offer his big boss the services of our mysterious hacker. And it looked like the hacker was seriously considering taking the job. The more we read, the more certain I became that the big boss was none other than Falcon.
Jinx turned away from the screen, her eyes bright with anticipation. “Hawes was playing broker.”
“Yeah, he was.”
We continued to read through Hawes’s exchanges with his hacker partner. The farther I got, the clearer the plan morphing in my brain became, but I held off voicing it. There was no sense in saying anything until we talked to Delacourt.
We came to the last message, and Jinx sat back, dragging her hands through the sunlit strands of her honey hair. “We have an in.”
I stifled a wince, though I wasn’t surprised by the news or by how fast Jinx mirrored my thoughts. There was a reason we worked well as partners. “We might have an in,” I corrected.
She dropped her hands and folded her arms. “Might? According to that last message, his boss is waiting for him to supply a date and time for the initial meet with the hacker. That sounds like an in to me.”
Lack of sleep wore the edge of my temper thin, leaving a quick fuse on my frustration. “It’s not that easy.”
Instead of pushing, she did the sneaky, twisty thing she always did, turning the conversation around. “Don’t tell me you’re not up to this. You, king of all things electronic.”
Okay, that just wasn’t nice at all. Even knowing what she was doing, I couldn’t help saying, “I’m up for it.”
The flash of triumph in her eyes was quickly veiled by her long lashes. “Okay, then, I say we give Delacourt a sitrep and get this show on the road.”
“Mais you’re so tête dure,” I muttered under my breath because the woman was more stubborn than a jackass.
She shot me a look. “I heard that.”
I sighed. Of course she’d heard me, because she had ears like a damn bat. “Fine, you call Delacourt.” I went back to my keyboard, opening up a window.
She pulled out her phone. “Who are you contacting?”
“My fellow…” I paused. “What did you call them? Cyberheads? Delacourt’s going to want information on our mysterious Gatekeeper.” Plus, I’d rather know just how black a hat I’ll be wearing.
Chapter 1
Jinx
Three Weeks Later
Sitting blindfolded in the back of a new-smelling sedan was not how I thought I’d be spending my Friday night—although for the last three weeks, thanks to an unexpected development, my normal routine had been turned on its ear. Rabbit’s Q and A with his Ethernet friends had unearthed a treasure trove of information on our mysterious black-hat hacker, Gatekeeper. In fact, the amount of information Rabbit’s friends had shared left me certain that one or two of them worked with the NSA, the FBI, or the CIA—dealer’s choice. Considering how quickly Delacourt disappeared into a hush-hush meeting and came back with a green light on the plan Rabbit and I suggested, I was betting on the NSA.
From the start, things moved faster than normal, which meant we weren’t the only ones hoping to shut down the cesspool that Major General Hawes’s dirty deeds had managed to stir up. When Delacourt returned from her meeting, she informed us that prior to Hawes’s death, Gatekeeper had been picked up on an unrelated case and had since become a permanent unacknowledged guest of the US government. Before Rabbit could get too excited about having a clear shot at stepping into Gatekeeper’s shoes, Delacourt added a double twist. Not only was Gatekeeper a she, but there was also a high chance that she was only one half of a two-person team. The problem was, while no one could confirm that the mysterious second person really existed, they also couldn’t rule it out—which left Rabbit sidelined and me up to bat.
With the Colonel’s additional information, Rabbit and I adjusted our plan, factoring in the expectation that further contact with Gatekeeper would be made at some point—it was just a question of when. Whatever murky transaction Hawes had set in motion required a high level of hacking skill, and the best person for the job was Gatekeeper. Utilizing the past pattern of communication and behavior between Hawes and his mysterious boss, which the investigation pieced together, we had little doubt that Hawes’s boss wouldn’t pass up a chance to employ Gatekeeper’s services. We just needed to be the ones who answered that call.
When we first set this operation into motion, anxiety was my constant companion. Every incoming call or text left me jittery. But as the days passed and things stayed quiet, my hypervigilance downgraded to just vigilance. Now that they’d finally made the first move—kidnapping me—my nervousness was mitigated by a keen eagerness.
Rabbit’s low voice sounded in my ear, thanks to the skin tag that doubled as a personal tracking device and comm system. “You’re heading into Carmel Valley.”
Since the device was hidden behind my ear, my escorts hadn’t detected it during their frisk. There was no sign of Rabbit’s sexy accent, but that was always the case when we were working. It was one of my partner’s many curious facets that I refused to dwell on—that way lay dragons, and I’d given up chasing mythical creatures long ago. Though I enjoyed indulging in the flirty byplay he did so well, I knew better than to take him seriously.
I shifted in my seat, crossing my legs in an effort to ease the ache in the balls of my feet. Initially, I’d held high hopes of being able to wear jeans, T-shirts, and hoodies during this operation—stereotypical hacker wear. Instead, I ended up with a wardrobe of posh, expensive labels and ridiculously high heels that hurt like hell despite costing a small fortune—all part and parcel of the unlikely face of Gatekeeper’s real-life persona, Elena Drake, an in-demand, highly paid corporate consultant. While the exact details of what she consulted on were a little blurry, she had a successful legit business that catered exclusively to high-end clientele.
You would think that would be more than enough to keep her busy, but nope. Her polished mask hid a brilliant yet ruthless opportunist. After spending hours poring over her file and watching the taped interviews that were couriered to Delacourt, I was equally fascinated and appalled by what I’d read and heard. Much like the nightmare megalodon shark, she hunted in the darkest depths of data, targeting rising underworld market demands in some seriously nasty shit and leaving only microscopic clues in her wake before surfacing as the dominant predator. Self-possessed to an arrogant degree, she truly believed she was untouchable. And she was. Well, until she wasn’t. That arrogance became my key to unlocking her persona.
