Protector Unmatched, page 6
9
Checking into Daphne’s background was child’s play—and more than just a little surprising. Pearce read through the information he’d gathered—illegally—from various government sites and—legally—from public records. In fact, he was so engrossed in the details that he realized too late that he was no longer alone in the command center.
“She’s a convicted criminal?”
Pearce spun around to stare at Enya. “What do you want?”
Enya shrugged and pulled an office chair closer to sit down. “Just wanted you to know that I have your back.”
Surprised, Pearce kept looking at her. “And why’s that?”
“’Cause the others all seem to have amnesia when it comes to all the rules they broke when it came to their mates.”
“Daphne isn’t my mate.”
“Not yet. But the way you defended your actions just now shows me that you care about her.”
“I only care about the fact that I can’t just eliminate an innocent woman because of a vision Winter had.”
“Innocent?” Enya chuckled and pointed to the monitor. “Hardly. Looks like she has a bit of a rap sheet.”
“One single conviction,” he corrected her, and lifted his index finger to emphasize it. “For hacking. Which isn’t any worse than what I do on a daily basis.”
“True, but you do it to save the world.”
“We don’t know what Daphne’s motivation might have been, but it surely wasn’t monetary. She has no savings to speak of, and she lives in a run-down apartment and covers the peeling paint with a poster.”
“You were in her apartment?”
Shit! He’d said too much. “Just doing my due diligence,” he said curtly, and turned back to the computer.
There was a short pause, then Enya shook her head. “You were in her place when she was there. Did you spy on her? Watch her get undressed?”
Clenching his jaw, he glared at his fellow Stealth Guardian. “I’m not some pervert!”
Enya leaned back and lifted her hands. “I didn’t say that. Now, if we were talking about Manus… But you, I don’t see you doing that. So, why were you blushing when I asked you?”
“I wasn’t blushing!”
“Pearce, I’m not blind. I can tell when somebody’s blushing.”
He was saved from answering Enya’s embarrassing observation when a window suddenly popped open on his screen.
Alert. Searches for Pearce Douglas performed during the last 120 minutes: nineteen. More details.
“What’s that?” Enya asked.
“The program that captures every search that somebody runs on anybody here in the compound.”
“Oh, I forgot about that. Who would search for you nineteen times in two hours?”
“Somebody who wants to know who I really am.” It wasn’t hard to guess who it was.
“Daphne?” Enya murmured.
He nodded.
“But why tonight? And how does she know your full name?”
“I gave it to her.”
“So you did speak to her.”
“I never said I didn’t.”
“You let the others believe that you hadn’t made contact with her.”
He gave her a sideways look. “Are you gonna run to them to tell them?”
“That depends.”
“On what?”
“On how this plays out.” She pointed to the monitor. “Go on, then—what did she try to find out about you?”
Pearce dug into the file and quickly perused it. All searches came from the same IP address. “Let’s see if that’s Daphne’s.” He typed in a few commands, and less than a minute later, he found the location of the IP address. “China.”
“So, it’s not her?”
“I’m not saying that. She’s a hacker who got caught. That means as part of her plea agreement, she’s not allowed to do any more hacking, or the agreement is voided. She probably covered herself. Let me see.” He opened another program, then pasted the IP address into it and let it run. “We’ll know in a minute or two.”
And they did. Pearce pointed to a map that popped up, and to a dot that now blinked. “That’s her apartment. She rerouted her IP address via several countries, piggybacking on a corporate server. Clever.” He looked at the timestamps. “She started googling me the moment I left.”
“Maybe if you told me what happened while you were there, I could tell you from a woman’s perspective what she was looking for,” Enya suggested.
“Nice try.” He started typing again. “First, she googled to get at all the public info. She hit the LinkedIn and Facebook pages that I set up as cover. But that clearly wasn’t enough. She hacked into the DMV and the Social Security Administration.”
“Is she good?”
“Pretty talented hacker. But I’m better.”
He could almost hear Enya rolling her eyes. “Oh, please. What did she find at the DMV and Social Security? Any problems there?”
“Nope. All my documents are current. Nothing looks out of the ordinary there.” After all, he was the one to make sure that the cover documentation for all Stealth Guardians of the Baltimore compound was kept up to date so, in case they ever got into a traffic stop or something similar, they had valid IDs. “Everything’s clean.”
Daphne had hacked into a few more government servers, including the FBI, the local police department, and the sex offender register. Enya pointed to those alerts and grinned. “She checked to see if you have a record. Looks to me like the kind of woman who checks to see if her date is legit.”
“It wasn’t a date!”
“Wow, touchy.”
“It proves something totally different.”
“Enlighten me.”
Pearce swiveled in his chair and faced Enya. “The fact that she had to do a full search on me, and that up until now she didn’t know me at all, means that whatever event is the reason she’ll kill me hasn’t happened yet.”
Slowly, Enya let out a breath. “Have you considered that by meeting her, by talking to her, you might have just triggered this event?”
“The thought crossed my mind.”
“What are you gonna do now?”
“Follow through with my plan.”
“Which is?”
“Change Winter’s vision so I won’t die.”
“Need help with that?”
“Not right now.”
“You know where to find me.”
“I appreciate it.”
She rose and hesitated for a moment. “And Pearce, don’t play with her feelings. Scorned women are dangerous.”
“I wasn’t—”
But Enya was already passing through the door, leaving him alone with his decision.
~ ~ ~
Since it was Friday, Pearce figured that Daphne might finish work earlier than the previous day, and therefore installed himself in a small bistro across the street from her office just after four o’clock. While he nursed his drink and ate a pastry, he watched the entrance to Cyberhack like a hawk. He could have called Daphne for a date, of course, but after checking her background and seeing what lengths she was going through to figure out who he was, he decided to let caution reign for now. There was no rush. It was better to watch her tonight, learn her routine, and discover those things that no background check could reveal. If he got bored of that, he could always call her for a date later.
When it was close to sunset, more and more people streamed out of the office building, until he finally saw Daphne’s black pixie haircut stand out from the masses. She was casually dressed, just like the day before. Her messenger bag was slung diagonally across her torso. He had to admit, despite the fact that she seemed to have no interest in fashion, she looked good. The style suited her. It went well with her short hair and her heart-shaped face, those green eyes… He noticed that, just like the night before, she wore little to no makeup. Well, she didn’t need it. Her skin was perfect. Damn, he had to rip his gaze from her before he started reliving the kiss from the night before.
Not wanting to lose sight of Daphne, Pearce quickly tossed money on the table, waved goodbye to the waitress, and went outside. Unfortunately, he’d made one miscalculation: he was visible, and since he was in plain sight of several people, and there was no alley he could dip into to make himself invisible without anybody noticing, he had to remain visible. Daphne was waiting for the lights to change in order to cross the street together with several other people. She was heading his way, though she hadn’t spotted him yet.
What now? Something colorful caught his eye from his left. There, on one of the outside tables, which were all empty, stood a small vase with a tiny bunch of wildflowers. Perfect. He glanced through the windows inside. The waitress was nowhere to be seen. Quickly, he snatched the bunch of flowers out of the vase and turned back toward the intersection, expecting Daphne to be almost upon him. But she wasn’t. Where had she gone?
He glanced back to Daphne’s office, but she hadn’t turned back there. Then he looked to his right and saw her disappear around the corner of the next building, a bank. He marched in the same direction, walking faster in order to catch up with her. When he caught sight of her again, he realized that she held her phone to her ear and had slowed down. A moment later, she stopped at the entrance of a building, but she didn’t go inside. Rather, she stood there to carry on her conversation.
“Yes, I got the plans,” he heard her say when he was only a few yards away from her, her face turned away from him. She sounded stressed. Had she had a hard day at work? Or perhaps she hadn’t gotten enough sleep last night, since she’d scoured the internet for information on him. He knew how the lack of sleep could make people cranky. He didn’t hold it against her.
Pearce was about to make Daphne aware that he was behind her when she added, “No, the security system is no problem. I can get past it.”
Security system? Something was up. And he had to find out what it was.
When the door to the building suddenly opened and a businessman exited, Daphne stepped aside, father away from Pearce and still looking in the other direction. This was his chance. Pearce snatched the door before it could snap in and walked into the foyer, which turned out to be an office building. He was in luck: though there was a desk where a doorman should sit, it was empty.
Nobody saw him when he turned himself invisible, then marched through the closed door back outside, where Daphne was just finishing her conversation.
“Yes, tonight.” Another pause. “No police. Yeah, I’m not stupid. And you’d better not be stupid either. If you hurt him—”
She suddenly pulled the cell phone away from her ear. “Asshole.”
Clearly, whoever she’d spoken to wasn’t her favorite person. And it was also clear that something illegal was going down. He had to find out what it was. And if it had anything to do with Winter’s death vision, he had to stop it.
Whatever was happening tonight could be the triggering event, as Enya had called it. The event that set Daphne on her path to killing him.
He had to be on his guard.
10
Daphne unlocked the door to her apartment and rushed inside, flicking the light switch on the way in. She didn’t have much time. Guido had been very specific about what he wanted her to do and when. As if a job like this didn’t need any preparation on her side. As if she were a miracle worker. And Guido and his gang wouldn’t even be there to help. They’d decided that she could do it all on her own. She was the only one who was risking something, while Guido sat back and watched. And of that she was sure: he, or somebody associated with him, watched her to make sure she didn’t go to the police at the last minute.
As if she could go to the police! Her brother’s life was at stake, and since she hadn’t been able to get any actionable information from Pearce the night before, she had to follow Guido’s orders. Tracing her brother’s cell phone hadn’t been successful either. It had been switched off until the moment Guido had called her from it.
It took her less than two minutes to change into black pants, a black turtleneck sweater, and black tennis shoes. Gloves completed her cat burglar look. She emptied her messenger bag and placed the few tools she needed inside: an assortment of screwdrivers, steel-cutting pliers, clamps, cables, a small flashlight, and her computer. During an unguarded moment at work, she’d printed the instructions Guido had emailed her from Tim’s email account. She folded those, stuffed them in her pants pocket, and snatched her darkest jacket from her closet. With her messenger bag slung across her body, she left the apartment less than ten minutes after she’d entered it.
She’d memorized the address Guido had given her. It was in a good part of town—in fact, in a very good part. Knowing she couldn’t leave any trace of where she was going, an Uber was out of the question. Instead, she took the bus as far as she could, then got off and walked the rest of the way. A few times, she looked over her shoulder, unable to shake the feeling that somebody was following her. But she saw nobody. It appeared that Guido’s people were skilled at shadowing their victims.
The address turned out to be a fancy two-story house with a pristine front yard and iron fences surrounding it. One outside light illuminated the driveway, but otherwise the property was dark. Daphne looked at her watch. She was right on time, and just like Guido had said, nobody was home. And it was too early for people to be in bed already.
Daphne walked to the other side of the property, the tradesmen entrance, which was used mainly to move trash cans from the house to the street. Two of said trash cans stood at the curb, and a third one stood just inside the gate. The light shining on the driveway didn’t reach here. The path was dark, and one of the streetlights that should have illuminated the tradesmen entrance had burned out, though she suspected that this was no accident.
After looking up and down the street, Daphne pulled one of the trash cans closer to the gate. Then she lifted herself up onto it, glad that the can was filled to the top, so the plastic lid supported her weight without caving in. With her gloved hands, she held on to the iron spikes of the gate, then climbed over it. Still holding on to the spikes, she swung to the side, so her feet touched the trash can on the other side of the gate. Slowly, she lowered herself onto it. It was empty, which was probably why it had been left inside the property. The lid started giving, but she managed to jump off and land on the ground before breaking it.
“Phew.”
Before getting up, she looked over her shoulder, making sure nobody had seen her acrobatics. She wasn’t used to this kind of exercise anymore. True, as a hacker there’d been a few incidents where she and her fellow computer geeks had had to vacate a place rather abruptly, often in the middle of the night, but she’d always had to leave a property, not break into one. This was different, even for her.
After verifying that she was still alone, Daphne stalked toward the house. She walked along the narrow path that led around the left of it and turned when she reached the corner of the house. She peered around it. The backyard was large and just as meticulously kept as the front yard. It bordered a similar property behind it, though the fence between the two properties was older and lower than in the front and on the sides. The large deck, which took up at least a third of the backyard, was furnished with a table and chairs as well as a supersized BBQ that looked like it cost more than the average American car.
On the back wall of the house, she found what she was looking for: a control panel. Several cables encased in steel tubes led into the panel, making it virtually impossible to cut the cables from there. The steel panel itself was locked. She could see it clearly, because the moon was just coming out from behind a cloud, providing sufficient light to make out the lock. It wasn’t hard to open it. Her steel-cutting pliers and a little elbow grease took care of the lock. Her heart was already beating faster. Shit, she’d just graduated from hacker to burglar. Even a lenient judge wouldn’t look past that.
In for a penny, in for a pound. It was real now. She was committing a crime. A crime that could get her five to eight in a state prison. Her brother had better be grateful for the rest of his life, considering what she was risking for him.
She wiped the perspiration off her brow, placed the pliers back in the messenger bag, pulled out her flashlight, and inspected the interior of the panel closely. Guido’s instructions had been vague about what she would find there, but he’d given her the name of the security system the house was protected with. It helped. The control panel had the right connectors inside to hook up a computer.
Knowing how to proceed, Daphne pulled out her laptop and booted it up. Once logged in, she opened a program. With a firewire, she connected her computer to the control panel, waited for her computer to recognize the connection, then started typing commands.
Several lines of code appeared. She read them, knew what they meant, then reacted with code of her own. A flood of lines filled the window, falling like green raindrops on the dark background. The program was trying millions of different combinations to disable the security system.
“Come on, come on,” she whispered to herself. Patience had never been her forte.
Finally, the lines of codes stopped. A last line with only one word appeared: Disabled.
Bingo!
She still had it. Still had the skills that she’d nearly gone to prison for. And that could land her there even now if she wasn’t careful. But she couldn’t think about that now. She had to finish the job before the residents returned.
Entering the property was the easiest of her tasks: one of the windows looking out over the deck had been left unlocked. How Guido had known that, she wasn’t sure, but she suspected that somehow he had access to the house. Which raised the question why he wasn’t doing the job himself.
Daphne slid the sash window up and crawled through the opening. When she got up and looked around, she noted that she was in the living room. The elegantly furnished room confirmed that the people here had money, and whatever was in that safe she was supposed to clean out—and Guido was very specific about taking everything out of it, no matter what it was—had to be valuable.
