Protector Unmatched, page 2
“He’s never gonna find out.”
“Famous last words.”
Pearce shrugged. “You’ll be invisible the entire time.” And not just because in her current state—shimmering golden—she couldn’t be seen in public. The demons were still after her for her psychic gift. If Winter ever fell into their hands, they would have a tool with which to destroy the Stealth Guardians.
“Come on,” he said, “don’t tell me you don’t get cabin fever, being cooped up here day in day out.”
“Fine. I’ll go with you.”
It took only a few minutes to research the two Daphnes and find out where they worked. It took another twenty minutes to leave the compound invisibly and make their way to the workplace of the first Daphne. It was a preschool.
Pearce felt his heart pound harder when they entered the small building in which the preschool was located. Would he meet his would-be killer here, where wee toddlers and kids up to five years of age were playing without worry, without a care in the world? Was the woman who was going to kill him masquerading as a preschool teacher?
Pearce held Winter’s arm and led her down the short corridor, reading the signs next to the doors. Though nobody was in the corridor, he didn’t speak and instead pointed to one of the doors, directing Winter there. On a sign it said, Miss Daphne Atherton’s class. A window in the door allowed them to look into the room.
He saw movement behind the door and several kids running around a woman who was handing out sugary treats. He stepped aside to give Winter sufficient space to look into the room, while he watched the corridor to make sure that nobody surprised them.
It took less than thirty seconds for Winter to turn away from the window in the door and shake her head, mouthing, “No.”
He understood and nodded. Silently they left the building. Outside, still invisible, he asked, “Are you sure?”
“One hundred percent.”
“Okay, let’s check out the other Daphne.”
3
A latte in one hand, a large messenger bag slung across her body, Daphne fished out her ID card from her jacket pocket. To her dismay, the lanyard got tangled up with her cell phone, which she’d haphazardly stuffed into the same pocket, and pulled it out. It dropped on the stone floor before she could catch it.
“Crap,” she cursed, while she heard the security guard snicker. She tossed him an annoyed look and picked up the phone, careful not to spill the hot beverage. Inspecting the screen, she was pleased to see that the shatterproof casing had done its job. Nevertheless, she couldn’t resist reacting to the security guard’s snickering. “This wouldn’t happen if you didn’t make me show my ID every day. For God’s sake, Gus, you know who I am!”
Gus stood next to his desk and shoved his beer belly in her direction. “Company policy. You know it. No exceptions. Not even for you, Daphne.”
“I really don’t know why that’s necessary. I’ve been working here for six months.”
“True, but what if you got fired from one day to the next, and I don’t get the memo right away? Can’t let anybody unauthorized enter. Cybersecurity starts at home.” He pointed to the card reader next to him.
Grumbling a curse underneath her breath, she tapped her card. A green light blinked.
“See,” Gus said smugly, “now I know you haven’t gotten fired yet. Was that so hard?”
“You have a nice day, too,” she said, infusing her tone with a good dose of sarcasm. She dropped her messenger bag into a tray and shoved it through the scanner, where a second security guard inspected the contents via a computer screen.
“Try not to get fired today,” Gus called after her as she marched through the metal detector. “I would miss our little chats in the mornings.”
Behind the scanner, Daphne grabbed her bag again, then waited in front of the elevator doors until they opened with a ding. She cast a look back at Gus, but he wasn’t looking in her direction. She liked the clean-shaven fifty-something man, but she didn’t like rules. However, suddenly working in the corporate world meant she had to play by them now, whether she felt stifled by them or not.
In a way, she’d been lucky. Had her criminal defense attorney not struck a deal with Cyberhack, an international cybersecurity company, who regularly employed ex-hackers as a means to combat cybercrime, she would have done time in prison for hacking. To her surprise, the judge in her case had been lenient, and she’d gotten away with probation only. Part of the plea agreement had been a three-year employment contract with Cyberhack. And she had to keep her nose clean. The only hacking she was allowed to perform was in the service of the company to test their own software.
It was a good job, it paid decently—better than the laundry shop in prison, anyway—and she had relatively flexible hours. As long as she performed the tasks her boss assigned every day, she could set her own hours. But, of course, there were rules. She wasn’t allowed to consort with any of the other ex-hackers the company employed. She followed that edict, not because it was a company rule, but because she wasn’t interested in hanging out with them anyway.
She was done with that part of her life. She’d spent enough years in crappy apartments smelling of cold pizza and flat soft drinks, shacked up with like-minded hackers wanting to disrupt government, to change the world, to wake up people to the problems the world was facing. And where had it gotten her? Into court. And nearly into prison. She was out. Done. From now on, she would be on the straight and narrow. Follow the rules. Operate within the law.
The elevator doors opened on the fifth floor. Daphne got out and took a quick gulp of her latte, then walked down the corridor to her cubicle. Over half the cubicles were occupied with other cybersecurity specialists typing away feverishly. Others would arrive whenever they rolled out of bed. Daphne preferred not to arrive past ten o’clock, since she liked having her evenings to herself rather than stay late. However, this morning she’d overslept.
The neighborhood the office was located in wasn’t exactly the best, and once night fell, questionable characters loitered in the dark alleys around the building. She made a point of leaving work while the sidewalks were still teeming with other workers. No need taking a chance with her life. Even though she was a criminal, she’d never committed a violent crime, and she certainly didn’t want to be a victim of one. Since she was on probation, she carried no weapon to defend herself against the hoodlums that crawled out of their hiding places at night.
Daphne set her latte on the desk in her cramped cubicle, met the glances of several of her colleagues with a quick nod, then dropped her bag on the floor, plopped into her chair, and switched on the computer. While the machine powered up, she dug into her bag and pulled her noise-cancelling headphones from her messenger bag. At least she could listen to music during work, which helped her concentrate.
Once she was logged in, she quickly reviewed the work assignment her boss had sent to her screen. She shrugged to herself. If her boss knew that the tasks he gave her to work on would barely take her half a day, he would surely double her workload. But she never let on that she was capable of so much more. After all, why should she be punished for working faster and more efficiently than the other employees?
Daphne was about to put her headphones on when her cell phone vibrated in her pocket. She quickly lifted herself a few inches out of her chair to be able to see her boss’s glass-enclosed office. He frowned on employees taking calls on their cell phones, but luckily, he was engrossed in a conversation with another employee. Letting herself fall back in her chair, she reached for her phone and looked at the display.
“Fuck,” she cursed under her breath. Seeing her brother’s name show up on the display was giving her instant heartburn. She contemplated ignoring the call, but she knew he would keep calling and texting until she replied.
“What do you want?” she answered in a hushed voice, using her hand to shield her mouth so her voice wouldn’t carry across the office.
“Listen carefully.”
The command jolted her involuntarily. The voice wasn’t her brother’s. And it sounded muffled, as if somebody was speaking through a layer of clothing.
“Who the fuck are you?”
“My name isn’t important.”
“So you stole his phone, asshole.” It didn’t surprise her. After all, the kind of people her brother hung around with had a disregard for other people’s property.
“Borrowed it,” the man snapped. “But you listen to me now—”
“Put my brother on!”
“He can’t talk right now. He’s a little tied up.” Daphne could make out a chuckle in the background.
Great! So her brother had gotten drunk, and his idiot friends were playing a prank. She had no time for their games.
“You know what? Tell my brother to grow up!” She stabbed the end call button and tossed her phone on a stack of papers. “Jerks!”
Her cubicle neighbor, Neil, a geek with John Lennon glasses and a goatee, popped his head over the cubicle wall. “Problem?”
She tossed him a glance and rolled her eyes. “Family.”
He grimaced. “Yep, best to ignore them. That’s what I do.”
“My plan exactly,” she agreed, and watched him dip down again. A moment later, she heard him tapping away on his keyboard.
Ready to work, Daphne opened a new window on her screen, but before the program could even fully load, a chime on her phone alerted her to a text message. She reached for it and looked at the display. A message from her brother. Big surprise. Clearly, he was pissed that she hadn’t played along with his little game. Reluctantly, she read the message.
Don’t dare ignore me or your brother dies.
The message jolted her for a second. Was the guy serious? While she was still contemplating how to react and whether to respond, another message arrived.
Watch the video.
What video?
Ding! Another message, this time a video attachment.
“I’m gonna kill you myself, Tim, if you’re sending me porn,” she murmured to herself. Okay, she would watch the damn video, and then she’d read him the riot act. But just to be on the safe side, she slipped on her headphones and plugged the jack into her phone so nobody in the office could overhear her.
With a sigh, she tapped on the video to play it back.
At first, she wasn’t sure what she was looking at. It was dark, a basement of some sort. Then a light beam was redirected to a spot in the middle of the video, and then she saw him: Tim, her twenty-seven-year-old brother. She almost didn’t recognize him. His hair was disheveled, his shirt ripped, and bloodstains were visible both on his chest and around his nose and mouth. One eye looked swollen. His arms appeared to be tied behind his back.
Daphne suppressed a gasp. Oh God, what was going on?
Suddenly, Tim stared right into the camera.
“Daphne, you’ve gotta help me. I’m in trouble. I owe them a lot of money. Please, help me. Or they’re gonna hurt me.”
By the looks of it, they’d already done so.
The video suddenly ended. Horrified, she sat there frozen in place. She couldn’t even blink. She’d always known about her brother’s gambling problem and his inability to handle money responsibly, but she hadn’t known that he’d gotten in that deep.
Shit!
The phone chimed again. Another message.
Ready to talk now?
She had no choice but to reply.
Yes.
A second later, the phone vibrated. She was receiving another call from her brother’s number. She accepted the call, kept the headphone on, and spoke into the attached microphone, keeping her voice as low as possible so her cubicle neighbor couldn’t hear her.
“If you hurt him—”
“Shut up!” the man interrupted her. “I’m the one talking now. Glad we were able to get your attention. Next time, don’t hang up on me, or you might just piss me off.” He grunted something unintelligible.
“Who are you?”
“You can call me Guido.” He chuckled to himself.
Daphne didn’t find it funny. “What do you want?”
“Your brother owes us money. Lots of it. He begged us not to hurt him and claims you’ll help him pay off his debt to us.”
“I don’t have any money.” Her brother knew she was living from paycheck to paycheck.
“We’re aware of that. That’s why you can do us a favor.”
“A favor?” She couldn’t imagine what kind of favor she could possibly do for this thug to get her brother out of trouble. But she didn’t dare voice her skepticism.
“He says you have skills.”
She swallowed hard. She didn’t have to be a genius to know what he was referring to. It figured that her brother had started singing like a bird at the slightest bit of physical pain.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she lied.
“Now, now, Daphne. You don’t mind if I call you Daphne, do you?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “We know all about your past. The hacking, the arrest.”
She cursed under her breath.
“Don’t worry. Your secret is safe with us.”
“It’s not a secret.”
But Guido, or whatever his name was, continued undeterred. “So you’re gonna do a little job for us. Get us around a little security system, retrieve something, you know, that kind of job. And once we’ve got what we want, your brother’s debt to us is wiped out, and he’s free to leave.”
Fuck, they wanted her to help them rob a place? A bank, most likely? “No way.” If she got involved in anything like that and something went wrong, the plea deal was off, and she’d be going to jail for a very long time.
“You’ve got no choice.”
No, she couldn’t do it. It would ruin her life. There had to be another way.
“Do it, or we’ll start sending you body parts in the mail.”
They were bluffing. Tim couldn’t have gotten involved with the kind of people who really made good on threats like that. During her time as a hacker, she’d seen enough bluffs and called them out. She’d rarely been wrong.
“You’re not gonna do it,” she said. “Because if you do, neither my brother nor I will ever pay you what he owes.”
“You think I’m bluffing?”
Her heart beat into her throat. “Let him go. Now. He’ll pay you back. We’ll work something out.”
“That’s not how this works.”
“Let him go,” she demanded again.
“You don’t give the orders here, lady.” Then his voice became more distant, and she realized he wasn’t talking to her anymore. “Looks like your sister doesn’t wanna play ball. What finger should we start with?” Suddenly, loud screams she recognized as her brother’s sounded in the background. Then the call was disconnected.
Her heart beating like a jackhammer, Daphne stared at her phone. What now? She had to call him back, try to reason with him. Seconds ticked by. Maybe she could pretend to go along with the plan, then speak to her probation officer and explain the situation. Then the police could set up a sting and they could save her brother from these mafiosos. Yes, that was what she would do.
With trembling fingers, she navigated to her brother’s number, but before she could call, another message arrived
A photo.
She dreaded having to look at it, but she knew she had to.
The photo depicted a bloody finger. A finger that had been severed from a hand.
Her stomach churned, and she nearly lost the little breakfast she’d had this morning. Guido had made his point. He was serious.
Her fingers trembling worse than before, she typed a short message and sent it: I’ll do it.
Guido’s message came almost immediately. We’ll be in touch with details soon. We’ll be watching you. So don’t be stupid. For your brother’s sake.
She knew what that meant. She couldn’t involve the police.
4
“Stay as close to me as possible when we’re inside,” Pearce urged Winter while they were approaching the building he’d identified as the workplace of Daphne Butler, the second Daphne on their short list of possible would-be killers.
Winter nodded. She knew the drill. To be on the safe side, Pearce now took her by the arm so that even if he lost his mental concentration, his touch would assure that Winter remained invisible. Because if anything happened to her on this extracurricular excursion, Logan would have his hide.
At the glass entrance door, which was closed, they had to wait a few moments until somebody opened it and entered and they could slip inside behind that person. Had Pearce been alone, he could have walked through the glass, but for Winter it was impossible. Only Stealth Guardians had the ability to dematerialize their bodies in order to pass through solid objects.
Inside the large lobby, a security guard sat behind his desk. He rose to greet the visitor, a delivery guy with an envelope. While the security guard signed for it, Pearce ushered Winter past the desk. He spotted the elevators and took two more steps, then he suddenly realized where he was. But it was too late now.
He and Winter were already passing through the metal detector. Warning bells dinged, and red lights flashed above their heads, most likely set off by the ancient dagger Pearce kept hidden in one of his boots. Quickly Pearce pulled Winter along and steered her to the side, because the security guard who was sitting next to an airport-style hand luggage scanner was already jumping up.
“What the fuck?” he cursed, and ran toward the metal detector. “What’s wrong with that damn thing now?”
The security guard who’d finished signing for the delivery stared at him. “Don’t ask me. You’re the tech guy.”
While the two security guards tried to figure out why the alarm had sounded and how to reset the machine, Pearce pressed the button to call the elevator. While they waited, he perused the company directory on the wall next to the elevator. He found what he was looking for quickly.
When the elevator doors opened, he made sure the cab was empty, then nodded for Winter to enter. From the corner of his eye, he noticed one of the guards looking toward him.
