“Well, I’m not sure about that either,” he argued quietly. “Everything affects him, likely way too much.”
She kept pounding away on the keyboards, and the siren suddenly stopped.
“So does that mean that they got what they wanted or that you got them out of there?”
“Both,” she snapped. “They’re out. They’re gone, and I’ve locked them out, but they got in, and I’m not sure how.” She buried her hands in her face and groaned. “God.” She dropped her hands and raised her head. “I’ve got my work cut out for me now, trying to figure out how they got in.”
“Where did they get to?”
“Oh shit,” she said, working away on the keys.
He wanted to ask her more questions, but this was definitely her field. As she worked over the keys, she made magic happen on the screen. Suddenly faces popped up.
“What’s that?”
“Something for you to peruse while you’re waiting on me,” she replied. “That’s your dead guy, and I confirmed he was likely the one who killed Wilson and shot Mera,” she murmured. “And that’s everywhere he went the day he was killed and where he stayed the two nights.”
Amazed, Damon studied the pathway she had backtracked on this guy and realized that he had been cocky enough—or at least comfortable enough—to have gone about living his life, not worrying about retribution. When the second team of killers had come after Peter, they had come from behind, and Peter had no warning.
“They completely blindsided him,” Damon murmured.
“Well, if you hire a killer, and you want to make sure there are no loose ends, you’ve got to make sure you’re good at taking out your killer,” she stated. “Otherwise you’re the one who’ll end up fried.”
“True enough,” he muttered. “But I don’t think this guy had a clue that he would be next.”
“Do they ever?” she murmured, as she continued to pound away on the keys.
“I don’t know.” Damon shrugged. “I’m putting on coffee. Do you want some?”
“Hell yeah,” she snapped. “I’ll need an entire pot now.”
He winced, then walked over, made a fresh pot of coffee, and stretched, hating the way he’d been startled into wakefulness. And then he went back to studying the tracks of the dead killer. “It’s not like he necessarily even tried to hide where he was.”
“No. I just don’t think he had the slightest idea that he could be next.”
“But he also didn’t seem to think that we were on to him or that we might follow him.”
“And why is that?”
“I think because they believe anybody with any abilities is dead.” He shook his head. “And the only way to know that …” he murmured.
She looked at him. “How though? Did they see everybody’s dead body? Assumed everybody was gone? Were they told everybody was gone? Possibly incorrectly? Just like I’m sure they think that I’m dead too.”
He nodded slowly. “That’s possible as well,” he agreed. “None of this is good news though.”
“It’s excellent news if it means that we still have a little bit of a window to hide in.”
He laughed. “I keep forgetting that you’re a major part of the team.”
“Hell no, I’m not,” she argued. “I’m the scaredy-cat apparently. I would just as soon run away and hide.”
“But you wouldn’t want to spend the rest of your life hiding.”
“No,” she agreed, “and that’s why I’m here. I’m also damn pissed about Mera and Wilson. This Peter is the asshole who took out Wilson. I know it. And the fact that he’s dead now too makes me angry all over again because I don’t get a chance to kick his ass.”
At that, Damon burst out laughing. “You deal with what you got to deal with on the computers right now,” he said. “I’ll study this for a while and see what I can come up with.”
“Good. I hope you can find something,” she stated. “I’ve been studying it, and, although it tells us where he went, it doesn’t tell us who he connected with. Oh—except for this.” She brought up the last screen she’d been working on when the alarms went off.
He leaned forward and asked, “Who the hell is that?”
“Well, our guy Peter was making phone calls throughout the day. So, I hacked into the phone records, and this is one call he made over twenty times. Unfortunately,” she said, as she clicked on a couple buttons, “this is where the number ends.”
“Oh, Christ, the defense department.” Damon groaned.
“Yep,” she confirmed, “so I think Terk is right. Our own government tried to kill us.”
“It doesn’t mean he was doing it on behalf of the government though,” Damon noted. “We have to watch making assumptions.”
“What do you mean?”
“It could be Peter went rogue,” he admitted. “I hate to say it, but it’s not that uncommon for somebody in the government to go bad on their own and to get paid off by these foreign governments to target our own.”
“Jesus. That’s just wrong on so many levels.” She stared at Damon in shock. “We do this work to protect our own, not to sacrifice them.”
“In this case, he obviously warrants looking into, but that—”
Just then another tab on her screen started flashing.
She brought it up and explained, “Well, this is a search I did on Peter, once I got his name. So let’s see how well that worked.” She tapped the screen, and there it was. “Deceased, as you can see, this morning.”
“Technically, depending on the time frame of the report’s origin, last night, in that car park. Yet this says he was shot execution style in the head at home. Well, somebody is definitely cleaning up,” he muttered. “So now the question is, who hired him, who killed him, and how do we track Peter’s life?”
“Well, at least it gives me somebody’s life to open up,” she stated. “I was starting to get more than pissed because I didn’t have any avenues to move on.”
“You’ve done a hell of a lot of work already,” he said in admiration. “You’ve always been great at ferreting out information on these guys. Good job.”
“Well, that’s why I get the big bucks,” she replied in a mocking note. “Unfortunately I didn’t realize it was a death sentence at the same time. So apparently I’m just as stupid as these guys.”
“No.” Damon shook his head. “I would hate to have you think that. I don’t think any of us would think we were stupid.”
“But here we sit, looking for betrayal within. And is there even a chance it’s not from within?” she asked, pivoting to shoot him a hard glance.
“Of course there is. We don’t even know who this guy was talking to.”
“No, not yet.”
And she spoke with such emphasis on the word that he grinned, walked back to the coffeepot, and poured them each a cup. She was doing something. Terk was doing something, and now Damon was the one feeling like he couldn’t do much. What he could do though was check the shield he had going outside.