Midnight Kiss (Men of Midnight #7) - Lisa Marie Rice Page 0,13
the story.” He looked her in the eyes and she almost got lost in them. Manly men weren’t supposed to have beautiful eyes but this one did. Just her luck. Light blue, with thin lines of dark blue and dark eyelashes though he was blond. She sighed, looked down, gathered her thoughts which were not of him. Not, not, not.
He nodded as she looked up again. “How’d you get out without anyone seeing you? Anyone with operational experience would have posted men at the front and back entrances. I don’t know what kind of manpower they had but they’d have covered all contingencies.”
“They probably did. But my apartment is part of a pretty big complex, a gated community of twelve apartment buildings. What isn’t visible, and what you can’t know unless you have property there, is that they are all connected via underground passageways, so people can get from one building to the next underground if it’s raining or snowing. The laundry rooms and garbage bins are there, and everyone has a storage locker. The elevators to go up to the apartments don’t go down to the basement, there are separate elevators down to the basement. So unless they did major research and hacked into the architect’s studio, they wouldn’t know about the underground passageways and the special elevators. I was in the special elevator to the basement before they made it up to the fifth floor. I followed them on the hallway security cameras. I ran down the basement corridor as fast as I could. In ten minutes I came up in a small alleyway twelve buildings away. It leads directly to a bus stop. I waited in the alleyway for a few minutes until a bus came. It covered the video cam across the street. The camera couldn’t catch me boarding. I got off right in front of the apartment of a friend of mine who’s away for two months on a course. She asked me to water her plants twice a week and I had the keys to her apartment in my backpack. I don’t think anyone would ever connect us. I stayed there all night. I hacked into Kyle’s work computers. He’s pretty good at security and it took me a while. But when I finally got in, his entire system had been trashed. His company will have to start over. Even the data stashed in the cloud was gone.”
Luke stared at her, unblinking. “That would take a lot of talent.”
She nodded. The fact that someone had killed Kyle’s entire IT department had frightened her almost more than the killing of Kyle himself. Any idiot with a gun can kill. It took talent and resources to wipe out Kyle’s company’s system.
“By evening, I realized I needed help, so I called the HER room.”
“Come again?” For a moment she was distracted by his frown. Damn, he was so handsome even frowning was a good look on him. “What’s a her room?”
That called up a slight smile. Just thinking of the HER room made her feel better, safer.
“The HER room. It’s a Blockchain-encrypted storage folder in the darkweb shared by the four of us. There were originally three of us in the same office at the NSA, we were the ones who set it up. This was before Felicity. Me — Hope — Emma and Riley. H.E.R. We founded it a couple of years ago when we were working together at the NSA. We had the Boss from Hell who managed to be oppressive, incompetent and sexist, all at once, and all at maximum volume. We were setting up a database of all the known means of communication of ISIS, and it required focus and he was always there, looking over our shoulders, complaining and making stupid comments because he didn’t understand the parameters of the database. Backstabbing sexist creep. Belittling us while waiting for us to make our breakthrough so he could claim credit.” She glanced angrily at him. “Did you ever have a boss like that?”
“Once. In the Army. But everyone hated him and he was eventually rotated back to Washington. Never in law enforcement.”
“Then you’ve been lucky.”
He bent his head. “I have. But you haven’t.”
“No.” She tried hard to control her breathing because just thinking about Kevin Dolby made her gnash her teeth and her cerebral circuits short out. “We needed a way to communicate because we suspected he had our workroom wired for video and sound.”