Page 85 of Talk to Me

And another lie.

“I was dedicated to my job. In fact, so dedicated that I didn’t take a vacation, or see my family for almost two years. I can’t even excuse it as they overworked me—I loved the challenge of it. The puzzles to break, the hunts to go on…” No, there were no excuses for the choices I’d made then. “That’s not really important. My fifth year on the floor, I noticed actual patterns in the assignments. Not just what my team was given but the other operators. We weren’t just hunting down cyberterrorists and hackers, we were hacking our own operations. Sometimes changing orders.”

How could I have been so stupid?

“Clearly we shouldn’t have been doing this, but it was presented as a test for another operations group… We would play the part of the intruders, sift information, and lift it. They were tasked with identifying the intrusions and stopping them. Every time we won, we got points then we were put on countering their incursions—allegedly.”

“How long did it take you to figure it out?” Remy offered no comfort or sympathy, just a kind of understanding. He didn’t make excuses for me or try to make me feel better about it, just wanted more facts.

That was better.

“That I was working for a shadowy government contractor with political and military ties that went far too deep for comfort and operated outside of the law?”

“Yes,” he said and I could feel his gaze even if it was dark and I couldn’t quite make out his eyes in the mirror.

I downed the rest of the water and then handed the empty to Locke. Then he handed me another bottle of water and what looked like a protein bar. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

“Seven missions,” I said, opening the wrapper with slow, deliberate motions. “Seven incursions, including one into the Pentagon and two separate military installations.”

“Holy shit,” Locke said with a slow exhale. “Patch…”

“I know. It was treason. I committed treason because I broke their security encryptions and duplicated the files.” There had been worse… “Three days after I accepted what was happening, I recognized that there was no exit plan. No way out. All this time I’d been convinced I was working for a sanctioned NSA division and I wasn’t. Some of the information we lifted was being sold to the highest bidder. The rest?”

I shook my head. Wherever it had been going, couldn’t have been good.

“I had to build my own exit. So, I wrote the protocols that would begin cleaning out my own files, my own footprint. It took me a while, but I managed to mark every piece of intel I’d taken. Most of it was four layers deep in encrypted files, but the worm I developed could go in and tag them. Then it began to shuttle the files out, one or two at a time. It took me almost a month to get everything in place.”

I took a bite of the protein bar, it was tasteless and dry. Yet the very act of chewing ignited all the grumbling in my stomach. They waited while I finished the bar, then washed it all down with water.

“The chances they would recognize what I was doing existed. Every single day that I went into the office, that I played the part, I knew it could be a day they figured it out. But I kept working, I needed to make sure I left nothing behind. When I left, it had to be scorched earth.”

So I had. I’d taken everything and left them meaningless gibberish in its place. The terabytes of information funneled out by the worm had been stored in stacked servers all over the world. The worm wouldn’t replicate, once it was done, it destroyed itself in their system. No trail was left for them to track electronically.

The files were out there in so many disparate packets they would never find them. Not without the encryption key. Not without knowing what to look for specifically, cause if they weren’t recompiled in the correct order?

They would get nothing.

“You strip-mined all their data?” Locke sounded impressed and worried.

“Yep. I emptied their servers, leaving them nothing but trash data in its place. I infected their systems with a half-dozen viruses that would be kicked off when they started searching for what I’d done. Then I finished erasing myself before I got up and left. I left the building, I left my life, I left everything.”

I’d begun building a bolthole for myself the day I decided to put the plan into action.

That was the day I’d died.

Chapter

Twenty-Seven

PATCH

Weariness swept over me in waves. Despite the exhaustion, however, the last thing I wanted to do was go to sleep. Sleep meant dreams, possibly nightmares. Worse, it might mean waking up back in that cell and discovering this was the dream.

There was a ribbon of light beginning to appear on the horizon, splintering the darkness into something that looked more like navy velvet. The sunrise was on my right, so we had to be driving north. I wasn’t even sure what state we were in.

When we changed lanes and began to slow, I shifted in my seat. “Where?—”