Page 87 of Talk to Me

I’d kept my secrets even from myself.

Here I was telling the story twice in a matter of hours. Remarkable or not, it was something he needed to know.

“So, you think they worked for the same department you did?” McQuade frowned.

I shrugged. “I don’t know. I can’t tell you exactly what I took, the information was vast. There are a lot of people who would do anything to get it back. The reasons I cleared out those caches hasn’t changed. They were not using it to prevent disasters or incidents, but to control when they happened and sometimes even to trigger them.”

“So, who do you think your captors were? If the people in your department were information hacks and operators, would they be capable of a black bag job and interrogation?”

“I don’t think so.” Then again, what did I know. “It was all highly compartmentalized and I gave up wishful thinking a long time ago.”

“Not government,” McQuade said, almost too fast then scowled.

“Maybe,” Locke retorted. “Could be black ops, CIA isn’t supposed to operate here but it could be Homeland. Since you took it from ‘them’.”

Them. “The department I worked wasn’t likely sanctioned even if it was linked. Too much of what we were doing and taking…”

No, there would be no Congressional oversight that would let that go.

“Then that makes the people you worked for even more suspicious,” Remy said. “They have no reasons to pull their punches. Whatever you took, they want back. How long have you been out?”

“Five years.”

Years of hiding from my own shadow, locked away in my very comfortable, well-appointed prison where I could do the best I could while never stepping a foot outside my door.

“That’s a long time to wait,” McQuade said slowly. “What brought them out now? Or were they hunting you all along?”

“I don’t know, I don’t even know how they tracked me this time. I’ve always been careful. I don’t use video. I don’t post as me. I haven’t even said my name in years before today.” Monitoring existed everywhere. From cameras at the grocery store watching you do self-checkout, to cameras observing you at ATMs, crossing streets, because security cameras were everywhere.

The U.S. didn’t quite have the CCTV coverage of some nations, but if you knew how to get into the private networks—we had almost as much coverage.

“The first couple of days I was in the cell, I kept hoping someone would slip and tell me how they found me. They didn’t—just kept asking me where it was.” When asking didn’t work, they went for torture.

“You said you killed the worm that stole it,” Remy repeated my earlier statement.

“I did. They can’t get it without me. No one can. It’s always moving, it’s stored across a hundred different servers. It will never have one port or home or even a dedicated drive. It’s all garbage without a decryption key.”

If I’d died, then the information died with me. Maybe I couldn’t survive their assaults in the long run. I accepted that might be my fate.

“But you can get to it,” Remy said. “They have to know that.”

Or they would have already tried to reclaim it all themselves. “I should have just destroyed it.” I’d thought about it. If I destroyed it entirely then the risk was gone along with the exposure. But it also meant the people behind it all may never face any kind of punishment. “But… it would let too many off the hook. So, I made it inaccessible.”

“You’re the key,” Locke said with a sigh and McQuade’s expression darkened even further.

“That means they have nothing to lose in their efforts to get it back. They have to have you.” He shook his head, admiration wound through his voice. “You really are a bad bitch, Sugar Bear.”

I refused to get used to that nickname, no matter how much affection he punched it up with. “Why?”

“Cause they wanted to break you and they didn’t”

No, but I’d been close so many times.

“The question is how do we handle this?” Remy had been circumspect in his comments since I began explaining everything. It was as though he needed to absorb all the data one part at a time. Now, he was processing it.

“We need to eliminate the threats,” McQuade said. “All of them.”

“We need to secure Patch while we do it.” Locke’s expression had taken on a narrow-eyed, focused look I recognized.