Hot Intent

“I see what all the fuss is about. That’s tasty,” he admitted.

“Have you never had a warm chocolate chip cookie fresh out of the oven before?” she demanded.

“Never. My father and I didn’t cook.”

“You poor, deprived man!”

She stood on tiptoe to plant a chocolate-flavored kiss on his mouth. She smelled of vanilla and joy. What must it have been like to grow up in her family? A blade of jealousy sliced into his heart for an instant. “I have some work to do. If you could take the baby...”

“Of course.” She scooped Dawn out of his arms. “What kind of work?”

“The kind I can’t talk about.”

Her bright blue eyes clouded over, but to her credit, she didn’t pry. He’d explained to her that he was accustomed to secrecy and that she couldn’t expect him to share every aspect of his life with her all the time. But he felt bad as he retreated to his office. What the hell was she doing to him? Since when did he want to spill every detail of his existence with anyone?

Furthermore, since when did he have feelings toward any other human being? His father had taught him well that feelings were the greatest weakness any spy could fall prey to. God knew, the past year of CIA training had only reinforced that message.

He’d thought he’d purged all deep feelings from his heart in that CIA training facility. But apparently not. Dammit. He had to find a way to isolate and contain these warm feelings he was having toward Katie.

Setting aside the problem of Katie McCloud, he locked himself in his office and got to work.

Mentally shaking his head, he broke into D.U.’s personnel files with a few casual keystrokes. Actually, it wasn’t that easy. He’d worked for months in jail developing and perfecting the decryption algorithm he used today.

He printed a hard copy of the entire employee roster of Doctors Unlimited and went to work. Financials were the easiest place to spot a turned spy. Mounting debt, illicit spending on a personal vice, an illness in the family—all the symptoms of a spy vulnerable to bribery or coercion—showed up most readily on bank statements. So, that was where he concentrated his search. He figured André would have done a thorough job vetting his people’s distant past and extended families, so he skipped looking at personal histories for now.

But after an entire afternoon of work and nearly a dozen of Katie’s irresistible cookies, nobody was leaping out at him as a candidate to be his father’s mole. Frowning, he went for a stroll around the terrace garden that had been his father’s pride and joy. He had to admit, Peter had a good eye for texture and color. The contrast of the stark cacti with softer, greener plant material was striking.

Contrast.

Maybe he’d been looking for the wrong thing. He’d been looking for a big change in someone’s spending habits. Instead, maybe he ought to be looking for a long-term pattern of expenditures that, in comparison to other D.U. employees, contrasted with the other people’s in the organization.

He went back to his computer to run a position-by-position spending comparison on D.U.’s staff. But that, too, turned up nothing.

Katie brought him a salad at some point and he ate it absently. Food had been optional often in the past year and was not something that held his attention anymore.

It grew dark outside, and he continued to poke and prod at the D.U. staff. But no matter how he examined them, nobody stood out as a mole. Which meant one of two things. Either there was no mole and his father was bluffing, or the mole was very, very good. He strongly suspected the latter was the case.

He leaned back frowning. If he were infiltrating Doctors Unlimited, how would he go about it? The aid organization placed physicians and nurses around the world in dangerous hot spots where regular aid organizations refused to send their people. The staff of D.U. was dedicated, passionate and a little crazy. Money wouldn’t be high on their personal priority lists. Ideals would be, though.

He ran a quick search of political affiliations. And that was when he got a hit. Dmitri Churzov. D.U.’s I.T. guy—responsible not only for its in-house computers, but also the all-important interface with the CIA’s computers—had been flagged by the FBI for attending several Communist Party rallies in college. Alex winced. God, it was so cliché. The kid even had a Russian name.

He frowned. In point of fact, the guy was a little too cliché. His father was emphatically not the type to recruit so obvious a target. Were he Peter, Dmitri would be the one guy he would not recruit to work for the FSB.

Decisively, Alex crossed Dmitri off his list of suspects. Who, then? The problem with an organization like Doctors Unlimited was that it used its legitimate work to passively collect intelligence on the side. André reported what his people observed. Nothing more. It wasn’t like anyone at D.U. besides André would know about, let alone get involved with, any high-profile, active ops. Why would anybody bother to infiltrate such a low-level group? Especially with a live mole who would be expensive to recruit and compensate, and who would be high maintenance to run?

André had allowed that the mole could be someone who merely interacted with D.U. at CIA headquarters. Maybe that was where his father’s mole was placed.

The agency’s computers would be significantly more difficult for Alex to hack than the D.U. system, particularly if he didn’t want to cause all sorts of alarms to go off and a black ops team to show up at his door. But it was by no means impossible.

Rather than make a direct attack, he instead went after André’s home computer. It took him nearly an hour, but eventually he lifted most of his boss’s passwords from his other accounts. Armed with those, Alex attempted a straight-up log-in to the CIA’s system as if he were André himself.

Tsk. Tsk. The same password that logged the guy into his daughter’s school grades got Alex into the CIA mainframe.

He unashamedly browsed his boss’s correspondence with his CIA superiors. If he’d once had any sense of ethics and morals about privacy, they’d been stripped out of him this past year.

It was mostly desultory reports and the occasional debrief on a concluded overseas mission by one of the D.U. medical teams. Even the intelligence reports were predictable, though. Troop emplacements, supply routes, casualty numbers, the usual stuff. But then a phrase jumped out at him.

Cold Intent. Major intelligence and military operations were given two-word names, a random adjective/noun combination. Some of them became well-known: Rolling Thunder. Desert Storm.

What major op could an unassuming, passive intel collection outfit like Doctors Unlimited be involved in?

The whole message read, Cold Intent is on track. The asset is in place and unaware. It was dated right about the time he and Katie were sent overseas last year.

He stared at the words on his screen with foreboding. The asset is in place and unaware. Unaware of what? What asset? Why did he get a sick feeling in his gut that the message had something to do with him?

Cold Intent. He typed the phrase into the CIA search engine. Immediately, a screen popped up announcing that André did not have access to that information. If it was above André’s pay grade, then why was the man aware of it and referring to it in a message?

Frowning, Alex turned his attention to the recipient of the message. There was no name, merely a series of random numbers and letters belonging to an IP address—a location designated somewhere on the internet to receive messages without being attached to any one email account or identity.

He initiated a deep system trace on the location of the IP address. He might not be able to find out who the recipient was, but he could find out where the recipient was.

The message had bounced off seven of the thirteen nodes that all internet traffic passed through and his system was painstakingly searching back to an eighth node when everything went crazy. Attack warnings flashed on his screen. Automated notifications that his antihacking software had been activated flashed up. Lines of code scrolled too fast to read, and then his computer screen went blank. A silent, blue screen of doom glowed at him.

What the hell?

“Are you coming to bed soon?” Katie asked from the doorway.

He looked up, startled. To bed with her? So she could smash through his emotional defenses with the shocking ease she always did? A frisson of dismay whispered through him. “No. Go on without me.”

Social norms dictated that he should probably kiss her good-night or in some other way act affectionate and social. He really owed it to her to at least pretend normalcy, but he just couldn’t bring himself to do it. He felt bad about not being able to show her simple affection, but he just couldn’t. He really ought to be riveted on how his computer had just been shut down. And why.

Katie retreated silently, disappointment darkening her blue eyes, and he turned his attention back to his dead computer.

What—who—was Cold Intent? Why did the mere act of tracing an IP address send an attack at him that had triggered a tactical nuclear meltdown of his computer?

He was shocked at the amount of damage the attack had done to his normally intensely secure computer. He ended up more or less wiping out every file on the hard drive, restoring it to the factory defaults and starting over from scratch reloading and rebooting the entire system from his backup files.

He was still working hours later when he heard Dawn stirring in her room over the intercom and went in to rock her back to sleep. He sat down with her in the rocking chair in her room and let the deep peace of the night and her sweet baby smell pass over him. How could something so innocent exist in the evil world he knew it to be? How was he ever going to manage to keep her safe from it all? The weight of the responsibility pressed down on him until he struggled to breathe. He laid the sleeping baby in her crib and went back to work grimly.

He took a break to doze on the leather sofa in his office while some particularly large files uploaded. But he lurched awake as an alarm sounded abruptly. He raced over to his computer and was stunned to see a warning that one of his bank accounts had just recorded an attempted hack-in. He sat down and typed quickly, locking down the account and his other accounts while he was at it.

He’d barely finished before the phone on his desk rang. What the hell? It was 4:00 a.m.

“Go,” he snapped.

“Mr. Peters? This is Advanced Security Systems. I’m sorry to disturb you at this hour. But we’ve just gotten notification on our internet server that there has been an attempt to break in to your house’s alarm protocols. A note on your file said you wanted to be notified immediately of any such incidents.”

Sonofabitch. Who was coming after him like this? Surely, it had something to do with Cold Intent. “Thanks. Lock it down for now. I’ll be in touch in a few hours with further instructions.”

“Will do, sir.”

He grabbed a jacket and headed out of the condo. Time to get the hell away from his home and his family to continue this search. He headed for an internet café, but not just any café. The Flaming Frog catered to hackers specifically. The firewalls and other protections in the café made its systems nearly impossible to trace. And even if a hack was traced, the café kept no records of who’d sat at which terminal. The FBI and NSA hated the place, but so far had failed to shut it down despite repeated visits to local courts on various trumped-up charges.

“Hey, dude. Haven’t seen you in a while.” The night manager waved cheerfully at him. Store policy: no names got used. Ever. He waved back at the girl, who looked about twelve but was probably closer to thirty. She was also a top-notch hacker.

“Hey, Blondie,” he murmured across the counter. “Feel like taking on one of the big boys?”

“Sure. Which alphabet agency we goin’ after?”

“I’ve got a name. I need more on it.”

Her face fell. “Just a vanilla research job, huh?”

“An aggressively defended name,” he corrected. “Nearly killed my home system earlier.”

She perked up. “Well, then. That’s better. Let’s have this name.”

“Cold Intent.”

“What the hell is that?” Blondie demanded.

“That’s what I’m trying to find out,” he retorted.

“Race ya,” she challenged.

“The bet?”

“Loser buys me a tattoo.”

He grinned. “What if I win?”

“You ain’t gonna win, old man.”

“If I do, I want a copy of the algorithm you used to hack the IRS last year.”

She sucked in a sharp breath, but she eventually shrugged. “You’re gonna lose, so what the hell. Deal.”

He threaded past a half dozen people staring at computer screens and sat down at a terminal in the back where no one could look over his shoulder. He started to type. Come to papa, Cold Intent.

CHAPTER THREE

KATIE WOKE UP SLOWLY. The sun was shining in around the edges of the heavy curtains too brightly. She lurched up out of bed and raced down the hall to Dawn’s bedroom. The baby was still asleep. Wow. Nearly 7:00 a.m.

She tiptoed down the hall to Alex’s office. What on earth had he been working on so hard yesterday? She poked her head in the door to ask—

Huh. He wasn’t there. She backed out and headed for the kitchen. His car keys were gone from the hook on the wall. That was weird. Where would he go this early? Particularly without telling her?

Alarmed, she headed back to his office. His computer was running some sort of diagnostic that she probably couldn’t interrupt. She spied a legal pad on his desk. What looked like rows of random numbers covered it. Although knowing Alex and his huge background in math, the numbers weren’t random at all. The rows of digits were interrupted by a single pair of words tucked off to one side of the pad. Cold Intent. What was that?

She heard the front door unlocking and moved out of his office before he could catch her snooping. She greeted Alex. “You look exhausted. Have you been working all night?”

He made an affirmative sound.

“Coffee or sleep?” she asked sympathetically.

“Sleep.”

“By all means.” She’d heard that doctors’ spouses had to get used to some weird working hours. Not that Alex had hinted in any way about marriage, of course. The poor guy was barely getting used to the idea of having a girlfriend, let alone a daughter. Of course , the obvious question—exactly how long was she planning to wait for him to get used to having a family—lingered in the back of her mind, a grenade without a pin in it. But for now, she kept her fingers wrapped around the handle and the bomb deactivated.

She heard Alex’s shower running while she dressed Dawn and fed her breakfast. The baby was starting to feed herself, which entailed much hilarity with flying food and lots of cleaning up. After breakfast, Dawn settled down to play with a pile of stuffed animals in need of chewing and tossing while Katie flipped on the television to check out the news. Ever since she’d hooked up with a spy, she paid much closer attention to world events than before.

Not that she was exactly sure what Alex was anymore. Supposedly, now that his training was finished, he would go back to work as a humanitarian aid doctor.

The morning news focused mostly on a hurricane entering the Caribbean. It was forecasted to grow into a major storm. Current storm tracks had it pointed at Cuba. Too bad. The impoverished nation needed a natural disaster like it needed a hole in the head. The news moved on to a shooting in a shopping mall somewhere on the west coast, and Dawn squalled. Katie picked her up quickly and shushed her lest she wake Alex. Sensing a bout of baby squeals and babble coming on, she bundled Dawn up and took her out onto the terrace for some fresh air.

Dawn bounced up and down excitedly in her walker, and Katie pulled out her cell phone to check her texts and email. Nothing much was happening with her friends or family. Bored, she pulled up a search engine and typed in the phrase she’d seen on Alex’s desk.

Her phone took a long time doing the search, and when the results finally flashed up on the small screen, they were worthless. Every hit had both of the words in it, but not together. It was a bust. She would have to wait until Alex woke up to ask him what it meant. She shrugged and strolled along behind Dawn, enjoying the early-springtime sun. Winter in Washington, D.C., was a gray, wet affair, and she was ready for some decent weather.

After nearly an hour outside, Dawn caught one of the wheels of her walker on a pavement joint, and without warning the whole thing started to tip over. Katie dived for the baby and walker just as the waist-high ceramic planter beside her exploded. Black dirt flew everywhere. What the heck? The baby started and let out a howl while Katie brushed dirt off both of them.

“Get inside,” Alex barked from the sliding glass door to his bedroom.

Katie looked up, shocked to see the blunt shape of a pistol in his fist. Keeping her head down, she raced through the door behind him. Dawn started to cry in earnest, no doubt sensing Katie’s panic. Alex slipped outside, closing the door behind him, while Katie tried to calm the baby. But Dawn was having no part of it.

Had the sharp warm-up overnight caused the cold ceramic to crack? Alex was going to be annoyed if that was what woke him up. He was so jumpy since he got back. Was he going to whip out a gun at every loud noise?

The outside door slid open, and she tensed. Okay, so she was jumpy, too. Hard not to be after all the crap last year. A bunch of people had made a good-faith effort to kill the three of them and nearly succeeded. And for the first time, they were all back together.

“Shooter’s gone,” Alex bit out.

“It was just a big pot cracking—”

He dropped something small and irregular on the bedspread. It looked like a pebble. She picked it up to examine it.

“Medium caliber slug,” he said tersely.

“You’re saying someone shot at you out there?”

“No. Someone shot at you. I dug that out of the dirt from the big planter that broke right beside you.”

She lurched. “Are we under attack? Do I need to get Dawn to the safe room?”

He shook his head briefly in the negative. “Shooter’s fled the area. We’re clear.” His syllables were clipped but stripped of any actual emotion.

Wasn’t he the slightest bit freaked out that someone had just shot at her? “Who was it?”

He shrugged. “I got no visual. I’ve called Langley, though, to have them pull satellite telemetry.”

“Now what?” she asked nervously. “What do we do?”

“Do? Nothing. It’s over. You’re safe. I’ll investigate who shot at you. When I know the source of the threat, I’ll eliminate it.”

God, not even a bump of emotion entered his voice as he casually talked about killing someone. A chill rattled across her skin. Who was this man? What had they turned him into? She stared at him in dismay. “But I thought we were done with all of that. The people who came after us before are all dead or in custody. It’s finished. They told me it was all over. And no one’s tried to kill me and Dawn since you left. Why now? If someone wants to kill me, why wait until the person who can best protect me comes home?”

He exhaled hard. “I kicked a hornet’s nest yesterday. This is my fault.”

She stared at him, wide-eyed. He hadn’t been the only one kicking at hornets. Yesterday, she’d asked for information on his mother from the CIA. Had that provoked someone to take a potshot at her? If so, who? And why? What was the big deal about his mother?

“What kind of hornets did you kick?” she asked him.

“Can’t say,” he bit out.

Dammit. She’d forgotten how fiercely he guarded his secrets. She should have known he’d be worse than ever about not sharing when he got home.

“I’m sorry, Katie,” he murmured, gathering her and Dawn close in a protective hug. “I swear, I won’t let anything bad happen to either one of you.”

She ought to tell him about the hornet’s nest of her own that she’d kicked. Let him off the guilt hook. But she’d really been hoping to surprise him with the information on his mother. The moment passed when it wouldn’t have been awkward to say anything. Great. Now she was keeping secrets from him, too. The guy’s bad habit of not sharing was contagious apparently.

“The windows are all bullet resistant and coated so heat-seeking equipment can’t see through them. The walls are treated the same way. Stay in here while I close the blinds throughout the house. And then you should be safe to move around inside the condo.”

As if that solved everything! Who’d just shot at her? And why?

Alex came back to report that the blinds were closed, and then he retreated to his office and closed the door. How could he go in there and poke at his laptop like someone hadn’t just narrowly missed killing her? She was completely freaked out! Were it not for Dawn already being upset, she would march in there and give him a piece of her mind.

Was he napping on the sofa or maybe doing something with Cold Intent and all those numbers on his computer? Curiosity would be the death of her yet.

Speaking of which, she called Uncle Charlie’s cell phone number and left a message in his voice mail asking if there’d been any progress on her request. She added that there had been some interest shown in her query this afternoon.

Trapped in the house by possible snipers outside, she plopped down in front of the television. She was intrigued that Alex hadn’t attempted to give chase to the shooter or in some way report the guy to the police. Were such occurrences so commonplace in his world they didn’t even register as worthy of response?

Although now that she thought about it, if she’d just taken a shot at someone, she would leave the area quickly so she didn’t get caught. Alex must have figured the shooter had too big a head start in fleeing to make a chase worthwhile. Still. What a lousy way to live. Was this what she had to look forward to for the next fifty years or so?

Despair washed over her. She’d thought they’d left all this stuff behind last year. How in the world were they supposed to raise a child in this insanity?

She vaguely heard Alex’s cell phone ring.

Maybe ten seconds passed before his office door burst open. “Turn on the news, Katie. Now.”

He sounded strange. Tense. She turned on the TV and asked him quickly, “Local, national or international?”

“Local.”

He moved to stand behind the sofa, and she swiveled around to stare at him. “What’s happened?”

“Someone has been murdered.”

“Who?”

“Hacker. I don’t know her real name. She was young, late twenties. It would likely be associated with something innocuous, like the theft of computer equipment. Have you seen anything like that today?” he asked urgently.

“No. Nothing,” she replied, alarmed. “They haven’t reported on any women being murdered or dying in some sort of accident. They’re talking mostly about the hurricane heading into the Caribbean.”

He swore under his breath.

“What’s going on? Who was she? You’re scaring me.”

“They’re covering up her death. Which speaks volumes about who killed her.”

They who? What wasn’t he telling her? “Volumes about who?” she demanded.

“They’re powerful. Connected. Probably government.”

“Our government? You’re saying an American citizen was killed right here in Washington by our government and it’s being covered up?” Holy crap.

“You really have to get over the whole Mom and apple pie thing when it comes to the United States, Katie. All governments work for their own best interest by whatever means they have at their disposal. None of them are nice about it.”

Sometimes she forgot what a cynic he was. The uncomfortable thing was that he might be right. Still, her patriotic upbringing ran deep. “Hey. You work for the U.S., too.”