Jack awoke to an otherwise empty bed. Soft murmuring assured him Ethan was somewhere out of his line of sight. Considering he was belly down, face in a pillow, that wasn’t hard. He didn’t feel like moving to find him, either. A pleasant lethargy weighed down his limbs, but a not-so-pleasant pressure in his bladder had other ideas.
Jack rolled over and levered himself up onto his elbows. Blinking his eyes into focus, he found Ethan.
The assassin stood by the car. He wore a pair of loose pants, the drawstring waist sitting low on his hips. Above it, the muscular curve of his toned stomach caught Jack’s gaze, shown off as Ethan leaned against the car, one hand resting on the silky-smooth metal. Head tilted forwards, he spoke softly into a smartphone, nodding occasionally. Whoever he was speaking with did a lot of talking, not letting Ethan get too much out. The hand on the car curled and uncurled into a fist.
The call didn’t look like it would end soon, so Jack scrambled out of the bed and hit the shower. The hot water sluiced away the dried sweat of the night’s exertions and left him feeling like he had perhaps a modicum of control back.
Right. He’d believe that when he didn’t bloody well jump Ethan’s bones in the next twenty-four hours.
Towel around his waist, he left the bathroom and found something to wear. By the time he was buttoning up a flannel, Ethan was done with his phone call and was setting out breakfast.
“Who died?”
Jack certainly hadn’t meant to start the morning after with such a topic, and by the way Ethan fumbled a plate of toast, he hadn’t been expecting to talk bodies over breakfast, either.
Deftly catching a fleeing piece of toast, Ethan frowned at Jack. “Pardon?”
Grimacing, Jack decided to just get it over with. Like ripping out stitches. “At the Office. Who did you kill?”
Continuing to set out a breakfast—toast, bacon, poached eggs, mushrooms and, naturally, a pot of tea—Ethan said, “Hopefully no one. I do recall your objections to unnecessary loss of life, Jack, so I tried to inflict nonfatal injuries. It may be that I wasn’t entirely successful, but I did my best, I can assure you.”
Holy shit. Had Jack, in his deepest, darkest thoughts, really missed this?
“Not that, but thank you for trying, anyway. I mean, which director was it? Who was the traitor?”
Ethan beamed at him. “You believe me.”
No. No, he hadn’t missed this. Not at all. “What? Believe you . . . What?”
“About the traitor within the Meta-State.”
“Jesus. Yes, I believe you. I think. I mean, you’re here, aren’t you?”
Ethan put an egg and bacon on a plate, then set it on the table in front of Jack. “Indeed I am. As are you. Thank you.”
He was doing it intentionally. Making up for a year of not messing with Jack’s head. Wondering if he should even bother trying to sort through Ethan’s crazy conversational method, Jack sat and contemplated his food while Ethan fetched him a mug of coffee.
“You’re welcome,” Jack eventually muttered as Ethan sat opposite and picked up a piece of toast. “But what for?”
“For coming here.” Ethan’s lips fought some overpowering expression, but his cheeks nevertheless flushed as he added, “Twice.”
Jack groaned, then snorted, then chuckled. “Smooth.”
Ethan’s smile was part shy, part wicked, and totally derailed Jack’s thought train, so he spent several minutes just eating and watching the man across from him. However, reality intruded and Jack got his head back in the game.
“So, who was it?” he asked blatantly. “Tan?” Please, don’t let it be McIntosh. She hadn’t treated him so well lately, even before the Great Escape, but it wasn’t as if it had been unjustified. Given how Jack’s behaviour and actions must look from her position, he couldn’t blame her for any of it.
“No one died, Jack. I don’t know who the traitor is.”
Jack’s brain went offline again, though it was anger, not lust, induced this time. “What? You mean I helped you escape for nothing?” And yes, Jack knew “nothing” was unfair. Getting Ethan out for his own well-being wasn’t “nothing.”
“Not for ‘nothing,’ Jack.” When Ethan continued, his tone was low, hesitant. “Even when you gave me what I needed to escape, I kept wondering if you would go through with it. Or if perhaps you were setting me up for a fall. I probably would have deserved it.”
“No probably about it.” Jack smiled to take the sting out of the words. “I considered it, though. Must have changed my mind about four times.”
“May I ask what convinced you?”
“Wasn’t any one thing. All of the directors were acting weird. None of them seemed too concerned about you directly, but more about what it meant for them that you’d shown up. Then someone killed Maria Dioli, the asset in charge of the Valadian operation. She found something about your involvement in the whole thing that got her killed.”
“And you believe it was someone who works for the Office.”
“Had to be. It’s a secure building.”
Ethan lifted his cup and sipped. “I got in.”
“Only with a sensational display. Are you saying you killed Maria?”
“I was locked in an escape-proof cell.”
“And yet you escaped.”
“With help. Thank you for the fudge, by the way. Though next time, perhaps something that doesn’t have chocolate chips.” Ethan touched his nose gently. “One of the little blighters got stuck up there.”
“Remind me, when this is all over, to go tell Gillian Golightly how her fudge, when stuffed up a nose, helps against gas attacks.”
“When this is all over, you will be taking me to Gillian Golightly so I may apologise for the terrible uses I put her excellent fudge to.”
“When this is all over, I’ll be lucky if I’m not in the cell you escaped from.”
Ethan reached across the table and touched the back of Jack’s hand. “Do you think I won’t keep you safe?”
“How can you? I broke a dozen laws helping you out of that cell and another half dozen just getting here, and I’m sure simply sitting here with you breaks at least three more.”
“Not to mention trespassing on private property. I must thank you for accurately discerning the door code. A wrong one would have triggered the destruction of the building.” At Jack’s alarmed eyebrow raise, he added, “Explosives under the floor. The whole place would have come down, not to mention a good portion of the street. I’m glad you made it in successfully. I would have hated to lose . . . Victoria.”
“Guess you’re going to have to change your brilliant code now I know it.”
Ethan smiled, slow and reminiscent of the way he’d looked after the second fuck. “I trust you, Jack.”
“You’ve said that before, then shot me.”
“For which I apologised.”
“Whatever.” Jack took a gulp of coffee. The subject of trust was one that should have been addressed before he willingly walked into this building. Well before. “So, if not to kill the traitor, what was the purpose of infiltrating the Office?”
“The purpose, Jack, was to discover the identity of the traitor. On my way out of the building, I planted spyware that will send data to an outside server.”
Jack frowned. “It’s been four days. They will have found it by now, isolated it, and purged it from the system. We do have some of the finest software and techs available, you realise.”
“I know. That’s why I planted four different programs. The first two are fairly standard infiltration programs, which mimic each other. Your techs will find one and think they’ve contained it, while the second continues to work in the background.” He held up a hand when Jack made to defend his co-workers’ skills. “When they realise the second program is still running, the third piggybacks on their own efforts to isolate it, in the process giving the fourth program a back door into most of their systems.”
Jack nodded. “All right, pretty thorough, but not foolproof.”
“It’s as close as it can be, though.”
“How?”
“The final program. It’s a Matryoshka program.”
The mug Jack had half raised to his mouth hit the table hard enough to slosh coffee onto the smooth surface. “Matryoshka program. Isn’t that just a rumour?”
Like the Russian nesting dolls it was named for, the Matryoshka program was layers upon layers of code that, when discovered by a host-protection program, peeled off the top coat as a distraction before escaping. It was hypothesised a perfect Matryoshka program could run forever and never be disabled. The downside was, they were supposedly very narrow-minded programs, specifically tasked with a single goal.
Ethan smirked. “To those who don’t have the money to buy one.”
Jack’s gaze skipped off Ethan, to the expensive car, to the living quarters setup that must have cost more than a few pretty pennies, then down to the floor under his bare feet, laced with enough explosives to take out the building. Even considering that . . .
“And you have enough money for that?” he asked, wondering just who this man was.
“No. But my client does.”
“Right. Your client. And this mysterious person cares enough about a traitor within the Office to buy a mythological computer program that can infiltrate any system?”
“Apparently so.”
Jack slumped in his chair. “Fuck.”
Ethan acknowledged it with a nod, then tucked into his food. Jack managed a bit of bacon, then had to stop.
“So, if this undetectable—”
“Not undetectable. Just unstoppable.”
“Fine. Unstoppable. If this wonder program is digging through the Office systems, what have you got it looking for?”
“The name of the traitor, of course.”
Jack snorted. “You really think they’re dumb enough to leave something so obvious on the system?”
“Of course not. The program was given a defined set of parameters to look for, namely any information on Samuel Valadian. He was definitely being protected by this person and the data should show some evidence of that. It will send that information to an associate of mine, who will do a pattern recognition scan on it and, fingers crossed, find the identity of the traitor. It was my associate I was talking to earlier. She’s not very happy with me at the moment.” A touch of his earlier annoyance tinged his tone again. “Apparently, I did not accurately surmise the amount of data she would have to go through. It will take her some time.”
“And in the meantime?”
Ethan pointed to the food between them. “I suggest you eat before it goes cold.”
“Maria said she had information that you’ve spent the past year tracking down the rest of Valadian’s organisation.”
Ethan went still, like prey sensing a predator. No, a predator sensing discovery. “I’m sure she did.”
Wondering what about his comment spooked Ethan, Jack pushed. “And? What did you find?”
After a long, tense moment, Ethan sighed and let the tension go. “Eventually, confirmation he was being protected by someone in the Australasian Meta-State, and precisely, a director in the Sydney Office. And that’s all you need to know.”
“Like fuck.” Jack was starting to feel used and abused again. Just another means Ethan utilised to reach his desired goal. He’d been a fool to think otherwise, though. “I think there’s a shitload more I need to know.”
“Jack, plausible denia—”
“No! That’s not what I’m talking about.”
Tone calm, Ethan asked, “Then what, Jack? What else is there?”
The sheer ignorance in those words shot through Jack like a jolt from a shock-stick. Did Ethan honestly not realise what he’d done? Yes, a small part of Jack’s mind answered. Ethan didn’t think the same way as normal people. How could he when he’d been tortured as a child and killing for half his life? Jack shouldn’t expect rational answers. Still, that voice was drowned out by rising anger, a surge he couldn’t stop just as he hadn’t been able to stop himself from climbing into bed with him.
“There’s me, Blade,” Jack snapped, as upset with himself as he was with Ethan but unable to hold back. “It’s been a year. It took me three weeks to get my shit together and come home. Then I spent two months under intensive review, my entire life put under the microscope. I went through hell trying to convince them I wasn’t a traitor. My own director still suspected me, right up to the day you waltzed into that building.” Jack pushed away from the table, getting up so he could pace. “I spent the first six months so on edge, waiting for you to show up somewhere, I cannot, in all good conscience, blame them for doubting me. Then when I finally decided you weren’t going to show, when I began to think you’d changed your mind, you appear. Right in my building!” He held his fingers a couple of millimetres apart. “This close, Blade. I was this close to getting my life back. And here you are, to fuck it all up again.”
Ethan sat and took it, his gaze locked on the cup of tea between his hands.
“So, yes, I think . . . no, I hope, there’s something more.” Jack forced himself to stop pacing. He leaned on the back of his chair, gripping it so tightly his knuckles went white. “Is there, Blade? Is there something else?”
The assassin was still, barely breathing. “Yes, Jack, there’s something else. Or at least, there was.”
“What was it?”
Drawing in a deep breath, then letting it out slowly, Ethan stood. He began gathering up the breakfast plates. “It was . . . something I can’t tell you about.”
“Can’t, or won’t?”
“Right at this moment, it’s can’t.” He sounded calm enough, but he wouldn’t look at Jack.
It was like the night in the cave, when after fucking, Ethan hadn’t been able to look at him. The man needed to be in control, of himself and his surroundings, and hadn’t liked it being taken away from him. But more so, he hadn’t wanted to admit that he had liked it, too.
He also hadn’t liked that it had been Jack to do it to him. Jack, the man he’d been gearing up to betray the very next day.
“Fine,” Jack muttered, shoving the chair under the table harder than necessary. “Here’s a suggestion, though. This time, when you aim a gun at me, make sure you mean to kill me.”