Stark
A client who had a standing date with one of Nassir’s working girls claimed he was being blackmailed by the escort. He was up in arms because the girl had threatened to out the John to his wife and the rest of his very conservative family. The man claimed she demanded twenty thousand dollars in cash and had already sent a threatening text message to the man’s spouse that had her questioning where he spent his Wednesday nights. Nassir was calling bullshit on the man’s story. His girls had rules, and they knew not to break them if they wanted to stay on the Devil’s good side and on his very lucrative payroll. He kept them safe. He vetted all the clients and wouldn’t let anyone near his business unless they knew how to keep quiet and treat the girls well. He didn’t tolerate any kind of nonsense, and his wife was even more fiercely protective of the women who earned their living in such a timeless and dangerous way. She didn’t tolerate any disrespect when it came to the working girls, and it was no surprise that Nassir was on the warpath if Keelyn was upset. He moved mountains and leveled entire cities to make things right for his woman. She was the only thing on Earth he cared about more than power and control.
I told the man who pulled my strings that I would run a background check on the John, pick through his finances, and trace where the text to the wife originated. I also promised to dig up whatever I could on the hooker. I refrained from calling her that because I didn’t have the time or the patience for a lecture on how people did what they had to do to survive in the Point, and no one should judge those choices. It was a common refrain in this city. People were always something more than a simple label. There was always a story behind how they had earned that title, but I wasn’t the kind of guy who ever cared about the story. Probably because I spent so much of my time trying to forget my own. I wanted to be the big, broody guy who was good with computers, nothing more and nothing less. Simple. However, since I’d started tangling with Noe, it was clear some stories couldn’t remain unspoken. Sometimes they were told without words. History and memories were shared through unblinking looks, soft touches, and surprising sweetness. She’d barely scratched the surface of where I’d been or what I’d done, but she was a girl who had the skills to look deeper, unearthing the truth. I couldn’t be anything but who I was with her, because she was the one person who could uncover the lies I’d been living for so long.
When I made my way back into the borrowed loft, she was on the computer again and didn’t bother to look up when I entered. She was scowling at something on the screen, her eyes flicking in my direction as I got closer.
“The motel where Goddard’s goons held me just burned to the ground. It’s all over the local news. Three people died because the fire suppression system didn’t come on—shocker—and because of those fucking bars on the windows. He’s covering his tracks. He even released a statement saying the loss of life is a tragedy and his heart goes out to the victims’ families. He’s such a prick. He followed that garbage up with the fact that losing such a disreputable business is no great loss to the community.” Her mouth was pulled into a furious, tight line and her dark eyes were alight with anger. “I can’t believe anyone re-elected him.”
I braced my hands on the edge of the marble counter and looked at her with grim determination. “That’s why we have to stop him.”
She let out a bitter laugh and pushed the red part of her hair off her forehead. “I’m all atwitter with anticipation to hear exactly how you plan to do that, Stark. The more I think about it, the more he seems untouchable. The man killed three innocent people to cover up the fact he kidnapped me. He’s ruthless.”
“He’s greedy. He wants to keep his standing in the community, his good name. He wants to keep his title and his money. But more than any of that, he wants to keep his secrets. We’re going to take each and every one of those things from him. We’re going to burn his entire world from the inside out.” My hands curled into fists on top of the marble; her eyes widened a fraction as she stared at me. My anger was happy to finally have a clear target, a pointed direction to blow. The heated vengeance wasn’t curling wildly and furiously around everything in my path anymore. It had a goal, a purpose, and I no longer felt like I needed to get a grip on it. I wanted to let it run wild and see what it would do.
“How?” The word escaped on a breath, and I couldn’t blame her for needing details and not having blind faith in my ability to come through for her. I’d already let her down.
I cocked my head to the side and watched her carefully as I told her, “You know what’s worse than death for a man like Goddard?” She shook her head, eyes curious, mouth still frowning and unsure. “The worst thing a man like Goddard can imagine is being invisible, being irrelevant. It’s torture for a man like him not to have the world falling at his feet, to have everything he’s ever wanted within reach but not able to touch any of it. We’re going to leave the walls of his empire standing but turn everything on the inside to ash. We’re going to kill him . . . digitally.” We were going to wipe any trace of the man off the face of the Earth but leave the old, tired, helpless vessel afloat in his sea of corruption, constantly searching for a life raft from his previous conquests but unable to get a hold on any of them.
She blinked at me for a second and then cocked her head to the opposite side of mine. “Like steal his identity?”
I grunted, “Oh, so much more than that just taking his identify. We are going to electronically wipe him out of his life. Not before we take his money and ruin his reputation. We’re going to ensure Goddard has a sizeable life insurance policy, naming his stepdaughter as the sole beneficiary. We’re going to expose every bribe, payout, and misappropriated use of taxpayer money he’s ever touched during his time in office. Once we do that, we’re going to make sure the city and the rest of the world knows that he likes to play grab ass with young girls, proving he’s not the man they think he is. Once we have him on the ropes, we pull the cyber trigger and end his digital life. A signed death certificate trumps all other forms of identification. Goddard can show his ID, flash his passport, he can scream from the top of his lungs that he’s alive, but if there’s a death certificate on file, it doesn’t matter. That piece of paper means you’re dead, which means no access to your money, no credit, no travel, no mortgage, no marriage . . . no anything. You don’t exist, even if you are someone important. WE bring his life to a total standstill so that even while he’s in the public eye, he loses control of everything. We take it all away from him. We put him on the streets and teach him what it’s like to have no options and no power.” He was going to live the way Noe did, frightened and alone. I wanted him as desperate and afraid as she had been when she first sought me out for help.
Noe slowly reached out to close the computer in front of her and delicately cleared her throat. She tapped her bare, broken fingernails on the counter and watched me with unwavering eyes. “That’s . . . ambitious. Wouldn’t it be a whole lot easier to let one of those guys you work with take care of the problem? Couldn’t Nassir make Goddard go away with a whole lot less work?”
I bristled a little at the implication that I wasn’t capable of getting my hands dirty but took a deep breath and reminded myself I had yet to prove to her just how capable I could be. I’d had to prove myself before and I hated every second of it. Showing her I could fix this for her was a challenge that made a strange heat work through me and some sort of foreign anticipation course under my skin. They were new feelings, but unlike the anger and helplessness I’d felt before when dealing with her, these emotions weren’t unpleasant at all. This was what I was made to do, and vengeance was definitely going to be mine.
Her question was valid but shortsighted. “If I thought a bullet between the eyes was the right answer, I would be the one pulling the trigger. We can put Goddard in the ground, but then whomever comes behind him is going to be more careful, more watchful, and even better at keeping his secrets hidden. If we take Goddard down my way, he’s here, a walking reminder of what happens when you mess with the kind of people who can be just as ruthless and cold-blooded as most politicians tend to be. If we strip Goddard bare in front of the entire city, we set a precedent. We show everyone who is really calling the shots and it sure as hell isn’t anyone they voted for. That man and the promises he made don’t exist. And with our skills, he won’t exist.”
I couldn’t keep the edge out of my tone, the harshness. Of course, Noe picked it up and, of course, she remembered what I told her about my reluctance to tangle with any kind of government when I refused to help her.
God, what I wouldn’t give to do that entire day over again. I would be more careful with what I told her, more careful with her, in general. After our kiss, I knew she was all kinds of soft and sweet under her prickly shell. She was just as vulnerable as I was, and it was clear neither one of us was very good at keeping our battered armor in place when we were around each other. In fact, if she kept looking at me like I was the answer to every single question she ever had, there was a chance there would be nothing between us at all before the day was done. The image of her dripping wet, wearing nothing but defiance and bravery, tripped unwanted and unstoppable through my mind. It was my favorite memory to date, but it bothered me to no end that it was more powerful than the task at hand I needed to focus on. I needed to get shit done, not get my dick wet. That could come after we took Goddard down.
I’d never had to struggle to concentrate on one and not the other before. She was messing with the way I was wired and it didn’t feel much like an improvement.
“You mentioned not picking fights you weren’t sure you could win when I asked you for help with Goddard. What makes you so sure we can do this? What makes you think this is a fight we can win?” She didn’t sound doubtful, just careful and curious.
I blew out a long breath and closed my eyes so her earnest expression was blacked out. “Because I can’t afford to lose again.” Last time I lost it cost me everything. My freedom. My family. My sense of self. “I’m a whole lot smarter and stronger now, thanks to the guys I lost to last time.” They took me. They trained me. They changed me. I knew about winning at all costs thanks to them.
“Does that have to do with why you hacked into the Department of Defense and disappeared? Were they the ones you lost to?” She’d heard the stories, but just like Google, those rumors only scratched the surface of everything that had really happened. My life had never been easy. Most kids were born and their parents told them that they could change the world if they tried hard enough. When I was born, it was obvious I would change the world and my parents were just waiting for the moment when. I was special, both Savina and I were, but that also made us more than just twins. It made us something more than children. We were a gift, treasured and cherished. We were never treated like typical kids and we only had each other. She was the only one who understood how hard it was when all eyes were on you before you’d even lost all your baby teeth. She was the only one who got it when I wanted to play baseball instead of work on Millennium Prize Problems.
I lifted a hand and rubbed it over my short hair. My fingers were shaking and I hoped she couldn’t see the tremor. I wanted her to trust me. I wanted her to believe in me. I wanted to pretend like I was invincible and unbreakable, just like she was.
“I hacked into the DoD because they killed my mother and I was looking for proof.” That was before I could control my impulses. That was before I’d learned to shut everything inside of me off. That was before I’d been honed into a hard, cold thing at the hands of the men who made me. I wanted to make them pay. I wanted to clear my father’s name. I wanted to save my family, but all I did was put everyone I loved right in the crosshairs of something so much bigger than any of us could have imagined. I heard my voice break and felt the way all of my muscles started to lock. It was fight or flight, and when I’d fallen into the wrong hands, the only choice I’d been given was fight. That conditioning was hard to shake even after all these years.
“That’s what your father said. He blames the government for her death and thinks they framed him and sent him to prison so they could get their hands on you.” It sounded outrageous, fictitious, and paranoid.
I believed with every fiber of my being that all of it was true.
I peeled my eyes open and blinked in surprise when I realized she was standing directly in front of me, close enough to touch. Without even trying, those knowing eyes of hers stripped away all the layers I’d spent years wrapping myself up in.
“When I wrote that predictive program that the military bought, I thought that would be the end of it. I thought they would use it to make the world a safer place, that they would utilize it to bring peace to places in the world that have been war-torn since before either of us were born. It was solid code that was adaptive. The program was designed to save lives, but our government used it to take them. They tweaked the code so that the algorithm predicted where it was most likely to find terrorist camps instead of possible targets. They called it preemptive measures. They wanted to stop the people behind the attacks rather than the attacks themselves. It was never about helping victims but about declaring war and waving their dicks around. My program made it possible for them to make sure they always had the most inches. They sent drones in and wiped out entire families, complete villages, without proper research. They didn’t have enough evidence to prove if the program was accurate or not, but they used it anyway. I have no idea how many innocent people died because of me, or how many more will. I know it’s a lot, but knowing the actual number might cripple me.” I wasn’t exaggerating.
“Last I heard, they were still using it. Hit or miss, if they take out the bad guys or not.” They wanted to take out the offenders, not save the innocent. Our goals had never been the same. From the beginning, what I had intended was bastardized and tainted. As a result, new terror groups got their legs under them and had moved to hiding in plain sight. More people have died for no reason, people simply trying to commute to work, or enjoying coffee with friends, people gathering in a crowd on a street minding their own business. It was possible my program would have pinpointed those exact locations, that it would have stopped those needless slaughters, but we would never know, because the powers that be instead used it to justify dropping bombs on undisclosed locations in the desert. All of it left a bitter, nasty taste in my mouth.
“They wanted you to write more software they could use against anyone they considered a threat to American soil, didn’t they?” She sounded so understanding. The reason I never talked about my past was because it hurt. The pain was always amplified when I realized whomever was hearing my story looked like they were struggling to believe it.
“That’s the problem with being smart. People think that intelligence is an unending commodity, that the well never runs dry. They wanted to pick my brain clean, but my mom insisted that Savina and I use our gifts to give back to society. She was convinced we were going to be part of a new Renaissance. She honestly thought my sister and I were going to change the world. She refused to let them tie me up in all their governmental red tape. She told them one program was enough, and if they wanted more, they could approach me when I was eighteen. She knew I was too scattered, too adventurous to tie myself to any one kind of programing. I wasn’t interested in warfare or military strategy.” I jolted when her hand landed on the center of my chest, her fingers smoothing over the cotton of my t-shirt like she was trying to soothe the erratic beat of my heart. I leaned into her like her small frame could keep me up when I was ready to collapse under memories and regret. “If I had given them what they wanted, something that would have taken no time and almost no effort on my part, maybe my mom would still be alive. She told the men who came for me no and her lab blew up the next week. My dad was arrested a month later, and they picked me up for the hack a month after that. My sister was left on her own, unprotected and vulnerable. The DoD told me if I did what they asked, if I let them completely own my body and mind, they wouldn’t lock me up next to my father. They promised they would train me and give me the tools I needed to excel physically and mentally, all while keeping Savina safe. They knew she was all that I had left. I was obsessed with her safety and they used it to gain my compliance. They knew I would do whatever they wanted as long as no one touched her.” My jaw clenched and there was a familiar burn at the back of my eyes. My hands curled into fists and my throat felt like it was going to close in on itself. It hurt. Talking about the past, remembering my sister. I never let that pain out. I kept it locked down with everything else, contained it and controlled it. She was the only person I’d ever shared it with, and that hurt in a different way, one that left me confused on top of everything else.
“What they wanted was for me to be a mass murderer. They wanted me to create weapons and strategy that would wipe out entire countries in the blink of an eye. They wanted me to change the world in an entirely different way than what my mother envisioned for her children, and they wanted me to do it while they pulled my strings and fiercely controlled my creativity and ingenuity. They swore up one side and down the other it was for the best. If I fell into the wrong hands, enemy hands, then I would be declared an enemy of the state, and the honey pot that was my mind would be considered a weapon of mass destruction. Then my own government, the men who were training me, molding me, challenging me, would have no choice but to end me.”
It burned like acid in my gut to admit that I’d been so easily manipulated. It made my teeth grind together and my jaw tighten when I thought about how malleable I’d been. I’d played right into their hands. I’d lost the game before I even knew we were playing. They set a trap and I walked right in like the naïve, unassuming child I was.
“They wanted you to be Captain America? A super soldier?” Noe sounded both horrified and amused.
If we were talking about anything else, I would have laughed. There was a moment when they had had me running drills and training with weapons that I wondered the same thing. I could do PT with the best of them and would probably make it through BUDs Seal training, if I had to. There wasn’t much I didn’t know how to do with my mind, and the government made it so the same was true with my body. The truth was, they only wanted me skilled enough to protect myself if someone else came after the unbelievable asset that was my mind. They wanted to keep their prized possession safe and out of enemy hands, and the first step in that was making sure I could kick ass and throw down if anyone they deemed a threat came after me. They wanted me to be able to take care of myself but rely on them . . . and I had. Much longer than I liked to think about.
“I’m no hero and I’m not interested in trying to save the world anymore. I just wanted to save my sister.” And I failed. Hard.
“They did a shit job of keeping her safe. She had more than one stalker according to the articles I read. She was constantly in the news and the public eye,” Noe sounded angry, and I remembered how hot and turbulent it felt when anger was the only thing keeping me going.
I wrapped my fingers around her tiny wrist and felt her pulse flutter rapidly against the touch. The frantic beat matched the one pounding between my ears, it was a fight song only she and I could hear. My frozen heart struggled to keep up with the powerful rhythm.
“I never realized they needed to protect her from herself. The stalkers never got close to her, but she was lonely, isolated by fame and her incredible gift. I was her only friend, the only one who understood her, and when I was taken away, she lost her hold on reality. She lost the only person she related to. We were more than close.” Twins had a connection that went deeper than most siblings. She was my other half. She was the best parts of me and she was the one who was special because of who she was, not because of what she could do.
I swallowed past the lump in my throat and squeezed my fingers around Noe’s wrist hard enough that she let out a low gasp. I was looking into her dark eyes, but I wasn’t seeing anything but my sister’s casket getting lowered into the ground. “When she committed suicide, she set me free. The DoD knew they didn’t have anything else to hold over my head when her safety was no longer an issue. They didn’t have anything that kept me compliant, and with all the training they’d given me, I was far more dangerous than when they took me. They lost the only bargaining chip they had, and now I really was a weapon of mass destruction. They threatened to lock me up, but after Savina was gone, I didn’t care. I thought I was going to die. I wanted to.” They’d been training me to compartmentalize my feelings for years. They wanted me to separate how I felt about what needed to be done from the very logical questions and reasons for why those things had to be done. There was no place for emotion in war. It was all tactical and strategic, but when Savina died, there was nothing. There was no emotion and no reasoning. I disappeared into the void she left behind. I was practically catatonic and I felt like I had lost a limb.
“No,” She whispered the word out and leaned forward so that her forehead was planted in the center of my chest.
“I did. I was unresponsive. I stopped eating. I stopped drinking. I didn’t care about anything. The guys at the DoD tried all kinds of shit to get me back: therapy, drugs, torture. They tried to bribe me, promised to let my dad out of prison if I would snap out of it. They could control me, but they couldn’t control the grief.” I shook my head and lifted a hand so I could thread it through the silky strands of her hair resting on the back of her neck. “I was broken, so they let me go. They had no use for a weapon that was bound to misfire when they needed it most.”
She lifted her head, eyebrows raised, and a million questions crowding her eyes. “Just like that?”
I shook my head in the negative and heaved a sigh that felt like it weighed a thousand pounds. “No, not just like that.” Nothing was ever that easy. “They keep eyes on me at all times, waiting for the day I slip up and let them know I’ve learned to function again. I spend every minute of every day making sure I don’t do anything special, that I’m nothing more than an ordinary guy who is good with computers. I’ve spent the last several years working for criminals and killers. Something they know would make my mother turn over in her grave. I don’t do anything remarkable. I don’t create anything that would ever make them think they want me back. I live my life in the dark. I use a fraction of my brain, and I live with the knowledge that I’m the reason my entire family was destroyed. I could go back, could let them use me as they see fit so my father is freed, but I don’t. I play dumb and feel helpless. I couldn’t help you because I don’t even know how to help myself.” It was a good thing Nassir and Benny hadn’t let me go after her when she was at the docks. There would be no hiding the things I knew how to do when I took whomever was in my way out of the picture trying to get to her. I could be just as effective as Booker when it came to the point and shoot. It wasn’t in my nature the way it was in his, but in order to get to her, I would have spilled my secrets and Nassir, as well as the ever-watchful eye of Big Brother, would know exactly what I was capable of. I was a dangerous man, one with nothing to lose.
I was in so deep that drowning had become comfortable.
We stared at each other silently for a long, drawn-out minute. I waited for her to tell me how disappointed she was in me, how I had shattered her illusion of the man I was. I waited for her to spit in my face and look at me with undisguised repulsion. She was so much stronger than I was, so much better at taking care of herself. I was a broken toy with no one to mend my pieces.
I stopped breathing when she lifted a hand and gently ran her finger over the curve of my bottom lip. “Sounds like you know your way around a pretty impossible situation, Stark. If anyone can take Goddard down, it’s going to be you.”
I was so far from cold it wasn’t funny. All that emptiness inside of me suddenly felt full. There was so much pressure inside of my chest I couldn’t get a breath around it. My hands curled on the counter so I didn’t touch her. I’d never had to fight down the urge to keep my hands to myself before. Everything about this woman was a battle. I fought everything about her and how she made me feel.
She was wrong about Goddard. I couldn’t do shit to him on my own because I was fucked up and frayed at the end of all my wires. Short circuiting without the tools to stop the sizzle. It was going to be us . . . had to be us . . . together . . . because she would fight, and I was going to give her all the ammunition she needed to take the bastard down.