If this wasn’t the most awkward car ride in Axel’s life, it sure came a close second. What was worse? Sitting in silence on the way to the sex, or on the morning after?

He didn’t have an answer for that.

He didn’t know if it was Fox making things weird, either. The poor guy hadn’t done anything wrong, and Axel was giving him the cold shoulder just for being there.

No, this was all Axel’s doing. He’d never thought he was anything but straight, like straight was somehow the default state of being and he’d never had to even consider anything outside that box, but maybe he wasn’t.

Maybe he was bi.

He sure as hell still found Fox gorgeous in the morning, standing there naked as the day he was born. He wasn’t embarrassed, he didn’t try to hide himself. That confidence was seductive, and Axel had to do his best to derail his own thoughts before they could end up fucking again, or whatever that had been last night. It sure felt like fucking.

Yeah. They’d definitely need to come back to that subject once Kennedy was behind bars. Until then, he’d asked Fox to shelve it, and he had to do the same thing.

Fox drove them east to catch up with the interstate, then up toward Houston. They passed the Loop and pulled in at one of the smaller towers nestled in among what felt like a hundred hospitals, though Axel figured it was probably only ten. The building was all mirrored glass, five stories high, and even more subtle about its signage than Axel’s office.

“Fancy,” he said.

“I guess.” Fox grinned at him. “Way fancier on the inside, though.”

“Oh, are we going for a pissing contest?”

“No need. I win.” Fox laughed and exited the car.

Axel followed him inside and signed the visitor book while the receptionist took a copy of his ID, then Fox swiped a card and led him through another door.

So far, Axel didn’t see anything out of the ordinary. It was an office. For all that intelligence work sounded cool, a lot of it came down to the people working at desks in offices miles away from the front line who crunched all the data.

“Ground floor office, huh?” He sniffed.

“It’s in case of a fire. The server room is protected by xeon, and that’s heavier than air, so we don’t want it leaking out and suffocating everyone below us.” Fox winked and swiped his card at another door, then led Axel inside. “Peter, Axel. Axel, Peter.”

“Ah, the man behind the voice.” Axel gave a friendly grin and offered his hand. “Axel Ford, FBI.”

“Oh, hey! I heard we were working with you guys on this.” Peter stood and shook Axel’s hand so enthusiastically that it made his beard bounce.

It was a lot of beard. Axel was impressed. There was a degree of fuck you required to let a beard get that long.

“Be out of your way in no time.” Axel cast around and then sat in a chair that looked available.

Fox took his phone out and scrolled through new messages as he sat, then wheeled in toward his desk. “Wow. Imagine how much work he could get done if he wasn’t trying to goad me so much. He’d be super productive!” He plucked a cable from a pile beside his computer and had his phone connected to the machine in seconds.

“Okay,” Peter said. “Update?”

Axel filled Peter in while Fox began feverishly tapping away at his computer. He left out the parts Peter didn’t need to know. He had no idea whether the CIA took issue with agents sleeping with other men the way the Army used to, but it was better to put that in Fox’s hands than take the choice—and potentially his career—away from him.

“Huh,” Peter finally said. “So now he’s trying to rattle Fox with spam. What is he, ten years old?”

“Yeah,” Fox snorted. “Pretty much. He was ten then and he’s ten now, looks like.”

Axel took a moment to glance around the room. There were racks of machines to his right and racks of cabling next to them. A screen was nestled here or there, darkened by screensavers. Behind all that, high on the wall, was a unit with warning stickers all over it, which he took to be the gas to suppress any fires that broke out.

If this was the level of technology Fox was used to having on hand, Axel could see why he’d been so irritated by the insurance company’s lack of investment in their infrastructure. Hell, even Axel’s branch office might not match the gear these guys had at hand.

Fine. Maybe Fox did win this particular pissing contest.

Axel looked back to the redhead. “What is it you’re doing now?”

“I don’t think he’s using SIM cards,” Fox murmured. His fingers didn’t even pause. “Trouble is these numbers aren’t on a public-facing net either that I can see. It’s usually really easy to find them if they’re using HTTP because search engines index all of it. It’s more likely that he’s using a dark web provider, which is a whole other bunch of protocols that search engines can’t even detect.”

Axel nodded at that. He was familiar with the concept of the dark web, where anonymity was king. That anonymity was what drew criminals to it, as well as ordinary people who just wanted to protect their personal data. Conspiracy theorists used it every bit as much as terrorists did.

“That gonna be a problem?”

Fox’s slender shoulders raised and fell in a soft shrug. “There are ways,” he said cryptically. “It’d be better if-” He broke off as his phone buzzed, and he grinned in triumph. “Yes! It’d be better if he texted me while my phone was hooked up. Sucker!”

Axel chuckled and sat back to send an email to Dane and touch base with her. “I said you were smarter,” he murmured.

“I mean, obviously,” Fox waved a hand for a second before he returned to typing. He was alternating between different windows on his screen, kicking off one command while others were still processing.

Axel bit the inside of his cheek as he watched Fox work. All those smarts were hot as hell. It didn’t take a psychologist to figure out what had drawn Axel to him. Fox was stunning, and not just in his looks. He was legitimately a genius, for all his butterfly camouflage.

And that was what it was, he realized. Fox’s quick words and deflection was all camouflage. But last night was real. This, right now, was real.

Axel sighed softly and read Dane’s response, skimming over data from Rodriguez’ interrogation. There wasn’t a whole lot there. The guy wasn’t talking and he’d asked for a lawyer, unlike half his stooges who were all far too inexperienced to lawyer up. The kind of people who asked for lawyers were the kind who knew not to talk anyway.

“Huh,” Fox said.

Axel looked up, then wheeled closer. “What is it?”

“Another text.”

“Okay. And?” He figured Fox wouldn’t have sounded confused if that’s all it was.

Fox held the phone up so Axel could see the message.

10.

“Ten?” Peter frowned at it. “Typo, maybe?”

“No,” Axel and Fox said at once.

He exchanged a strained glance with Fox, who looked every bit as worried as Axel felt.

“Timer?” Axel offered.

“That’s what I’m thinking,” Fox agreed. “Seconds? Minutes? Hours?”

“Days?” Peter shook his head. “I dunno, he’s texting you like he’s got a crush. I doubt he’d give a ten-day warning for anything.”

“Yeah.” Fox was typing again. “Trouble is I’m having to eliminate servers one by one. It’s a case of hitting up every one individually and then searching for other servers if he’s not using the ones I know of.”

“Right. So it’s best if we shut up.” Axel smiled.

“Sorry. Thankfully it’s impossible to completely hide this kind of activity, ’cause—”

The phone buzzed.

“Minutes, then,” Peter said.

Axel’s gut began to clench a little. Nine minutes until what? In his experience countdowns were never good, especially not when being issued by crazy assholes who liked to blow things up.

“Yeah,” Fox said. “’Cause to connect to the cellular networks you still have to use IMEI codes and cell numbers that the networks have created, and you still have to penetrate those networks in a way that means leaving dark web protocols behind.”

“Like a burglar who leaves a footprint under the window,” Axel surmised.

“Exactly like that, yeah.” Fox grinned and ignored his phone as it buzzed again. “It looks like most of these numbers are Verizon-issued, which means if I just…” He tailed off and opened new windows. “Crack into their systems so we can figure out which cell towers those numbers are using…”

“That’ll give us server location,” Peter said. “Not Kennedy’s.”

“Yeah. But if I can work out where the server’s based I can scour that physical location for the server, then backtrack from there to Kennedy’s own machine.”

Axel felt a little lost at this point, but Fox’s words seemed to mean that he could retrace Kennedy’s steps to find the source and hopefully an address.

Axel liked addresses. Especially addresses with suspects hiding away in them.

Another buzz.

7.

Axel could see the tension in Fox’s shoulders, the speed with which he attempted to get into the cell providers’ databases. By the speed with which he seemed to manage it, Axel figured the CIA had to have the same kind of pathways into those systems that the FBI did, which made sense.

He texted Dane. Something had to be going down in six minutes, and the faster his team could move when it happened, the better.

5.

Axel’s mouth felt dry. He tried to look elsewhere, but his eyes were glued to Fox’s screen despite not understanding a word of it. What else could he do?

3.

“Yessss,” Fox hissed under his breath.

Axel looked up, then to Peter for a translation.

“He’s into the server Kennedy’s using,” Peter explained.

“Stronger security on the database, but not enough on their physical lines.” Fox shook his head. “Gonna take too long to put a wire sniffer on their network ports. They’ve only got around a 50Mb downlink speed.”

“Just do what you can,” Axel said softly.

“This is a brute force job,” Fox muttered. “If they see me, we’ve lost it. I’m spoofing my activity as well as I can, but there’s only so much I can do in a hurry.”

Axel nodded. There was nothing to say. Fox knew what he was doing.

They all ignored the phone when it buzzed again.

“Come on, come on,” Fox snarled. “Give me your goddamn packets, asshole! One more text! Give me the damn text!”

This time when the buzz came, Axel looked.

1.

“Yes! Oh you’re gonna fucking regret this, Spike. You gave me way, way too much rope to hang you with!”

Lines and lines of what looked like code scrolled up Fox’s screen.

“You beauty!” He began tapping again.

Axel tried not to fidget.

A bead of sweat ran a cold line down between his shoulders.

When the buzz came again, he almost didn’t want to look. What would a zero even mean?

Still, he looked, and there wasn’t a number. Just a single word.

Boom.

“Fuck,” Peter said. “Where?” He turned to his own computer to tap away at it while Fox still hammered at his own keyboard.

Axel’s phone rang.

“I guess we’re about to find out,” he said as he checked the caller ID. “Jones?”

“Axel!” Jones wheezed. There was yelling and a fire alarm in the background.

Axel’s gut tightened until he felt sick.

“We got hit,” Jones said. “We’re evacuating everyone.”

“Be there quick as I can,” Axel snapped. He looked to Fox. “At least we know where the bomb was,” he said grimly. “He hit our office.”

“Holy shit,” Peter breathed.

“Got it!” Fox sprang out of his chair, fist held high over his head. “Fuck you, Spike! Fuck you right in the ear!”

Axel appreciated the sentiment. He’d echo it if he could, but there wasn’t time. “Let’s go. Peter, you probably wanna evacuate this place. He might hit it next.”

“You got it,” Peter said.

Fox yanked his phone free of the cable, then darted for the door. “C’mon. Let’s go nail the bastard.”

Axel sprinted after him. “Where’s the address?”

“Back in Hidden Creek.”

Axel jogged ahead to hit door buttons and shoulder them open for Fox. “Then we can swing by my office on the way. I’m gonna need a sitrep on my team.”

Fox looked about ready to argue but then he nodded. “Maybe we can switch cars at your office, too. Mine’s got bullet holes in it. I’ve got error lights on the dash. I don’t want it to crap out on us in an emergency.”

“No problem.” Axel slid into the passenger seat and buckled in. “Let’s go nail this son of a bitch.”

They sped off toward the Loop and Axel started to feel like the end of the chase was near.

And then he could figure out where he stood with Fox.