He watched her strut around the DARC Ops boardroom with a confidence he’d never seen before.

“Want I want to do,” Holly said, pausing at the briefing table and holding her hands at the edge, “is get back to my headquarters, ASAP. Get to my workstation and open the program without running the virus.”

Tansy cut in with a very intelligent-sounding, “Umm . . .”

She continued, still looking at Jackson. “I know what I’m doing. Instead of running it, I’ll funnel the results back to DARC.”

“I’m skeptical,” Jackson said.

“I know.”

Tansy said, “So am I.”

“I know.”

“We don’t exactly have the best relationship with the CIA,” Jackson said. “Especially with what happened to one of our associates.”

Holly nodded. “You’re talking about Macy Chandler.”

“I’m talking about her, yes, and the rest of us who had to go to war with the deep state.”

“I’m not the deep state,” Holly said, “neither is anyone else I know at the CIA.”

“That’s very intentional,” Jackson said.

“I’m sure. I don’t deny that it exists, but—”

“So what you’re saying,” Jackson said, smiling, “is that you would help the CIA to cooperate with us, without them actually cooperating with us?”

Her smile reminded Logan of the many occasions where the true Holly was aching to come out. The college rebel. The hacker. It lived inside her right along with her lust for life, an infectious vivacity that he’d missed out on. Without her, and without that smile, his life had coasted into a big morass of military orders and red tape.

Together, maybe, they could bust through the tape and finally live the kind of life they’d been destined for.

“Tansy, what have you got?” Jackson asked.

“Apprehension,” he said. “And a lot of it. The CIA will track down the activity, see it leading back to the same source. They might even know your background with Logan.”

“I can do this from my boss’ office,” Holly said. “They’re setting it up this weekend, lots of people and machines coming and going out of there. I won’t be detected. I’ll go in late, when most of the staff have cleared the building.”

“They’ll detect you,” Tansy said, “not by what machines are moved around, but by your activity in the system. I’m sure they’re looking at that stuff more carefully.”

“Not my new boss. Trust me, he’s low-tech enough that I’ll be able to do this right under his nose.”

“And there’s no other nose looking down on him? A fail-safe?” Jackson said.

“No,” she said. “As long as I do a relatively good job of this, no one will know what happened.”

Tansy’s eyebrows shot up. “A relatively good job?”

“I can open the files without activating the virus.”

“With my help,” he said.

Logan had expected Holly to clam up and hold her ground, insist that it was her project, her baby. Her cousin. But instead she nodded. “Yes, your help.”

“I’ve been working on something in my spare time,” Tansy said.

“In your what?” Jackson said, staring at him. “You’re not supposed to have spare time.”

Tansy flipped him off and continued. “A backdoor program. Even if someone who knows what they’re doing actually looks, they won’t be able to find anything. That, plus you working on it in your boss’ office, should make this basically bombproof.”

Despite being relatively new with DARC Ops, Logan had heard that term thrown around before. Bombproof . . . Two out of the three times, it had ended in a blast so large that it couldn’t be contained. The proof in the tasting of the pudding had been suddenly muddled mission objectives, lives at risk, things spiraling out of control faster than Jackson could talk them back in.

After their meeting, the first thing he did was tell Jackson that he would be riding along with Holly, sticking as closely as possible to her. For once, Jackson offered no objection.

* * *

Logan parked the car a block away from her headquarters, turned off the engine, and looked over to Holly with the hope that it wouldn’t be the last time. When she finally smiled, he said, “I don’t know, Kiddo. I don’t like it.”

“No one’s supposed to like it,” she said. “But I won’t get caught. I promise.”

Logan couldn’t help but laugh about her promise. She had promised a lot of things over the years, most of them coming true. But this latest promise sounded a little too shaky.

He couldn’t let her go like that. He couldn’t let so many lives, and perhaps a relationship, depend on a flimsy parked-car promise.

Holly knew him well. She reached over, poking him in the stomach. “Hey,” she said, “I’m still here. You can get all gloomy after I leave.”

“It’s not gloomy. It’s fear for your life.”

She jabbed him harder. “Way to talk me up and make me feel good.”

“Sorry.” He pulled her hand away, still holding it, lifting it up by her wrist and kissing the tops of her knuckles. “I hope these don’t have to do any damage in there.”

“The only reason I’d have to use those,” she said, “is trashing his office, punching cracks into LCD screens. Holes in the drywall . . .”

“You mean if your hacking doesn’t work?”

“No, I want to fuck up his office. Just in general.”

“You could bring me in for that,” Logan said. “I’ve got a lot of pent-up rage, too.”

“I know,” she said. “But I thought you got rid of some of that last night.”

He smiled, fighting the urge to say the first nasty little thing that popped into his head.

“Wasn’t that the point?” she asked.

Now he had to stop himself from saying the opposite, from allowing himself to sound cheesy and love-struck. Of the two revelations, that would’ve been the worst. She couldn’t know . . .

Logan reached over and squeezed her knee, producing a hushed squeal.

“But maybe that’s a good idea, though?” she said.

“Of course it is.”

“I mean damaging his office. I could make it look like a break-in.”

“That sounds like more trouble than it’s worth. Let’s stick to the plan.”

“That’s funny,” she said, “you telling me to stick to the plan.”

It was a little funny. Funny how there could be no win, how he felt as nervous about Holly following the plan as not following it. It was so much easier to ride that thin gray line by himself, like an athlete calm on adrenaline in the thick of the game. But now, watching from the sidelines, he felt all his nerves jumping in all the wrong ways.

She was looking seriously at him. “It’ll be fine,” she said. “Johnson won’t be here. He’s never in on the weekends, especially the weekend before his first day. He’s probably out drinking somewhere right now. He’s probably out catching some disease from a prostitute. Did I mention that I think I hate him?”

“Well,” Logan said, “His ineptness as your boss is what’s making this whole thing easier. Is it not?”

“You’re right. It is.”

“And you hate Andrei Godev more. Do you not?”

“I do,” she said.

“Okay,” Logan said. “So are you ready to roll?”

“I am.”