White-Hot Hack (Kate and Ian #2)(62)
“What if they don’t hit it off?”
“Then we don’t do it again.”
“Maybe we should give it some more thought,” he said. “And trust me, Charlie is definitely a player.”
“What are you not telling me? And when did we start keeping things from each other?”
Ian took a drink and wiped his mouth with a napkin. “I don’t know if I want Charlie to come here.”
“You don’t know if you want to invite your friend and fellow task force member to our home?”
“I don’t know if I’m comfortable with it.”
Kate laid down her fork. “Oh my God,” she said, sounding stunned. “You think it’s Charlie.”
“You told him where you were meeting Jade for dinner, and that very night someone follows you home. At the charity event, you said Charlie looked at you as if he knew you. The only agents who knew what you looked like were the ones from the field office in Minneapolis who were watching over you. I suppose any member of the task force could have googled you out of curiosity before I erased your images, but I doubt they would have taken the time.”
“But Charlie knew the FBI staged the crash. He knew everything about the situation, including the fact that you were still very much alive.”
“Yes, but Charlie could have been the one to give my name and location to the carders in exchange for money. Maybe he knew what they were planning to do after they doxed me, maybe he didn’t. Either way, he got paid. When the carders found out I was dead, they were probably furious with him, but technically he’d held up his end of the bargain, so he stuck to the story. It’s not his fault I died before they could act. That’s why they sent Zach Nielsen into the food pantry to see if you were acting like someone who’d just lost her boyfriend.”
“Okay. Say you’re right about everything. Why would Charlie follow me home? Why would he hack our security system?”
“To verify the address and make sure it was really us. He’s seen my car. One look inside our garage would confirm it. Maybe he grabbed a still photo or two off the garage camera as proof. Think about it. He now has information that might once again fetch a pretty good price if he were to offer it to the right people.”
“Does he know about your money?”
“It came up once a long time ago. He made an offhand comment about my lifestyle not matching that of someone who was still trying to get a struggling business off the ground. He doesn’t know all the details, but he knows I did some programming work and was compensated for it. He’s smart. He would have read between the lines and figured it out.”
“I’m running out of objections.”
“I did too when I was going through it in my head.”
Kate pushed her plate away because her stomach was now in knots. “I think you’re wrong about Charlie.”
“It’s just a gut feeling I can’t shake, and believe me, I’ve tried.”
“I don’t want it to be him.”
“Neither do I.”
“I like him.”
“I know you do. I like him too.”
“It isn’t him.”
“I hope you’re right. But until I know for sure who it is, I can’t have him here.”
Ian was right, and there was no way she would ever argue for something that might jeopardize their safety, no matter how crazy she thought the theory seemed.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Kate and Rob made small talk as he drove her to her latest social engineering assignment. At first she’d felt a little silly bringing a bodyguard to work, but it wasn’t long before she discovered that having someone idling in the parking lot sure came in handy when she needed to make a quick getaway.
When he wasn’t with her, Rob hung out in the guard shack by the garage, which Ian had decided to expand into an outbuilding with enough room to install additional surveillance equipment and give the guards someplace to take a break. He’d equipped it with a fridge and microwave and put a couch and TV in the corner. There was still some interior work to be done, but it was coming along nicely.
“Can you please park over there?” Kate asked when they reached their destination, pointing toward a visitor spot near the front of the building. She would have preferred that Rob park in the back of the lot, but she’d learned he considered it one of the most unsafe things a person could do and insisted on parking as close to the door as he could. She leafed through her notes after he brought the car to a stop. Because the task force had been taking up increasingly large amounts of his time, Ian had agreed to let Kate complete all the pretexting for their current assignment. He would be responsible for hacking into the network, but he’d put her in charge of all nontechnical penetration as well as physical entry.
“I won’t be long, probably less than five minutes,” she told Rob.
She’d tucked her hair up under a baseball cap, and she wore a polo shirt that bore the logo of the waste-removal company that was scheduled to empty the dumpsters the next day the way they did every Thursday. Pen in hand and carrying her clipboard, she approached a guard shack similar to the one at their front gate.
The man stationed inside looked up. “Can I help you?”
“Hi. My manager received a call that you’ve got a problem with one of the dumpsters you use for your paper recycling. He sent me to take a look at it so we can get it fixed before tomorrow’s pickup.”