Cabin 1 Page 13

  And I was hungry… not for any kind of meat, I’d noticed, I was hungry only for my client in Cabin 1.

  That threw me off.

  As I took my plate to the sink, I wondered—was that all it was?

  Did I only want Niki because I couldn’t have her?

  I quickly decided that whatever feelings I was getting for Niki better be nothing deeper than that because if I fucked up—if I fucked Niki—I’d be out of a job or banished from personal security, at the very least.

  Frustrated—and worse, doubting myself—I haphazardly wiped the plate, set it in the dishwasher and considered a drive to Frank’s Bar for a few Bloody Marys and a roll in the hay with whichever bartender was on call. A smooth drink and smoother woman was exactly what I needed to cool my irritation—and my thoughts about Niki. A good lay was exactly what I needed.

  First, though, I needed to figure out why the hell my oldest brother, Feen, was MIA.

  I left the chatter behind, a heated debate about women paying for dinners, and jogged up the staircase to the second floor. After checking for Feen in his room, I checked the gym, the garage, then the shooting range via the security cameras. No Phoenix. I checked the back deck—sometimes Feen would drink his morning coffee outside—then I headed back inside. Frowning, I searched the main level, unease beginning to mix with the pancakes in my stomach.

  Feen had been off over the last forty-eight hours, then again, we all were. Death anniversaries were never fun, especially when it belonged to your dad. The only difference was that Gunner, Ax, and I drew strength from each other, each rather having a prostate exam than show pain. It’s how we dealt with it. Feen, on the other hand, had been wound tighter than a two dollar watch.

  Something was up with the guy and I needed to find out what that was.

  Back upstairs, I made my way down the east hallway and stopped at the door that had remained closed for the last year—only entered by Opal, our housekeeper, and that was simply to dust around the things we’d asked her not to touch. None of us went into that room, ever… except for Phoenix, apparently.

  I turned the brass knob and pushed open the thick, wooden door.

  Dad.

  I could smell him, the scent of his spicy cologne hung in the air like a memory still clinging onto the present. My stomach sank.

  God, I missed him.

  Feen sat behind our father’s desk, everything in his office in the exact position it had been on the day he died. The same monogrammed pen laying vertically on personalized stationary. The same Newton’s Cradle pendulum balls that no longer swung. The same family picture, slowly fading in the sunlight.

  Books lined the walls, all dark cherry oak, file cabinets, and in the center of the room, a multi-computer set up that looked more like a command center for a warship, which, some might say was fitting for the kind of work my Dad did. A command center that was now buzzing with life, with Feen behind the controls.

  I quickly closed the door behind me with a glance over my shoulder.

  “What the hell are you doing, brother?” I crossed the authentic Chinese rug, concern brewing like a green batch of beer.

  No response.

  “Feen.”

  Just noticing me, Feen looked up and leaned back in our dad’s massive leather chair. He ran his fingers through his mussed, greasy hair. His eyes were shaded, heavy with bags that added ten years to his age. His skin was pale, pasty even. He looked like shit.

  My instinct went to alert. “What’s wrong with you?”

  In a mindless tick, Feen started shaking his head side to side. Like a damn mental patient. My frown deepened as I walked around the desk and zeroed in on the computer screen where multiple reports and spreadsheets covered the monitors. Below, a piece of notebook paper with Feen’s scribbled writing all over it.

  “I repeat. What the hell is wrong with you?”

  An exasperated exhale, then, “Dad was into something, Gage.” His voice was weak and scratchy as if he’d been to a rager the night before.

  I held up a hand. “No, hang on. Are you okay?”

  Feen’s eyes skirted around the desk, for what I wasn’t sure. My instincts were at five-alarm stage now. I turned, quickly walked into the bathroom, grabbed a rinsing cup and filled it with cold water. My brother chugged it, then took a deep breath.

  “Better?”

  “Yeah. Thanks.”

  “Now. Go. What’s going on?”

  “Dad was researching something… something big before he died. I’ve… I’ve been filtering through shit since yesterday morning.”

  “Yesterday morning? Why didn’t you tell us?”

  “Tell you what?” Attitude flashed in his eyes, which, honestly, made me feel better. It was life in him, and at that moment, that’s what I needed to see. He continued, “That I was finally going to take action on my hunch that Dad didn’t actually die of a heart attack? That he was murdered? Please. Get out of here with that.”

  He had a point. Ax, Gunner, and I—and Dallas for that matter—would have done everything we could to keep him from exploring a conspiracy theory we’d all been forced to put to bed a year earlier. It wasn’t healthy. Obviously, it wasn’t healthy. Feen looked like he’d caught a rabid case of food poisoning.

  “Okay, fine.” I shook my head and held up my hands to surrender. “What have you found?”

  “Okay…” He spoke quickly, the words pouring out in a hyped up, jittery run-on sentence. “So you know the NSA is responsible for monitoring and analyzing foreign and domestic data to provide intelligence to the military…”

  “Right.”

  “You also know that Dad specialized in cryptology—in writing and analyzing code. He was smart as shit.”

  “Yeah, Ax is the only one who got that gene.”

  Feen snorted. “Anyway, I found some encrypted files buried deep in Dad’s hard drive—”

  “Encrypted?”

  “Yeah.”

  My eyes narrowed. “We just agreed that Ax is the only smart one in the family, so how the hell did you find these—and then actually get into them?”

  No answer.

  “Feen…”

  He looked up at me with a grim expression. “Wolf helped.”

  “Wolf?”

  “Yeah…”

  “You had our employee help you with something behind your brothers’ backs? Something you shouldn’t even be doing in the first place?”

  Feen surged to his feet—startling the shit out of me—sending the chair tumbling backward and me taking a step back, and thankful that I wouldn’t need to grab a new pair of shorts on the way out.

  “Someone had to do this, Gage!” His voice boomed through the silent room. Rage, the color of blood, spilled from his eyes. The guy was literally shaking.

  He was a total, complete nut job.

  This had to stop.

  I stepped forward, toe to toe, jaw clenched. “Cool it, Phoenix.”

  My heartbeat started to pick up as he stared down at me, fingers beginning to tingle like they used to the moment before Feen and I would pummel each other for whatever argument we’d gotten into. But that was decades ago…

  The flare of his nostrils eased and he finally stepped back. I chocked that up to exhaustion. Ol’ badass Feen had never backed down from a fight. Ever.

  Yeah, this guy was on the brink of a mental breakdown.

  “Sit.” I told him. “And keep your voice down unless you want the entire family coming up here. Jesus, Feen, Dallas would flip out if she knew what you were doing.”

  He sat as he’d been told—shocking me—and scrubbed his hands over his face, taking a deep breath. It was that moment that I realized he didn’t sit because I demanded it, he sat in concession because he needed something from me. He needed my help, and he knew it.

  I crossed my arms over my chest, more intrigued than ever, and angled behind him, peering at the computer screen.

  “As I was saying,” he started again. “I’ve been going through these
encrypted files…”

  “Hang on. Why? Dad probably had thousands of encrypted files on his computer, right? Why’d you go through these in particular?”

  “Because, Gage, these were on his personal computer. Not his work computer.”

  My eyebrows raised.

  “What I’ve gathered is that Dad was researching off the books. Investigating something personally. Something big. And guess when the time stamp is for the first file he pulled?”

  “Don’t fucking tell me…”

  “Two days before he died.”

  I blew out a breath and dragged my fingers through my hair. Christ. “Do we know what he was researching?”

  After a few clicks, Feen pulled up a black and white photo of a man, mid-sixties, draped in military garb and brandishing an AK-15.

  “You recognize this guy?”

  I shook my head, running through the most wanted list I used to know by heart.

  “That’s Andrei Sokolov, with the FSB.”

  “The Russian secret service?”

  “Yep. He was the director over military counterintelligence.”

  “Was?”

  “Yep. Assassinated a few weeks before Dad died. According to these restricted files, Sokolov caught a bullet in the brain one night while sleeping in his bed… under heavy security, I might add. No one knows how someone snuck into his home, or more importantly, why he was killed. News spun it that—get this—he died of a heart attack.”

  “How did Dad get these files?”

  Feen shrugged. “I’m sure he pulled it directly from one of our government’s hacking groups that no one knows about. Dad had full security clearance.”

  “Okay, so what does this Sokolov cat have to do with making you think Dad’s death was no accident?”

  “Well, Dad was researching Sokolov’s assassination extensively, along with this…” he clicked a few more keys, bringing up a black screen with an eye-crossing amount of tiny-ass code running across it. “…this code, or key, I should say. Dad was researching something called QKD, or quantum cryptography.”

  “What the hell is quantum cryptography?”

  “According to Wolf, it’s basically a way to communicate through satellites. It’s a way to send a password key that’s used to decrypt some form of communication.” He grabbed a stack of papers, spilling the water I’d gotten for him. After wiping up the mess, he pointed to a bunch of hand-written notes across various geographic print-outs. “Look here, this key correlates to a specific satellite.”

  My brows squeezed together to ward off an impending headache. “One of our satellites?”

  “Yep. And according to Dad’s notes here, Dad believed the key was embedded into our satellite system.”

  “Embedded as in… secretly embedded?”

  “Exactly. This key was used to decrypt emails between two people, a group of people, whatever. It’s almost completely untraceable. But here’s the deal.” Feen pulled up another image of the code, highlighted in various rows. In the upper corner was a date, handwritten and circled several times. “That’s Dad’s writing. It’s the date the code was discovered. Guess when that date is?”

  “Let me guess... the date Sokolov was assassinated.”

  “Exactly.” Feen smiled, leaned back and blew out a breath like he’d just aced his SAT. Something none of us, aside from Ax—and Wolf, for that matter—had ever done.

  Squinting, I leaned forward, scanning each screen. “So you’re saying that a few days before Dad died, he was researching a secret code embedded into one of our satellites, and believes this code correlates to the assassination of Russia’s Director of Military Counterintelligence of the FSB.”

  “Doesn’t just correlate, Gage, whoever killed Sokolov was secretly sending password keys to decrypt confidential communication, through our satellites. Meaning someone here, in the US, was involved. And two days after Dad discovers this hidden code, he dies of a massive heart attack.”

  A ball formed in the pit of my stomach. “Jesus, Feen.”

  “I know.”

  A moment slid by.

  “Gage.”

  Feen’s tone sent a chill up my spine. I shifted my gaze from the computer to him.

  “That’s not all.” He scrolled down to show the backside of the code printout that had been scanned to Dad’s account. “Look…”

  I leaned in. Underlined and circled several times in red ink, were two words scribbled across the paper in our dad’s writing.

  Knight Fox

  I looked at Feen, my insides twisting. “Who’s Knight Fox?”

  “No idea.”

  Holy. Shit. My stomach clenched knowing that my brother had just ripped off the top of Pandora’s box.

  “I thought about asking Dad’s buddies at the NSA, but, frankly, Gage, how do we know that someone from the government didn’t secretly assassinate Sokolov?” He glanced over his shoulder. “And maybe that person killed Dad. I don’t think we can trust anyone right now.”

  “Can you trace the embedded code? See where it came from, or where it originated from?”

  “According to Wolf, that’s nearly impossible. He’s going to work on it, though.”

  “You need to bring Ax in on this.”

  Feen nodded, “I know. I wanted to keep it quiet from you guys until I got something solid. Black and white facts that we could act on. We don’t have that yet… but we have a name.”

  “The Knight Fox,” I whispered under my breath.

  Silent, we stared at the screen, together, each knowing, understanding, that this information just changed the course of our family’s future.

  “I’m going to find out who he is. Somewhere in these files, there’s clues, links to it all. The Knight Fox is the link to figuring out why Dad was murdered.”

  “Or, the Knight Fox is the man who murdered him.” Unbelievable. In a daze of information, I straightened and crossed the room to the window.

  I’d just walked directly into my own nightmare. The thought that someone had targeted my dad, my family, was almost too much to bare. Phoenix had been right all along—Dad’s death wasn’t an accident.

  Dad had been murdered.

  Maybe I knew. Maybe deep in my gut I knew that, too. Maybe that was why I’d been drinking and screwing my way through the last year.

  As I looked down at the land my Dad had worked so hard for, I only knew one thing for certain.

  The Knight Fox better fucking run.

  16

  Niki

  Blinking, I pulled away from my laptop, where I’d spent the entire afternoon filtering through not only Mickey Greco’s case files, but old files as well, looking for anything that could lead me to my attacker. My current stalker. I had a notebook full of incoherent notes, names, dates, a few doodles of a tornado, block letters, flowers… and GS scribbled more times than I cared to admit. At least I hadn’t doodled NS with a heart around it, like some tragically love-stricken eighth grader.

  I grabbed the beer I’d been sipping on for the last hour and swigged the rest.

  I needed a break.

  Leaning back against the couch, my gaze settled on the sweeping windows where the sun was beginning to set. Bright orange, yellow, and fuchsia painted the sky, shooting through the woods like slanted fire. But the view that pulled me the most were the glimpses of the main house through the trees.

  Gage.

  I picked my red leaf and twirled it around in my fingers.

  Gage.

  Yes, I needed a break, and I knew exactly where to go.

  I carefully set the leaf down, stood, and paused to grab my phone. Remembering that I didn’t have one was like the sugar-free icing on top of a raw, vegan carrot cake.

  Not good.

  Just like the day I’d just had.

  So, instead, I grabbed my SOS necklace and security remote and paused in front of the mirror. I grimaced at the knot below my eye, now a hundred different shades of purple. The swelling had gone down, though—yee-haw. In a
n attempt to refresh myself, I finger-combed my hair, my nails catching on the curls that had formed at the bottom from going to bed with wet hair the night before. Resigning to the disheveled look, I glanced down at my clothes, a white cashmere sweater with skinny jeans, courtesy of Celeste. After a quick dab of lip gloss to distract from the shiner below my eye, I shrugged and pushed out the back door of Cabin 1.

  Taking a deep breath, I inhaled the fresh, autumn air, and felt the tension release from my shoulders. The knots from the evening before had been compounded by a surprise visit that morning by a very pushy psychiatrist named Dr. Murray. Well, pushy might be a stretch but when I’d made it evident to the doctor that I had zero interest in replaying the attack for the hundredth time, she’d proceeded to do exactly what I would have done—ask probing personal questions thinly veiled to lead to an emotional breakthrough. Or, breakdown.

  Well, sweetheart, I’d already broken down. And break through? I wanted to break Gage’s face for scheduling the little appointment to begin with. Although… it’d be difficult to break the man’s face who’d slept on my deck to ensure no one else dropped off their heads, or their bullets into my body.

  It would be difficult to break the man’s face who’d captivated my every thought since the moment he’d kissed me.

  It had been a sleepless night with visions of Gage Steele running through my mind, the man who’d rescued me from the woods, saved my life, and kissed me with more passion than I’d ever felt before.

  There was a heat between us.

  Raw.

  Unprecedented.

  Volatile.

  Magic.

  Like fire and gasoline.

  I reminded myself, though, of course there was passion. Gage was a walking bottle of testosterone, unable to control, conceal, or hide the fire that so evidently raged inside him. A scorching passion that could only be dulled by booze and women. The ultimate alpha male—controlling, demanding, and quick to label anything he wanted as his own.