Operation Owl (Beyond Fairytales) Read online

  Which meant he needed to get the hell away from her as soon as humanly possible, at least until the CIA, NSA, FBI, and Homeland Security were no longer determined to send him to an off-the-map black-site prison for the rest of his wretched life.

  “My definition of what?” Maya’s question jerked Zack out of his mental self-flagellation.

  Mad as hell at himself, he scratched the back of his head. “It’s not important. Let’s go sit on one of those benches and talk.”

  Without protest, she followed him to sit with her legs crossed on a slab of black marble. The exhibit wasn’t popular, and they were the only people in the room. He found his gaze drifting to her lap before he jerked his head up and plunked his ass down next to hers. Taking a deep breath, he flattened his palms on the cold surface and used the icy sensation to reel in his less-than platonic thoughts.

  Deciding the best way out was to give her the necessary information as quickly as possible, he shifted mental gears and focused on the events leading to his current predicament. “About a year ago, I was contracted by the National Security Agency for what they called Operation Owl.”

  She turned and squinted at him. “Operation Owl? Are you sure you’re not making this up?”

  He rolled his eyes. “The irony isn’t lost on me either. Apparently, the person in charge of naming these NSA projects was a Nicodemus fan, so fairy-tale titles were used as operation code names. Mine happened to be The Owl.”

  She raised an eyebrow. “You do realize the confluence of operation name, my nickname, and this meeting place supports the theory you’re a schizophrenic conspiracy theorist, right?”

  He scowled. “And sane people don’t use words like ‘confluence’ in every day conversation. Do you want to hear my story or not?”

  She patted his shoulder. “Sorry. Please continue.”

  He had a feeling she was making fun of him but decided to let it slide. “The goal of Operation Owl is simple. The country’s top white hat hackers—”

  “And now we can add delusions of grandeur to your list of symptoms,” she murmured.

  Detecting a hint of amusement, he cleared his throat. “Some white hat hackers were hired to gain access to the Barn—a bank of servers the NSA uses to intercept any and all electronic communication. The government would like to think the facility is impervious to offsite attacks, but they wanted to make sure. We were given a simple task—break in, retrieve a picture of an owl they hid among the data, and brief them about their vulnerabilities. The people who contracted us were pretty damn sure we’d all fail.”

  “I’m guessing you didn’t?”

  He snorted. “The US government is the least technologically savvy entity in this country. Breaking into the Barn was like taking candy from a baby. What I didn’t expect to find was a vulnerability built into the code—a back door that would allow any systems administrator to not only read communications, but to also intercept and change them before delivery.”

  Her spine snapped straight, her shoulders drawing back. As one of the most intelligent people he’d encountered, he’d known it’d take her mere seconds to connect the dots. “You reported it, didn’t you?”

  Remembering the moment of stupidity tempted him to slam his fist onto the marble bench. Hindsight was a bitch. “Bill Camden—the contracting agent who gave me the job—was a buddy of mine. I omitted the findings from the official brief I turned in, but I gave him a verbal report. He told me he was going to send the information up the food chain as soon as I left his office.”

  Silence surrounded them for a long while, truncated only by distant echoes of footsteps. “And?” she prompted.

  Rage coiled in his gut and turned into a lump in his throat. “And the healthy, thirty-three-year-old triathlete died of a heart attack the next day, leaving behind a wife and two children.”

  Her breath came out in a hiss. “D—arn.”

  Despite the oppressive torrent of emotions pummeling him on all sides, he chuckled. “I’m pretty sure my story warrants ‘Damn.’”

  She rolled her shoulders, as if needing to relieve the tension. “Swearing doesn’t improve any situation, and I’ve been trying to cut down on it. Okay, I’m guessing they figured out you were involved.”

  “In a manner of speaking. They suspected I had a link to Bill after I hacked into their system again and downloaded a huge chunk of their database—specifically a two-year log of every intercepted communication, doctored or otherwise, as well as usernames of the agents who accessed the server. Then I hacked into a different system and matched those identifiers to personnel records.”

  Her jaw dropped. “Of all the stupid, idiotic, egotistical moves—”

  “I was pissed, all right?” His voice resonated in the empty room. Realizing the mistake, he modulated the rest of his explanation. “Bill was my friend. His kids are now fatherless. I needed to figure out who killed him—I owe the man at least that much.”

  She puffed out her cheeks and pursed her lips. The woman had one of the cutest angry-faces he’d ever seen. “And now you’ve gone and ruined your life. Did you find out what you wanted at least?”

  “No. That’s where you come in.”

  “That’s where I what?” The question came out as a squeak.

  He reached into his pocket and took out a USB thumb drive shaped as a gold bracelet. “I’m a hacker, not a forensic accountant.” Grabbing her left hand, he circled the memory device around her slim wrist. “Here’s a copy of all the data, close to a terabyte of it. I need you to use your voodoo math skills to figure out who profited from these interceptions and how.”

  Chapter Two

  “Just remember, Zack is not interested in you that way,” Maya muttered at her reflection after rinsing out her mouth. With her teeth minty fresh, she stripped off her robe and stepped into the shower. Closing her eyes, she turned the cold water on full blast and allowed the chilled cascade to soak her hair and cool her overheated body. On the advice of her best friend turned crimina

  l, she’d gone through her usual routine for the day—back to work, and then to a spin class, followed by a bite to eat at Whole Foods. Needing to burn off energy, she followed the quinoa salad with another half hour on the rowing machine.

  Neither the workout nor the less-than-filling dinner in any way dampened her state of arousal. Sometimes, she hated having the libido of a twenty-five-year-old woman.

  Any sane person would be focused on the fact that the USB bracelet on her kitchen counter contained illegally obtained classified documents vital to national security. A normal individual with an ounce of self-preservation who wasn’t still infatuated with her best friend after all these years would have slapped Zack in the face and told him to go to hell. They would not have mutely remained on a marble bench in the National Gallery, watching a hunted fugitive waltz away while deciding to give him everything he asked for.

  Lifting her lids, she drew a ragged breath as every inch of her skin continued to tingle despite the numbing cold. Her breasts ached, her nipples budding into sharp points and pulsing as if in anticipation. Unable to resist, she filled her palm with shower gel and soaped her needy flesh, her ministrations doing little to ease her discomfort. After five years, she shouldn’t still be in lust with a man who had made it abundantly clear he saw her as no more than a friend.

  For most of their two-year-long acquaintance, she had suspected the bond between them to be far from platonic. She’d also hidden the belief for ninety-nine percent of those years because the object of her affection had a girlfriend. After meeting his high school sweetheart twice, she’d ascertained the woman’s selfishness, conceit, and vapidity. But since he’d claimed to be in love with Veronica, Maya had kept her thoughts to herself. Besides, how could she have pointed out he was suffering from commitment bias without sounding like a jealous, besotted idiot?

  But Veronica had done them all a favor and broken up with Zack a few days before his graduation. Maya hadn’t been terribly surprised to see her frie
nd in better spirits after the end of his five-year-long, soap-operatic relationship than he’d ever been before. The man had practically celebrated getting dumped, which everyone besides her had found odd. Such life events were typically commemorated in their social circle with a thirty-eight-hour World of Warcraft induced stupor, or at the very least a Star Trek marathon. Zack hadn’t even had the decency to innovate a new social media platform as a way to prove to his ex the depth of her mistake.

  Instead, he’d hosted a LAN party in his dorm room, bought everyone free beer, and gotten drunk enough she’d beaten him at Guitar Hero. In her infinite lack of wisdom, she’d interpreted every minutiae of his behavior that night—the fact that he asked her to stay after the rest of the crew had left, the way he tucked her hair behind her ear several times over the course of three hours, and the fact that his lips grazed her cheek as he pulled her down on the mattress beside him—to mean that he wanted something more.

  So she kissed him.

  And at the time, she’d thought he kissed her back. His tongue had been inside her mouth, his hands had slid under her sweatshirt, and he’d damn well used his knee to part her thighs. Just when she’d thought all her dreams were on the verge of coming true, he’d bolted up as if tasered and stormed out of his own dorm room.

  The next day, he’d boarded the first plane out of Logan Airport for San Francisco. She hadn’t heard a word from him since. They’d shared e-mails and Facebook comments of course, and even a few several hour-long instant messenger sessions at random points in their lives, but nothing in person or over the phone. Since she’d been the one who’d screwed things up, she’d felt it appropriate to let him make the first move. He never had.

  As rejections went, she figured she’d scored the highest possible mark. And, for five years, she’d replayed how one dumb, stupid, idiotic misunderstanding had obliterated her most cherished friendship in less than a minute. One would think such a life-changing experience would have taught her a lesson.

  But no, here she was, standing in a cold shower, still fixated on a guy who only wanted friendship. Well, that and getting her to help him unravel a cyber-conspiracy at the heart of the national security apparatus of the most powerful country in the world. Lucky her.

  Since the lowered temperature didn’t seem to reduce her newly awakened sex-drive, she mixed in some hot water and massaged shampoo into her hair. The keratin treatment she happily paid for every six weeks ensured her fingers wouldn’t get tangled the way they used to before she discovered proper hair care. The limonene-scented shampoo and conditioner that came as part of the package also smelled divine enough to distract her from thoughts of Zack for the next few minutes.

  By the time she finished her bathing ritual, however, she found herself in the same boat as before—inexplicably aroused and seriously contemplating ways to rectify the situation. She didn’t have anything against masturbation, religiously, morally, or culturally speaking. While she’d never had the “sex talk” with her mother, the lapse hadn’t been due to any prudishness on either side. In her parents’ culture, the conversation came a little later in life—before the marriage night under ideal circumstances, but definitely after their daughter turned sixteen. Northern Virginia’s public school system required all children to learn the mechanical intricacies of this biological act at the age of twelve, and the Internet took care of the rest. So when Ammi thought the lesson had come due, Maya had treated her mother to an eye roll and a teenager’s “I already know everything” groan.

  Maya hadn’t actually known everything, but it wasn’t as if she could ask her mother, “How, exactly, do I masturbate?” Besides, there were much better and less embarrassing sources for this information. So she did some online research, watched videos, and even bought a lipstick-shaped vibrator from a joke store. It didn’t take long for her to figure out where she should use it and to get the angle just right. But once she succeeded, her interest took a nosedive. The entire endeavor had been born more out of haywire teenage hormones and intellectual curiosity than any actual interest in the act. At seventeen, she’d chucked the vibrator and gotten on with her life. She’d figured she’d experience the real deal soon enough.

  Boy, had she been wrong.

  It would be nice if she could blame her virginity on sexual repression, religious belief, or familial pressure, but self-awareness came with downsides. Her parents were well-educated immigrants, smart enough to accept the stark cultural differences between D.C. and Chandigarh. While Ammi and Baba preferred to maintain a don’t-ask-don’t-tell policy, she’d doubted they’d expected chastity. As long as she got straight As, attended the right college, and held a steady job, she doubted they’d care if she brought home a tattooed biker.

  But despite their laissez-faire attitude, there she sat—a twenty-five-year-old virgin. She could fling some of the blame in her parents’ direction. They’d gifted her with the dorkiest genes possible and chosen to settle in an ethnically Indian neighborhood. Her grade-school friends hadn’t owned Barbie dolls or watched cartoons; they’d trounced each other at Math Blaster and held trivia contests. When most pre-teens showed off dresses for their school dance, her peers crowed over their latest graphic calculators. Instead of planning prom dates, her social circle geared up for the National Science Bowl.

  College opened her eyes to the stark difference between her home environment and reality. But within a month of her arrival at MIT, she’d fallen for Zack. This infatuation and the disaster that followed led to a period of celibacy. Once he left, she’d gotten wrapped up in squeezing a bachelors and masters into four years of college. Afterward, she’d landed her dream job at the Treasury Department, a numbers-obsessed government agency that had crap pay, great benefits, and a nonexistent dating pool.

  After less than ten minutes in Zack’s presence, her libido came back with a vengeance. Every part of her body seemed on edge. In her current state, taking measures to alleviate her problem was beyond logical. She did her best work when relaxed, and an orgasm achieved just that.

  Pulling the lever that switched the output from the shower to the faucet, she sealed the drain and drew back the plastic curtain. Once the tub was half-full, she unhooked the showerhead, sank down, and leaned back. With a gentle kick, she reversed the flow of water.

  ***

  Where the hell was Maya?

  Parked on the opposite side of the narrow street, Zack had a straight line of sight into his friend’s fourth story apartment. Knowing how harebrained she could be, he hadn’t been surprised to find all her blinds wide open, giving anyone who looked full view of both her bedroom and living room. If he ever got out of this mess, they’d have to chat about basic operational security.

  He’d never understood why, but despite being a few IQ points shy of mathematical genius, Maya had always struggled with real-world applications of her knowledge and intelligence. Ask her to solve a differential equation, code a program for a quantum physics simulation, or, hell, create a probabilistic model for the mating habits of mole rats, and she’d handle the task with aplomb. Remind her to lock her dorm room before going out, and she’d forget half the time.

  But the woman was nothing if not predictable. She should have gone to the gym, eaten dinner, and returned home by now. The GPS on the cell phone he’d given her indicated her presence in the apartment. But he couldn’t spot her anywhere, and after spending three months as the target of both a governmental and private manhunt, his imagination tended to linger on worst-case scenarios. Someone could have spotted them at the gallery and intercepted her on the way back. She could be in danger. She could even be dead. Not being able to see her alive and breathing drove him insane.

  It took him all of fifteen minutes to ghost her computer. Guessing her Wi-Fi router’s password had been child’s play, seeing as how she hadn’t bothered to change it from the out-of-the-box setting. The network name was also her apartment number, a really dumb habit city dwellers had gotten into. She’d left the computer on sle
ep mode, which meant all he’d needed to do was remotely connect, guess her password, and install malware—tasks he could accomplish in his sleep.

  Of course, having complete access to her online activity didn’t do him any good if she wasn’t using the damn thing, or worse, if she was lying unconscious somewhere obscured from his line of sight. What if he turned on her webcam?

  Hesitating at the threshold of stalker-like activity, the logical part of his brain made one last-ditch attempt to stall his fingers. This wasn’t acceptable behavior, not by any stretch of the imagination. He should wait and see what happened. If push came to shove, he could always abandon his post and knock on her door.

  But he’d been sitting there for ages, an abnormal amount of time for anyone to spend in the bathroom. She could have passed out in there, and then where would they be? His brain’s paranoid frontal lobe ended up winning the battle. He needed a quick peek, a brief glance to confirm her location. If the trick gave him a glimpse of her in the shower, the curtain would obscure his view. If he saw even a hint of skin, he’d shut the damn feed off. No harm could come of this.

  He accessed her webcam and turned it on. As luck would have it, the computer was angled at the open bathroom door, the only part of her apartment he couldn’t see into from the street. With the wall-to-wall mirror completely visible on screen, it wouldn’t be hard to ascertain her presence. A few keystrokes allowed him to enhance the high definition feed and zoom in. A light coating of condensation blurred the reflection by a fraction, but the open doors allowed most of it to dissipate. The reflected image was clear enough to make out shapes and colors.