Authors: Bev Elle
Obsidian Faith (13 page)
“This hotel reminds me of growing up in Orlando,” Shanice said. “It’s so festive here.”
“Yeah, the games are just little more adult-oriented,” Trevor said and smiled. He stopped their slow promenade through the hotel lobby, cupped her face, and kissed her tenderly. “Present company is also much better.”
Shanice beamed at him. “See, you’re better at playing the doting husband than you thought you’d be.”
“You make it easy,” he said.
They reached the windowed foyer where the roller coaster was whisking by and riders were throwing up their hands in wild abandon, while others had a look of sheer terror on their faces. Shanice tugged on his arm. “Can we ride after lunch?”
“Yes. But we should give our food a chance to digest. We wouldn’t want a
Sand Lot
moment happening on our honeymoon, now would we?”
“As long as we don’t chew any tobacco after our meal, we should be good.”
“You remember that much about that movie?”
She rolled her eyes playfully. “It was only your favorite movie of all time. You even layered your t-shirts with button-ups, just like Benny Rodriguez did.”
“That was a brilliant fashion statement.”
“Yeah, unique to you and millions of other boys who loved that movie.”
They reached the restaurant and were seated.
“I’m starved,” Shanice said.
Trevor laughed. “You’re about the size of a gnat, girl. Where do you put it all?”
“In my compact little thunder thighs, and this round little tush you like so much,” she said.
Trevor felt his face heat up. “Am I that obvious?”
She leaned in and planted a soft kiss on his neck. “Only to me.” She patted his arm.
“I’ll have you know, I love all of you. Never doubt that.”
He was so wrapped up in the moment, Trevor almost forgot he needed to talk to Shanice about Philip. He hoped it would occur before they flew out to meet the Baileys on Friday. He didn’t want Philip to know about his marriage to Shanice until Special Agent Hemphill and his team were able to get enough on Phillip to take him down, once and for all. They would have to construct an elaborate ruse, especially to keep Shanice safe. There was no time like the present to bring her in on things. Well, at least the things he could share with her at the moment. Some of what was going down would have to be on a “need to know basis.”
“Babe?”
Shanice licked her lips in a way that made him want to run back to their room. “Yeah?”
Trevor mentally shook himself to clear all thoughts of a sexual nature from his mind. He had to be on his game. “Philip is likely to show up around here.”
“Really? You mean now? While we’re here?”
“Yeah. He wanted to pick me up from the facility, but I told him I’d made other plans. I’ll be hooking up with him tonight or tomorrow.” He said it fast, knowing she’d probably frown on him having anything further to do with his uncle.
“Trevor, do you really think that’s wise? He’s the reason you ended up in prison in the first place. Part of your rehabilitation is not having anything to do with the people you were in contact with before.”
Trevor put his arm around her and pulled her close. “How do you know that?”
“Your caseworker told me.”
“You became besties with my caseworker?”
“Stop trying to distract me.”
“Okay, then. Will you trust that I’m not trying to go down that path again? I’m only doing this to prove something to the only people who matter to me. You and your parents. That’s all I can tell you now, because keeping you away from Philip is the most important thing, and I need you to be as careful as possible moving around the city.”
“Avoiding him won’t be an issue for me. I never got the feeling he liked me very much.”
“Philip doesn’t like himself very much. You’re right, though, he’s nothing like David, believe me. The best decision I ever made was to keep you away from him after David and Elena died.”
“Then why are you entertaining the idea of seeing him now, and on our honeymoon?”
Trevor had to be careful here. He didn’t want to flat out lie to his bride. He would tell her the whole story some other time, when he was up for sharing just how pathetic his life had been with good old Uncle Philip.
“This is the best opportunity I’ll ever get to take him down. If I don’t do it now, while he thinks he has me at a disadvantage, it won’t happen.”
“David Kyle was a saint compared to his brother. Isn’t it strange how two children who grew up in the same household can turn out so different?”
“Tell me about it. Hey, maybe you should stay at Lisa’s the next couple of days, so you can be completely out of harm’s way.”
She was shaking her head before he was finished speaking. “No way. Trevor, we’re on our honeymoon, and I’m not afraid of your uncle.”
“Maybe you should be.”
“And besides, you promised never to push me away again.”
Trevor wished he’d qualified that promise more. “This is an entirely different situation, baby.”
“Not on our honeymoon, it isn’t.”
He pulled her into his arms. “When did you become so stubborn? The little snaggle-toothed girl I remember used to always do what I said.”
“She grew up,” she replied and followed up with a kiss.
“Compromise,” he said. “How about you stay at Lisa’s just on the morning I’m working with the feds to catch Phil. We should have all that dirty business taken care of by noon.”
“I think I can deal with that,” she said.
He held his breath then blew it out and said, “Is your faith in me firmly intact?”
“Absolutely.”
He leaned in and kissed his wife’s delectable lips. “Good.”
The Las Vegas field office had an impressive array of computer gadgetry, the likes of which Trevor had never seen. What he’d done for the bureau while in the joint was small potatoes. With the equipment in this room, and a few other additions, Trevor could take down the computer systems of the entire world, if he were a “black hat hacker,” which he wasn’t.
Donald gave him a crooked grin. “This shit gives you a hard-on doesn’t it?”
“In the worst way.” Trevor grinned. “This is the closest my wife will ever come to identifying anything as my mistress.”
“Good, because she and that hellcat friend of hers would make you a eunuch if you were ever to look sideways at another woman.”
Trevor raised eyebrows with a look of incredulity. “Did Lisa threaten you?”
“And at your wedding reception, no less. She thinks I’m one of your criminal friends, and I’m a bad influence on you. She threatened to sic her ‘
high-ranking Air Force official father’ on both of us. Shanice is his goddaughter, and she compared her father to a Corleone.
That woman is fierce.”
“And you like her.” Trevor took a seat in front of a quad of computer monitors, touched the mouse, and the powerful computer woke up.
Agent Hemphill looked sheepish for the first time ever in their association. “After we bag your uncle Phil, I might have to reintroduce myself to Lisa Bradford, is all I’m saying.”
Trevor laughed. Then he became immersed in the world of computer code. A world he understood better than any other, until he fell in love with one Shanice Anderson Bailey. Now it was time to protect her and her family from Philip Kyle’s threats, once and for all.
First, Trevor pulled up the program he’d used to perpetrate his heist.
“See this string code right here?” Trevor said. “This is what I hid in the main code, so you guys could trace the program to me.”
Donald pulled a chair next to Trevor and sat backwards in it then draped his hands over the back. “If you hadn’t done that, we would never have caught you. Now that this is almost over, you want to tell me why?”
“When I went away to college, I thought I was so smart. I’d finally gotten away from Phillip and acted all cocky about it. Then the Baileys were in a car accident. Someone had run their van off the road when they were coming back from church. It’s a good thing the children weren’t in the car with them. Shanice had taken them to a matinee. Isaiah suffered a concussion and Brenda a broken arm. Afterward, Phillip let it ‘slip’ he might have been involved in that, too.”
“He was sending you a message.”
“Yep. At that point, I no longer asked ‘how high’ when Philip said jump. I’d severed my relationship with Shanice a couple of times, but he didn’t buy it. Philip wanted me to know he wasn’t bluffing about hurting the people I cared about most. It’s the only way I agreed to do the unclaimed funds heist.”
“Did you always have a plan to go to jail on his behalf? You could’ve rigged the code to frame him.”
“Those goons he employed had mafia connections. His directive was if anything happened to him, they were to take out a hit on the Bailey family.”
“So, you took the fall so he wouldn’t use you to do his dirty work anymore?”
“Yeah, that and I knew it would take me several years to retrofit this program to catch Philip. I needed to go to jail to protect Shanice and her family and to buy the time I needed to write the new program.”
“So, how is this going to work?”
“It’ll go in reverse of the original program. I’ll hack into the financial institutions around the world that hold the funds the original program took. We’re talking institutions in all the places where the uber-rich hide their money, like the British Virgin Islands, the Bahamas, the Cayman Islands, Cook Islands, Belize, and Switzerland. There’s several million in each location that when aggregated, is over a billion dollars, not to mention the interest that has accumulated. Philip believes his half of the code is required for me to access the money. That’s true and not true. In six months, I was able to write a program to override his half of the code.”
“You can do that in six months, but it took several years to override the original program?”
“I only had clearance to work on that when you brought me other projects to work on. The prison didn’t give me carte blanche use of their computer systems.”
“You mean you
took
clearance to work on it with my projects. Son of a bitch.”
“My biological mother
was
sort of a bitch,” Trevor said. “So I’m not offended by the term.”
“Smart ass,” Donald said. “So, once you come to work for us, you’re going to teach me everything you know, right.”
“Maybe not everything.” He smirked. “It’s called job security, my man.”
“I’ll settle for that. It’d be a far sight better than what the bureau currently has. You’re the only hacker who’s ever been able to completely cover their electronic footprint. I’d be happy to just know how to do that.”
“Okay, we’ll hammer out the details later.” I’ll be right back.
Trevor left and came back holding a toothbrush.
“What the fuck?” Donald said. “You about to brush the hell out of some ones and zeros?”
Trevor removed the handle of the toothbrush to reveal what looked like a USB connection. “This is how I stored the program I created while in prison. Two-hundred-sixty-four gigabytes of storage.”
“In a goddamn toothbrush. Ingenious. The one item the prison would never have thought to take away from you or x-ray for contraband.”
“True.”
“But how did you get it inside?”
“If I tell you that, I’ll have to kill ya.”
“Funny guy.”
Trevor took the USB and attached it to the computer. “Now, all I have to do is tweak this to send the money back to the original banks, rather than in the banks where it’s being hidden. Philip will be none the wiser. All he’ll see is that a huge sum of money has been transferred to what he believes are his off-shore accounts.”
“Now, to go over what we’ll need for an indictment,” Donald said. “You have to get him to admit his part in the original crime.”
“That shouldn’t be difficult, given how much of a narcissist my uncle is.”
“So, my men tell me Philip arrived today. He expects to have to drive to the prison tomorrow morning to meet you. Tonight might be a good time to make contact. Let him know what time you plan to meet up with him.”
“Okay, here’s hoping he has the same cell phone number.”
“Oh, he does.”
“I should’ve known you’d leave no stone unturned.”
“That’s why they pay me the big bucks.”
“Yeah, yeah.” Trevor turned his full attention back to his programming. “Now, to test this. Wouldn’t want a bug to render this code useless or send over a billion dollars to places unknown.”
“Right. That happens, we just might have to send you back to the slammer.” Donald chuckled.
“Not funny, Agent Hemphill.”
“Just kidding. I know you don’t make those kinds of mistakes.”
“Not if I can help it.”
Before he went back to the suite to join Shanice, Trevor called a number he’d never forgotten. Despite his uncle’s penchant for dealing with him as if he hadn’t used, threatened and blackmailed him most of his teenage life, Trevor’s interactions with the man remained thinly veiled hostility. He was careful to maintain that tone when he called.
“Just letting you know, the feds sprung me early.”
“Well, if it isn’t my nephew the felon,” Philip said. “My, how the wunderkind has fallen.”
“Cut the crap, Uncle Philip. I’m only calling you because you’re my next-of-kin on the books, and you need something from me.”
“Oh yeah? Well, I’m already in Vegas. We were going to drive down tomorrow and pick you up, but since that’s not necessary, the boys and I can make a later night of it on the strip. You want to hang with us?”
“Nah, I’m chilling with a honey I hooked up with since I’ve been out.”
“Understandable, but you need to meet up with us first thing tomorrow. One full night of getting your dick wet for the first time in seven years should suffice.”
“Yeah, you’ll need to drop a bundle on some computer hardware if you want me to do that job first thing.”
“Why can’t we go back and do it in Orlando on the equipment I already have there?”
“That footprint has to be under surveillance, and I don’t plan on going back to prison any time soon. If you want it done, it’ll have to be done here, on a new system that I can rig so it can’t be traced.”
Philip was quiet for almost too long. “Okay, we’ll get everything you need tomorrow, but we’re keeping all the goddamn receipts, because that shit is going back right away.”
“Sure thing.”
Once Trevor hung up with Philip, he dialed Hemphill. “Those mafia guys are here with him for sure. He must owe their organization a lot of money, because they’re not letting him out of their sight.”
“I don’t like the idea of you going in alone, Trevor. You need to create a plausible reason for me to be there. If he’s entitled to two sidekicks, you should at least have one.”
“Aw, Agent Hemphill, I didn’t know you cared so much.”
“I’m just saying, the bureau is invested in you now. It’d be a damned shame if anything were to happen to you. You’ve convinced me that Philip, or his muscle, could put a bullet in you the moment he gets the funds transferred over. He’ll believe he has all the money. ”
“Fine, but I’m not calling him back tonight. You’ll just go with me in the morning, and I’ll explain the situation then. He doesn’t like it, he can take a hike.”
“Well, not really, because we still want to bag this asshole.”
“Believe me, the element of surprise will be better. You just figure out how you’re going to conceal a weapon. You’ll be frisked.”
“I’ll put it where no self-respecting man will feel comfortable searching for it.”
“Enough said.”
“You’re a wuss, Trevor. I’m going to have the bureau send you through FBI recruit training. You need to learn how to properly conceal and fire a weapon, if you’re going to work with my team.”
“If I wanted to do that, I’d have signed up for the military.”
“Geeks like you don’t usually like the military.”
“That’s where you’re wrong. My Dad was a Marine and a bigger geek than I am.”
“I stand corrected, then, but your ass is still running the obstacle course and learning to handle firearms. I insist on all my field and desk agents going through the same training.”
“You don’t think I’ll be able to cut it, do you?”
“We’ll certainly find out.”
“I didn’t veg in prison, man. You know I worked out religiously, and I can bench two-fifty.”
“We’ll see, computer geek.”
“Goodnight, Donald. My bride is waiting on me. I don’t have time to argue with you anymore.”
“Meet you in the lobby at 0800 hours.”
“Sharp.” Trevor said and hung up.