Hide From Evil (30 page)

Outlandish as it sounded, it looked like Talia was telling the truth. She might not have been privy to all the details, but she alone could provide the missing link to get them pointed in the right direction.

Which had led them here, in the industrial section of Seattle, breaking into a warehouse adjacent to a shipping lot owned and operated by Maxwell’s transportation company, where they hoped to find more information to back up Talia’s claims.

“Okay, what you want to do now is key in this combination.” Krista could hear Ibarra through her earpiece as he talked Sean through resetting the building’s alarm system.

She looked over her shoulder at every little creak and scuffle that rang through the darkness, listening for any sign that the handful of security guards who were monitoring the shipping lot were alerted to their presence.

Talia had claimed that the transportation and shipping company was one of Maxwell’s last legitimate businesses, and while it brought in hefty revenues, it hadn’t been nearly enough to pull Margaret out of debt and build their bank accounts back to the current levels.

For that, David had had to get creative, Talia claimed. And even though the shipping business itself was legit, many of the activities and transactions that went down in the shipping yard, she suspected, weren’t.

Despite what they’d uncovered, for Krista it felt like a gigantic leap of faith to take the word of a questionable witness and use that as her excuse to break into private property.

Again.

And this time it wasn’t owned by Jack Brooks who would call it good after a few punches. Unlike her father’s house, she couldn’t rationalize this away with the excuse of if she used a key, it wasn’t really illegal.

This time they were breaking into a place owned by one of the wealthiest, most influential men in the Pacific Northwest. A man who would ruin her life and her career if they didn’t find what they needed to nail him to the wall.

Oh, who are you kidding. After everything you’ve gotten yourself into in the past three days, you’ll barely get a chance to kiss your career good-bye as it swirls down the toilet.

“I can’t believe it,” Sean said as he keyed in the combination Ibarra gave them. “It’s been fifteen minutes and you haven’t whined once about committing another felony.”

“I’m too busy calculating how many years I’ll be doing when all this is over,” she snapped.

There was a high-pitched beep and a click. “Door alarm should be disarmed,” Ibarra, who was parked near the lot entrance to keep watch, spoke to them through the earpieces both she and Sean wore. Talia had briefed them on the security systems installed at the warehouse in an earlier phone call.

“He always thought I was stupid,” Talia had said, bitterness evident in her tone. “But I watched everything. Unless he’s changed the codes, you should be able to get in.”

Ibarra assured them that even if that was the case, he would have no problem working around the security system. Still, no plan was foolproof, and Krista held her breath as Sean turned the handle, bracing herself for the shriek of an alarm.

The door swung open.

“Looks like the codes Talia gave us are still good. Stay close to the front of the building,” Ibarra’s disembodied voice commanded. “You’ve still got the internal motion sensors to contend with.”

Sean swept the interior of the warehouse with the beam of his flashlight. Though it was completely dark, from what Krista could see, the warehouse was exactly as Talia had described. What looked like a beaten-down abandoned warehouse on the outside was a fully finished, luxuriously furnished space.

“Go to the east wall and walk about ten paces,” Ibarra’s disembodied voice commanded.

“Stay right with me,” Sean said. In the darkness, his gloved hand sought hers and he placed it on his shoulder. Only inches separated them as Sean moved carefully along the wall. Though the warehouse was cavernous, according to Talia the downstairs had been partitioned to make a sitting area combined with a kitchen and a private office.

Up the spiral staircase Krista could just make out in the darkness a master bedroom suite.

“A secret lair worthy of a James Bond villain,” Talia had said wryly.

From the little that Krista could see, it looked a lot like any number of warehouses that had been converted into luxury work/living spaces, although those spaces were all clumped together in newly gentrified neighborhoods, not supposedly abandoned spaces next to a trucking lot.

“There should be a panel along the wall,” Ibarra said. “Can you see it?”

They carefully sidestepped a low couch and Sean flashed his light along the wall. No panel, but there were two massive abstract acrylic canvases on the wall above the couch. Sean handed Krista the flashlight and took first one and then the other canvas down off the wall and propped them on the back of the couch. “Bingo.”

Ibarra repeated the information Talia had provided, and Sean had the motion sensors deactivated in a matter of seconds.

Sean carefully rehung the paintings and said, “According to Talia, the office is in the back right corner of the warehouse.”

They walked more quickly now that they didn’t have to worry about the motion sensors. Krista still held onto Sean’s shoulder, not so much because she was worried of losing him in the dark, but because that slight contact took the edge off the anxiety pumping through her, the awful feeling that something was about to go horribly, irrevocably wrong.

They came to a closed door. As Sean’s hand reached slowly for the knob, Krista’s heart leaped to her throat, and as Sean turned the knob she fully expected alarms and sirens to sound and for a trap door to open and send them hurtling down to a deep dark cave.

Instead, the door opened without issue. There wasn’t even a simple button lock to keep a person out.

Sean closed the door and switched on the light. Even if someone happened to walk by the warehouse, no light would leak from the windowless room. The room was dominated by a huge mahogany desk topped by piles of paper and a large computer monitor, and the wall behind the desk was lined with custom cabinets built from the same material as the desks.

Krista flipped on the computer as Sean went to work on the cabinet locks. As the machine hummed to life, Talia’s words rang in her head.

He used to brag that he had secrets there beyond what anyone could imagine, secrets that could take down the entire state from the top down.

If that was true, those secrets were in this room, hidden in those locked cabinets or stored on his hard drive. Krista crossed her fingers and prayed for the dozenth time that Talia hadn’t steered them wrong.

A few minutes passed, and Ibarra whispered, “Okay, I’m in.” By simply turning on the computer and ensuring it was connected to the network, Krista had opened a back door for Ibarra to hack his way in, just as he had Kowalski’s computer and the police department’s intranet. Krista didn’t understand the methods or the technicalities, but she promised herself that when this was over, she was never leaving her sensitive information on a networked computer.

“He’s got a lot of data on here,” Ibarra said, almost to himself. “It will take me a few minutes to copy this.”

There was a loud thud behind her. Krista jumped, gasped, and then gave a little laugh when she realized that Sean had just dropped the heavy flashlight. “You scared the—” Her voice stuck in her throat when she saw Sean.

He was standing at the end of the cabinets, his hands braced on the narrow counter jutting out from the wall. Krista could hear the breath soughing in and out of his chest, see the sweat bead on his forehead.

“Sean?”

He straightened abruptly, his eyes frantic as they bounced from her to the closed door behind her to the thick, windowless walls.

“It’s okay,” she whispered, approaching him slowly, as she might a nervous animal. “We’re going to be out of here in just a few minutes.”

He nodded jerkily. She didn’t know what else to do, so she put her hand on his back, half expecting him to jerk away from her touch as he had before. She winced at the tremble of muscles under the damp fabric of his shirt. To her shock, instead of turning away, he turned toward her. She instinctively wrapped her arms around him, lifted one hand to his neck to pull it into her shoulder, and held him as tightly as she could.

His breath whistled heavily in her ear—in, out. Maybe it was her imagination, but he seemed to calm a degree. No, he was settling down, his breath slowing as his arms held her in an almost desperate grip.

Krista whispered reassurances and molded herself against Sean as though she could pull the anxiety from his body to hers.

“We’re almost finished. Shit!” The alarm in Ibarra’s tone snapped them both back to attention.

“What?” Krista whispered.

“I’ve got two cars headed in your direction, heading down Marginal from the north.”

“How do you know they’re coming here?” Sean asked, his voice steady but tight as a bowstring.

“I don’t,” Ibarra snapped. “But they’ve passed the Boeing complex, and there’s not much else around here to interest anyone at this time of night.”

“How much time do we have?” Sean asked.

“About forty-five seconds.”

“How much longer to finish copying the files?” Krista asked.

“About thirty seconds.”

“That doesn’t give us enough time to re-arm the alarm system and lock up,” Sean said grimly. “They’ll know we were here.”

Krista shook her head. “We can’t tip him off. Not until we know exactly what we have. But if we go now—”

“If you stop the transfer process now, some of the files will be corrupted on his end,” Ibarra said grimly.

Krista blew out a frustrated curse. “We’ll have to come back—”

But before she could finish Sean had opened the office door. “Make sure the transfer finishes clean.” He headed for the door.

“Sean wait—”

“I’m going to reset the alarms.”

“You can’t do that, we’ll be…trapped,” she barely breathed the last word, because Sean was already halfway across the warehouse.

Sweat beaded on her own brow as she went back to the computer. “Come on, come on,” she muttered as the status bar seemed to pause interminably at ninety-eight percent complete. She looked toward the door, but the meager glow of the computer cast just a small halo of light. Only the beam of Sean’s flashlight glowed in the inky darkness beyond.

Sean finished resetting the alarms, and Krista felt her stomach drop to the floor as he hurried through the dark warehouse. “What about the motion detectors?” she hissed.

“I re-armed it but left the motion detectors off,” Sean hissed back through the darkness. “Unless he tries to set them off himself, he shouldn’t notice.”

“I no longer have a visual on the vehicles,” Ibarra said. At that moment, Krista heard the sound of car tires crunching in the gravel outside. A few seconds later, the doors slammed.

“They just parked,” she whispered into her collar.

“You need to kill the light, Sean.”

Her heart thudded in her throat as Sean’s flashlight went dark and she looked frantically at the glowing computer monitor. She could turn off the screen, but if they came into the office, they would notice it had been turned off with the tower unit still on.

“Copy is complete. Kill the computer. Be sure to use the proper shut down procedures,” he cautioned.

Krista quickly powered down the machine, feeling the sweat bead under her shirt as it seemed to take an eternity for the screen to go black.

She waited by the door and thought her heart was going to crash through her chest as she heard muffled voices outside and then the beep of the door alarm being disarmed. A metallic scrape, and the door was opening…

A large hand caught Krista in the chest and pushed her back into the office. She barely stifled her squeal of alarm as Sean quietly shut the door behind them.

Light showed in the crack under the door, and footsteps sounded. The voices got louder.

“I don’t know why you insisted on this meeting,” she heard a male voice say.

A nudge on her arm pulled her attention back to Sean. He aimed his light at the ceiling, clicked it on and off twice, pointed at himself, her, then up at the ceiling, and then handed her the flashlight.

Was that supposed to be some kind of signal, she wondered frantically.

Sean moved quietly as a cat on top of the desk. “Light.” His whisper cut through the stillness. “Up,” he snapped, squinting angrily as the beam hit him full in the face.

Realization dawned as he reached up and carefully, quietly popped a ceiling panel from the frame and shifted it to the side. He beckoned her up onto the desk.

“Careful,” he whispered and she nodded, gently shifting her foot away from the jar of pens stacked in the middle of the desk top.

She raised her hands up but was barely able to curl her fingers around the edges of the panel. Strong hands gripped her hips and lifted her. She smothered a grunt as she got her elbows up over the edge and used them to help pull herself up. Sean’s hands moved to her butt and finished boosting her through the hole.

She rolled to the side and heard a
thunk
as Sean put the flashlight up through the opening. In the pitch black, every sound was magnified. As Sean reached to pull himself up after her, Krista swore the sound of plaster shifting echoed like a bullet in the room below. She held her breath, expecting the door to burst open at any second.

But so far, so good, and Sean reached for the light and shined it on the opening long enough to make sure he placed it back squarely and securely. “Let’s hope they don’t notice the plaster dust on the desk,” he whispered. The panel slid into place, and Krista thought of the wall of cabinets whose contents they hadn’t had time to search.

They had the contents of Maxwell’s hard drive, she consoled herself. It had to be enough.

For what?
a doubtful inner voice taunted her.
You broke into his private property and stole the information. No matter what he’s up to, you’ll never be able to use it against him in court.