next... Not ever again until today. He’d simply disappeared without even a phone call, making no further contact even when a complication from the gunshot had nearly taken her life.
Never. She’d never give him the chance to hurt her again.
Ashley held up one finger, then pinched her cheek between the thumb and index finger of her free hand, eyes welling with unshed tears. She searched Ethan’s profile a long time. The headlights of a passing car illuminated the hard set of his jaw. Hold it together, girl. Ethan might have almost gotten her killed and taken off on her when she’d needed him, but he’d never, ever lied. “Okay. I believe you, but you tell me what you know before I tell you anything. Those cards? Still not on the table.”
“Smart girl. Even if you’re using those smarts against me.”
No way was she going to glow at his praise. No. Way. He didn’t deserve it.
Ethan didn’t wait for her to respond. “Seven months ago, Sean deployed to Afghanistan. Likely it was sooner than anyone expected.”
“He’s been gone so much the past few years, I was pretty shocked the army would send him again when he’d been home less than a year.”
“He asked.”
Her eyes widened and her mouth opened, closed, opened again before she could find her voice. “Why?”
“On his last deployment, Sean got wind of some issues with the Field Ordering Officer, the guy in charge of the money going to contractors to build Forward Operating Bases and the like. He did a little digging and found discrepancies in the paperwork from some of the contractors. A group of locals and two companies in particular. Some of the discrepancies didn’t match between live documents and backup copies. Someone had hacked in and made changes, small ones scattered over a lot of entries. It added up to huge amounts of cash, virtually untraceable. He contacted me because he was unsure if his chain of command was involved.”
Ethan watched her closely from the corner of his eye, gauging what she knew.
Well, he could gauge all he wanted. All of this was news to her. Deeply troubling news in light of Sean’s mysterious messages. “Prove to me you’re helping him and not digging for information, thinking he’s involved with the bad guys.” Ashley knew how investigations worked, and she wouldn’t tip her hand until she was certain Sean wasn’t in danger.
“Nobody’s saying Sean’s in with the bad guys, but you know for us to be good at our jobs we have to keep every possibility in mind.”
“There’s no way.” She shifted slightly in the seat, streetlights playing dark and light across her hands.
“Anything is possible for anybody.” The truck engine hummed louder as Ethan changed lanes to take an exit that would lead them away from Syracuse and deeper into the North Country. Shadows in the cab grew darker as they left the city behind. “Money can turn even the strongest of minds.”
Something about the look on his face didn’t sit right with her. He couldn’t possibly think Sean could be bought. “So you’re telling me even you have a price?” She leaned closer, not quite bridging the gap between them. “How much would it take? Ten thousand? Half a million? At what point would you turn your back on the country you’ve sworn to defend? If everyone has a price, what’s yours?”
Red heat hit his skin as though she’d turned a flamethrower on him. Yeah. He ought to be ashamed of himself.
Her chuckle was low and harsh. “It’s insulting to you. And it would be just as insulting to Sean.” She tugged at the sleeve of her black jacket. “Watch how you toss your words, Kincaid. You run the risk of sounding incredibly arrogant.” In the face of her triumph, the threat of fear vanished. Control. Her very best friend. She held on to it like a life preserver.
“Tell me some small part of you doesn’t think that’s possible.” Ashley opened her mouth to speak, but Ethan carried on. “You’re the one who floated the idea when you didn’t know what I was going to say.”
“You weren’t going there?”
“I never said it wasn’t a theory, but he’s the one who brought the problem to our attention. Unless that’s a bluff to throw suspicion off of him, Sean’s innocent.” He switched gears without pausing. “My team believes what Sean uncovered is a small piece of something worse—an insurgent infiltration of our trusted contractors. That would give them access to bases, soldiers...”
Ashley was silent, watching the lines in the road, stomach churning. All of this was unthinkable but horribly plausible. “That would explain what happened to me just now. A well-connected group could have sleeper cells anywhere, and this attack wasn’t random. He specifically mentioned Sean.” She gasped. That message. Sean wouldn’t. He hadn’t.
“What?” Of course Ethan would pick up on her realization almost as fast as she had.
Ashley kept her mouth shut. If he wanted what she knew, he’d have to ask for it specifically.
Ethan checked the rearview mirror then glanced her way. “I’m guessing you figured it out. Sean sent you intel on a set of thumb drives. He asked you to pick up his mail, but there’s one package he cautioned you to leave in the box.”
Ashley nodded, muscles weakening. Ethan was telling the truth. “Sean’s stationed in Colorado, but he forwards all of his mail to a post-office box to make it easier for me to take care of his affairs. There’s one package he told me not to worry about. It was there the last time I checked the mail—a little over a week ago.” The message. The package. The program they’d developed together during her recovery. Whatever was on those thumb drives, it would require their shared work to decode it.
She needed to get to her apartment. Sean’s life was in danger and their program might be the one thing that could save him. “You have to take me home. Without the software Sean and I developed, those drives are worthless.”
“You tell me where it’s stored and Mitch will retrieve it.”
“Absolutely not.” Her trust in Ethan was thin enough, but there was no way she was going to hand the height of her life’s work over to anyone other than him. The stakes were too high. That program, when fully realized, would fund her future and Sean’s, as well.
“I’m getting you to safety. I’ve got a place where—”
Ashley’s head shook so quickly, strands of hair clung to her eyelashes. She swept them to the side and focused on the moment. If she kept moving, kept planning, she’d forget the entire situation was spiraling. “You have to take me to my apartment.”
“It’s dangerous. Sean said they hacked his computer, read his emails. They knew you were on that flight, which clearly means they’ve studied you enough to know where you live.”
“Clearly I have to go home. The program we developed... I didn’t store it on my hard drive.” The very same laptop the man at the airport had taken when he’d grabbed her bag. “It’s not stored in the cloud. Encryption software like we developed is valuable, an easy target if word gets out that it exists before we’re ready to shop it around. There are only two copies. The first one’s hidden in my apartment and the other is in a safe-deposit box, but the keys to that are at my place, too.
“Sean’s smart, and I’ll guarantee
