Dark Deception (DARC Ops Book 11) Read online

  Dark Deception

  DARC Ops Book 11

  Jamie Garrett

  Wild Owl Press

  Contents

  Copyright and Disclaimer

  1. Asher

  2. Ellie

  3. Asher

  4. Ellie

  5. Asher

  6. Ellie

  7. Asher

  8. Ellie

  9. Asher

  10. Ellie

  11. Asher

  12. Ellie

  13. Asher

  14. Ellie

  15. Asher

  16. Ellie

  17. Asher

  18. Ellie

  19. Ellie

  20. Asher

  21. Ellie

  22. Asher

  23. Ellie

  24. Asher

  Also by Jamie Garrett

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright and Disclaimer

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2018 by Jamie Garrett

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law. All requests should be forwarded to [email protected].

  Connect with me on Facebook: http://facebook.com/JamieGarrettBooks

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  Cover design by The Final Wrap.

  Editing by Jennifer Harshman, Harshman Services.

  1

  Asher

  “She’s an introverted social-justice junkie.”

  Asher waited for Jackson’s description of his target to continue, then frowned. Outside the window of his truck cab, he navigated the winding frontage road that took him along the track line heading into South Boston. Not much traffic, few lampposts, the glow of lights from the city illuminating much of the northern skyline.

  “That’s all you’ve got?”

  “Well, other than my suspicion that she’s poking her nose where it doesn’t belong, yeah. We’re still digging up information.”

  Asher switched his phone to his other ear, sighing with frustration. “So why am I here now? Why not wait until we get more information, determine whether or not she’s even worth watching?”

  Silence. Asher certainly did not mean to be disrespectful to his team leader, but sometimes, he just didn’t understand the rationale. This was kind of like putting the cart before the horse, wasn’t it?

  “The early bird gets the worm, right?”

  “Sure,” Asher replied. “Just how long am I supposed to sit on the worm before taking a bite, so to speak?”

  “For now, a day or two, then we’ll see what develops. I know this doesn’t make a lot of sense to you, but sometimes, it just doesn’t. It’s a feeling. And I have a feeling that Ellie Jespersen is someone we need to keep an eye on. You’re it.”

  “Got it,” Asher said. He knew when not to push. Jackson was rarely wrong, especially when it came to his instincts. Asher didn’t have to like it, but he would do his job.

  “Keep me posted,” Jackson said, then disconnected the call.

  A few hours later, Asher started to mutter to himself in the dark interior of his F-150. He shook his head, growing more frustrated by the minute. This inactivity was going kill him. Babysitting duty. That’s all this shit was when it came down to it.

  “Watch the girl . . . watch the girl,” he grumbled, trying to stretch his legs. It was an impossible task sitting behind the wheel in the dark. In the cold. The onset of winter in Boston was no joke. It was frickin’ twenty degrees outside, and that didn’t even take into account the wind chill or the occasional wind gusts coming off the Atlantic and buffeting his truck.

  Of course, he couldn’t run the engine, or the exhaust would be seen, so he crossed his arms over his chest, tucked his hands under his armpits, and continued to glare at the fourth-story window in the apartment building across and down the street—the humble abode of his target: twenty-three-year-old Ellie Jespersen.

  After his latest stint in Afghanistan, he should be glad to be back on home ground. Still, acclimating from over one-hundred degree dry and abysmally hot desert air to the frigid environment of the somewhat blurred edges between the Southland and South Boston districts was no picnic. The two districts were demarcated by Interstate Ninety-Three, which he could just make out toward the west. To his east rose Telegraph Hill, the channels, and Old Harbor. To the north, downtown, and to the west past the interstate, the Back Bay and Fenway districts.

  Ellie Jespersen’s apartment was located just off Broadway, nestled between West Fourth and Dorchester. A stone’s throw away ran the network of the train tracks, the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority, and the South Boston Public Works. Not the absolute worst part of Boston, but not the best, either. Working-class neighborhood, at least this section of it was. This area of Boston didn’t much appeal to him. Actually, no big city really did. As a native of a small town called Sewanee, located off the main highways between Murfreesboro and Chattanooga, Tennessee, he was used to—and preferred—a more rural environment, but he wasn’t about to start complaining. He loved his job. Loved the action, the adrenaline, and the intensity.

  As one of the newest members of the DARC Ops team, even after Kabul, he still felt that he needed to prove himself. Sure, he was often given the “grunt work”—the boring assignments, like this one. It wasn’t unexpected, especially because he wasn’t as adept at computer skills as some of the other guys. Still, he had other talents. One of them, which he didn’t brag about, was his natural ability as a shit detector. He had the ability to read people, to “get them,” and his skills had come in handy a time or two since he’d joined the team. True, his talents weren’t a patch on Sam’s, but unlike the professor, Asher loved getting out in the field. Usually. Today’s boredom was pushing even his limits.

  His talents weren’t merely mental. He was also skilled in Muay Thai, stood six-foot-three, and weighed in at two hundred ten pounds of solid muscle. He pulled his weight with the team.

  No, he wasn’t about to complain to Jackson, or to Declan, off on a well-deserved “vacation” of sorts, and certainly not to Logan, another recent recruit. The more established team members, which included Jackson, had set a high standard, and he was determined to perform no matter how menial the task.

  So while he grumbled about watching the computer nerd suspected of potentially hacking into a number of computer databases she had no business nosing around in, he knew it was all important. Every task, every assignment. How the hell Jackson found out about these people, he had no idea.

  Apparently, Little Miss Ellie was quite the hacker, a regular contributor—anonymously of course—to an underground, often anti-government watchdog newsletter. All Jackson had told him before he left their home base was that she was a gifted hacker who had a nasty little habit of commonly infiltrating local law enforcement and even state government agencies, and had once managed to get through several barriers of the FBI’s network.

  When he’d gotten his first good look at her earlier this afternoon, he had chuckled, shaking his head in dismay. He’d instantly pigeonholed her as a wallflower, a nerd, a computer geek, and she did
n’t help the characterization with her style, or lack of it. His first sight of her had been walking home from a corner grocery with a paper grocery bag, out of which he saw sticking up a roll of toilet paper. She wore checkered flannel pants—guy’s checkered flannel pants to be precise. Loungewear, pajamas, whatever. Over that, a baggy gray sweatshirt at least two sizes too big for her. Her shoulder-length dark brown hair had been pulled up into a high ponytail captured into one of those scrunchy things that he remembered from the nineties, the kind that his younger sister used to wear. Ellie didn’t wear glasses, at least as far as he knew, but what he did know was that her unassuming appearance was the farthest thing from what he envisioned for one of the most gifted hackers in the entire country.

  He sighed heavily. Keeping an eye on her all night was nothing more than a waste of time. It was nearing midnight, and her windows remained dark. More than likely, she was snuggled nice and warm in her bed while he was out here freezing his ass off.

  The quiet inside his cab was abruptly jarred by his low-volume ring tone, the theme song from the original 1963 movie, The Pink Panther. He kept it mostly because it bugged the other guys, but he also found it amusing. Sometimes, life just got too serious, and Asher tried to do whatever he could to find laughter where he could to ease the pressures of those more serious—and often deadly—moments in life.

  He pulled the phone from the leg pocket of his pants and held it down between his leg and the driver side door as he glanced at the screen so the illumination was hidden. “What?” he grumbled.

  “Having fun yet?” Jackson asked.

  “Yeah, if you can consider a numb butt, numb nuts, and freezing toes having fun.”

  “Anything?”

  “Nope. She ran out to the grocery store before dark, but everything’s dark in the apartment, and has been. No sign of any activity.” He knew when to cut the crap. Jackson hardly ever relaxed, always had his antenna up, always on guard. Not a bad thing, actually, but sometimes such vigilance could take you to the edge.

  “Got a little more background information on her,” Jackson said. “MIT grad with a double Masters in computer science and computational and systems biology—”

  “What the hell is that?” Asher interrupted, his gaze still on the darkened windows of Ellie’s apartment. Graduating with a double Masters and she was only twenty-three? Was she some kind of kid genius?

  “I had to look it up,” Jackson admitted. “Apparently, it’s a research program that links computer scientists, engineers, and biologists in a multidisciplinary approach to some kind of analysis on biological phenomena—”

  “Still don’t know what the hell that is,” Asher mumbled.

  “Is isn’t really applicable to what we’re watching her for her, but apparently she focused on mathematical models of biological stuff.”

  “So she’s a hacker interested in going into medicine or something?”

  “I don’t even think she knows. What I do know is that she’s highly intelligent, at least in book smarts.”

  “Gotta be,” Asher agreed. “And of course, she knows her way around computers, but that doesn’t mean she’s got street smarts.”

  “The underground newsletter she writes for . . . I’ve read some stuff that’s been attributed to her.”

  “What, no byline?”

  “Not officially. All her stuff is anonymous, but I think she also submits stuff under the moniker Dysnomia, but I’ve also learned that her style is fairly noticeable.”

  Asher wasn’t about to ask how Jackson knew some of the stuff he found out about people. “Then perhaps she’s not so smart. If she’s trying to stay anonymous, she should probably mix it up a little bit, you’d think?”

  “I just don’t want her snooping around to the point where she’s able to home in on us. She’s been nosing around a little too much for my comfort lately. Just keep an eye on her for a day or two, okay?”

  “Will do,” Asher said, not surprised that the call again abruptly disconnected.

  He sighed, slid the phone back into the pocket of his khakis, and resituated himself, prepared to spend a long, cold, and boring night staring up at that dark window. And a long, cold night it would be. After another fifteen minutes, a wispy fog began to roll in from the ocean, making its damp, moist way into the cab of his truck. The temperature seemed to plummet at least another ten degrees.

  He gazed out the window, the streetlamps now casting a dull, yellowish glow with the fog rolling in, the streets fairly deserted. It looked creepy out there now, like a horror movie set with the fog machines pumping vaporous clouds into the scene. Still, he watched. He rotated his views through his rearview mirror, then through the windshield, then the side mirrors, then back to the apartment building, ever watchful. He wanted to think this was nothing but a waste of time, but he knew better. Jackson would never have sent him off on a wild goose chase. There was something about this woman that bothered him, and—

  Something moved in his peripheral vision. Without moving his body, Asher turned his head a couple of inches in the darkness of the cab. He moved slowly, not wanting to draw attention. His eyes sought out every shadow of the building on the opposite side of the street in front of Ellie’s building. Had he imagined it? Maybe the fog or leaves blowing or something . . . no, there it was again, a slight shift in the shadows near the corner of her brick apartment building.

  He stared, his gaze riveted to the spot. A homeless man? A drug addict looking for a score? The shadow slowly emerged from the deeper darkness. Asher didn’t move a muscle as a man wearing close-fitted black clothing wandered slowly along the base of the structure, staying to the shadows as much as possible, outlined only once when he passed just below a dimly lit first-floor window.

  What the hell was the guy doing? The man paused to gazed upward. He appeared to be looking up toward Ellie’s apartment window. Was he just being paranoid? Asher shook his head. It was entirely possible. The last DARC mission had had everyone on edge for days after Declan and his target had gone missing in the Afghan desert. This time, his target was just a regular girl in Boston. Not someone with terrorists chasing after her. The man was just a vagrant. The dark streets, the fog, and the eerie atmosphere was playing tricks with him.

  Or at least Asher thought so until the vagrant approached the wide stone steps leading into the apartment building. He ignored the row of buzzers on the outside and stood with his back toward the street as he obviously picked the lock of the thick glass doors leading into the foyer. With a furtive glance over his shoulder, he pulled open the door.

  Asher moved immediately, reaching for his door handle. He’d already disabled the truck’s overhead light, so when he quietly opened his door, he remained cloaked in darkness. The man had nearly slipped entirely through the now-open foyer door by the time Asher slid out of his truck, softly brushing his hip against it to muffle the sound when he closed it. The man didn’t look back again but disappeared inside.

  Asher quickly glanced up and down the street—no traffic—and raced across. In less than five seconds, he bounded up the steps and caught the door as he slipped the toe of his boot into the two-inch gap. Thank God for slow-shutting door mechanisms.

  Turns out he wasn’t the type of man to believe in coincidences. He quickly glanced around, intending to act as a tenant if the man reappeared, but he didn’t hear anything, see anything. The building was quiet, only the dull sound of a television running some type of ad about miracle soap from behind the thick oak door of a nearby apartment.

  The man had only been a few seconds ahead of him. Where had he disappeared so quickly? Past the foyer, a hallway spanned the apartment building, apartments to the right and left. A stairway rose upward in the center, numerous right angles as it rose upward six floors. The building was old but the woodwork obviously well-cared for. It looked shiny with decades of wood oil in the light of low-wattage wall sconces. The guy had to have gone up, or he would’ve seen him in the hallway. Unless he lived in one of t
he closest apartments. Not likely, unless he’d forgotten his key and was adept at lock-picking.

  Silently, he took the steps two at a time, staying as close to the railing as he could to avoid any squeaks or cracking sounds in the floorboards. He needn’t have worried. Half hunched over, constantly looking upward, he climbed, pausing at the landing of each floor and quickly glancing down the hallways, looking for the silhouette of the man. Had he gone into an apartment already? Did he live here?

  Asher continued on up to the fourth floor. Ellie Jespersen’s apartment was the first one on the right. No sound came from within. The door remained firmly shut, no signs of intrusion. He glanced down the hall, frowned, then uttered a silent curse as he saw that the window at the far end was open, filmy white curtains at the end fluttering softly with the breeze.

  Asher raced down the hallway, keeping his steps as light as possible. He made it to the window and the fire escape just beyond and then poked his head out in time to see a dark shape scrambling away, already halfway down the fire escape. The man looked up, but Asher was unable to get a glimpse of any features that might identify him—just a white face in the darkness.

  Without hesitating, he quickly clambered over the window sill and, as quietly as possible, made his way down the fire escape after the intruder, but the man had too much of a lead. He was just over halfway down when the dark-clad figure reached the bottom of the fire escape, leapt the last several feet, and dashed down the street, disappearing into a nearby alleyway.