“The bank wouldn’t give me the money or any other account information since my name wasn’t on the account and I didn’t have the passcode, even though I explained the account holder was dead. I even sent a copy of his death certificate, but they kept denying me. So I hacked in. Every single deposit was made by the same depositor. A company, presumably, called WCE. They deposited twelve million dollars.”
She gasped. Curses and mutters went around the room. God, there it was in a numerical value. What it had taken for her father to throw away everything he’d ever valued. The price put on the lives of Nick’s six comrades who’d died there on a dirt road in Afghanistan. It made her nauseous. “That’s what the 12M stood for in the note you hid in my jewelry box?” She reached up a hand to Nick. His expression was a storm about to open up. He sat down and kept his fingers intertwined with hers.
“You found that? Yeah. When things started getting dicey, I needed to make some copies of the info. I put it in Mom’s necklace, too, but I lost it.”
“I found it at a motel. How did you get the necklace, though?”
A sheepish expression came over his exhausted face. “I broke into your back door. Needed to hide some stuff without you knowing.”
“Charlie! I thought I was going crazy! What else did you hide?”
“Two of my laptops are in your basement crawl space.”
Becca shook her head, completely overwhelmed by Charlie’s story.
“Back up. What is WCE?” Marz asked.
“Never did find out. As soon as I started searching for it, attacks against my firewalls began. Someone must’ve set up a tracer alerting them of searches for that set of characters and was trying to figure out who was doing the searching. So I started moving locations. Lasted for a while. Until it didn’t.” He shrugged. “Guys who held me were hot as hell to find out how I’d learned about WCE, but I didn’t say a word. Figured they were going to kill me either way.”
Pride and sadness roared through Becca. How courageous he’d been. Her gaze dropped to the bandages on his hand. And how he’d paid for it. The guys were looking at him with a new respect, too.
“Well, hell, good to know about the tracing. Before I start hitting the bank information, I’ll make sure the IP address is buried so deep no one can track it back to us,” Marz said.
“Marz is their computer expert,” Becca said. Marz and Charlie exchanged nods. She could totally see them getting along.
“In addition to digging into WCE, I dug into my father in Afghanistan. That’s when I noticed that in the few accounts of the ambush I could find, they made it sound like everyone had died, when DoD records I later hacked trying to learn more indicated there were survivors. And the fitness reports in your official records don’t match the ones I have on the thumb drive. The circumstances of the Colonel’s death didn’t add up. Seemed like you might be an ally in getting to the bottom of it all,” he said to Nick.
“Jesus,” Beckett bit out. “Do you realize how scary him and Marz would be together.”
Charlie frowned. Marz grinned.
Charlie pushed his hair off his face and yawned with a grimace. “The Colonel was on the take from somebody. Big time. Someone with the power to trace my digital signatures and to grab me off the street. So it wasn’t just any Joe Schmo. It has something to do with heroin. Main and most lucrative economic activity in Afghanistan plus main drug trade of the Churchmen equals way too coincidental when you’re talking that kind of coin . . .” Charlie broke off, his gaze fixated and then narrowed at the end of the bed where Becca had discarded her bracelet. “What’s that?” he asked, pointing at it.
“This? It’s a bracelet Dad gave me for my birthday last year.” She grasped it. “Kinda funky for his taste, but . . .” She shrugged.
He frowned. “Can I see it?” She handed it to him, and he spread it out on his lap. “Bec, these charms . . . this is binary code.”
She leaned in. “What do you mean?”
His eyes went wide, and the other men stepped closer. “I mean, zeroes and ones. Binary code. Someone have paper?”
“Holy shit. He might be right,” Marz said, handing him a legal pad and a pen.
“Oh, never mind.” He held up his wrapped right hand.
“Tell me what to write,” she said, taking the pad. He read out the code, and she wrote it down. “I can’t believe I’ve been wearing some kind of code on my wrist for the last year.” She’d thought that once they had Charlie back, everything would make sense. But the situation was as surreal as it had ever been.
“Write it down this way, too,” he said, turning the bracelet around and reciting the string of zeroes and ones backward.
“You think this is the passcode you mentioned?” Nick asked.
“Not this, but maybe the decimal equivalent. Which the Colonel would’ve known I could figure out. Damn, the guys who held me kept asking about the passcode, too. And here you might have been wearing it on your wrist all this time. God, if they’d known.” Charlie’s voice hitched. Shaking his head, he grasped the notepad and focused on the numbers, frowning. “This way it reads . . . 631780.” He dragged a finger along the second line of numbers. “And this way . . . 162905.”
“Shit, he’s right,” Marz said as he brought his laptop over. “You just converted that in your head?”
Charlie shrugged.
“Why all the cloak and dagger, though?” Becca said, frustration welling up inside her. “If he was going to send us information, why not just be straightforward about it? Do you think he was trying to sneak us access to that money? Because, God, I wouldn’t want it.”
“Problem is, the bank passcode is a seven-digit number. I found that much out,” Charlie said. “These are six. It’s not for the bank after all.”
“What the hell does the bracelet go to, then?” Nick asked, tension rolling off him. Becca squeezed his hand, exhaustion making it hard to keep up with all this information.
“Jesus,” Shane said. “Charlie’s story raises as many questions as it answers.”
Charlie yawned and grimaced. “God, I feel a lot like death warmed over.”
“Take these,” Becca said, handing him some pain medicine and water. He drank it down, and Becca was so grateful he was okay. Thankful to these men all around them.
Nick turned, his intense gaze raking over each person. “This isn’t over. Whatever this is, it’s just beginning.”
Beckett hammered his finger into his palm. “Who or what is WCE? How was Merritt connected to them? To Church? What were they looking for when they ransacked both your houses? Who was the ‘company’ tonight at the club? What do these codes go to? When will they strike again, because you know they will. The list of what we don’t know goes on and on.”
You could almost feel the consensus build in the room around them.
“I want my honor back. My reputation. My career,” Easy said from where he sat on a bench press. Blazing dark eyes flashed, and he gestured to the group. “Only way that happens is if we stay together and follow the leads wherever they go.”
“Fuckin’ A. I couldn’t agree more,” Shane bit out. “There’s something here. And it just might lead to redemption.”
Beckett stepped forward, shoulders tense, expression dark. “We did nothing wrong. It’s time we take back what was stolen from us. Count me in.”