Street Game
Page 31

Bring him up, Brian, Mack ordered.
The room fell silent as Paul was brought into the room. Mack could almost feel sorry for the kid—almost. His skin was so pale he looked luminous, his freckles standing out. He was twenty-four, but looked fifteen. Like Javier, he had a boyish face. He was crack shot with his rifle and not bad in hand-to-hand. He’d completed all the required training to become a GhostWalker, which meant he had to have earned his tattoo. Mack knew no one would have gone easy on him, not with his looks. Javier had been driven pretty hard until his trainers began to look over their shoulders at night.
The boy looked scared, but he didn’t break. He didn’t drop his eyes or look away from Mack’s intimidating stare. Mack pointed to the spot in front of him. Paul walked reluctantly through the others to stop in front of Mack.
“I’m going to give you a chance to tell me what you were up to, Paul. Then Javier and Jaimie are going to take your laptop apart and get to the truth.”
“Permission to speak freely, Top,” Paul said.
“By all means.”
“If you’re going to tear my laptop apart, I’d rather see how good they really are.”
A slow, humorless smile added a mean twist to Mack’s mouth. “I think he’s just challenged you, Javier.”
The kid didn’t flinch, not even when Javier walked right up to him, nose to nose, dark eyes smoldering.
“Back off, Javier,” Mack ordered. “Just get the information I need.”
What am I looking for, boss?
You’ll know when you find it. He’s guilty over something. Could be nothing, could be treason.
“I’m on it, boss,” Javier said. He gave Paul another hard stare, turned, and took the laptop down the stairs to Jaimie’s workspace.
She emerged from the bathroom looking fresh. She’d changed her clothes. Mack studied her carefully. He knew her every mood and right now, she was very hesitant.
He eased the situation immediately.
“I could use your help, honey,” he said. “Javier’s trying to get information off a computer for me. Would you give him a hand?” This is important, or I wouldn’t ask.
Her gaze flicked to his face, then to Paul, who stood stiffly at attention. “Of course. No problem.” Javier know what we’re looking for?
He sent her a negative shake of his head mentally. “Paul seems to think he might have something in his computer to keep you out.”
Her eyebrow shot up. “Really?” She flashed Paul a quick, almost respectful grin.
“There’s much more to you than meets the eye, isn’t there?”
The boy flushed a bright red and Mack frowned. Jaimie had a way of looking at a man, never realizing the picture she made with her wild hair and sexy mouth, the combination of innocence and temptress. The thing was, she had no idea anyone ever looked at her. She was wrapped up in her mind, processing, analyzing, not ever seeing the way men saw her. If there was such a thing as bedroom eyes, she had them.
Everything about her screamed sex, and few men ever realized just how sexy her brain was. How could a man sit and watch her talk, watch the animation on her face as she figured things out that most people had no clue about, and not find her intensely sexy?
You’re staring at me.
Sorry, babe, I just got lost in you for a minute. It happens.
Jaimie blushed and shook her head, turning away from him. “I’ll be downstairs.”
“You might as well eat, Paul,” Mack offered. “We’ve got a decent meal for once.”
He glanced at the others. “At least I think so.”
“We could lie,” Ethan said, shoveling more lasagna onto his plate. “But I think you’d figure it out fast enough.” He dragged a chair up to the table next to him with the toe of his boot. “Park it, Paul. And grab yourself French bread before these locusts devour everything in sight.”
“You’d better save some for Jaimie and Javier,” Mack said, already scooping a Jaimie portion onto a plate.
“Javier already ate half of it,” Kane said. “We’re not saving any for him.” He reached to take the French bread from Mack.
Mack slapped his hand and glared. “Touch that and you lose that hand. That’s for Jaimie.”
Kane withdrew his hand quickly. “You’re a little testy, boss.”
“I got to go with Kane on this one,” Ethan said, rubbing his sore jaw. “You get in a fight with your woman?”
Mack covered Jaimie’s plate carefully and made certain the men could see his intention to harm anyone trying to come near it. “I don’t fight with my woman, Ethan,” he replied. “There’s no percentage in it.”
Kane snorted derisively but subsided when Mack turned a cold eye on him. Mack wedged another chair up to the table right across from Paul. He sank into it and took his first bite of the lasagna.
Kane grinned at the look on his face. “You’re right, Mack. No one can mess up Jaimie’s sauce. The girl can cook.”
Mack did justice to the food, all the while keeping a close eye on Paul. The kid had grit. Mack began to think maybe he’d underestimated him. It would be embarrassing since he had Javier as a perfect example of how not to judge a book by its proverbial cover. Javier looked sweet and innocent. Women tended to want to cuddle and protect him. The man was as lethal as one could get. Was Paul the same way?
Had the kid been sitting right in the middle of his team, rubbing shoulders day in and day out, camouflaged in lamb’s wool, fooling all of them? He certainly hadn’t raised any warnings. Or had he? Mack kept chewing, keeping his face expressionless.
He had wondered from the beginning at the orders. He’d argued about the danger of bringing a new man into an experienced team. They knew one another, could communicate telepathically, not have to use radios, but Sergeant Major had been adamant.
“How often do you report to Sergeant Major?” Mack asked casually.
The kid’s fingers tightened around his fork, but he sent Mack a puzzled glance.
“You talking to me, Top?”
“Do you see anyone else who sends reports to Sergeant Major?”
“I haven’t spoken a word to him, Top.”
Mack watched the kid put a forkful of lasagna into his mouth and chew as though nothing was wrong, but he’d scored. Paul hadn’t lied. But he didn’t need to break silence to report.
“Why didn’t you volunteer that you had computer skills? It isn’t in your jacket.”
Ethan nudged him playfully. “You a secret agent, boy? James f**kin’ Bond? Bet you have a souped-up car hidden and maybe a cape.”
The table erupted in laughter. “That’s Batman, dope,” Jacob jeered. “Bond gets all the women.”
Ethan slapped his forehead and laughed with the others. “I always get that wrong.”
The easy camaraderie and teasing that included Paul put him off balance more than Mack’s questions.
“You really good at computers?” Lucas asked curiously. “Like hacking into programs, writing them, all that stuff Javier and Jaimie can do?”
Paul nodded slowly. “I have a PhD in computer science, specializing in analysis of algorithms.”
“The hell you say,” Marc breathed in awe. “That sounds badass. Where’d you go to school?”
Paul looked smug. “Undergraduate work at CalTech, graduating magna cum laude. My PhD came from MIT.”
Mack sat back in his chair and regarded Paul steadily. “None of that was in your jacket.”
“No, Top.”
To his credit, the kid kept a straight face, but he was smirking inside. Mack didn’t have to see the smile to know. “Sergeant Major planted you on my team, and he doctored your background.”
Paul said nothing, just ate another forkful of lasagna. Marc slapped a twenty on the table. “I’m going to back the new guy. If he can pull the wool over our eyes for the last few weeks, then I’m betting Jaimie and Javier can’t break into his laptop.”
“I’ll take that bet,” Kane said, laying out his twenty. “Anyone else in?”
Ethan poked Paul with his elbow. “You really got letters at the end of your name, kid?”
“I do,” Paul said.
Ethan slammed down the twenty. “Javier hardly went to school. And Jaimie doesn’t have any of those letters.”
Mack tipped his chair back lazily. “Are you crazy, Ethan? She has three paragraphs’ worth of letters behind her name and three or four pages of awards. Javier didn’t need to go to a formal school. He worked with the best in the business and got his education hands-on, not to mention both of them are brilliant. You’re betting against them?”
Brian tossed his money over Ethan’s. “Jaimie graduated high school at eleven, you idiot. Jaimie, all the way. I’m in.”
“Jaimie did your homework for you,” Kane reminded.
“Where did she go to school?” Paul asked.
Mack deliberately smirked. “She received her B.A. summa cum laude from Columbia University.” He tipped his chair forward and looked into Paul’s eyes. “I believe that’s the highest honors there, kid. If I remember my Latin correctly, summa trumps magna any day, am I right?”
Kane grinned. “And don’t you think going to an Ivy League university instead of an engineering institute might give you a little more rounded education?”
“Not necessarily.” Paul sniffed. “If you want to play around with other things.”
“She was only what?” Mack turned his head toward Kane. “Sixteen or seventeen?”
“I don’t think she was even that old,” Kane replied.
“Where’d she get her PhD?” Paul asked, the smugness fading.
“She got her PhD from Stanford University.” Mack tipped back his chair again, balancing on the two back legs. “She specialized in artificial intelligence.” His grin was back. “AI sounds a whole lot sexier than ‘analysis of algorithms’ to me.”
“Is that good?” Ethan asked Paul. “Why would you want to be artificially intelligent? You’re the real thing, right?” His hand hovered over the twenty he’d thrown out.
Kane slapped his hand. “Back off, moron.”
“Don’t worry, Ethan,” Paul said. “This is all about encryption.”
Mack snorted. “And you’re feeling really confident that she doesn’t know much about that, right? Not her strong suit?”
Ethan groaned. “He’s taunting us, man. That’s not good.”
Marc rubbed his jaw. “Maybe we should change the bet. We could put a time limit on her. What does it usually take to do something like this? Minutes? Hours?”
“Try weeks or months,” Paul said. “Sometimes years, depending on the encryption.”
Mack and Kane exchanged a long look, smug amusement mixed with pride in their grins.
Paul scowled. “It will take years. If they can even do it.”
Ethan nudged him. “There’s two of them and only one of you. We should get odds on this. And maybe we could blindfold Jaimie.”
“Just tell us what you’re dying to tell us,” Paul said.
“She did her dissertation on a revolutionary, AI-based encryption algorithm.”
Mack delivered the killing argument with quiet satisfaction. “Her AI dissertation is entitled, ‘An Experimental Schema-Based Approach to Mememetric Password Generation.’”
“I can’t believe this,” Paul said and wiped his face with his hand.
“Not so cocky now, are you?” Mack taunted. “Never, ever underestimate my woman.” There was a wealth of pride in his voice.
“Are you saying she might be able to do it?”