Spy to Die For

It took some back-tracing, but he found it.

“Got you, you bastard,” he said softly.

“What?” Skye asked.

“Nothing,” Jack said. He wanted her to be focusing on their trip. “You got the information I sent you, right?”

“Yes,” she said. “I’m trying to speed the recalibration up. I’m worried that this ship is much closer than we think.”

He was worried about that too. He looked at the configuration of the ship before it went into stealth mode, selected the image, and told the computer to find that ship in all the various registries.

The ship was smaller than Jack expected, the kind of ship only one person or two people used, which didn’t reassure him. He wanted to see a larger ship, something owned by a corporation or the Guild. He didn’t want a fast-moving stealth ship that could sneak up on something larger, like the Hawk.

While the computer searched registries in various sectors, Jack did one other thing. He hacked into the system of the store where he and Skye had purchased the Hawk. He had set up the hack before leaving, figuring they might need more information.

At the time, he had been worried that the Hawk was stolen and being resold. He wanted information at his fingertips: if someone trailed them again and tried to attack them for something the Hawk’s original owner had done, he wanted to know who the original owner was.

He hadn’t expected to use the same hack to determine if anyone else had looked at the records.

No one outside the store had, but the records were accessed a few days after Jack and Skye left Zaeen. And then someone had dug into Skye’s identity.

“Skye,” Jack said, “did the Guild issue the identity that you used to buy this ship?”

“Why does that matter?” Skye asked.

“Because I want to know how breakable the identity is,” Jack said.

She shrugged. “If you’re good, you might be able to figure out that it came from the Guild. But you won’t be able to go beyond that.”

If you were good, you wouldn’t need to go beyond that. Hell, if you weren’t even marginally good. If someone had looked at Krell’s security feeds, saw Skye and Jack together, realized that they had stolen the Rapido together, then that someone could trace both Skye and Jack. They had been a presence on Zaeen, but they hadn’t been there long.

Long enough to be on security, though. Security that could easily be sold to someone with cash and a determination to find them.

Even someone who usually hired spies and investigators to do his dirty work could follow this trail, if he were determined enough.

Jack didn’t like how he was thinking. It was too close to a preconception.

Then the computer pinged at him. The ship following them had been part of a bulk buy from a sector so far away that it took nearly two months to travel from there to here. That wasn’t what caught Jack’s eye, though. What caught his eye was this: The ship was registered to a familiar name.

One Jack had invented. He had created the corporate identity, he had filled out all of the documentation, he had even set up the bank accounts.

That ship was part of a Rover buy from two years ago.

He tapped the screen so that the computer would show him the image of the person who had flown that ship out of its last port.

The man frozen in the two-dimensional image was slight, with scruffy brown hair. He wore the same jacket that he had worn on Krell.

Heller.

“Oh, shit,” Jack said. They were in deep trouble now.

Chapter 51

A warning light appeared on the navigation panel. Skye checked it as Jack cursed beside her.

He probably had the same thought she did; they’d been boarded.

She activated a part of the Hawk’s exterior usually used only as a ship approached a port, to identify and dislodge anything that might have attached itself to the exterior during flight.

The docking hooks near the cargo bay lit up. Something had attached itself—and space debris usually didn’t use docking hooks.

“We’ve been boarded,” she said.

Jack cursed again. Then he stood so fast that he banged his knees on the console. “I’ll take care of it.”

“Take care of what?” she asked. “There could be a dozen people down there.”

He looked down at her, his face pale. “There isn’t. At most, there are two or three.”

“And you’re going up against two or three people?” she asked. “I’m just going to speed up and get us to Kordita as quickly as possible.”

“No,” he said. “As soon as I go below, you’re going to seal off this level. Separate the environmental system from the rest of the ship. Lock out anyone who tries to access the cockpit.”

He knew something. He wasn’t telling her everything. She felt a wave of anger run through her. Nothing infuriated her more.

“You know what’s going on,” she said.

“Yeah,” he said. “I traced the ship. It’s small, and it belongs to Heller.”

Her breath caught. Heller? On board? How was that possible? And Jack was heading down to greet him? Alone?

“I’m going to separate the Hawk’s environmental system now,” she said. “If he put anything into it, I can scrub it. Then I’ll just get us to Kordita.”

“No,” Jack said. “Heller’s not the kind of assassin you’re used to. He doesn’t care who dies. He’s probably attaching some kind of explosive to the interior of the Hawk. Then he’s going to leave, and no one will ever know what happened. We certainly won’t. We’ll be dead.”

“He may have already done that,” she said.

“And I’ll disable it,” Jack said.

“You know how to do that?” she asked.

He shook his head. “Do you?”

“We learned how to make bombs, not how to take them apart,” she said. “And it was mostly theory, because bombs rarely take out only one target.”

“Exactly,” Jack said. “This ship is the middle of a shipping lane. Heller doesn’t even care if someone else’s ship gets destroyed because of his bomb. I’m going down.”

She caught his arm. “I’ll get the Hawk away from everything. I’ll separate us off from the rest of the ship. He’ll leave. And then we can get the bomb together.”

“No,” Jack said. “Because that allows him to go free. He’ll go after your director. He’ll go after all those government contracts. He’ll kill lots of innocent people.”

“Starting with you,” Skye said.

Jack shook her off. “I’ll be all right.”

“It would be better if I went,” she said. “I’m the one with assassin training.”

“You’re the one who failed assassin training,” Jack said, his tone harsh. “I’m going. Stop arguing.”

“But you won’t know what to do,” she said.

“That means Heller won’t know what to expect,” Jack said.

He bent down, cupped her face in his hands, and kissed her so thoroughly that her toes curled. She grabbed at him, feeling oddly desperate, wondering if she could seduce him into staying.

Then their lips separated, but he didn’t let go of her face.