Stolen. Part 8

"But Lucy loves you. I'm not even on her radar. I care for her enough to respect her decision, including keeping you in her life. But if you really loved her-"

"Don't ever doubt my feelings for Lucy."

"You would clean the slate. She's going to be a sworn FBI agent in four months. What if someone else finds out this information? What if they tell her? What if she does or doesn't do something because she thinks she's protecting you? Secrets kill, Sean. You know it. I'm the one who wanted to bring you into this operation. For all the s.h.i.+t you pull, you're one of the smartest guys I know, and you're loyal. I can't do this without you."

If Noah had planned on guilting him into going along with this insane plan, it was working. Noah was right about one thing-that Paxton knew what happened nine and a half years ago meant that someone else knew about it, and there might be proof. Proof that could hurt not only Sean but also Lucy.

"You don't even know what I did."

"Trust Rick to do everything in his power to protect you." Noah paused. "This isn't going to be easy. You'll have to make Colton believe you quit RCK."

"That isn't the hard part," Sean said. "I simply need to quit."

Noah looked surprised. "You want to read Duke into the plan?"

"No. You don't want Duke to know. He won't like it, and I don't want him looking over my shoulder. But I know what to do to set Duke off and give me a reason to quit." Sean pushed a b.u.t.ton on his desk and his voice came out through a house-wide intercom. He hadn't realized that he'd already decided to help until now. But Noah was right. He didn't have a choice. He couldn't let Lucy pay for his past crimes. "Rick, you can return."

When Rick stepped back in, Sean said, "The hard part is that Paxton knows what I did. He won't want me working with Colton on anything, but we're at a standstill. If Paxton pushes, I'll push back. I never gave him back what he hired me to steal. It's my leverage on him, and it's all I have."

"What does Paxton specifically know?"

"I don't think he has proof, but he knows enough that I'm nervous that someone has proof." Sean took a deep breath. He hadn't spoken about Robert Martin or Martin Holdings to anyone since he left MIT. It was still a black cloud over him.

"When I was at MIT, Colton and I created a group called Net. We were primarily an activist group that hacked into secure computer systems to expose the weaknesses and embarra.s.s the companies and governments."

Rick said, "Much like what you do for RCK now."

Sean smiled. "Except now I get paid for it, we fix the security problems without publicly exposing the weakness, and they don't call it hacking."

"Hacking is usually a five-to-seven-year sentence."

"We also needed money to buy and build the best computer systems. It's not just skill, but equipment, that made us good. We took a few jobs that weren't exactly kosher-usually stealing from crooks."

"You're going to have to elaborate."

Sean had a lot of examples, but he didn't feel the need to share everything with the feds. He gave them one. "There was a guy the FBI was investigating for insider trading. He was really good; you never would have caught him, not until he was drinking daiquiris on some island in the Caribbean."

"Who?"

"Cyrus Block."

"If I recall correctly, we did catch him. He was given ten to twenty."

Sean smirked. "You're welcome."

Rick didn't comment. But Noah let out a short laugh. He knew what was coming. Maybe Noah wasn't all that bad of a guy.

Sean said, "You wouldn't have caught him if we didn't set him up. We learned about him after he hosted a seminar at MIT on the security of finance systems. He seduced a freshman-he was in his forties; she was eighteen-and she tried to kill herself when she found out she was pregnant. Her parents had sacrificed everything for her to go to MIT; she had a partial scholars.h.i.+p, but they took out a second mortgage on their house to get her there. She was in the same sorority as my girlfriend." Sean stared at Rick and Noah. "He was a f.u.c.king a.s.shole."

"Sounds like," Noah said.

"Skye Jansen, my girlfriend at the time, knew everything about finances. Sharp girl. She did some legal research and suspected that Block was involved in insider trading, but there was no proof without breaking some laws. My friends and I came up with a plan to take him down. We hacked into his computer and left a trail of bread crumbs so the FBI would be able to figure it out."

Rick raised an eyebrow. "Our white-collar division is good, Rogan. You don't know that we wouldn't have caught him."

"Some of them are good," Sean agreed. "But I know that it usually takes a tip to alert the FBI that there's something going on. We not only gave you the tip, but we opened the door so you could put him in prison."

"You'd probably be given probation. Maybe fines. Lectured. I doubt you would have done jail time."

"We peeled off one of his accounts."

Rick looked at him quizzically. "Peeled off?"

"The FBI never even knew it existed. We rerouted it before the FBI sting. We set up a sh.e.l.l company to donate the money to MIT on the condition that Trina, Skye's sorority sister, was given a full-ride scholars.h.i.+p. We never kept control over the money, but last I heard, the school managed the funds nicely. It pays out a dozen full-ride scholars.h.i.+ps a year to women studying the sciences."

"So essentially, the government would have seized the money under a.s.set forfeiture laws. You stole from the government. That's really a gray area, but I think the statute is up on that. I can check for you. But unless someone has physical proof, I don't see your concern."

"I'm not worried about the Block money. I was giving you an example of the things we did. We did a lot of things like that. I'm not going to go into everything."

Rick looked confused, so Sean got to the point. "Ten years ago-technically, nine years and five months ago-Colton and I hacked into a bank. We'd been emboldened by what happened to Block, and I guess we had it in our heads that we could be Robin Hood, taking from the bad guys and giving to the good. Or rather, returning funds to those who were cheated. I learned a lot from our investigation into Cyrus Block. How financial scams worked, and how to identify them. I won't bore you-"

"It's actually not boring, but go on."

"Colton and I decided to keep this particular job to ourselves. Partly to protect the others, and partly because we really didn't have a plan." This was where it was going to be difficult, Sean realized. Not just talking about Robert Martin but admitting his responsibility in what happened to him.

"Colton and I uncovered a pension scam being run by a company called Martin Holdings during one of our, um, reconnaissance missions. It took us a few days but we learned the company was scamming new retirees-they signed over their pension payments to him, and he invested the money. But we figured out it was a version of the Ponzi scheme. They paid dividends from new investors to the older investors, and skimmed the bulk of the money into offsh.o.r.e accounts. We thought at first it was a large group of money people involved, but eventually learned it was one guy running everything. Robert Martin."

"Never heard of him."

"You wouldn't have." Sean rubbed his eyes. This was where it was going to get hard. But if ever he wanted to believe the cliche that the truth would set him free, now was the time.

"I was twenty. Arrogant-more so then than now. I wanted to punish the guy. He was stealing from the elderly-people in their sixties and seventies who had secure pensions. He was a con artist, he manipulated them. Because of the way the wire transfers were managed, we easily cut off continued payments from the investors to Martin. And that should have been enough for us; we should have set him up for the FBI like we did with Block. But we took it a step further. We piggybacked a virus on one of his international transfers and all the money in that offsh.o.r.e account was rerouted back to his primary U.S. account. We repaid all the accounts with interest, then sent a letter from Martin Holdings to the investors that the company had disbanded and all funds invested had been returned."

"Wait," Noah said. "Transactions that large would be flagged by banks."

"No, because they were business accounts with a history of large transactions. There are ways around every law, Noah. You patch a problem, smart guys will get around it."

"And because what you did was actually bank fraud," Rick said, "there's a ten-year statute of limitations."

"Bingo."

The men were silent for a moment before Rick said, "No jury would convict you. The prosecution would want to plead out because they know the case would be difficult to prosecute. You're right when you called yourselves Robin Hood. And now with all the companies under investigation for mortgage fraud and pension scams? The Justice Department would never touch the case."

"Maybe. Maybe not."

Noah asked, "Does Paxton have proof?"

"I don't know. I kept a file of Martin Holdings records-the real records, not the doctored files that were open to investors. I put it in a safe-deposit box in Boston. After Paxton blackmailed me, I went there-it's still intact."

"You kept evidence of your crime?" Noah sounded surprised.

"I kept it to keep Robert Martin from doing the same thing again. I sent him proof of what I'd done, and told him if he ever tried it again, I would know-and turn everything over to the FBI."

"Why didn't you do that anyway?" Rick asked.

Noah said, "Because Sean would have gone to jail as well."

Sean shrugged. "There was that. I was on probation, thanks to the agreement Duke worked out with Stanford and the FBI in California. See-I started college early. I was two weeks shy of my eighteenth birthday when I was expelled. Duke was my legal guardian. He made the deal over my objections. So everything I did with Net and Colton in Boston was in violation of my probation. But that wasn't the main reason I never went to the FBI." He took a deep breath and finished his story. "A week after I shut down Martin Holdings, Robert Martin committed suicide."

"That wasn't your fault," Rick said.

"Well, it felt like it. I didn't pull the trigger, but I destroyed his life. I don't feel guilty for what I did, but a man is dead. He wasn't a killer; he was a con artist. I didn't want him to kill himself. I read all the news articles. No mention of the Ponzi scheme, no mention of the pensions, just that he shut down his company after returning money to his investors, then shot himself in the head."

Sean was glad Rick didn't say anything. There was nothing to say.

"I left MIT shortly after that. I was close to graduation anyway; I worked it out with my professors and turned in my finals early. Worked my a.s.s off for two months just so I could get my d.a.m.n degrees and leave. Colton's the only one who knew what happened."

"And he told Paxton?"

"I don't know." Sean still couldn't believe that his friend would betray him like that. Unless for some reason Colton trusted Paxton more than Sean.

Sean typed in a code on his desk and a hidden drawer popped open. He took out the small vial that held the microchip he'd stolen from Paxton. "This is my leverage on Paxton."

"What is it?"

"It's what he had me steal back from someone who took it from him." Sean couldn't go into the details, because Noah had been involved in the investigation and if Sean told him what he knew, he could be charged with something. Sean didn't know what-obstruction? Withholding information? But it wasn't important to what they were doing now.

"What I mean is, what's on it?"

"I don't know. I wanted to crack the code, but decided to hold on to it for a while and see what happened. And what happened is that Paxton is now in bed with Colton Thayer."

"I thought your curiosity would get the better of you," Noah said.

Sean smiled. "It almost did." He tossed the vial to Noah, who caught it. "Now it's yours."

Rick took the vial from Noah and handed it back to Sean. "Keep it for now. We'll figure out what to do with it, but I think it would help us if you found out what is on that chip. I can't do it, and I don't want to bring in a cyberteam, not this early."

"Sean," Noah said, "are you in?"

He closed his eyes. He was going to regret this, but did he really have a choice? "Yes."

"You know you can't tell anyone. Not your partner, not even Lucy."

"I know." He opened his eyes and looked at Noah. "But I need to be the one to tell her, when the time comes."

"Of course."

Sean wasn't going to lie to Lucy, but she was at Quantico for four months. He hoped this project wouldn't take longer.

Rick stood. "You and Noah work out the best way to get into Colton Thayer's group, then let me know the details. I have already secured two apartments in Manhattan and set up a false ident.i.ty for Noah."

"It'll take a month or two before I can get back in," Sean said. "Knowing Colton, he'll have a job for me first, to prove I'm loyal. I'm going to use that job to force a confrontation with Duke. It's the only way that Colton will believe I've really left-to be fired or publicly quit."

Sean looked again at the clock: 3:26. He couldn't stop thinking about the woman who'd been following him. The more he thought about her, the more he thought, Fed.

Who was she? What did she want? More important, what did she know? Did she know what happened with Martin Holdings? Did she have evidence that pointed to Sean? Why did he care? He had immunity. He had Rick's word.

Except twelve years ago Sean had the promise of the FBI that he wouldn't be arrested for exposing his pedophile professor, but he'd spent three nights in jail. He'd had the promise that he wouldn't be expelled from Stanford, but he was.

Promises didn't mean much. Rick's intent was one thing, but Sean knew that anything could happen when all was said and done.

Noah could have brought someone in and not told Sean. Or was she the mole? Was she following him at the behest of Senator Paxton?

Sean needed to find out, because information was power and the lack of information could be deadly.

CHAPTER NINE.

Duke Rogan sat at his desk Monday morning doing the one thing he hated about his job: paperwork.

The last month had been h.e.l.l without Sean. Patrick was handling all East Coast a.s.signments; it was everything he could do to keep up with the workload, and Duke was turning down new clients until they could replace Sean. He couldn't risk overworking his people and putting themselves or their clients in danger.

No successful business could survive on the presence of one person, but Sean's leaving had definitely hurt RCK in ways that Duke hadn't expected. He'd known his brother was a vital cog in the wheel but hadn't realized he'd been doing the work of at least three people and still had time to play. It was the way his brain was wired-when it came to computer systems, it just didn't take him as long to do the job.

Duke had considered sending Mitch Bianchi and Claire O'Brien, two of his top people, to help Patrick run RCK East. Mitch had the added benefit of being a former FBI agent. He'd even had a preliminary conversation. But Duke wanted Sean to return. He couldn't make major decisions like transferring staff until he had a long conversation with Sean-without emotion.

Duke had gone from being furious with Sean to being worried that he was going to get himself in such deep trouble that Duke wouldn't be able to get him out of it. He was still angry that Sean had put RCK in this position-by both leaving them and potentially damaging their reputation. JT, who'd always sided with Sean even when Duke disagreed, was more than a little livid. JT didn't want Sean to return at all.

"He made his d.a.m.n bed, Duke, when he decided to work off-book for Colton Thayer," JT had said when Duke told him what had happened. "You can't clean up this mess."

Duke could smooth things over with JT if he could just talk to Sean and find out what was going on. He'd been trying to reach Sean since he quit, but he had ignored Duke. Sean shut off his phone and Duke didn't have a new number for him.

Maybe Duke should have cut Sean some slack when he found out about his reconnection with Thayer. Twelve years ago, their lives had been different. Sean had been both wild and angry after what happened at Stanford. Colton had been there when Duke wasn't. Yet Colton wasn't a good influence on Sean and had been under investigation multiple times. Colton had to have an insider in the FBI to never have been indicted, but Duke didn't know who or how. He'd asked people he trusted, but no one knew much about Thayer.

Duke didn't want Sean sucked back into the life that he'd escaped when he left Boston.

Had Duke not appreciated Sean enough? Was that it? What more did he want? Duke let Sean open RCK East, even against Duke's better judgment that Sean wasn't ready to be on his own. He was still susceptible to breaking the rules, and while skirting the law was Duke's job, he never allowed himself to cross the line. They'd worked too long and too hard to put RCK in a position of importance, and he wasn't going to let the whims of his little brother jeopardize a company that employed forty professionals, from computer wizards to bodyguards to security experts. They had a successful operation. Why didn't Sean understand he couldn't do whatever he wanted?

There was a knock at Duke's door.

"Come in," he said.