Full Domain (A Nice Guys Novel Book 3) Read online

  Kreed leaned back as a heaping mound of nachos and a plate of potato skins were placed in front of Aaron. The waitress sat a small empty plate next to the cute computer guy. The question he’d just asked was forgotten as the look of delight on Aaron’s face morphed into confusion when Kreed had an identical plate placed in front of him.

  “Don’t worry. I’m not mooching in on your grub.” Kreed lifted two hands high, making sure Aaron knew he wasn’t going to hone in on his food. Aaron eyed him closely before digging in, filling his plate to capacity. When done, he took one nacho and placed it on Kreed’s plate with a little you’re-welcome smirk. They both laughed at the move. “So I’m guessing you’re the youngest in your family?”

  “Why do you say that?” Aaron asked after swallowing his first bite.

  “Experience. The youngest in the family’s least likely to share. And that’s magnified by the number of siblings. I’m thinking you’re probably the youngest of a big group of kids—like four or five.”

  Aaron nodded, swallowing another bite before taking a big drink of the ice water. “Very observant, Deputy Marshal. I make number five.”

  Before he spoke, Aaron lifted the napkin from his lap and wiped his mouth. He used utensils to eat his nachos and potato skins, chewed with his mouth closed, and frequently wiped with a napkin. No matter the rebel-meets-hipster style Aaron donned, he had an ingrained sense of manners that usually came from wealth, which just intensified the questions already forming in Kreed’s brain.

  Kreed understood that in order to solve a puzzle, you had to start by placing the first piece, then the second, and over time the whole picture would slowly be revealed, making the game more time-consuming than complicated. Good thing Kreed had time.

  “We should be going over the facts…” Aaron suggested, leaning back to make room as some pasta dish was placed in front of him. “That’s the reason I’m here.”

  Kreed moved the plate in front of him to let the waitress place his there. He unwrapped the napkin, listening to Aaron ask for more butter, salsa, and ranch dressing. For Kreed, he was good with a Jumbo Jack from Jack in the Box for dinner. Somehow he didn’t see Aaron as a fast-food junkie. He’d probably reject that idea in such a way that it would be fun to taunt him with the stops. He made that mental note to remember to do that and gave a simple, “I’m good,” to the waitress when she asked if he needed anything more.

  “So you and me, plus Connors and Brown, are the new team?” Aaron questioned. Kreed built his burger, adding mustard to the bun.

  “I don’t think anyone else got called in from vacation.”

  “What about the assistant who helped Mitch?”

  “Anne? I don’t know. We’ll have to see. We have a two o’clock report time.” Kreed lifted his burger to his mouth and took a big bite. He’d found this little hole-in-the-wall place last time he was in town. His memory of the food didn’t disappoint.

  “So I’m probably not getting out of this?” Aaron asked. The honesty of the question intrigued Kreed, since he’d assumed the surly disposition had been an act. Aaron had always been ready to help, day or night.

  “Probably not,” Kreed stated, giving Aaron a truthful answer.

  “Dammit,” Aaron mumbled between bites. Kreed cocked his brow, watching the kid.

  “Ahh, I’m all warm and fuzzy with sentiment. I’m looking forward to working with you, too.” Kreed took another big bite of his food. He held back his smile as he watched the never-ending flow of food from Aaron’s plate to his mouth. The guy was thin, yet he was consuming more food than Kreed had eaten in the last forty-eight hours. With his mouth still full, Kreed added, “But on the bright side, we’ll team up against Connors and bully our way through. The more we get done unsupervised, the faster we can wrap this up.”

  “All right. Good backup plan. I’d rather find a way out of being here, but if I can’t, I’ll concede to that. Get done and go home. Connors and Brown up for that?” Even though the food intake never stopped, Aaron never spoke with food in his mouth—impressive and a bit of its own art form, truth be told.

  “Brown is. Connors surprised me with that interrogation of Agent Langley—the way he pushed that through—so the jury’s still out on him.” Kreed took another bite, letting Aaron process that bit of information. Aaron had to know he couldn’t talk his way out of being a part of this task force, especially with Mitch sidelined, and Aaron had been there from almost day one, helping Knox find all the dots that connected the cases. He was the most logical choice to fill the Mitch-shaped hole in their investigative team.

  “So if we were gonna close this file for good, where would you start?” Kreed asked after a moment of silence. The biggest concern Kreed had about the case right now was who could be trusted. With the discovery that Special Agent Langley had been on the inside—and that he hadn’t acted alone—there were most likely other dirty agents, either in the FBI or other government agencies. Aaron was technically the only one he really trusted right now and that said a lot. Aaron had single-handedly broken the case wide open when he’d identified Peter Langley’s attorney being at Kreed’s brother’s funeral when no one else had—or maybe they had, and never shared.

  If he and Aaron were on the same page going into the meeting today, they could bust out of DC by tomorrow. And if they weren’t under someone’s thumb, and he and the kid worked closely together, it might not be much of a stretch to close this case by week’s end. Because with Kreed’s gut and his willingness to allow Stuart to do whatever it took—both inside and outside the law—to find this information, he figured they could wrap this case up tight.

  Aaron stayed silent for so long that Kreed figured the guy had caught on to his ploy to entice Aaron to close this investigation quickly rather than encouraging the man’s desire to leave the case behind. The kid surprised him when he finally answered. “It’s hate related. It’s not rocket science that hate masks itself in religion all the time. Religion means a church is involved. Before I left, I narrowed it down to three satellite churches. All had members involved in the rally. ”

  “So you’re thinking like I’m thinking—there’s a religious organization behind this whole deal, probably starting back before even the Colt Michaels accident?” Kreed laid his burger on the plate, pushed the food aside, and took a deep breath. Being on the same mental page gave him the validation he needed to continue with his plans.

  “Pretty much,” Aaron said, before taking another bite of pasta.

  “Have you looked into any of them closely?” Kreed asked, and Aaron went silent, eating the rest of his plate without making eye contact.

  “If we’re gonna be partners and get this solved so you can get out of here, you need to come clean with me, Aaron,” Kreed said quietly. He leaned in a little and whispered the next words. “I want this done. Mitch and Cody aren’t safe until we figure this out. You can trust me. I swear.”

  “We aren’t partners yet, and the less you know about my processes, the better,” Aaron quipped and Kreed leaned back a little disappointed.

  “Well, that’s fucking cryptic for a government employee who wants the hell out of here,” Kreed snorted. He needed to remember Stuart wasn’t someone to push. Aaron needed a gentle hand to help guide him where Kreed wanted him to go. “So if you were looking at the churches, when will you know something?”

  Aaron wiped his mouth and gave an exaggerated eye roll.

  “I’ve narrowed it down, but won’t know for certain until I can get a secure connection,” Aaron replied, before finishing off his pasta dish. Kreed nodded in agreement. That was all he’d needed to know. Kreed lifted his hand for the check. All of a sudden, getting Aaron to the office was the only thing Kreed was interested in.

  “I ordered dessert,” Aaron said defiantly when he realized Kreed’s intent to leave.

  Kreed shoved from the booth, heading toward the back where he saw the waitress go. He quickly asked her to bag Aaron’s dessert and handed her his credit card for the
meal. There would be little more than a skeleton crew at FBI headquarters, and they could work reasonably undetected. Maybe he could access Mitch’s old office and stick Aaron in there, see if he could gather any more valuable information before they all met this afternoon.

  Chapter 4

  Dammit! Aaron knew better than to think he could worm his way out of this mandatory onsite request. To make it worse, he had no one to blame but himself. Society’s shady-ass behavior always intrigued him to the point of trying to figure out motives and the potential next moves they planned to make. Add that to his innate do-gooder attitude and he always went after the bad guy when any sort of injustice made its presence known.

  Good versus evil and all that superhero shit made him feel better at the end of the day if he had to break a few rules to expose the bad guy. His online buddies called him the modern-day Robin Hood, hacking information and releasing it to the disenfranchised. Knowledge was power, and the power should be with the people, not corporate overlords. Typically, that was a source of pride, but right now, riding in this car, he had the major heebie-jeebies—times about a million—at the prospect of walking into the front doors of FBI headquarters. This shit just got way too real and wasn’t funny at all.

  Aaron looked down at his palms. They were sweaty from his overactive nerves, and he quickly ran them down the front of his jeans before tucking his hands under his thighs. Up until Mitch’s case that somehow inadvertently got dumped on his shoulders, Aaron had been able to do his Robin Hood thing from behind his computer screen in the safety of his own home. Now, as they pulled into the parking lot with the massive Federal Bureau of Investigation stamped on the entrance, a fear Aaron hadn’t known, became his number one focus.

  While working adventures with his merry band of brothers, Aaron might be branded the king of manipulating and exploiting limitations in the proxy servers of large organizations—more specifically, the largest corporations in the world, who tended to regularly exploit the little guy. And there might have been a time, or perhaps a few dozen times, where he may have orchestrated a complete flood on their system by simply issuing a calculated DDoS—Distributed Denial of Service—attack. And since Aaron’s particular talents included systematically evading any reverse proxy servers in their way, allowing the unsuspecting flood to penetrate, some legal eagles might consider that a planned global cyber-attack. Aaron dubbed it more a wakeup call to the senior administration when they’d gotten a little too big for their britches.

  Honestly, it had all been in good fun. Hell, they’d had a blast. He loved hacking for the sake of hacking. When corporate blowhards declared things like their systems being secure and unbreakable, hack resistant… Hmm, okay, challenge accepted.

  Those hacks were the best times ever! And at the end of the day, he loved leaving his calling card of a fire breathing dragon avatar for the IT department to eventually find.

  Aaron had his ways of leading anyone who might see him into a very wild goose chase. Okay, amend the previous thought. Spoofing his source address, redirecting his activity, and leading the authorities to an old abandoned house in Nebraska while they tried in vain to track him down… Yeah, that was the best time of all.

  The problem with all that hacking was that he’d learned too much about the true evil side of excessive greed and ego. As much as Aaron liked and believed in Mitch, he didn’t trust the federal, state, or local government as far as he could throw them. He’d hacked into too much, seen disgusting classified information that only the top of the top could access. Very few knew that his true reason for being a government employee was to keep his friends close and his enemies closer. The FBI represented that enemy tenfold.

  After Kreed parked, Aaron paused for several seconds before he opened the car door and got out. Where the hell were Neo and Trinity from the Matrix when he needed them? Grabbing his gear, Aaron silently followed Kreed inside. A small, unreasonable fear trickled up his spine for about the hundredth time. What if this was a setup? Had he finally given them enough evidence to piece together his extracurricular activities? Kreed held the door open. Aaron entered, but let Kreed lead the way to the front desk as he tried to mask his face and calm his ass down.

  “Tension’s rolling off you in waves,” Kreed said casually, flashing his ID at security. Aaron watched everything and everyone behind the desk. Even in holiday skeleton mode, they were way overstaffed at the entrance. Kreed went through the motions of logging his weapon while having security issue the proper identification to enter the building.

  “It’s weird being on this side of things.” Since he hadn’t been arrested the minute he’d walked inside, he redirected his pent-up anxiety and pushed forward his disgust. He wasn’t necessarily sneering at the security guards but more the entire building, as he pulled out his government employee credentials and handed them over the counter, following Kreed’s lead. The smartass officer took the documents to a desk behind a bulletproof barrier.

  “Connors is gonna love you being on this case,” Kreed teased, giving Aaron a wink and smile. Aaron appreciated his attempt to lighten the mood. It didn’t work, but the thought was there.

  “Maybe he could throw a fit and send me home?” Aaron replied eagerly.

  “Whatever gives you hope,” Kreed tossed out, tucking his badge back in his pocket. He turned to fully face Aaron and leaned against the counter. He’d been cleared for entrance, but he waited on Aaron, whose gaze danced between Kreed and the guys talking behind the bulletproof window.

  Since Aaron’s arrest record always popped up, he mentally began to count, three…two…one… Yep, perfect timing. One of the security agents behind the desk picked up the phone while the other came forward, flanked by two additional well-armed agents.

  “If you could come this way,” one of the men-in-black said to him while reaching for the backpack still slung over Aaron’s shoulder. Aaron turned his shoulder away as Kreed’s subdued attitude faded. Kreed stretched to his full height, sticking out a hand to stop the guard from taking the bag. Yeah, Kreed’s move didn’t go over well. All that security muscle tensed as waves of testosterone hit from every angle.

  “I’ve been instructed to bring this man, NSA employee, Aaron Stuart, into this office to work an open case with me. He’s authorized and under my supervision,” Kreed explained, his voice deep, actually frighteningly threatening, and Aaron lifted a brow in surprise at the huge fucking turn-on that was, even during such a clearly intense time.

  “It’s not their fault. Keep my computer for me. I’ll go with them. It’ll take about fifteen minutes to go through the chain of command to prove I have access,” Aaron said, trying to neutralize this situation. He quickly looked around. Eight against one… Aaron shook his head. Kreed was a badass—no doubt there—but he sure didn’t see the guy coming out of this unscathed against all this bulk raining down on them.

  “This shit’s not right. I just told them I’ll take responsibility for you,” Kreed argued, clearly not used to having his word dismissed. Kreed wedged his body where his arm had been and got right in the agent’s face.

  “Deputy Marshal Sinacola, I don’t have a problem with you.”

  Aaron took a small step to the side and looked around Kreed’s massive body. Now, he wasn’t a body language kind of guy, but from the sight of the ever-growing anger blooming on the men’s faces, Aaron decided the agent’s words were probably untrue.

  “Apparently, you do. I just gave you my word as a deputy marshal of this justice system and that’s not good enough for you?” The sentence might have been phrased in the form of a question, but it carried all the attitude of someone ready to kick ass.

  Fuck. He needed to calm this situation. Aaron moved between the two of them, shoving his computer into Kreed’s chest. “Keep an eye on this. Don’t let it out of your sight.” Aaron quickly turned to the guard, giving Kreed his back. “Take me wherever.”

  “Director Skinner has a personal note in his file. He’s to be admitted,” the agen
t behind the desk called out, his eyes still trained at his monitor. It still took a few seconds to defuse the cock-measuring contest currently underway. Kreed held his stance as the security guy eased his. Even relaxed, the agent confronting Kreed held his stare as he stepped aside, handing Aaron his identification. Kreed didn’t ease; his formidable scowl and narrowed gaze stayed trained on the agent as Aaron took his laptop case back and moved to the desk to get his temporary badge. Another officer patted Aaron down to make sure he wasn’t carrying a weapon. All the while Kreed monitored everything going on around him. Aaron had never felt safer in his entire adult life. Without question, if Aaron got himself in a bad situation, Kreed was the guy he wanted on his side.

  Based on what he’d just witnessed, Aaron conceded that Mitch wasn’t the most dangerous part of the dynamic duo of K & M. And he realized right then, the urban legend he’d read about Kreed could quite possibly be true. Aaron glanced back to see every single eye in the area still trained on Kreed, with every agent’s palm resting on the butt of their weapon. Anger wafted all around him.

  He’d been fooled by Kreed’s laid-back demeanor. That casual, overly easygoing guy of the last hour had evaporated in less than a second, leaving no doubt Kreed could have taken out many of those agents by himself.

  Aaron remembered reading Kreed’s military file. It was filled with intense moments of heroism along with large black holes of missing documentation. That stayed consistent until he went to work for the marshal service. Since Aaron had that knowledge and had still underestimated Kreed, he wondered if anyone—even Mitch—could fill in those blanks in Kreed’s military career.

  “You’ll be admitted under the supervision of Deputy Sinacola…” the guard behind the desk asserted carefully.

  “Like I fuckin’ said,” Kreed growled at all the agents standing around the area. After getting to his feet, the agent came around the desk, his hands up in the air, trying for calm.