Password Incorrect

Chapter 7

Nicky's POV

"Where are we going now?" I question.

Ryder doesn't reply and stares straight ahead at the road in front of him. Occasionally he drums his fingers along the steering wheel.

Hell, I don't even know if he is staring ahead at the road. Those stupid sunglasses cover his eyes. For all I know, he's rolled his eyes so far back into his head they're stuck there and he's just decided not to say anything about it.

Yes, I realize how ridiculous that sounds.

And yes, I realize there's no probability of that actually happening.

I glare at him when he continues not to respond. It doesn't seem to affect him. He doesn't seem to notice. He's in his zone. Which I guess is good. I mean, the way I see it, it's both good and bad.

Good that he's taking his job so seriously because that means, contrary to my original belief, I'll be relatively safe with him.

I say relatively safe because I'm still not a hundred percent sure he won't pitch me off a cliff if he gets the chance.

Bad, because now any hope I have to get away is squashed. Well, unless I actually bring physical harm to him. I have a couple tasers that are a tad bit defective. They scramble all your brain cells and then knock you out. Tasers aren't supposed to knock people out. That's why they're a tad bit defective.

I stare out the window as we pass by several houses and business. I start to make a habit out of counting out all the houses with the same basic architecture. And, just for the hell of it, I count out loud so Ryder can hear me.

"Eight. Nine."

"Shut up."

"Twelve. Thirteen."

"I will reach over and toss you out the window."

"Fifteen. Sixteen."

"One more number. Say it. I dare you."

I glare at him and open my mouth to do just that when I notice something in the rearview mirror. Something I should have noticed before. I mentally curse myself at the dismissal I had made of it earlier.

"Uh, Agent Stevenson?"

He ignores me.

"Agent Stevenson."

Still ignoring me.

"Ryder!"

"What?" He shouts, his knuckles white on the grip he's got on the steering wheel and his jaw clenched.

"You know that car I told you about?"

"Yes, the black Hummer. I've been keeping an eye out for it," He replies. "It's not following us, but I would have heard from the other agents if they'd been able to locate it."

"Yeah, that one," I respond, my gaze still on the rearview mirror. "But maybe I should have also mentioned the motorcycle."

"What motorcycle?"

"There was a motorcycle parked two houses down. I didn't think anything of it. No one was on it, but . . ."

"But, what?"

"It's behind us."

Ryder takes his gaze off the road long enough to look in the rearview. He lets out a string of very colorful curse words. "Are you sure that's the same motorcycle?"

"Yes," I reply.

"And where did you say it was parked?"

"Two houses down on the opposite end of the street from where we were."

More cursing from him. "Why didn't you point this out before?"

I glare at him. "Is the location this motorcycle was parked at important?"

"Yes," He says gruffly. "That house has been under renovations for the past week. No one's been there and no one was supposed to be there until next week."

"Well, why didn't you pick up on the motorcycle then?"

"I wasn't making a habit of staring out the windows like a paranoid freak."

I want to slap him. It would be so easy. And so worth it.

He looks in the rearview mirror again as he makes a turn. "I now understand how you survived this long. You're very observant."

I stare at him in surprise. I think that was almost a compliment.

"Otherwise you have absolutely no survival skills of any use. I thought it was a miracle you'd survived this long. You're one brain cell short of stupid." He added.

Spoke too soon. I went back to plotting his murder.

"One brain cell short of stupid?" I repeat.

"Did I stutter?"

"Would you like to know the probability that you make it out of this car alive? Because it's getting lower with every word that comes out of your mouth."

He pulls his sunglasses down so I can see his deadly glare as he turns his gaze to me. "Is that a threat?"

"No. That's a fact," I tell him. "A threat would be me saying something along the lines of, if you don't take your gaze off me and back onto the road, I'm going to slit your throat." I flash him a bitter smile. "Hypothetically, of course."

He listens to me for the moment. His gaze goes back to the road. "And I would-not so hypothetically-use you for target practice."

"You couldn't hit a target with both eyes open and a laser pointer."

A scary smile spreads across his face. "Remember you said that," He says. His tone of voice scarily chilling.

I resist the urge to shudder. No way am I ever letting him know he affects me, in any way. I go back to looking at the motorcycle in the rearview mirror.

"What are you going to do about the motorcycle?" I ask.

He doesn't take his eyes off the road. "I'm going to let him follow us down a deserted alley and then we're going to talk."

I cut my eyes to him. "What?"

He shrugs. "I figure since you won't talk to me," He says. "I'll get what I need to know from him."

I feel my heartbeat start to pick up and I stop short of sucking in a sharp breath. He can't talk to him. It can't happen. If that guy tells Ryder who I really am. That's it. I'm done for. But what could I do . . .

The traffic lights.

I pull my iPad out of my backpack and immediately my fingers instinctively move rapidly over the screen. I prefer to use a computer, but I can still accomplish most things I want to do with a smartphone or tablet instead. Other things that are more complicated, I need a computer.

I send a silent prayer for all the traffic jams and possible accidents I'll likely cause and start to change the lights.

First thing I did was change all our lights to green. Second thing I did was abruptly change the lights back to red the second we crossed into the intersection.

"What the hell?" Ryder mutters as car horns begin to sound off followed closely by the screeching and crashing of metal on metal. "s**t!" He shouts as he barely avoids being hit.

I wince and shut my eyes. A grimace permanently etched in my face.

This would not have happened if I'd had time to reprogram all the signal lights at each of the intersections. But I'd only been able to change the color of each intersection. Not each individual light. Which meant that all lights turned green at the same time and then turned red.

And four different directions of traffic coming at each other at the same time poses a problem.

On the bright side, the motorcycle is now stuck behind a three-car collision. On the other hand, there was now a huge problem.

I'm so sorry, I thought as I gazed at the wreckage. Luckily the majority of the cars were able to stop quickly and the ones that did crash don't look very bad at all.

Ryder continues to look back at the intersection but doesn't stop driving on down the road. "What the hell happened?" He mutters more to himself than to me.

I slip the iPad back into my backpack and lean back in the seat. My rate finally going back to normal and my breathing evening out.

"Well, I guess we don't have to worry about that motorcycle anymore," I say.

Ryder looks over at me, but I can't see what he's thinking because of the sunglasses.

He mutters something under his breath and turns his attention back to the road with a shake of his head. Like he's thinking it's too big of a coincidence for the lights go haywire at the exact time that they did.

"What?" I question with narrowed eyes.

"Nothing," He replies absently. Like he's trying to piece something together. I don't know how much he knows, or how much he's guessed about what I can do with a phone or computer, but if he thinks about it enough I'm sure he'll jump right to hacker.

That wouldn't be particularly good, but it wouldn't be the end of the world either. If he made the leap from hacker to Nicolette Moore, then it would be the end of the world.

We sat in silence for a long while. I was watching, waiting for something to happen and Ryder appeared to be just as tense.

Finally, I hear him let out a long, frustrated sigh. "I can't help you, if I don't know what I'm up against," His words are soft and there's frustration lacing his tone.

I shake my head and stare out the window. "You're not up against anything," I say.

He curses. "I am now. It's my job to keep you safe and I can't do that if I don't know the danger."

"Or you could just drop me off at the nearest bus station."

"Believe me," He says. "I'd love nothing more than to do just that, carrot top." I glare at him. "But that's not going to happen. I was given a job and I'm going to do it. Now tell me what's going on."

I pause, trying to put something together in my mind that makes sense and at the same time doesn't give away who I am.

"Well?" He questions impatiently.

"There's this gang," I start. "And according to them, I saw something I wasn't supposed to." Lies.

"'According to them'?" He repeats.

I shrug. I decide to go with the truth, but it's not my truth. "It was just gibberish on a computer screen. I don't know what any of it meant." My mind replayed the moment my dad had walked in on me while I was using my computer for something highly illegal.

Ryder frowns as if something's bothering him, but he doesn't press the matter. "What gang?" He asks instead.

Now I really don't know what to tell him. It had started out as one gang, but through the years it had combined with hundreds of other gangs to become the largest and deadliest gang in the world. Not to mention the whole, joining up and becoming the deadliest was sort of my fault.

I may have played a huge role in the original creation of the gang. It didn't exactly have its own name, mostly all you had to tell someone was that it was The Gang or That Gang. Great titles, I know.

Since it was made up of several hundreds of gangs, mostly it depended on which area you were in. The gangs, though all thought to be one, were still independent of each other and went by their original names. Of course, they were all controlled by the same person.

"Oh, you know," I reply vaguely. "One of them."

Technically, I'm not lying.

"Which one?" Ryder questions, frustration coloring his tone.

"I don't actually know the name." In some ways, this was true.

"I don't believe that."

"What?"

"You're on the run from a gang and your first thought is not to get the name of that gang so you know who you're running from?" He questions in incredulously. "You're not even that stupid."

I glare lasers into his head and imagine it bursting into flames.

I swear I'm not usually a violent person.

"Are you going to tell me what gang?" Ryder asks impatiently.

"Are you going to continue to insult me?"

"It is tempting."

I was tempted to set his hair on fire and watch him go around screaming and looking for a water source.

Or, at the very least, I was seriously debating what the consequences would be of hacking into the car system and deploying the driver's side airbags.

I continue to glare at him as I start to answer his question. "It's-" I stop abruptly as I see something coming at us from the side. Black Hummer.

"Ryder!" I shout in warning but it's too late.

Our car's hit on the driver's side and we're thrown from the road, spinning out of control. I hear someone screaming, and I think it's probably me. The car comes to a stop on the side of the road. Ryder's slumped forward in his seat, glass shards from his window all over him.

My head and heart are pounding, and there's a soft ringing in my ears. I unlock my seatbelt and lean towards Ryder, shaking him. He lets out a groan and his hand clutches at the side of his head.

"Agent Stevenson," I say, trying to bring his focus back to the present. "Ryder-" I let out another scream as my window is suddenly shattered and glass rains down on me.

I'm grabbed my hair and collar of my shirt and yanked out the broken window, glass digging into my back and legs.

"s**t!" I hear Ryder shout, but I'm being dragged towards the black Hummer.

I kick out with my legs and scratch at the hands holding on to me. I'm released for a split second before a gun is slammed into my head and I collapse to the ground, struggling to keep myself from fading into the darkness fast approaching as I'm lifted up and thrown in the back of the Hummer.