Sex, Lies and Surveillance Read Online Free

way she could take that NSA job now.
    If it saved her father stress and her mother worry, she would run this office, take care of her brothers and make damn sure her family never discovered what she did for fun.
    And she’d keep an eye on the new guy. Her gaze narrowed on the wall separating her office from Mal’s.
    Something about the man made her Spidey sense tingle, and she wasn’t talking sex now. It was something she couldn’t quite put her finger on.
    Or maybe her attraction screwed with her intuition. Maybe he was exactly what he said he was.
    Then again, maybe they’d all missed something.
    Yes, she’d be keeping a close eye on Mal.

Chapter Two
    The next morning, Mal pushed away from his desk, needing to get up and move.
    Fuck. He was getting nowhere.
    He’d spent the past two hours with his fingers on the keyboard, trying to find something—anything in the DeMarcos’ private files that linked them to his case.
    His wrists ached, his fingers ached—hell, his brain ached. He felt like he’d been scuba diving in mud.
    And he had nothing to show for it.
    Their files were as clean as their government records.
    Either the DeMarcos had one big magic eraser or they were the saints most everyone in the federal government believed them to be.
    But there had to be a damn good reason why his handler had tasked him to find a link between the DeMarcos and Thomas Carabini, CEO of Carabini Family Inc., a legitimate import-export business with a 150-year-old unsoiled reputation.
    Until three months ago, when Carabini had been charged with importing stolen Russian weapons along with the olive oil and wine his family brought from Italy. A year ago, one of those guns had killed Mal’s partner, Dev. French national Damon Mays had pulled the trigger.
    Mays’s brilliance as a code cracker had brought him to the attention of the NSA after a semester at NYU. Afterward, he’d supposedly gone back to France to start an internet coffee shop. Instead, he’d stayed to play at international espionage by settling in a backwater Pennsylvania town to steal US government secrets to sell to the highest bidder.
    Mal and Dev had been undercover, their background cover stories perfectly aligned for Mays’s needs—disgruntled former US servicemen with technology skill sets.
    It’d been a low-risk assignment, something to get Dev’s feet wet before possible deployment overseas. But Dev had ended up dead.
    Because Mal had screwed up.
    For months after Dev’s death, every time Mal closed his eyes, he’d seen his partner’s face as he bled out. Dev had never stopped smiling, not even while he died. Not that he’d known he was dying. Mal kept telling him he wasn’t, that everything would be okay. That the ambulance would be there in minutes and Mal would make sure his wife was at the hospital waiting for him.
    His wife had been at the hospital, but it’d been too late. As Vicki had sobbed in his arms, Mal had promised her he’d make everyone who’d had a hand in Dev’s death pay.
    He’d nailed Mays in court; then he’d pursued Carabini with a vengeance, gathering enough evidence to send the guy away for life. When Carabini had appeared before the federal grand jury, he sang like a robin on the first day of spring. He gave up his Russian mob contacts and mentioned that he’d had a source in the Philadelphia police department in exchange for protection and leniency.
    And somewhere in the investigation that followed, the DeMarco name had popped up. The grand jury testimony had been sealed, but no one in Washington believed the DeMarcos were involved with Carabini. It just wasn’t possible.
    Frank was one of the most decorated officers in military intelligence history. Instructors used his career as a guide for budding agents in all branches of the military. And Grace…well, Grace had clearance the president envied. No one Mal knew had clearance to read her files. Just the scraps of missions that had leaked out were enough to make