Mission: Impossible to Deny (The Impossible Mission Romantic Suspense Series Book 7) - Jacki Delecki (great novels of all time txt) 📗

“I’m surprised Richard Dean didn’t use his influence to pull this one.”

Molly hit the button, and Reeves Hewitt’s angular face filled the giant screen. His thick, ebony hair was disheveled, his black eyes staring at Darcy. He could have been an ad for a men’s cologne or a Porsche with his arm draped casually around Sophie Dean, his collared shirt open to reveal a hint of his potent virility. How was this guy a computer nerd? There was no question the man oozed sex-on-a-stick with privilege.

Why did she have such a visceral reaction to this one man? She refused to acknowledge the synergy between them during the three-hour gaming marathon. She thought she had finished with the whole love ’em and leave ’em type. He could be best friends with one of her older brothers. And she had seen the trail of heartbreak her brothers left behind. She didn’t require overloaded testosterone to make her life exciting. The CIA gave enough of that.

“Dean might control his computer world, but there’s no way he can monitor every picture of his daughter and her friends.” Molly smirked.

Darcy didn’t have access to Molly’s file. All Darcy knew was from comments the young hacker made as an aside. Molly had been a foster kid and seemed to have a lot of trust issues around authority figures. The CIA had recruited her to use her skills for the government, not against it. Richard Dean, billionaire software guru, was the ultimate father figure to rail against. Making Molly the perfect partner for pushing the boundaries but not crossing the CIA line with their deep dive into Hewitt.

“Why do such piddly shit when Hewitt could hack into the main frame of the CIA? The dude doesn’t need to use his game to install ransomware. And why countries that are barely on the international radar?”

Darcy hated to admit that Molly’s logic was sound. She was frustrated and under a lot of pressure after being sent back to Langley before her fieldwork had been finished. She needed a win, or she would end up behind a desk forever instead of fighting the bad guys. The only reason she had gotten this assignment was that she had been a big gamer before she straightened up her life and joined the military. Instead of attending her college classes, she spent hours gaming, hooking up, and smoking weed.

Wishing Hewitt to be a terrorist didn’t make it so. Hewitt was probably too smart to be the perpetrator of the cyberattack. Neither he or Thompson were capable of selling the virus-infected variation to the highest bidder. She had the requisite amount of cyber skills for this op but nothing like Molly or Hewitt.

She was a field agent … or used to be. Her father always reminded her that her need to win would come back to bite her in the ass. But she grew up in a household of five men—four older brothers and her father, who cast a long and formidable shadow. She wanted a life of adventure in foreign countries, not to be a housewife like her mother, who’d spent her days cooking and cleaning. She’d died before she ever had a chance to live. And Darcy wasn’t going to let that happen to her.

The door opened, and a man in an ill-fitting black jacket waited in the entrance. His sidearm bulged under his Men’s Wearhouse polyester suit. “Officer Darcy Wilson?”

“Yes.” Darcy’s heart raced from the formality of his voice and his military posture.

“The director wants to see you. Now.”

“He’s in his office?” Her voice quavered. It was midnight.

“Yes. He just arrived and immediately sent for you.”

The tingling feeling behind her knees worsened when she heard Molly mumble under her breath, “Oh, shit.”

“You should hustle.” The man gestured for her to go in front of him.

This wasn’t the heart-pounding adventure she wanted when she joined the CIA.

Her heart thrashed in loud thumps against her chest when her escort held the door to the director’s office. She walked into the darkened space. Two metal lamps on the giant desk were the only light source. She had never met the director, but Andrew Marwick’s reputation was that he was a total ball-breaker who did not tolerate idiots or idiots’ mistakes.

“You wish to see me, sir?”

Could she be delusional enough to believe that he had breaking information on the ransomware? She stepped farther into the huge office lined with shelves of leather-bound books and gold-framed pictures of the director hobnobbing with world leaders.

He stood with his back to her, surveying the courtyard below. His silver hair was in sharp contrast to his crisp white shirt. Unlike her jeans and t-shirt, he sported a dark blue, almost black, expensively cut suit as if he had just returned from a late-night meeting.

The power suit accentuated his broad shoulders. By his ramrod posture and his linebacker physique, she would’ve deduced that he was military, like the past directors. Marwick, the exception, was a career diplomat with years of service in embassies across the globe, including West Africa, and part of the reason she wanted to prove herself with this assignment. Embassies were close to the director’s heart, as was human intelligence over unfiltered cyber data.

Marwick’s appointment was part of the president’s mandate that human intelligence and human relationships remained vital to the security of the United States, despite the growing use of AI to gather data and predict human outcomes. She was thrilled with Marwick’s nomination since she was the type of agent he’d value. Or so she hoped.

“Ms. Wilson. You’ve been with the agency a little more than two years?”

“Yes, sir. I was recruited during my second deployment in Afghanistan.”

He hadn’t offered a seat, so she remained standing at attention as he sat behind his desk.

“You were an Army intelligence officer? Gathering intel from the local tribes.”

“Yes, sir. I have a facility with dialects that helped me to reach out and connect with the women.”

Witnessing the Taliban’s repression of the Afghan