But the voice let her know the scan had worked perfectly. “You are cleared, Ms. Dixon.”
“Everyone blinks,” Matt said as the doors opened. “Doesn’t matter. The scan happens superfast.”
They walked into a room. Two nice-looking men in dark suits stood by a set of glass doors.
“Carrie, this is Brock Grayson and Cooper Ross,” Jena said. “Guys, this is Matt’s sister Carrie.”
They shook hands.
Brock opened the door. “The rest of the team is already in the War Room.”
As they followed Brock and Cooper down the hall, she whispered to Jena, “War Room?”
“Not actual wars, but the name definitely fits for the kind of work we do here. We are the very front of the country’s war on cyber terrorism.”
When they walked into the room, Carrie saw several people seated around a long conference table, which had images floating on its surface. She saw a couple of them typing away on the table’s top at what looked to her like touch monitors. Again, she turned to Jena for answers. “That’s an impressive table. Are the monitors voice activated as well?”
“Yes.” Jena smiled. “That’s my baby. I designed it. Each team member can work individually or the entire table can become a single screen that can tie into the monitors on the walls.”
She was introduced to the entire Shannon’s Elite team. Being more nervous than she’d anticipated, she wished that Josh and Jacob were here to support her. The men and women around Jena’s special table were CIA. What would they think of her after she told them about the two million dollars?
“Thank you for coming, Carrie,” Easton Black, the team’s leader, said. “Everyone take a seat and let’s get started.”
It didn’t take long for her to relax, as each of the team listened intently to her recount how she’d escaped Willie with the two million dollars of stolen money. “I kept a list of each church Willie conned.”
“We made copies of Carrie’s list,” Jena said, passing around the pages to the others. “It’s very detailed. I’ll have a digital copy up that you can download to your ROCs after this meeting.”
“Carrie, how old were you when you started the list?” Jaris Simmons—she’d learned during the introductions—was one of the sheriff’s deputies and also the newest member of Shannon’s Elite.
“I think around five or six.”
“How did you know to do that so young?” the other deputy, Nicole Coleman, asked.
“At first, it was just a journal I started to remember all the places we lived. Then as I got older I realized the information might be valuable someday. We always left each town in such a hurry that by the time I was thirteen I suspected that Willie was robb
ing from each of the congregations, although I didn’t know how he was doing it. It took me a few more years to figure out his whole scheme, but when I did I started planning how I was going to escape and return the money.”
Mr. Black nodded. “It’s amazing that you have such high ethics having been raised by such a wicked man.”
“Actually, from every congregation I met such kind and decent people. I decided at an early age I wanted to be like them.”
“Some of those churches likely don’t exist anymore, Carrie,” Joanne Brown, the woman to Black’s right, said.
“Maybe not, but as you can see on the papers that Jena gave you, I do have a name of at least one elder from each church on the list. Will you help me get this money back to its rightful owners?”
“Yes, but not only that, Carrie,” Black said, “we’re going to find Willie and make sure you don’t have to run ever again. Dylan, what can you tell us about the man’s last known whereabouts?”
“August of last year he was captured on a security camera at a bank in Wisconsin,” Dylan Strange, the head of TBK security as well as Shannon’s Elite member, said. Dylan wore sunglasses, even though they were inside and underground. Carrie wasn’t quite sure what to make of him, but since he was on the team she thought he had to be one of the good guys.
“Willie had been living there for a few months under an alias,” Jaris continued. On another screen a small church appeared. “We knew that he’d been attending the Good Shepherd Chapel while living there. We also know that he had been wooing the members to make him their pastor. What we hadn’t known was why.” Jaris smiled at her. “But thanks to Carrie, now we do.”
“What happened to the church?” Carrie asked, wondering how many other churches Willie had conned after she’d escaped. “Did he steal from them, too?”
“No,” Jaris said. “Perhaps without you it was harder for him to convince congregations to take a chance on him.”
“I bet you’re right, Jaris. Whenever we showed up to a church Willie told them a sob story about how he was trying to raise me on his own and about how my fictional mother had died in a car accident.”
Matt grabbed her hand. “I hate that you had to go through so much with that bastard.”