Wicked and True (Wicked & Devoted 4)

Zy glanced down the hall. Laila’s light was still on. “Should I encourage her to go to sleep?”

“You can try, but she won’t.”

With a grim press of his lips, Zy shook his head, made two cups of coffee, and headed back to the table where Trees furiously scribbled notes, peering at the screen, then his list of chicken scratchings growing longer.

Zy was on the last swallow of his java—along with his last nerve—when Trees finally looked up. His friend’s grave expression told Zy he wasn’t going to like whatever Trees had to say.

Fuck. His heart nose-dived to his belly. His throat tightened. “What?”

“There are footprints of communications from what looks like a Gmail account to an external mail host with its servers in Switzerland.”

“Why is that important? Why does the server location matter?”

“Because the Swiss have some of the strictest tech privacy laws in the world. No one is getting their hands on that information. A lot of people use this kind of service. People who don’t like their emails being scanned for key words so that online retailers can market to them, for instance. People who don’t love government intrusion into their personal life.”

“So you have one of these email addresses?”

“Not this particular provider. This one is expensive. But I have one like it. It’s also commonly used by people who have something to hide.”

“Like criminals?”

“Exactly.” Trees shrugged. “Obviously, I’m not saying that anyone who has one of these is up to something nefarious, but I am saying that anyone up to something nefarious probably has one of these email addresses, rather than a simple freebie.”

“Let me recap: Someone with Gmail sent messages to a party with a super secure email address who might be a criminal?”

“Yes.”

“And?”

“Because the information packet passed through our server, and I have some goodies residing there just in case, I can read the contents of the emails. But I can’t prove who the Gmail address belongs to.”

Maybe they could figure it out. If they could read the contents of the outgoing messages, they might be able to glean who the Gmail belonged to—and thus, the identity of their mole.

“Are the communications from this Gmail something to worry about?”

Trees scanned, frowned, then sighed. “August eighteenth. The Gmail account owner wrote a summation of the plan Hunter outlined for Walker and me to spy in Mexico. The mission in which he was taken in the parking lot.”

Zy’s blood ran cold. That breach had definitely been the work of their mole. And the bosses probably would have come to Trees sooner to have him run this down if they hadn’t suspected him. “Shit.”

“Yep. Shit,” Trees confirmed. “There’s just one thing about this that’s a little weird: the message was sent in the middle of the night.”

Zy tried to puzzle that through. “Tessa takes her laptop home with her more often than not. She always said it was in case the bosses needed something during evening and weekends.”

“Or maybe she does that in case a certain cartel needs answers day or night.”

As much as Zy hated to think it, yeah. “How do we prove whether that message came from Tessa?”

“Without her computer, we don’t.”

That wasn’t what Zy wanted to hear, but maybe there was another way to attack this. “What about Walker’s rescue mission in September? That went off without a hitch.”

“The one I missed because of truck-stop sushi. Right…” Trees tapped on his keyboard again, waited for a few tense seconds, then started scanning whatever filled his screen. Zy felt as if he waited forever before Trees shook his head. “No. Nothing.”

She hadn’t sent the enemy any plans about the rescue mission? Hadn’t told them when and where and how they were planning to extract One-Mile and hopefully Laila with him? There must be some reason. “Were the bosses keeping the details of that rescue mission better under wraps? Or…” Then Zy remembered. “Wait. Wasn’t that when she went to Tennessee because her father died?”

Trees snapped his fingers, clicked onto a calendar, then nodded. “You’re right. She wasn’t around to learn about the plan and pass it on.”

Now that he’d gotten over hating to think of Tessa being guilty, anger set in. With every detail they unturned, he was beginning to see her step-by-step betrayal. It crushed him. It made him want to nail her for her deception. “But she was back in plenty of time to rat out the location of Valeria’s safe house in St. Louis.”

His buddy clicked a few more times, then nodded. “I just accessed the server’s October backup. Sure enough, here’s another communication from the Gmail account to the secure mail host, forwarding the email Walker sent me—via Tessa—with the location’s floor plan. And like before, she sent the email in the middle of the night.”

“She told the drug lord exactly where to find his estranged wife?”