Toeing the Line (The Complete Serial) by Allyson Lindt Read Free Book Online Page A

deal…”
    Oh geez, she really had screwed up. “You know it sounds like a very big deal, right?”
    “I do.” He dropped his forehead onto his knee for a moment before looking at her again. “You wanted to know where I’d been for the last two years.”
    Her breath caught, and her pulse slowed. That was what this was about? “I was curious, but I figured top secret , right?”
    He gave a bitter laugh. “They’d like you to think so.”
    The conversation about no-string sex could wait. This felt infinitely more important than how she got off at the end of the night. “Now I’m extra curious.”
    “A couple of years ago, I got a new assignment. They wanted me doing some heavier surveillance. It was a huge challenge, so I jumped on it.”
    Of course he had,
    “They told me I was getting them into some really tough places. Networks most people couldn’t crack. Then they gave me someone new to report to.”
    “Okay…?” She wasn’t sure why it mattered.
    He ran his fingers over the stubble on his head. “We did this differently than I’d ever done surveillance before. The woman they had me working with was very good at it, and the entire idea was scary brilliant.”
    Riley forced back her wince at the unabashed compliment for another woman. “How so?”
    “You know how phishing and spoofing work, right?”
    She nodded. The recipient clicked on a link they thought was taking them to one place, and it took them to another instead, while capturing the associated login information.
    “This is spoofing meets psy-ops. She would interact with specific people online. Chatting, friendly shit— How’s the dog? Did you have a good vacation? —the kind of casual conversation you see everywhere. If she couldn’t get connect with someone online, she’d do it in person, posing as a waitress, whatever, for the target. She didn’t need anything critical from them, just the standard kind of stuff anyone might tell a stranger. How work’s going. How the kids are. Stuff like that.”
    “My job…” He paused, as if thinking how to best phrase what he’d say next. “My job was to send those people email. Spoof it and make it look like it was from someone they knew and trusted. A boss. A girlfriend. A daughter. I had to make the email completely real and passable, so no filters could tell it was from anyone other than who it should be from. The recipient clicked the link—I don’t know, social media, whatever—and it passed through a gateway that downloaded the tiniest little Trojan in history, and we had full access to their computer. They ended up where they thought they were going and never questioned it.”
    “Wow.” She was wary enough not to click those stupid links from strangers that said things like, guess what I just heard about you online , but never hesitated when the messages from her friends looked genuine.
    “Yeah.” He dragged out the word. “It wasn’t my job to look at where we were going, just to get us there and make sure we stayed.”
    Riley’s head spun with the information.
    “Except one night, things changed.”
    “What?”
    “She left me alone for the first time.”
    “Before that, you were together twenty-four, seven? Long stakeout?”
    He let out a dry laugh. “Something like that. I only figured out later, but it had a lot more to do with the fact that I wasn’t under the same watch restrictions as before.”
    “Watch restrictions?”
    He nodded. “I poked harder than normal that night. I got bored and skimmed one of the computers I’d planted the back door on. The name caught my attention. American name. American IP… There was absolutely nothing top secret about that machine. It was some teenager’s laptop. The worst things on it were a couple of emails she’d sent a friend, about sneaking out to get drunk that Friday night.”
    “Why were you spying on American teenagers?”
    “I wondered that too. Every time my CO left me alone after that, I dug into another