Constant Risk. Janie Crouch

me? Do you think this is a bad idea?”

      He hated the look of worry on her face. She’d already carried so many burdens and so much pain. He’d be damned if he was going to add to it.

      “I promise I think this is a fantastic idea. I would tell you if I didn’t.”

      She relaxed. After what they’d been through, she knew he wasn’t going to start keeping the truth from her now.

      And it was the truth. He did think this place was a fantastic idea. What Bree and Cassandra could create here would be amazing.

      “I know you’ve got to get back to work,” she whispered. “But I couldn’t wait to show you this.”

      He wrapped his arm tightly around her waist. “And I’m so glad you did. You and Cass have a lot of decisions to make.”

      He did too. Just different ones than he’d been expecting.

       Chapter Three

      “When I was eight years old, I was invited to participate in a computer coding class provided for free by the charity Communication For All. My father died when I was just a baby and my mother worked really hard just to make ends meet. There were no finances for tutoring or extra lessons. Everyone, including my elementary school teachers, knew I needed to be challenged, but no one knew how to do it. By eight years old I had already figured out more than what most of them had learned in their computer science degrees.”

      Bree ran a hand over her eyes, then stared at the laptop screen in front of her on the kitchen table at Tanner’s ranch house.

      Gregory Lightfoot, one of the federal prosecuting attorneys for Michael Jeter’s case, had been working with her two or three times a week for the past month on her witness statement for the prosecution.

      Gregory was located in Dallas, where the federal trial against Jeter would take place. Eventually Bree would have to go there, but for right now they were working via teleconferencing. Her testimony in Jeter’s trial in a couple months would play an important role. The case against the members of the Organization was very complicated and intertwined.

      Bree wanted to help ensure the conviction of Michael Jeter, but this part wasn’t the way she wanted to go about it.

      She let out a sigh. “I just don’t understand why I have to go back so far into my personal Bethany Ragan history. Why can’t we just focus on me talking about the crimes I can prove Jeter and the Organization committed, and how I brought them down?”

      As far as she was concerned, Bethany had ceased to exist once she’d gotten away from the Organization.

      Gregory’s face filled her screen. “Because what they did to you and your mother will be the nail in the coffin. Terrorist activities can sometimes be vague in a jury’s mind. But picturing little eleven-year-old Bethany being tortured in order to get her to cooperate? That’s the sort of thing that will guarantee a conviction.”

      “Right.”

      But did it matter that she didn’t want to relive that? That there were times when she could still hear her own bones snapping in her dreams? That she could still remember what it was like to hold her mother as she vomited up blood from the beatings the Organization inflicted on her?

      “Let’s just focus on Michael Jeter,” Gregory said. “Let’s leave the more painful stuff out for today and focus on when you first met him.”

      Gregory didn’t understand. It was all tied to Jeter. He’d been the face of her nightmares for nearly a dozen years. There was no separating him from the horror of what happened to her, even if most of it hadn’t actually happened by his hand.

      She attempted to focus.

      “I moved up the ranks at Communication For All pretty quickly. At the time my mother didn’t realize that the free courses were being utilized by the Organization to discover children who had natural hacking abilities. We just thought they were giving kids in poorer neighborhoods a leg up.”

      “And when did you meet Michael Jeter?”

      “I’d been inside the Organization for over a year before that happened. He didn’t get involved with the classroom programs in any regard except the highest possible levels. He met maybe one child per year.”

      “And you were that child?”

      Bree nodded, glancing away from the screen. “Yes. I’d aced every class and test they’d given me. I was already living on the Communication For All compound with my mom, and honestly was a little bored.”

      She could still almost perfectly remember the day she met Jeter. His office had been on a high floor in a Chicago skyscraper. She and her mother had grinned at each other all the way in the ride up the elevator.

      “What happened at that meeting?” Gregory asked, yanking her out of the memory—one of the last clear good ones she had of her mother.

      “I was brought into his office. It had unbelievable views from the window, and I wanted to look out them. But Jeter told me I had to do a test first before I could.”

      On the other end of the screen, Gregory jotted something down. “And what was the test?”

      “To most people it would’ve looked like a computer coding game. That’s how Michael presented it to me.”

      Thinking about it all now, with such hindsight, was difficult. If she hadn’t wanted to show off so much, impress the bigwig in the fancy suit with the grandiose office, how much different her life would’ve turned out.

      “I almost missed the true test,” she finally murmured. “I was so used to everything coming so easily to me with computers that I almost missed the Trojan horse Jeter had put inside his little game.”

      The defect had been placed deep inside the coding, and couldn’t be fixed with a simple rewrite. Almost the entire program had to be refitted, and had to be done quickly and creatively because of the countdown the system was on.

      “He was testing to see how I could adapt. He wanted to know what I would do when a system’s walls started closing in around me. If I could think outside the coding box.”

      “And how did you do?”

      “I passed.” She said it with a shrug like it was no big deal.

      It had been the hugest of deals.

      She would never forget the look in Jeter’s eye when she completed his little coding puzzle and turned the laptop back around toward him with time to spare.

      Until that moment she’d been nothing to him. Just another kid who, with the right guidance, would probably grow up to do pretty advanced programming, or maybe even start her own business.

      But once she’d turned the laptop back around to him and he’d seen what she’d done, she had become something much different to him.

      Much more interesting.

      From that day forward, until the day her mother had finally broken them out, there wasn’t a single day that Bree could remember that didn’t have Michael Jeter in it.

      “Were you aware of his illegal activities at the time?”

      She let out a sigh. “I was eleven. And for the first time being challenged to my fullest potential. To me, it was all a game. In the beginning at least.”

      “And when did things take a turn for the worse?”

      She stared at the screen, almost unable to focus on Gregory’s friendly face. She tried to force words out of her mouth—once, twice—but they wouldn’t come. Panic bubbled inside her.

      All she could see was Michael Jeter.

      All she could hear was his voice.

      All