With a Pull of a Trigger

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty

The Verity of Fiction

Paris, France

The safety house was still the same.

It still looked the same with its white walls and nondescript furniture. Hell, it even felt the same under Reini’s fingertips, her mind going a mile a minute as she remembered the two years she spent there with Eena.

Everything was untouched.

Her bedroom was the way she left it, the bed immaculately made, the floors clean. Truly, the house felt empty despite the very few possessions Eena and Reini left there, despite the fact that once upon a time, someone did live in the house.

Everything was silent except for the quiet tap tap her heels made on the floor, except for the sighs she expelled every once in a while. She had spent two years in that very house hiding because, for all intents and purposes, she was dead.

The silence was, quite frankly, deafening.

Nothing changed, yet it seemed that everything did. She felt the past rushing, finally catching up to the present like a predator finally catching up to its prey. She stepped into that house willingly two years ago and she stepped into it willingly now. Damn the consequences or the repercussions because whatever happened, it would all be her fault. She needed to do this, though. She had to face the past before it had the chance to sneak up on her.

Fear was an absolute, irrefutable thing that had the ability to flip everything upside down. It was time that Reini finally faced it in the eye and deny it the opportunity to do so.

She took the pillow from her bed—still in its clean white cover—and put it away, taking the laptop that it had hidden. The laptop wasn’t really hidden, per se, but Reini had known that when she put the laptop there.

She put the laptop on the nondescript desk nearby and turned it on, sitting down on the chair with something akin to impatience in her eyes. She didn’t have much time to figure out what she needed to know, didn’t have much time to discover what she could, before they caught up with her. She was smart, yes, but they were smart too. They also had the means to locate her considering the technology they had—technology even she couldn’t afford to acquire.

Uncle E had once given her a state-of-the-art technological device that formulated a personalized programming code designed to keep her laptop virtually untraceable and unhackable. For all intents and purposes, her laptop didn’t exist. She was a ghost in the network, and she was fine with it staying that way.

She knew that the agency hadn’t yet acquired that kind of technology what with all the budget cuts they had to endure, but even she knew that if she weren’t careful, Charles would be able to detect her every move.

Reini typed in her code, watching as the blinking cursor disappeared and row after row filled with computer code made its way onto her laptop screen. After a few seconds, the black background with the CIA seal returned.

The laptop was a standard issue. It was grayish-silver, rounded on the edges and a bit sleek, though not as sleek as Greg’s Macbook Air. It also didn’t exist, at least not on the CIA’s network archives.

As Reini was supposed to be dead, she wasn’t allowed to use her own sleek CIA-issued laptop until her days of hiding was over, and so they gave her a new one, so to speak. It was actually an older version of the standard laptop the agency provided their senior agents, so even without the programmed code her laptop was deemed invisible. However, if she used it without the code and she proceeded to get into the CIA network archives with a laptop wasn’t supposed to exist—especially since only a handful of people knew about it, Charles included, as well as the fact that it should have been broken by now—Charles would know, and he would shut down the archives.