Under His Watch Read Online Free PDF Page A

the table. He strode to the kitchen to find her at the sink washing the frying pan. He nearly laughed, but instead he said sternly, “Where did I tell you to be in this kitchen?”
    Charity whirled around, the fear returning to her eyes. Good, Ryan thought grimly, if I need to make you afraid of me rather than the bad guys, so be it.
    “Answer me, Charity.”
    “P-please don’t spank me, Ryan?”
    It was a question—it was definitely a question.
    “I won’t spank you for this, honey, but when you’re done with the dishes I want your disobedient backside in that chair.” He pointed. “If I’m going to keep you safe, I need to know that you’re listening to everything I ask you to do.”
    “Yes, alright,” Charity whispered.
    Should he say what he was thinking? “From now on,” he said, “you’ll call me ‘sir.’”
    Her brow furrowed.
    “Go on,” Ryan said calmly.
    “Yes, sir?”
    “That’s it. Now finish washing the dishes and sit at the table until I get back. You may go to the bathroom if you need to, but that’s it.”
    “Yes, sir,” Charity replied meekly. Ryan’s ideas about how his future relationship with Charity Phillips would go took a rather sudden turn at that moment, but he didn’t stop to interrogate the shift. He went into the living room and secured the windows, drawing the shades quickly. It probably wouldn’t save them from whoever was watching being able to figure out that he was back, but he didn’t want them to gain any more information about what went on in Charity’s apartment than that.
    He sat down at the desk and woke the laptop from its sleep mode. He took the diagnostic thumb-drive from the pocket where he always kept it and plugged it in. Ryan wasn’t a computer guy, but he felt completely comfortable with every form of technology he had ever encountered, and he had a buddy from the SEALs who supplied him with these diagnostic drives. If Charity’s PC had any online connectivity left, the drive would contact Ryan’s friend Joe in Texas—or rather, Joe’s heavily encrypted servers—and find and fix whatever was going on.
    After a twenty-minute conversation with Joe, Ryan knew that whatever Charity had gotten herself into didn’t have to do with mining rare-earth minerals—or at least that whatever rare-earth minerals were involved were only part of a bigger story.
    “That’s NSA shit, Ryan,” Joe said. “Only way I unlocked that machine was with NSA shit of my own—and that’s just because it was designed to be unlocked. If they had wanted to brick her machine, they could have done it no-fuss-no-muss.”
    Ryan felt his brow furrow as he spoke into his cell phone. “So you’re saying that they wanted someone to figure out that they’re… I don’t get it.”
    “I’m not sure I do either,” Joe replied, “but my best guess is that they know that Charity will send her PC to someone who can figure out that they’re using high-level government hacking tech. I’m thinking that’s the real message they were trying to send. The video thing, with the sniper pics, was just to get her attention.”
    “Huh. Okay,” Ryan said, because he couldn’t think of what else to say. “Would Mithras have this kind of thing?”
    “I doubt it,” Joe replied, “but these big conglomerates sometimes have hidden defense businesses. You might want to look into that, next—if you’re feeling rambunctious.”
    “Won’t they expect that, too? They can’t be thinking that she’s going to hear it’s a government thing and then just roll over, right?”
    “I can’t figure that out,” Joe admitted. “Maybe there’s a shoe that hasn’t dropped yet. But one thing I know is that even if the NSA and the CIA decide not to go all black helicopter, some of these defense contractors have no compunction. Watch your back.”
    “Thanks, Joe,” Ryan said, and hung up.
    Charity looked up as he walked into the kitchen. She had been reading a book Ryan recognized as a