Chapter 5 - The Hard Drive and the Ghost from the Past
We went back to the motel, the agents buzzing with frustration, but I couldn’t stop thinking about the penthouse. When Voss had run for the elevator, he’d dropped something. A small black external hard drive, tucked under the edge of the bed. I’d stuffed it in my purse when no one was looking, before the crime scene team got there.
I locked myself in the bathroom, turned on the shower to muffle the sound, and plugged the hard drive into my laptop.
It was a goldmine.
Voss had kept everything on it. Every email, every text, every video, every transaction. There were photos of the girls he’d trafficked, locked in basements, their faces thin and scared. There were videos of him paying off cops, paying off judges, paying off the Harringtons. There were spreadsheets listing every shipment coming through the Port of Miami, dates, times, numbers of women, amounts of cash. There was even a video of him killing the Harringtons’ head of security, shooting him in the back of the head in a parking garage, because the guy had tried to blackmail him.
And then there was the folder labeled CARTER.
My hands shook as I clicked it open.
Inside were photos of me, from when I was a little girl—me at my elementary school graduation, me at my high school prom, me walking into the FBI academy. There were photos of Mom, taken through our kitchen window, just like the one he’d left at our apartment. And there was a file on a man named Mark Carter.
My dad.
I’d grown up thinking he’d died in a car crash when I was two. Mom had never talked about him, never showed me photos, just said he was gone, it was better that way. But the file said he was alive. He was an FBI agent. He’d gone undercover in Voss’s organization twenty-two years ago, infiltrated his inner circle, gotten close enough to take him down—until Voss found out. Mark had faked his own death to protect Mom and me, spent the last twenty years deep undercover, working his way up Voss’s chain of command, waiting for the right moment to take him down for good.
He was the mole inside Voss’s organization. The one who’d been feeding the FBI tips for years. The one who’d told Agent Carter to hire me to go undercover with the Harringtons, because he knew I was smart enough, tough enough, to get the job done.
I stared at the screen, tears running down my face. My dad was alive. He’d been watching over me my entire life, from the shadows, and I’d never known.
I ran out of the bathroom, found Agent Carter in the main room, talking on the phone.
“Where is he?” I said, holding up my laptop, my voice shaking. “Where’s my dad?”
Carter’s face fell. He hung up the phone, sighed, and gestured for me to sit down.
“We were gonna tell you,” he said, soft. “After we took Voss down. We didn’t want to distract you. Mark’s been undercover for twenty years. He’s Voss’s right-hand man now. The only reason we got as far as we did with the Harringtons is because Mark fed us the info. He’s the one who told us Voss was planning to use Blake to steal your mom’s business—he wanted to make sure you were protected.”
“I want to see him,” I said. “Now.”
Carter hesitated, then nodded. “He’s in Miami. Working on the inside of Voss’s port operation. He’s been trying to get intel on Voss’s next big shipment—fifty women, coming in from Ukraine, due to arrive at the port in three days. If Voss gets them out of the port, we’ll never find them. They’ll be sold to hotels, to private clients, gone forever.”
He pulled out his phone, sent a text. Ten minutes later, there was a knock on the door.
I opened it.
He was older than the photo in the file, lines around his eyes, gray in his hair, a scar running down his left cheek. But he had my eyes. My mom’s smile.
“Grace,” he said, his voice rough, like he was holding back tears. “You look just like your mom.”
I threw my arms around him, sobbing, all the anger, all the confusion, all the loneliness of growing up without a dad pouring out of me. He held me tight, his arms warm and strong, and whispered, “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry I wasn’t there. But I’m here now. And we’re gonna take Voss down. Together.”
Mom called a few minutes later. I told her Mark was there. She was quiet for a long time, then said, “Put him on.”
I handed him the phone. I couldn’t hear what she said, but I saw his face crumple, saw him nod, say “I know. I’m sorry. I’ll make it right.” When he handed the phone back, Mom said to me, soft, “He’s a good man, Gracie. He did what he had to do to keep us safe. Let him help you.”
The four of us—me, Mark, Agent Carter, the rest of the team—sat around the motel table for the next six hours, going through the hard drive, planning. We had three days until the shipment arrived. Three days to get into the port, find the warehouse where Voss was holding the women, arrest Voss red-handed, and make sure no one got hurt.
Mark had the inside access. I had the forensic skills to track the money trail, to make sure we had enough evidence to put Voss away for life. Mom had the contacts—her old cleaning friends who worked at the port, who’d been telling her for years that something bad was going on there, who were willing to help.
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It was a long shot. Voss had hundreds of men, guns, money, power. We had a team of six FBI agents, a forensic accountant in a torn black dress, an undercover agent who’d been in the cold for twenty years, and a bunch of cleaning ladies with walkie-talkies.
But as Mark said, looking at me, smiling that same smile I saw in the mirror every morning: “Voss has always underestimated the people he thinks are beneath him. That’s his biggest mistake. He’s never met a family like ours.”
