Page 148 of Covert Mission

I scoot my chair to the other side of the table, away from him.

He lifts a brow. “Did you find anything new?”

I avoid looking at him. “No, but I made a list of the facts.” I push my notepad toward him.

As he looks over the key points of the case, I watch him quickly reading, absorbing the information. It’s hard not to appreciate him as an operative. Even if he just gutted me.

It’s hard to make my voice flat. “That last line, the one that’s circled. I’ll need your help for that. I don’t know what’s in two of the cargo boxes that came in on the truck. None of my team…” I stop and correct myself. “None of the FamFind team knows what’s in the cases. They’re not marked.”

He looks up from the paper. “How large are they?”

“Two feet squared, maybe a little bigger?”

“How much do they weigh?”

“It took two people to unload them, but mostly because of the size.”

“I’ll go tonight and have a look.”

He lays the paper on the table. “Why don’t you start at the beginning? What kind of financial documents were given to PCI?”

I hit the space bar and wake up my laptop. After a few more clicks, I open an encrypted file that contains spreadsheets. “This is the earlier accounting discrepancy the board found.”

He leans close, narrowing his gaze. “Shit, that’s a lot of money.”

I have to stabilize myself by gripping the table. My heart is wobbling inside my chest. Every inhale of his scent makes me more upset. “It is.”

I flip to another file as I try to get a handle on my runaway emotions. “Every time, the money was spent from the discretionary funds accounts.”

“How?”

“No one knows. The money just went out. No receipts.”

Lucas is frowning as he takes over control of the trackpad on my machine. “Not on a credit card?”

“Nope.” My tone is clipped. “The money was taken out in cash. Every time.”

“Who took it out?”

“My boss, Ralph. He would send it on the missions as emergency money.”

“And it never came back.”

“Correct. There are also some missing donations that never even went into the account. We suspect a couple hundred thousand more.”

He leans back in his chair. “That’s a fuckton of money to be carrying around.”

“Unless you use a crate…”

His brow goes up. “So, your boss sends two crates of cash on missions, and they never come back, but there’s no accounting for how the money is spent.”

“That’s what I think.”

He lifts the pen and starts tapping it on the notepad, filling one corner of the paper with dots. “Who was the team leader before you?”

“A guy named William.”

“What happened to him?”

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