Code Name: Admiral (Special Forces: Operation Alpha) (K19 Sentinel Cyber #1)

3. Alice

3

ALICE

“ H ey, Sage,” said Lark, my usual barista, when I walked into Method Tea and Coffee for my morning cup of Matcha. The familiar scent of freshly ground coffee beans and steamed milk wrapped around me like a comfort blanket, a stark contrast to the anxiety churning in my gut.

I had no idea if Lark was her birth name or one she chose that felt like it fit better. For me, Sage wasn’t either—just the thing that popped into my head when she’d asked my name the first time she took my order and the lingering scent of smudging still clung to my clothes from my morning ritual. Sometimes, the best covers were the ones born from simple circumstances.

“Are you hanging out today?” she asked as I shrugged off my coat and slung it over one of the chairs before adjusting the angle of the table nearest to the front window, positioning myself where I could see both the entrance and the street. The morning crowd bustled past outside, each face a potential threat, each passing car a possible surveillance point.

Some days, I “hung out,” as she’d put it, when the noise in my head became too much and I needed to lose myself in the city’s rhythm. New York had a way of drowning out your thoughts if you let it—eight million stories playing out simultaneously, each one fighting for attention. But today wasn’t about finding peace in chaos.

At three this morning, I’d caught someone trying to get inside my head—or more specifically, inside my computers. Screen snooping—or signal bleeding, as some called it—was a sophisticated way of remotely capturing electromagnetic emissions from monitors. These bastards were trying to read my screens without ever setting foot in my apartment.

I first noticed it during a complex coding sequence—a millisecond delay between my keystrokes and their appearance on screen, like an echo in digital space. The diagnostic I ran showed no hardware issues, which only confirmed my suspicions: someone was intercepting my keystrokes, creating tiny electromagnetic echoes as their equipment picked up and processed the emissions before they reached my screen.

I had a dozen ways to block them, but using any of them would be like sending up a flare announcing I was onto them. Instead, I needed to think like a chess player—three moves ahead. The coffee-shop strategy was elegant in its simplicity: use the electromagnetic chaos of an active business to hide in plain sight. Other laptops, phones, charging cables, the industrial espresso machines, even the ancient coffee grinders—all created a symphony of interference that would make isolating a single device’s emissions nearly impossible.

The solution was quite brilliant, actually. It just wouldn’t work long term, especially given my preference to code in the middle of the night, when most businesses were closed.

“Here you go, honey,” said Lark, bringing my tea to the table. “Let me know what else I can get you.”

Since I rarely heard her say much more than good morning, her longer string of words today revealed an accent I couldn’t quite place. Figuring out where someone was from, based on not just pronunciations but dialects, was a quirk of mine. A rabbit hole I couldn’t afford to let myself fall down this morning.

“Hey, Lark. Where are you from?” I asked as she was walking away.

“A place I’m sure you’ve never heard of,” she responded, a hint of amusement in her voice.

“Try me.”

“You’ve heard of Lake Placid, right?”

“Of course.”

“I grew up about two hours south of there, in a place called Gloversville. What about you?”

“I’ve never lived outside of Manhattan.” I kept the rest to myself as I pulled up the town’s demographics on my laptop. With a current population under ten thousand, it boasted it was once the home of over two hundred glove-making manufacturers—the kind of place where everyone knew everyone else’s business. The exact opposite of where I’d ever want to be.

I rested against the chair and picked up my cup of tea, letting the steam warm my face. Matcha, like living in the city, wasn’t for everyone, but I loved its bright green color, its smell of freshly cut grass, and the unexpected, slightly bitter, and earthy flavor profile. Sarah, the one and only time I got her to try it, nearly hurled, saying it was like drinking a hot mushroom milkshake.

When I caught myself giggling at the memory, my eyes filled with tears.

I set down the tea and opened my laptop. My sister was dead, and I didn’t have time for shit like asking the barista where she came from. I knew in my gut that Bobby Kane was responsible for my sister’s death, and I’d make the sonuvabitch pay if it was the last thing I ever did.

I spent the rest of the morning hacking into my sister’s call log. “What the hell is this?” I mumbled to myself when I picked up on a pattern of calls to an unknown number. They appeared sporadic at first, but for someone who was used to spotting consistencies, I sure as hell did. After a couple of hours spent getting absolutely nowhere, I knew who to reach out to.

“Hey, Alice. How’re you doing?” Tex’s voice came through almost before the first ring ended.

“Good. Listen, I need your help.”

“Back up for a minute and answer me. How are you doing?” I hated the way he enunciated every word, letting me know loud and clear he wouldn’t tolerate whatever attempt I made to avoid answering him.

“Shitty. Okay?”

“I hear you. Now, tell me how I can help.”

I shook my head. That was all he’d needed. An acknowledgment that I was actually feeling something.

“It’s a number Sarah called that I can’t trace. Every attempt I’ve made, I’ve been blocked.”

“What is it?” he asked.

“Unknown, but there’s enough of a pattern that I feel like it’s one and the same.”

“Got it. Give me a few.”

“Thanks, Tex.”

“Anything you need, Alice, I’m here. You know that, right?”

“I’m sitting in a fucking coffee shop. If you make me cry?—”

“Wait. What?”

“I caught somebody trying to pull a Van Eck last night.” The official term for what I’d picked up on was Van Eck phreaking, which was a fancy phrase for an attacker gathering information from electronic devices by picking up and decoding the electromagnetic radiation they emitted. I preferred to call it signal bleeding.

“No shit?”

“Yeah, so anyway?—”

“What are you doing about it?”

I sighed loud enough there was no way he hadn’t heard it. “What I’m doing is trying to find out who the unknown number my sister was calling every seven to ten days belongs to.”

“Right. Like I said, give me a few.”

Tex already had everything he needed in order to hack into Sarah’s cell records the way I had. He just wouldn’t do it until I asked him to. And now, I had.

Ten minutes later, which was twice as long as I figured it would take him, he finally called back.

“What have you got for me?” I asked rather than waste time with things like saying hello.

“Not much in the way of specifics, but I can tell you the address of origin.”

“Yeah?” I snapped, tapping my fingers on the table hard enough he could probably hear it.

“26 Federal Plaza.”

“What the fuck? The Jacob K. Javits Federal Building?” I muttered. “What all is there?”

“Homeland Security, among other things.”

I probably had the same site as him pulled up. On the other hand, Tex likely already knew the building’s tenants.

“Department of Health and Human Services, the Social Security Administration, the Department of Housing and Urban Development— oh shit . The FBI’s field office is on the twenty-third floor.”

“Bingo.”

My mind spun with possibilities. Had Sarah been an informant? “What could have been big enough to put her in contact with the Feds? And why hadn’t she told me?” I muttered, thinking out loud more than expecting Tex to answer.

“I don’t know, Alice, but it sure as hell bears looking into. Want me to keep digging?”

“Please.”

At the same time I ended the call, the bell above the door chimed. When I looked up out of habit, my heart stopped. Walking through the door was the mystery man from Bobby’s family photo, looking every inch a federal agent in his crisp suit and regulation haircut. Our eyes met for a fraction of a second, and I knew with crushing certainty that nothing about his appearance here was coincidental.

The game had just changed, and I wasn’t sure anymore who was stalking who.