Chapter 22
ALEXA
Some things changed.
Some things stayed the same.
Some things hopped in a time machine and skipped back a whole decade.
Nolan put a bowl of risotto beside me, then perched on the edge of the enormous desk.
I minimised the browser where I’d been researching Roy and Margaret Leland and the Silver Hollow Vineyard.
Until Dionysus began winning awards, Roy had been the area’s golden boy, but reading between the lines, Margaret was the brains behind the operation.
A wiry woman with a hawkish face, she was listed on the website as Production Manager, and in interviews with industry publications, it was she who proved knowledgeable about the technical aspects of winemaking while Roy boasted about high-profile customers and accolades.
I’d been checking out the Hayes family too, but they didn’t seem to spend much time online, which was spectacularly irritating.
Yes, I had their tax records, their property information, yada yada yada, but none of those gave me an insight into their minds.
They didn’t even have a smart TV I could hack.
“Do you want company?” Nolan asked.
I still wasn’t a fan of the polished walnut monstrosity, but when he’d set up my new desk—now with four legs—in the bedroom upstairs, the sun got in my eyes.
And right now, he was too busy with wine stuff to dismantle furniture and rearrange things.
I missed Chase. But I’d done the right thing by sending him to Japan because he needed that time at the dojo the way I needed to hack—it challenged him, energised him, gave him a boost that carried him through the next period of mundanity.
As always, I was playing the long game, and I played to win.
When I hired Chase Lindstrom, we’d both understood it would be a big commitment.
On the move constantly, at my beck and call.
Almost from the start, we’d made the arrangement more of a collaboration than a boss/employee relationship, and so far, it had worked out well for both of us.
I got the interface between myself and the world at large that I desperately needed, and Chase got to travel on a generous budget.
Whenever he needed a break, he parked me somewhere safe for a week or two, usually at Casa del Gato.
But now I had a new sanctuary.
An old friend by my side.
And a…boyfriend?
I’d been shocked as hell when Nolan casually threw the g-word out in front of Antonella, and sober me was still freaking out about it.
No, I hadn’t kissed him again. I’d googled “how to move a relationship forward,” bought several self-help ebooks, and even asked anonymously on Reddit, but now I was even more confused than I had been before.
One part of me wished he’d just take over and show me what to do, but the other part was grateful he’d given me the space to breathe.
“I need to review the risk register ahead of next month’s board meeting,” I said.
A tedious job, but we had to stay on top of any threats and vulnerabilities that could impact our clients’ businesses or our own infrastructure.
The Choir was busy shooting at things this month, so they didn’t need as much cyber support as usual. “Stay if you want.”
“I’ll get a plate. Wine?”
“Sure, why not?”
It would make this report more interesting, and I was almost finished with it in any case.
And the Choir wasn’t the only thing that had gone quiet this week; the most exciting thing the security cameras had captured was two raccoons throwing down over an ear of corn outside the winery.
Nobody knew where they’d found the corn.
If Chase were here, he’d have come up with a “fun” activity for us to do, probably outside, definitely unpleasant, possibly involving nature or hills or wild animals.
But he was busy finding his zen in Tokyo, which meant I was free to journey around the internet rather than some bug-infested hellscape.
Yesterday, I’d finally managed to access the databases of a particularly pesky defence contractor, so I deserved the wine to celebrate. And chocolate. And Nolan.
But I didn’t get any of it.
Between Nolan going to fetch wine and returning with a bottle, a message from GutterMuse dropped into my inbox. Well, not mine, exactly. It belonged to a sick fool who went by the name five_star_fuck online, but he’d been in FBI custody for the past three months, so now it belonged to me.
You are invited
1 Kepcoin
The message didn’t specify what I was invited to, but it didn’t have to. A timer ticked down from sixty minutes, and I knew if I failed to pay, a line of psychos was waiting to take my place.
Tick, tick, tick.
Bile rose in my throat.
Women had started going missing over four years ago.
A twenty-year-old student in Virginia. A nineteen-year-old model in Florida.
A twenty-four-year-old personal shopper in Maine.
A twenty-two-year-old nail technician in Colorado.
The FBI hadn’t even been involved back then, not until the eighteen-year-old daughter of a prominent Italian businessman vanished on a trip to Grand Teton National Park.
Maybe she’d just gotten lost in the wilderness?
At first, local cops figured that’s precisely what had happened, but then searchers found a single jewelled leather flip-flop lying on the trail, and a couple camping nearby reported hearing a scream.
Then the evidence of their fates began showing up.
Hidden deep on the dark web, first grim tableaus of rape and death, then videos. Snuff movies and torture porn changed hands for thousands on darknet markets like Amber Road, and GutterMuse produced the best. The bloodiest, the cruellest, the most sensational.
I dialled Willard “call me Will” Branning.
At age fifty-four, Senior Special Agent Branning was a veteran of the FBI’s Violent Crimes Section, and also the poor schmuck who’d been tasked with leading Operation Onion after the authorities began connecting the dots.
He swore the name had been picked at random when the case was merely a kidnap investigation, but the name had taken on a new meaning as more layers of horror were uncovered.
“Branning.” He sounded half asleep.
“It’s your favourite informant. There’s another one.”
“Goldarnit.” Oh, now he was awake. No matter how bad things got, Branning never cursed, and I knew he didn’t like it when I did, but I also didn’t care. “You got a picture?”
“Nothing but an invite.”
“You accepted?”
“Not yet.”
“You gonna?”
“Duh.”
“Giving those varmints money sticks in my craw.”
Understatement. “If it helps, I stole the Kepcoins from a drug dealer, so it’s not as if it costs us anything.”
“I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that, missy.”
“Less of the ‘missy.’”
He ignored the complaint. “But it still goes to a criminal.”
“Temporarily. I fully intend to get it back. And you need to find out who the girl is and where she got taken from.”
I could see Branning’s point about the payments—nobody wanted to fund a monster’s lifestyle.
But we weren’t. Sending a payment in cryptocurrency wasn’t the same as handing over cash.
You couldn’t hide it under a mattress. No, when you held crypto, it meant you controlled an address on that currency’s blockchain, which was the central ledger where all transactions were recorded.
And you controlled the address by having the private key, basically a long-ass password, that was allowed to sign its transactions.
Anyone could look at the balances and transactions from a particular blockchain, but what we couldn’t do was link them to an individual.
The beauty of crypto was that owners remained anonymous.
And the frustration of crypto was that owners remained anonymous.
I could see that GutterMuse hadn’t spent one bean of the Kepcoins he’d been sent, so either he had access to a bunch more wallets he was draining before the ones we’d identified as belonging to him, or he wasn’t doing this for the money.
Or maybe both theories were true?
I’d watched three live sessions in his red room, two via stolen identities, and one by piggybacking on a guy I was monitoring for totally unrelated reasons.
He was in jail awaiting trial, willing to cooperate if it would buy him leniency, but he didn’t know much more than we’d already discovered.
And when I said “we,” I meant “I” because the FBI had been blissfully oblivious until I held a show-and-tell.
My relationship with the authorities was a complex one.
My moral compass didn’t align with the letter of the law, partly because the law was an ass and partly because those who were meant to enforce the law also broke the rules when it suited them.
Fight fire with fire and all that. I rooted through their databases, fucked with their systems, and exposed their dirty tricks when it suited me.
I had more loyalty to my cadre of hacker friends than I did to the FBI or the CIA.
Don’t even get me started on cops or the assholes at Homeland Security.
But I did have one or two rules.
I wouldn’t jeopardise national security, and I wouldn’t stand back and watch young women die because some psycho had a torture kink.
Even if all the point teams worked together, we didn’t have the resources of the FBI, nor the capacity to handle a long-term investigation.
Groups like the Choir were rapid reaction forces.
We weren’t out there interviewing sobbing relatives or searching for body parts in rural Wisconsin.
My hunt for GutterMuse and his cronies was my hobby, not my career, but I was still better at it than Special Agent Branning.