Chapter 12
Something pulled me from sleep. Not a noise—the absence of one. The constant hum of my monitors had gone silent.
The encryption pattern.
I'd been dreaming about it, my subconscious working through the problem while I slept. I'd been looking at it wrong.
I threw off the blanket and crossed to my workstation as quietly as possible. Katherine's bedroom door was closed, no light underneath. Good. She needed sleep more than I did.
My fingers flew across the keyboard, pulling up the malware signature I'd been analyzing for days.
There. The custom protocol wasn't military issue. It was modified military, adapted for civilian infrastructure. That narrowed the field considerably. Whoever built this had training but wasn't currently serving. Former NSA or DoD contractor, maybe. Someone with clearance who'd gone private sector.
I ran the signature through a different database, one Thompson had given me access to off the books. Cross-referenced coding styles, encryption methods, implementation patterns.
The search took eleven minutes.
Russell Dunlap.
I stared at the driver's license photo on my screen. Mid-thirties, thinning brown hair, unremarkable features. Didn’t look anything like the man from Pearl’s parking lot footage.
Former employee of a now-defunct Bay Area tech start-up with undisclosed backing, laid off three years ago. Current address in Burbank.
My phone showed 3:02 AM. I texted Simon anyway.
"Got a name. Russell Dunlap. Need eyes on his apartment ASAP. Burbank address attached."
The reply came back in ninety seconds. Simon never really slept either.
"On it. Krause owes me. He's fifteen minutes from there."
I pulled up everything I could find on Russell Dunlap while I waited. LinkedIn profile, barely updated. Facebook account dormant for two years. No Twitter, no Instagram, no digital footprint beyond the basics. The guy was a ghost.
Twenty-three minutes later, my phone buzzed.
"Apartment's occupied but abandoned. Dishes in sink, food in the fridge, mail piled up. No computer equipment. No electronics at all."
My hands clenched into fists.
Russell had run. Taken his equipment and disappeared. Either he knew I was closing in, or someone had warned him.
I typed back to Simon. "He took the evidence with him."
"Figured. Keep digging. We'll find him."
I set down my phone and stared at Russell Dunlap's face on the screen. The unremarkable features that could disappear into any crowd. The bland expression that revealed nothing about the man underneath.
Somewhere out there, Russell Dunlap was sitting in front of a computer with deepfake files ready to destroy Katherine's career. And I had no idea where he was or how to find him.
The sun wouldn't rise for another three hours. I pulled up my search algorithms and started over from the beginning.
Hours blurred together. I barely noticed when the sky outside began to lighten, shifting from black to deep blue to pale gray.
At some point, exhaustion won. My head dropped forward, cheek pressing against the keyboard. The space bar engaged, filling the screen with a line of blank characters.
A knock at the door jerked me awake.
I lifted my head, disoriented. My neck screamed in protest. The clock showed 9:17 AM.
The knock came again, followed by Angelica's voice. "Code? You alive in there?"
I dragged myself to the door and opened it. Angelica stood there with red and white checkered bags from Down Home Diner, her expression shifting from cheerful to concerned the moment she saw my face.
"Jesus, Code. You look like hell."
"Thanks." I stepped back to let her in.
She breezed past me and started unpacking food on the dining table, carefully avoiding my monitors. Her eyes caught on the pillow and blanket still on the couch, then flicked to me with a knowing look. "Please tell me you slept at least a little."
"Some." Not enough. Never enough.
Katherine's bedroom door opened. She emerged in jeans and a sweater, her hair pulled back in a ponytail, no makeup. She looked soft and rumpled from sleep, and my chest tightened remembering last night. The kiss. Her hands in my hair. The way she'd called me out for being scared.
She was right. I was terrified.
"Morning." Her eyes met mine, searching. Pink colored her cheeks—she was remembering too.
"Morning."
Angelica looked between us, taking in the couch, our careful distance, the way neither of us could quite hold eye contact. A knowing smile spread across her face. "So. Did you two—"
"Do either of you recognize this man?" I pulled up a driver's license photo. "Russell Dunlap. Former Google employee. Lives in Burbank. Ever heard of that name? Seen his face?"
They both studied the screen. Angelica shook her head immediately.
Katherine stared longer, her brow furrowed. "Russell. Russ. Rusty." She closed her eyes, clearly searching her memory. "No. Nothing."
"Which means the connection is buried deeper than we thought." I leaned against the table. "Family member of someone you know. Old roommate. Could be anything."
Katherine's face lit up. "But you found him. Code, that's amazing! When can we—"
"He's gone."
The hope died in her eyes.
"What do you mean, gone?" Angelica set down the container of eggs she'd been unpacking.
I moved to my monitors and pulled up Russell's information. "Found his name around three-thirty this morning. Had Simon's contact check his apartment immediately. Place is abandoned. Dishes in the sink, but all his computer equipment is gone. Four days of newspapers outside.”
"Four days?" Katherine's eyes widened. "You've been investigating for six days.”
"Yeah." My jaw tightened. "He's monitoring for pursuit. Probably has alerts set up for anyone digging into his identity or operation. The second he detected someone getting close, he ran."
"So, he knows you're coming," Angelica said quietly.
"He knows someone's coming. But he left in a hurry—didn't have time to clean up properly. That means we rattled him. Got closer than he expected, faster than he planned for."
Another knock at the door. This time I recognized Jase's pattern. Two sharp raps, pause, one more.
Angelica opened the door. Jase stood there with Bonnie beside him, a basket covered with a blue cloth in her hands. Behind them, Amber and Lachlan bounced with barely contained energy.
"Aunt Angelica!" Lachlan pushed past his parents. "We're going to pick apples!"
"At Aunt Millie's orchard!" Amber followed her brother. "She said we can climb the trees if we're careful."
Bonnie held up the basket. "I brought brownies. Fresh this morning."
My stomach growled loud enough for everyone to hear. Bonnie raised an eyebrow.
"When did you last eat real food?"
"Define real food."
"Anything that didn't come out of a vending machine." She marched past me and set the basket on the table, beside the red-and-white checkered bags from Down Home Diner. "Oh, good, you do have a real breakfast. You're eating. Now."
Angelica leaned close as she passed, her whisper barely audible. "Chocolate is an aphrodisiac, you know."
I shot her a look. "You've always been trouble, Angie."
Her grin was pure mischief. "That's what you love about me."
The twins had already spotted my gaming setup in the corner. Lachlan tugged on Katherine's arm.
"Can we play Quantum Strike? Please? I've been practicing and I almost beat Tyler last week."
"Maybe later, buddy." Jase's hand landed on his son's shoulder. His tone had shifted. The kids recognized it immediately.
“Can I have the box of peanut butter M&M’s?” Lachlan asked as he picked it up from the mini-bar box.
“You just had three brownies, you can’t possibly be hungry,” Bonnie shook her head. “Now put that back.”
“What’s this?” Amber asked, picking up a different box from the mini bar.
“Uhm.” Bonnie’s voice sounded embarrassed. Jase and I both turned to see what had Bonnie flummoxed. Jase snorted, and I grinned. Amber was holding up the discreet pink, intimacy box that I had spotted earlier. It contained condoms, lube, and a mini vibrator.
“It’s for adults,” Jase boomed out. “Put it back.”
"Come on." Bonnie herded them toward Katherine's bedroom. "You can watch a movie on the iPad while the grown-ups talk."
Once the door closed behind them, Jase's expression hardened. He must have caught enough of our conversation from the porch.
"You've got a name?"
I nodded. "Russell Dunlap. Tech guy from Burbank. But he ran four days ago. Apartment's abandoned."
Jase moved to look at the monitors, studying the sparse information I'd compiled. His jaw tightened.
"Have you considered the possibility that he was hired?"
The question made me pause. I'd been so focused on finding Russell's personal connection to Katherine that I hadn't seriously considered the alternative.
"Hired gun?" I pulled up Russell's employment history. "Guy worked at Google for eight years. Got laid off, did some consulting. Nothing in his background suggests mercenary work."
"That's exactly my point." Jase crossed his arms. "Clean operation, professional execution, zero digital footprint connecting him to Kit. This guy's good. Maybe too good for someone working alone on a personal vendetta."
"You think someone in Hollywood hired him?" Katherine asked.
"I think someone with deep pockets and a grudge could have found Russell and paid him to do this.
Kit never meets the real enemy. Russell takes all the risk.
" Jase shrugged. "Money. Blackmail. Maybe he owes someone a favor.
Or maybe he's got his own reasons and someone just pointed him in the right direction. "
"So we're looking at two possibilities." I leaned back against the table. "Either Russell has a personal connection to Katherine's world that we haven't found yet, or he's working for someone else entirely."
"Either way," Jase said, "you need to be careful. Someone with these kinds of resources and patience isn't going to give up easily. The fact that he ran four days ago means he knows you're hunting him."