21. Miles
Twenty-One
Miles
The files have been open for six hours.
That's not unusual. For the first time since I picked up this case, I don't feel like I'm chasing scraps.
I feel like I'm standing at the edge of the truth.
The tattoo isn't a clue anymore, it's the link. It’s the piece that connects the network to the organization that's been moving girls.
They buried their tracks so well nobody saw the pattern, until now.
The burner phone sits beside the rig on my desk. The alert system hums through its background checks. The partition keeps working through the network database, everything runs exactly as it should.
I have plans with Sadie tonight at eight o'clock. It’s nothing formal, she suggested it after regionals, something casual, and I said yes before I'd even finished thinking it through. That's becoming a habit with her, she asks, and somehow my answer is already there.
I’ve got two hours until seven, that’s enough time for me to look through more of the footage I’ve been breaking through.
I pull up the network map and start cross-referencing the tattoo database hit against the financial traces I built last week. I’m looking for the overlap between the documented prison network and the money movement. The place where the two threads become one thread.
The screens flicker, only for a milli second, but I notice it.
I stop typing.
It flickers again.
There’s one second of static. Then two. It’s long enough for someone else to blame a power fluctuation, or a hardware glitch. There are dozens of explanations, but my body dismisses every one of them before my brain finishes the list.
Suddenly, the screens go black. All five monitors have gone completely black. The rig, and everything on the desk, but not the laptop, which rules out hardware failure.
There’s three seconds of darkness, then everything comes back on line.
Well, not my desktop, not the partition, and none of the files I'd left open.
There’s a camera feed instead. It’s grainy, silent and live.
For half a second, my brain refuses to make sense of it.
It’s my camera, the one I built into the laptop I never use because I always disable it.
It’s the same one I disabled six weeks ago and apparently someone has just re-enabled it remotely.
I'm looking at myself, sitting at my desk. From my own laptop. In real time.
Then the text appears across the feed in big letters, in a clean font.
YOU'RE WATCHING US. WE'RE WATCHING YOU.
My jaw tightens. My hands are already moving, reaching for the keyboard, running the counter-intrusion protocol I have set up for exactly this, when the images start loading underneath the text.
It’s not the case files. It’s not anything from my system. It’s my family.
Mason outside the house three days ago. Declan at the university library. Lileah at Grounds, yesterday. An exterior shot of my parents' house, it’s showing the front door, and the number is clearly visible.
Then the last image loads. It’s this house.
Our house, it’s showing the front, the side entrance, and the window of the room I'm sitting in right now.
The scene blinks and I’m looking at my house as a live feed, what the fuck?
I'm out of the chair as the video plays.
I pull all the wires out. ll of them: the power, the ethernet, every physical connection to the rig, I pull them all out fast. The monitors die.
I close the laptop, pull its battery, and pocket the burner phone.
I cross to the router in the corner and kill the WIFI at the hardware level, not the software level, but the actual switch on the device.
I grab my gun from my drawer, then I'm out the door and down the stairs.
Mason is in the kitchen. Declan’s on the sofa. Both of them look up when I come through the door at a speed that registers immediately.
"Phones off," I say. "Now, not airplane mode. Off."
Mason stands. "What…"
"Off, Mason. Now." I'm already moving to the main router panel in the hallway, the household system, and killing it at the source. "They're in the system. They have eyes on the house."
Declan is on his feet before I've finished speaking. His phone is already powering down, and his keys are in his hand.
"How long?” Declan asks.
"Don't know. Recent." I check the front window from the side, not straight on. The street outside looks ordinary, but that means nothing. "Hayden. Call him from the landline, tell him to get to Lileah now. Don't explain. Just go."
Mason is already moving to the landline on the kitchen wall, the one we've had since we moved in and never used because nobody uses landlines these days.
I check the back door, it’s locked. The side entrance is locked, too.
My pulse is completely even. That's Cain’s training, fifteen years of it, it’s the discipline of a mind that doesn't go loud when it should go quiet.
"Hayden's going," Mason says from the kitchen.
"Good."
"Miles." His voice has a different quality now. "What exactly did they…"
The lights go out; we are in complete darkness. Every light in the house simultaneously goes off, which means they’ve cut us off at the mains. They’re coming.
"Be ready," I say.
The front door comes off its hinges as they storm the house.
There are three of them. Maybe four, it’s hard to count in the dark. They’re moving fast, it’s a coordinated entry of people who have done this many times before. Fuck.
Two come straight for me.
The first one is fast. I sidestep the initial rush, get my elbow into his throat on the way past, it’s not clean, only glancing, but enough to slow him down.
The second one is bigger and hits me from the left before I've fully reset, he drives his shoulder into my ribs, driving me back into the wall.
The impact knocks the breath out of me, but I don't go down, not without a fucking fight.
My elbow finds his face on the way up, it catches his nose, and I hear the crunch of cartilage. He pulls back; I get my hands on his jacket and use his own momentum to redirect him into the wall.
I can hear Mason behind me. He's holding his own.
The first guy comes back. He comes low this time and gets his arms around my waist before I can get my gun clear, then we're on the floor and the gun skids somewhere in the dark.
The second guy is back up, who the fuck are these people?
Both of them are on me. I'm the one they came for. Whatever they think I found, they knew I was getting close.
Good, that means I found something real, and if they think I’m going to stop after this, they don’t know anything about me. I’m never going to stop until I find out who they are and close them down.
My head connects with the floor, and a white burst explodes behind my eyes that I breathe through.
I keep moving and keep fighting. One of them has my right arm pinned behind my back.
I get my left hand into his jacket pocket while he's focused on keeping me down, my fingers closing around something hard and rectangular.
A phone. I get it out and into my waistband in the two seconds before he shifts his weight and drives an elbow into my ribs.
The pain is immediate. One rib, maybe two, fucking cracked at most.
I keep fighting.
The second guy hits me across the face, then a second time. The taste of blood comes from somewhere, my lip maybe, or inside the cheek. I can feel my eye starting to swell on the left side. Suddenly, the first guy stops and stands up, then he steps back. The second guy steps back too.
Standing over me he looks down at me. They’re taking their time about it, they're not finishing this today, which means this wasn’t about killing me. This was about sending me a message.
The first one crouches. He gets close enough that I can see the outline of his face in the dark. His voice is accented, Eastern European.
"Stay away," he says. "Or next time you won't be breathing."
He stands and they both leave through the front door, the same way they came in.
The lights come back on suddenly, and the brightness is jarring after the dark. I lie on the floor for a moment and let my eyes adjust and take inventory.
My ribs on the left side. Yes, they’re cracked.
My face, left eye, and my lip, are all bleeding.
I roll to my side and get one knee under me and stand, which takes longer than it should. The room comes back into focus.
Declan is on his feet, the phones already powering back on. Crawford emergencies have taught him the same lesson they've taught the rest of us. Move first, ask questions later.
"Fuck," I say to nobody in particular. It comes out rough, the rib making itself known every time my lungs expand.
"We need to go to Mum and Dad's," Mason says. "Now."
"No."
"Miles…"
"No." I find the wall with one hand and use it. "They got into my system; I need to know how. I need to know what they accessed, what they saw, and what I have to rebuild before I go anywhere."
"You need a hospital." Mason tries to fight with me, but he can fight all he wants, I'm not leaving.
"I need to figure out how they broke my software."
"Miles." Mason's voice carries the edge it always does once he's done arguing. "You can barely stand."
He's right. I know he's right because the room is doing something it shouldn't be doing and my left hand is on the wall for a reason. I breathe through it, carefully, because of the pain tearing through my ribs.
Declan is looking at me with the steady assessment of someone running calculations. "What did they take?"
"Nothing from the rig, I pulled it before they got in." I shift my weight to test the ribs. "They got into the laptop remotely. I don't know how deep they were before I killed the connection."
"How long do you need?"
"Hours, maybe more."
Mason runs a hand over his face. The cut above his eyebrow is bleeding steadily but he doesn't seem to have noticed. "They know where we live."
"They knew before tonight. The image on the screen…" I stop. Breathe. "They've been watching us for a while. Tonight was a message."
"Stay away or you won't be breathing," Declan says.
"Yeah, something like that."