Chapter Five
Leo had been alone in his condo until a little while ago, and now a woman he hadn’t seen in a while was standing in his kitchen setting up a command post, and he was struggling to remember how to breathe normally.
Anja had moved efficiently through his place.
No surface had been left untouched, from the couch cushions to the undersides of his cabinets.
She’d asked him questions about his building’s camera coverage and typed his answers into her phone.
Despite all that, she hadn’t once made him feel like a client.
She had, however, reminded him that he was a living, breathing man with a pulse and a healthy libido, which was the opposite of what he’d been hoping for.
His brain had not exaggerated.
If anything, it had undersold her.
She was on the other side of his island now, unpacking gear from a zippered case with the concentration he associated with surgeons and pit crews.
A laptop came out first, slim and matte black, followed by a mesh pouch of cables and a device the size of a paperback that she set to one side without explanation.
She didn’t seem to notice the strand of white-blonde hair that had fallen along her cheek.
Leo’s palms itched with the ridiculous urge to tuck it behind her ear.
He shoved both hands into his pockets and studied the wall above her head instead.
Get it together, De Luca. A man is dead. Your name is on a warning. The woman is here to do a job.
“You’re staring.”
Her voice was light. She hadn’t looked up.
“I’m supervising.”
“Supervising what?”
“My thoughts. It’s a complicated operation.”
Her mouth tipped at the corner, which was probably not a smile, but he chose to interpret it as one anyway.
She set a coil of cables on the island and glanced up at him.
The blue of her eyes in the warm light of his pendant lamps hit him harder than it had any business doing to a grown man in his own home.
“Sit down, Leo.”
“I’m fine standing.”
“You look dead on your feet. Please sit. I’m about to put Tyler on a video link, and I need you alert, not asleep standing up.”
The stool scraped against the oak floor as he sat. She slid a bottle of water she’d grabbed from his fridge across the counter to him without comment, and he drank it because she’d put it there. The cold of it going down reminded him that he hadn’t eaten dinner.
“I can make you something to eat,” he offered. “Eggs. I have eggs.”
“Later. Work first.”
“I’m trying to be a good host.”
“You’re trying to be useful. Those aren’t the same thing tonight. Let me do my job, and I’ll let you feed me at two in the morning when we’re both running on fumes. Deal?”
“Deal.”
She pulled a stool around to the corner of the island so they’d both be visible to the laptop camera, angled the screen, and tapped through a secure client he didn’t recognize.
Her fingers moved over the keys smoothly, indicating this would be the easy part of her evening.
Beneath his sternum, a knot he’d been carrying since 4:47 this afternoon at Bellerive loosened a quarter-turn.
Anja was here. She was working. He wasn’t alone anymore.
He’d fall apart in private later.
Tyler’s face filled the screen on the second ring.
In the background was a room that looked as technical and futuristic as the USS Enterprise, with a wall of dark monitors and the faint green pulse of rack lights behind his left shoulder.
Tyler wore a yellow Henley, a knit cap pulled over his hair, and a faint squint that probably came from reading code in dim rooms since he was seven.
He was holding a mug that read, I Told You the Firewall Was Fine.
“Thanks for doing this for me, Tyler. I apologize for dragging you out of bed. Ten seconds and I’ll put you on a split screen with the client.”
“Take your time. I’m isolating a sandbox on my end.”
Anja tapped twice on the trackpad, and the window rearranged itself. Leo came into the frame beside her.
Tyler’s eyes flicked up and then brightened. “Hey, Leo. Good to see you, bud. I didn’t know you were the client.”
“Yeah, lucky me.”
“Buckle in, because for the next several hours, I’m going to be the most paranoid man in your life.”
Leo glanced at Anja. “You’ve got competition for the title.”
Tyler nodded. “Fair.” He set his mug down off-screen. “Anja, walk me through what you’ve got.”
“A cheap, generic encrypted thumb drive, a burner flip phone powered off with a single contact saved as answer, and a handwritten note on hotel stationery that instructs Leo, quote, ‘not to trust his own people.’ All three arrived at Leo’s office via courier this afternoon.
The return address is a sports agent named Victor Shaw, who was found dead in a Kansas City hotel room.
The story that’s being pushed is suicide. We don’t believe it.”
“Why is that?”
“Because the note was written by a man who expected to die, and because Leo saw Shaw three nights ago at a steakhouse and Shaw was being hunted.”
Tyler absorbed that. “Understood. First things first. Before you plug that drive into anything, I need you to build an isolated environment. Is your field laptop the Hardened Three or the Hardened Four?”
“Four.”
“Good. Pull up your tool menu, go to Quarantine Mode, and select Level Three. That’ll partition the hell out of your storage, kill every network adapter except the one talking to me, and route all drive activity through a virtual container I can see from my side.
Anything on that thumb drive that tries to phone home hits a wall I built three weeks ago.
You’ll never know it happened, and neither will they. ”
Anja’s fingers moved. A menu cascaded, selections clicked through, and a thin red border appeared around the edge of her screen.
“I’m in Quarantine Three.”
“Container’s up on my side. I can see your sandbox. Plug the drive in.”
She did.
Leo watched everything happening in awe. The vernacular flew right over his head, but damn, it was impressive. It was obvious they knew what they were doing.
A folder appeared on Anja’s desktop inside the red border. A single encrypted archive sat inside it, the file icon mocking them with a gold padlock.
“There it is. Beautiful. Okay. Standard encrypted archive, probably AES-256, which means the password is the only thing between us and whatever Shaw wanted you to see. Brute force isn’t happening tonight on a file this size. We need the password.”
“Leo tried the obvious ones at his office. Shaw’s name, birthday, the hotel name, and the postmark date.”
“Of course he did. Amateurs always try the obvious ones first.” Tyler’s eyes shifted to Leo on the split screen. “No offense, Leo. It’s a compliment. Lawyers are usually smart enough to try and dumb enough to keep trying.”
He wasn’t sure, but he thought that might’ve been a double slam. “Uh, thanks?”
Tyler chuckled. “Here’s what I need from you.
Shaw probably wouldn’t have picked a password you could guess cold.
He’d have selected one you had to think about.
Something that belonged to the world you both lived in, that nobody outside would recognize.
It could be a reference, a code phrase, or even a joke.
Take a breath, close your eyes, and think about the two of you in the same room at the same time.
Where were you? What were you talking about? What did Shaw used to say?”
Leo closed his eyes.
He saw Vic Shaw at Tony’s and at industry events with a beer in one hand and a grievance in the other.
He recalled him at a bar in Indianapolis during the Super Bowl, thirty feet away, catching Leo’s eye across the room and lifting his glass in a mock salute he’d meant as sarcasm, which Leo had chosen to interpret as a truce.
Hmm, maybe the password was alcohol-related since he always seemed to have a drink nearby.
He went further back to when they were both junior agents brand new to the industry.
They had sat in a windowless conference room in Columbus, Ohio.
The moderator had been a retired college football coach named Roy Banister, and he had opened every single session with the same five words.
It had reminded Leo of a priest bestowing a blessing, and every new agent in that room had learned to chant it back.
The phrase had shown up on the inside cover of the packet materials in all capitals and on merchandise handed out to attendees.
They’d been Vic’s running joke for years afterward.
Leo opened his eyes.
“Try ‘The client eats first, always.’”
Tyler didn’t ask where it came from. “Use the exact phrasing, Anja. Lowercase with no spaces first, then the first letters of each word capitalized with spaces, and last the full sentence with a period at the end.”
Anja typed each in turn. The archive rejected the first and the second. The third made a hushed unlocking chime, and the padlock icon fell away. “We’re in.”
“Excellent. Open the top-level directory, but do not open any individual files yet. I want to see the folder structure before we touch anything.”
The directory opened, and Leo’s world got quieter.
It was the same kind of silence he remembered from the operating room after his knee surgery, when the anesthesia started lifting, and the surgeon’s voice reached him through a thick layer of cotton.
He’d understood, in a detached sort of way, that the conversation happening two feet from his head was about his life.
This was like that. Tyler was saying something. Anja was answering him. Leo was watching the screen.
Eight folders appeared, each one named with a number and a set of initials.
01-DCR. 02-MAS. 03-JTH. 04-RFG. 05-TCL. 06-KWB.
07-BSA. 08-DLM. They were arranged alphabetically by initial, not by number, suggesting they had been imported in the order they’d been added to the library, and the numbering reflected the order of collection.
Anja’s finger hovered over the trackpad. “Which one first?”