Chapter Thirty-Six
Something just hadn’t seemed right. So V’d had to do some double-checking.
As he sat in his office in silence, it was behind the frosted privacy screens because he didn’t want anybody to bother him.
His head was way too scattered. To the point where, as he stared at the image in front of him, he couldn’t have told Lassiter Himself what one of his computer systems he was using.
Lighting up another hand-rolled, he eased back in his chair. It was funny how the brain tried to edit things when they didn’t fit into patterns of accepted reality. Confirmation bias really was a bitch. True logic, however, demanded a connection to what was actually happening.
Or, at least, it should.
For the twelfth fucking time—or whatever the count was—he forced himself to dismantle the elements of the static picture from the security feed and rebuild the composite:
— shelves full of an entire collection of the Old Laws
— a male sitting in one of the armchairs
— a cell phone in each of the male’s hands
— the time clock on the lower right showing that two hours had passed
— the date
Vishous exhaled a stream of smoke and watched it drift up to the ceiling vent.
There was no lingering for the little cloud.
The air purification system sucked it up, sent the shit through a HEPA filter, and spit clean oxygen back out.
He’d installed the units throughout the facility so that members of his staff wouldn’t be forced to carry the smell of his Turkish tobacco around on their clothes.
Even though cancer wasn’t a risk, not everybody appreciated the unique, pungent fragrance.
And it was weird. The concern for other people’s schnozzes was not his usual deal.
He wasn’t the kind to worry about other people like that, and the setups had been a last-minute, near afterthought that had delayed him getting his team into the facility by a week.
He still didn’t know why he’d bothered.
Whatever.
V refocused on the screen. The library was one nobody ever really went into at the Wheel.
When the Brotherhood and the fighters had moved in there with their families, and the new Audience House had been going full steam ahead, one of the sets of the Old Laws had needed a storage unit, and someone had thought, hey, why not throw them up on some shelves at home base.
The date and the time clock indicated that the feed had come in between roughly eight and ten a.m. this morning.
The male was Allhan.
That was the extent of the details that made sense.
The second phone in Allhan’s hand was the problem.
It was not the one that the guy had been issued when he’d started working at FT. Which shouldn’t be a problem. On the surface, that was. After all, Allhan made his own money, and he could go his own way. He wasn’t required to only use provided technology and communications devices.
It also wasn’t a problem for the male to go into any of the BDB databases. On the surface, that was.
And finally, the fact that the guy was turning off his location features on his provided device shouldn’t be a problem.
On the surface.
True?
V took another drag on the hand-rolled, and then reached forward to zoom in on the other cell. It was not an iPhone, so hey, there was that. But it was also not any particular maker’s phone.
The goddamn thing was a burner—
His own phone started to vibrate beside him, the rattling sound the Samsung made as it boogied across the glass of his desk the kind of thing that would have annoyed the hell out of him. If he hadn’t been doing arithmetic that fucked his head up.
When he’d started going through the various monitoring systems on his networks, he’d intended only to see where else the male had been peeking into.
What other databases had been visited by anonymous users.
If anything had been tampered with. He’d hated the part of his brain that was so untrusting.
Had done his best to reroute the impulse.
There was only one other database that had been logged into.
The species census.
Which contained the names, addresses, contact phones and emails, ages, and bloodline intersections of the entire population of vampires. Not just here in Caldwell, but out west and in the Old Country, too.
This breach hadn’t been like the one that had been flagged at eight a.m.
V had had to work to find it. Whoever had snuck in the back door had been a ghost, tripping no alarms, disturbing nothing, leaving nada behind.
The date of the infiltration was five months ago.
Within one night of Allhan coming to work at FT.
V had discovered it three hours ago at home, and as he’d sat through First Meal, and then come here, the excuses had flowed like water.
Hackers were everywhere these days, working to get into all kinds of shit.
It was possible that his networks had been tripped over, and whoever had found them just wanted to see what it was all about—and when the information was only a bunch of names, they’d bailed in favor of more lucrative or targeted pursuits.
Except after he’d gone three levels deeper… he’d discovered that the search had been done here.
It had originated… inside his own IT program.
Talk about the call coming from inside the house. And in response, he’d had to look into the logs of all of the males and females who worked for him. None of them had gone into the census files. Not even Allhan.
Supposedly.
But Al was the only person who had the skills to hide his tracks that well.
“Fucking hell,” V muttered before taking another drag.
Getting up, he went over to the minibar across the way. The fridge was of the dorm-sized variety, although made by some fancy, state-of-the-art manufacturer with a hyphenated name. Opening up the freezer, he took out one of the three bottles of Goose he kept on ice.
He stuck the cigarette between his front teeth as he cracked the top, and then he tossed the cap into the wastebasket, rabbit fingered his smoke, and drank right from the neck.
As he sat back down, he looked at the image he’d frozen. Once he’d started tapping on veins when it came to Al, he’d had to follow them all. Which was how he’d found this feed from the Old Laws room.
Which was also how he discovered the male had been turning off his location services. The night at the alley? When Al had stumbled onto those males? There had been no record of him being downtown. His ping had gone dark as soon as he’d left the Wheel.
V clicked on the next screen and looked at the pattern of times and durations Allhan had been going ghost: The night of those deaths. Last night, too.
About once a month, maybe twice.
Sure, the male was allowed to have his own life, but there were limits. And red fucking flags.
A lot of those.
Including why Allhan was right now sitting at his desk and accessing the CPD’s evidence database.
What the fuck was he doing now, true?