Chasing the White Lion, James Hannibal [ebook reader macos .TXT] 📗

“Meh . . .” Talia made a face. “‘Have’ is a strong word when you’re dealing with the French female Unabomber.” She hit his keyboard to unlock the screens. “Okay. I heard cheat code and Zelda. Give me the Geek-to-Normal translation please.”

“I got an alert at four a.m., another hit from the digital marker Tyler and I traced to Boyd.”

“Like the one that told you Oleg’s tip-off about Vera Novak came from Boyd’s network.”

“Right. And since I knew you were safe, I rolled over and tried to go back to sleep. But the image of the marker called to me. I saw it every time I closed my eyes, like when Rey kept seeing visions of Kylo Ren, and she—”

“We both promised never to speak of that movie again.”

“Yeah. Sorry.” Eddie clicked on the satellite, opening a window of constantly shifting data. “Anyway, the encryption fragment from the alert kept poking at my brain, especially the six-digit preamble.”

“Again, Geek-to-Normal, please.”

He captured a screenshot of the shifting data and blew it up to fill the center screen, showing her several columns of code. “Here. Look at these. Each one is a data packet passing through this satellite on its way to somewhere else. Keep in mind, lots of networks use this same satellite.”

“Okay . . .”

“Okay. Data packets entering a satellite acquire little riders, tour guides that help the packets navigate an internal maze. And it’s a moving maze—walls shifting, doors opening and closing—all designed to make a finite digital space as efficient as possible.”

Eddie was still talking above her geek level. Talia flipped back through images of his words to make sense of them. “The six-digit codes are tour guides that help the data find its way.”

“Exactly. Picture an army of tour guides who all speak different languages. When the satellite encounters a new encryption language, it builds a new tour guide with a new code.” Eddie sniffled, circling one of the columns with his cursor. “Look at this.”

She stared at the column, blinked, and shook her head.

He rolled his eyes. “You’re looking at a new six-digit tour guide, unique to Boyd’s encryption. In short, the marker led us to the satellite and its tour guide, and the tour guide led us to Boyd’s unique encryption pattern. Now we have a treasure chest filled with trackable data fragments.”

She retrieved the coffee from her desk. She felt like she would need it. “You know, you could have led with ‘treasure chest of trackable data’ and skipped the rest.”

“But then you wouldn’t fully appreciate my genius. Anyway, pieces of the puzzle are falling into place every hour now. It’s incredible, unlike anything we’ve ever seen.”

He was too excited, skipping key parts of the story. Talia took a swig and cringed at the level of sugar. Luanne had been right. She’d gone a step too far. “Be specific, Eddie. What is unlike anything we’ve ever seen?”

“Boyd’s criminal network. Our British wunderkind has put together a global crime syndicate on a scale as yet unheard of.”

Eddie paused to blow his nose, leaving her hanging—and a little disgusted—for several seconds. He clicked his mouse, and the digital camera flew from city to city. Blue glowing labels popped up everywhere next to warehouses, coffee shops, and skyscrapers. Each was a code with two letters and a string of numbers—FM60915, JR2937, CO852.

“Those labels. What do they mean?”

“Members? Users? I’ve broken out portions of a few messages so far. Think of it like playing Wheel of Fortune. I think F-M is field mouse. C-O is cobra.”

Talia wrinkled her nose. “Why is Boyd using animal—” Talia stopped mid-sentence. What was she doing? She flipped Eddie’s monitors back to the screensaver. “I don’t care.” She said it to herself as much as to the geek. “And I don’t want to care. This is Tyler’s crusade, not mine.”

Eddie swiveled around to look up at her. “You have to care. We’re trying to find a traitor.” He dropped his voice to a whisper. “We’re trying to find the person who ordered the hit on your father.”

“And I wish you the best. But don’t you get it?” Talia pulled the rolling chair over from her desk and sat beside her friend. “Holding on to my anger over Dad’s death crippled me—physically and spiritually. I can’t run back into that darkness.”

“So you’re just . . . moving on?”

She nodded.

“But the prime suspect is you-know-who.” Eddie inclined his head toward a wooden door at the far end of the Russian Ops section. “The Ice Queen.”

Talia wasn’t ready to face that idea. She let it pass unchallenged. “You can’t call your female boss the Ice Queen, Eddie. It’s offensive.”

“Don’t be such a snowflake.”

“I’m not a snowflake. You’re a snowflake.”

They locked eyes until their grim stares broke down into giggles, lightening the mood.

Eddie grinned. “If Jordan’s the Ice Queen, doesn’t that make her a snowflake?”

“Talia!” The wooden door was open. Jordan stood in the frame. “Get in here.”

Talia went rigid. She whispered through clenched teeth, “How long was she watching us?”

“I don’t know. But if you’re not back in ten, I’m calling the Marines.”

CHAPTER

ELEVEN

CIA HEADQUARTERS

LANGLEY, VIRGINIA

THEDOORBANGEDCLOSED the moment Talia walked through. Jordan stormed past her. “Just who do you think you are?”

Talia watched, dumbfounded, as her boss took up a post at the corner of her giant mahogany desk, arms crossed. She had no idea how to answer.

“You’re an officer of the Directorate of Operations. You’re part of a team, and I expect you to act like it.” Her arms dropped. “How do you think I feel? One of my people—my own recruit—is ambushed and disappears in Volgograd. The next day, she turns up at Minsk Station long enough to grab a fresh passport and vanishes again. For how long?”

On foolish instinct Talia moved to check the date and time on her phone. She went so far as to touch her back pocket before thinking the better of it.

“Two days!” Jordan pounded the desk so hard a steel stickman on a tightwire—one of those perpetual motion desk