Apex Predator Thriller Series Collection (Including the blockbuster new shark park thriller, Salechii)

by Carolyn McCray

  “Come on, Warp. You’ve come this far,” Zach encouraged. “You’ve got to have a way to narrow down the pool.”

  “We’re not even the cyber-crimes division,” Warp whined.

  “Who needs those pussies?” Zach countered. “If the Robin Hood Hacker is in town, we are going to bring him down. Think of the bragging rights.”

  Warp’s eyes scanned back and forth over Zach’s face. “It would be nice to hold my head high the next time I’m in DC for a tech conference.”

  “For a conference?” Zach snorted. “They will call you to DC permanently.”

  Zach knew that the computer array in Washington was like a geek’s mecca. Just the thought of the banks and banks of computer servers brightened Warp’s expression.

  “You are a world–class hacker,” Zach added.

  Unfortunately, the tech didn’t take that as a compliment. “Hacker? You think I’m a hacker?”

  God, how Zach hated having to talk with the tech staff. It was like they lived in a different world. Operated on a different wavelength, and seemed to get pissed off at random stuff.

  “I am a cracker,” Warp stated proudly.

  Again, what did you say to that? As Zach knew it, “cracker” was derogatory slang for a white person. He really needed to bring in an interpreter with him.

  “Okay, honky,” Zach responded, just trying to get Warp back on track.

  “No,” Warp said, shaking his head so hard that his mini-fro swayed back and forth. “I don’t hack. That is an illegal entry into a system. I crack. I break through code to pursue hackers.”

  “Whatever,” Zach said. “Can you crack this case?”

  “It wouldn’t hurt to try,” Warp said. “Right?” Although Zach was pretty sure the tech wasn’t talking to him. To prove his theory, Warp cocked his head as if he were listening to someone, then answered himself. “Right.”

  Zach clapped Warp on the back and nearly knocked the kid over. “That’s the spirit. Now, how are we going to do this?”

  The tech bit his lip as he called up each possible target. “I have a theory.”

  “Of course you do.”

  That got a wavering smile from Warp. Zach needed the tech confident. They needed to figure this out fast. Christmas was rapidly waning. This might be their best chance…ever to catch the Robin Hood Hacker.

  “You see, I have tracked his last twenty jobs and found that in a median band width, he—”

  “Warp,” Zach stopped the tech. “If you’ve got a hunch, let’s hear it.”

  “I don’t do hunches,” Warp said, scratching his arm like he was about to get hives. “I deal in statistics and relative factors and—”

  Zach gave the tech’s shoulder a squeeze, trying to infuse every ounce of confidence Zach had to share. “Warp, today we deal in hunches. So hit me with yours.”

  Still, the tech didn’t seem so sure.

  “What are hunches, Warp?” Zach asked. The scraggly-haired man looked at him with a blank expression. He was probably having a lengthy conversation internally, so Zach pressed on. “Your brain is the most sophisticated computer known to man. A hunch is just your subconscious working faster than your rational mind. So let’s get cracking.”

  Warp slowly nodded as his fingers went back to his keyboard. He brought up a single company. The B & L Oil Refinery Holding Company. Zach stepped around the tech to get nice and close to the large monitor.

  “I can find another one,” Warp offered, seeming to slip into his insecure persona, but Zach shook his head. He liked this one.

  “No, this is inside the hacker’s wheelhouse,” Zach explained.

  An ecologically unfriendly company with a history of evading clean-up laws and taxes. But most of the other companies the hacker had pinged were nearly as bad. A pesticide consortium, a bank known to still be issuing high risk mortgage loans, a cigarette retailer specializing in selling to the underage market. All of them perfect targets for a hacker who thought himself some kind of underdog financial vigilante.

  Stealing from rich companies and giving to the poor. Although, Zach noticed, he also kept a tidy sum for himself. Not exactly a purely altruistic Robin Hood. Even if he didn’t take that cut, Zach would still bring him in.

  Laws were laws.

  And this oil company had probably broken most of them, but the business wasn’t the one under investigation. The Robin Hood Hacker was. If he had a target in El Paso, the oil company would be it.

  “Let’s do this,” Zach said.

  Warp looked around. “Do what?”

  * * *

  Ronnie shifted the hot laser from one hand to the other. Even though she’d wrapped her sleeve around her already gloved hands, her palms burned. “Seriously, you didn’t install some kind of heat sink in this thing?”

  “Oh dearie,” Quirk replied, not bothering to cover his irritation. “What? In all of its six inches long and half an inch wide I didn’t somehow cram in a complicated heat conducting system never before created by man? That is what you thought you were holding in your hand?”

  “Still, I think you might have anticipated—”

  “That you couldn’t fit your booty-licious self-past some pipes, then have guards completely abandon their professional code of honor?” Ronnie waited for Quirk to think that through. He didn’t sound nearly as haughty as he continued. “Yeah, okay, that should have been on my radar. Point taken.”

  Ronnie might have taken more pleasure in Quirk’s realization had it not been for the red hot metal beating waves of heat at her. Not cool. Not cool on so many levels.

  “You’d better hurry, girlfriend,” Quirk encouraged. “They are making a beeline for the elevator.”

  It was a little hard to hurry physics, though, however Ronnie tried. She stopped going in a straight line and, instead, heated the metal in a perforated line. There just wasn’t time to melt it all.

  Ronnie could hear the rattle of the elevator doors opening. Turning off the laser before it liquefied itself, Ronnie put her shoulder against the metal square and shoved.

  “You did put a magnet on it before you punched it out, right?” Quirk reminded her a second too late.

  Good news, the metal square gave, strings of heated metal dripped from the edges. Bad news, the square was about to fall on top of the elevator. And no matter how much spiked eggnog the guards had consumed, they were going to notice that.

  Ronnie lashed out, grabbing the metal sheet, feeling the heat through her gloves. She tried to hold on, she really did, but damn.

  The metal slipped from her grasp, falling down the long elevator shaft, ten stories. It hit the cement bottom, clattering. She held her breath as the sound reverberated up the access tunnel. The guards entered the elevator seemingly unaware.

  Thank god for Celine’s “Little Drummer Boy.”

  “They’re pressing the floor button,” Quirk informed her. “You’d best hurry.”

  Only she couldn’t. Her stepping on top of their elevator? That they could hear. Ronnie had to wait until that first jerk of the cable to mask her movement. However, if she waited too long—well, goodbye, leg.

  Cocking her head to listen to the motor grind, Ronnie teetered on the thin rim of metal. Balance bar wasn’t exactly her greatest gymnastic event. Okay, neither were uneven bars, floor work or vaulting, but that wasn’t the point. She more sensed than heard when the cables snapped tight.

  Just as the elevator jerked upward, Ronnie’s foot came down on the elevator’s steel bracing. She allowed the rising car to lift her past the hole she had made and rise up one floor. With a loud, eggnog-induced laugh, the guards exited the elevator.

  “Who knows how long they’re going to be,” Quirk said.

  Ronnie turned on her laser. She had to get back into the access tunnel. There was no way to breach the penthouse from the outside.

  “Maybe a distraction of some sort?” Quirk asked. “I could turn on a motion sensor on the other side of this floor?”

  “We can’t a
lert them,” Ronnie said, wincing as the laser heated up. “This has got to be a clean entry and exit.”

  “Like they ever are,” Quirk murmured in her ear.

  How she hated when he was right.

  * * *

  Zach stepped on the gas, but then had to slam his foot on the brake as a blue minivan cut him off. Holiday traffic was really cramping his hot pursuit of the Robin Hood Hacker.

  Speaking of hackers... “Warp, you can do this.”

  “Of course we can,” the tech answered into Zach’s earbud.

  Awesome. The confident Warp was showing up. “ETA until you are in the oil company’s computers?” Zach asked.

  “You do realize that I am having to crack my way in behind Robin Hood, right? I have to tread just as carefully and not set off any alarms.”

  Traffic piled up ahead. Seriously, did a blaring siren and flashing lights mean nothing to these holiday travelers? Zach jerked the wheel to the left, went up onto the embankment, and gunned it, despite being tilted nearly twenty degrees.

  Over the sirens and rattle of the tires, Zach asked, “Are you trying to tell me that the Robin Hood Hacker is better than you?”

  “Of course he is better than me,” Warp answered. “Everyone is better than me.”

  Great. Now the insecure Warp showed up. “We just need you inside the first layer of—”

  “Turn left!”

  “But I’m—”

  “Left!” Warp yelled, as lights flashed ahead at a train crossing.

  Braking, Zach spun the wheel to the left, found a hole between oncoming traffic, and sped down a side street. Buildings with their red and green decorations flashed by. He felt a bit guilty for a moment, imagining his mother and fiancée waiting dinner for him. Not very patiently.

  Maybe Ellard was right. Maybe Zach should go all-in again. Go to DC and see how far up the ladder he could go. His mom was healthy. He’d done his duty. Plus, moving to DC would make Julia happy. He would get far more a dose of culture than he would like, but during the day he would be working on cases far more intricate than check fraud or jaywalking.

  “I’m in!” Warp exclaimed.

  “And?” Zach asked, the thought of dinner slipping away.

  “Nothing yet, but I am going to see if I can’t re-task a border satellite to El Paso for a more detailed picture of the area.”

  Zach wished he had a dozen agents at his back, but that wasn’t going to happen. And maybe it was just as well. Because bringing in the Robin Hood hacker with only Warp would feel pretty damned good.

  * * *

  Ronnie backed out the last of the screws that held the penthouse access door in place. Before she finished the job, Ronnie made sure to attach one of the magnets to the panel, preventing it from falling and clattering down the elevator shaft.

  Moving the door out of the way, Ronnie looked down the shaft. That was a drop. She didn’t mind heights. She just wasn’t all that fond of the fall.

  Luckily, she had a secret weapon. Pulling two other magnets out of her bag, Ronnie got ready to make her journey around the periphery of the shaft. The magnets in her hands weren’t just “hold them tight” magnets. Oh no. These were more of Quirk’s prototypes.

  “You’re sure this is going to work?”

  “I’m sure if you don’t use them there is a greater than thirty percent chance you are going to fall down that shaft,” Quirk answered.

  Not exactly reassuring.

  In theory, these were traveling magnets. Not the kind you got for your fridge, but magnets that actually moved. Ronnie grabbed each by the handle and pressed them against the metal wall. Due to simple magnetic attraction, they stuck there. Now came the fun part.

  She pulled up, clicking the handle out of its locked position, then turned it to the left. A small charge alternated the magnetic field. Through microscopic cycling of the repulsion and attraction, with the leading edge rotating through the positive cycling more frequently, the magnet moved to the left, while still maintaining enough grip on the wall to keep Ronnie safe.

  In theory.

  The metal beam she stood on barely supported half her foot. And as was well documented, her sense of balance was not the greatest. Without the magnets, well, Quirk’s estimates about a potential plummet were not far off.

  Slowly, she allowed the magnets to do their work as they practically dragged her across the beam. Imagine that. A Quirk prototype that actually worked. Then one of the handles went wobbly, spinning around under her hand. Suddenly, one magnet was going left, while the other right and up.

  “Quirk, your magnets are going rogue,” she growled.

  “Don’t blame them. You must have done something.”

  What did it say about their relationship that Quirk always sided with his toys?

  As her foot lifted off the beam, Ronnie needed to do something or let the magnet go before it carried her up and off the beam. And what usually worked was hitting something. She lifted up her hand, pulled the magnet off the wall and slammed it back down again.

  “Inanimate object abuse!” Quirk yelled in her ear.

  “However, it worked,” Ronnie answered, guiding the magnet back to its rightful place.

  After the little rebellion, Ronnie swiftly made her way around to the elevator doors. She paused, turning off the magnets before forcing the doors open. “Are the penthouse’s pressure sensors down?” Ronnie asked.

  “Modified,” Quirk corrected her. “I reset their sensitivity so that they still show functional on the control panel in the security office, but will only trigger if, say, a horse steps onto the penthouse. Or, you know, a hacker who hasn’t exactly been faithful to her diet.”

  Ronnie didn’t bother to take the bait. “Motion detectors?”

  Quirk sighed. “Yes, Miss Micromanager. All the security features of the penthouse are under our control.”

  With a deep breath, Ronnie placed a small hydraulic expander into the seam between the doors. With a single flip of the switch, the doors were parted and held open by the device.

  “Quirk, you really are a genius.”

  “I know.”

  Ronnie smiled. The two had originally bonded over their mutual self-assurance during a game of Gauntlet. There really should be more cooperative video games. Nothing brought kindred spirits together like killing ogres.

  Stepping out into the office, Ronnie lingered, making sure no alarms sounded. Once she was sure that Quirk really was as good as he said, she removed the device from the doors and allowed the elevator to close behind her.

  Lacing her fingers together, Ronnie cracked her knuckles. Time to move onto some actual hacking. She did need to live up to her reputation. Ronnie slid into the CEO’s leather chair. She couldn’t help but spin around in it once. The thing wasn’t a chair, it was a work of art. But she hadn’t come here to appreciate the extravagance. She was here to extract some cash and give it to the charities the company should have been donating to.

  Booting up the computer, Ronnie rolled out a gel keyboard onto the mahogany desk. The thing was state of the art, using subtle fluid movement to track her keystrokes, but it still wasn’t what she really wanted.

  “Wouldn’t it be cool if I didn’t even need a keyboard,” Ronnie asked.

  “Oh. My. God,” Quirk exclaimed. “Get over it. We are not implanting a keyboard in your brain.”

  “Maybe not,” Ronnie said as the computer screen came to life. “But wouldn’t it be cool?”

  “Of course,” Quirk answered. “Duh.”

  Ah, they truly were two peas in a pod.

  Rapidly, Ronnie entered the security code into the pop-up window. They’d figured that out weeks ago, then pinged the system again this morning, pretending to be the company’s backup server. It worked like a charm. Once the correct code was entered, a panel slid open behind her, revealing a wall of highly secured servers. The sleek black cases with their blue indicator lights flashing made her feel right at home. This was her playground.

&nb
sp; Getting to the DOS prompt, Ronnie threw down some angle brackets and started with her first arg. She found a nice wormhole and took it as far into the code as it would allow.

  Running up against the first firewall she couldn’t skirt, Ronnie raised her shoulders up and down, preparing for the hours it could take her to dig into the company’s financials.

  “Um…” Quirk said in her ear.

  Ronnie didn’t like “ums.” Not when they were so close. “You wanted to say something, Quirk?”

  “Hold on, checking another traffic cam…”

  While Ronnie didn’t stop the hack—she was in the middle of parsing out a patch—she did frown. What in the hell could Quirk need with traffic cam footage?

  “Yeah, this is real,” he said.

  “What is real?”

  “We’ve got an FBI car hauling ass in your direction.”

  “What?” Ronnie pressed. “Did you trip an alarm?”

  “No! Did you?”

  “No,” Ronnie shot back. “Of course not.”

  “Well, I didn’t either,” Quirk sniped.

  Distracted, Ronnie almost zeroed out some important files. “Are you sure the agent is coming here?”

  “That would kind of be the reason we are monitoring all law enforcement vehicle’s GPS signals. And I am not sure where else an FBI car would be traveling over sixty mile an hour to in this part of town. There’s nothing else on the police scanner.”

  Damn it. Was the guy just late for Christmas dinner, or had something in their approach to the hack tip off the FBI? They had been so freaking careful.

  “Wait,” Ronnie said. “You said one car?”

  “Yes. And now it is going seventy miles an hour.”

  “If the guys in DC had figured us out, wouldn’t they have sent a fleet of black SUVs?”

  Quirk paused. Ronnie kept typing. Even though she loved the feel and give of the gel keyboard, she kind of missed the clicking. It would normally soothe her in moments like this.