11

by Kylie Brant

  Ignoring Hunter’s humor, she considered. “It has to be an opportunity he can’t pass up. You offer to share hacking information with him. No.” She dismissed the thought as soon as it occurred. “What would he want that you have? It came to her in the next moment. “Money.”

  Jude’s expression was intrigued. “You have a devious side that’s very appealing. Why do I want to give him money?”

  “I can’t do all the heavy lifting. There’s your nugget. Massage it.” And she sat back in her seat, more than a little fascinated as the two men proceeded to do exactly that.

  * * * *

  There was no way to determine if Munson was even home. Jude parked on a residential Denver street well down the block from the man’s small white clapboard house. Its attached garage was closed, and the blinds were drawn. It wasn’t yet seven PM. Too early for lights to go on in an occupied house. With a sense of déjà vu he settled in.

  His wait was rewarded far more quickly than it had been in Tucson the night before. After only thirty-five minutes the garage door at the house raised. A decades old black Jeep Cherokee backed down the drive as the door lowered again.

  Jude fired up the engine of his rental. They’d taken out extra insurance precisely because of what he was going to do next.

  Accelerating, he caught up with the Jeep quickly, because Munson was already slowing for the stop sign ahead. Jude did not. He hit the Jeep’s bumper with enough force to jolt it forward several yards, before screeching to a halt.

  He was out of the vehicle before the other man exited his, kneeling down to survey the damage. “Oh man, oh man, oh man,” he moaned rocking a bit in his position. “I’m really sorry. It’s my wife. She calls me every damn time I get behind the wheel and distracts me.”

  Munson was a hulk of a man whose stated weight on his driver’s license had been a result of wishful thinking. And he was a seething hulk of a man right now. “You idiot! Are you blind? Stop signs are red for a reason!”

  “I know, I know.” Jude got to his feet, staggered just a little. “It’s my fault, totally. I’ll pay to have the dent removed from your bumper.”

  With a cagey expression Munson said, “You’ll do more than that. The whole damn bumper will have to be replaced. Not to mention where you scraped the paint.”

  Lowering his voice, Jude pulled out his wallet. “Listen. We can take care of this, just the two of us, can’t we? I’ll make it right. No one says the police have to be involved.” He swayed a bit. Visibly fumbled to open the wallet he’d prepared earlier in the day.

  The big man stepped closer when Jude started pulling out bills. “You maybe trying to avoid a drunk driving conviction, is that it, pal?”

  “No, no.” A hundred dollar bill fluttered to the ground and Jude made a grab for it. Fell to one knee in the attempt. “Couple of beers, that’s all.”

  “Yeah, right. How many DUIs do you have already? I oughta let them haul your ass to jail right now.”

  “Look, I got five hundred on me.” Jude pulled the cash out and folded it in one motion, tried to stuff it in the other man’s hand. “I’ll get more.”

  “Uh-huh.” Munson wasn’t having it. He wiped his perspiring forehead on the edge of his shirt. “You know, now that I think about it, my neck is killing me. Whiplash is a bitch.”

  “How much? How much to make this whole thing go away?”

  Munson sent an appraising look toward the white Impala Jude had rented. Thought for a moment. “Three thousand.”

  “Three thous--,” Jude threw up his hands. “C’mon, you’re killing me here. That’s a month’s wages.”

  “Then you can afford it,” Munson said unsympathetically. The outcome of the evening wouldn’t have altered either way, but Jude was sort of glad the man was a complete prick. It made what was to come halfway enjoyable.

  He studied the pavement for several moments before letting his shoulders slump a little. “Okay. I gotta go home. Try to sneak in without the wife seeing… She’s going to miss the money, man. I’m gonna have to take it out of her stash.”

  “Do I care about your problems? Give me your ID.”

  With a show of reluctance, Jude removed his false license from his wallet and handed it to the man. Munson studied it. “Sam Fielding. What the hell are you doing here from New Mexico?”

  “Moved six months ago.” Jude manufactured a morose tone as he pretended to study the damage again. “Fresh start and all that. Like hell.”

  “You’ve got an hour to bring me the rest of the money or I call the cops.” The big man waved the ID Jude had given him.

  “Okay. All right.” His tone sounded properly defeated. “Where’s your place?”

  “We can meet at a bar I know. It’s not that far from here.”

  “Are you kidding me? I swear to God my wife is on speaking terms with every bartender in a ten mile radius. They’ll rat me out. Plus I gotta go to work in an hour. If we’re going to do this thing, it has to be quick.”

  Munson thought better of the idea. It was clear from his expression. But the cash clenched in his fist was a powerful motivator. “Okay. See that shit yellow house down the street? 11876. It’s mine. If you’re not there in an hour, I’ll make sure your ass is in jail.”

  “Your wife gonna be home? Because if she is, you don’t want her to know you’ve got this kind of money, believe me.”

  Curling his lip, Munson said, “I was never dumb enough to get married.”

  Jude returned to his car, satisfied that the man would be alone later. He waited for Munson to pull away. There really was a good-sized dent in the man’s bumper. A matching one in his rental’s. If he were feeling generous at the end of this, maybe he’d let the man keep the five hundred.

  He timed it almost to the minute. He wanted Munson sweating his return. Pulling up in the driveway, he switched off the ignition and reached for a sack on the seat beside him. Running up the front walk to the porch, he pounded on the front door. It was opened immediately.

  “Almost thought you weren’t going to show.” Munson held the knob with one hand to leave only a small crack in the door. He stuck a sneaker-clad foot in the narrow opening. “What’s in the bag? Give me the money.”

  Jude made a show of looking over his shoulder uneasily. “Fuck that, I’m not waving around this kind of cash on the street. All I need is to get mugged before my wife can kill me first. The cash is in the bag.” He opened it briefly to show a stack of money. Closed it again. “Let’s do this inside.” There was a long silence. “C’mon man, we gonna do this or not? I gotta get to work.”

  Finally Munson opened the door wide enough for Jude to slip through. He dug in his front pocket and brought out a fat wad of cash. “I need my license back.”

  Munson took the thick stack of bills and smiled. “License is going to cost you another hundred.”

  “Shit!” He reached toward his back pocket, but took the sap out of the waistband of his jeans. He slammed it upwards to make contact with the man’s chin, before rapping it smartly above his ear.

  Munson staggered back, shook his head. Then, letting out a roar he rushed toward Jude, fists flying. He managed to duck the first one. The second roundhouse caught him in the left temple and had him seeing stars. He grabbed the man’s wrist and pulled him around, using his momentum against him. Yanking his arm toward the center of his back, Jude ran him toward the doorjamb and rammed his head against it with as much force as he could muster. Once. Twice. Again.

  Munson still didn’t crumple. But he was dazed enough that Jude could get the zip locks out of his pocket and tighten them over his wrists. Because he didn’t think that would keep the man down, he shoved him onto the floor and used Munson’s belt to wrap around the man’s feet.

  By the time he rose, Jude was breathing hard and had a bitch of a headache. He scanned the front room. Was gratified to see three computers taking up an entire side of it. “Well, this is convenient.” He locked the front door before going to the adjoining kitchen
and rummaged in the drawers for a dishtowel. Behind him, Munson was yelling at an ear-splitting decibel. Returning, Jude wadded up the towel and shoved it in the man’s mouth. “By the way,” he said casually, gathering up the bag and prying the money out of the man’s fist. “TopCat says hey.”

  According to Logan’s report, TopCat was the name of the man’s nemesis with which he had a long-running feud. Munson would be looking for a reason for Jude’s interest in his hard drives. The name of the other black hat would give him one.

  Stepping over his body, Jude dropped the bills back into the top bag and pulled the entire sack away from the one hidden beneath it. The bottom bag held four stand-alone hard drives that he’d bought when they’d gone shopping after landing in Denver. He’d need only three, one for each of the computers on the long table in front of him.

  Jude took a moment to look at each screen and grinned. Mia had been right. The man was home, so he was wired. Maybe he should put her on the payroll.

  He took a few minutes taking the hardware out of the boxes and hooking them up to the computers to clone Munson’s hard drives. Realizing what he was up to, the big man fought to his feet and hopped toward him, fury in his eyes.

  Sighing, Jude got up and grabbed the man’s shoulder, tripping him and shoving him down ungently at the same time. The floor shook when his weight hit it. “This is going to be very tiresome if we have to do this over and over, so stay down. I’ll be out of your way soon enough.”

  Munson stayed down. Crossing to the computers again, Jude began looking at what the man had. Most of the files were encrypted, which wouldn’t be a problem when he got the cloned drives back to the other purchased equipment at the hotel. He’d spent a good deal of money duplicating hardware he already had at headquarters, plus he’d likely have the expense of shipping it all back east. Tossing the man a look, he saw he’d rolled to his back, all the better to glare at him. “Hope this is worth my time. I heard you were behind that breach at Belways. Am I gonna find all those customers’ credit card info on here?”

  Munson gave a muffled roar and Jude smiled. “TopCat will be pleased. Have to wonder why you’re living in this shithole if you struck the big time, but maybe you’ve got your money stashed somewhere, huh? If so, I’m sure we’ll find it when we have time to go through the drives later.”

  It was hard to tell if the man was buying the farce, but Jude figured he’d installed plenty of doubt. He spent the remainder of the time looking through the web search history on each machine. Found nothing of interest. There might be more hidden deeper, but it was likely the history was securely wiped at regular intervals.

  It was Munson’s email that would be the most valuable, of course. It would save them a lot of time if they could find verification of Eldon Weale’s location. Or damning proof that Weale was the man they were hunting.

  The copying was finished in less than half an hour. Whistling tunelessly, Jude unhooked his drives and piled them in the bag again. “You can keep the five hundred,” he said, skirting the man’s body as he lifted the blind of the front window an inch to peer outside. Getting close enough to go through his pockets wasn’t worth the possible trouble. “It won’t buy you a new bumper, but I have a feeling you weren’t going to fix your car anyway.”

  * * * *

  In addition to the new computer equipment, the three of them had bought some clothes. But it was the hardware that took up most of the available surfaces in the outer room. Jude had ordered another suite, but because Mia had suggested it he’d gotten Hunter a separate room for use when Jude was here. Likely the man’s whining about his back had eventually gotten to her. After updating his operative, he’d dismissed him hours earlier. The man had a lot of qualities that made him a valuable employee, but his computer skills weren’t among them.

  Not for the first time in the last few hours, Jude glanced at the bedroom door. Resisted the urge to check on Mia. It took more self-control than it should have. He didn’t want to take the chance of disturbing her. She needed the rest and he couldn’t afford the distraction. Already thoughts of her were lodged in the back of his skull, difficult to banish.

  Rubbing his eyes with the heels of his palm, he stared blearily at the computer screen. He’d gone through two drives already and it had taken him most of the night to crack the encrypted files. There was plenty there to intrigue. Munson kept logs of his successful breaches, proving once again that ego could trump self-preservation. He also apparently did freelance work for anyone with the money to pay. The spreadsheet of labor and payment was coded. Jude ignored it for the time being. If they found nothing else Logan could tackle it. So far Jude hadn’t found a link to Mia.

  He discovered it on the third cloned drive. He stared, half stunned as he recognized the contents of the file he’d cracked. There were screen shots of blocks of jumbled computer gibberish. Beneath each were typed snippets of information that the man had obviously pieced together from them. Names were highlighted. A note in all caps was at the bottom of the document.

  Dr. Joan Young 16 Dr. Erich Halston 21 Frederick Paulus 14

  Jude sat back. Studied the comment. Realized that Munson had likely counted the names of psychologists Mia had researched most frequently. The man who’d hired him would need to narrow his focus in his search for a link to Mia. This recovery of her computer information would have helped him do so.

  A primitive fury flooded his system, lacing his muscles with tension. The hacker had painstakingly pieced together that mess of numbers that Mia’s wipe of her hard drive would have left in its wake. It would have been tedious work, and the price for it wouldn’t have come cheap. His fingers curled into fists at the visual image of the man laboring over Mia’s laptop. He wouldn’t have cared why his employer who’d hired him wanted the information. Or what he planned to do with it. Like Tuttle, Munson just cared about being paid.

  Had the man also examined Halston’s computer? It seemed logical. It would have been child’s play compared to restoring the wiped information on Mia’s. That a man had died in the process of its theft wouldn’t have been a factor to Munson. Jude had met the man. If he’d ever possessed scruples they’d been ground out long ago.

  So. He took a deep breath to dissipate the anger that could cloud reason. The chain was starting to make sense. Tuttle with the drugs and eventually the TASER. Which linked to Munson with the computer know-how and the pass through mail drop for the drugs. Then the trail to Eldon Weale, who collected the drugs in South Dakota.

  With renewed determination he began narrowing his focus to finding clues that would lead them to Weale. Email seemed the most likely place to start. The password on Munson’s account was better than decent and had Jude swearing under his breath for most of an hour before he finally cracked it. The man used a proxy web service, of course, to disguise where his emails originated. But many of his correspondents did not. Jude was able to look up most of the geographical locations of the IP addresses utilized by the sender of the messages.

  It didn’t take long to discover several cryptic emails from Eldon Weales. They revealed no useful information, Jude realized, scrolling through them. Codes for a drug order for Munson to pass on, maybe? He had more luck when he dug into the IP address on Weales’ messages. It wasn’t a South Dakota address to match the one listed on the registration for the mail drop the man used. It listed the man as residing in Davison, Nebraska.

  He tapped the table in front of the keyboard as he thought swiftly. IP addresses could be spoofed to make it appear as though they came from somewhere else. Knowing this, he swiftly readjusted his plans. Binton, South Dakota wasn’t going to be his next stop, after all.

  They were heading to Davison, Nebraska.

  * * * *

  “Anthony!”

  The sharp tone snapped him out of his reverie. “I’m sorry, Mother. I was lost in thought.” He couldn’t concentrate on the mindless details for the upcoming customer appreciation party. Who could blame him? He was drowning in a we
ll of depression and anger. The story of the woman falling to her death in Coopers Rock State Forest had been easy to find in the forty-eight hours since he’d spoken to Eleven.

  The name of the victim hadn’t been released. Without checking his records, Anthony couldn’t be certain of Four’s given name himself. Because it was meaningless. He’d tagged her, much as they marked the priceless pieces for sale on the floor of their antiquities showroom. She hadn’t had a value until her selection and he’d taught her the true meaning of her existence.

  And now she was gone in the most final way possible. The way Eight had been. He’d thought he’d known true grief then. But Eight’s replacement had eventually healed his loss. Four’s death left a void that wouldn’t be as easily filled. She’d been the first item he’d collected and thought of nothing but pleasing him. None of his other possessions came close to her slavish devotion.

  “You’ve drifted away again.” With a no-nonsense click of spiked heels on the marble floor, Mother approached to lay a hand on his forehead, a look of concern on her elegant features. “You don’t seem to have a temperature, but I’m not convinced you’re fully recovered from that bug you had a couple days ago when you went to Atlanta.”

  “I’m fine.” He tried to work up a smile for her. “Maybe just a little blue.”

  “Well, you certainly have nothing to be depressed about darling. Those candelabra were a marvelous find. I’m half inclined to keep it for myself.”

  He knew she wouldn’t. The antique, while exquisite, wasn’t the type of thing she was drawn to. And the money it would fetch was too attractive. “Maybe I am still a little under the weather,” he lied. He returned his attention to the spreadsheet of guest names, accommodation details, and menu. They’d kept in mind the tastes of their most valued clients when they’d finalized it. Frankly he found the incessant fussing over trivialities exasperating at the best of times.

  He was hardly in the mood for a big celebration in a couple days. But bringing in some of their most valued customers every summer gave them a chance to preview the Davis Antiquities fall catalog and whet interest for the annual auction. The business his grandfather had started would never be on the level of a Christies. But what they lacked in volume they made up for with meticulous client care and an eye toward the rare and unusual.