Fatal Intrusion: A Novel (Sanchez & Heron) by Jeffery Deaver & Isabella Maldonado

Author:Jeffery Deaver & Isabella Maldonado [Deaver, Jeffery & Maldonado, Isabella]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Thomas & Mercer
Published: 2024-09-01T06:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 35

Present Day

“Now you’re going to tell me why I shouldn’t arrest you for evidence tampering.”

Jake sat with Sanchez in the SUV parked by the side of Indian Avenue, after the Powell grunts’ shootout. He dug his hand into his back pocket and held up the device he’d used to clone the shooters’ phones.

She eyed it suspiciously. “Yeah?”

He explained what he’d done.

“Cloned them? You have five seconds to start talking.” Sanchez gripped the steering wheel hard enough to whiten her knuckles. “Or my handcuffs come out.”

“I wanted to know if they were working with Spider.”

“Spider? We decided that didn’t make sense. Didn’t fit the profile. Something else is going on here, Heron. Out with it.”

Traffic zipped past, summoning miniature cyclones of dust that whirled out into the wasteland to die.

“Four years ago,” he finally said.

Her features settled into an inscrutable mask.

“That Christmas Eve,” he continued, “when you nailed me for hacking into the IRS.”

“You thought you were Robin Hood. You broke into the Treasury mainframe and moved the returns of crooked CEOs and other assholes to the Service’s ‘To Audit’ file. And yeah, most of ’em got busted for hiding money offshore and in fake charities and diverting money meant for toxic cleanup. You nailed a bunch of bad people and you didn’t line your own pocket. And it bought you some reduced charges by yours truly.”

She was referring to the capital F Favor.

She added, “You did your time. You stopped hacking. You became an intrusionist. So why are you stealing data from the phones of two dyed-in-the-wool losers on a shitty road in a shitty part of the county?”

“There’s more,” he said. “So much more.”

“I’m listening.”

He began his story a month before that holiday night. He’d found a series of messages on the dark web encrypted with code he’d never seen. Brilliantly written code. He’d finally gotten inside the server of a hacker named Ironsights-26.

“He was helping a cell of separatists buy arms. It sounded like they were planning an attack. Domestic terror. The project was code-named ‘Nix,’ as in canceling something.”

She frowned. Something familiar about the word, it seemed. But she gestured for him to continue.

“I could’ve sent everything to the Bureau anonymously. But there was something about this Ironsights . . . When I tried to get more details he’d block me with some new code he’d hacked together on the fly. He’d come after me and I’d block him. Then one day my screen goes blue and there’s a message. It said, ‘Game on,’ like he was challenging me to a duel.

“After that, I had to find him. For a week or more, we went at it, his skills against mine . . . he was doing things with script that couldn’t be done—or so I thought. He kept taunting me, which only made me more determined to stop him.”

Jake’s gut twisted at the memory of his frustration. Of his humiliation. Of his failure.

Sanchez gave him a shrewd look. “He was leading you on for a reason.

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