Page 120 of Once a Hero

Jake’s good friend Stella Evans had vouched for him at the National Cyber Investigative Joint Task Force, getting him a position there. Yet he wasn’t interested in his own heroics.

He took the job because the jailed Molyneux refused to cooperate with the authorities about her extensive cyberspace presence. Since the FBI needed the information to shut down her operations, it must be mined in another way.

This was where the NCIJTF came in. An agent there, Stella Evans’s team stood poised to destroy Molyneux’s Internet stranglehold. Jake would deliver the black box, so to speak.

After this was over, Jake might choose a career outside the federal government. Maybe he could leave the Bureau altogether and go work for Helen Hu, or better yet, go work with Beatrice Glynn. Right now, neither one had panned out.

Helen had enough people working at Hu Knows, Inc. Jake would end up as a contract investigator, if at all.

As for Beatrice, their adventure ended, and Jake had no reason to hang around Charleston, especially when Beatrice was probably not there.

In fact, he had no idea where Beatrice went. She traveled a lot, and that was a problem for Jake.

He wanted to settle down. He did not want a relationship in which both spouses traveled to everywhere but home.

Perhaps Beatrice was not for him.

Perhaps God had other plans.

Had he considered moving on?

That might be another reason he needed work. He had to get his mind off Beatrice.

After church one Sunday, he packed for a weeklong conference in Zurich. He had been given a choice to attend a conference in San Francisco or Zurich.

He didn’t want to go back to California. Too many memories of Beatrice. Every time he thought about it, his heart simply ached.

So Zurich it was.

Unfortunately, his new partner and old friend Stella Evans had been preoccupied with babysitting a bunch of hackers in Atlanta in a classified project. She could not go.

His direct supervisor told him that they would send someone else to go with him to the Cyberspace Meets Real Life conference, in which a surveillance target of theirs would attend.

The target was the missing link between a Libyan arms dealer and Molyneux’s organization.

The cybercriminal known as 819A repeatedly broke into museum computers and manipulated their security systems. After he cracked open the museum back doors, his clients would enter later to steal artifacts worth millions of dollars.

If Jake could record 819A talk to at least two or three prospective clients about what he would do for them and how he made his living, Jake would hit the jackpot.

The FBI Art Crime Team would like to talk to him, as would several countries in Europe whose museums had been broken into in the last several months.

Shortly after Jake packed, he made the fifteen-minute drive to the Baltimore/Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport, where he boarded his airplane to Zurich. It would take over sixteen hours of flight with two stops, one in Atlanta and the other in Amsterdam, where he would change planes.

On long flights like this, he’d rather not be alone, but there was nothing he could do about it.

Post COVID-19 virus pandemic, everyone onboard wore masks, so when Jake walked down the aisle, he couldn’t see anyone’s faces. That could pose a problem for law enforcement. However, that wasn’t his capacity today.

In the business class, the seat next to Jake was empty. It was supposed to be Stella’s seat. Since it was an aisle seat, Jake moved and sat there instead. He stretched his long legs.

As everyone took their seats, Jake recharged his phone at the USB socket in front of him. He thumbed through the movie offerings. Seeing nothing of interest, he decided he’d take a short nap until they reached Atlanta, and then take a longer nap—something like eight hours—on the connecting flight to Amsterdam. From Schiphol airport to Zurich, he probably should stay awake for the two-hour flight.

He wished he had someone to talk to on the flight. He recalled his conversations with Beatrice in her Gulfstream. He had never gotten along with anyone else better than he had with Beatrice.

Think about work, Jake.

In his head, he ran through the itinerary for the next day. He was supposed to hit the ground running by attending something like five workshops that were useless to him. That would go on for four days and then on the fourth night, he would attend a ball. Since he didn’t dance, he’d have to do other things while all the time trying to get close enough to 819A to record his conversations.

He closed his eyes and thought of all the things he could do to kill time when he arrived in Zurich the next day.

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