Page 46 of Saving Summer
Come on,you bastard.Take the bait.Jay sat with his fingertips hovering over his keyboard, waiting for the hacker who called himself Muerte Negra to engage. And bingo, after a week of playing cat and mouse, the lure of easy money had done the trick.
Pretending to be eighty-nine-year-old Abigail Clarkie, he typed in a fake bank account number and hit enter. Back door open, he uploaded a bit of JavaScript and reverse-traced the IP address of the scammer trying to wipe out the substantial savings of a fictitious granny by convincing her she needed to bail her grandson out of a Mexican prison.
He’d discovered the hacker last week after one of his programs had gotten multiple hits for electronic activity related to Jonas Johnson that didn’t fall within the norm. Someone new had succeeded in breaking into the computer system used by Johnson’s campaign team and downloaded information on his upcoming election tour. Dates. Places. Locations. Hotels. Transportation routes.
Had to be Jamie.
Or more to the point, it had to be someone selling the information to Jamie.
And if he found the one, he’d find the other.
His program pinged through multiple VPNs. Service networks in Russia, China, Italy, Australia. All masking the true IP address of the computer he was looking for. Ninety-nine percent of the time, a couple of reroutes did the trick to hide the identity of those who didn’t want to be found.
And these days, most hackers were smart enough to limit their vulnerability by shutting down open lines before they could be traced back to the source. But Jay’s tracking programs were faster, his coding more advanced.
Ten seconds. Eight. Six. Four. Two.
Gotchya.
Surprise motherfucker.Fingers flying over keys, he broke into the hacker’s computer, accessing everything from the camera to the hard drive. In less than five minutes, he had everything he needed, and after uploading some malware in case he needed easy entry later, he hit the kill switch and pulled the plug.
Managua, Nicaragua.
With a couple clicks of his mouse, he narrowed the city map to one square block and put it on the SmartBoard. Another couple of clicks, and he added a picture of Pedro Santos. Then he grabbed his phone off his desk and thumbed a group text.
Jamie found. Let’s roll.
Didn’t take long for the members of the JTT to invade the boardroom. “Where is he?” Adam demanded, entering with Chase right behind him.
Jay pointed at the map while seats around the table filled with the bodies of his teammates. “Managua.”
“Nicaragua?” Cody said. “What the hell is he doing there?”
“Planning to go after Johnson,” he replied, adding the presidential candidate’s campaign schedule to the big screen.
“Holy shit.” Cody leaned forward, his forearms planted on the table while he squinted at the small print. “Looks like Johnson’s personal calendar for the next eight weeks.”
“Ten,” Jay corrected, blowing up the font size and scrolling through the detailed list of campaign stops. “Primaries start next Monday. If we don’t intervene now, Jamie’s going on the hunt.”
“You got a visual on him?” Grant asked.
“No.”
“Then how do you know he’s in Nicaragua?”
“The hacker supplying him with information hasn’t forwarded any of it electronically. Means he’s delivering intel on a flash drive or in hard copy.” One hundred percent confident in his rapid-fire analysis, he referred them back to the screen with a fast jab of his finger. “Guaranteed, Pedro Santos is our direct link.”
“So we send a team to Managua, track down our buddy Pedro, convince him to give us Jamie’s location, kidnap the dumbass, and drag his ass back to Montana,” Cody said.
“Yep.” Jay nodded. “That pretty much sums it up.”
“We’ll need to move fast,” Adam agreed. “Z, how quick can you get a plane in the air?”
“I can have the jet ready, pilots on standby, and flight clearance in four hours,” he replied. “Whether or not we get off the ground depends on the weather conditions. There’s a storm moving in, freezing rain in the forecast.”
“Do it.” Adam turned to Chase. “You’ll lead the extrication team. Take Grant and Cody with you.”
“Roger that,” he acknowledged.
