Page 5 of The Grave Artist
“Yes!”
Yesterday’s scam, where they emptied the data from the phone of Dim Tim, as Sanchez had dubbed him, was a success. They had breached Tristan Kane’s computer defenses.
“Where is he?” she asked.
Jake had launched a multipronged attack. “Don’t know yet. The physical address bot’s still looking. But another one got into his bank accounts. I’m having them emptied—found three so far. It’s all going to FCEA.”
Financial Crimes Evidence Account. Where funds confiscated from suspects were parked pending trial. The account in the case ofUnited States v. Tristan Kanewas well into eight figures.
They had done this several times—turned him into a pauper and, after discovering his location, tried to have him arrested, though he always managed to escape before the authorities broke down his door.
Tristan Kane . . .
One of the world’s most nimble, and certainly one of the most amoral, hackers. A man with shifting nicknames. Presently his handle reflected the new technology of the battlefield: DR-one.
As in drone. A weapon far more efficient, and capable of causing far more pain and death, than a knife or firearm. And there was also something indefinably creepy about the prefix letters, “DR,” as if it were an homage to someone medically trained and prone to darkexperimentation. Kane himself leaned into the image, wearing not hoodies and cargo pants—the couture of most hackers—but black suits and white shirts. He was tall, slim and pale, not unlike Jake himself. The complexion was de rigueur—hackers did not sun.
Kane would break into systems for whoever paid his substantial fee. Sometimes he would help terrorists wreak destruction in the name of their ideology—whatever it might be, however simpleminded, as it usually was. Sometimes he would help the more sophisticated clients plunder wealth from governments, companies or the rich.
Never content just to complete the mission, Kane reveled in inflicting gratuitous harm. If innocent bystanders died to more effectively destroy his targets, so much the better. Victims were nothing more than the two-dimensional characters he gunned down in his beloved first-person shooter video games.
Kane had recently been in the process of executing a for-hire project—involving both money and murder—when Jake and Sanchez had joined forces to stop him. His clients had been collared but Kane had escaped.
That incident had not been the first run-in he’d had with Kane, who a few years before had used Jake the way astronauts use the moon’s gravitation to catapult them into space. Jake had been unwittingly tricked into helping Kane succeed in a terrorist hack that resulted in a half dozen deaths.
Afterward, Kane couldn’t resist slamming Jake with a taunt sent via anonymous messaging:
How does it feel to kill someone, Jake? Did you enjoy it as much as I do?
And howdidit feel?
There were no words to describe the despair. And the anger.
At Kane.
And at himself for letting his ego override his better judgment.
Jake was going to find the man and bring him to justice.
Whatever that justice might look like. Traditionally, as Sanchez would have it: arrest, trial and conviction.
Or ... some other way, a more direct means perhaps. Jake Heron believed rules and laws could also be viewed as mere suggestions.
Which was why if someone had asked him a month ago if he’d consider working with federal law enforcement, he would have replied, “Not just no, but hell no.”
Yet circumstances change—sometimes dramatically—and now he and Sanchez were in an open-plan government facility that resembled any other office in this no-nonsense Southern California city of Long Beach. It had until recently been a garage—and that had become its nickname, which he and Sanchez spelled with an uppercase “G” to give it the gravitas of an official workplace. Much had been done to convert it to the space it now was, decked out with hastily plasterboarded walls, gray tile floors as yet unscuffed, energetic lighting in the ceiling—where steel beams remained. The scent was ofnew: paint and tile adhesive most predominantly. And, if you were aware of its prior incarnation, you might detect a faint lingering scent of automotive grease or oil.
The windowless fifty-by-fifty-foot area held four workstations. Only two were occupied. Most of the remaining space was empty, though functional shelves lined the walls. Some were bare but others contained office supplies, digital storage media, computers and parts, all neatly labeled.
A vertical storage unit in the corner featured two locks. Inside were assault rifles, pistols, ammunition, Tasers, tactical comms gear and flash-bang grenades.
To say the space was decoration-free was not quite accurate. Mounted on the south wall were three enormous video monitors, two presently in screen saver mode, one showing a time-lapsed video of a seed germinating into a yellow flower, the other filling with numbers of pi being calculated ad infinitum. The third was the case board of the Tristan Kane investigation—a digital version of the whiteboards seenin every law enforcement office worldwide, displaying the details like connections between suspects and bios of unsubs and witness accounts, photos of the hacker’s former residences, maps.
One other decoration: characters stenciled in black paint on the opposite wall.
i2
Also known as “I-squared,” which stood for Intrusion Investigations, it was a pilot program so small that only he and Sanchez were on the team.
