Page 83 of Insidious Threats

“Still ringing,” Sasha volunteered.

The woman outside gave a small shrug, thumbed the phone, and raised it to her ear.

“Hello.”

Leo watched the woman’s mouth form the greeting and, an instant later, heard the word through Sasha’s handset. He reached over and jabbed the button to end the call.

“Hey,” Sasha protested.

He pointed through the glass to their watcher, who was ending the call on her end. She dropped the phone back into her pocket and resumed her fake scrolling.

“She has Amanda’s phone?”

“It looks that way,” he said.

Sasha released a string of profanity that broke through Petra’s concentration and drew her attention away from the worm.

“What’s up?”

“We have a complication,” Leo told the hacker.

* * *

Stasia was getting cold.She would’ve considered that a weakness, but she was in Idaho, in the dead of winter, and she’d been standing outside for four hours. She flexed her fingers in her gloves and stomped her boots against the pavement to get her circulation going.

Her phone rang.Bruce.

“Did you find her?”

“Yeah, I sent you a bunch of pictures, her firm bio, and a couple newspaper articles. Who is she?”

“She’s the lawyer who ATJ met with in Pittsburgh.”

“Hey, where’d ATJ go, anyway? I thought she’d be on the Airbus yesterday. Did she fly commercial back to SFO or something?”

“Or something.” Her tone didn’t invite further questions from the pilot.

“Okay. So I got you the stuff you wanted on the McCandless-Connelly woman? Do you need anything else?”

“No. But there’s been a change of plans. We might not be leaving here until later tonight. So you have time for a couple more runs down the mountain.”

“Cool.”

“Bruce?”

“Yeah.”

“No booze.”

“Jeez, okay.”

She ended the call. He could be as salty as he wanted. She was a passable pilot, but she wasn’t interested in trying to take off from a mountain. He needed to be able to fly.

She pulled up the text he’d sent and nearly dropped her phone in a snowbank when she saw the first picture. Sasha McCandless-Connelly, the lawyer who’d called ATJ’s number not fifteen minutes ago, smiled at her from her firm’s website. She was the same woman who’d come out of Petra Vukovic’s apartment, taken two turns around the block, then gone back inside.

Why would the Pittsburgh lawyer be visiting a programmer who just happened to work for the company that had debugged Mjölnir? It couldn’t just be a coincidence. Could it?

She thumbed through the rest of the pictures. There was one grainy photo of Sasha with her husband. It had obviously been taken with a long-range telephoto lens, as if it had been shot by a paparazzo. Or an agent on a stakeout. She searched for Leo Connelly online and got a suspiciously small digital footprint. Not a total blank, which would have been an obvious red flag, but an unusually thin background. As if it had been scrubbed. Leo Connelly was a cipher. He could be working for foreign interests. Or one of Leith’s competitors. Or the feds. Or he could just be a dude who didn’t like social media. She had no way of knowing.