Page 151 of Nowhere to Hide

“I’m just bringing more danger with me.”

She shook her head. “The moment Locke saved you on the wharf you became ours. Period. I, for one, am glad he saved you.”

My eyes stung again. “Thanks.”

“Now, can we get to work?”

I huffed out a laugh. “Yes.”

“Good.” She pulled me back to her workstation. “I wrote a program to comb through all the shit we found on the dark web. I have a few names that overlap now that we have the network ID from Mason’s team. The most promising one is a shell companythat has more layers than an onion. I’d need a month to dissect it all.”

“We don’t have a month.”

I couldn’t live with another death on my hands, let alone a month’s worth of victims who looked just like me.

“Then we have work to do.”

“What if we pick wrong? What if this name isn’t right?”

Nyx picked up the sphere Lego that she’d been playing with all day. “Then we move onto the next, but I don’t think I’m wrong. My instincts are screaming that this means something. That network address from the dock is practically a fortress. Something is there.”

I sighed. I needed to find my hope. “Then let’s dig in.”

Bastian and I excavated deep into the owner of the network. My expertise was numbers and for the most part a shell company was used to hide money or for laundering money. I ran down rabbit hole after rabbit hole and only one company overlapped—Port Tas.

It was such a strange name, but it was so specific that it made me wonder if that was the point. The killer was so arrogant and controlling in what he did with his victims.

“What have you figured out?” Bastian leaned against my desk.

“When it comes to a shell company, money laundering is the only thing that usually makes sense. But then there’re these little six alphanumeric combinations after the names, but they’re too short to be a bank account.”

Bastian “So where does it lead to?”

“Nowhere.” I pushed away.

“It has to go somewhere.”

“The only thing I’ve figured out is the people who own the company have the same letters in their name.”

“Like an anagram?”

“I guess so, yeah.”

“I love those damn things.” Bastian rubbed his hands together. “Let me look.”

“The names are Astro Op and Port Tas.”

I kept digging and found eight alpha numeric strings. As if there was a hierarchy to the deposits.

The deeper it went into the layers of this shell company, the more complex it got.

“What if it’s a password?” I whispered.

Nyx rolled her chair over. “Could it be a key?”

“For a network?”

Nyx nodded. “The dark web works on a relay system. No one knows really what the other person is linked to. It’s why it’s so hard to trace illegal activities. That network they found the camera on bounces around.”