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PROLOGUE

SEDONA, ARIZONA

MONDAY, MARCH 13, 2023

2:00 P.M.

Most of the time the door to Ali Reynolds’s office at High Noon Enterprises was wide open. That was not the case during the first two weeks of March. The fifteenth of that month was the deadline for putting together and handing over all the numbers to the accountant so that company tax documents could be prepared in time to comply with Uncle Sam’s April fifteenth deadline.

Growing up, Ali had never seen herself as a numbers person. What she had wanted was to be a journalist—specifically a television journalist, and she had done so for a number of years. At the top of her game she had been a high-profile local news anchor for an L.A. station until, in her early fifties, she’d been booted from her desk because the new and much younger news director deemed her “too old” to be on TV.

At that point, she had bailed on L.A. and come back to her hometown, Sedona, in central Arizona’s Verde Valley, and that’s when her life had changed direction. After a short foray into the world of law enforcement, she had met and married a tech entrepreneur named B. Simpson, a guy who had abandoned his given name, Bartholomew, in junior high due to unrelenting teasing about his being the real Bart Simpson.

Ali had been in on the ground floor as B. founded his cybersecurity company, High Noon Enterprises. He was the tech genius in the family. What Ali didn’t know about high tech could have filled volumes, but it turned out that, although she really didn’t care for numbers, she was good at them, and that’s how she had eventually morphed into being High Noon’s CFO.

In the world of cybersecurity, High Noon was the David to everyone else’s Goliath. With fewer than ten full-time and mostly long-term employees, the company was fast making an international name for itself. One of those employees was Lance Tucker. As a high school kid in San Leandro, Texas, he and his computer science teacher had created a piece of groundbreaking encrypted software they called GHOST, which made it possible for High Noon to prevent unauthorized incursions into clients’ computer systems while, at the same time, being able to track bad actors back to their original source.

When Ali’s phone rang at 2:45, she saw it was B. on the line. He and Lance had flown out of Phoenix the night before and were currently in Washington, DC, working with their attorney to secure a patent on the next version of GHOST.

“How’s it going?” Ali asked.

“It’s going,” B. said, sounding a bit gloomy. “Dealing with attorneys isn’t exactly my favorite pastime. I’m guessing it’s going to take the rest of the week to get this all sorted. How are things on the home front?”

“Pretty much the same,” she replied. “My having to deal with tax season is on a par with your messing around with attorneys.”

“Sounds about right,” B. replied with a short laugh. “Did Cami get off all right?”

Camille Lee, High Noon’s outside salesperson, was spending the entire week in California doing meet and greets with both new and existing customers. By far the most important of those get-togethers would be a high-profile meeting with the head of a Japanese conglomerate, Dozo International.

“Yes, she landed in L.A. a couple of hours ago,” Ali answered. “She’s planning on spending all day Thursday studying the dossiers Frigg prepared on all the Dozo company execs who will be in attendance at the dinner that evening.”

Frigg was the pet name of an AI owned by one of High Noon’s key employees, Stu Ramey. Dossiers prepared by the artificial intelligence were incredibly thorough, enough so that Cami would walk into the meeting knowing far more about her guests than any of them suspected.

“It’d be wonderful if Cami could reel Dozo in,” B. said. “It would be a huge feather in her cap, and in ours, too. Oh, wait. Lance is giving me the high sign. I have to go.”

“Okay,” Ali said. “Talk to you later.”

GRAYS, UK

TUESDAY, MARCH 14, 2023

9:00 A.m.

The text exchange was brief and to the point:

Is everything in place?

Yes.

Good. Happy hunting. You’ll get the rest of your money once she’s well in hand. Keep me posted.

With that, Adrian Willoughby shut down his computer and headed home. At long last, things were finally in motion. Once this was all over, he’d be out of here for good.