Page 4 of The Grave Artist

Sanchez looked toward Jake, who said, “All done.”

“Perfect.” She smiled. Then to Tim: “We don’t needanyof your words. Single or double or more. We got what we wanted from the phone.”

“What? No, man. No. This is, like, totally illegal and against, you know ... some law.”

“Both illegalandagainst some law,” Jake said thoughtfully. “Sounds pretty bad.”

“Heron,” Sanchez said, trying not to smile. Meaning, he guessed, don’t needle the suspect. Though it was always fun.

To Tim, she continued, “We know you hired Tristan Kane to hack financial services accounts. Kane’s under federal indictment, and that makes you a coconspirator under RICO. So we’ve got search warrants.”

Serving one, though, would have given Tim at least a few seconds, maybe more, to wipe the phone. Or at least lock it down. They needed to take the device by surprise.

When Jake was pretending to call for backup, he was really uploading the contents of Tim’s phone onto a secure server at their organization’s headquarters.

“That means ... No! You gothisaccount? Tristan Kane’s account? Because of me?”

All of that was true, Jake reflected, and obvious. Again, no need to reply.

“But when he finds out ... I’m a dead man.”

Sanchez said, “The silver lining is you’ll be safely behind bars for the next five to seven years, depending on how lenient your judge is.” She nodded to Grange, who led the man away.

“How was my acting?” Jake asked.

She would have heard the whole thing. They had all worn earpieces.

“Sounded good to me. And how’dIdo?”

He said, “Academy Award. Best corpse in a drama series.”

And he was relieved he didn’t blurt what first occurred to him, using instead of “corpse” the word “body.”

Chapter 3

Wednesday, June 24

The attack began at 8:00 a.m. on the dot.

A faint ping sounded from the largest of three laptops sitting on the desk in Jake’s workstation. He was staring at white letters on a black screen, the place where serious communications occurred between human and machine, not Windows, not Apple, but the naked command prompt that all hackers love, C:\.

Incursion Successful

System log reports:

Pinging J2607:f6b0:4004:c06::8b with 230 bytes of data:

Reply from

2607:f6b0:4004:c06::8b: time=18ms

More messages followed.

“Sanchez,” Jake called over his shoulder, keeping his eyes on the screen.

A moment later she walked from her adjoining workstation to his. She stepped close to him and bent down. He smelled a familiar scent. Lavender.

Now a special agent with DHS’s enforcement wing, Homeland Security Investigations, Sanchez had formerly been an FBI agent in their cybercrimes division. Jake saw from her expression as she followed the lines of type on his monitor that she understood exactly what had just happened.