Page 28 of The Grave Artist (Sanchez & Heron #2)

Jake returned to his workstation, cradling the coffee he’d made in the Keurig machine upon entering the Garage.

He set the cup down and before he took a sip, he called the hospital where Frank Tandy had been admitted.

He’d wanted to talk to Sanchez, but she’d left.

The nurse or administrator he spoke to wouldn’t give him any information about the detective’s condition, even after Jake lied, claiming he was a relative.

He said, “When he wakes up tell him Jake Heron called. And he’s looking forward to gaming with him as soon as he’s out of StaleState.”

“Out of—”

He spelled the word.

And they disconnected.

Maybe we could go online as a team sometime ...

One sip of coffee. Another.

Sanchez walked into the workstation and sat heavily in the chair across from Jake’s desk.

He recounted his failed attempt at information gathering.

“I just came from there. He’s still in surgery.”

“How’d you get in?”

“Badge.”

“How’s he doing?”

“They won’t say anything until he’s out. They’re as stingy with info as cops are.” She made a coffee too.

“Could he give you any statement?”

“No. He’s been out the whole time. I don’t know what he could say, anyway. The scenario was pretty clear. HK got him from behind. He never had a chance to turn around. Jake ...”

Something odd about this, using his first name, unsettling. They were a surname-only pair. An unspoken habit between them, maybe to maintain a certain emotional distance. Keep things strictly professional.

After a pause, as if she too realized what she’d done, she continued, “When I first heard about the attack, I thought it was you. I mean, you were supposed to go talk to the girl in the cemetery.”

The sentence carried a particular tone. And it defined Carmen Sanchez to a T.

She was, in her typical understated way, expressing how relieved she was that he was safe, how devastated she would have been if anything had happened to him.

It was how they communicated about matters between them—personal matters.

Obliquely.

He asked, “You know Frank well?”

“Pretty well. We were on a couple of task forces together.” A faint laugh. “He’s been working up the courage to ask me out.”

Jake hesitated a moment, recalling the detective’s questions about Sanchez’s relationship status. “You think so?”

“You never noticed?”

“Not really.”

Her eyes narrowed, ever so slightly. Understandably. As his response was neither yes nor no.

But the question he wanted to ask—you plan to go out with him?—remained unspoken.

And Sanchez was apparently not inclined to volunteer anything. “Did you come up with any leads to Ms. Person of Interest with the red-stripe shoes?”

Understanding the prior subject to be closed, he refocused his attention on the case at hand.

“She turned west on Harrison Street. Retail district. I’ve been searching for cameras but not having much luck.

” He nodded to his screen. “A street vid showed her ducking into a cosmetics store. Didn’t buy anything.

And there was only a fake camera inside. ”

Half the cameras in retail stores were for show only.

A monthly security surveillance system with cloud storage could cost hundreds.

For thirty bucks you could buy a plastic mock-up of a camera with a battery-powered blinking red light.

Savvy criminals knew the difference, but for the most part, using such a cam was a solid deterrent.

His computer chimed with an incoming message.

As he read the words, his gut twisted.

“We have a lead, Sanchez.” A whisper.

“HK?”

“The other one.”

Tristan Kane.

“You heard from Hot Tub Woman?”

Jake didn’t bother to sigh. The truth was it had been quite the memorable evening, snow falling, the Italian Alps in the background, bubbles in the hot tub roiling excitedly ...

But that was his business.

Like her relationship with easygoing, gaming Frank Tandy was hers.

“Yes, Aruba gave me the info.”

She continued, “I told you. The warrant doesn’t extend to her.”

“All she’s doing is pointing us in a direction.”

“She’s going to point us right to a not-guilty verdict by reason of fucked-up evidence.”

“Let’s find Kane first—”

“And worry about the trial later,” she cut in. “Broken record, Heron.”

“I used that phrase with my niece once and she asked me what a record was.”

“Heron, don’t change the subject.” Then she peered over his shoulder, sighing in surrender. “As long as she’s got it ... Show me.”

Someone with Kane’s digital signature recently chartered boat in Managua, Nicaragua.

Company used is known for ferrying illicits to Oaxaca in Mexico.

Possibly Bahias De Huatulco International Airport.

Hub for moving persons out of Mexico and Central America.

Generally, used for transporting cartel people to Europe and the Far East.

Got a hit on male passenger Kane’s age and description on flight to St. Maarten, Dutch West Indies, onward to Amsterdam. Charter tourist flight. Would have landed there by now. No record of “Tristan Kane” in Dutch customs but he creates identities and passports as needed. Will keep digging.

He looked at Sanchez. She nodded. He could tell she was pleased at the intel.

Jake replied:

K

Running a search like Aruba was conducting would have been impossible a few years ago.

But now she knew the access codes to the world’s most powerful supercomputers.

Her favorite was the famed Japanese Fugaku, whose initial performance was an astonishing Rmax of 416 petaflops, rising to 442 after an upgrade.

A number that to a lay person was gibberish, but to a geek translated into an awestruck “Fuck me.”

“What kinda pods you guys have?”

The low female voice pulled him from the mesmerizing visual lull of code on the screen.

He glanced up to see an athletic woman in a pale-blue jogging outfit printed with Marvel comic characters, black ankle boots and a pink bow in her straight jet-black and shiny hair.

The ink on her neck and back of her hands were the only tatts visible, and Jake often wondered what the rest of the body art might be.

On the job, thirtyish Su Ling wore concealing clothing suitable for her position as head of HSI Long Beach’s Crime Scene Unit.

Some of the work involved taking photos of crime scenes and she was known as one of the best in the business.

In fact, she occasionally channeled that skill into fashion photography.

Su’s pictures had graced spreads in Vogue , Elle , GQ and Marie Claire —impressive, Jake supposed, but as he was not a subscriber, he had to take Sanchez’s word for it.

The MIT valedictorian was also an extreme marathoner ... and a devoted mother.

How she found the time ...

Sanchez waved toward the Keurig in response to the question. “Help yourself.”

Su strode to the machine and rummaged. “No hazelnut. What’s the point?” She found one that apparently suited her taste, though, and brewed.

“All right. I just scored something about Kane.”

Su had been parsing the evidence recovered from Kane’s last known location, in Trinidad and Tobago, where he’d fled after his recent failed mission in the United States.

Jake nodded to his computer. “Just got a message from an associate. He might be headed to Amsterdam.”

“Could be related,” Su said. “Let me tell you what I found.” She gestured to his computer. “May I?”

“Sure.”

She spoke as she typed. “This was in the hallway of his hotel in Trinidad the day he skipped town when he found out you and Carmen were onto him. Near his door.”

The photo was of a PCB—a printed circuit board. Green in color, it would have been made of the substrate FR4, a composite of fiberglass and epoxy resin. He shrugged. “One of about twenty million in the Western Hemisphere.”

“But how many are made by Systèmes de Circuits Spécialisés de Lyons?”

Jake felt his heart tap hard. “What? How can you tell?”

“Micro etching. Invisible to the naked eye.” She sipped more coffee. “Though I’d prefer to say unaided eye. The idea of an eyeball wearing clothes is just odd. Is it significant, Jake?”

“Oh, yes. It’s a company that works almost exclusively with CERN.”

The European Council for Nuclear Research is an international organization that runs the largest particle physics laboratory in the world.

Located in Meyrin, a western suburb of Geneva, Switzerland, it’s been the site of dozens of particle accelerators since the 1950s and presently houses the Large Hadron Collider, the biggest and most powerful such device in the world.

Su said, “Particle acceleration’s a research tool. If you’re thinking Kane could weaponize a collider, I don’t know how.”

“No,” Jake said. “The problem’s something else. A lot of people don’t know CERN is also one of the largest computing networks in the world. Last year they generated more than fifty petabytes of data.”

Sanchez said to Su, “He talks this way sometimes. Heron?”

“Fifty petabytes would be—” He glanced at Su. “You have children. Fifty petabytes of YouTube videos would keep them busy for five million years.”

“Lord,” she muttered. “And I cut them off after an hour.”

“The World Wide Web was invented at CERN.”

Sanchez said, “So the internet traffic going through CERN is massive. If Kane could get access to that ...”

Su said, “It’s a short flight from Amsterdam to Geneva.”

Jake muttered, “Does HSI have a presence there?”

“Yes,” Sanchez said. “I don’t know if it’s Geneva or Zurich. But I’ll find out. And get a notice to the supervisory special agent. They’ll contact CERN and the Swiss and French intelligence forces.”

Su was studying him. He could feel her eyes. “You really want this guy Kane, don’t you?”

How does it feel . . .

He offered only a nod.

After she left, Sanchez took a call and Jake deduced from her end of the conversation that the canvassing LAPD officers were having no luck learning where HK had gone after attacking Tandy.

Her shaking head confirmed his deductions. After disconnecting, she said, “We really need Ms. Person of Interest, Heron. She was at the murder scene. She was at the funeral. She knows something .”

“That she clearly doesn’t want to share.”

Jake returned to his computer. His chaining bot was working.

Like Tarzan swinging through the jungle from vine to vine, chaining is when a bot looking for a particular subject spots something that could be related to it and then makes a determination about where to go next.

In this case, it meant the next logical video camera that might pick up an image of Ms. POI on Harrison.

The bot would keep up the chaining until the subject vanished completely or it scored ID information, like facial recognition or a license plate.

This particular search would not raise any Fourth Amendment issues with Sanchez. It was completely legal. The procedure involved using both public and private security cameras in commercial stores along Harrison Street—unlike his illegal hacks earlier.

This time, merchants had willingly—with a little pressure from police—given access to their videos.

Most were aimed at tills and counters, meant to capture the bad guys during a stickup, or employees trying to palm cash from the register.

But a few were angled in such a way that they caught small swaths of the street and sidewalk.

Still, the algorithm was having no luck finding a tall woman in funeral black, face obscured by an old-fashioned veil and hat and wearing stylish shoes—described simply as “black mid-height heeled shoes featuring a bright-red stripe down the heel.” He had decided to omit in the search the term “kick-ass” on the theory that the phrase was a bit too human for even the worldliest bot.