Page 3 of The Grave Artist (Sanchez & Heron #2)

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:

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.

“Yes!”

Yesterday’s scam, where they emptied the data from the phone of Dim Tim, as Sanchez had dubbed him, was a success. They had breached Tristan Kane’s computer defenses.

“Where is he?” she asked.

Jake had launched a multipronged attack. “Don’t know yet. The physical address bot’s still looking. But another one got into his bank accounts. I’m having them emptied—found three so far. It’s all going to FCEA.”

Financial Crimes Evidence Account. Where funds confiscated from suspects were parked pending trial. The account in the case of United States v. Tristan Kane was well into eight figures.

They had done this several times—turned him into a pauper and, after discovering his location, tried to have him arrested, though he always managed to escape before the authorities broke down his door.

Tristan Kane . . .

One of the world’s most nimble, and certainly one of the most amoral, hackers. A man with shifting nicknames. Presently his handle reflected the new technology of the battlefield: DR-one.

As in drone. A weapon far more efficient, and capable of causing far more pain and death, than a knife or firearm.

And there was also something indefinably creepy about the prefix letters, “DR,” as if it were an homage to someone medically trained and prone to dark experimentation.

Kane himself leaned into the image, wearing not hoodies and cargo pants—the couture of most hackers—but black suits and white shirts.

He was tall, slim and pale, not unlike Jake himself.

The complexion was de rigueur—hackers did not sun.

Kane would break into systems for whoever paid his substantial fee.

Sometimes he would help terrorists wreak destruction in the name of their ideology—whatever it might be, however simpleminded, as it usually was.

Sometimes he would help the more sophisticated clients plunder wealth from governments, companies or the rich.

Never content just to complete the mission, Kane reveled in inflicting gratuitous harm.

If innocent bystanders died to more effectively destroy his targets, so much the better.

Victims were nothing more than the two-dimensional characters he gunned down in his beloved first-person shooter video games.

Kane had recently been in the process of executing a for-hire project—involving both money and murder—when Jake and Sanchez had joined forces to stop him. His clients had been collared but Kane had escaped.

That incident had not been the first run-in he’d had with Kane, who a few years before had used Jake the way astronauts use the moon’s gravitation to catapult them into space. Jake had been unwittingly tricked into helping Kane succeed in a terrorist hack that resulted in a half dozen deaths.

Afterward, Kane couldn’t resist slamming Jake with a taunt sent via anonymous messaging:

How does it feel to kill someone, Jake? Did you enjoy it as much as I do?

And how did it feel?

There were no words to describe the despair. And the anger.

At Kane.

And at himself for letting his ego override his better judgment.

Jake was going to find the man and bring him to justice.

Whatever that justice might look like. Traditionally, as Sanchez would have it: arrest, trial and conviction.

Or ... some other way, a more direct means perhaps. Jake Heron believed rules and laws could also be viewed as mere suggestions.

Which was why if someone had asked him a month ago if he’d consider working with federal law enforcement, he would have replied, “Not just no, but hell no.”

Yet circumstances change—sometimes dramatically—and now he and Sanchez were in an open-plan government facility that resembled any other office in this no-nonsense Southern California city of Long Beach.

It had until recently been a garage—and that had become its nickname, which he and Sanchez spelled with an uppercase “G” to give it the gravitas of an official workplace.

Much had been done to convert it to the space it now was, decked out with hastily plasterboarded walls, gray tile floors as yet unscuffed, energetic lighting in the ceiling—where steel beams remained.

The scent was of new : paint and tile adhesive most predominantly.

And, if you were aware of its prior incarnation, you might detect a faint lingering scent of automotive grease or oil.

The windowless fifty-by-fifty-foot area held four workstations. Only two were occupied. Most of the remaining space was empty, though functional shelves lined the walls. Some were bare but others contained office supplies, digital storage media, computers and parts, all neatly labeled.

A vertical storage unit in the corner featured two locks. Inside were assault rifles, pistols, ammunition, Tasers, tactical comms gear and flash-bang grenades.

To say the space was decoration-free was not quite accurate.

Mounted on the south wall were three enormous video monitors, two presently in screen saver mode, one showing a time-lapsed video of a seed germinating into a yellow flower, the other filling with numbers of pi being calculated ad infinitum.

The third was the case board of the Tristan Kane investigation—a digital version of the whiteboards seen in every law enforcement office worldwide, displaying the details like connections between suspects and bios of unsubs and witness accounts, photos of the hacker’s former residences, maps.

One other decoration: characters stenciled in black paint on the opposite wall.

i 2

Also known as “I-squared,” which stood for Intrusion Investigations, it was a pilot program so small that only he and Sanchez were on the team.

The first word in the name was the key to its purpose.

It derived from Jake’s real profession. Dr. Jacoby Heron was a self-described “intrusionist” who made his living as a penetration tester—hired by government and corporate entities to breach their physical and internet facilities and report back on vulnerabilities.

That paid the rent and was fun. More important, to him, was teaching at a small San Francisco college and giving public lectures, warning of the dangers of government and corporate intrusion (he never pen tested for any company he knew was guilty of such practices).

Much lecture time was devoted to domestic abuse, which he considered one of the most dangerous and widespread forms of intrusion that existed.

Jake and Sanchez had managed— largely managed—to overcome their complicated past to investigate that recent case involving Tristan Kane. The partnership proved to be successful, and it was natural they would be asked by senior Justice Department officials to work together again.

Sanchez frowned at his screen. “We got his money. I want his where . But don’t contact HTW to give us a hand.” Her frown melted into a sly glance.

He sighed at the reference to a fellow hacker from his former life, whom Sanchez always referred to as “Hot Tub Woman.” Would he ever live it down? “It was one night, Sanchez.”

She put her hand to her chest. “You and a beautiful blonde in a hot tub overlooking the Matterhorn. Maybe it was only one night, but I’ll bet it was a memorable one.”

“It was Monte Bianco, and she wasn’t blonde. At least not then.”

“Did your fingers get very wrinkled?” Sanchez pursued.

Engendering another sigh.

The individual in question was a woman of both mysterious origins and undisclosed residences.

Aruba—a nickname that had attached based on one of those locations—was in her early thirties, with features that bore the graceful hallmarks of her Caribbean heritage and, yes, was occasionally blonde, though her waist-length braids were sometimes red, brunette, blue or purple.

She was renowned on the dark web for being a hacker of extraordinary skill, which, Jake admitted, was probably superior to his.

Sanchez was referring to the fact that the warrant out on Kane permitted intrusion by official law enforcers. It did not extend to international hackers hiding somewhere in Indonesia or Sweden or, for all they knew, maybe in nearby Laguna Beach.

Sanchez’s concern was understandable. Her philosophy was to follow the letter of the law to make sure the results of an investigation could be admitted at trial over defense objections.

Jake’s attitude was, again, to do whatever it took to find the bastard and worry about the niceties of jurisprudence later.

Otherwise seemingly compatible, Jake and Sanchez were forever at loggerheads on this issue.

“I won’t ask Aruba to do anything illegal,” Jake assured her.

She squinted his way. “That’s a sentence with so many exceptions you could drive a lawyer through it.”

He gave her a sardonic glance.

A voice intruded. “I told him you need a real plant in here. Not a virtual one.”

Jake turned to see a slim young woman in her twenties.

She had just entered the Garage from the main Homeland Security Investigations building, which was attached by a short hallway.

Her dark-blonde hair was in a messy bun held in place with a lacquered wood chopstick.

Her attire was typical of what she usually wore: jeans and a gray tee.

Her footwear consisted of retro bright-red Chuck Taylor All Star high-tops that zippered up the side.

Her feet were forever busy, tapping slightly.

Fingernails black. She must have owned a thousand earrings, because he couldn’t recall her ever wearing the same pair twice.

Her eyes, intense blue, were on the looping germination monitor.

“Declan picked the screen saver?” Sanchez asked.

“Who else?” she offered, lifting two hands, palms up. Her given name was Alwilda, but she was known universally as Mouse. The reference was not to the rodent but to the user interface device. She’d earned the moniker by spending inordinate amounts of time online assisting her boss, Sanchez.

“Real plant?” The agent scanned the Garage. “Nothing would grow. No light.”

“Oh. Forgot about that. I don’t grow things. So, he wants to see you both.”

“What’s up?” Sanchez asked.

“I’m not sure. But from what I could hear—nobody’s ever seen anything like it before.”