Page 58 of Wild Fever

"Can you tell me where you were last night between midnight and 2:00 AM?”

"I was here at the house.”

"Can anyone verify that?”

"My wife, but she's not here right now. She's at work. The kids are in school.”

"Were you on the computer at that time?"

Sean huffed with irritation. "I'm not stupid. If I were going to hack into a system, I sure as hell wouldn't do it from my house.”

"How would you do it?"

"I wouldn’t do it at all. It's stupid. And what would it accomplish anyway? You know what goes into high-level hacking? Do you know how many precautions you have to take? There are so many ways you can leave breadcrumbs on the Internet. You really have to know what you're doing. That kind of stuff is way out of my area of expertise. Now, if you'll excuse me, gentlemen, this conversation is over.”

He closed the door and locked the deadbolt.

I got the sense he was telling the truth. A guy like Sean had too much to risk. And there was zero financial gain from sabotaging Wentworth’s cryo-pod.

My phone buzzed with a call from Piper. "I got in. You're gonna want to see this."

JD and I hurried back to the Porsche, hopped in, and sped back to theAvventura.

35

“She’s back,” Piper said when we returned to the boat.

“Kara?” I said with surprise.

“She doesn’t look too good either,” she said, making a grave face.

“Where is she?”

“In her stateroom, I guess.”

I cringed. “I’ll go check on her.”

“Take a look at this first.”

We huddled around her laptop at the bar on the sky deck.

"Yan Zheng is funded by the Chinese government,” Piper said. "It looks like he's part of an operation making large land purchases across the United States in close proximity to military bases.”

"That's nothing new," Jack said. "We’ve known about that kind of thing for a long time."

"Yes, but this talks about strategic plans for drone attacks deployed from those sites against U.S. military installations,” Piper said. “This is hard, concrete evidence. The marina Mr. Yan was looking at here is a perfect place to launch a drone strike on the nearby naval base.” Piper paused, looking over the data on her laptop. “Now I can't discern if there is an actual attack planned, or if these are just contingencies in case of a future event. Either way, it poses a national security risk.”

"We need to get this information to the proper authorities,” Jack said.

I said, “Perhaps Kara can cut a deal for immunity."

“Immunity isn’t going to do her much good at the moment.” In a hushed voice, he said, “We don’t know she didn’t kill Zheng.”

“We don’t know that she did.”

"I'm trying to make sense of all this. Let's just say the CIA hired Kara to seduce Mr. Yan, access classified information, and deliver it. They poisoned her to cut the trail, so it wouldn’t lead back to them. Some kind of plausible deniability. But why kill Mr. Yan? Makes no sense. Draws too much attention.”

“I'm thinking it wasn’t the CIA,” I said.