Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center | San Francisco, California
Agent Denzel arrived at the hospital less than twelve hours after Eric Symon was admitted. He abided hospital regulations patiently, but once he learned that Symon was out of surgery and in the ICU, he flexed some FBI muscle, to gain admittance to his room.
“He’s in a coma,” the surgeon explained. “He lost a lot of blood, and the bullet nicked his left lung. We were able to repair that, but he’s currently on a chest tube to remove blood and fluid from around the area. We’re mostly concerned that there is fluid buildup near his heart.”
Denzel nodded at this. “When will he regain consciousness?”
The surgeon shook his head. “There’s no way to know for sure. He went into hemorrhagic shock from the blood loss, and we’ve been able to correct it with a transfusion. To be honest, if his wife hadn’t been so quick to staunch blood flow, I’m not sure he would have survived.”
“His wife,” Denzel said flatly.
“She came in with him, on the ambulance,” the surgeon said. “But we haven’t been able to locate her since Agent Symon was admitted to the ER. Our staff has contacted the police. We’re concerned she may be in shock herself, from the trauma of seeing it happen.”
Denzel doubted that Alex Kayne was traumatized, but things regarding her were so sensitive he decided to let all the assumptions run their course. He’d contact local PD to tell them they needn’t bother with trying to track down Symon’s “wife.” He didn’t want resources wasted on a fruitless hunt.
He had already gathered every bit of footage that could be found, from the scene of the shooting. Alex Kayne wasn’t in any of it. Instead, there was a sort of ghostly gap, as cars and people all reacted to Kayne’s sprint through traffic, rushing to Symon’s side. That fancy software of hers was doing a good job of keeping her hidden.
It was concerning, to Denzel. Weird. Definitely outside his usual experience.
Regardless, even with Kayne masked out of the video, it was clear she had nothing to do with the shooting. The footage showed a black SUV pull up to the curb near Agent Symon, and the gunman fired from the driver-side window before speeding off. There were plates on the SUV, and Denzel was already running them, but he was pretty sure what he’d find. Either the vehicle or the plates would be stolen. It was effectively untraceable.
There was no clear image of the driver. In fact, there was no way to know exactly how many people were in the SUV, at the time. One, five… no way to know.
The round that hit Symon was already in the chain of custody, on its way to a local forensics lab, along with two other rounds recovered from the scene. Denzel would check in on those over the next few hours.
Everything was getting a rush, because an FBI agent was down.
“Where is he?” a woman’s voice asked from the hall.
Denzel stepped out to see Agent Mayher approaching, her FBI credentials pinned to her blazer and the ebony-toned Historic Crimes Division badge hanging from around her neck. Her face was stern, but worried.
She saw Denzel and headed straight for him. “Is he…?”
“Alive,” Denzel said. “But in a coma, in critical condition.”
She nodded at this, worry plain on her face. “Can I see him?”
“They’ve asked us to give them some time,” Denzel said. “I was in with him for a few minutes. The doctors are keeping me updated on his progress.”
“Has anyone called his family? His aunt?”
Denzel nodded. “It’s handled,” he said. Then, more gently, “What about you? How are you?”
She looked up at him with a startled expression. “Me? I’m…” she hesitated. “I’m fine. A little rattled.”
Again he nodded. “That’s understandable. You got here pretty quick.”
“I was already waiting for a flight,” she said. “We wrapped up in Round Rock, and I was supposed to join Eric… Agent Symon… here in San Francisco, to keep up the hunt for Kayne.”
“Any progress? Any idea why Kayne was in Texas?”
Mayher huffed. “Same sort of thing that usually has her poking her head out. She has a client, here in the Bay Area. It’s a patent thing. We have some leads. As usual, Kayne’s uncovered something we’ll need to look into a little deeper.”
Denzel nodded at this. “Agent Symon updated me by phone… just before.”
She blinked, studying him. “You were on the phone with him. When it happened.”
“I was,” Denzel said.
“So… are you ok?”
He shook his head lightly. “It’s fine. I’m more angry that this would happen in broad daylight, with cops and agents all over the place. We were all so hung up on looking for Alex Kayne, we didn’t see this coming.”
“And Kayne is in the wind again?” Mayher asked.
“She was here,” he said, nodding to their surroundings. “She saved his life.”
Mayher considered this. “She’s… that doesn’t surprise me. She doesn’t really act like a fugitive, you know?”
“Oh, she acts exactly like a fugitive,” Denzel said. “She just doesn’t act like a murderer. She acts like a human being.”
Mayher turned and leaned against the wall, and Denzel stepped closer. The bustle of the ICU went on all around them, and he was becoming conscious of the fact that they might be in the way here. “Let’s get out of here,” he said. “There’s a coffee shop on the ground floor. My treat.”
Mayher nodded, and the two of them began walking.
There was a ping from Denzel’s phone, and when he checked he saw a message from an unknown number. He opened it.
I found him, it said. Check your email.
Denzel shook his head and replied, Who is this?
Though he suspected he knew.
Even before he got a reply, he opened the mail app and saw that there was a message marked urgent, from an unknown sender. He opened it and found there were dozens of attachments.
As he and Mayher stepped into the elevator, he started opening each attachment, scanning through. They were mostly financial records and legal documents—a litany of files that were annotated and cross-linked. As he read through, two names appeared again and again:
Stephen Spencer and Julia Faure.
Another ping from his phone.
These two are running a con from within BO&C, the message read. Denzel was now certain it was Alex Kayne.
Eckhart is innocent. You should be able to trace all of this back to these two. I’ve included bank records, including traces to accounts in the Caymans. Spencer and Faure are joint owners in about a dozen shell companies. It’s all cardboard and money.
“What is it?” Mayher asked, noting that Denzel was preoccupied with his phone.
Denzel glanced up, shook his head once, and held up a finger before responding to the text.
Alex, you need to turn yourself in, he typed. Then he paused, realizing something. You said you found “him.” You’re not didn’t mean Spencer or Faure, did you? Who did you find?
He watched as three dots pulsed on screen.
The guy who tried to kill Eric, Kayne replied.
Give me his name, Denzel typed.
Three dots, then it cleared. Denzel waited. Three dots appeared again.
Eric isn’t the only target. You’re in danger, too. Watch your back.
Denzel’s eyebrows went up. Thanks for the heads up. I can take care of myself. Give me the guy’s name and I’ll have him locked up in an hour.
There was another dance of dots. Typing, cleared, typing. Finally, as if she had resolved to just come out with it, Kayne replied.
He’s mine, she wrote.
And before Denzel could respond, she added, Give the files to Mayher. She’s going to need something to keep her mind off of Eric.
Alex, Denzel typed, don’t do this. Leave it to me. To the FBI. This is our job. You shouldn’t even be involved.
He’s mine, Kayne replied again. And after that she stopped responding to anything Denzel typed. Eventually he sighed and slid his phone back into his pocket.
“What is it?” Mayher repeated as they exited the elevator and walked toward the coffee shop.
“Trouble,” Denzel said.
“Alex Kayne,” Mayher said.
And Denzel nodded. “Alex Kayne.”
Somewhere in San Francisco
It hadn’t taken long at all. Kayne hadn’t even exited the second Uber when she’d gotten an alert from QuIEK. The search was over. She had her man.
Or men, as it turned out.
The gunman, who was just some hired jerk from the Dark Web. He was easy. QuIEK had skipped along a trail of cameras—everything from ATMs to traffic cameras to bodegas, anything that had a lens and kept footage on file became QuIEK’s eyes—and by extension, Kayne’s eyes. She was able to follow the guy to the chop shop where he disposed of the SUV, and then on to the apartment across town that he was using as a safe house.
She had toyed with the idea of going there. Of finding him. Of taking out all the rage she was feeling on this guy’s head. But that wasn’t going to cut it. He wasn’t the trigger man, not the one calling the shots. Taking him down wouldn’t be enough.
She sent several anonymous tips, all from disguised numbers and email addresses, to the local FBI. She’d let them take care of the shooter. They could have him.
She had the guy.
The man behind layers of anonymity. The man who had reached out through a web of VPNs and masked IP addresses. The man using privacy software purchased from some of the most prominent security experts in the space. The man who thought he was untouchable.
The man who had paid to have Agent Symon killed.
Derrick Conners.
He was the owner of an exotic animal ranch in Oklahoma, and had recently been the target of an FBI raid. His property had been seized, including hundreds of pieces of stolen art. His assets had been frozen. The raid had been solid, and Conners had suffered a pretty big slap in the face.
Conners wasn’t one to let a slap in the face go unanswered.
Kayne scanned through the profile QuIEK had built for her and saw that Conner’s wealth was spread around all over the planet. His US accounts had been frozen, as a result of the FBI raid, but he still had access to several Swiss and Cayman Islands accounts. Plus, off the books Conners held dozens of US accounts under shell companies and phony identities. This, along with a Midas fortune of liquid assets Conners had stashed here and there meant that the limits of the FBI’s grip on him had been solidly reached, and he was in prime shape to skate. He could live the rest of his life in luxury, completely off the radar.
That was one problem. The other was the man himself.
Conners was as shady as they come.
Kayne gave his bio a more thorough and in-depth look once she was safely in her new home base. This was a time share near the heart of San Francisco’s Presidio—a small but upscale rental property that gave her a view of the Golden Gate Bridge, as well as parts of the grounds for Industrial Light and Magic. She would have been thrilled over both of these, any other time. Even when she’d lived in San Francisco, she’d rarely had time to explore the IL&M campus, and had mostly only seen the bridge as she was passing over it.
But at the moment, all of this was just another landscape, just another set of buildings. Something else—someone else—had her focus.
She had a shiny new laptop, courtesy of swinging by one of her new resource drops on the way here, and she used this now to do a quick but deep dive into all things Derrick Conners. And the story that unfolded was the stuff of a Netflix documentary series.
Conners had started his dark and oily career as a petty crook, spending time in jail for things like burglary and car theft. He boosted a BMW when he was fourteen, and though that was expunged from his record, he spent a lot of time, these days, bragging about it online. It wasn’t even his first crime, he claimed. And from what Kayne could see, it certainly wasn’t his last.
He graduated to bigger and better schemes by the time he was seventeen. Using money from an unknown source—Kayne suspected he stole it, but there was no real way to know—Conners bought his first piece of real estate. It was, in fact, the very ranch that would eventually become the focus of the FBI raid. And over the next twenty years, Conners used that piece of property for a dozen different purposes, most of which brought him scads of profit, both illicit and legit.
Eventually, Conners expanded the property by buying out his neighbors. Though, gauging by some of the police reports that went dark and the lawsuits that were inevitably withdrawn, Kayne had a sneaky suspicion that most of his neighbors hadn’t actually wanted to sell.
Conners also held the deeds on hundreds of other properties around the country and worldwide. Within the state of Oklahoma alone, Conners became one of the biggest landlords around. Though most of his holdings might have qualified him as a slum lord, at best.
From real estate, Conners branched out into venues. He bought several small hotels, conference halls, and other venues, most of which were held through dozens of shell corporations. Even the FBI didn’t know about all of them. But, thanks to QuIEK’s digging, Kayne now did.
Real estate and events eventually led to investing in a casino, which led to investing in more casinos, spread through Vegas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, and Atlantic City. Through these Conners laundered millions of dollars from his various “enterprises,” in a trail so widespread and dispersed it was hard for even QuIEK to trace.
Hard… but not impossible.
The next leap in his holdings was a little more murky, but Kayne thought she could guess some of it.
Conners started collecting.
His favorite was to buy exotic animals, especially big cats. He turned his ranch into an open-air zoo, a drive-in safari. It got heavy advertising on billboards all along the highways of Oklahoma, for miles in all directions. Families and individuals could, for just twenty bucks per car, drive through the Oklahoma equivalent of the Sahara and Serengeti, passing through herds of zebra and antelope, packs of fennec foxes and caravans of camels.
It was an eclectic menagerie, and not always region-accurate. Most of the animals Conners collected would never have encountered each other in the wild. They ranged in origin across at least three continents, and across hundreds of regions and climates. It was obviously more important to provide the spectacle than it was to observe the natural habitat of these animals. And Conners had hundreds of species mish-mashed together behind twelve-foot wire fences. Touring the ranch was like running through a dictionary of animals, A to Z.
The big draw to Conner’s ranch, however, was the cats.
Lions, tigers, panthers, pumas, cheetahs—if it was feline, he had it. Including some rare breeds, white tigers and Canadian lynx, and dozens of others Kayne had never heard of.
In one respect—and indeed, according to the website—the ranch was helping to keep these animals preserved and protected. Several were on the endangered species list, and Conners actually received stipends from various world governments, for aiding in their preservation.
But Kayne saw through this. In fact, the FBI and several other agencies saw through this as well. Conners didn’t care about “preservation.” The animals he kept were a source of revenue, and the show of protecting them was a useful deception at best, but could more accurately be described as simply another stream of revenue. If it ever came down to it, if caring for these animals ever tilted away from profit and toward liability, Kayne was sure Conners would host a giant exotic animal barbecue and feel no shame in it.
As she dug deeper, she now came down to the even darker stuff. Conners wasn’t just collecting animals, he was into all sorts of things. Some of it on the far, darker end of the legal spectrum.
He had diversified by taking in stolen art, buying pieces on the black market as fast as he could gather them. There as a rumor, in the criminal world, that stolen art could be a bargaining chip, and Conners appeared to be banking on that as a contingency plan. Or maybe he just liked the idea of owning something irreplaceable, that wasn’t rightfully his. It could go either way with this guy.
Kayne had the profile that Agent Symon had worked up on Conners, and Symon’s impression was that Conners would gladly hold on to something rare and stolen just to keep anyone else from having it. Even if he couldn’t sell it, depriving people of it was treasure enough. They guy was a sociopath.
Conners’ other collections included an arsenal of weapons that would make an Alt-Right militia blush, as well as caverns of purloined booze with bottling dates spanning centuries, and a metropolitan museum’s worth of rare artifacts stolen from collections and cultures worldwide.
And there was more. Hints of things so dark, even Derrick Conners kept no traceable records.
He operated as if he were untouchable, because for such a very long time, he was.
But that time was over. And Conners didn’t like it.
When Agents Denzel and Symon brought some real heat down on the guy—the sort of thing that actually forced Conners to retreat—he responded the way someone like Conners always would. He used his reach in the criminal world and put out a hit on the two agents. And in Eric’s case, it might turn out to be successful.
Kayne tried not to chastise herself, to be hard on herself. There was no way she could have known someone was out there gunning for Symon. Until today, she hadn’t even known about the raid on Conners’ ranch, or who Derrick Connors even was. She couldn’t have predicted or prevented what happened. It had nothing to do with her.
But it hit too close anyway.
She’d seen it happen. She’d knelt beside him, had his blood on her hands. She’d felt his pulse go thready, seen his eyes flutter closed.
She squeezed her own eyes shut, trying to push the image out of her mind. Her heart was racing. Anxiety was pressing in on her. She needed to get it in check, keep her head, keep her focus.
Kayne had found the second assassin immediately—the one contracted to take out Agent Denzel. She diverted four times the funds the man had been promised, paying him out of Conners’ hidden bank accounts, as a “kill fee.”
Kill the job, not the man, she ordered. He acknowledged, with enthusiastic gratitude. Though he did question how Conners had managed to track him down. Anonymity was the core of this business. Once the agreement was made, there would be no way to shut it down. That was the way of it. So having Connors somehow reach him, that was a red flag.
The money, however, was enough to keep the guy’s alarm and curiosity tamped down. Maybe he’d keep an eye on Conners, maybe he’d eventually come calling. That part didn’t bother Kayne at all.
She leaked all the details of the transaction to local and federal authorities, including the description and last known location of the hit man, and a document trail that would implicate Conners in hiring him. It would take a hitman out of commission, which was a significant win, and good work all on its own. It would also help put another nail in Conners’ coffin.
But Kayne didn’t want Conners nailed into any coffins. Not before he was put in the right state for it.
Helping the FBI build a case against Conners was more about disassembling his empire, so that no one could rise up and take his place on whatever gaudy throne the guy occupied. She was blocking Conners from having a legacy. But Conners’ fate—that belonged to Alex Kayne.
It took some digging, with QuIEK running backwards through the transactions and payments made to the hit man, tracing a series of IP addresses, ferreting out Conner’s real trail from the VPNs he used to mask it. His digital security was good. He’d put a lot of money into it, hiring a string of firms who operated both above and below the table, serving a community of people who paid well to remain anonymous and discreet online and out in the three-dimensional world as well. Conners had invested heavily in staying off all radar, and deep in the shadows. But she eventually found him.
He had stayed in the States, in a compound in Montana. This was a bit surprising—Kayne had thought for sure he’d be in a non-extradition country by now. She’d been prepared to hunt him over oceans. As it turned out, he was only three states over.
She had satellite photos of the place. It was as middle of nowhere as anyone could get, along a stretch of the Missouri River, on a patch of land that was mostly scratch and dirt, with jagged fingers of low hills circling the property.
The place was off the books. No records existed to show who owned it. It was just a vast swath of Montana landscape, by all public records, with only a few buildings dotting it. One of those buildings was a fairly large house on a hillside. Not a mansion, by any stretch. And certainly not on the scale of Conners’ former ranch home in Oklahoma, or any of his estate-like residences worldwide. It lacked the sophisticated charm of the suites he owned above dozens of casinos, and in hundreds of luxury hotels.
This was a hiding place, with its own airstrip and helicopter pad, with boats docked on the river, with roads blocked end-to-end by massive gates and signs warning that anyone entering the property would be assumed to be trespassing, and all trespassers would be shot.
There was nothing to connect this property to Derrick Conners. He could hide there indefinitely. No one would ever find him.
Perfect, Kayne thought.
She opened a new browser window and got to work.