San Francisco, California
Mayher hated to admit it, but she needed the distraction.
She resented everything about this one, though. Because she knew that all the leads she was currently running down had come from Alex Kayne. And Kayne had been there when it happened. Kayne had been the first on the scene. Kayne had been the one kneeling beside Agent Symon, keeping him from bleeding out.
Did she have anything to do with Symon getting shot?
Mayher thought that was likely, at first. But Agent Denzel had pinged her to let her know that they now had a profile on the shooter. It was looking like an outside hit, tied to their case against Derrick Conners—nothing to do with Eckhart case.
Denzel had been a little sketchy on the particulars, but said he wanted her to know they were circling in on the shooter. Conners was another issue, but Denzel had resources on tracking him down.
Meanwhile, Mayher was told her priority was to get everything settled on the Eckhart case. That was the job. Do the job.
She would do the job.
But she wasn’t sure if she should keep doing the job.
This was something that had been nagging at her for a while now. She had a growing sense that her life—her career—had gotten off track somehow, somewhere along the way. After a pretty good run, working with the FBI and doing some real good in the world, she was finding the work less satisfying than it used to be. She was finding herself thinking more about gray areas, when she’d always seen things as pretty much black and white.
Mayher didn’t like gray areas. Alex Kayne represented a pretty wide gray area. A whole spectrum of gray. And, Mayher finally had to admit, so did Eric Symon.
She knew Symon’s history. She knew the raw deal he’d gotten, after Director Crispen had been brought down for treason. But she also knew that Symon was good. Probably the best.
When she’d been asked to join Symon’s team, to help hunt down Alex Kayne and others like her, Symon’s tarnished reputation hadn’t mattered to her. Mayher wanted to work with best, to learn from the best, and Agent Eric Symon was the best, whether anyone else in the Bureau understood that or not.
So she’d known that working with Symon would come with some challenges. She thought she was prepared for them.
And then came Alex Kayne.
The woman was a running enigma to Mayher. She had skills—that was undeniable. Mayher had been on the receiving end of Kayne’s personal combat training, which was formidable. And Kayne had slipped out of Mayher’s grasp more than once, sometimes in humiliating ways. Kayne had an infuriating knack for escaping custody, even when there seemed to be no way out.
It was a hard lesson—learning that no matter how good you were, no matter how noble your cause, no matter how many resources you had, or even that you had the law on your side, Alex Kayne was going to escape. It was her nature. She was an immutable fact in the universe.
At least, that’s how it felt. Mostly because of QuIEK.
Mayher hadn’t known about Kayne’s “magic software” at first. Symon had kept it pretty confidential. She’d known that it existed, of course. The story from on high was that Kayne had tried to cut a deal with the Russians, but had double-crossed them, killing her business partner and going on the run with something that presented a serious threat to national security. Even world security. So, Mayher knew the gist.
It wasn’t until she and Symon had been asked to join Historic Crimes Division that Mayher had finally learned some of the deeper, scarier details. Kayne had built this thing—QuIEk—supposedly as a way to help keep everyday folks safe and secure online, to preserve privacy, to protect against scams and security breeches and tons of other modern day threats.
It all sounded good on paper.
And Symon had confessed to her that he thought Kayne was actually innocent of the charges against her. He had a theory that Kayne’s business partner, Adrian Ballard, had been the one double-dealing with the Russians, and double-crossing the US government. He suspected Ballard had tried to frame Kayne, in advance of making a killing by selling the software to the Russians outright. And when Kayne had disrupted that plan, the Russians had killed Ballard and basically set the whole house on fire. Kayne got framed, and she went on the run, taking QuIEK with her.
And she’d been running ever since.
Mayher knew Symon well enough to trust his judgement. And more, she trusted him as an Agent, to keep his oath. Just because he believed Kayne didn’t mean he would let her slide. To Mayher, Symon had proven his loyalty to that oath again and again. She believed Symon when he said his primary objective was to bring Kayne in, to put her behind bars, to make her face the charges levied against her.
Easier said than done.
Arresting Alex Kayne was like trying to hold on to a fistful of water. In the end, you just ended up empty handed and all wet.
The real surprise to Mayher, though, was when Kayne was invited to become a confidential informant.
As a CI, Kayne was able to openly share tips and information with Agent Symon, with the FBI, and with HCD. And that information could be used legally in the pursuit and arrest of other criminals.
It was a goodwill play for Kayne, Mayher knew. It might give her some points, to help reduce the penalties, once she was apprehended. If she was apprehended. But despite all that “goodwill,” Kayne was still a fugitive, and the order was still “arrest on sight.” It was a weird, contentious sort of relationship that Mayher struggled to reconcile.
To Mayher, making Kayne a CI was equivalent to endorsing her. It felt like giving her a pass, of sorts. Because, sure, the order to arrest her still stood. But how seriously would anyone really take that, if it meant eliminating one of the HCD’s best assets? If they did manage to bring her in, would the HCD be content with losing her as a resource? Or would she just be grafted into service, chipped or tagged or otherwise hobbled, and then sent out to just keep doing what she was doing?
It felt like a conflict of interest to Mayher. And that conflict made her question everything.
Maybe this wasn’t the place for her anymore. Not just Historic Crimes, but the FBI. Law enforcement. All of it.
Well, it didn’t matter. Not right now. She had a job to do at the moment, and she’d do that job, and it would help keep her mind off of the fact that Eric Symon was currently fighting for his life in an ICU across town.
She’d deal with how she felt about that, and other things, later. After. Whatever after ended up meaning.
Her phone chirped, and she looked to see that she was getting a call from the Bureau offices in Round Rock.
“Agent Mayher,” she answered.
“Mayher,” a now-familiar voice said. She could hear the smile from Agent Christian Daniels, on the other side of the line.
She hadn’t had a chance to tell him about Symon.
She decided to hold off. A conversation that wasn’t focused on whether Symon would live or die was something she really needed right now.
“Agent Daniels,” she said, trying to drum up a genuine smile herself. “How’s the weather?”
He laughed lightly from his end. “Warmer every minute. I give it a week before everyone down here is back to cargo shorts and T-shirts, and bitchin’ about the heat and humidity.”
Mayher’s smile was genuine now, and she shook her head. “Texas.”
“Yeah,” Daniels said. “Texas.”
Mayher cleared her throat. “Got anything for me?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Daniels said, his voice a light and charming drawl. “We have Stephen Spencer in custody here, thanks to the intel you emailed over.”
Mayher blinked. She hadn’t sent any emails to Daniels or anyone else, regarding the Eckhart case.
“Refresh my memory,” she said. “It’s been a long twenty-four hours.”
“Oh, well, I got an email from you with some links and attachments. Video from the security cameras, enhanced audio, and a bunch of files implicating Mr. Spencer and someone there in San Francisco. A woman named…” He was quiet for a moment, and Mayher imagined he was referencing the emails. “Julia Faure. Says she’s a receptionist at Bertrand, Owens and Cromwell.”
“Oh, that email,” Mayher said, rolling her eyes and trying not to sound annoyed.
Kayne. Again.
“I assume you guys are picking up Ms. Faure?”
“Absolutely,” Mayher said, but she made a note to check in on that.
“It’s a shame,” Daniels said.
“What’s a shame?” Mayher asked.
“She’s got the same first name as you,” he said, and sounded for all the world like a dopey, bashful teenage boy making his first pass at trying to flirt.
She smiled again and even felt herself blush. She liked Daniels—he was good looking, in that rugged but cultivated sort of way. He seemed like a guy who would be as comfortable on a ranch as he was in a Bureau field office. Mayher hadn’t dated much, over the past few years. The job made it tough to meet anyone who wasn’t about to be brought up on charges. And it wasn’t a good idea to date your co-workers. Or your partners. Not that there had been any of that happening. She’d once thought she and Eric might hook up… but that was off the table. It seemed, anyway.
“Yeah,” Mayher said. “We might have to kick her out of the Julia club.”
Daniels gave a light laugh from the other end of the phone. “Well, we have Mr. Spencer in custody, and after showing him all the evidence, he’s talking. He says he has a stash of encrypted hard drives in his home, there in Bay Area. He’s willing to give us the passwords for all of it, in exchange for a deal.”
Mayher felt her blood pressure spike.
Eric Symon was struggling to say alive. Kayne was in the wind again. Everything felt like it was either up in the air or teetering on a cliff. And Mayher hadn’t slept in more than twenty-four hours.
“No deals,” she said.
“Oh,” Daniels said. “Ok…”
“We’re not going to need him to unlock anything,” she said. “We have a resource.”
If Kayne’s going to do my job and send emails on my behalf, I’m going to commit her to some work without asking. It seemed like a fair trade.
“Gotcha,” Daniels said. “Well, in that case, I’ll let him cool it in a room for a while. His lawyers are all from BO&C, and they made it clear that he’s officially dropped as a client. So he’s waiting for a public defender. I’m guessing he’ll upgrade through whoever that poor soul turns out to be.”
“No problem,” Mayher said. “I’ll make sure Ms. Faure gets a similar set of circumstances. And we’ll need to start contacting people who were impacted by this, see if we can resolve the whole stolen patent thing.”
“Roger that,” Daniels said. “So… I guess we’ll be wrapping this up soon. Any… any chance you’ll be back this way? Back here in Round Rock?”
Mayher felt her heart thump, and it surprised her. She thought for a moment. She had no real reason to go back. And yet…
“I think so,” she said. “I… have some time off coming to me. I hear Austin is a fun town.”
“It can be,” Daniels said. “If you have the right guide.”
She smiled, and after she promised to circle up with him they hung up. She spent several minutes making quick calls to the local Bureau, confirming that they all got the same sorts of emails from “her.” They had. Videos, audio, paper trails, all of it. Things were already in progress.
Alex Kayne, cleaning house, tying up loose ends.
Why even bother carrying the badge at all? Mayher thought. When you had an asset like Alex Kayne working for you, the law was just a formality, right?
Mayher she shook her head, dismissing that thought and all the emotional baggage that came with it. No need to be petty. Kayne was actually doing the sort of thing that HCD actually wanted her for. It was a little shady—posing as an FBI agent, sending emails on Mayher’s behalf, accessing evidence using illicit methods. But this was the world Mayher lived in now. Alex Kayne’s world.
For now.
She unlocked her phone. Unlike Symon, Mayher didn’t have a direct line to Kayne, so she had no real idea how to reach her.
As it turned out, she didn’t have to wonder long.
There was a text message, from an unknown sender, waiting for her—just a simple, single emoji. A smiley face with dark sunglasses.
If this is you, Mayher typed, the security guy has hard drives that are protected by password. I volunteered you to crack them.
Almost immediately there was a pulsing series of dots, followed by a response.
No problem, the message read. I already found them, stacked in a secret server that Spencer was keeping in his apartment Everything is unlocked, and I copied all of it to the FBI servers, under your account.
Mayher nodded. She’d half expected this. But she couldn’t resist the twinge of annoyance. Nor could she resist commenting.
You could have asked first.
The three dots returned, then, Yeah. Sorry. I’m in a hurry. Please keep an eye on Eric.
Mayher felt another flash, but it faded.
Kayne was worried about Symon, just like Mayher was.
Mayher had a lot of mixed feelings about Alex Kayne, but she knew for a fact that Kayne and Symon had some kind of bond. And Symon—the good man that he was—cared for Kayne, even if he intended to arrest her. It was obvious that Kayne felt the same about him.
How could Mayher hold a grudge against Kayne over petty things? She’d just solved a case that Symon was working on. And, if Mayher knew anything about Kayne, the woman was already on the hunt for the person responsible for Symon being shot.
It was suddenly obvious to Mayher.
She raised the phone and typed.
Find them, Mayher typed. Take them down.
A pulse from Kayne’s end, and then: I absolutely will.