| |
Sawyer hated to lose the condo in Seattle, but when Reagan vanished overnight, he needed to implement security precautions. He hadn’t known whom she’d told or what had happened to her.
He and Lisa arrived at his actual home base—a house outside of Atlanta. One of the few places he could be himself, and a spot no one associated with him except for her.
“I’m going to ditch my bags and change,” Lisa said as they entered the kitchen through the garage.
“Sounds good. Meet you in the war room in fifteen?”
She gave a short nod and headed down the hall toward her room. Neither of them spent enough time here to consider it home, but it was as close as they got.
He climbed the stairs to the second floor—his sanctuary. Ten minutes later, he’d exchanged the suit for a T-shirt and sweat shorts, and was walking into the room at the back of the house.
If he decided later he still wanted to go a couple of rounds with the punching bag, he was dressed for it. Lisa had her seat staked out on a beanbag on the other side of the room. She’d shed her work uniform for a tank top and yoga pants.
Sawyer bypassed the desks against the wall and a couple more beanbags, and grabbed himself a spot on one of the couches. He plugged a network cable into a port hidden under a spot in the floor, and the other end went into his laptop.
There was no wireless in here. It wouldn’t travel through the copper-lined walls even if it were an acceptable risk. “Do we have an assessment on the residual damage from Alice’s network prank?” he asked.
Lisa didn’t look up from her computer. “She used a back door.”
Which was the top possibility, but it didn’t explain— “How did she get it on the server?”
“Do you want solid facts or my best guess?”
He didn’t like the sarcasm. It meant she didn’t have solid facts. How did Alice do this without leaving a trace? “Best guess.”
“She piggybacked it on an update for something widely used, embedding it well enough that everyone has it but she’s only using it on us.”
“She’s not that good.” Was she? No. She might have considerable skill, but not better than what he and Lisa did when they put their heads together.
The beanbag creaked beneath Lisa as she leaned forward. She set her laptop aside and rested her forearms on her knees. “You don’t know that. Besides, she doesn’t have to. Guess what else I found?”
“Not in the mood.”
“You can be Oscar the Grouch now, too. Fantastic.” Lisa rolled her eyes. “After Vegas, I sent out a crawler, to check the high-roller suites for all of our contracts. It’s hard to tell for sure, but based on patterns and the security footage they keep in the cloud, she’s playing a different casino’s tables every other weekend. She’s dropping tens of thousands and winning ninety percent of the time. This has been going on for at least a couple of months, and I assume as long as six months total, not counting the big-spender tables.”
He tilted his head back and stared at the ceiling, letting out a long groan. “So she can count cards. Your point is?”
“She’s not hurting for cash. Whatever she can’t do, she can pay someone else for.”
Not as interesting as if Alice did the work herself, but it was something he didn’t expect from her. “Send me what you have and check the traps.”
“Will do.”
Seconds later, he had the information Lisa had gathered, and her fingers flew across her keyboard. The traps were a series of crawlers always scanning for anyone looking for Jabberwock. The methods had been refined over time, to make the process more accurate, but details needed to be manually vetted, and pursued or discarded.
When Sawyer and Lisa started this, she let him take the lead. As she put it, I’m not a deal maker. Sawyer had been burned twice now, by Alex and then Blake. Lisa was the only person he trusted.
“Remember we have a business to run.” Her comment jarred him out of his thoughts, and the edge in her voice caught him off-guard.
He studied her for a moment and raised a brow. “What does that mean?”
“If you spend your life pursuing Alice, you’re the one who’s going to fall down the rabbit hole.”
Irritation snaked through him. “She hacked my fucking network. I’d like to know how, and stop her from doing it again.”
“Our network.” Lisa glared at him. “I’m not saying you’re wrong, Mr. Defensive; it’s a warning. Watch yourself.”
“I get it.” He spoke through clenched teeth. The exchange climbed under his skin and settled in, along with the heavy mood in the room.
He tried to focus on the new information about Alice’s activities, but Lisa’s comments nagged his thoughts. When his phone chimed, he grabbed it, grateful for the distraction.
Hearing whispers about Cheshire Cat.
When he read the message from Three, he realized he shouldn’t have been so eager. The Heart was in Tokyo, investigating a potential client.
Keep an ear out. Let me know, Sawyer replied as Jabberwock.
When Jabberwock agreed to work with someone, he’d already done his research. He reviewed every corner of a person’s life online. He had a knack for finding the subtleties in people and their digital interactions.
It was the reason he’d trusted Blake when he let him into the organization, besides the bland past, which was apparently doctored. It took Blake years to work his way up the ladder, but when it was time for Sawyer to replace Alex, Blake had proven himself.
Sawyer had still worked with Blake—Two of Clubs at the time, a simple grunt—over the course of several jobs before he named the trio Hatter, Hare, and Dormouse.
It was also why he let Blake leave with Alice. It didn’t matter whom Blake worked for; he didn’t see the world in the black and white that would drive him back to the side of law enforcement.
Speaking of Blake—Sawyer knew where he’d been for the last six months, and it wasn’t with Alice. So why was he at the diner?
Another message chimed through from Three. They’re talking about some shooting in the US. They’ve said Jabberwock several times.
So Knave’s itchy finger had gone international. “We need to do damage control PR on this shooting in Salt Lake,” he said.
“You’re on that, then?” Lisa sounded annoyed. “Checking the traps.”
His email pinged. It was a dummy account he’d set up for client interactions, and the message was from the same group Three was watching in Japan. Cancelling the contract.
“Mother fucker.” Sawyer slammed his fist into the cushion next to him.
Lisa jumped. “What now?”
He reeled his reaction back in. “This isn’t right.” How did they know Knave was his? Pieces ticked against each other in his head, looking for a way to click. There it was. What were the odds that two different clients, in two different parts of the world, canceled on the same day?
Knave’s mistake made the news, but the second instance just happened to be while Three was watching, and they just happened to be discussing that very thing within ear shot, and just happened to cut the contract moments later. “We lost Tokyo.”
“What?” Lisa’s voice rose in volume and pitch. “Why?”
“Do you want solid facts or my best guess?”
She pursed her lips. “Clever. What’s your guess?”
“Cheshire Cat. We need to know who the fuck it is.”
“Alice.”
He gave a dark laugh. “You think you’re funny, but you’re not. Cat has been around for years.”
“Point to you.” Lisa sighed. “What do you need me to do? What are we going to do?”
Sawyer hadn’t figured that out yet.