“Don’t look now, but I just saw a man … from Valor.” Jalen stared over the rim of his orange juice at Wyatt. His heart jumped in his chest, but he tried to remain calm.
“What do you mean?” Wyatt said. The two boys sat at the Starbucks outside their gate waiting to board. “Stop staring. Do you mean one of the staff?”
“No, that lady—the secretary woman with the bug eyes—this guy was with her. The big dude. Looks like some kind of islander.”
“Dammit.” Wyatt again sipped his coffee casually. “Lean your head down.”
Jalen’s Gucci sunglasses rested on top of his head, and he leaned down, letting Wyatt look in the yellowish reflection on his face to confirm his suspicion.
“Right behind you and to the left…” Jalen said. “He’s wearing a Grizzlies hat and headphones. Looks like he’s gotten himself two éclairs.”
“I see him. It’s Tui. How the hell did he track us here?”
Jalen closed his eyes, a wave of realization washing over him. “So this morning, before you woke up—”
“Aside from Narcy’s,” Wyatt continued thinking aloud. “We’ve been on Darsie’s train, essentially untrackable from the outside.”
“Listen,” Jalen said. “This morning. I couldn’t sleep, so I took a walk.”
“A walk? Where?”
“Well, just around … the wharf area.”
“You gotta be kidding me.”
“I guess he coulda followed me.”
Wyatt sighed. “There’s a reason why I’m looking over my shoulder all the time. And it’s not my neurotic nature. Push your glasses back up. And pull something out of your backpack to look at.”
“There’s nothing but clothes. And the Valor manual.”
“Well, pull that out and start at chapter one, where it says don’t go prancing around the city, potentially exposing yourself to rogue agents while we’re on a mission.”
“I’m sorry, okay?… So what do we do?” Jalen fumbled in his pack. “Think he knows where we’re going?”
“I don’t know.” Wyatt checked his watch. “Let’s just wait until the absolute last second to board. If he’s not on our flight already, he’ll know we’re headed to San Francisco, but he’ll have to figure out how to meet us there … or have someone else pick us up at the airport.”
“Pick us up?”
“Yeah, pick us up—have somebody in the airport to continue following us.”
Thirty minutes later, Jalen boarded the plane, as he was told: seconds before the cabin doors were closed, just ahead of Wyatt. The two ran up to their gate, apologizing to the weary flight attendant, who looked at them like dumb kids who almost missed their flight home.
“Think he split?” Jalen asked as the boys crammed their backpacks in the overhead and shuffled to their seats next to the lavatory. Darsie had booked them on a discount local carrier, the kind that wouldn’t give you a pretzel even if you were about to go into a diabetic coma.
“I didn’t see him. But there could be plants on that plane,” Wyatt muttered. “So don’t talk mission.”
Jalen nodded. “That dude’s so huge, he’d have to buy two seats on this plane.”
“If I had to put money on it, I’d guess the SecDef is just following up. She’s got red mustache guy at Valor to enforce her rules. And Maui Jim here to follow us around, but it’s better to err on the side of caution.”
Once they deboarded, Wyatt looked like something from a Bond film, cutting through the crowds, looking over his shoulder, slipping down to ground transportation.
“Don’t think he’s on us,” he said to Jalen as he pulled up the Uber app. “Even so, keep alert.”
Moments later, the Uber, a slick silver Tesla Model S, quietly crept up to the curb. The doors popped open.
“Holy moly,” Jalen said of the vehicle.
The young, hooded driver, in the few moments it took for Wyatt and Jalen to pile in, had loaded the address to the apartment and pulled away from the airport.
“Are all the Ubers in San Francisco like this?” Jalen asked.
“Don’t know, man. This isn’t my main gig. I’m in between start-ups.”
“Work on anything I’ve heard of?” Jalen asked, then looked at Wyatt, who narrowed his eyes at him for being chatty.
“Facebook, Instagram,” the driver said, “but now I’m trying to do my own thing.”
“Cool,” Jalen said, feeling excited and invigorated. He could smell the ocean, and in the quiet cabin of the electric car, they could hear the gulls circling overhead.
“So this is California.” Jalen smiled.
“Nah,” the driver said. “This is Silicon Valley. California’s another state.”
“Yeah.” Wyatt nodded, his scowl warning Jalen to rein in the excitement. “Don’t let the salt air go to your head.”
The safe house that Wyatt and Jalen shared was a former Airbnb. Darsie had found the single-bedroom apartment on the website, and in order to keep total secrecy, he bought it outright. “Guess you could say”—Darsie smirked—“I booked it for life.”
The apartment itself was nothing to write home about, save for the location close-ish to downtown San Francisco. It was shabby chic, with a little more emphasis on shabby. But it came with a couple of Darsie’s personal men.
“The room has already been swept,” Darsie’s head of security said to the boys as they entered. “It’s clean. And we’ll have someone out here day and night.”
That seemed to satisfy Wyatt somewhat, though Jalen watched him proceed to do his own assessment: lifting up lamps, going through kitchen cabinets, taking the top off anything electric, and looking in air vents.
“Think I need a nap,” Jalen said, flopping on the couch. “You can take the bedroom.” Even though it was afternoon, the predawn trip to the airport had made them quite tired.
“Okay. But no more walks,” Wyatt said dryly, going over to check the lock on the door. Out the window, a gleaming black Mercedes was parallel parking out front. “Actually, don’t think we’re getting that nap.”
And sure enough, approximately one minute later, Darsie came barreling through the front door. He pulled out a barstool from underneath the kitchen island and sat down, his head in his hands, veins throbbing in his temples.
“Morning,” Wyatt said, pouring him a cup of coffee. “To what do we owe the pleasure?”
“There’s been a development. It doesn’t look good.”
Jalen watched Darsie’s perfectly manicured hands shaking as he lifted the mug. “At Red Trident, we monitor all the internet traffic on the network. Every site that is visited, it’s all tracked. Hi Kyto, of course, knows this, so we’d never expect her to make this kind of mistake.”
“What did she do?” Jalen leaned in.
“Let me ask you, have you ever heard of a Raspberry Pi?”
Both boys shook their heads.
“Well, it’s a device you can use to create a VPN—virtual private network. I noticed that Hi Kyto purchased one with a private credit card midyear.”
“How did you know that?”
“I just know, okay? The point is a Raspberry Pi—or a device like it—can be used to make secure tunnels and then connections. They’re practically unhackable. Two weeks before the fires, security cameras in the restaurant across the street from Red Trident captured this footage of Hi Kyto’s laptop.” Darsie flipped on his iPad and slid it over to Wyatt. There was Hi Kyto, having an iced tea and French fries and a salad. Her computer was open. Wyatt zoomed in.
“The security camera at the restaurant takes images only every five seconds, so it’s possible she visited different sites, but what we’ve done is analyze URLs and imagery to build the following progression. Go ahead and swipe left.”
Wyatt swiped through the photographs. “First she visited the website of the drugmaker Zovoricin. She looked at the chemical makeup of the drug,” Darsie said. “Next she visited sites about the chemical process of addiction.”
Jalen looked on in horror: public records, medical data, scientific reports, addiction specialists—in an hour and a half, she’d visited approximately forty-five information sources, everything from how a person becomes addicted, to the chemical process, to the spiritual deterioration, and finally, the change in the brain anatomy of chronic users.
“Since she has a photographic memory, this is only a snippet of what she could have learned over the days, weeks, months,” Darsie continued. “The last image is most damning.”
Wyatt flipped, and there was Hi Kyto on the Tor browser, searching for recovery groups in California.
“Days later, Encyte, armed with knowledge of the crippling effects of addiction, lured Daniel Acoda to strike the match that caused the biggest wildfire in California’s history. And,” Darsie said, pausing, “Encyte contacted Daniel through a chat group in Tor.”
Jalen waited a few minutes to respond. “This topic is pretty common … there are a lot of people who have these addictions. Maybe she was looking for—”
“For what? She works for me. She’s a student. Sure, maybe taken in isolation, this means nothing, but this is a very strong coincidence, and I don’t believe in coincidences.”
Jalen blinked, not sure if it was disappointment or fear he was feeling. What if he couldn’t do this? Darsie, though he’d suspected the worst, clearly didn’t want to believe it, either.
“I’m sorry,” Wyatt said.
“Don’t be sorry,” Darsie snapped. “Just get to the bottom of this. Jalen, stay on her. Get me something definitive. I just want to move on.”