7

AGENT JESSE LONG jerked himself awake in his Buick sedan—an old man’s car. It was a perfect fit, according to his colleagues back at the office. Long rarely spent any time in his cubicle. After a quarter century with the agency, he had no desire to compete with the millennials who thought the sexy way to follow terrorists was using the latest high-tech equipment. That was fine with him. Instead of being proficient at shooting electrons, he was as good as any gunslinger from his hometown of Cody, Wyoming, at putting a slug in a sniper.

And he preferred to stake out his suspects the old-fashioned way, which was why he found himself perched on Lytton Street in Palo Alto, directly across from the offices of Wyckoff & Schechter.

Long rubbed his eyes. He loved being a father, but was still adapting to everything that came with it. He now knew what it was like to work after no sleep and a shrieking, colicky baby. He calculated that he’d slept a total of two hours that night.

As he watched a pair of Wyckoff attorneys cross the street for the coffee shop, Long tried to sort through the facts of his latest assignment from the Department of Justice: After receiving his PhD at Caltech, Quinn Moon interned with an American company, HydroGen, Inc., which had won a contract with the Department of Energy to find a way to economically produce hydrogen fuel. After six months, HydroGen’s president, Jerry Wilcox, filed a complaint alleging that Quinn had recently left for Korea to start his own company, WTG, after stealing HydroGen’s intellectual property. Long had been tracking Quinn’s visit to the States over the past year. This stopover, however, was different from the others. Quinn was involved in his own stakeout, following a patent attorney named Addeline Verges. Which was fine, except Quinn just happened to be following her when Addy’s hydrogen blimp went up in flames.

Why?

Long was familiar with cases involving the theft of trade secrets. Hackers from Eastern Europe to China constantly broke into the databases of US companies, but this case was different. Here, a Korean national had worked for a US company with strict national security requirements, then left the country with a head full of technical data. Still, Long knew he couldn’t arrest Quinn for being competitive. He needed a smoking gun, and the DOJ insisted he find it.

Long pulled out his phone and studied the photo of the man with the tattoo who’d shot the flare. Initial assessments were that he was Middle Eastern.

The Bureau was working to improve the photo’s resolution to sharpen the tattoo, but had nothing yet, other than it appeared to be some kind of Arabic writing. The most logical conclusion was that the man was part of a radical terrorist group like ISIS, which was committed to blocking technology that might reduce dependence on Middle Eastern oil. But how did they know about Quinn? Had they tapped into his computer network in Korea? Heaven knows, the FBI had tried to hack the WTG files without luck.

Long wasn’t in Palo Alto to observe Addy. He already knew she was in Vietnam with Quinn. The moment US Customs scanned her passport, he’d been notified.

He needed some paid time off, self-imposed paternity leave, so he’d told his office that he was getting a feel for the neighborhood, trying to find a good place to spy on Addy when she returned.