“You can get up now,” Paul called.
Walker flicked off the blanket. Monica scooted across the bench, behind Paul, leaving Walker behind the empty passenger seat. The car was still coasting along a two-lane highway. Blacktop, patchy. Not the interstate, Walker noted. Something north-by-northwest. The road had a slow gradient. They were going up, the truck easily doing sixty. In this particular truck they could drive all the way to Yellowstone without stopping. Probably further.
“I’d ask how you found me,” Paul said, his eyes not leaving the view ahead. “But it wouldn’t be too hard to do, even for an amateur. If one was trying to find me. If they knew my new name.”
“You weren’t trying not to be found,” Monica pointed out.
“I’m guessing you could have done that pretty well, Paul,” Walker added. “Building layers of protection around your new ID?”
Paul nodded. “The question is, Monica, why were you looking for me? Before this thing with Jasper?”
Monica, silent, stared at the back of his head.
“You had to change your name, because you’ve got a record,” Walker said.
Paul glanced at him in the rearview mirror.
“You needed to move on, get a decent job,” Walker said, “so you bought or created your new ID.”
The glance became a longer look. “Who are you?” Paul said slowly but clearly.
“Jed Walker.”
“I mean who, not a name. Who do you work for?”
“Myself. I’m helping Monica find her brother so that we can stop these cyber attacks. I’m an old friend.”
Paul adjusted the mirror slightly so he could get Monica into view.
“That true, Mon?”
“Yes.”
“And you trust this guy?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
Monica looked at Walker, then back at Paul’s reflection in the mirror.
“Because he’s helping me, and no one else is.”
“What about the FBI?” Paul said. “Surely they’d have reached out to you straightaway.”
“Yeah, right. They did. They wanted me to stay indoors with Dad. Wait this out. Watch it, see what comes, sit on our hands. All while someone had Jasper—have you seen it? How they have him? What they make him say and do?”
Paul was silent but he nodded. He overtook a refrigerated truck without slowing. The road ahead stretched to the horizon, tilting up to a blue sky.
“Whoever has him will—”
“Monica,” Paul said firmly. “I really don’t care much for Jasper, right? I mean, he was in contact a couple of years back, and then he did the same old cut and run. Fool me once, right? Damn . . .”
“How can you say that?” Monica said, sitting forward on the bench and looking closely at him.
“Mon, do you know what Jasper and I were doing? The government was what we were fighting against in the first place. All those hours and days and weeks and months—working to dismantle what they were doing. And then he joined them.”
“And look where that got him, right?” Monica said. She let it hang in the air a moment, then added, “Do you think he deserves what’s happening to him?”
Walker waited to hear an answer but none came. Monica sat back. She was looking down at her hands, wringing them and clutching them, fidgeting with bottled-up anger and angst.
“I’ll tell you this much for free,” Paul said. “For all Jasper’s faults, he’s patriotic. The last time I spoke to him, he was still at the NSA. When he got there he was in the Global Communications Department. All of the covert sites and cover-sites all networked through Fort Meade and Langley. He reached out to me to do some white-hat penetration—he said he couldn’t believe the vulnerabilities in the systems. And they were there—I could read comms in less than ten minutes if I knew an internal email address within the given department. The NSA were great at coding and crypto but shit at tech. They were using off-the-shelf software and hardware that had all kinds of vulnerabilities—and this is at the Top Secret level. The work I did with him got him a commendation and promotion, and he went off to Berlin for a six-month posting. He offered me an assistant role; he didn’t realize that it was too late for me. Government work’s out of the question. Fine for him, right?”
“Do you know what he was working on in Berlin?” Walker asked.
He nodded. “We spoke, for the last time it turns out, four months into that tour. He rang me one night—we spoke for hours, until dawn my time. He was drunk, which was rare for him—”
“He doesn’t drink,” interrupted Monica.
Paul paused, as if deciding how much to tell her. “He did, sometimes. And over there, he told me he was doing a lot of it. They all did. It’s how they operated.”
“Drinking didn’t agree with him,” Monica said to Walker.
“Berlin . . . there were always big gatherings of delegates from industry. One week banking, the other mining, pharmaceuticals, tech, you name it. He made friends with a bunch of the CIA officers working out of the embassy on the Casanova Project. Heard of it?”
“No,” Monica said.
“Recruiting,” Walker said. “Through nefarious means.”
“Recruiting for what?” Monica asked.
“Look,” said Walker. “I worked for the government, and I mean worked . . .” His voice reverberated around the cab of the truck and settled like a thick fog. “For a long time. Pointy-end stuff in all the messed-up places that you can think of. And I got out, because they burned me. I settled that score. Jasper’s part of the machine, like I was. He deserves our help.”
Paul looked at Walker’s eyes in the mirror and said, “Hate the player, not the game?”
“You’ve got it backward,” Walker said. “Hate the league. The guys calling the shots. Sure, fine, I get that. But those in the arena—shit. And besides it all—whether we like Jasper or not, we need to do what we can to find him and stop him. If he melts down a nuclear plant or diverts air traffic control into chaos . . .” Walker leaned forward, his forearms on the back of the front seat, his weight making it creak and tip back a couple of inches. “What’s vital here is that we don’t get to see what’s going to happen at the thirty-six-hour mark. And all that happens before that. You get me? We have to give it a shot.”
Paul’s hands on the steering wheel relaxed. His jaw too. He looked out his side window at the basin of the wide valley spreading out below. The highway cut through it in place of a river. Bone dry, but for the houses and their insatiable appetite for brought-in water.
Paul said, “You want to know what I saw when I saw Jasper on the screen last night? I saw a dead man.”