Code Name: Hacker (Paperback)

Griffin

Even though the moon is at its fullest and brightest, there’s enough cloud cover for me to stand at the edge of the woods behind the woman’s house without being noticed. She lives about twenty miles north of the city of Pittsburgh in a little town called Cranberry.

I’ve learned a bit about her because I’ve been watching her for a few days. Her home is not modest. Cranberry is not as quaint as the name might infer, but affluent. Her house is a four-thousand-square-foot dwelling all done in gray brick with cream shutters and a manicured lawn. The suburban lifestyle is at odds with her day job, which I haven’t quite figured out yet. When I followed her to work, she disappeared into an abandoned warehouse in a rundown section of Pittsburgh where she stayed until the evening commute home.

She’s in her kitchen now, the window facing outward to her backyard. There’s a massive child’s playset in it that includes a slide, swings, fort, and a climbing wall. Her kid is too old for it, and he never uses it. He does like to tromp through the woods, though. His trail leads down to a tiny creek where he valiantly tries to fish, but he comes up empty-handed because he doesn’t know what he’s doing. He clearly needs someone to show him a thing or two.

I study the woman, wondering how someone so pretty ended up in such a bad mess. She’s petite, almost delicate, with exquisite bone structure. Her hair is so black it glints almost blue under the kitchen lighting. While the exact color of her eyes is not discernable from this distance, they are pale against the darkness of her hair. It makes her seem almost ethereal. Contrast that with the tattoos she has down her arms, and it adds an element of toughness in the way she holds herself. A steel spine is how I’d describe it.

She has tattoos in other places, too—ribs, legs, and back. I don’t know that from watching her, though.

It’s in the file back in my hotel room.

When I’d received it from my boss, it had been fairly thin and contained a photo that doesn’t remotely resemble the woman I see now. She was young, in her early twenties, with bleached-blond hair cut extremely short, but she has one of those faces made for that style. There had even been a diamond stud in her nose, a ring in her lip, and a barbell through an eyebrow.

Blue. Pale, icy blue is the actual color of her eyes. I can’t quite see them through the cover of night, but they’d been vivid in that photo.

It was a prison photo, no doubt, and right below was a list of the tattoos she had with more close-up photos attached. They were meant to be used to identify her.

I was given her name, which is Bebe Grimshaw—formally known as Brianna Belle Grimshaw—and told to find her. My boss had heard through his underground network of black-market contacts that she was in the Pittsburgh area. With a little digging, I’d found her through the real estate tax records here in Cranberry.

I’m not the kind of employee—thug, muscle, hired help, or whatever—who does a half-assed job. I fleshed out the file I’d been given with some research of my own. Turns out Bebe Grimshaw had more of a colorful past than I ever could have imagined.

About eight years ago, she pled guilty to cyber-espionage charges leveled against her by the federal government. Seems the little fairy waif is incredibly talented at hacking, and she’d managed to pilfer nuclear codes that were in turn going to be sold to the Chinese. While that makes her far more interesting than the suburban single mom of a young boy who lives with her mother, what really interests me was how she refused to name any of her co-conspirators and was the lone person to take the fall for the crime.

She was sentenced to thirty-five years in prison.

Most would wonder how in the hell she’s now living a quiet life in Cranberry, Pennsylvania, but I’m fairly sure I know the answer.

Given the things I’ve seen during the past two years of working for my boss, I’m going to take a pretty good guess he was involved in the nuclear-code hack.

As if thinking about the man procures him into reality, the phone in my pocket starts vibrating. I step several feet back into the tree line before turning my back on the Grimshaw home so the glow of my cell doesn’t catch Bebe’s interest while she finishes the dinner dishes.

The man’s name is programmed into my contacts as simply AB, which stands for Anatoly Bogachev. Despite his Russian heritage, he was raised in the Brighton Beach portion of Brooklyn and has no discernable trace of his motherland accent.

He wastes no time on pleasantries when I answer the phone. “Have you found her?”

Even though I’d located her three days ago, I lie. “Just today.”

“And?” he prompts.

“She’s in a small town called Cranberry, north of Pittsburgh.” I don’t offer anything more.

Anatoly is silent for a few moments, but his next words catch me by surprise. “Take her out.”

“Take her out?” I repeat.

“Yes, yes,” he exclaims impatiently. “Eliminate her.”

“When?”

“Now,” he snaps. “Get it done and return to New York.”

I grit my teeth. Sometimes, he’s like an overgrown child, despite the fact that we’re both thirty-five. “I need time to plan this so it’s done cleanly with no blowback on me and, more importantly, on you. I’ll need to watch her for a bit to get to know her patterns. Figure how I’m going to do it. Where to dispose of her.”

“Throw her in the fucking Allegheny River for all I care,” he growls. I can just envision him in his office right now, pacing back and forth in front of his desk, fists clenched and desperate for me to carry out his dirty work. I’ve come to know him well in the past two years.

I take in a breath before slowly letting it out. “I’m your man, Anatoly. I can do this, but you’ve got to give me the time to be clean about it. I’m not going to fucking prison over some chick who broke your heart, whom you now want offed.”

Anatoly snarls. “Watch it, Griffin.”

At my peril, I ignore his warning. Anatoly Bogachev is extremely volatile and dangerous. “I need at least a few weeks. She’s not going anywhere. I’m watching her closely. Once I have her all figured out, I’ll be able to take her out in the way that best protects us all.”

“Fine,” he mutters. “You have two weeks.”

“Thank you,” I reply softly, knowing he prefers to be addressed reverently to soothe his ego.

“And she didn’t break my heart,” he adds gruffly. “But she’s a dangerous liability, which is all you need to know.”

“I’ll handle it,” I assure him.

His reply is a quick disconnect of the phone.

The countdown starts.

***

Leaning against the headboard of my hotel bed, I cross my hands over my stomach and ponder. It’s not hard to put things together. Anatoly wants Bebe Grimshaw dead. She got sent to prison for a thirty-five-year stretch around eight years ago for a crime, and she’d refused to name her co-conspirators. She’s now free long before she’d be eligible for parole, and I’ve yet to figure out how she accomplished that.

Anatoly knows she’s out of prison earlier than should be possible, and he doesn’t want her to have an attack of conscience.

But why is she in western Pennsylvania when her roots are in Ohio?

I think about her actions over the last few days of tailing her. I rode my Harley down from New York because the weather was gorgeous for the end of September, but I’ve since rented a car. The pipes on my Harley are far too loud to be inconspicuous.

One thing I’ve noticed is how wary Bebe is. It’s obvious by how she’s always scanning her surroundings when she’s out and about. She takes different routes into the city when she goes to work, and she carries a gun in her purse. Through her windows, I’ve watched her take it out in the evenings before she goes to bed. She carries it upstairs long after her mom and son have gone to bed, and I imagine she puts it under her pillow or by her nightstand.

She’s scared of someone coming after her.

I’m betting that someone is Anatoly.

But still… how the fuck did she get out of prison? Her crime was serious. Yet, here she is, living a free life before paying her dues.

And what in the hell does she do for a living?

That first day I followed her into the city, I was shocked when she drove deeper into the seedier part until she’d finally pulled into an underground parking deck of an abandoned warehouse.

Except… it wasn’t abandoned. There was a box near the rolling steel gate she’d peered into, which I’m sure it scanned her eyes. If that’s the case, she’s once again involved with some high-tech shit. Possibly another hacker group?

Anatoly runs a criminal syndicate loosely known as Kobaloi. His family backing is the Russian mob, but over the years—because he’s smart as fuck—he moved more into black-hat crime. It’s a means of hacking individuals and organizations for monetary profit. It’s far more lucrative than mob work, which basically squeezes lessers to funnel riches up the food chain and launder money. I’m one of a handful of hired muscle he uses for any job he can think of, but mainly for protection.

Mob politics are extremely dangerous, and there are plenty of people who hate Anatoly.

My mind returns to that warehouse. I nab my laptop, which is next to me on the mattress, and boot it up. Google is my friend, and I start to navigate its murky waters of information.

It takes me about an hour of deep diving and testing hunches before I’m able to find out who probably owns the building. It’s buried under three layers of corporate ownership, but I eventually come up with the name Joslyn Meyers.

Of course, everyone who’s anyone knows who she is. She’s an incredibly talented actress and singer who boasts multiple awards. I suppose there could be an argument that the warehouse is actually a secret recording studio or something, but I immediately dismiss the idea. No way it would be protected with security that involves a retinal scan. Music isn’t that valuable.

I dive back into Google to read more news articles. A few more queries reveal Joslyn Meyers is now married to a man named Kynan McGrath, and there’s a wealth of information about him. British, former Royal Marine, and current owner of Jameson Force Security—a huge private contract security company. Looks like it originated in Vegas, and it’s now headquartered in Pittsburgh. The website is sleek, but it’s too vague to give me the answers I need. Some well-worded crap about high-end security services, but the lack of true information makes me believe what they do is very much under the radar. Most likely contract work doing stuff for our government that it just can’t do because of political constraint.

Regardless, this makes a bit more sense. Presumably, Bebe now hacks for the good guys. At least that’s my guess given her skill level. Let’s face it, she’s no dummy if she was able to hack American nuclear codes.

That means she’s probably more protected than I originally thought. I get why she’s wary, too.

I’m relieved Anatoly gave me two weeks. This isn’t something I can rush into.

I put the laptop aside, then lace my hands together behind my head. Staring at the ceiling, I consider the few places Bebe visited over the past few days—to and from work, to the grocery store, and to her son’s school to pick him up. Each day after school, she takes him to the park to toss a football. It’s sweet to watch them together. The kid is clearly her world now.

As far as I can tell, it’s my only entry point to get closer to her.

The kid, I mean.

I decide to hit up the park tomorrow afternoon to figure out how close I can get to them.

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