Burning Bright (Peter Ash #2)(48)

“Not on this machine. When I get home, I’ll have more resources.” She set down the tablet and picked up her phone. “I just want to get my email accounts set up.”

“Right,” said Peter. “If you can’t check email every ten minutes, your head will explode.”

“We can’t all be antiques.” She was swiping at the small screen, not looking at him. “Do you even have an email address?”

“Sure.”

“When was the last time you checked it?”

He had to think. “A month ago?”

She snorted. “How are you even employed?”

“I’m on sabbatical,” he said. “And I’m not interested in the virtual world anyway.”

He wasn’t going to admit to being unemployed. Or living out of his truck, for that matter. Regardless, he didn’t need to be employed, not ever again, although he had complicated feelings about that.

June didn’t seem to be paying attention to him, anyway. After a few more minutes with her nose to the screen, she set her phone on the center console, pillowed her jacket against the door, and closed her eyes. “I think I’ll crash for a while.”

Peter started to answer, but stopped himself. She’d already fallen asleep, her mouth partway open.

He watched the darkened landscape, dimly lit. From inside the car, he couldn’t tell whether he was moving through the land or he was stationary and the land was passing beneath him.

After a few minutes, June began to snore.

She sounded like a rhino with a sinus infection.

But those freckles. And that attitude.

Oh, man.





21





Three hours later, the fuel gauge getting low, Peter pulled off the highway.

June came awake on the ramp and hopped out of the minivan at the pumps. She paced back and forth under the unearthly gas station lights while he filled the tank. She talked a mile a minute, as if she’d been thinking in her sleep.

“So our guys, they’re definitely pros,” she said. “They’re ex-Army, and working for somebody who doesn’t want to be known. Some kind of hidden operation.”

“Yeah,” said Peter. He needed more coffee. “They actually could be government, you know. Off-book groups have been known to pretend to be in the private sector. It’s the easiest way to hide from oversight. And you could understand why Uncle Sam would want the algorithm.”

“Anybody would want it,” she said. “If you had a tool to sneak into secure systems? The G would want to keep it for themselves. Private groups would use it for corporate espionage, to steal government information, industrial secrets, intellectual property of all kinds.”

Peter leaned against the minivan and rubbed his eyes. June had clocked a pair of decent naps that day, but Peter had been on the go since first light, and had slept in a tree the night before. June talked on, powered by the idea, walking and talking and checking her email on her phone at the same time. The woman clearly had a lot of energy.

“You could sell it as a service—place your order, tell us what you want, we’ll get it for you. The Chinese and the Russians would go crazy for that. Want the design specs for the Reaper drone? No problem, but it’s gonna cost you. If you aren’t that ambitious? Shit, just break into the banking system and transfer a bunch of money into a few hundred numbered accounts, then send it all over the world. If you were smart, you’d take a hundred dollars from two million people’s accounts over a few months’ time. Most people wouldn’t even know it was gone, they’d just think they lost an ATM receipt. If you went into corporate accounts, you could steal billions. It might not even be reported, because it would be so embarrassing. Hide your tracks in Belize, and your money in Switzerland.”

“A killer app,” he said, then felt bad about it. Her mom.

She glanced at his face and stopped pacing. She put her hand on his upper arm. “You look pretty wiped. My turn to drive, okay?”

He nodded. Her fat lip was turning purple, the dark stitches still shocking in her pale skin, but the ice seemed to have stopped the swelling. Her freckles were arrayed across her face like some complex constellation whose meaning he was still trying to fathom. Her eyes shone with intelligence and humor and, maybe, something else. There was no way the heat of her hand could make it through the thick fleece of his jacket, but he felt its warmth anyway.

She said, “Give me a minute to grab coffee and Twizzlers. You get some sleep.”

He cleared his throat. “Yeah,” he said. “Sure.”

? ? ?

HE WOKE AS they were coming up on Seattle from the south, June humming softly in the driver’s seat. The medical boot was tight on his left leg. He hated it already, the limitations. What if he had to move fast to protect her?

The clock on the dash said 11:45 a.m. Freeway traffic was heavy and rain splattered on the windshield in fits and starts. The airport sprawled on their left, then a futuristic elevated commuter railway. Dense vegetation and thick stands of trees climbed the fog-shrouded hillsides to their right. Everything was so green, and it was only March. In northern Wisconsin, where Peter grew up, the ground would still be covered with snow, with more snow falling into April. And May.

June pulled off the freeway well before downtown. “I want to make a quick stop before we go to my place. The address for that company SafeSecure is only a mile or so from here.”