Burning Bright (Peter Ash #2)(69)

They walked through a gate in a sturdy picket fence. A dog began to bark somewhere inside. The yard was a mix of shrubs and perennials, messy but blooming in the spring weather. The porch was new cedar, the front door painted bright yellow. The dog got louder. A girl, maybe fifteen or sixteen, opened the door a crack before Peter could knock.

“What do you want?” She kept the security chain on and spoke through the gap.

Good girl, thought Peter. He could see a sliver of long brown hair, caramel-colored skin, and worry lines on her forehead. She looked more than a little like the man who’d been thrown from the Suburban and bashed in his head with a rock on landing.

She kept the dog, a big German shepherd, back from the door with her leg, but it growled deep and low behind her. June bumped Peter slightly with her elbow, signaling him to move out of the way. “Hi,” she said. “We’re looking for Martin Alvarez. Is that your dad?”

“Not home,” said the girl. And moved to close the door.

“How about your mom,” said June.

“She’s gone,” said the girl. “Years now. Just me and Dad. And he’s not home.”

Peter peered through the crack in the doorway, trying to get some sense of Alvarez. He wasn’t willing to break the door down. He had the logging truck driver’s gun tucked awkwardly into his jacket pocket, but he didn’t want to have to shoot the dog. This girl was going to have worse problems soon enough.

June kept talking. “Do you know when he’ll be back?” she asked. “We’d like to talk to him.”

“Home tonight,” said the girl, her mouth tightening up. “What’s this about?”

She was worried, thought Peter. Maybe her dad was supposed to call, and hadn’t.

Because he was dead.

He looked past the girl into the house, looking for anything useful, some piece of stray information.

The living room was neat as a pin, despite the big dog and absent dad. A few potted plants looking green and healthy, a big sectional couch, a leather recliner, and a wall of shelves built around a giant television. Photos in frames, hard to see in detail at that distance but they looked mostly like just two people, one big, one small. And a teddy bear, sitting up high on a shelf like he was king of the hill, likely some cherished reminder of the girl’s childhood.

He was starting to wish he hadn’t looked.

June said, “We’re trying to find your dad. But he’s not answering his work phone. Did he give you any emergency contact numbers? Any other way to reach him?”

“He works for the government,” said the girl, lifting her chin in a mixture of pride and defiance. “Sometimes he’s hard to get hold of. But we take care of each other.”

June blinked at Peter, trying to keep the sorrow from her face.

Peter looked at the girl, so much older than her years. “Thanks, hon,” he said. “We won’t bother you again. If you have someone to call, any other family or even friends, you should do that.”

They turned and walked down the steps, the girl still staring at them through the crack in the doorway.

At the car, June handed Peter the keys. “You better drive,” she said, tears running down her face.

Peter started the engine. He put his hand on June’s arm.

“You were there on that mountain road,” he said quietly. “Alvarez was no innocent. It was them or us.”

“I know,” she said. “It was his choice. But not his daughter’s. She didn’t have a choice.”

Peter took a breath and let it back out. “Yeah.”

He put the engine into gear and got them out of there.





35





June had had the next address plugged into Peter’s phone so he could find his way through the twisting streets.

She opened her new laptop. “Let’s try the algorithm while we drive. Maybe I can get something more on that lawyer.”

She took out a piece of paper and copied a URL into the browser on the laptop.

“Wouldn’t your mom already have tried that?”

“Maybe. But she also said it’s getting better. Smarter. And we know more about the people who tried to kill us.”

The URL was just a long string of random-appearing numbers and letters.

“That’s it? The algorithm? The skeleton key?”

“Tyg3r,” she said, and hit Return, turning the laptop so he could see the screen.

He glanced over. The first thing that struck him was how simple it was. Completely blank except for a blinking cursor inside a text box with a single line below it.




You are not authorized.

“Shit,” she said.

“It doesn’t know you’re you,” Peter said, navigating in the slow traffic. “Remember, it found you on your phone because you’d logged in to your email. Which you should maybe undo, actually.”

He was remembering the surge in Iraq. The NSA had helped take down AQ fighters by getting access to Iraq’s emerging cellular network and tracking all cell and text traffic. There was no reason to think that the hunters couldn’t do the same.

“I did that yesterday,” she said. “I forgot to tell you. I shitcanned that phone and bought a new burner. I can always go to an Internet café to check my email. But that doesn’t help me here. There’s not even a security question. The name of my first dog or whatever.”