Burning Bright (Peter Ash #2)(85)

She’d been up half the night digging into Charles Dawes IV, also known as Chip.

The other half she’d spent sexually harassing her bodyguard.

He didn’t seem to mind.

They were camped in a sheltered pocket on the edge of a bluff in Discovery Park, a five-hundred-acre natural area where Seattle met the ocean. It wasn’t exactly a suite at the Four Seasons, but she couldn’t ask Peter to sleep in a hotel, not now. Maybe never.

She heard him unzip the tent to let in some fresh air, then the sound of the little backpacking stove firing in the tent’s vestibule. “Coffee in ten minutes,” he said quietly.

“Let’s go out to breakfast,” she said, yawning. “Eggs Benedict, bacon, hash browns.”

“That sounds nice,” he said. “I can offer you trail mix and a banana.”

“I had your banana last night.” She smiled sweetly. “Twice, in fact.”

“I regret to inform the young lady,” he said, bending to brush his lips against the side of her neck, “that was no banana.”

The coffee water boiled over the top of the pan.

? ? ?

EVENTUALLY PETER stuffed the pack with their sleeping bags and the sodden tent, then followed her up the broken bluffs to the wide undulating plateau. The hard rain had diminished to a thin drizzle. A narrow trail led through high grass and wildflowers to the parking lot, where a silver Escalade waited, idling silently.

The driver’s window hummed down and the rear hatch floated up.

“You hobos need a ride?”

Meeting Lewis yesterday was interesting. He had a presence much larger than his physical body. In his black jeans, crisp white shirt, and black raincoat, he reminded her of nothing more than a sleek dark muscle car with the engine idling and the clutch engaged, all controlled combustion just waiting to be released. She should have been scared of him, but she liked him. He made her feel safe. That probably should have scared her, too.

“Your Cadillac got an outlet for my laptop?” she asked him, climbing into the back seat. “My battery’s about dead.”

“Hand me the plug,” Lewis said, reaching back. “I’ll take care of you.” He had the assault rifle barrel-down in the footwell, the stock rising up along his door. She felt her pulse picking up speed. Maybe she didn’t need another cup of coffee after all.

Peter threw the pack into the cargo bay and closed the hatch. Now he hopped into the front passenger seat and dropped the bag of trail mix onto the center console. “Breakfast?”

Lewis gave him an amused look. “I already ate. Salmon omelet, hash browns, two sides of bacon, and a quad mocha with extra whip.”

“Jeez, I knew I should have stayed with you,” June told him. “All I got was a lousy banana. Okay, go straight out of this parking lot. You’ll follow the arterial left, then right again.”

Lewis put the Escalade in gear. To Peter, he said, “Weapons on the floor, wrapped in the towel.” Over his shoulder to June, he asked, “Learn anything new?”

In the car the night before, she’d told Lewis how her mother’s algorithm had ransacked Nicolet’s firm’s servers and found a contract with a company called Citadel Security, signed by Charles Dawes IV, for negotiating the purchase of unnamed intellectual property from unnamed owners. It was the lack of detail in a legal document that made her suspicious. Then Tyg3r had found a report from Nicolet to Citadel that noted four unsuccessful negotiation attempts. The dates of the attempts lined up with the dates of Nicolet’s emails to June’s mom.

“You just wandered into a law firm’s internal network and started reading documents?” Lewis had asked, incredulous. “That’s like strolling into Fort Knox and slipping gold bars in your pockets.”

“There’s more,” June had said. “Last month, my mom tried to use Tyg3r to do the same thing, but failed. The algorithm is learning. Quickly.”

Now she said, “I looked at Citadel overnight. A corporate security firm, only six years old, but becoming a player very quickly. It specializes in defending companies against corporate espionage, both virtual and real.” She poked her arm forward, pointing. “Stay to the right here, then down the hill and across the bridge.”

“Which means they’re probably also working the other side of the fence,” said Peter. “Defending companies, but spying for them, too.”

“Did you get into their servers, too?”

“For about five minutes,” she said. “Not long enough to learn anything. Then I lost the connection. Either they kicked me out or expanded the air gap.”

“An air gap,” Lewis informed Peter, “is when sensitive information is kept disconnected from the Web, to prevent hacking.”

“What, you think I don’t know that?”

Lewis snorted and turned back to June. “What else you got?”

“Citadel is privately held,” she said, “so they don’t have to disclose anything. Tyg3r did get me into the state tax website, which only lists twelve employees. It’s a subsidiary of a holding company based in Belize.”

“And the shooters work for a different company called SafeSecure,” said Peter. “Owned by another holding company. Also based in Belize.”

“The iceberg strategy,” said Lewis. “Mostly invisible, hiding below the surface.”