White-Hot Hack (Kate and Ian #2)(18)

She looked at him strangely and shook her head. “No way.”

He smiled and put his arm around her. “We’ll see about that.” He pulled her close. “Did you get my text about that nap?”

“I did.”

“What did you think about it?”

“I think you should know I’m not tired at all.”

He kissed her forehead, took her by the hand, and led her inside. “Neither am I, sweetness. Neither am I.”





CHAPTER NINE

The next morning, Ian was on his way to meet with the task force by ten o’clock. It was true that in the past, visits to FBI headquarters weren’t often at the top of his list of favorite activities. He chafed at the structure.

The hierarchy.

The rules.

After the first year or two of working with the FBI, Phillip had stopped asking him to come on board as an official agent because he knew Ian would never say yes, but today he might have considered it if Phillip were to suddenly ask, such was his excitement to be part of the task force again. He couldn’t wait to hear what Charlie and the others were working on, and he would forever be thankful for Kate’s blessing.

The task force was a subset of the FBI’s Cyber Action Team, which was housed under the National Cyber Investigative Joint Task Force. Under Phillip’s stellar guidance, they’d worked their way up until they were the premiere task force for domestic cybercrime. If there was a cyber equivalent of the Navy SEALS, they were it. The five-member team—six now that Ian had returned—included some of the nation’s top experts in criminal investigation and code analysis, and no other team was more proficient in identifying cybercrimes that were an emerging threat to the American people.

Before he’d started working with Phillip on the pentesting, they’d spoken at length regarding Ian’s concerns about being seen at headquarters. The FBI often attended hacker conventions such as Def Con and Black Hat and recruited hackers as special agents—hackers who might have once worn black hats or at the very least had friends who still did. The last thing Ian needed was to bump into whoever had doxed him when they passed each other in the hallway. Phillip had shared Ian’s concern, so instead of meeting in his office at headquarters, they’d met off-site in the conference room of a large, nondescript office building half a mile away, kept by the FBI for this very reason. From now on, the task force meetings would also be held there.

Everyone looked up when Ian walked through the door.

“Somebody call it,” Charlie said.

Tom, a seven-year veteran of the task force, raised his hand. “Right here.”

Charlie withdrew a stack of bills from an envelope and shoved the money across the table.

“Thank you, gentlemen,” Tom said as he pocketed the cash.

“You placed bets?” Ian said.

“You didn’t think anyone believed you when you said you were quitting, did you?” Charlie asked. “I gave you ninety days. Clearly I underestimated how long you could hold out.”

“Do you all not remember the part where someone doxed me and hacked my girlfriend—who is now my wife—and I had to break her heart into a million pieces by pretending I was dead? Not to mention put my beloved car in the Mississippi and throw away a company I’d spent ten years building?”

“And yet here you are,” Charlie said with a giant shit-eating grin.

“That’s because Kate insisted I rejoin you.” He sat down and pointed around the table. “May you single men marry half as well as I did.”

Phillip opened the door and hurried into the room. “Welcome back, Ian,” he said as he sat down and pulled a sheaf of papers from his briefcase.

“Did you know they placed bets?”

“Oh, who won?” Phillip asked with interest, looking up from his notes.

“Tom,” Charlie said.

Ian frowned. “I’m disappointed in you, Phillip.”

“All I can say is you’d better hold on to that wife of yours. She’s one of a kind. Okay, we’ve got a lot to discuss, so let’s get to it. Charlie, bring Ian up to speed please.”

“In the past three months, there’s been a string of cyberattacks on several high-profile websites, mostly banks and credit card companies. What appeared last summer to be a series of random hacktivist activity has recently become more organized. In the past month there have been cyberattacks on both the CIA and NATO, which were thankfully unsuccessful. We have reason to believe the same group is responsible for all of them.”

“Sounds familiar,” Ian said. Phillip had been smart to focus on making sure the FBI’s current systems were secure, and the reason he’d asked Ian to do the pentesting was clearer than ever.

“Exactly,” Charlie said.

Several years ago a hacktivist group led by a man named Joshua Morrison had done virtually everything Charlie had just said, right down to the CIA and NATO attacks. The group was already a major thorn in Phillip’s side when they took things one step further and pulled off a successful cyberattack on one of the FBI’s own affiliates, defacing the website and stealing passwords and other sensitive information. Their retaliation had been fierce, and Ian’s infiltration of the group had garnered enough evidence to arrest Joshua and send him to a medium-security federal prison in Oklahoma where he was currently serving a ten-year sentence.