Into the Fire(75)

She let the phone slip from her cheek and fall into her gaping briefcase. Beside her, Peter tilted back in a partial limbo, his overstuffed backpack sagging past his rear end. He was firing bullets from a paper-towel roll he’d embellished with a Magic Marker, turning it into a futuristic gun.

Right now he was shooting out the overhead lights. “Pew pew pew!” He turned and saw them. “Evan Smoak! And niece-person Joey! And a awesome dog!” He swung around and fired the paper-towel roll at Evan. “Pew pew pew.”

Mia looked how Evan felt: mortified.

“Pew pew pew.”

The doors started to close, and Mia stuck out a foot, knocking the bumpers back. “C’mon, Peter. Let’s go.”

“No,” he said. “He has to shoot back.” For good measure he swept the cardboard barrel to cover Joey, too. “Pew pew pew.”

Mia hustled Peter out of the car, but he bucked away.

“C’mon! You haveta shoot back. That’s how you play.”

Heat crept up Evan’s throat, spread beneath his face. Reluctantly he made a finger gun and aimed it at Peter. “Bang,” he said.

Peter flung himself against the wall, crunching his backpack against the marble. He clutched his chest, gasped theatrically, and slid to the floor, legs splayed before him in a manner not unlike Detective Nu?ez’s final pose.

Mia’s face was flushed, her tone sharp. “Get up right now, Peter. We’re gonna be late.”

As Peter reanimated, Evan and Joey stepped past him into the elevator, tugging Dog the dog with them.

“Wait, I didn’t get to pet the dog,” Peter said as Mia dragged him away. “Mom, can we get a dog? Just a little one?”

The car sealed off Peter’s continued entreaties. As the elevator rose, Evan blew out a breath through clenched teeth.

“What was up with that?” Joey said. “Awkward.”

Evan said, “It’s complicated.”

“Okay, Facebook.”

“What?”

“Nothing.”

They rode the rest of the way in silence.





40



Your Average Lowlife





For what was coming, Evan couldn’t have any tactical gear on him.

No cargo pants with discreet pockets for hiding spare magazines. No Woolrich shirts with magnetic buttons. No Original S.W.A.T. boots. No ARES 1911 or Strider folding knife.

He had to look like your average lowlife.

He grabbed a pair of dark 501s from the bureau drawer and stepped into them.

The door to the bathroom was open, the shower door slid back, the hidden door ajar. And Joey was inside the Vault at the commands, a pilot driving a spaceship, shouting her findings out to him. “Unshockingly, Twin Towers Jail hasn’t updated their security systems in ages! Budget shortfalls, blah-blah-blah. I mean, a noob with a Compaq and a USRobotics dial-up modem writing their hack in Visual Basic could get in here in, like, thirty seconds.” She gave a self-satisfied snort.

Evan went toward the walk-in closet, buttoning his jeans. “I don’t know what any of that means.”

Joey’s voice boomed out at him. “Jail surveillance bad. Joey good.”

At the foot of the bed, a scattering of dog hairs rested on the concrete floor, pronounced beneath the overhead lights. He blinked his eyes hard, opened them, but they remained. He’d have to deep-clean the penthouse when this was over with.

He tore himself from the sight and entered the closet. Past the neatly stacked cartons of boots was a bin holding several pairs of sneakers he’d dragged behind his truck, scuffing them up for undercover work.

This would certainly qualify as undercover work.

“So get this!” Joey shouted. “Like, half of the surveillance cameras are still using the factory default passwords.” She laughed heartily.

It never ceased to amaze him what the girl found amusing.

He stomped into his sneakers and swept the hanging shirts aside to reach a cubbyhole cut into the drywall. A dozen metal cases, each the size of a deck of playing cards, were stacked inside. He slid the top one free and cracked it open. Slotted neatly into the black foam lining were twenty glass microscope slides. An oval of silicone composite film half as wide as a strand of dental floss resided inside each, suspended in a ghostly float.

Fingerprint adhesives.

As he slid the case into his pocket, Joey rattled on. “They have everything hooked up to the Internet. Typical. Like, let’s get everything online and vulnerable and then not update it, ’cuz we’re stupid city bureaucrats. So I banged in there with Shodan.”

“Shodan?”

“Dude, c’mon, X. The search engine for Internet-connected devices? Every device that sends data out has a string that IDs what it is. Shodan searches all those strings, feeds you the geolocations based on the IP addresses. I bust into the cameras, and I’m looking at a bunch of ugly-ass felons sitting in jail. Oh—and a deputy in the control room picking his nose. Aaaand he’s eating it.”

Pulling on a T-shirt, Evan ducked into the bathroom and fingertipped in another specialized contact lens to cover his dilated right eye. Then he yanked open the other drawers, searching their contents.

“I’m gonna drop in a zero-day exploit now,” Joey said. “Make that two, so I have one for insurance. Hang on, and…”