1st Case - James Patterson Page 0,44

on the wall. “Any new word on who’s doing this, or why?”

I was pretty sure I saw a twinge in Billy’s eye just then. He’d been calm and pulled together the whole time, but this was his sore spot. He looked over to SAC Gruss, and she took it from there.

“Obviously, they’re well organized, with some amount of infrastructure, and certainly a high degree of technical acumen,” she said. “Not to mention funding. Beyond that, it could be some kind of snuff network, or a hacker collective, or of course a terrorist cell, domestic or international.”

“So you think there’s some kind of larger objective here?” the DC agent followed up. “That maybe all this movement is just some kind of opening salvo?”

Keats answered that one. “We don’t know,” he said. “But it does seem like a lot of trouble to go to, just to find people to kill.”

You could feel the edge in the room. Nobody was comfortable with how little we had so far.

“Whatever they are, they’re up to fifteen million unduplicated copies now,” Zack Ciomek chimed in. “Which, again, points to some kind of larger-scale operation.”

I wanted to speak up in the worst way. I wasn’t as ready as most in the room to dismiss the idea that these attacks might be taken at face value. Everything they’d done so far was unprecedented in hacker circles, but by the same token, it was just a bigger version of what you might expect from people like that.

There’s no hacker on the planet who wouldn’t want to see his work duplicated on fifteen million devices. It could have easily been its own objective, just to see how far they could take it. In my mind, it all felt like giant egos run amok. The attention seeking. The showy programming. Even the murders.

But I didn’t have anything more than my gut instinct and an aborted grad school education to back me up on that one. Presumably, Keats and Gruss were privy to all kinds of data I hadn’t seen.

And if nothing else, I’d already gotten far more attention that day than I wanted. So I kept my thoughts to myself.

For the time being, anyway.

CHAPTER 48

“HEY, ANGELA, WAIT UP!”

I put my hand on the elevator button. Keats nodded at the two security guards as he passed, got on with me, then waited for the doors to close.

“You okay?” he asked once we were heading down.

“I’m fine,” I said. “I’m not going to let this throw me.”

“Maybe you should,” he said. “You know. Worry a little more?”

“Where have I heard that before?” I asked. “Oh, right. Everywhere.”

“Angela—”

“It’s not like they didn’t already know who we were,” I told Billy and kept going before he could cut me off. “Besides, I’m meeting my new boyfriend, George, right down here in the lobby.”

George Yates was the retired agent who had the dubious pleasure of being my first security officer. He was going to be with me through the night.

“What about you?” I asked. “Are you okay?”

The elevator hit the ground floor and we stepped out into the lobby. I saw George outside by his car and held up a finger to let him know I’d be right there.

“We never got a chance to talk,” Billy said. “After last night, I mean.”

“I know.”

I think he was expecting me to be on pins and needles about it, which was sweet, in a way. But not really necessary.

“Last night was incredible,” I said. “You were incredible. Just what I needed. But I know the deal here, Billy. I know all the reasons why it was a mistake, and I know that none of them are personal.”

Billy never would have used that word—mistake. In his own way, he was a gentleman. But he didn’t contradict me, either.

“I’m not sure what to say to that,” he said.

“It’s fine,” I told him. “Besides, who knows? Maybe we’ll get to make the same mistake again sometime.”

“No, no, no,” he said. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but that can’t happen again.”

“We’ll see,” I said, partly because that’s what I thought. But also because Billy was fun to mess with. It was like coming full circle, back to Office Flirtation 2.0. “I’d better get moving. My guy’s waiting.”

It could have been uncomfortable. Maybe it even should have been. But it just wasn’t. Billy seemed to vibe with me about it, too, and my joke glanced off him without any tension.

Which of course only made him hotter. Dammit.

When we got outside, Billy stopped to