were hoping you could tell us. Like I said, your father was an independent contractor. He did some hacking at our request, but for the most part, he followed his own leads wherever they led. If he found something interesting, he’d send it to us, but he didn’t send anything to his handler for weeks prior to his death.”
Kyla remembered the thousands of encrypted files she’d found on his computer. Could something in there tell her who’d killed her dad?
“Do you have any idea where your father did his hacking?” Shaw asked, interrupting her thoughts. “We’ve been looking for where he did his work for a while now so we can recover his files. You wouldn’t happen to have any ideas, would you?”
She had a vision of a bunch of men in suits descending on her dad’s Bat Cave, callously ripping cables from the computers and stripping the hard drives out to make it easier to bypass his passwords and encryption programs. They’d dig through the files, keeping what they thought was interesting and destroying anything that was beneath them—or might lead to uncomfortable questions. And what if they found information about who killed her father? Would they do was was in his best interest or their own?
Kyla met Shaw’s gaze. “Sorry. I don’t know where dad did any of his stuff for the CIA. As far as I know, he did everything from home or his office at work.”
Shaw nodded thoughtfully. “We checked both those places and didn’t find anything.”
She forced herself to not flinch at the thought of the CIA searching her parents’ house without her or her mom’s knowledge. It made her want to punch Shaw in the nose.
Shaw stayed a little while longer, asking more questions about her father. Like where he went and what he did when he wasn’t working. When he didn’t get anything useful from her, Shaw started asking her about personal stuff, such as her college program, her hobbies, and how she knew SEAL Team 5. Shaw probably though he was subtle, but it didn’t take long for Kyla to realize he knew she was a member of The People and that she was a hacker like her dad. The CIA agent didn’t make it blatant, but it seemed like he was trying to recruit her. Though whether he actually wanted her in the agency or as an expendable freelance asset on the side like her dad wasn’t clear.
Kyla didn’t commit one way or the other. She could play this game, too.
“If you don’t mind, I’d like to come talk to you again in a few days after you’ve had a chance to think over our conversation,” Shaw said as he left.
She shrugged. “Sure.”
Kyla forced herself to wait a full thirty minutes after Shaw walked out of her dorm before grabbing her car keys and walking casually to where her Prius was parked in the lot next to the building. She felt naked without her cell phone, but it was too easy for the CIA to track her if she’d brought it. As soon as she was off campus, she drove across town to a car wash, spending an extra long time cleaning the undercarriage of her vehicle in case Shaw had put a GPS tracker on it. Then she took the long way to her dad’s Bat Cave, pulling up in front of the building and going inside only after making sure no one was following her.
It took a few hours to figure out the pattern her father used for his file encryption passwords—a rolling number generator based on the formula for wind loads with Kyla’s and her mother’s birthdays taking the place of the key coefficients of pressure, drag, exposure, gust response, and area.
Yeah, her dad had been a complete and total geek.
After several more hours of skimming through files filled with information he’d dug up while hacking, Kyla came to a far more important conclusion. Her dad had been up to his eyeballs in terrorists, criminals, corrupt politicians, influence peddlers, arms dealers, cold-blooded killers, ruthless dictators, and mega-rich people with psychotic agendas. The people he’d been snooping on were flat out terrifying.
Now all she had to do was figure out which one of them had murdered him.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
WES STIFLED A yawn as he drove to Kyla’s dorm. Thanks to all the aches and pains from his run-in with that white van, then the packing crate that fell on him, he hadn’t gotten much sleep the past two days. The