Deadly Little Secrets Page 0,45

them.

“Sit down before you fall down,” Pretzky ordered. “You eat yet?”

“Yeah,” Ana managed to reply before she put her head on the table. “I’m just whipped. Like I said. Never been shot at before. Pretty much sucks to be grilled on top of it too. Hate that part.”

“Yeah, me too,” Pretzky admitted, spinning the blinds open so the curious could see Ana was okay. Pearson was hovering at the door. “Yeah?” Pretzky opened the door enough to ask the question.

“I know it’s a bitch, but IT wants to come up, when you’re ready. Want to talk to both of you, and me.”

Pretzky frowned. “Send ’em in. Tell Davis I said to get some drinks for everyone,” Pretzky said with a malicious grin. “He can take the orders when everyone gets here.”

Pearson’s grin was equally feral. “Sure thing, boss.”

“She’ll enjoy that,” Pretzky said, not looking at Ana. “I will too, come to think of it.”

Ana was too tired to censor the laugh that snorted out, or the weary comment. “Davis is a pus-ball.”

Pretzky snickered. There was no other way to describe the sound. “Yeah. Perfect description.”

She didn’t move from her spot at the conference room window, but Pretzky added, in a more serious tone, “Here they come. You up for this, Burton?”

“Yeah. I’m good.” She wasn’t, of course. Far from it. Her brain felt like mush. Her thoughts were running like gerbils on a wheel, and the gerbils were on crack, running like there was a world record at stake.

“Right. Suck it up. Here we go,” Pretzky muttered. “Agents, you know Agent Burton. Thanks, Pearson,” she said and nodded her approval to the woman who settled drinks and cups on the table. “Lay it out for us, Monroe,” she snapped. “What the hell happened, and how did anyone get around our security?”

With Pretzky on the attack, Ana let the conversation—mostly deflection of responsibility and rants about budget—flow around her. One comment finally caught her attention, and she spoke up.

“I caught five ISPs,” she interjected. Monroe, the IT guy, had said he only caught three.

“Five?” Monroe leaned forward, ass-covering forgotten in his interest in a geek problem. “How’d you see five? What were they? Here.” He shoved paper toward her with numbers scrawled on it. “Those were the ones I caught before they self-erased. What’d you get?”

Ana closed her eyes and pictured the screens flashing in front of her mind’s eye. “This one, and this one, I saw. This one I didn’t. Here’s the other three I saw. She neatly printed the series of numbers on the sheet under his scratchings.

“Six then. Damn. That’s a hell of a hacker. Outside the US too,” he said, and Ana nodded.

“What? Where?” Pretzky demanded, yanking the page around to look at it, as if she could determine that from the numbers.

“See this?” Monroe was all eager-teacher now. “This prefix? Yeah. That’s Belgium, Antwerp maybe, or close. This one’s somewhere in, uh…” He paused thinking.

“Turkey. Probably around Izmir, on the coast,” Ana said, recognizing the prefix. Monroe looked impressed.

“Cool. So, yeah, Turkey,” he continued, getting more excited. “This one here is in Canada. That’s probably a bounce though. Most of the Canadian signatures are bounces ’cause not a lot of bad guys in Canada. Too cold, I guess,” he joked, snickering at whatever made that funny for him. He finally noticed they weren’t laughing and said, “Yeah, well, here, this one, that’s somewhere in the Balkans. We caught those a lot back when the US was active there, so I recognize it.”

“What about the other two?” Pretzky demanded.

“Don’t know,” Monroe admitted immediately.

Everyone looked at Ana. “I don’t recognize either of them. Monroe can track them though.” She put the ball squarely back in his court.

“Oh, yeah, yeah, I can track them. But six. Wow. That’s righteous.”

The other IT agent, silent up to this point, finally spoke. “I think one of those is Georgia, the country, not the state.”

“Russia?” Pretzky and Ana said together.

Chapter Eight

“Um, yeah, former Soviet state? Independent now,” the man said.

“Agent…” Pretzky waited for the IT guy to fill in his name. Monroe shot an elbow into his side.

“Oh, uh, Talmadge, sir. I mean ma’am.”

“Special Agent Pretzky,” Monroe hissed.

Talmadge blushed. “Um, sorry. New,” he muttered as if that explained everything.

“Yeah, he took Wade’s place. You know, guy that went to Cisco, big bucks.”

Pretzky looked irritated. “No, I hadn’t heard, but it has no bearing at the moment.” She paused for a moment. “Who’s Perkins, by the way? He was up here before you came.”

Monroe