four DEA agents.
In the next room, Ella was on a video call with her boss, Lincoln Dobbs, as well as several others in Virginia, and Dallas, Lund, and their boss, Alexander Higa. I was sitting out of range of the camera, as I was not with the DEA or the FBI, but Ella was fragile and insisted I attend. Her life had changed in a blink, and she was having trouble finding her equilibrium. I was there to help with that, and, I was certain, she wanted to keep an eye on me. She was taking no chances that I’d disappear on her again, despite my many assurances to the contrary.
She explained about the people Murray killed, her original team, many other DEA agents, as well as Rojas, his latest law enforcement victim. Files were put up on the screen that she walked everyone through, the money trail, the drug trail, and the fact that there were photos was mind blowing. She hid her pictures, amazingly enough, on Flickr, in her private Photostream. Who would have thought to look there, or would believe she’d hide something so sensitive on a community platform? It was risky as hell, but it worked, so along with beautiful sunset photos from years before she was with the cartel, there were pictures of drug deals in progress and crystal-clear black-and-white shots of ledgers, shipping manifests, and contact information for a whole variety of people that had not been, until now, on the DEA and FBI radar. It was a mountain of evidence that would ensure a conviction and a long stay in a federal prison. The issue at hand was figuring out where Murray was. His whereabouts could not be confirmed, and an hour later, Dobbs made the official announcement. “Murray is in the wind,” he informed the room, but directed the comment to Ella. “We were able to empty your apartment there in Sinaloa, as well as your original place in Guadalajara, of all personal belongings before anyone else arrived.”
She jolted in her chair. “He doesn’t know my real name, does he?”
Dobbs squinted at her. “Unfortunately, we had a breach. We believe someone in the organization got hold of a hacker on a terrorist watchlist there in Cancun.”
She started to hyperventilate, and I got up and crossed over to her, squatting down beside her chair as she turned to face me, both hands in mine.
“Breathe,” I told her gently. “I mean”—I cleared my throat—“what would Javi say?” Instant scowl, and I winced in reply, my face clenched up like I was embarrassed for her. “Because, you know,” I said, laying it on, “maybe this is too much for you.”
She growled, and her head lifted, shoulders squared, and she turned steely eyes back to her boss.
I glanced at Dallas, who was squinting at me in question. I gave him a slight shake of my head and was going to walk back out of the camera frame.
“Mr. Esca.”
Turning, I faced the bank of flat-screen monitors. “Yes, sir?”
Dobbs cleared his throat. “The hacker was looking for anything he could find on Special Agent Guzman, but when he tried to access her files, his entire system crashed like a kill switch was triggered.”
I waited.
“So was there a breach or not?” Higa asked him.
“There was,” he replied, looking at Higa as he answered. “We saw the hacker enter the system, we were powerless to stop it, but as soon as there was an attempt to access Agent Guzman’s records, or I should say, to access Lucia Diaz’s records, he was shut down. There were two more attempts from different IP addresses, with the same result. By the time the fourth hack was attempted and detected, our system had learned the signature, and the firewall was able to block the attack,” he finished, his focus back on me.
I remained silent.
“Can I assume that you’ve already been debriefed by your employer, and that you expressed your concern that Agent Guzman might be the target of a cyberattack?”
“I did, yes,” I replied, because why would I lie about that? When I had texted my boss with a status update on the way to the field office, I told him where things stood at the moment, told him Murray was the big bad, and that my friend, Ella Guzman, was in his crosshairs. The rest, I was sure, her alias, et cetera, Jared Colter could figure out for himself.
He cleared his throat. “I have it here that you work for Torus Intercession?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You