A Friend in the Dark - Gregory Ashe Page 0,75

on this question?” Hemming, Sam shrugged. “Pet, pet, pet. Honest to God, I don’t know. Maybe when he was growing up, but once we were in the same platoon, we were deployed for too long. He wouldn’t have gotten a dog just to leave it—oh. Uh. Ok. Try bulldog. Actually, Bulldog. Capital B.”

“Are you sure?” Rufus asked.

“That was the name of our camp when we were at Bagram. It’s the only thing close to a pet I can think of.”

Rufus typed it in. Bulldog with a capital B. He perked up when the browser instructed him to choose a new password. “It worked!”

“Of course.”

“Don’t get cocky,” Rufus warned. He sipped his coffee before giving the account a new password. Once successfully inside, he scrolled through the long list of data Jake apparently dumped into the cloud account every Monday morning. “He’s got a lot of text messages from the same number. It’s not any of my burner numbers…. No contact name either.” Rufus looked at Sam. “I’m gonna download it all.”

“Now say something like ‘They’re hacking into the mainframe.’”

“I won’t be your Matrix wet dream.” Rufus tapped at the screen again and then had nothing to do but wait while the download bar inched forward. He set the coffee mug on the desk and walked to the couch. “Hey.”

“Well, hey there yourself, stranger.”

Rufus hovered over Sam. “Last time you were strutting around in your birthday suit, I got a good-morning kiss.”

“You did?” Sam stretched up to kiss him. “Like that?”

Rufus smiled. “Something like that, yeah.”

Sam kissed him again, a little longer this time. When he pulled back, his voice was husky as he said, “I wasn’t joking about that hack-into-the-mainframe comment. You’ve got this crazy, sexy, nerd vibe going on right now. Just try it. Let’s hear how it sounds.”

“There’s something wrong with you.” Rufus looked at his phone when it vibrated in his hand. “Ah-ha, success.” Rufus moved back a few steps, his brow furrowed. “Hang on… these texts look weird.”

Coffee in hand, Sam came to stand at his shoulder. “What?”

“It’s strings of numbers.” Rufus showed Sam the phone. “This first one looks like military time, but what’s the rest of it?”

For a moment, Sam stared at the screen. Then he grabbed his phone from the coffee table, tapped it a few times, and held it out toward Rufus. He had pulled up a maps app, and a pin was dropped not far from where they stood.

“Latitude and longitude,” Sam said. “I don’t recognize the characters there, though. Chinese, Korean, Japanese? No clue.”

Rufus got down into a crouched position and scrolled with his thumb. “Japanese, I think. This character means gold, and when it’s with these other two, it means Friday. I always remembered that because gold was like payday. Don’t ask why I know this.”

“I’ll try,” Sam muttered as he dragged on jeans. “That sounds like a meeting. Day, time, location. Anything else in there?”

Rufus hummed under his breath. “Do you remember old internet jargon?”

“Some.”

“It’s like cruising old sex ads from Craigslist.”

“Let’s see.”

Rufus held up his phone. “2WF—two white females, yeah? 1BM—one black male. So on and so on.”

“1RS.” When Rufus glanced up again, Sam’s face was stubbly innocence. “One redheaded smartass.”

“No need to send a creepy message—you already have me.” Rufus got to his feet.

Sam smiled at that, but the smile faded as he turned to the phone. “That’s some pretty messed-up shit.”

“It corroborates Juliana’s story and what we saw at the house in Queens,” Rufus said. “Jake was backing up digital copies of requests for people, location meetups, fuck—there’s probably costs hidden in these messages too.”

“And he’s got the numbers those requests were sent from, right?”

Rufus glanced at the phone again, already nodding. “Yeah, it looks like it.” He stared at Sam. “The messages weren’t coming and going from Jake’s phone, though. He was backing up another device into his personal account. So… a burner, maybe?” Rufus’s eyebrows shot up at his own revelation. “That’s a small tangible item I might have been trusted to pick up.”

“So where is it?” Sam said, and then he shook his head. “And do we even want to find it?”

“We have to. Jake was killed because of these messages.” Rufus stuffed the phone into his pocket. “But who do we hand it over to?”

“We do what Jake should have done: we make as many copies of this evidence as we can, and we send it to everybody we can think of—starting with Ophelia.”

“And Lampo,” Rufus continued. “Jake clearly didn’t level