Page 92 of Into the Fire

Her left cheek tightened, a lopsided scowl. “And if you die?”

Joey armored over her vulnerability with anger. He knew this. And yet the quickness of it surprised him every time.

“If I die,” he said, “take care of Dog.”

Joey turned away from him. “That’s not funny.”

“It’s a little funny.”

But this earned no response. She was lost again to the myriad screens, leaning forward, chewing her lip. And then she stiffened. “Goddamn it.” She flopped the keyboard onto the stretch of curved desk before her. At the clatter, Dog the dog tucked his tail and scurried out of the pod. She glared after him. “Some lion hunter you turned out to be.”

Evan gestured at the inscrutable wall of code on the monitor. “What’s wrong?”

“First of all, you’re pointing at the wrong monitor.” She grabbed his wrist and swung his finger to the adjacent screen, which contained an equally inscrutable wall of code.

Feigning forbearance, he waited for her to explain.

She didn’t disappoint. “The shitty SIM outfit leases their cell towers from real companies. Which means they can’t keep location logs—no access. So I can’t pin down where the caller is.” She rocked back in her gamer chair so far that he thought she might topple over. “Incompetence can be an infuriatingly effective defense.”

Sometimes she was almost as quotable as Jack.

He could sense her magnificent brain powering away, could practically feel the heat rising from her head. He knew to keep his mouth shut and let the engines churn.

Scrunching her eyes tight, she flipped her mane of brown-black hair to one side, revealing the shaved strip above her right ear. Ten seconds passed, and then ten more. He was about to clear his throat pointedly when she said, “Unless.”

“Unless what?”

She bounced forward, her hands locking back onto the keyboard as if magnetized. “We do it in real time.”

“Track the call.”

“Yeah,” she said. “If you make a live call, I can capture the IMEI with my Stingray.”

“And triangulate the cell towers.”

“More like advanced forward link trilateration,” she said. “But we can’t expect the mouth breathers to grasp the difference.” She held up her fist.

He bumped it. “Indeed not.”

“If it’s an urban area with denser cell towers, I can pin him within fifty meters. Rural could be a miles-wide zone, which is tougher. But also easier ’cuz, like, fewer buildings.”

“I know, Joey. Even the mouth breathers can grasp—”

She plucked the Turing off the desktop, a cord swaying beneath like the tail of a kite. She shoved it at Evan. “Go. Talk.”

“Do I have to keep him on the line for a certain amount of time?”

“Yeah,” she said, “especially if you teleport into a movie from 1987.” She spun around on the chair, and Evan had to lean back to avoid getting kneecapped by the armrest. Tucking into another section of her circular desk, she cluttered the screens with windows that, he gleaned, showed the inner workings of several telephone networks. “Just do your whole Nowhere Man thing. You know”—now a self-important frownie face with a husky voice—“‘Do you need my help?’ ‘How did you get this number?’ ‘Hold on, I have to crack some walnuts between my buttocks.’”

Her impression of him was accompanied with more head wagging than seemed fair. But then again: artistic license.

“That’s totally off the mark,” Evan said. “I usually crack the walnuts in my chin cleft.”

But she was dialed in to the monitors now, the scroll reflecting like rainfall in her deep green eyes.

The heat thrown off by all the hardware was starting to get to him. Gripping the phone, he pushed up from his lean against the inner desk and a surge of unsteadiness hit him. He staggered to right his balance and put his hand down hard on Joey’s keyboard.

Her head snapped over. “What’s going on?”