Page 55 of Lone Wolf

“‘French’ would be too on-the-nose.”

“Fair.” The encasement was firm, giving way unevenly, and Evan kept at it with the tiny hammer. Brushing every last clinging speck off the throat of the bottle, he caught them in a cupped hand before moving to a fresh section of wax. “Jayla Hill said her father reported directly to Allman. That’s gotta be pretty rare in a corporate structure as vast as Solventry’s.”

“Ya think? That’d be like an Orphan talking directly with the secretary of defense. Solventry has something like eight hundred thousand workers. Not everyone gets to sit on Santa’s lap.”

“So whatever Benjamin Hill was on was highest priority.”

“Correct.”

“I have to talk to Allman.”

“Good luck with that. Might as well ask to have high tea with Elon. Or brunch with J. D. Salinger.”

“Salinger’s dead.”

“I’m sayin’.”

Still tapping and brushing archaeologically at the bottle, Evan pondered how he might go about getting to Allman and came up snake eyes. “What’d you find out about Hill’s work?”

“Doc Hill’s system follows a policy of defense-in-depth…” Joey began, her voice slowing as she watched his assiduous advances on the sealed bottle.

Snatching the hammer and bottle from him, she smashed the remaining wax seal with a few vicious strikes. Chunks skittered across the desk onto the floor, a speck of shrapnel hitting Evan just beneath the right eye. Under her continued assault, the extant encasement crumbled across the mouse pad and Evan’s lap. She popped the cork, sloshed a finger of vodka into the rocks glass, and shoved it at Evan.

He took it.

Having accelerated the process to her liking, she continued. “So it’ll be an uphill battle to get in. I have to hack through more layers of encryptions and some tricky protocols and this stupid port-knocking thing that just takes longer.” A glance at Evan to see if he was keeping up. “How can I find language you’ll understand?” She contemplated the herculean task of summoning a sufficiently primitive description for Evan to comprehend. “It’s like peeling an onion.”

“What’s an onion?”

She glowered at him.

He paired her amused distress with a sip of the Beluga Gold. Faintly medicinal nose, creamy thick body, vanilla undertones, and he swore he could make out a trace of Rhodiola rosea extract.

“Plus Hill’s access was terminated,” she said, with I-won’t-dignify-that-with-a-response haste, “so I have to restore Active Directory. Big tech doesn’t waste time. Two seconds after you get shot in the head, they’re shutting down your proverbial cubicle.”

“What about DNA on the ear chunk?”

“I got it to Melinda.”

Evan’s trusted forger, Melinda Truong, ran an antique-movie-poster restoration business in Northridge as a cover for her illicit activities. She had more talent, capabilities, and black-market resources than it made sense for any single human to have.

Joey said, “She needs a day or two but she has backdoor access to all sorts of labs ’cuz Melinda. Also I asked her for help on the Manurhin revolver front since illegally acquired luxury items are her jam.”

“And you’re checking on Jayla Hill?” Evan asked. “The Marshals got her somewhere safe?”

“Put it this way,” Joey said. “I can’t find her.”

“Good,” Evan said. “But the Marshals won’t hold her forever. She’s not a government witness. There’s a ticking clock.”

“So we work faster.”

“How about the missing dog?”

“I’ve been scanning all Web-based surveillance cameras in a five-mile radius around Hill’s town house. I’m using facial-recognition software for Loco.”

“Facial recognition for a dog?”

“Yeah, you canine-phobe. Dogs are people, too. I hacked into a DARPA program they’re developing to track service dogs and stole their algorithms and training set. So I have that running”—a jerk of her head to the north-facing wall of the Vault, where avalanches of code thundered ever downward and various progress bars showed various progress—“because that cloud you’ve heard so much about is cheap, and spinning up ten thousand machines or so to run my parallelized Erlang cluster saves time, and I’m not gonna be the rusty wheel on a Nowhere Man mission.” With a neat jerk of her head, she cracked her neck and flung the mane of hair above her undercut from right to left, the whole thing like a choreographed dance move or peacock display. Then she gave that high-wattage smile that said she was in her best, easiest self. “I’m a Mexican. Not a Mexican’t. You know it’s in my blood to do everything better’n everyone else.”