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Chapter 1
Dani
“The guy’s a ghost,” Agent Tom Peterson says as he clicks to the next slide.
He has prepared a whole PowerPoint presentation with cool fading transitions and everything. Too bad nobody here is giving out points for effort. Still, I think it looks nice.
I’m at the front of the spacious conference room, taking diligent notes in the little black Moleskine my little sister, Tabitha, gave me for my birthday. I go through a dozen of these things in a year, my indecipherable chicken scratch covering every square inch of the available pages.
“He has no social media whatsoever,” Tom continues. “No Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, you name it. I don’t think the guy even has an Amazon account. Smart, considering our man’s one of the best hackers in the world. He’s too smart to leave a digital footprint.”
“We don’t even have a picture of the guy?” Agent Lincoln Gomez asks. Gomez is in the very back, chugging his fourth coffee. He hates early morning debriefs as much as Garfield hates Mondays. At least he had the common decency to bring in a box of breakfast muffins for us.
Peterson clicks to the next slide with a small grin, very clearly excited to be asked the question. On the SmartBoard™ that costs as much as my second-hand Toyota, he pulls up a blurry black and white image of someone getting out of a vehicle. The image quality is shit, and there’s an unfortunately placed telephone pole blocking the vehicle’s license plate, as well as the man’s face. All I can tell is he’s tall and maybe has dark brown hair.
“Seriously?” I ask dryly. “This is all we’ve got?”
“Unfortunately.”
“Aren’t his brothers super famous tech company millionaires?”
“Make that billionaires with a capital B, and yes.” Peterson clicks to the next slide, pulling up the images of three very handsome men. They’re not mugshots like I’m used to, but pictures taken from things like the front cover of Forbes and red-carpet events.
Peterson taps on the board and blows up the image of the first man in question. There’s a dignified air about him, like he’s here to talk business and won’t leave until the job is done. He’s ruggedly handsome with a sharp jaw and slight frown. Definitely a silver fox if I ever saw one.
Hot damn.
“Mikhail Antonov, the eldest of the Antonov Brothers. He was the CEO and face of CyberFort for several years before suddenly retiring to Russia.”
Click. The slide changes. This guy looks like he’s fun at parties with his charming smile and brilliant eyes. The photo looks to be a few years old from some sort of charity gala. The tuxedo he wears hugs his body, giving away the width of his chest and strength of his shoulders. If I didn’t know any better, I would have mistaken him for a movie star.
Double hot damn.
“This is Dimitri Antonov, the second oldest. The previous CFO and Public Relations Officer at CyberFort. He also suddenly retired to Russia around the same time Mikhail did.”
Click. There’s a new face on the screen. Harder edges, far darker eyes. The man gives meFallen Angelby Alexandre Cabanel vibes. Very intense, but mesmerizing to look at. The sheer size of him is what truly surprises me. There is strength in those hands, and the way he towers over everyone in the picture with his chest puffed out proud and his smug expression suggests he knows it.
Seriously, did these guys win the genetic lottery or what?
“Pyotr Antonov, the third brother and Dimitri’s younger fraternal twin. Currently, he’s serving as CyberFort’s CEO. I’m sure you all remember the splash he made a few years ago when a rival business mogul, Richard Eaton Jones, accused him of physical assault. The news made the rounds.”
“Those charges were dropped,” I point out with a frown. “They say Jones was harassing Pyotr’s wife. Didn’t Jones hire a drone operator to take pics of the poor woman in her apartment?”
Peterson shrugs. “That was never confirmed. Point is, it was all swept under the rug. Very hush-hush.”
Click. He takes us back to the blurry picture of our target. I want to know what this guy looks like. Is he handsome like his brothers, I wonder. Of course, it doesn’t actually matter to me. I swear my curiosity extends only so far as to know who we’re supposed to be tracking down. Nothing more, nothing less.
“The man of the hour: Luka Antonov,” Peterson says. “The youngest brother and an absolute mystery. We’re pretty sure he’s the programmer behind most of CyberFort’s products.”
I arch a brow. “Pretty sure?”
“Like I said. The guy’s a ghost, and a paranoid one at that. All our recon team’s attempts to gather information on him has proved less than useless. He knows how to cover his tracks. The head honchos in Washington aren’t pleased.”
A murmur breaks out across the room. Washington. He means FBI Headquarters in D.C. If the brass are already bending over and tying themselves up in knots over this guy, hemustbe a high value target. The only question is—
“So who is he?” I ask. “Out with it, Peterson. Leave the edging for your late-night romps with the missus.”
This earns a couple of crass chuckles from the other agents in the room. Peterson laughs, too. We like to rib each other here. Given the dark places our work can take us, it’s better to keep the atmosphere at the office light. I’m not going to lie, it’s definitely a sausage fest at our New York office, so it can sometimes feel like a damn frat house, but I know how to hold my own just fine.
