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“Gosh, if I had the money…. You should get them.”
My hum was more of a weighted sigh. The distraction was good, but guilt and fear were eating me alive even for stopping long enough to make a call.
“Hey, are you okay?” Cara asked, the noise in the background disappearing. “Did I catch you at a bad time?”
“No,” I reassured her. “I’m just stressed out. I have this research to get done for class, and I’m worried about what it means.”
“Doesn’t make it easier when Professor Reid seems to ride you harder than the other students.”
I bit back a snort of laughter at her unintended pun. She was absolutely right; he did ride me harder.
“It sucks that he expects a higher standard of work from you.”
“I don’t mind it,” I murmured, playing with Moragreiga’s glasses again. “That’s the kind of research I do for a living, so it makes sense he expects more of me.”
“What do you do?” she asked curiously. “Your shoes are too pretty for you to be a broke student.” Her laugh had a pretty tinkle to it, feminine and a little nervous.
I huffed out a laugh, hating that I had to use my cover employment with Cara. I couldn’t explain it, but I really liked her. She put me at ease, and her friendship wasn’t contrived. She was genuine. “I’m actually a cyber investigator for the Federal Police. Ezra is technically my boss.”
“Oh.”
There was a momentary pause, and my gut twisted. Did that put her off being friends? I’d never been worried about that kind of thing before, but I found myself wanting to open up and talk to her.
“Oh, sugar!” she exclaimed. “I yelled at your boss? I mean, he shouldn’t be mean to you, especially outside of work—or during work for that matter. But you should have told me! I didn’t put your job at risk, did I—”
She cut herself off, and I couldn’t help my snort of laughter. Ezra was acting like anything but my boss the night Cara had met him at the pub. He was grumpy and fighting himself, wanting to join our relationship but holding back because of his friendship with my dad.
“It’s okay; you didn’t put my job at risk. He actually apologized afterward, so even he acknowledged that he was wrong.”
“I’m glad to hear you laughing again, Zali. I like it when you do that. It makes me happy too,” she said.
Her comment hit me square on in the chest, and I wished that I was right there next to her so I could hug her.
“Thank you,” I said quietly, unsure of what else to say. I hadn’t had a girlfriend before. Flynn had been my best friend since we were kids, but I’d never connected with a girl like I had with Cara.
“Get back to what you were doing and take a break in an hour. I’m going to put these shoes and bag on hold for you. Call back during your next break and pay for them. Then, call me when you’ve done that, and if I’m still here, I’ll pick them up for you.”
My chest squeezed and I grinned. “Sounds like a plan.” We said our goodbyes, and I turned my attention back to the screen.
Transaction data allowed me to follow the digital trail left behind. But for two out of the three accounts, the trail was cold. Some of the ISPs had shut down. The IP addresses used were dynamic, changing frequently, and every one I checked out was long gone.
The transactions on the third account—the one used more recently—kept resisting my attempt to trace it. The VPN used was CIA quality. I could crack the codes—it wouldn’t be any harder than getting into the Grande Banque Uni—but I wanted a faster option than chasing my tail for weeks.
There had to be another way.
Pushing my fingers into my hair, I massaged my scalp and tried to stretch out the kinks in my neck. I needed to come up with a different approach. But what?
Time slowed as my mind ticked over all the options. Every one of them ended the same way—at a dead end.
Except one.
If I couldn’t follow them, maybe I needed to lure them out. Get them to do the chasing. They’d threatened Tristan. They had some knowledge of what he was doing. They were keeping tabs on him in some way.
That was it. Tristan was the key.
Wrapping up in 2021, the Federal Police ran Special Operation Ironside. They had developed an app with an encoded messaging function that was accessible only on stripped back phones—ones that weren’t capable of making calls or sending emails. The app resulted in smashing more organized criminal activities than perhaps any other on record.
The app had undergone a complete overhaul. It had been expanded into a dark web marketplace, that part of the internet that wasn’t traceable and gave users complete anonymity. Except only the gateway to the site was on the dark web. Once users gained access, the site cloned itself. User interfaces, and even the underlying code, matched those on the dark web, but the marketplace actually operated on the deep web. The site whisked away data on users, creating a trail for law enforcement agencies to follow. Cyber investigators creamed their pants over it.
