CHAPTER ONE
Jorja Buchanan heardthe notification chime from her computer all the way from the kitchen and glared over her shoulder toward her office. “You couldn’t wait until my noodles were cooked?” She flipped off the stove and moved the pan off the burner. “Of course, you couldn’t. It’s always the second my food is almost ready that you decide to ping at me.” After checking twice that the burner was indeed off, she grabbed her wine tumbler and went back to her office. A kitchen fire wouldn’t be ideal. While it might bring a bunch of firefighters, the ones in her town weren’t of the sexy variety. She also didn’t need to draw attention to herself.
“Show momma what you got.” She moved the mouse to light up the screen. Playing around down here on the dark web had its dangers, but sometimes she found little gems like this site she’d seen mentioned in a chat box on another page. At least she hoped it would be a gem. She had clients all over the world, looking for the latest information on artifacts coming up for sale. If she could direct some of the richest people on the planet to an obscure piece before it went onsale to the general public, then her commission was enough to keep her in good coffee, wine, and books for years at a time. She scowled at the pop-up box telling her to check her email. “Damn, this better not be a phishing site.”
She flipped through the screens to her disposable email and clicked on the new message, breathing a sigh of relief when it gave her a password and didn’t ask her to click on a link. She copied the ten-digit number and went back to the other screen before pasting the code into the box. It took so long for the swirly circle to stop that she was about to go back to the email and recopy the number in case she’d added a space to the end the first time when the page finally loaded. “Let’s see what you’ve got.”
She steeled herself against the filth she was probably about to see. Most of these sites had screenshot notifiers, where the site host was notified if a user took a screenshot. She reached for her phone and made sure the charging wire was plugged in. While finding artifacts was her bread-and-butter business, if she happened to stumble upon some useful information to forward to the authorities and bring down some scumbags, then she wanted to be prepared to take photographs.
“Guns. More guns. Weapons. Delivery services. I do not want to know what kind of deliveries you are doing, buddy.” She kept scrolling down the listings. “Where are the artifacts?” Just when she thought this site was going to be another bust, she found a list called ‘disposal, no repairs.’ Maybe someone had some broken items which needed to be refurbished. She had clients for those too. Mostly museums, but they would gladly take an obscure piece off her hands. She tucked her left foot in under her, and got comfortable to read down the list, and clicked the link.
She picked up her wine tumbler and put it to her mouthwithout taking her eyes from the screen. When she didn’t get the mouthful of wine she was expecting, she lowered the tumbler and slid back the button. Sometimes having a tumbler which closed was a pain in the ass, but not having one which was spill proof was a recipe for disaster when you had a habit of knocking crap over. Finally, sipping on her wine, she went back to the list, taking photos with her phone as she went. Most of it was in Russian. Thankfully, the translation app it had, crappy as it was, was good enough to translate everything into English. “Damn, just a list of names. Well, that was a waste of ti—” She cut herself off and leaned in closer to the screen when a name caught her eye. “Gunnar McKinley.” She hovered over his name with the mouse. “Aren’t you a blast from the past?” She remembered the McKinley brothers who’d attended the same high school she had back in Baltimore. She remembered the tall, light-haired teenager, with a stubborn streak a mile wide. Nobody messed with any of the younger McKinley boys, not unless they wanted Gunnar—well—gunning for them.
It couldn’t possibly be the same man though. The last she’d heard, Gunnar McKinley had joined the military straight out of school—all of the boys had. He had no reason to be listed on the dark web with the kind of people who played around down here. “Why are you on the list with all these other men?”
She half stood out of her chair to grab her other laptop. “Let’s see if it is him. Then you can decide if he’s migrated to asshole territory.” She made sure she was connected to a different IP address, then opened up the search engines. Finding things was her jam. Locating information on Gunnar should be easy peasy.
Ten minutes later, she was questioning her own abilities. All she’d been able to find was redacted military records. “It’s like he’s dropped off the face of the earth.” She tapped herfinger on her chin and glanced back at her main computer. “Well, that’s weird.” It took a couple of seconds for her to figure out what had changed. Three of the ten names on the list had a line scratched through them and initials in brackets after them. The clock behind her chimed ten, reminding her that she was supposed to be working, and not looking to see if the teenaged heartthrob Gunnar had become one of the sexiest men on the planet as the cheerleaders used to speculate. “Even if he did, he isn’t going to pay your bills or buy you those pretty hardback covered books of Riley’s. Get your butt back to work.” Deciding it was better to take her own advice, she clicked out of the list and went back to scrolling down the listings. When she had found something for her clients, she could go back to daydreaming about the hottie that was Gunnar McKinley… just like she used to as a teenager.
By the time she looked up from the computer again it was almost two in the morning. The traffic on the street below her apartment had quieted down to an occasional car. Even the neon lights of the bar across the street were now off. She got to her feet and stretched her arms over her head to work the kinks from sitting in one position for so long out of her back. All the hours spent poring over the computer had resulted in a short list of possibilities for her to investigate. But that could wait until tomorrow. For now, in her head, she could hear her bed calling her name from all the way down the hall.
Jorja made sure she disconnected from the internet and pressed the button to put her computer to sleep. Her clients knew she worked on German time. They would wait for her to wake in the morning before they asked for an update. She double-checked her door was locked and made a beeline for her bedroom.
One of the benefits of working from home most of thetime was that she didn’t have to change into her jammies before she went to bed. She grabbed the TV remote from the dresser inside her bedroom and switched on the TV. Here in her bedroom was the only place she had a TV. Her living room doubled as her office, and a TV there was a distraction she couldn’t afford. While the TV connected to the internet, she went to the bathroom to do her nightly routine.
Coming back to our main breaking news,the TV anchor’s familiar voice filtered through to the bathroom,former Russian KGB agents Vladimir Karamazov and Maxim Sokolov’s bodies were found earlier this evening at a spa in Hong Kong.
Jorja paused with her toothbrush in her mouth.
Huh, those are the names from the list.
She leaned out the bathroom door as if seeing the TV screen would make it easier to hear what was being said.
The Kremlin has yet to release a statement,the woman on TV continued,but speculation is rife that these two deaths were as a result of a hit organized by the Russian President.
Shit. Was that a hit list?
She spat out the toothpaste, hurried back to her computer, and powered it back up before reconnecting to the internet. By the time she got all of her security measures in place and navigated back to the dark site, the link to the list had disappeared from the main page. “Shit, that can’t be good.” This right here was why she took pictures. Stuff on the dark web had a habit of disappearing when you least wanted it to. She grabbed her phone and pulled up the photos she’d taken earlier. There they were, the two names mentioned on the news. “Vladimir Karamazov and Maxim Sokolov.”
Three names below those two was the name which had led her down memory lane earlier, Gunnar McKinley.
It can’t be him.
As she went back to her bedroom, she decided if it did happen to be the same man, there wasn’t anything she could do about it.
There has to be thousands of Gunnar McKinleys in this world. Right?
As she climbed into bed, she listened to the speculation from the news anchors about the two men. Possibilities and reasons swirled in her mind. There was no way she was going to be able to settle down until she figured out the puzzle which fate had thrown her tonight. “Damn it, I won’t be able to sleep until I know.” She went back to the living room to grab her second laptop. At least if she was working from bed, she could tell herself she was relaxing and it wasn’t work.
After multiple searches through every database she knew of and was able to access, all she could find were redacted military records. “Why is there nothing on him? Everyone has a footprint online. Everyone!” She cocked her head to one side, trying to remember his younger brothers’ names. “Colt. That’s one.” She repeated the search for Colt McKinley and repeated the process for Remi and Talon when links from their old high school page connected them together, and once again came up empty-handed. “This isn’t possible.” She wasn’t the best hacker on the planet. Hell, she probably wasn’t even in the top twenty percent. But she was good enough that she should be able to find something. Google normally knew everything and could find anyone. “If they are living in the Stone Age, then there is only one way to get answers.”
She picked up her phone, punched in a number from memory, and put the phone to her ear as she waited for her call to be answered.
“Hello.”
“Hey, Momma, it’s me.”
“Jorja, baby. You must have heard me thinking about you.”
