“Where’s Sabrina?” Hew asked before the last syllable left Britt’s lips.
“Both are still upstairs being questioned,” Douglas declared.
“I want to talk to Julia,” Britt insisted. He needed to know what was going on with Knox. He needed to know what they planned to do to keep Knox?—
His thoughts were interrupted when Hew said, “And I want to talk to Sabrina.”
Britt shot his teammate a curious glance. But Hew’s impassive face gave nothing away.
“Agent O’Toole is with your brother and will come down to fill you in on what’s happening with him when she has the chance,” Douglas assured Britt. “And Miss Greenlee is still talking with Agents Keplar and Maddox.”
Hew seemed to grow six inches. His tone was menacing when he said, “You think that’s a good idea? One of those sonsofbitches could be the rat and?—”
“Never mind that.” Douglas lifted the phone in his hand. “There’s a call for you two.”
“A call?” Hew’s chin jerked back.
“Who is it?” Britt asked as an odd sense of foreboding gripped the back of his neck.
Douglas wiggled the phone. “It’s your blond-haired designer. I don’t know how the sonofabitch found my personal cell phone number. But here we are. And he’s demanding to talk to you. He says it's urgent.”
“Right.” Britt snatched the phone from the fed’s hand before Hew could do the honors. “Ozzie, my man, what have you got?” he said into the phone’s microphone.
“I have been eating at a buffet of the bizarre for twenty-four hours.” Ozzie’s tone was brisk. “Every firewall I’ve jumped, every code I’ve cracked has made me itchy, like someone is watching my every keystroke. But I haven’t been able to figure out who it is. And thentheymade themselves known.”
Britt frowned. “What do you meanthey?”
“Kerberos.”
“Jesus,” Britt breathed. The hairs on his scalp lifted so fast and so high it was a wonder they didn’t jettison themselves right off his head.
For a long time, Kerberos was thought to be a myth, a secret hacktivist organization dreamed up by computer nerds who liked the idea of an all-seeing, all-knowing group that policed the dark web and brought the bad guys to justice.
But the Black Knights had come to know that Kerberos was, in fact, real. Therewasa group of vigilante computer geeks out there who remained anonymous and who seemed to find information even highly skilled white hat hackers like Ozzie couldn’t.
“What did they say?” he asked Ozzie now.
As Ozzie outlined what he’d learned from the supermen of cyberspace, gunpowder began to fill Britt’s veins, and his heart began to thunder in the rhythm of a war march. By the time he told Ozzie, “Got it. Thanks for the call,” he felt as focused and as ferocious as he did when he was dropped into a hot zone behind enemy lines.
Thedingof the elevator bank diverted his attention.
When his eyes landed on the group of people exiting through the silver doors, the center of his sight began to crackle like disco lights, and the edges of his vision began to darken. The feds had confiscated his and Hew’s sidearms and had yet to return them. Which left only Agent Douglas.
“Take out your weapon,” he growled to Julia’s partner as all the restless energy Hew spoke of coalesced into a chilling stillness inside him.
“Wh-what?” Douglas sputtered in confusion.
“Take. Out. Your.Weapon,” Britt snarled each word, not daring to take his eyes off the approaching group.
When the fed only blinked, Britt growled, “Fine. I’ll do it myself.”
Before Agent Douglas could object—or offer any resistance—Britt reached into the man’s jacket and snatched his service weapon from its holster.
A split second later, he aimed his sights between the eyes of the rat.
“What the hell?” Julia, who at some point had changed into another one of her formless pantsuits, stopped in her tracks and stared at him incredulously. Knox, Sabrina, and the agents from South Carolina all followed Julia’s lead and abruptly halted their journey across the lobby.
The guard at the desk jumped up and pulled his service weapon, pointing it shakily at Britt’s chest.
