A broker.
“Do you know how I get to him?”
“No. I have never encountered him. There is only a rumor I heard.”
“What rumor?”
“You cannot find them until they want to find you.”
I understand. I need to put myself on their radar.
“Thank you, Rose,” I say.
“Be safe, Kiddo,” she says and hangs up.
What neither Rosalia nor the Lords know is that I now have something they won’t see coming: Zeus on a closed system. The laptop I took from Lilian's office. By doing so, I not only broke her trust but now also officially conspired against the government of the United States—but it was a one-in-a-million chance, one I had totake.
Lilian does well to hate me.
I take every precaution I can before I open the laptop. Meaning I use an open network in a cafe with no surveillance, wearing a hood pulled deep over my face and glasses to conceal myself even as Ella.
I don’t know Zeus's code, so I don’t know which parts are on-device and which use cloud computing and require closed server access. What I know is that there will be security mechanisms in place to handle external requests within the closed system, so I am ready to either vanish quickly or defend myself.
My plan is to act as quickly as possible, fetch what I need, and become a shadow again.
I have to crack the password first, but since I saw nine of the sixteen digits she typed, my cracking tool cracks it in under ten seconds.
Lilian's search for the employee is still open, and I cross-reference him to everything I got from the man I killed. First and foremost, locations and contact overlaps.
Zeus gives me four results. Three communications to the same number, one time in the same place. A warehouse in New Jersey, owned by a company named Iscariot Industries. It makes me suspicious. Because Judas's last name, the one who betrayed Jesus, was Iscariot.
I make Zeus give me a movement map of both of them and let it overlay, because I get suspicious. The movements are almost identical, with only three outliers, and I wonder if Zeus could find other people with a similar movement map.
It takes ages, and I glance around nervously, watching the street outside through the cafe’s glass doors. My breathing is agitated. I didn’t plan on being here that long, and every minute bears more risk.
Just when I think I need to stop it, I get a result.
Four more people. All with a contact named Wes Peter, but with different numbers.
And I finally understand.
Wes Peter is the broker. It has to be.
I set Zeus to generate a list of all the numbers it can find for known persons with a contact named Wes Peter; it’s quite long, andI’ll handle the rest with my tools. I pull it onto an external drive. I need to leave.
One name draws my attention, and I freeze.
Robert Grand-Hives. The UK Prime Minister.
“I’ll be damned,” I whisper as I understand that everything is connected.Everything.
I close the laptop and slip out of the cafe’s back door as a precaution, enter the subway two minutes later, and become a nobody among the everybodys.
While I ride the subway, my mind sorts and stacks the new information.
I change subways at the last possible moment at 6 Av, and check if anyone follows me, but no one does.
I pull out my laptop and check what I can find about the building and the company the employee went to.
