Remember when you taught me English, Chelovek? I never told you, but my favorite word you taught me was incandescent. Glowing with intense heat. It reminded me of you. And I think, maybe, it reminded you of me, too.
Little Flame
I pocketed my phone, the corner of my lips crooked in a half smile. Did she think she was the cat and I was the mouse in our lethal game? I wouldn’t put it past her. Tierney had always beenan unpredictable creature. It was one of the reasons she held my attention in a death grip.
Now, to find her.
She needed a good forged passport, not some fed honeypot, so I knew Sam Brennan was the one to issue it. He was the best in the business and one of the only people in the country to forge the kind of identification that’d flawlessly pass an automatic counterfeit detection system. She’d need to go through a shit ton of those to get out of the United States and travel between countries. Just as well as I knew the Irish motherfucker was a dead end. Boston’s infamous fixer wouldn’t sell out a client to me, no matter the price.
I also trusted Tierney not to smuggle herself past borders in the trunk of some car. Getting caught was not a chance she’d be willing to take.
Sloppiness wasn’t in her nature.
That left me to do some legwork. Luckily, I never shied away from a challenge.
And I knew just where to start looking.
__________
“You sure there’s no better way of finding her, boss?” Carmine, my soldier, whimpered three hours later in my makeshift computer lab. “There are, like, twenty thousand women in this database.”
“Twenty-three thousand,” I corrected. “And all I’m hearing is that you need to work faster.”
I set up thirty laptops in my parents’ drawing room, putting a soldier in charge of each, with Jeremie overlooking the entire operation.
Contrary to general belief, I didn’t take a liking to Jeremie because he was a good soldier or a decent man. He was neither; the tank-sized Russian was as obedient as a kidney stone.
See, when Alex, Jeremie’s brother, started nagging us to send him back to Vegas not even a month after I took him as collateral, I wondered why the rush. Jeremie was good at fighting, but so was every other shitbag on Alex’s payroll. Jeremie, I’d quickly understood, possessed a unique skill Alex was in need of:hacking.
The night Jeremie had broken into Luca’s security system and erased forty minutes of footage from his bedroom camera, the penny dropped.
Jeremie was a hacker.
A fucking good one.
Thank you, Luca, for being a shit husband who probably fucks his mistresses in his wife’s bed.
Jeremie had the ability to bypass the cybersecurity software of individual airlines, but even more importantly, he could access the government agencies that received travel data in real time. This meant I didn’t need to go on a wild-goose chase, searching for Tierney’s grainy CCTV footage across the country—I could simply find out what alias she was using and see where she was headed.
“Jeremie, how far in are we?” I clapped the Russian’s back. His glacial irises landed on my hand like it was dirt. I kept it there just to piss him off. He returned his attention to the laptop. “Thirty-two percent in. So far, no matches.”
If Tierney had a passport that could get her past airport security, that meant one thing—identity theft. The passport had to mimic an existing one, which belonged to a real person.Presumably, a real person who fell victim to a security breach and was female, between the ages of eighteen to thirty-two, lived in the tristate area, and was white.
Twenty-three thousand people fell under this description. We went through every single one of them.
A picture of Tierney was plastered to the side of every laptop in the room as my soldiers browsed through face after face that resembled my little flame.
“It’d be easier if we just hacked into Sam’s computer,” I grumbled, scanning the slouched shoulders and concentrated looks of my soldiers as they went through every passport of every idiot who had their security breached the past few days. Brennan would choose a fresh victim, no doubt. One who fit Tierney’s description enough not to raise suspicion.
“Sam’s computer is secured through the nose.” Jeremie clicked away on his computer, flipping through photos. “Besides, where’s the fun in that?”
I stood up straight, weaving through the mass of bodies as I peered at screens.
An hour and a half later, we hit pay dirt. One of my soldiers snapped his head up excitedly. “I think I got her!”
Jeremie and I stalked over to him. On the screen in front of us Louise Fisher stared back, a fresh-faced woman from Connecticut. She had dark hair but otherwise held a striking resemblance to Tierney—same green, upturned eyes; same wide, graceful mouth and aquiline nose, and the bone structure of a supermodel. She even had a similar dusting of freckles across the bridge of her nose.
Fuck me sideways and call me Suzie.
