“Makes sense.” Cam started typing on his keyboard.
Kiley’s head popped up, and she looked at Addy. “Hold everything. I’m done looking at your laptop files. Immediately before leaving your office, you were viewing PDFs stored on the network.”
“The files that are missing, I assume,” Addy said.
“I assume so too,” Kiley said. “But I’ll print a list of the file names for you to review. Maybe they’ll jog a memory.” She kicked off the printer.
Addy hopped up and grabbed the pages. Mack opened his mouth to tell her to stop, then closed it. Harris might have banned Addy from the investigation, but she was the right person to review these files. He knew if he talked to Harris, he could probably get her to agree, but he wouldn’t put her in that position.
Addy grabbed her laptop and sat at the nearby dining table. Cam remained working on the sofa, while Kiley joined them and placed her laptop on the table.
Addy spread out the pages, and Mack leaned over her shoulder, catching the familiar peach scent of her conditioner. He’d always loved the fragrance and remembered her coming out of a steamy shower, the room holding the same smell as the warm peach cobbler his mother often made for Sunday dinners. He let the memory play, a desperate urge to have Addy regain her memory and come back into his life making him lean closer.
“Look!” Her head snapped up, nearly hitting him as she tapped the corner of several pages. “These links refer to stories about the cables.”
“Okay.” Mack blinked a few times to focus. “So these stories appeared on the pages you viewed. Other stories appear on web pages all the time, but why did you connect them with your investigation?”
She looked over her shoulder at him. “I don’t know. It’s not obvious from this article. Let’s look up the links. I’ll take the first one and you two do these.” She handed one to Kiley and one to Mack.
Mack dropped into the chair next to her and entered one of the URLs in a browser on his computer. The article opened onthe screen, reporting a cable malfunction three weeks earlier in California. “Cable sliced. Possibly on purpose. Confirms what you were on to when you took off before the accident.”
Addy nodded but kept her focus on the article she was reading.
He crossed the room and dragged a clean whiteboard on an easel next to the table. He jotted down location and date details from his article. “Tell me where and when the outage occurred in your story, if in fact that’s what it’s about.”
“Mine took place four months ago in California.” Kiley grabbed another article and entered the link in her laptop.
“Last month, an outage occurred in Tijuana, Mexico.” Addy’s eyes narrowed. “That’s definitely a border town.”
“So is this. It happened in Redondo Beach, California.” Kiley rattled off the date. “Let me bring up the last one.”
He and Addy both watched as Kiley’s fingers flew over the keyboard, and she scanned the article. “Nada.”
Mack stood back and studied the board. “We have three locations where a cable was cut, and the links appeared on internet pages that you previously downloaded. That can’t be a coincidence.”
“Agreed,” Kiley said. “Something in these stories or the key words attached to them made the search engine think the articles on oceanic cables might be of interest to you.”
“Let’s carefully read the stories to see if we can find a common thread.” Mack picked up the page he’d looked up and read the story about gunrunning in California. He underlined any reference to the internet or dark web, but he found no mention of cables. When he was done, he sat back to wait for the others to finish and focused on Addy.
She was so absorbed in the article that she didn’t have a clue that he was watching her. Her tongue poked out the corner of her mouth, a habit he’d come to associate with her when she was concentrating. It darted back in as she circled something on the page, then soon poked out again.
How many of her actions had Mack stored in his memory that he had forgotten about? Their years together had given him a huge data bank of memories. He couldn’t possibly recall them all, but each one told him a lot about the woman he knew and loved. He would give anything to find a way to be with her again.
He was seeing a Christian counselor for his PTSD, and the counselor kept reminding him that he was a child of God, who was watching over him at all times. God knew what was happening and exactly where Mack was in His plan and purpose for Mack’s life. So God knew that Mack wanted to be with Addy, and it was Mack’s job to figure out if that was what God wanted and then how to make it happen. After all, he wasn’t one to easily give up. He always embraced the Night Stalkers’ motto,Night Stalkers Don’t Quit. This would be no different.
Addy’s head lifted, and she gave him a quizzical look. He certainly wasn’t going to share his thoughts in front of the team, so he pointed at the page. “What did you find?”
“My story’s about Michigan State University researchers,” she said. “They infiltrated the dark web to find out how firearms are anonymously bought and sold. They knew guns were being sold online similar to illicit pharmaceuticals and narcotics, but not to the extent drugs were being sold. They found that the majority of guns sold were handguns, and because the dark web allows for total anonymity, the buyers are people who couldn’t purchase a firearm legally.”
Mack digested the information. “Surprises me that it’s mostly handguns.”
“Yeah, me too. I would’ve thought rifles. Especially assault rifles.” Addy looked back at the page. “It goes on to say the sellers shipped the product in pieces and hid them in books, shoes, cocoa, computer parts, and other harmless things. Many of them were international shippers.”
“Razo could be one of them,” Mack said. “Not for the miniguns, but other weapons.”
“He totally could be,” Addy said. “So, what’s your story about?”
“A guy with an FFL who was caught making parts for a gunrunner,” Mack said. “Not miniguns, but Barrett sniper rifles.”
