Page 36 of Crown of Ash

A chill swept over Andre, starting from his collar and seeping down his spine like icy water. Bell knew about Reyes. His reach extended into corners of Andre's life he'd always assumed were safe, sealed off from the world of men like Bell.

"How do you know about her cat?" Andre's voice was steady, but there was an undercurrent of unease threading through his words.

Bell didn't answer him directly. Instead, he turned his attention back to Princess, his fingers resuming their gentle stroking of her. "I know everything, darlin'," he said, his voice a low purr that echoed around the room. He was already dismissing them, a king done with his court. "That's the whole point of me."

Chapter 19

Ghost was ensconced in a nest of technology, a quartet of screens casting an eerie, pulsating glow that danced across his focused features. His eyes, sharp and intense, flickered with the reflected light, darting from one screen to another. He was engaged in a conversation with none of them, his words hanging in the air like tendrils of smoke. "No, that's not right. Hang on." His voice was a low murmur, not directed at Marcus, but at the unseen entity on the other end of his headset. The device sat askew in his left ear, a lifeline to the digital world he was navigating with the precision of a seasoned mariner.

Every few seconds, his free hand would instinctively rise to press it closer to his skin, an old habit that seemed to run on autopilot beneath the surface of his conscious actions. "You're in the wrong layer. Go up one. No, up. I said up." His tone was firm, authoritative, a commander directing troops on a battlefield.

A voice responded, a thin, tinny echo that Marcus could barely discern. The rhythm of speech was rapid and even, leaking out around the edges of the earpiece, a testament to someone as deeply entrenched in this world as Ghost himself.

"That's Phantom," Ghost offered without turning around, his words seemingly an afterthought for Marcus's benefit. "Bell's guy. Girl. Person. Doesn't matter, we've never met, we just yell at each other through firewalls."

"And how's that going?" Marcus asked, his tone laced with a hint of dry humor.

"It's going incredible." Ghost's fingers danced across the keyboard with a fluidity that was almost mesmerizing. "Years of nothing on this network. Forty minutes with somebody who actually knows what they're doing, and we've got more already."

Marcus had been rooted to the same spot for eleven minutes, a silent observer in this digital ballet. He forced himself to stop counting the minutes and instead pulled a chair over. He positioned it close enough to glimpse the middle screen but far enough away not to encroach on Ghost's personal space.

Lines of text cascaded across the screen in a relentless torrent, pausing only to be replaced by more. Marcus didn't understand the specifics, but he didn't need to. He recognized the pattern, the ebb and flow of a digital battle, much like the rhythm of a deposition before he'd read a single line. Pressure applied in just the right place, resistance crumbling elsewhere. Then, suddenly, a structure that had held firm for years discovering in real time that it was not as invincible as it had believed.

"There." Ghost's body went rigid, his sudden stillness echoing louder than the relentless tapping of keys had been. "There he is."

"Drakov's hacker?" Marcus asked, his voice barely above a whisper, as if afraid to break the spell that Ghost had cast over the room.

"Was. Drakov's hacker was. He's not doing anything anymore, he's just watching us take his house apart from the inside, same as you are." The corner of Ghost's mouth twitched, not quite a smile, close enough that Marcus let it stand. "Phantom's already got the shell company that pays this guy. I've got everyone that shell company's ever paid."

"How many?"

"Growing number." Ghost said it flat, already moving on. "Customs officer in Toledo. A judge's clerk. Somebody at DPD who's been closing cases a little too clean for a little too long."

The list kept coming. Marcus stopped tracking it as a list. This was years of Drakov's reach rendered in names instead of shrugs, in people instead of the abstraction Marcus had spent six years arguing against in his own head.

"There's one more thing." Ghost's hands didn't stop moving, but his voice dropped, the register he used whenever a line of data turned into something that actually mattered. "Buried in a shipping manifest. Container coming through the port in under a day. Logged as machine parts."

"It isn't machine parts."

"Weight's off by four hundred pounds, give or take, and machine parts don't need airholes drilled into a container's floor plate. Somebody was careless." Ghost finally looked up from the screen. "You want the coordinates?"

"I want everything you have on it. Location, timing, how many men he's likely running on it."

"Give me an hour."

"Take two. Do it right. And when you're sure, get it to our extended team. We'll get those people outta there."

Ghost was already turning back to the screen before Marcus finished the sentence.

"Priya Okafor," Ghost said.

Marcus went still.

"Coast Guard liaison," Ghost went on, not looking up. Whether he knew yet what he'd just said, or didn't care, was genuinely hard to tell with Ghost. "Paid twice. Once eighteen months ago. Once eleven days before the warehouse."

The warehouse. Forty people moved out minutes ahead of a raid that never should have leaked, because the leak wasn't a gap in tradecraft, it was a woman with a badge and a price.

"Marcus." Ghost had turned around. Whatever was on Marcus's face, Ghost read it fast. He didn't reach for him. Ghost had never been a toucher, and he knew better than most when a man needed the room instead of the hand. "You want me to keep going, or you want to go find your detective first?"