Page 13 of Talk to Me

I shrugged, despite the fact he couldn’t see me. “I know, I think my answer still stands.” It took me a minute to figure out where the best location for his sniper’s nest would be. Then I studied the local traffic cams.

He was invisible on all of them.

Remy was good.

“Uh huh, okay, so if you weren’t on the phone with me, you’d be binging Netflix.”

“More or less,” I answered, flipping screens to the research. The names were just that. Names. They might be targets. They might be associates.

They could be his partners in a bowling league.

“What if you had a different job entirely?” He seemed fixed on this particular topic. “Like how do you even go to school for tech goddess of the universe?”

I snorted. “Who said I went to school?”

“Me,” he retaliated. “You’re too damn intelligent to not have like fourteen different degrees. I bet you’ve even got a PhD floating around. I’d play doctor with you anytime.”

My face heated at the less than subtle innuendo, but I kept my laughter light. “You’d lose that bet, I’m afraid. I never even finished my Master’s.”

“Damn. MIT, though right? You seem like you’d be running MIT.”

“Remy…”

“Yes, Patch my dear?”

“Focus.”

“I am focused,” he said. “We have time. You’re doing research, and I’m curious.”

“I don’t have to stay on the line while I do the research. I can always just finish up the files and drop them in your box for you so you can review them when you’re done.”

It was how we normally did this.

“Ouch,” he said with a huff of faint laughter. “C’mon, Patch. Indulge me. It’s been forty-eight hours since one of these pricks stuck their head out to check the weather. I could be here for days and die of dehydration or boredom. Maybe both.”

“And questioning me about my life is something to do?”

“Well, you practically know everything about me. Where I grew up…”

“Idaho?” I mused aloud.

“Stoke-on-Trent.” The snap in his voice had me biting back a smile. “You’ve got jokes now.”

“I’ve always had jokes,” I told him. “You just have to pay attention.” I was putting together a profile on the first name. They were—very clean. Almost too clean. Work history. School history.

Even their credit history.

All very normal. Middle of the road. No huge investments. No huge losses. One bad item of bad credit that rolled off after seven years. Small, insignificant loans. Car loan.

House refinance.

House sale.

House sale? I pulled up the papers on the property and the tax records for the property. Though it showed payments for ten years, and in his name before—no wait there it was. He assumed the mortgage.

Yeah, it was a really good job of an identity build but this was a cover ID. I flagged the file with a warning for Remy. If he’d been given someone in WitSec as a target, he needed to think about that hard.

So did I.

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