Page 2 of Code Name: Admiral

I’d seen the same initials in her planner. No name. So, who was this mystery man she’d met on the dating app? And was that how it really went down? Or was her profile a facade like so much else in her life?

The security footage I’d gathered played on one of the smaller monitors. So, was BK the guy who turned up over and over with her in the security-video bank I’d started building after finding the initials?

The only thing I knew for sure about him was that Sarah hadn’t known him longer than a few months, since the first footage I found of them was from May of last year. The other thing I knew was that he was a criminal.

My obsession with hacking into every surveillance system I could to find a single piece of footage where I could see the guy’s face hadn’t turned up anything. Nobody was that lucky. He knew damned well what he was doing, always keeping his face turned away from cameras, wearing nondescript clothing, and moving with the practiced awareness of someone who didn’t want to be detected.

Tonight was going to be different, and I’d find something useful. I could feel it. I wrapped my fingers around the piece of clear quartz I held in my palm, willing BK to turn up in at least one of the dark web search protocols I’d initiated. If it worked the way I’d written it, every person with a connection to the guy would show up too. As I sat and watched, the code ran through terabytes of data, cross-referencing known associates, financial transactions, and more CCTV footage from across the city.

I rested against my chair and stretched my arms over my head while I waited, stupidly shutting my eyes longer than a blink. Whenever I did, I saw Sarah’s lifeless body lying on the floor of her apartment. The image was seared into my brain: her pale skin, the blue tinge to her lips, the way her favorite yellow cardigan was buttoned wrong. Based on her body temp and the lack of rigor mortis, she’d been dead less than three hours when I let myself in after she hadn’t shown up for our weekly dinner date, and the tracker on her phone indicated she hadn’t left her building.

The sauce from the pasta marinara takeaway I’d picked up, thinking she’d forgotten we were supposed to meet, spilled across her floor like blood when I dropped the bag. It was the worst moment of my life. Nothing could ever eclipse it. You hear it all the time—my sister was the yin to my yang. Or so I’d thought. I hated that, now that she was gone, I was plagued by thoughts that I never really knew her.

Before I bought this apartment five years ago after inheriting money from my parents, Sarah had begged me to get a place in her building. Instead, I chose this one since, unlike hers, it was south-facing—the most auspicious direction in feng shui because it was good for light, chi absorption, and harmony. I still stuck by my decision, especially given I rarely left it, except when she and I got together, and that would never happen again.

“Fuck, Sarah. Talk to me. Tell me what the hell happened. Tell me why you didn’t come to me. Tell me the goddamn truth about your life.” I thought about something she’d given me the first time she visited my new place. It was an envelope that still sat in my safe. Even if it held clues to the things she’d never admitted to me, I couldn’t look at it. Not yet. Plus, I wouldn’t find anything about BK in it; she hadn’t known him long enough.

I set the quartz on the desk before I stood, then moved my body into the first of six yoga positions I routinely did after sitting for too long.

The day I moved in, the first thing I set up was my workspace. It was my sanctuary, my command center, my way of making sense of a world that often felt too chaotic. I’d arranged six monitors, with their custom-built PC towers humming quietly beneath the desk—the same processing power it would take to run a small company—in a semicircle to allow enough space for my yoga mat when I couldn’t pull myself away from the processors.

My profession, as was reported after I’d exposed three major tech company scandals, was as an “ethical hacker and whistleblower.” I’d been likened to Robin Hood when, in reality, the ease with which I discovered what each multimillion-dollar company was doing made me feel as though they deserved to get caught. It wasn’t even challenging—their security was full of holes that any decent hacker could exploit.

The best part was that the news outlets hadn’t been able to figure out who I was. If they had, they would’ve discovered I was self-taught and that the one man I trusted enough to reveal my identity to called me a programming prodigy. Tex had been my mentor since I was sixteen, catching me trying to breach a firewall he’d been hired to protect. Instead of reporting me, he’d taken me under his wing, teaching me not just how to code better, but how to use my skills for the greater good.

Second only to my work area in terms of importance was the zen place I’d created for meditation. While it was only four feet by six feet, during the day, it was filled with natural light and big enough for a zafu cushion centered on a rug, and a small altar. The space helped balance out the chaos of my digital world, giving me somewhere to ground myself when the ones and zeros threatened to overwhelm me.

I’d just settled into the half-lotus position, focusing on my breathing and clearing my mind, when an alert sounded on one of the monitors. The chime cut through the rain’s white noise like a knife. After several seconds of trying to block it out, I gave in and checked. My heart rate spiked as I saw the results populating my main screen.

“Shukriya,”I said, giving thanks when the screen revealed far more than I’d hoped to find on BK—Bobby Kane—the man I now knew, without any doubt, was responsible for my sister’s death. The pieces were finally starting to fall into place, but they painted a darker picture than I’d imagined.

Thesonuvabitchwas a street-level enforcer and drug runner for Vincent Castellano, who led one of the largest organized crime families in the city. While their primary base of operation was Staten Island, the more modernized they became under the mob boss’ direction, the bigger their territory grew. White-collar crime and political corruption, the family’s new emphasis, were rampant in most boroughs. Hell, it was everywhere in the world.

That didn’t mean they’d given up the illegal activities that had been their biggest source of income for decades. Immediately after financial crimes, drug trafficking was their major cash-flow generator. It was followed by extortion, human trafficking, gambling, and the sale of counterfeit goods. The Castellanos had simply gotten better at hiding it all behind legitimate businesses and political connections.

According to the report my coding had generated, Bobby Kane, aka Cue Ball, reported directly to Alessandro Castellano, the family’s chief enforcer. The nickname made sense now that I saw his photo—his head was completely shaved, making him look more menacing than he had in earlier pictures I found.

So how did a white ex-jock from an affluent area in Central New York get involved with the mafia? And how had he and Sarah met? Had it really been through the dating app?

I studied one of the images my search yielded. It was from a family gathering a few years ago. While not of the greatest resolution, Bobby appeared to be okay looking. The whole family was attractive in a fifties-throwback kind of way, all sharp jawlines and perfect smiles that didn’t quite reach their eyes.

I zoomed in to study them, focusing mostly on the guy standing next to Bobby. There was something in the way he held himself that made me guess he was former military. Based on his too-perfect hair, conservative clothing, and expression, I’d say he was either still active duty or worked for the bureau or the agency—meaning the FBI or CIA. The way he stood slightly apart from the others, observing more than participating, screamed law enforcement of some kind.

While I should’ve been running Bobby’s image again to see what else I could dig up, the other guy intrigued me enough to run him first. My search algorithms churned through facial recognition databases, both public and private. What I found confirmed my suspicions that he worked for the FBI, or had been three years ago, when the video of a press conference was shot.

I vaguely remembered the case he spoke about. An Olympic skier had been abducted but escaped, leading law enforcement to uncover a serial killer who was eventually linked to more than fifty deaths, most of which occurred in the southern part of the Adirondacks. The case had been all over the news, but I’d been too focused on exposing corporate corruption to pay much attention.

The man’s name was Pershing Kane, and while I found very little else, his birth certificate and Bobby’s listed different parents. Digging deeper, I discovered their fathers were brothers, making them cousins. The connection made my skin crawl—how many other law enforcement officials had ties to the Castellano family?

Talk about outward-appearance opposites. Pershing was the special agent in charge back then, and Bobby had already begun his career in organized crime. Then again, maybe they weren’t so different. One of the things I’d read about the Castellanos was the high number of politicians they allegedly had in their pockets. The thought it included FBI agents made me sick to my stomach.

Still, there was something about the guy—Pershing, not Bobby—that kept me going back, studying the photo but also watching the press-conference video. What was it about him that made me want to know more? Had Sarah experienced something similar with the guy I believed had supplied her with the drugs that killed her?

The rain continued to pour outside as I fell deeper into the rabbit hole, knowing that somewhere in all this data was the truth about what had really happened to my sister.

A new alert pinged on my screen—another facial recognition match. My heart stopped when I saw the timestamp. It was from a week ago, the night Sarah died, and showed Bobby Kane entering her building at 6:47 PM. When he left less than an hour later, his face was clearly visible.

I had him.

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