Page 7 of Code Name: Admiral

I shook my head. That was all he’d needed. An acknowledgment that I was actually feeling something.

“It’s a number Sarah called that I can’t trace. Every attempt I’ve made, I’ve been blocked.”

“What is it?” he asked.

“Unknown, but there’s enough of a pattern that I feel like it’s one and the same.”

“Got it. Give me a few.”

“Thanks, Tex.”

“Anything you need, Alice, I’m here. You know that, right?”

“I’m sitting in a fucking coffee shop. If you make me cry?—”

“Wait. What?”

“I caught somebody trying to pull a Van Eck last night.” The official term for what I’d picked up on was Van Eck phreaking, which was a fancy phrase for an attacker gathering information from electronic devices by picking up and decoding the electromagnetic radiation they emitted. I preferred to call it signal bleeding.

“No shit?”

“Yeah, so anyway?—”

“What are you doing about it?”

I sighed loud enough there was no way he hadn’t heard it. “What I’m doing is trying to find out who the unknown number my sister was calling every seven to ten days belongs to.”

“Right. Like I said, give me a few.”

Tex already had everything he needed in order to hack into Sarah’s cell records the way I had. He just wouldn’t do it until I asked him to. And now, I had.

Ten minutes later, which was twice as long as I figured it would take him, he finally called back.

“What have you got for me?” I asked rather than waste time with things like saying hello.

“Not much in the way of specifics, but I can tell you the address of origin.”

“Yeah?” I snapped, tapping my fingers on the table hard enough he could probably hear it.

“26 Federal Plaza.”

“What the fuck? The Jacob K. Javits Federal Building?” I muttered. “What all is there?”

“Homeland Security, among other things.”

I probably had the same site as him pulled up. On the other hand, Tex likely already knew the building’s tenants.

“Department of Health and Human Services, the Social Security Administration, the Department of Housing and Urban Development—oh shit. The FBI’s field office is on the twenty-third floor.”

“Bingo.”

My mind spun with possibilities. Had Sarah been an informant? “What could have been big enough to put her in contact with the Feds? And why hadn’t she told me?” I muttered, thinking out loud more than expecting Tex to answer.

“I don’t know, Alice, but it sure as hell bears looking into. Want me to keep digging?”

“Please.”

At the same time I ended the call, the bell above the door chimed. When I looked up out of habit, my heart stopped. Walking through the door was the mystery man from Bobby’s family photo, looking every inch a federal agent in his crisp suit and regulation haircut. Our eyes met for a fraction of a second, and I knew with crushing certainty that nothing about his appearance here was coincidental.

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