Page 37 of Undercover Hacker

“Sophie! I found something!”

I glanced over at Kat’s monitor.

“The Prime Minister of Russia is blackmailing Sanchez.”

Blackmailing wasn’t the reason he brought me in. There had to be more.

“Okay, explain how that affects me?”

“You’re not looking.” Kat pointed to the bottom of a page.

Holy shit!The Prime Minister of Russia and Sanchez used to work together. Yermushin was the Prime Minister’s younger brother.

“Yermushin and the Prime Minister are brothers. Wow.”

Kat let out an aggravated huff. “The Prime Minister has all the information about our parents’ deaths, and it looks like our grandparents’ deaths too.”

Based on a transaction sheet Kat had found, Sanchez was paying the Prime Minister money each month. She was right. Two weeks prior, an email had come from Russia, demanding more money. Sanchez couldn’t pay, so he was helping Yermushin sell the nuke codes to North Korea. If he produced the codes, and the sale went through, his debt would be cleared.

“Sanchez must’ve thought I’d read the email between him and the Prime Minister.”

When I stopped returning his calls, he must’ve thoughtI was working on collecting data. Then, when I didn’t turn over the communication I had, Sanchez must have been worried I would bring him down.

He was smart to have kept my sister and me apart. In one day, we had stopped his money train and figured out why he was after me. What we needed to do was get information from the servers that confirmed he killed our family. That, along with the recording Kat had about the nuke codes, would put the director away for a long time.

“Do the boys have a trace on Sanchez?” Kat was peering over to Brock’s station.

We were told to stay out of the current mission, not the mission of destroying Sanchez. Swiveling in the chair to Brock’s station, I pulled up the closed browsers. Brock was tracing Sanchez’s movement. He was near the meatpacking district. Since losing Kat, maybe Sanchez planned on taking Yermushin out himself.

“You keep digging on the server. I’ll look around on the dark web. Sanchez is in New York.”

The dark web was a place where you needed to know what you were looking for. Google didn’t exist on the dark web. The government had put up false pages, hoping to catch people doing the wrong thing. I was looking for archived data of when a hit might’ve been placed on my parents. I pulled up a page I was familiar with AlphaBay. AlphaBay was one of the top sites used for hits.

I accessed a well-known hit list page. What I saw made my heart drop. Antonio and Zane were both on the list.

I clicked the link to see who took out the hit, but I didn’t have time to look further. I heard footsteps coming down the hall. I exited out of the page ten seconds before Brock walked through the door.

“Jessica and Bridget are upstairs with the food. I figured you guys needed a break,” he said.

No, he wanted us out of the room so he could talk with the guys with us not around. I wanted to get Kat’s opinion on the information I’d found, so when I saw Kat start to protest, I shook my head at her.

* * *

I couldn’t helpbut smile at the women around the table. Jessica and Bridget each had a container of Chinese food. Two more containers waited for Kat and me to dig in. No matter how much I wanted to have a fun lunch with my friends and sister, Kat and I needed to discuss the information I found online and whether we would let Brock know or be stupid and try to save them ourselves.

“Hey, I need to talk to Kat about something. We’ll grab our food and go.”

When Bridget’s family went on the run for her father’s mistakes, they had moved into the same neighborhood CJ and I lived in. Our love for computers made the friendship effortless. The three of us had spent hours together, coding and fine-tuning our craft. When Bridget’s previous life came out last year, it hurt that she hadn’t told me. I contemplated coming clean about my past, but she had just gotten pregnant. I knew she would want to help, and I couldn’t put her in danger.

Bridget smiled and pointed to the chair. “Come on. Don’t cut us out. I want to help. Jessica counts numbers all day. We know she needs something fun in her life.”

Jessica swatted at Bridget. “My man keeps me entertained.” A slow blush crept over her face.

Bridget reached over and grasped my hand. “Tell me what the plan is. How much money do you need, and where are we going?”

“We figured out why Sanchez is after me.” I shook my head when Bridget went to jump in. “Kat and I wanted to dig deeper. I was checking out the dark web and pulled up AlphaBay. I wanted to look at the archives. I never made it past the new posting page. Someone hired a hit on Antonio and Zane.”

Kat gasped. She leaped from her chair and was heading for the door, but we needed to talk for a second and work this out our way. “Kat, sit back down.”

---