Page 101 of Silver Secrets

Gage’s heartbeat throbbed in his head. “You want me to let a fucking serial killer get access to all of our apartments and just have him walk right into the building? Fuck no, Phoenix. No.”

“Look, Sloane doesn’t even have to be here. We can move her to a secure location. Call Agent Liu. Have her send a team in from the Dallas office and wait for this guy to make a move.”

Gage’s fingers moved smoothly across his keyboard as he worked to chase the hacker. “Let me fucking think for a second. I’ve almost got this asshole to the trap door. If he goes in there, it’s all over for him.”

Hawk pulled his cell phone out, but Gage was too focused on the screen in front of him to care about whatever his buddy was doing. If he could route the hacker into a corner, they might be able to snag?—

“Oh, shit. Nice try asshole.”

“You good?”

“Yeah, and let’s be thankful whoever the hell this is isn’t as good as me.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s some amateur. I don’t know why the fuck someone who didn’t know the difference between encoding and encryption would be trying to hack into a system I spent months meticulously building with those cyber-security assholes Cap insisted we work with, but whoever this is is about to get written into a corner they’re never going to get out of. Let’s see how they like it when I flip the fucking script on them.”

A few more keystrokes and Gage laid the perfect trap. Now, they just needed to wait and see?—

“Well, he took the bait faster than I thought. Idiot.”

“You able to track the IP address or anything?”

“Working on it.” His eyes had to be fucking deceiving him. “What the fuck?”

“What are you seeing that I’m missing?”

“This.” Gage pointed to a section of code. A trailing slash written into the code set off alarm bells. “This just gave them away.”

“And I’m taking it from your expression that you know who this is?”

“Yeah. You know them too. It’s Elias.”

* * *

“Sloane?” Gage’s voice startled her as she tipped the open bag of chips out into a serving bowl.

“Hey. I was just going to go bring this up to Mae. Do you need something before I go?”

“Have you been in contact with Agent Liu today?” Hawk asked.

“No.” A sinking feeling worked its way into her stomach. “She was traveling back to Virginia today though. I messaged her this afternoon, but thought she might just be in the air when I didn’t hear back from her.”

“Fuck,” Gage muttered.

“What is it?”

“There’s something going on with the Montgomery Defense security.”

“Right. That’s why Hawk was here. Did you guys figure it out?”

“Yeah. Sloane, have you heard from Courtney tonight?”

“No. What the hell is going on?”

“We need to know where Elias is.”

“I thought you said he was in New York?”

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