Page 58 of The Hacker
Leland smiled but it was brief. “What about Ramón? He was a professional boxer. That’s a sport the mob is often involved in.”
She had been trying not to think about the possibility. But Ramón adored his wife. If she was involved in arms dealing, it was hard to imagine that he wouldn’t know. There was also the engraved gun safe in his desk, a direct contradiction to his claim that he no longer believed in violence of any kind.
“I just can’t see Ramón doing this.” She rubbed her temples.
“Although I don’t believe in guilt by association, it’s his gym the data traffic is flowing through, and his wife’s fingernails are on the website.” Leland’s tone was gentle and he laid his hand over hers where it rested by the touch pad. “That’s a lot of connections.”
She turned her hand to clutch at his. “So what do we do now?”
“You do nothing. You stay far, far away from this. I call Tully.” His grip tightened and the set of his jaw was hard. “I wish like hell you hadn’t gone to Ramón’s office with me. That was stupid and reckless on my part.”
“It made the most sense and we weren’t expecting guns.” But she felt as though he meantshewas stupid and reckless as well.
“It involves the dark web. I should have expected the worst.” He raised her hand to kiss the back of it. “Tully will want to talk with you. Is that all right?”
“Why wouldn’t it be?”
“Because I don’t want anything to drag you back into your past.”
Strange, but nothing about this had triggered her fear in that way. Maybe because she trusted Leland so completely. “No, I’m fine.”
He searched her face for a long moment before he reached for his cell phone.
“Tully, it’s Leland,” he said almost immediately. “I need your help.”
In less than half an hour, Tully strode into Mission Control. Dawn had met him at a couple of the parties thrown by Alice and Derek. He’d seemed like a big easygoing cowboy with his tooled leather boots, plaid shirts, and booming laugh. But the man who entered the computer room didn’t look at all easygoing. His gray eyes were pure steel, his mouth was set in a grim line, and he looked like laughter was an alien concept to him.
Now she understood why Leland and Derek had been intimidated by him when they first met in business school.
“Did you find any other indications of a connection to the gym in the photos?” he asked after greeting them with efficient brevity.
At Tully’s request, Dawn and Leland had combed through the rest of the photos on the Tactical Arms website, looking for any other clue that pointed to Work It Out, Vicky, or Ramón. But there had been no sparkly, leopard-spotted nails highlighted against the grips of the submachine guns or grenade launchers.
Dawn shook her head. “Just that one photo.”
Tully seized a chair and wheeled it over to the computer station where Dawn and Leland sat. “Let’s see what you’ve got.”
Fortunately, the desk and screens were so large that all three of them could sit side by side and view the website. An unaccustomed sense of safety enveloped her as she sat between the two powerful men. Right here and now, no one and nothing could hurt her. She sat very still, savoring a feeling she hadn’t experienced since that hideous, life-destroying Saturday afternoon. If she could sit here long enough, maybe the feeling of safety would become her normal once again.
Leland was talking about how he’d found the website, using technical language she found incomprehensible. Tully seemed a little more advanced in his dark web knowledge, but even he finally held up his hand to stop Leland’s spate of acronyms.
“The website is well hidden and encrypted,” Tully said. “I get that. Someone who knows what they’re doing set it up. But that leaves us with a hell of a lot of questions. Like why would they suddenly start directing data traffic through the gym’s router? Can’t they get it there through some other node in the deep web?”
“Illegal websites tend to have to relocate frequently,” Leland said. “The authorities like your FBI buddies are getting better and better at finding them, so they move to stay ahead of the game. In this case, someone may have gotten too close so they had to move unexpectedly. They wouldn’t want to shut down so they rerouted traffic from the old website address to the new one through a router they already controlled. That’s a simplified explanation, of course. My guess is that the website will move again soon.”
“Yeah, because you had to go and poke the hornet’s nest.” Tully was clearly not happy about that.
Dawn refused to let Tully shred her newfound comfort. “We didn’t know the hornets had bullets. And we had a perfectly believable reason for being in the office.”
“Arms dealers don’t survive without being paranoid.” Tully dragged his finger over the touch pad to scan the website’s menu. “Holy shit, this is a serious operation. They’ve got some military-only weapons on here. Where the fu—sorry—hell did they get it?”
After rapidly but thoroughly examining every page of the website, he sat back, his expression downright chilling. He swung his gaze around to Leland. “You screwed up, buddy.”
Leland’s lips tightened.
Tully rolled his chair back from the desk so that both Dawn and Leland had to swivel theirs to look at him. He pinned first Dawn, then Leland, with that gimlet-hard stare. “You all are done with this situation. Totally, completely, and absolutely done. You will forget all about it. This is for your own safety and well-being. And to keep the sightlines clear of civilians so my colleagues at the FBI can take these bastards down. Do you hear me?”
Dawn nodded. Leland said, “Loud and clear.”
