Page 72 of Tides of Discovery
“Don’t.” His voice was quiet but sharp. “Don’t pretend you don’t remember.” He pulled out his phone, his fingers shaking as he scrolled through his messages. “This one.”
He turned the screen toward me, and my blood ran cold as I read the words displayed there.
I’ve been thinking. These attacks have made me realize I need to focus on the coffee shop. Let’s go back to being friends. I’m sorry.
“Jesus Christ.” The words fell from my lips in a horrified whisper. “Jack, I didn’t send this. I would never—” I grabbed my own phone, frantically pulling up my message history with him. “Look, see? The last text I sent you was about Garrett missing Shaw at the motel. There’s nothing after that.”
Jack leaned forward, studying both screens with the intensity of someone trying to solve a puzzle. Slowly, understanding dawned in his eyes, followed immediately by fury.
“That bastard,” he breathed. “Shaw used a man-in-the-middle attack. He must have set up a stingray—a fake cell tower—somewhere nearby and intercepted our phone signals. He sent the text, making it appear to come from your number.”
Relief flooded through me so powerfully I felt dizzy. “So you don’t believe I actually?—”
“Not anymore,” Jack said quickly, reaching across the desk to grab my hand. “I was devastated because I thought you meant it.” He squeezed my fingers and shook his head. “I was an idiot. I should have known it wasn’t really you.”
“How big is a stingray?” I asked, my mind already racing ahead to the implications. “Where would he put it, if the stingray needs to be close enough to intercept our signals?”
“It could be briefcase-sized. Easy to hide in a car parked on the street, somewhere with line of sight to the coffee shop and my apartment.” Jack was already pulling up technical specifications on his phone. “He’d want to position it where it could catch the strongest signals from both our phones.”
A chill ran down my spine. “There’s been an SUV parked in the alley behind the shop for two days. I thought it was weird, but didn’t think much of it.”
The blood drained from Jack’s face. “Let’s go,” he said.
We left my office and walked down the hallway toward the back door, Jack’s hand warm and reassuring in mine. I pushed open the heavy door to the alley, and there it was: the silver SUV with tinted windows that had been parked in the same spot for two days, looking innocuous enough but now seeming sinister. “That’s it,” I said, pointing toward the vehicle wedged between the dumpster and the brick wall of the building across the alley. Jack pulled out his phone and held it up, his expression growing more certain as he watched the signal strength bars.
“Signal’s definitely stronger here,” he confirmed, then looked up at me with grim satisfaction. “This has to be?—”
The SUV’s door suddenly burst open, and a man stumbled out, his eyes wild when he spotted us. For a split second, we all froze. Then the man bolted.
“Stop!” I shouted, but he was already sprinting down the narrow alley toward the street.
I took off after him, my feet pounding against the cracked asphalt. The man was fast, but desperation made me faster. I could hear Jack behind me, his voice urgent as he called Garrett and yelled that we’d found Shaw. Shaw stumbled slightly on a piece of broken asphalt, and I launched myself forward andtackled him hard to the ground. My shoulder took the brunt of the fall, and I grunted.
“Get off me!” Shaw writhed beneath me, trying to throw me off. “You can’t prove anything!”
“We’ll see about that,” I panted, sitting on Shaw and pinning his shoulders down as he continued to struggle. Behind me, I could hear Jack giving Garrett our location, his voice tight.
Shaw kept twisting and cursing, but I held him firm until the wail of a siren filled the alley and Garrett’s Interceptor screeched to a stop near the mouth. Garrett jumped out, his hand on his weapon.
“Cooper, step back,” Garrett commanded, moving in with practiced efficiency. He hauled Shaw to his feet and cuffed him while reading him his rights, Shaw protesting his innocence the entire time.
Once Garrett secured Shaw in the back of his Interceptor, he walked over to us and pulled out his phone. “Let’s test this theory of yours.”
We gathered around Shaw’s SUV, all three of us checking our signal strength. The bars on our phones were noticeably stronger there than they’d been just twenty-five feet away.
“That’s our smoking gun,” Garrett said with satisfaction. “I’ll get a search warrant for the vehicle. In the meantime...” He walked back to his Interceptor and returned with a roll of yellow crime scene tape, quickly cordoning off the SUV. “A deputy is on her way to watch the scene.”
After the deputy arrived, Garrett drove away with Shaw. Jack and I stood in the alley, the weight of what had just happened settling over us.
“It’s over,” Jack said quietly, and the relief in his voice matched the flood of emotion washing through me.
“It’s really over.” I pulled him into my arms, holding him tight against my chest. “No more looking over our shoulders, no more wondering when the next attack will come.”
We stood there for a long moment, just breathing each other in, before Jack pulled back with a smile that lit up his entire face.
“Come on,” he said, taking my hand. “We have a Valentine’s Day event to run, and with the air cleared between us we can actually enjoy it.”
Walking back into the coffee shop, I felt lighter than I had in weeks, and I realized that with Shaw finally caught and the cyberattacks behind us, nothing stood in the way of what Jack and I could become.
