“I’m trying to free you!” Waggs shouted at the beetle, wind whipping through the car. It still didn’t budge.
“Waggs, that you? You in a wind tunnel?” a male voice announced, picking up.
“Yeah, lemme just . . .” With the push of a button, Waggs closed the window, the beetle still in place.
“I called you twice—where you been?” Gary asked.
It was a bad sign. For nearly a decade, Gary’s conversations led with small talk, usually about whatever obscure BBC detective show he was suddenly obsessed with, before he explained your IT problem. If he was diving into business . . .
“You found who was in Mint’s Black House account?” Waggs asked.
“Actually, by design, all Black House accounts are binary, with seeded hash and the highest entropy keys, meaning they can’t—”
“Bored! Speak English, not instruction manual,” Waggs said, grabbing a notepad from the car’s cup holder and leaning toward the passenger seat to swat the beetle from the windshield. Since she was still driving and holding the steering wheel, her arm wasn’t long enough. Annoyed, she threw the pad at the beetle. Still didn’t move.
“Waggs, do you know how the NSA catches bad guys?”
“If I say yes, can you get to your point?”
“It’s a philosophy. The NSA knows that if every crook has encryption and there’s no way to get the keys, there’s only one choice: you wait for the bad guys to make a mistake. So here, when you’re dealing with secure operating systems or Starlink satellites—”
“Gary, if you don’t tell me who you found in Mint’s account in the next three seconds, I’m gonna drive straight to the office and throw away every damn action figure on your desk, including that homemade Benedict Cumberbatch Sherlock Holmes Lego set.”
Gary went silent for a full five seconds. “You can’t tell anyone I told you this.”
“Elementary, my dear Watson.”
Gary took a breath and Waggs could picture him tugging his shirt away from his sweaty belly. “Waggs, you need to understand, by design, Black House accounts don’t come with an exploit—though they do come with instructions . . . and paramount among them is that it’s designed to be used on mobile.”
“You download the app, and that’s what gives you security.”
“Exactly. The app is a closed system. But if you run it on desktop, now Black House is going through a browser, which means open identifiers—”
“Just give me the name, Gary.”
“Names. Plural. There were two of them—though it doesn’t give us actual IDs. We get IP addresses, which you can then use t—”
“You’re speaking nerd again. Tell me the addresses.”
“One of them traced to a residence. Owned by someone named Zion Lopez.”
Waggs nodded. They already knew Zion was the one who’d pulled the trigger on Mint. The question was, who hired him—and why? According to Zig, it went back to the twenty-two million dollars that was stolen five years ago from Grandma’s Pantry. So whoever was behind this, is that who was in Mint’s Black House account? Did they think Mint stole the money and they were looking for it? Or was it the other way around—that Mint, and maybe Rashida, figured out who actually stole the money, and they were threatening to go public?
“Gary, I need the other person who was in Mint’s account.”
“Pull over. I’m texting you the address. Tell me if it looks familiar.”
On her phone, Waggs swiped to texts. “I don’t see it.”