London Calling Read online

  "I can't put you two back in the field right now. It's too hot, and you would probably just screw it up anyway."

  "That's hurtful."

  "Shut...up...Zeke." She drew an exasperated breath and shook her head. "You just never know when to shut up, do you?"

  "Got me through high school. Not shutting up, I mean. Well, that and Marcy Dorcester. She was really good at math tests. My scores were through the roof. All it took was a little baseball cap on test day, and I could copy my way to..." His voice trailed off as he realized Director Benson was neither amused nor entertained by the story.

  "Typical," she said. "You two are suspended for one month."

  "What?" Phoenix blurted. "You can't be serious."

  "With pay."

  Zeke cocked his head to the side. "That softens the blow a bit."

  "You keep making those smart aleck comments, and it will be without pay, for good. You understand?"

  "Termination? Sure. I get it."

  She rolled her eyes. "Stay out of trouble, and lie low for the next four weeks, and we will see what happens. I've got people to answer to, gentlemen, and they are not happy about what went down in London. They wanted you gone, eliminated, fired, whatever you want to call it. I went to bat for you because of what you did in Afghanistan. I think you're good agents. But you cocked this one up."

  "Four weeks?" Phoenix said in a daze.

  "Get some rest, do some research or training or whatever you do. Go play golf. I don't care. Just stay out of the public eye for the next month until this blows over. You understand?"

  The two men nodded, albeit with heavy reluctance.

  "Yes, ma'am," Zeke said sardonically.

  "Good. I'll be in touch."

  The screen blinked to black and then returned to the main menu. Neither of the guys said anything. Seconds ticked by in silence. Zeke stared at the screen while Phoenix gazed down at the floor with vapid eyes.

  "Suspended," Phoenix said in disbelief. "We're suspended."

  "Yeah, but with pay, buddy. I say we hit the beach, maybe some casinos; lots of things to do here in Europe. Maybe we head down to Croatia and check out the beaches there. I hear they're nice."

  "Everything is a joke to you, isn't it?"

  "It's a coping mechanism. Probably because I wasn't hugged enough as a child. Or maybe I was hugged too much by my creepy Aunt Mae. Always thought there was something off about her. But yes, pretty much everything is a joke to me—or it should be."

  "You just don't get it, do you?" Phoenix boomed. "This was our chance, our first chance to do something important, something better than the crap we were doing before. Remember that? Remember how boring our jobs were, how much we hated them, how badly we wanted to do field work?"

  It was a sobering question, and Zeke felt his heart sink a little. "Yeah. I do."

  "Well, we just screwed it up."

  "True, but not for good. You heard her. Give it a month; we'll be back in the rotation. They can't keep us down forever."

  "That's just it, Zeke," Phoenix argued. "They can. She said a month, but that's no guarantee they'll reinstate us in four weeks. They may decide to send us back to the desk jobs we had before."

  "You're right. I know you're right, I'm just…I'm trying to stay positive, that's all." Dejection filled his voice, and he lowered his head. "I always wanted to be in the field, to do the dangerous stuff that could save lives or help people or whatever. I don't want to blow this, either."

  "Well, congratulations because that very well might be what happened." Phoenix stood and paced to the back of the room. He ran his fingers through his hair and stopped on the back of his skull, then turned and looked toward his partner. "Ugh, this sucks."

  Zeke fell silent, contemplating his forced vacation. He didn't like it any more than Phoenix, but what could they do? They were off the job, off the grid, temporarily burned—so to speak. They were powerless to do anything until the agency reinstated them.

  Or were they?

  "You're sure the target didn't see us, right?" he asked, the question sprinkled with a dusting of hope.

  Phoenix shrugged. "I know he didn't see me, though he did start running right after he went by. I noticed you left out that little tidbit with Jessica."

  "We have to have each other's backs."

  "I appreciate that."

  "Still, though, you weren't made, and I know for sure I wasn't. He never even looked my way."

  Phoenix walked back across the room and slumped into the chair he'd been using before. "What are you getting at, Zeke?"

  "If he wasn't running from us, then who was he running from?" Zeke's eyebrows lifted as he waited for the lightbulb in his partner's head to switch on.

  It didn't take more than a few seconds.

  Phoenix's eyes widened. "He wasn’t running from us."

  "Bingo."

  "Then who? What spooked him?"

  "That's what we need to find out."

  "Yeah, but..." Phoenix let his voice trail off for a moment. "We don't have access to any of our stuff, and we have zero clearance right now. How are we supposed to do any kind of investigation without that, not to mention we're on zero authority at the moment."

  "You're good with computers," Zeke said, cocking his head to one side. "Maybe we need to do a little hacking of our own."

  Zeke's lips creased slightly, curling at one end.

  "No. Oh no. You don't mean what I think you mean. Do you?"

  "That depends."

  "On?"

  "Whether or not you think I mean that we should hack into the city's surveillance footage."

  Phoenix's eyes shot wide. He laughed after staring at his partner for a moment. "Yeah. Okay, buddy. Seriously, what's your plan?"

  Zeke rolled his shoulders and tilted his head to the side. "I mean, it's that, or we kidnap our guy, take him somewhere else, and make him talk."

  "Wait. What? You mean re-abduct the guy we abducted yesterday?"

  "I just said; it's that or the other thing. Personally, I don't think kidnapping a prisoner the GIC plans on interrogating is a good idea. Not to mention I have no clue how we'd pull it off."

  Phoenix pressed his thumb to his lips and gnawed on the nail as he thought. "You might be right about hacking the surveillance footage. If we can get into the system and see what or who he was running from, maybe we can get a positive ID and track them down."

  "So, you like the idea?"

  "I didn't say that," Phoenix countered. "But the first thing we should do—if we're going to do this—is ask the prisoner."

  "Hold on," Zeke said, raising a hand and furrowing his brow. "Did you say ask the prisoner? You know we can't get to him, right? Jessica just told us she's revoking our clearance. We have zero resources right now. If we're going to do this, we'll be on our own."

  "Not necessarily. Jessica is back in the States. It could take a few hours before our orders are sent here. And she didn't say anything about our suspension being effective immediately. If we get in trouble, we could just say that we thought we would work the rest of the day and then it would start tomorrow."

  Zeke's face curled into an appreciative grin. "I have to hand it to you, partner. Usually, I'm the one who tries to find the loopholes or gray areas." He stepped over to Phoenix and clapped his hand on Phoenix's shoulder. "I'm proud of you."

  "Yeah, well, don't get excited just yet. We still have to figure out how to get into the holding area to see the prisoner."

  A mischievous twinkle escaped Zeke's eyes. "Leave that to me. What about the hacking into the system?"

  "That might be difficult, but luckily I think we know someone who can help us."

  "Freeman?"

  "Freeman."

  3

  London

  "Seriously? This is what you meant when you said leave it to you?" Phoenix groused as the two men stood outside the interrogation room waiting to be granted access. "I thought maybe you had some kind of slick plan to sneak into the holding area or the guy's cell or something. I didn't know you meant we were just going to try to go in through the front door like everything was fine."

  "Sorry," Zeke said with a snicker. "But it's like you said: Our clearance should work until the end of the day. Maybe even into tomorrow. I'd say there's a small chance Jessica won't even remember to send out the memo or whatever she does for something like this."

  "Okay, you're pushing it. You know that's not how that works, right?"

  "Maybe. My point is we're going to be fine, and I am putting all of my faith in your idea."

  "My idea?" Phoenix hissed, trying not to draw the attention of the guards at the end of the corridor.

  They were standing in a hallway lined with brick and crumbling mortar. Three single bulbs dangled from the ceiling to provide light, but other than that it was dark and musty—evidence of the building’s age and the heavy use it had endured during its lifetime.

  "I still don't think this is a good idea. Not really what I had in mind," Phoenix said.

  "It'll be fine," Zeke offered. "We'll be in and out in a jiff. We just need to find out what that guy saw that spooked him so much. It had to be some kind of threat; otherwise, he wouldn't have run."

  "Yes, that's true, but at this point it feels more like we're going against orders, which is something I don't want to do. I've heard horror stories about assets like us who disobey directors. It doesn't end well, almost ever."

  "I know. It's a big risk, but if we don't do it, then who will? Jessica doesn't understand what's going on here. Someone else was after this guy. That means this whole thing could be way bigger than we first thought."

  "Right, but going in through the—" He cut himself off as one of the guards approached. The man had light brown skin with hair cropped short on the
top and pointed sideburns that came down below his earlobes. He wore a scowl, and neither Zeke nor Phoenix was sure he was going allow them in.

  "You're clear," the man said. His badge claimed his name was Roger Dickens. "You'll have half an hour with the suspect. Then we have to move him to another facility."

  "You're moving him?" Phoenix asked.

  "Standard procedure. Of course, guys with your level of clearance probably see this sort of thing all the time. This is just a temp holding facility. He'll be going to a more secure place."

  "Oh yeah. Just making sure you guys were doing it by the book."

  Phoenix clearly had no clue, but Roger didn't seem to care. The tired look in his eyes told them that the man had probably had a long week, or at the very least, a long day.

  He scanned his card and entered some numbers into a keypad. The metal door buzzed then clicked as the lock released.

  The door swung free, and Zeke led the way in. "We won't be long," he said to Roger. "Could you get us a couple of cups of coffee? Two creams, two sugars in each?"

  Roger raised an eyebrow. "No. You have thirty minutes."

  The door closed with a thud, and Zeke and Phoenix were left facing the man they'd apprehended on the street.

  There were two metal chairs on their side and a matching steel table. The suspect was shackled to the table with cuffs, his head bowed low so the visitors couldn't see his eyes.

  They knew his name, or at least the moniker he chose to use. Philipe Gaston was a well-known hacktivist in the hacker community, though beyond the borders of the shadowy underworld, few probably knew much about the man. He was a registered citizen of France, paid his taxes, and on the surface appeared to be just an ordinary guy. Except he was anything but ordinary.

  Philipe had engineered hacking jobs on computer systems in every industrialized nation on the planet, including the United States and the UK. In those instances, his targets were primarily large corporations, though he'd once managed to thrust one of the smaller social media companies into an abyss for over eight hours before the company's security team was able to lock down the threat.

  Most of the time, the viruses he planted or the jobs he pulled were innocuous, doing little damage to users or to the companies themselves. Most of his critics in the hacking world thought he didn't take things far enough. Others considered him an amateur, an egomaniac who simply hacked high-security systems for the fun of it, or to get attention, even though he never showed his face. Whenever and whatever he did, there was always the same calling card: a symbol of a lightning bolt in a triangle—and he went by the hacker name of Zeus.

  Some of the more conspiratorially minded theorists thought that perhaps he was a member of the elusive Illuminati, that he was running their digital crime division—if such a thing existed.

  That kind of speculation, however, was probably extreme. Zeke and Phoenix suspected the man did it as a hobby. While that might have sounded ridiculous to most, considering Zeus's—or rather, Philipe's—profile, it kind of made sense. The guy was a law-abiding citizen who spent much of his time in London on a work visa. He had no criminal record save for a few speeding tickets he'd received while racing around on his motorcycle. Other than that, the guy was an angel, which made the allegations of this most recent hacking attempt all the more difficult to piece together.

  Interpol both received tips that a high-profile hacker was targeting one of the largest social media startups in the world to scrape the databases for passwords, emails, and any other information he could pull. Up to that point, Philipe Gaston had never, to anyone's knowledge, done something so egregious. Then again, criminals had to start somewhere, and usually it was with simple crimes. You don't rob a bank on your first job. You steal chewing gum from the supermarket, or maybe a candy bar. Then you work your way up to pickpocketing tourists or aloof commuters on the sidewalk. Criminals usually worked up to the big jobs, and the one Zeke and Phoenix apprehended Philipe for was most certainly a big one.

  The data he might have collected would have been worth millions, maybe tens of millions if there were accounts connected to electronic payment systems, store checkouts, and user profiles. Larger companies could usually detect such activity, but sometimes the timeframe of detection could be between hours and days. By the time news outlets released the story, personal information from millions of accounts was already obtained and the damage done. All of that, however, was a mere cover for the hacker’s real intentions, the true target. He never intended to use an ordinary person’s information for profit. This hacker, it seemed, had a code of ethics.

  The social media job was nothing more than a cover up, a decoy to distract from the real target. He set his sights on NATO’s proprietary payment system for Western defense contractors. But before he could pull it off, he’d gone off the grid—as much as a hacker was able.

  Most people would never see any damage because it would be covered up, written off. Security measures would be revamped. But he’d been caught before he could pull it off. Such a heist would have set him up for life as well as his great grandchildren. Instead, he’d attempted to screw with the international banking system with a powerful virus.

  Zeke sauntered around behind the man and stopped, crossing his arms. Phoenix stepped up to the table and pulled out a chair, slid into it, and folded his hands on the table. A cup of water sat next to the prisoner, nearly out of his reach.

  "Hello, Zeus," Zeke said, spitting the nickname with venom. "How's the head?" He motioned to the purple bump on the man's forehead but only got a seething glare in return. "Do you know who we are?"

  The man kept his clean-shaven head down as he stared at the table's surface. His shoulders jarred as he laughed. "You're the two imbeciles that arrested me earlier today." He inclined his head, revealing gray eyes beneath dark lashes. Philipe wasn't huge, but it was clear he worked out.

  Zeke glowered at the back of the man's bald head. He pursed his lips and nodded. "First of all, our boss prefers to call us idiots. Not imbeciles."

  "That's true," Phoenix agreed.

  "Secondly, it's one thing if you think it, but saying it out loud—that's not very nice."

  "I don't care," Philipe said with a few other choice nouns thrown in regarding his opinion of his two inquisitors.

  "I'm Agent Phoenix Underwood, and this is Agent Zeke Marshall," Phoenix said, ignoring the man's jab. He did not intend to let a guy who was no older than twenty-three cause him to lose his temper, even though he and Zeke were both still in their twenties.

  "We know you weren't running from us, Philipe," Zeke chimed in and then walked around to the side of the table. He leaned down and pressed his palms onto the surface as he'd seen on television shows where someone was being questioned.

  That caught the man's attention.

  "We know you go by the hacker name of Zeus," Phoenix continued. "We know that you do more mischief than harm on the internet."

  "You don't know anything about me," Philipe countered. He tilted his head at an angle and glanced up at the blinking red light on the camera in the corner.

  Phoenix twisted his head around and looked at the camera then back to the prisoner. "We have that under control," he said. "The agency, Interpol, no one will know what we say in this room. Understand?"

  "How?"

  "You're a tech guy," Zeke said. "We may not be as good at the hacking stuff as you, but we have some resources, and Phoenix there isn't too bad with that stuff, either."

  The prisoner snorted derisively.

  "We need to know who you were running from," Phoenix pressed. "It wasn't us."

  "How do you know?"

  "Because you didn't see us. We're trained to be invisible while still being in plain sight." Zeke embellished the truth, but he hoped it would pay off.

  Philipe clenched his jaw for a moment and tightened the muscles around his eyes as he considered the question. "I'm not telling you two anything. I need some ibuprofen and a lawyer."

  "That's fine," Phoenix said, standing up. "Sorry about your head, by the way. We couldn't risk you getting away."

  "You can shove your apology."

  "Fair enough," Zeke said. He made his way toward the door. "But you know as well as I do that there is nowhere you'll be safe. If you really were that afraid of someone, you'll be on the run no matter where you go. Prison, another country…it won't matter. You're a high-profile target for multiple agencies around the globe. That means you're probably important to some high-level crime lords, too."