“I know what it means,” Anna snapped back. “Be on the lookout.”
“Okay, I’m sorry. Relax a bit, will you? We’re on the same team.”
He regretted his choice of words the moment they came out of his mouth.
“Are we? Because last time you said that, you fucked us all.”
She had a point. There wasn’t much he could say to soothe her, so he remained silent.
“I sent Tony an email,” she told him after a moment. “He’ll be here shortly with another SUV.”
“He knows where we are?”
“He’s been tracking us the whole time.”
“How?”
“Through me, of course.”
It made sense that Tony didn’t trust him to keep his little sister safe. They both knew Anna’s safety wasn’t Hunt’s priority.
Still, Hunt wasn’t happy about this new development.
“I specifically told the both of you I didn’t want him around.”
“And you’re a fool if you thought you could keep him at bay. His daughter might be in there too. Don’t forget that.”
Hunt sighed. The sort of help he needed was trained operators, not gunslingers. “How long before he gets here?”
Anna looked at her phone. “Five minutes.”
“Show me the video.”
“Stop right there!” Anna said.
Hunt paused the video.
“Back up a few seconds.”
Hunt did. “What did you see?”
She reached over him and clicked on the play button. “Look at the door handle.”
The video focused on the main entrance. A large, modern wooden front door with no window occupied the whole frame. The door was beautiful and looked expensive.
“There’s no lock,” Hunt said. “Only a keypad.”
“Correct,” Anna said. “It’s a Schlage lock.”
“And that’s good news? The door looks heavy as hell. We can’t pick that kind of lock.”
“Maybe you can’t pick it, but I can hack it.”
“You’re serious?”
Anna flashed him a mischievous grin, but there was no warmth to it, only contempt. “You’re not the only one who can keep secrets.”
She watched the green words of code flicker across the screen of her laptop, her fingers burning up the keyboard. She brought up a hidden sign-on screen and entered a code, and just like that, she was in the security mainframe.
“I never asked you where you learned to do that.”
“And you’re asking me now?”
“I am.”
“None of your damn business,” she replied bluntly.
Anna remembered the first time she had cracked into a computer. She was fifteen and still in high school. She did it to change her best friend’s math test result. A handsome young man—Agustín was his name—who used to work for her father had patiently shown her how to do it. For close to two years, every afternoon after school, she spent half an hour or so with Agustín and watched him work. He was incredible. Within minutes, Agustín was able to hack into someone’s bank account and transfer money out of it. After moving the money around the world, it ended up in one of Vicente Garcia’s Bahamian bank accounts. For his services, Agustín—at least this is what he had told her—was getting 20 percent of whatever he sent to her father.
Then, one day, she came back from school, and Agustín wasn’t at his desk. He wasn’t there the next day either. When she inquired about his whereabouts, her father told her Agustín wasn’t working for him anymore.
“Why?” she asked him.
“He stole from me.”
Her father’s reply—the way he said it—had chilled her to the bone, but she’d summoned the courage to say, “I thought you liked him. Didn’t he make you lots of money?”
Vicente banged his fist on his desk, making Anna jump. “I said, he stole from me,” Vicente roared. “If someone steals from me, there are consequences.”
Anna, too terrified to ask what the consequences were, had run back to her room. For a while, she didn’t dare touch another computer. But when the time came to go to college, she couldn’t help herself. She hacked into the mainframes of most of the colleges she applied to just to see how she ranked among her peers. There was no need to change the rankings. She was high enough to pick where she wanted to go. She ended up graduating with a master’s degree in computer science from the Florida Institute of Technology and working for her father doing pretty much the same thing Agustín had done. But better. She beefed up her father’s network security while keeping an eye on their competitors’ vulnerabilities and exploiting them whenever she could. After a few years, though, she needed a new challenge and had gone to work for a couple of start-up companies. That was what she’d been doing when she met Terrance Davis. To be completely honest, she was as angry with herself for being so naive as she was at Hunt for his treachery.