Dirty Deals: Olesia Anderson Thriller #1

Chapter 4

The aftermath was brief. Two agents from out of state arrived with yellow warning tape and a body bag. Olesia watched as they cleaned out the house, vacuuming up every stray hair and skin flake and organizing them into little plastic bags. They took photos of the singed carpet fibers where ejected shells had bounced. They scoured the doorknobs and keyboards for prints.

Within an hour, the house seemed alien and empty. Olesia waited around the corner, where a white Blackrock van was parked beneath a tree. Inside, a man with a deep Caribbean tan was sucking data off the pile of hard drives they'd recovered from around the house.

The back of the van was tropical-humid, and Olesia fanned herself with a sheaf of papers as she watched over the tech-man's shoulder. "Got anything?"

"You've got to hold on a while. They shot up his computers pretty bad, and just about every one of these drives has got a nick or hole in it." The tech-man peered into the light of his monitor. "Wiped the drives too, but only a single round of formatting. Must've been in a hurry."

"You can recover everything?"

"In time."

She sighed. "I need the name of his contact now. Not tomorrow, not in a few hours. Now, before they take the data and fuck off behind the Iron Curtain. Understand?"

"Shit, lady, I get it." The tech-guy wiped sweat from his eyes. "I've found some pointers to his cloud data. Might be something there."

"Protected?"

"Give me an hour."

Olesia nodded and called Sparks. "Hey," she said. "Sorry about being abrupt, but things got messy here."

"Don't worry, don't worry. What about you? Are you okay?"

There was something in Spark's voice that made her stand up straight. "Aww, are you worried about me?"

"I'm not worried, I'm just-"

"It's okay, Sparks. I'm a professional. If anything, I'm pissed. They were right outside, and I let them drive away."

"Any idea who they were?"

"Basic suits, dark glasses. Young looking." She screwed herself down into the corner of the van, listening to the hum of the tech-guy's equipment. "What's worrying me is what they did with the Lockheed security team that were posted here. There's a nature reserve nearby, but we've swept the grass and there's nothing there, so maybe they're in a ditch, or a river... Shit, or they're in the trunk of the bastard's car."

"Well, we're trying to track that one now, but we're not having much luck. There's a satellite fixed on Bethesda 24/7, but it's focused on Lockheed headquarters. Might be able to stitch something together from local surveillance cameras-"

"Wait a minute." She frowned, then reached into her pocket. The SD card was still tucked inside, and she held it up to the light. "You think Young was stupid enough to use the same passwords at work and home?"

The tech-guy took the SD card and slotted it into his laptop. "Worth a try. Here we go... office password was transition, with ones for i's. What a dick."

Olesia, thinking of her own passwords, said nothing.

"Okay, trying his cloud data... Got it!" The tech-guy gave the thumbs-up. Data was spitting across his screen, massive file trees unfolding like origami. "Jesus, an engineer with a dictionary pass. Like he wanted it to be easy."

Olesia patted the tech-guy on the shoulder. "Sparks, you hear that?"

"I hear it," said Sparks. "Have him send everything through to headquarters."