Total pages in book: 82
Estimated words: 78334 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 392(@200wpm)___ 313(@250wpm)___ 261(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 78334 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 392(@200wpm)___ 313(@250wpm)___ 261(@300wpm)
I blink. “I didn’t mean—”
“I know you didn’t,” she says easily. “Most people assume and it’s fine.” She takes a sip of her coffee. “Intelligence is my specialty, not my limitation. And in fact,” she says with a sheepish smile, “I’m going out tomorrow to do some work with Cole down at the docks.” She then winces at the reminder that I’ll be stuck here like a houseplant. “Sorry.”
“It’s fine,” I say with an exaggerated wave of indifference. “I’ll just sit here and shrivel up from boredom.”
Josie snickers. “That’s dramatic.”
“How did you end up in intelligence specifically?” I’m genuinely curious rather than just filling silence. Josie is the kind of person who makes you want to understand how they got where they are.
Her expression brightens and she crosses her arms on the table. “I was born into it, honestly. My dad was in intelligence in the marines. He’s a general now.” A small private smile crosses her face. “Growing up, dinner table conversation was… educational.”
“I imagine.”
“He never told me anything classified,” she says. “But he taught me how to think. How to look at a system and find where it was vulnerable. How to follow a thread without pulling it too hard.” Her lips quirk upward. “I was taking apart computers and putting them back together by the time I was eleven. Dad thought it was funny. Mom thought it was expensive.”
I smile. “Where did you go to school?”
“Undergrad at UW,” she says. “Computer engineering. Then Carnegie Mellon for my master’s in cybersecurity analytics.”
“Carnegie Mellon,” I repeat, impressed despite myself. “That’s serious.”
“It was serious work,” she agrees. “After that I went to the NSA.”
My eyebrows lift. “The NSA. That sounds—”
“Incredible,” she finishes. “It was. The work was extraordinary. The access, the resources, the scope of what we were doing.” She pauses, turning her tumbler slowly on the table. “I loved it.”
“So why leave?”
She’s quiet for a moment and the pause feels lightly curated rather than evasive. “The NSA is all-consuming,” she says finally. “Which is fine when you’re twenty-six and the work is everything. But I started wanting…” She stops, offers a sheepish smile. “I wanted a life. Dinner somewhere other than my desk. A dog, maybe. Someone to come home to. The whole embarrassingly clichéd white picket fence scenario. Does that sound stupid?”
The way she says it holds a vulnerability behind her desire to find a deeper connection than just work—makes me like her more than I already did. “I think that makes you not just smart, but well-rounded. Is that why you came to Jameson?”
“Seattle specifically,” she confirms with a nod. “A ground floor opportunity and I could still do work that matters without it overtaking my entire life.” She shrugs one shoulder. “Still working on the rest of it.”
“The white picket fence.”
“The white picket fence,” she agrees dryly. “Although I haven’t found the man to inhabit it with me yet, and I’m still working on a dog.”
I open my mouth to respond—I’m not sure with what, maybe something about how she’ll find it, which sounds so hollow—when her phone buzzes against the table.
She glances down at it and goes still.
“What?” I ask immediately, because I have spent enough time around people to know when a response resonates.
Josie picks up the phone, reading. “Facial recognition results came back,” she says, her voice carefully even. “From the breach at your house.”
My pulse ticks up. “And?”
“One confirmed hit.” She looks up at me. “A man named Thomas Vega.”
The name hits me like a static shock. “Thomas Vega,” I murmur as I grab the notebook and start flipping pages. The name was one of a dozen Erik had listed that I’d flagged to research, and I hadn’t gotten to it yet.
There.
Thomas Vega. A date beside it from eight months ago and a second date three months later. Both circled. A notation beside the second one in Erik’s shorthand that I haven’t decoded yet but that suddenly feels a great deal more urgent.
I press my finger to the page and look up at Josie. “He’s in the notebook.”
“Really?” she asks, eyebrows raised in pleasant surprise.
“Erik circled his name as if it was more important for some reason.”
For a moment we just look at each other across the table, trying to grasp the magnitude of this information. A man who broke into my house was on Erik Lanning’s radar.
“This is big,” she says.
“Huge,” I agree.
Josie holds up her hand, palm out, and I slap it without hesitation. The high five echoes off the exposed brick and the reclaimed timber ceiling and probably reaches the second floor, and neither of us cares even slightly.
“Okay,” Josie says, pulling her tablet toward her, already typing. “Let me pull everything on him. Military record—because you just know a man like that has prior experience—financials, travel—”
“We need to connect him to SAPG,” I murmur thoughtfully.