The hacker was either impatient or arrogant, or both.
Lila dug into the trap, pulling back each strand of the web until she located the hacker’s ID. It did not belong to Zephyr. It was someone called the Baron.
Lila snorted at the obviously fake ID, an ID predicated on aristocratic German nobility. What was the hacker trying to say with that? It couldn’t be a German who’d infected BullNet. It wasn’t the empire’s style. The empire was a loaded gun, pointed at your head. Zephyr and the Baron, on the other hand, led you with a plume of perfume, tempting you to fall obliviously onto a pile of spikes.
No, the ID didn’t belong to an enemy merc.
Lila set up an exhaustive search for the Baron’s ID and let it run, wondering where else the hacker’s sticky little fingers might have been, but she had no idea if the search was pointless or not. Reaper, Zephyr, and now the Baron? How many more
IDs might she find?
Would they lead to her blackmailer or to more questions?
Her eyes lit onto the scrap of paper with Sergeant Davies’s palm ID. While she waited for the search to run, she hacked into Davies’s account data at Bullstow Financial and cycled through his current statement.
She found no new transactions.
Unconvinced that he’d suddenly become a good boy, Lila hacked deeper. The Park family owned a chain of banks, a chain that Lila had hacked into on the previous case with her father. It wasn’t unreasonable to assume that Davies had set up an alternate account.
It took less than half an hour to prove her instinct right. Davies had opened an account only three weeks before. Nothing had graced it but one deposit that very morning. One payment from a Liberté bank account that she’d never seen. One payment for the exact amount he’d received the month before.
Whoever had been pulling Davies’s strings had found another way to pull them.
What was the purpose of the payment? To stir up trouble by asking for the family’s logins? To pay for the assassination of a prime who had gotten far too close for comfort?
The amount was too high for a few calls, but it damn sure seemed too low for an assassination attempt.
Then again, perhaps she valued her own neck more than the account holder did.
Lila pushed the implications out of her mind and turned the investigation back to her assassination. She poked into WolfNet and pulled up the garage’s security footage from the night before, syncing each camera perfectly and setting them to run simultaneously on her screen. They played in reverse from the moment she picked up her motorcycle that morning.
It didn’t take too long to find it. There were no cuts in the footage. The cameras hadn’t been damaged, nor had they gone out or been sprayed over. They hadn’t been looped or hacked, either.
Whoever had done the job was too smart for that, likely knowing that someone always watched the cameras in the security office. Usually several someones, not to mention Lila’s programs. The latter would detect many anomalies too subtle for a pair of bored militia eyes.
The break-in had occurred at four o’clock that morning while she slept off the effects of her surgery. A figure clothed in a short black coat had crept into the garage and wheeled Lila’s Firefly into the back of the garage behind her silver Adessi roadster. Five minutes later, the motorcycle had been wheeled back into place.
She could hardly blame her people for not spotting the intruder. The footage was so dark that you could barely make anything out. The snoop had used night-vision goggles and deactivated the motion sensors in the garage, for the lights should have turned on the moment anyone walked inside or stepped near the building. The change in brightness would have triggered her programs to increase the camera’s priority, demanding that someone in the security office look immediately.
The snoop had bested Lila’s system by going low tech, rather than high.
Instead of stopping the cameras, Lila let them run back further, watching every view, waiting to see the intruder loiter in the garage during the daytime. Judging by the form’s shape and size, it had to have been a teenage boy or a petite woman.
It didn’t take long to find the figure again. At around eight o’clock, a figure in the same black coat darted into the garage behind Jewel and Senator Dubois, crawling along the perimeter while the couple laughed and stole a kiss, their bodies pressing against one another and the chairwoman’s Blanc roadster.
Lila reversed the footage and squinted at her monitor. The intruder had added something on the motion sensor’s plugs. If she had to guess, it was some sort of switch that turned them on and off remotely.
The snoop then slinked around the wall, waiting to dart out once more as soon as Jewel and Senator Dubois left the garage in a sedan.
It had only taken five minutes to get the job done, and Jewel and Senator Dubois had never even realized they’d been accomplices.
Lila followed the figure through the compound’s security footage, watching as the snoop dodged a militia patrol after leaving the garage, nearly getting caught in the process. Long red hair peeked from a skull cap, but the intruder managed to avoid the cameras well enough to stay hidden. The trail ended ten blocks away when the snoop ducked into an alley on the north side of the complex and did not come out again.
Whoever wanted to kill Lila knew the positions of the security cameras, or at least knew them enough to get away.
That seemed to rule out Sergeant Davies, and increased the likelihood that someone in her own family was trying to kill her.
Lila snatched up her palm, ready to order an extra patrol near the garage. The only thing that stopped her was Sutton. The new chief would want to know why she’d ordered the change.