One Chef!

Chapter 3

Chapter 3

FBI agent Marcus Reynolds and his partner Leona Edwards were walking along the 50th Street side of Rockefeller Center in midtown Manhattan when a semi-truck burst out of the underground loading dock and almost plowed into them.

“s**t!” New York was like that. Your attention goes sideways for a moment and you’re done.

He automatically noted that it was from Express Truck of the Five Boroughs and had a twenty-foot burnt orange shipping container on its bed. The driver waved them by without too much impatience, then he roared out over the sidewalk.

Marcus’ problem was the same as it had been for the last six weeks: Leona. That’s how long she’d been his partner and he still couldn’t stop looking at her instead of trucks that were trying to kill him.

Leona Edwards’ lustrous skin was the color that only emphasized his pale-guy whiteness and would have sent his w*********h parents stumbling for their shotguns. The way she filled out a white shirt and black suit coat were enough to kill a man; definitely custom-tailored—had to be on her frame. No problem hiding a sidearm in a shoulder holster; she had plenty else filling out the jacket for even her FN Five-seveN semi-auto service issue to be a distraction.

She caught him and quirked one of her eyebrows up; damn woman thought she was Spock. He’d been caught staring so many times that now it was just part of their routine. She had too damn much worth staring at and the woman knew it.

She pulled him out of the way of a midnight blue BMW 760Li sedan with dark-tinted glass all around that shot out of the parking garage and across the sidewalk without even touching its brakes.

He really needed to get his head back in the game.

“What is this ‘hacker signature’ crap again?” Leona was way better at computers than he was. Which didn’t bother him any, as long as he kept outshooting her on the range. It was close, but she hadn’t beat him yet.

“Every computer hacker has a style, a unique way of doing things, as unique as a bomber does for wiring a timer. It’s their fingerprint or signature.”

Damn but he could listen to her rich, mellow voice all day. No wedding ring, no jewelry at all, which didn’t signify squat on a field agent. Six weeks together and he didn’t even know if she was married or had a boyfriend.

He held a door for her then they headed across the busy lobby of Rockefeller Center to the bank of elevators.

“So someone with this hacker signature broke into our FBI databases and no one could stop them?” Cyber warfare creeped him out. He didn’t like things that made him afraid of his own smartphone.

“They didn’t just break in, they strolled in with such a sophisticated set of tools that the guys down in Quantico still aren’t sure how they were hit or what was taken.”

“Then how—”

“You know we’ve been trying to tag Rafe for the last six months?”

The fact that the two of them had been working the case from opposite ends was what finally brought them together. That and his old partner retiring. Marcus would have to remember to thank him someday.

Marcus and Leona somehow got their own elevator and started the climb. He thought of some things that two people could do in an elevator if they were willing. Then he thought about the cameras that were probably watching them and stayed focused on the conversation.

“Sure. I just don’t get why we’re here when we should be closing in on this creep. Damn, we were so close. Then he guns down poor Jake and vanishes.” Jake’s death was the reason Leona needed a new partner.

“Because,” Leona stared unblinking at the floor numbers. Damn but she was a strong woman.

Out of some thin shred of decency, Marcus resisted the urge to look down and see what nice things that shoulders-back position did to her figure.

“That hacker with their very unique signature strolled into our system. Not just some random part of it, they went into DITU.”

“s**t! Really? I thought that thing was bolted down hard, I remember a lecture on it.” The Data Intercept Technology Unit was about the scariest damn thing he’d ever heard of. E-mails, phone calls, Internet browsing history, all of it compiled and cross-indexed covering pretty much everyone in the country, or whose signals crossed American borders.

“Said hacker,” Leona continued, “apparently read every e-mail and grabbed every phone call we had scooped up on Rafe and a number of others. It’s a signature they haven’t seen in almost five years.”

“So we’re going to see Kate Stark the owner of Cooks Network because…” it was finally making sense.

“Kate Stark,” Leona straightened her jacket as the elevator slowed, “was a Secret Service agent at the time, in the counterfeiting division. She is credited with taking down this same hacker who just popped back up inside our network, but there’s no record of who the hacker was.”

The elevator doors slid open on the main floor of Cooks Network to shouts.

A lot of them.

They weren’t shouts of surprise.

They were panic.