Page 41 of Dozer

I think about Hunter's voice. Watch each other's backs. It hadn't sounded like an order. It had sounded like something he already trusted was true.

He isn't wrong. I've been watching her back since the morgue. I intend to keep doing it, for as long as this job takes, and possibly, though I'm not ready to examine that thought too closely standing in a rest-stop parking lot with contaminated evidence between us, considerably longer than that.

Kenzi closes the case. "We're ready."

I nod. "We drive until the lab contact. No stops unless I say so."

"Copy that."

I almost smile. I don't let her see it.

She climbs into the passenger seat, and I take one last look around the parking lot before getting behind the wheel. Nothing moves. Nothing looks wrong. That doesn't mean anything anymore. We've learned that lesson the hard way.

I start the engine. Kenzi settles beside me, the evidence case secured between our seats. Two clean samples. One compromised chain of custody. A dead man who officially doesn't exist. A crime ring desperate enough to kill for silence. And somewhere ahead of us, someone knows exactly what we're carrying. They are a step ahead of us, since we haven’t a clue as to what it is.

I put the vehicle in gear. This time, I don't just intend to get the evidence to D.C. I intend to find the person who tried to destroy it. And if they come after Kenzi again, they're going to learn something the hard way.

She isn't just part of my mission anymore.

She's under my protection.

And I don't abandon what's mine.

CHAPTER 12

Kenzi

The lab contact's building has better security than most banks I've audited, which tells me exactly how much Hunter's favors are worth, and also tells me, within about ninety seconds of trying to get our secure channel back online, that somebody has gotten into our comms architecture before we've even arrived.

"Someone's in the system," I say, laptop open on a borrowed desk in a back room that smells like old coffee and expensive equipment, fingers already moving faster than my mouth for once, which almost never happens. "Not brute force. This is someone who had legitimate access at some point and either still has it or handed off credentials."

Dozer stands behind me, close enough that I can feel his attention without turning around. He's doing what he always does when we're somewhere unfamiliar, watching doors, windows, corners, anything that could become a problem before it actually becomes one. He's quiet about it. The man could probably stand in the middle of a fireworks factory and look like he's waiting for a bus.

"Can you lock them out?"

"I can do better than lock them out. Give me a minute."

I don't really talk to him anymore after that. I'm talking to the problem, which is different. I narrate my process out loud because it helps me think, because somewhere along the way talking to myself became the same thing as talking to the work, and I've stopped being embarrassed about it around most people a long time ago. Most people. Apparently, Dozer has become a category all by himself, which is irritating and inconvenient and something I'm choosing not to examine while I'm elbows-deep in a compromised communications system.

"Okay. Okay, you're in our relay, that's cute. That's a nice little backdoor somebody built and forgot to patch. Very sloppy. Very fixable⁠—"

A password prompt blinks at me, mocking. I don't blink back.

"It wants a handshake. Fine. We'll shake hands."

"Talk to me," Dozer says.

"I'm talking to the server, not you. There's a difference." My fingers don't stop moving. "And right now we're negotiating, and it is a delicate process, so please do not rush a woman mid-handshake. This isn't how any of this works."

I hum under my breath. I do that. I've been told it's off-key. I don't even realize I'm doing it until the tune cracks slightly on a note that clearly isn't in whatever song I've started.

There it is. The backdoor's actual architecture opens up beneath my hands, laid bare in a way that's elegant and stupid at the same time, which is how most intrusions look when someone clever enough to build them isn't clever enough to hide them from someone who's spent nine years reading exactly this kind of sloppy government-adjacent code for a living.

"Oh, you're kidding me."

Dozer says nothing. I lean closer to the screen.

"No. No, no, no. You did not leave that there."