Page 20 of Protector Unmatched

“I gave it to her.”

“So you did speak to her.”

“I never said I didn’t.”

“You let the others believe that you hadn’t made contact with her.”

He gave her a sideways look. “Are you gonna run to them to tell them?”

“That depends.”

“On what?”

“On how this plays out.” She pointed to the monitor. “Go on, then—what did she try to find out about you?”

Pearce dug into the file and quickly perused it. All searches came from the same IP address. “Let’s see if that’s Daphne’s.” He typed in a few commands, and less than a minute later, he found the location of the IP address. “China.”

“So, it’s not her?”

“I’m not saying that. She’s a hacker who got caught. That means as part of her plea agreement, she’s not allowed to do any more hacking, or the agreement is voided. She probably covered herself. Let me see.” He opened another program, then pasted the IP address into it and let it run. “We’ll know in a minute or two.”

And they did. Pearce pointed to a map that popped up, and to a dot that now blinked. “That’s her apartment. She rerouted her IP address via several countries, piggybacking on a corporate server. Clever.” He looked at the timestamps. “She started googling me the moment I left.”

“Maybe if you told me what happened while you were there, I could tell you from a woman’s perspective what she was looking for,” Enya suggested.

“Nice try.” He started typing again. “First, she googled to get at all the public info. She hit the LinkedIn and Facebook pages that I set up as cover. But that clearly wasn’t enough. She hacked into the DMV and the Social Security Administration.”

“Is she good?”

“Pretty talented hacker. But I’m better.”

He could almost hear Enya rolling her eyes. “Oh, please. What did she find at the DMV and Social Security? Any problems there?”

“Nope. All my documents are current. Nothing looks out of the ordinary there.” After all, he was the one to make sure that the cover documentation for all Stealth Guardians of the Baltimore compound was kept up to date so, in case they ever got into a traffic stop or something similar, they had valid IDs. “Everything’s clean.”

Daphne had hacked into a few more government servers, including the FBI, the local police department, and the sex offender register. Enya pointed to those alerts and grinned. “She checked to see if you have a record. Looks to me like the kind of woman who checks to see if her date is legit.”

“It wasn’t a date!”

“Wow, touchy.”

“It proves something totally different.”

“Enlighten me.”

Pearce swiveled in his chair and faced Enya. “The fact that she had to do a full search on me, and that up until now she didn’t know me at all, means that whatever event is the reason she’ll kill me hasn’t happened yet.”

Slowly, Enya let out a breath. “Have you considered that by meeting her, by talking to her, you might have just triggered this event?”

“The thought crossed my mind.”

“What are you gonna do now?”

“Follow through with my plan.”

“Which is?”

“Change Winter’s vision so I won’t die.”