Cooper shot a glance through a large picture window at the harbor. It was dark. Quiet. Not a single ship, large or small, could be seen. What was going on? “How can I tell which ship is being hacked?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never studied maritime shipping systems, Cooper.”

He sprinted over to where Matt lay on the ground. Riley had removed her t-shirt under her bulletproof vest and pressed it against the wound in his side. “He’s alive. Barely. The paramedics are on the way.”

“Is he conscious?” But he could see for himself that Matt was not.

“No. What’s going on with the exploit?”

Cooper shook his head. “It’s been launched. And I can’t stop it.”

“Try Murphy.”

“I already did. He’s too far away. And nothing has helped.”

“What about Leah Roberts?”

* * *

Kate’s phone vibrated. She pulled it from her pocket, her fingers tensing when she saw the number. “Kate Lange.”

“This is Detective Ellis.” She mouthed ‘police’ to Randall.

His gaze sharpened.

“Are you still at the hospital?”

“Yes.” An orderly pushed a cart by them. Kate stepped to the side.

“I need you to put Leah Roberts on the phone. It’s important.”

“Detective, you can’t question—”

“She needs to help us with the exploit that was just executed. It’s urgent.”

“Okay. Hold on.” She broke into a jog, with Randall on her heels, skirting the orderly’s cart. She placed the phone by her client’s ear. “It’s the police. They need your help.”

* * *

“Hello,” Leah said into Kate’s phone.

It seemed like an innocuous thing to say to the man who was trying to put her behind bars.

He didn’t respond in kind. “Leah, I’m at Tr0lz’s apartment.”

“Is Matt okay?” Her breath was lodged somewhere between her heart and her throat.

“He was shot, but he’s still alive.”

Matt. No. She knew why he went there. He wanted to save her.

“Leah, they executed an exploit. And I need you to tell me how to stop it.”

Think, Leah. Drifts of black expanded and contracted in her head. She forced herself to cut through it. “Read the code to me.”

“Okay.” He started reading the code really fast.

Her stomach tightened as she heard the commands. Between Tr0lz and Matt, they had figured out how to hack into the AIS system and put in false GPS coordinates for the container ship. If they could do that, then the ship would change its course.

“What should I do?”

“There’s too much to fix here. We need to block the hack.”

“You just said you couldn’t do that.”

“At a macro level.”

“What the hell does that mean?

“If the ship already has been hacked, we need to physically block the GPS signal.” She spoke more quickly. “A GPS jammer could jam the data transmission from the ship’s AIS transponder.”