Nic said, “You can bust out all your toys. I can’t tell you what I don’t know.”

Yoshida shook his head and curled his lip in disgust. Turning to one of his subordinates, he said, “Take our guest out the back and then cleanse the site.”

Chapter 78

Burke reluctantly asked Carter to captain the Firebird, so that he could work on the trip back from Alannon’s lair. He wanted to know more about Agent Yoshida, and if the hard drives didn’t pan out, they needed to be generating other leads. His first thought on how to do both was to hack into the CIA.

His first step was to find a directory listing and isolate the secretary of some mid-level CIA contractor with a certain amount of power and access, but not enough to be on full alert. All he needed was a foot in the door, and he could handle the rest. He checked a few sources on the Dark Web. Run off a group of privately owned and operated servers located in countries with non-existent internet laws who were not exactly friendly to the US, sites on the Dark Web catered to all manner of illegal and illicit desires, everything from child and murder pornography to the sale and distribution of weapons of mass destruction. It was also a good place for hackers (which was an inaccurate term that Burke hated using but was already so pervasive in the culture that there was no point in correcting everyone) to share scripts and exploits.

Within two minutes, he had found the phone directory for a CIA subcontractor in Langley, Virginia, and the direct line for one of the many secretaries. Then he looked the woman up online, but she didn’t appear to have any presence. He could have dug deeper, but deciding to go for lower-hanging fruit, he grabbed a different name from the list. A quick search revealed that Marjorie Connell did have a Facebook page as well as a Snapchat and Instagram. Scrolling them all, he learned every piece of info he needed.

Carter, who was thankfully doing a nice job with the Firebird, driving the speed limit and using his lanes and signals properly, said, “What are you doing over there?”

“I figured it’s time we learn a few things about our friend, Agent Yoshida.”

“And how are … Never mind, I don’t want to know.”

Burke pulled out his cell phone and dialed Marjorie’s direct line. She answered with a chipper, “Amy Wong’s office. How can I be of assistance today?”

She had a sweet Southern drawl to her voice, so Burke made an on-the-fly decision and answered back in a Southern accent of his own, “Howdy, darling, this is Dewayne Campbell over in IT. I was down your way a while back running new fiber optic lines, chatted you up for a bit. How is Isaac doing? You had mentioned that he was going to state for discus or shot put, I can’t remember which.”