Page 107 of Lone Wolf

“That’ll show me.”

“No one thinks you’re funny. I’ll get into the stupid phones. And I have to get back to the Solventry hack. My keys are returning garbage when I decrypt with them.”

“You can’t get in?”

“I didn’t say that. The encryption’s just really … stubborn.” She started grumbling about Erlang programming.

Suddenly he understood her mood more fully. Josephine Morales had met her match. Or was afraid that she had. And she was fighting her way forward into the forest of Solventry’s digital security while trying to reset her nervous system from constant electronic engagement.

A battle without. A battle within.

He’d never seen her cowed by a mission. He’d never lived with anyone detoxing from excessive phone use. He’d never had to deal with someone else under his roof while he was supposed to be sleeping and working out and prepping for a mission.

He didn’t like it much.

Four days until Jayla was back in the world, released from the Marshals where Lopatina could get her. Seven more hours until Evan was due to meet Nathan Friedhoff, Allman’s rival, the man who’d possibly put the Wolf and everything else into motion. If this theory was correct, the execution of Dr. Benjamin Hill and the continued terrorizing of his seventeen-year-old daughter were merely collateral damage so Friedhoff could get the upper hand on Solventry in the technology wars.

Collateral damage was unprofessional, imprecise, and unacceptable. It offended Evan as much as it angered him.

He hadn’t slept in over twenty-four hours.

Joey and Dog followed him back to the master suite. Once they veered off into the Vault, he stripped down and took a shower so hot it turned his skin pink. Then he dressed, gathered up the heap of dirty clothes, and loaded them into the freestanding fireplace in the great room. From the last purging of worn evidence, a few artifacts remained—the steel shank, toe caps, and lace eyelets from his Original S.W.A.T.s, a Vertex fob watch, a scorched length of zipper. He stoked up a fire and let it roar.

Back to the bedroom, onto his maglev bed, lying on top of the sheets, counting down to sleep from five … four … two …

PROUD OF THE BROWN, THAT’S WHAT WE SHOULD BE!

Rap music pulsing through the walls from the Vault.

He lurched out of bed, through the bathroom, into the still-wet shower stall. Shoving through the hidden door, he saw Joey bouncing her head as she clicked through one of the burner phones from the human traffickers.

“What the hell, Joey!”

Her head snapped up, Red Vine dangling from her mouth, and paused the music. “I been working twenty-four/seven. I need tunes to power me. You’re the one who needed me to move in here to do all this for you!”

Dog was lying on his side, one paw curled up over his face, a pose Evan anthropomorphized into an indication of shared annoyance at the music.

“And guess what, dummy?” Joey waved the burner phone. “If you’d even bothered to check the phone before giving it to your long-suffering servant, you’d’ve seen the next hit laid out right here in text.”

“What?”

“There’s a text exchange between this human-trafficking douchenozzle and ‘W.’ Which your operationally honed brain mighta figured out was the Wolf. It literally spells out the target, date, time, and location.”

“Which are?”

“Russo Dmitri. Tonight. Ten P.M. Stretch of Sunset Boulevard between Holloway and Larrabee. He’s a mobbed-up thug from Sacramento, which has a shit-ton of human trafficking. They want him gone because he’s pushing into Reno.”

“How do you know?”

She shoved the phone at him. “It says right here!”

“Why the location?”

“He travels armored up with heavy security. He’s got a meeting with three crime families in a penthouse condo on that block. They want him sniped as he turns in to the parking garage, send a signal to the folks waiting upstairs. Got the license plate of the target car and everything. You want Karissa Lopatina? That’s where she’ll be.” Joey flipped the phone at him. “Now quit wasting my time and let me get back to work.”

With a stageworthy pointedness, she screwed in her earphones and resumed her listening quietly.

Having prepped for the evening’s encounters, envisioning countless scenarios, Evan sat in the lotus position on a mat in the great room to ready himself for the mission’s coming escalation. Veiling his eyes, he prepared his breath for meditation, bringing each inhalation deep into the—