Luke stared at the information the commander had sent him. For the most part, he was on his own on this op, but the commander was funneling as much information as he could Luke’s way. It wasn’t much, but they were working with the guy who’d tipped them off to the online group. Privacy and peer pressure were giving the people in the group a false sense of security. From what Luke could gather, Brain Trust—as the group was called—was as closed mouthed as Fight Club. First rule of Fight Club and all that. Luckily for them, one guy had finally seen the potential for harm in the online group and had done the right thing. He’d alerted someone who alerted someone, who got word to the right people. They’d brought in the commander to take care of it.

It was a damned good thing, too. The online room was invite only, but it contained people working in finance, chemical research labs, companies with defense contracts, and more. All were young and up and coming people whose intelligence level far surpassed their street smarts. In many cases, they were somewhere on the genius scale. They reminded Luke of a guy he’d gone to school with. The kid had easily been the smartest guy in their class, but he’d been insanely naïve when it came to anything requiring the least bit of common sense. Luke remembered taking driver’s ed with the kid and being in the back seat when it was brainiac’s turn to drive. Saying it was scary was putting it mildly. It was a little like putting a robot behind the wheel. One who couldn’t calculate anything other than something that had been preprogrammed into his head. And, apparently, driving wasn’t in his programming.

They’d driven up onto several people’s lawns because the kid was incapable of determining how far to turn the wheel. He couldn’t seem to move the vehicle enough to point it onto the road without going over the middle line and across to the lawn on the opposite side of the road.

A lot of the people in Brain Trust seemed to be like that. Highly advanced in some ways, hopelessly ignorant in others. Within Brain Trust, they played what they thought were role playing war games. Things like, how would you get ahold of this or how would you hack that? How would you break chemical A out of plant B? What would it take to sabotage transportation from this area to that area at such and such time.

Some of it was theoretical. Someone would pose a question like, what kind of damage could you do with CRISPR? The acronym stood for clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats, and as Luke understood it, the technology had to do with bacterial defense systems. When you put a bunch of geeks into a virtual room and asked them to play around with CRISPR scenarios, the shit you get is a whole lot of scary. New levels of scary. They came up with ways to attack a single race of people, provided you could get enough information about that race’s genome.

Naturally, they also came up with a few ways to get their hands on that genomic data. In fact, they’d come up with several ways to get their hands on masses and masses of genomic data, in addition to things like data from those health trackers everyone was into wearing nowadays. The ones that counted your steps and activity. They had ideas for things you could do with that data, as well. None of it set Luke’s mind at ease.

If you looked through the history of the group, you would see gradually more and more information being shared. Most of the time, the person leaking the intel would say “hypothetically this” and “hypothetically that,” but the commander’s people had checked much of it. These people were releasing actionable information in some pretty scary industries. As more and more of them shared information, there seemed to be a collective sense that they could do so without risk. The members seemed to want to one-up one another with what kind of information they could provide.

Luke had poured through almost all of the chatter they’d been able to access, going back months, and he was sure there were a few moles in the group. Identities that had been set up by the organizers purely to goad others into talking about things they shouldn’t talk about.

The most secure course of action would be to go in and shut it all down. They could go to the companies involved and help them close loopholes and weaknesses that had been identified. Shoring up reserves and getting the people involved out of positions where they had access to any kind of sensitive information. They would do that, eventually. But first, they needed Luke to track the person or people behind it. If he didn’t, they would simply close shop and start up somewhere else.

Luke had started by cataloguing who he thought each actor was. He was sure he’d identified at least five fake profiles based on their activity. The fake profiles seemed to offer less in terms of their own information or strategies, choosing instead to egg on or encourage others. In fact, that seemed to be the main purpose of the accounts he’d flagged.

Three of them were the bold type who agitated others in the group on. The other two had been harder for him to spot. They weren’t leaders. They were quiet and reserved, but every so often, they would pipe up with a piece of supposed intel just at the right moment in the game to push someone else into revealing something. The pattern was only noticeable when you looked at things in the group from a big picture scenario—something Luke happened to excel in from his days as a SEAL.

He suspected there were really one or two actors behind the false identities.

The one thing they knew for sure was that the person behind the private chat room was living in the apartment across the hall from him right now. Since he was guessing it wasn’t one of the cute twins with the big brown eyes he’d just met, that left the other occupant.

Somehow, he didn’t want to believe the chestnut-haired woman with the intense eyes was behind it, but he also knew things could get tight for a single mom. From the information he’d been given, Lyra Hill had been widowed before her girls were born. She worked for a company that made customized iPhone apps for small businesses and had no criminal history.

There’d been an easy smile on her face and the dusting of freckles across pale peach-toned skin said girl next door not cybercriminal. He’d felt bad about the recording device hidden in the button of his Henley. At least it wasn’t being transmitted to a backup team somewhere. He was simply downloading and storing the recordings for his own use and to have a record when and if they needed to justify this op.

Still, he felt awful for some reason. Maybe it was because she and her daughters were the picture of a loving mom and kids. The girls shared her eyes. Their skin might be mocha brown, but their cheeks had the same smattering of freckles across the bridge of their noses. There was no mistaking the relationship, and there’d been no mistaking the girls had been loved by their mom. Their interactions had screamed of it.

One had been outgoing and friendly, with no reservations. The other didn’t exactly appear shy, so much as she seemed happy to remain quiet and observe the world. Then again, her sister had talked enough for the both of them. Maybe she simply had no need to talk much.

Luke shook his head at himself as he closed out his computer programs and began to shut down his computer. He had clearly lost his edge. As an operative years before, he’d never have been so distracted by the woman and her children. His mind would have been on one thing and one thing only. The job. There was no doubt he’d lost something of the focus and intensity he’d once had. But again, something needled at his brain. Something that said the woman he’d met an hour earlier wasn’t the person behind the online group.

The secure phone he’d been given by the commander beeped an incoming text alert.

They’re moving on setting up auction. Working on getting you in as a bidder.

Luke closed the screen and put the phone back in the drawer to his left. He had a feeling the commander was hoping to take down a few of the bidders with this job, as well. Now that he’d seen the kind of information they were looking to sell, Luke couldn’t blame him. This type of information would be attractive to terrorist groups, cartels, and your general extremist groups of all shapes and sizes.

If they kept the group in play, they could gather a lot of intel before shutting it down. He only hoped the gamble was worth it. Some of the information being shared in that group could lead to a hell of a lot of lives lost.

He had just pulled up one of the screens he used for running background checks to look into the building’s other residents when his phone rang. This time, it was his personal phone.

“’Lo?” He clicked through computer screens, then added the name of the guy living next to Lyra in 1D. It didn’t take a genius to see the guy was a complete creep. In fact, when he’d met Aiden James in the hall earlier, the asshole had told him all about Lyra, complete with lewd gestures and the kind of grin he thought would get Luke to join in on the trash talk. Asshole.

“Hey, I’m at your place. Where the hell are you?” His brother’s message came through loud and clear. He’d expected Luke to be sitting and waiting for him as though he had no life.

He didn’t, really, now that Naomi was off to school, but still. It wasn’t like Zach needed to stress that fact to him. Besides, Luke did get out. He played on a local baseball team every Saturday morning, and usually went for beers with the guys once or twice a week. Okay, maybe once or twice a month.

“I’m not there.” He clicked through a few more screens, honing in on Aiden James’ state criminal record. It was scant, but it was more than Lyra’s. Nothing related to cybercrimes. One thing Luke did in his job was help people interpret criminal records. It could often be hard to decipher whether a charge on a record was for an arrest that was later withdrawn or dismissed, or if a person had been tried and convicted of the crime. Aiden had been arrested but not tried for malicious destruction of property and second degree assault when he was nineteen. The case was dismissed without going to trial. Could be a bar fight or something along those lines where arrests were made on scene only to have the charges dropped once the people involved agreed to make reparations.

“I know you’re not here. I just told you that.”

Luke laughed. It was just like Zach to say something like that. It wasn’t going to change the fact that Luke wasn’t at his place.

“Hey.” Zach’s voice came through loud and clear, his annoyance along with it.

“Sorry. Just running a background check.” Luke took a minute to look and see that there was no federal record for James before turning away from the screen. “I’m not home. I’m staying at a friend’s place for awhile.”

“Why would you do that?”

“Doing him a favor. He’s the super at an apartment building nearby. Got a great gig on some boat for a month, so I said I’d stay here for him.” In reality, the commander had arranged for the super to get the job on the boat, knowing it would be something he would jump at since he was in a marine biology program at school and the internship would be a huge boost to his resume. As far as the real super knew, the building manager was sending a temporary super to stay in his place and he was damned lucky they were being so accommodating for him.

“Uh huh. Does this have something to do with the job you told me about?” Zach’s tone told Luke he didn’t buy it. Apparently, he wasn’t as easy to fool as a hungry student eager to get on board a boat and count tentacles. Or testicles. Luke chuckled.

“What’s funny?” Zach asked.

“Nothing. Sorry. It’s just something I’m taking care of for a friend. If you’re that worried about me, I can send you the address. You can come over and check on me. Tuck me in.”

Zach snorted. “I was thinking we could grab a beer, watch the game. But if you’re ready for bed, old man . . . ”

Luke felt a grin split his face. He’d never tell anyone, but he was glad Zach had settled back here after leaving the military. He was glad they’d stayed close, that he’d had Zach around to help him raise Naomi. His thoughts wandered for a split second to the woman across the hall, wondering if Lyra’s family was close and helped her with the girls. He shoved the thoughts away. “I’ll text you the address. Bring the beer.”