A phone rang in Ian’s hand. “It’s Callum.”
“About damned time,” Mark muttered. They needed him here so they could come up with a game plan.
“You’re on speaker again, Callum. Are you en route?”
“No, I’m not coming. I’m staying undercover. I only have a few minutes to talk.”
Jenna’s eyes got big. “I thought helping get us out of the attack on the lab compromised your position in Joaquin’s organization.”
“They suspect me but can’t prove it, so I’m safe for the time being.”
Ian shook his head. “Callum, are you sure about this? The last undercover agent they found—”
“Trust me, I remember the pieces. But there’s something going on.Big. I don’t know what, and I’m not exactly sure when, but I’ve got to keep digging.”
“We know the when,” Jenna said. “Exactly two and a half days from now. The latest robot, Emily, provided that intel.”
“Okay. That gives me something to work with.”
“Emily also witnessed Joaquin killing one of his own team,” Mark put in. “Although we don’t think she would be the most credible witness in court.”
There was a slight pause before Callum spoke. “I haven’t been able to get close to Joaquin himself. He’s too smart for that. But I’ll keep pressing and try to figure out what’s going down in two and a half days. I’ve got to go.”
“We’ll do the same,” Ian said. “Be careful, brother. I like you better whole than in pieces.”
“Trust me, so do I.” The call clicked off.
* * *
Jenna was firing on all cylinders at the workstation on the bus. She used damned near superhero-level powers. She had four monitors running different…stuff. Hell if Mark knew what most of it was.
“The key here is the dark web. Like you guys said, there was no reason for Joaquin to piggyback off government servers if he was trying to send messages. He could access The Onion Router wherever he wanted.” She never looked away from the screens or stopped typing as she spoke.
“Onion Router is really the name for how you access the dark web?”
“Don’t look at me. I didn’t come up with the name. It was something to do with peeling back layers. Everyone calls it Tor.”
Mark shook his head. “And anyone can access the dark web?”
“If they’re determined to, they can. Pretty easily, actually. But it’s not like the regular web where you can just Google stuff once you’re there. If you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll basically be sitting around doing nothing.”
“But Joaquin didn’t need the government servers to access what he needed on the dark web.”
She stopped typing. “Definitely not. My thinking is that he’s piggybacking off the government servers to add some credibility to whatever messages he’s sending out.”
Mark crossed his arms over his chest. “Like:I’m about to do this big, bad thing, and you can believe me because, look, I already have access to the US government’s secrets.”
“Yes, exactly like that.”
That made a twisted sort of sense.
“But—” Jenna turned and waggled her eyebrows at him “—I’m going to use Joaquin’s arrogance against him.”
“How so?”
“I wrote an algorithm that is checking the darknet for messages or data that was sent when each robot broke in to their building. I don’t know what data it will give us, but it will give us something.”
Mark waggled his own eyebrows. “You’re super sexy when you’re brilliant, you know that?”