All Chapters of Cracking His Code: Chapter 121 - Chapter 130

KirOba has acquired a van.It is white, unmarked, fourteen years old, and large enough to seat all eleven of us with cargo space left over. Oba acquires things. The provenance is not always something the team needs in writing."Insurance?" I ask."Insured.""To whom?""A man in Lille who does not exist.""Oba.""It’s fully papered. Plates clean, vehicle clean. We’re a group of people on an extended hiking holiday in the Czech mountains. We even have brochures in the glove box."I suppose we look fit enough to be hikers. And like an extremely eclectic group of friends.Oliver climbs into the front passenger seat without asking. Chana takes the seat behind him. Tariq and Saint claim the row behind that. Dom, Max, Butcher and Ray fold themselves into the third row. Oba and Jozef take the rear bench, where Oba immediately begins arranging a small, tidy nest of snacks, two thermoses, a bag of clementines, and a folded blanket.I drive.We stop at an internet café Oliver has scouted

OliverThe flat we’ve rented for the day is on the third floor of a yellow building two blocks from Vanguard's Prague staging site, and it smells like boiled cabbage."This is the worst place I’ve ever been in," Chana says from the kitchen."You haven't seen the bathroom yet.""I don’t want to see the bathroom.""There’s mold growing on the mold, Chana. There are species of mold in there that science has not yet named.""Stop."We’ve been here forty minutes and the kitchen table has been turned into our workstation. Two laptops side by side, three monitors propped against the wall, a tangle of cabling running to a portable power-distribution unit Oba sourced last night. The grid map on Chana’s left monitor is alive. Green lines for active circuits, amber for the substation feeders, red for the three secured lines running into Vanguard's building. We’ve been pulling at the substation's data layer since dawn. "Their UPS is asleep," Chana mutters."Their UPS is napping. There’s a di

KirThe day's planning ran to ten at night. Dom drew up two breach plans for Salzburg on the white board, both ugly. Chana ran the building's electrical and security architecture six different ways. Butcher built a case for the right placement of the charges. Saint asked a quiet question about our exit lanes that nobody had asked yet, and the answer added an hour to the meeting.By the time we broke up I had a knot the size of a fist between my shoulder blades.Oliver finds me in the loft at half past ten. He’s already showered, hair damp, wearing nothing but a pair of plain boxer shorts.He looks at me and his mouth tilts up."You look like a man who’s been arguing about ductwork for three hours.""Four hours.""Tragic. It’s a good thing you have the greatest boyfriend in the world to help you relax."He crosses the room and stops in front of me. Reaches up and presses his thumb hard into the muscle at the side of my neck. I close my eyes for a second and groan loudly."That bad

OliverEight in the morning and the kitchen already looks like a war room.Chana's at the long table with two laptops open and her external monitor balanced on a stack of cookbooks. Saint is on the counter again because Saint is always on the counter, like he’s allergic to chairs. He’s picking apart a doughnut Oba bought in town before the rest of us were up. Butcher is moving slowly, favoring the bruised thigh, but moving. Max is asleep on the sofa in the next room. Loudly."Hurry up," Chana tells me without looking up.She's saved the seat next to her. She has the chair pushed out an inch, which is Chana for come here. I hurry."What do we have?""Everything.""Define everything."She turns the screen toward me.The directory tree is huge. Fourteen years of contracts. Personnel rotation logs going back to Vanguard's founding. Encrypted comms archives. Financial records. Subsidiary corporate structures across three continents. Every kill order they’ve ever processed. Every ret

DomThe dress is olive green, expensive, structured at the shoulders, and the wrong side of comfortable.Oliver told Oba what he needed and Oba sourced it overnight through a contact in Milan.It has a lining that hides the wire in the seam at my left hip. The wire feeds a clean signal back to where Oliver and Chana are running comms.I check my appearance again in the mirror of the gallery's small entrance vestibule. Hair pinned. Lipstick a shade of pink I would never wear in real life. The shoes are the worst part. I like dressing up and own my fair share of designer labels, but I’m no slave to fashion.Comfort and haute-couture can co-exist. They’re not doing it today.Bartoš's gallery sits on a corner in the old town, two streets up from the Danube, in a building that pretends to be eighteenth century but is mostly nineteen-sixty repair work. The interior is bright and cold. Concrete floors. A wall of windows facing the street. Photographs on the back wall of mostly naked girl