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Girl Friday Books - Mark Pawlosky

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140 pages

English

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Description

1st place award in the 2023 Feathered Quill Book Awards, Mystery/Suspense category

When a top secret and powerful US surveillance technology is stolen and offered for sale on the black market, an exiled reporter races to expose the theft and untangle the plot—before the story is spiked, and he is silenced for good.

Coming off a successful investigation into a major banking scandal, Newshound reporter Nik Byron arrives in Washington, DC, with high hopes for his career. But a disruptive corporate merger and a vengeful boss quickly dash his plans. Relegated to scut work and the graveyard shift, Nik’s career and emotions are in a tailspin. That is, until a late-night explosion levels a high-tech office park—home to some of the nation’s top clandestine programs—and provides Nik with an opportunity to reverse his fortunes. As Nik tries to unravel the mystery at the heart of the explosion, he suddenly finds himself confronting domestic terrorists, rogue American and Chinese spies, mercenaries, and a brilliant but temperamental computer expert.

With the help of a small team of colleagues and his new girlfriend, Samantha Whyte—the chief investigator for the Northern Virginia Sheriff’s Department, who has her own secrets to conceal—Nik follows a bloody trail of bodies from DC to the upper Midwest. But as word gets out that what he has dug up threatens to expose the theft of highly sensitive US technology, now being sold to terrorists and repressive regimes, new enemies close in. How far is Nik willing to go for a story, and how much is he willing to risk to reveal the truth?

Sujets

Policier & Thriller

Thriller

Amateur Sleuth

Political

Detective

Politics

Mystery

Fiction

Informations

Publié par	Girl Friday Books
Date de parution	12 juillet 2022
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781954854611
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	2 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0050€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Copyright © 2022 by Mark Pawlosky
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

Published by Girl Friday Books™, Seattle www.girlfridaybooks.com
Produced by Girl Friday Productions
Production editorial: Bethany Davis Project management: Sara Spees Addicott Cover design: Emily Weigel
Image credits: cover © Shutterstock/Orhan Cam, Shutterstock/Motortion Films
ISBN (paperback): 978-1-954854-60-4 ISBN (e-book): 978-1-954854-61-1
Library of Congress Control Number: 2022903955

To Jen, Ben, and Will—my love and devotion, forever and a day

Author’s Note
Hack is set in Washington, DC, where I once lived and worked and which I still remember fondly. The city and its environs have changed considerably since my days there, and, out of a sense of nostalgia, I’ve resurrected several long-shuttered establishments for the telling of this story. I have attempted to remain true to the more iconic landmarks, but, for my purposes, I have altered some locations and conjured up whole entities—the Northern Virginia County Sheriff’s Department, among them—where none exist.

Chapter 1
December 15, 2018, Interstate 270, Maryland
The rattletrap panel van was pushing sixty-eight miles an hour, headed north on Interstate 270 just south of the Pennsylvania state line as darkness descended. The road noise in the cab was deafening, and Cooley had to shout to be heard.
“You see that fireball, Nuky? I bet that sucker rattled the fuckin’ china cabinet in the fuckin’ White House,” wailed Cooley, highballing on a combination of adrenaline and meth.
Cooley’s companion, a towhead named Nukowski with a stringy mullet and eyes as red as cayenne peppers, let go a long blue cloud of vape as he stared out the passenger window at the vanishing countryside and muttered under his breath.
“Whaaaat?” Cooley said at the top of his lungs. “I told you I can’t hear you with you mumblin’ all the time.”
“I seen it,” Nukowski said, thinking, The bomb was supposed to go off in the morning when people were at work, not Sunday night when no one was around. “Lucky we didn’t get blowed up ourselves, and would have, too, if that security guard hadn’t spooked us. You screwed the pooch, Cooley.”
“Uh-uh. No way. I didn’t set that detonator. Hawk did. And he told me he double-checked it and all I had to do was flip the switch. Something musta triggered it.” Cooley defended himself.
“It didn’t look like no fuckin’ FBI building, either,” Nukowski said.
“Hawk never said FBI office,” Cooley replied, hunched over the steering wheel, one hand obsessively clawing at his rubbery, loon-like neck while he stared out at the highway through slitted eyes. “He said FBI had top-secret operations there.” Cooley slapped the steering wheel and let out another high-pitched war whoop.
“I signed on to kill government agents, not blow up fuckin’ shopping centers,” Nukowski said, glaring at his addled accomplice and wondering how Cooley had ever survived two tours of duty in Afghanistan.
“That weren’t no shoppin’ center. It was an office park,” Cooley corrected.
“Same difference,” Nukowski replied.
“No it ain’t neither, and besides,” Cooley assured him, “Hawk said we’ll have plenty more opportunities. You’re just tired, s’all. Why don’t you try to catch some shut-eye whilst I drive. We got a long road ahead of us before we get back to Michigan. I got this.”
Nukowski muttered under his breath again, and Cooley, nerves frayed and jangled by the meth, and seemingly exasperated by his companion’s sourpuss attitude, taunted in a braying voice, “Twat you say? Cunt hear you. Bare ass me again.”
Nukowski seethed and contemplated plunging the tip of his vape stick deep into Cooley’s right eye socket, then thought better of it. Instead, he said, “Can’t sleep in this fuckin’ washtub. Tell me again about Hawk’s plans.”
Cooley whipped his bullet-shaped head around to face Nukowski and flashed him a set of mossy teeth. “Well, now, Nuky, that right there’s the beauty part.”

Chapter 2
December 15, Washington, DC
It was a dreary gray mid-December evening and, as he had been every weekend for the past three months, reporter Nik Byron sat alone in Newshound ’s Washington, DC, office, single-handedly manning the phones, knocking out mundane news stories, monitoring social media feeds, and keeping one ear tuned to the police scanner while drinking bitter coffee from a mug inscribed with the phrase “World’s Greatest Reporter.” The irony was as cruel and comical as it was inescapable.
Months earlier, Nik had landed in Washington at the peak of summer to strangling humidity, swarms of cicadas, and the devastating news that he had been demoted and would no longer be Newshound ’s DC chief editor, a promotion he had been promised after uncovering a massive banking scandal in the Midwest for the feisty online news operation.
Instead of sitting atop Newshound ’s food chain when he arrived in Washington, Nik was now a bottom-feeder, the casualty of a hastily hatched media merger. He was relegated to weekend duty, the drudgery of the graveyard shift, and assignments no one else wanted. He had been given the title chief deputy editor, as if that carried any weight at all.
Nik’s only “scoop” since arriving in DC was a story on King Kobe, a packaged food mogul, who, it turned out, was adulterating the ultra-premium beef with horseflesh from some stables he owned outside The Plains, Virginia, and selling it to high-end restaurants in and around the nation’s capital for top dollar.
The story had resulted in two utterly predictable outcomes: health officials declaring themselves shocked and launching an investigation, and Nik’s officemates seizing on the story and knighting him the Galloping Gourmet. They had even chipped in and bought him a stick pony that made galloping sounds when you rode it around the office. The good-natured ribbing only helped to underscore the demoralizing turn of events Nik’s career had taken.
As he switched off the office lights and headed for the door, Nik was grateful it had been a relatively quiet weekend. He planned to meet with two colleagues after work, and he was looking forward to an evening on the town. His erratic work schedule and complicated personal life made for a meager social existence.
In his late thirties with a thick tassel of golden hair, a perpetual three-day stubble, aquiline nose, and easy manner, Nik seldom wanted for companionship, but before relocating, he had committed to a long-distance relationship with his girlfriend, Haley Patterson, a budding entrepreneur who had launched a successful online cosmetics company in Kansas City.
The cross-country courtship, emotionally intense, sexually adventurous, and all-consuming at first, had flagged by month three and cratered in month five, just before Thanksgiving. Nik had remained faithful to Haley during the trial run and spent most nights at home by himself with his dog, Gyp, a high-strung vizsla, in his Georgetown apartment, but now, single again, he was eager to socialize with friends and drown his sorrows in what his colleagues had dubbed “boozehounders,” nights of hard drinking, gossip swapping, and scheming to undermine Li’l Dick Whetstone, their tyrannical boss.
Nik was standing in the hallway absentmindedly locking up and musing about the night ahead when the police scanner in the office burped to life. The scanner was tuned to filter out routine calls and only monitor critical developments.
Nik pressed his ear to the door to listen and silently cursed his luck. Two more minutes, and he would have been riding the elevator down to the parking garage, home free.
The scanner crackled with nonstop chatter, though Nik had a hard time deciphering what was being said through the closed door, and he couldn’t make heads or tails of the shorthand codes that were being broadcast.
“Damn it,” he cursed aloud and pushed back through the doorway, dropping his bag on the carpet and stumbling across the darkened office to where the scanner sat next to a bank of television monitors and the light panel. He toggled on the lights just as a voice spilled over the speaker: “Injuries reported, extent unknown, medics dispatched to Trident Office Park, Homeland Security alerted, code Z as in zebra.” There was a brief pause, and then: “Switching to secure channel.” The squawking ceased and the monitor fell silent.
Nik didn’t know what code Z was, but Trident Park rang a bell. It was a southeast office complex where a number of high-tech companies, including OmniSoft Corporation, were located.
When Nik had first joined Newshound ’s DC operation, he had been saddled with the OmniSoft saga—a hair ball of a story so convoluted and vexing that the other reporters in the office had run screaming from it.
The owner of OmniSoft, Cal Walker, claimed the government had forced him into bankruptcy in order to gain control of his proprietary surveillance monitoring software—named POOF. When Walker decided to fight back and sue the US government in federal court for $100 million, every attorney in town he approached refused to represent him on the grounds that they thought he was delusional, a conspiracy kook, and, moreover, penniless. Washington lawyers were greedy, but they weren’t stupid.
Walker had no choice but to represent himself, and Nik, as the new guy on the beat, had inherited the long-running case just as it was headed to trial, along with thousands of pages of court filings, govern