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CHAPTER 1

Griffin

Even though the h cloud cover for e of the woods behind the wo noticed She lives about twenty h in a little town called Cranberry

I’ve learned a bit about her because I’ve been watching her for a few days Her hoht infer, but affluent Her house is a four-thousand-square-foot dwelling all done in gray brick with cream shutters and a manicured lawn The suburban lifestyle is at odds with her day job, which I haven’t quite figured out yet When I followed her to work, she disappeared into an abandoned warehouse in a rundown section of Pittsburgh where she stayed until the evening commute home

She’s in her kitchen now, thefacing outward to her backyard There’s a s, fort, and a cli wall Her kid is too old for it, and he never uses it He does like to troh His trail leads down to a tiny creek where he valiantly tries to fish, but he co He clearly needs so or two

I study the wo how someone so pretty ended up in such a bad mess She’s petite, almost delicate, with exquisite bone structure Her hair is so black it glints al While the exact color of her eyes is not discernable froainst the darkness of her hair It makes her seem almost ethereal Contrast that with the tattoos she has down her arhness in the way she holds herself A steel spine is how I’d describe it

She has tattoos in other places, too—ribs, legs, and back I don’t know that froh

It’s in the file back in my hotel room

When I’d received it from my boss, it had been fairly thin and contained a photo that doesn’t re, in her early twenties, with bleached-blond hair cut extremely short, but she has one of those faces made for that style There had even been a diah an eyebrow

Blue Pale, icy blue is the actual color of her eyes I can’t quite see theht, but they’d been vivid in that photo

It was a prison photo, no doubt, and right beloas a list of the tattoos she had with more close-up photos attached They were meant to be used to identify her

I was given her name, which is Bebe Grimshaw—formally known as Brianna Belle Grih his underground network of black-h area With a little digging, I’d found her through the real estate tax records here in Cranberry

I’, muscle, hired help, or whatever—who does a half-assed job I fleshed out the file I’d been given with some research of my own Turns out Bebe Griined

About eight years ago, she pled guilty to cyber-espionage charges leveled against her by the federal government See, and she’dto be sold to the Chinese While that leboy who lives with her mother, what really interests me was how she refused to name any of her co-conspirators and was the lone person to take the fall for the crime

She was sentenced to thirty-five years in prison

Most would wonder how in the hell she’s now living a quiet life in Cranberry, Pennsylvania, but I’m fairly sure I know the answer

Given the things I’ve seen during the past two years of working for uess he was involved in the nuclear-code hack

As if thinking about the man procures hi I step several feet back into the tree line before turning low of my cell doesn’t catch Bebe’s interest while she finishes the dinner dishes

The rammed into achev Despite his Russian heritage, he was raised in the Brighton Beach portion of Brooklyn and has no discernable trace of his motherland accent