Page 1 of Hunt Me, Daddy

CHAPTER 1

Kit Calloway

Boston, Massachusetts

At two in the morning, Boston finally knew how to shut the fuck up.

That was my favorite time of night.

It wasn’t midnight, when the drunk girls in heels were still laughing too loudly on the sidewalks below and the boys who thought they were men were revving engines at red lights like anyone cared. It wasn’t even at one in the morning, when the last delivery scooters whined down the street and somebody inevitably decided it was the perfect time to slam a car door twelve times in a row.

Two in the morning was perfect.

The city went quiet in a way it never did during daylight hours. Steam drifted up from manhole covers in thin ghostly ribbons. Traffic lights changed for no one. The windows across from minebecame dark squares of other people’s sleeping lives, and my apartment settled around me with that particular stillness I had always trusted more than anything else.

I sat cross-legged in my desk chair with my laptop open in front of me, a second monitor glowing beside it, and a mug of coffee gone cold enough that the oil had gathered in a bitter-looking sheen across the top. I drank it anyway. I wasn’t precious about caffeine. Hot, cold, burnt, stale—I didn’t care. Coffee was a delivery system, not a personality trait.

The only light in the apartment came from my screens and the thin strip of LEDs under the kitchen cabinets, dimmed to the lowest setting because full brightness after midnight was an act of violence just like the daylight mode setting on your computer. My desk faced the room, never the wall. My back was to nothing but brick. The door was visible from the corner of my eye. So were the windows, the hallway mirror, and the black rectangle of the disabled smart TV I didn’t trust enough to plug in unless I was actively using it.

People thought paranoia was messy.

Mine was organized.

My apartment looked normal if you didn’t know what you were looking at. Small one-bedroom in a converted brick building on the edge of a neighborhood that realtors described as ‘up and coming,’ which meant the rent was stupid and the pipes screamed every time someone upstairs took a shower. I had bookshelves. A cheap couch. A kitchen table with one chair because I didn’t ever have anyone over. I had plants I had somehow managed not to kill. A gray throw blanket folded over the back of the couch with enough neatness that made people assume I was tidy instead of suspicious.

The important things were harder to see, like the pressure sensor beneath the mat that looked like it came from a hardware store but absolutely did not. The little black camera tucked inside the dead smoke detector above the hall. The second router running a honeypot network named PrettyFlyForAWiFi because I still had a sense of humor despite the reality of life. The safe bolted behind the removable panel under the sink. The burner phones in the flour canister. The wedge jammed under the bedroom window every night, even though I lived on the fourth floor and the fire escape ladder was rusted badly enough that even a desperate man would think twice about using it even in a pinch.

Systems failed.

People lied.

Locks were simply suggestions in the world I lived in.

I treated every door, device, connection, and human being as compromised until proven otherwise, and even then, I liked to circle back around and check my work.

That attitude had made me very good at my job.

It had also made me very bad at dinner parties, relationships, group vacations, roommate situations, casual intimacy, and letting anyone touch my laptop without imagining at least four ways I could ruin their credit before they made it to the elevator.

Honestly, fair trade.

I was a freelance cybersecurity consultant, which was a fancy way of saying companies paid me obscene hourly rates to tell them all the ways their expensive infrastructure was held together with duct tape, denial, and Gary from accounting’spassword reuse problem. I worked for banks, private firms, politicians who thought ‘encrypted’ meant ‘uses a password,’ and one biotech startup whose entire data security model appeared to be totally based on vibes.

I liked the work.

More accurately, I liked the part where the system opened up beneath my hands and showed me what it was hiding.

Everything hid something. People. Companies. Families. Criminal organizations with polished fronts and dirty money moving through shell networks three states wide.

The Orlovs, for example.

I leaned forward, dragging my finger over the trackpad and watching the newest batch of transactions populate on my left monitor. Rows of numbers scrolled past in the soft blue-white glow, each one tied to an entity that looked legitimate if you didn’t stare too long. Import/export companies. Logistics consultants. Real estate holding groups. A restaurant group registered out of Illinois with six subsidiaries and not a single photograph of food online, which was just embarrassing from a branding perspective.

The Orlov financial network had started as a contract.

That was what I kept telling myself anyway.

A private security firm in Boston had hired me six weeks ago to do a limited assessment of suspected money-laundering routes connected to several Chicago shell companies. They hadn’t said the name Orlov directly, but they hadn’t needed to. I knew they were connected to Mikhail Orlov.