Dragon Knight (The Collegium Book 3) by Jenny Schwartz Page B

frenzy. Money would be spent beyond rationality—or resources abandoned as they fled. Greed could take advantage of fear. People afraid for their and their children’s lives didn’t think logically, and that’s when the vulpine Group of 5 swooped in.
    On screen, Lindsay’s hundred thousand dollars disappeared into a Swiss bank account. Damn . Gina recognized the bank. It was run by people who understood magic. They’d hired mages to ward their vaults, both the physical ones and those in cyberspace. The bank was not for hacking.
    Gina pushed back from her desk, idly picking up a piece of paper she’d scribbled notes on and folding it into a paper tulip—a trick one of her ten-year-old cousin’s had recently taught her. With the International Children’s Conference convening and children everywhere around the world encouraged to send their wishes written on recycled colored paper to accompany their nation’s youthful representative to the conference in Mexico, children were going wild for origami. Gina found it soothing to fold and shape paper while her thoughts drifted.
    Would it be so bad to hack the bank? She was very tempted. Who owned the account Lindsay had sent her money to? But that was the teenage part of herself whispering temptation, the bit that had only just avoided FBI scrutiny at fifteen. Surely she’d learned prudence since then?
    Gina set the paper tulip down beside her computer, next to a paper rose, three paper irises and a paper peony.
    By some measures, one hundred thousand dollars was a small amount of money. Small enough not to trigger mundane intelligence agencies’ attention unless Lindsay repeated the financial action—which she hadn’t.
    But one hundred thousand was also sufficient to hire a rogue mage to undertake a destabilizing activity; that is, if the activity was small enough and its consequences not immediately obvious. Rogue mages weren’t stupid. They knew the line they couldn’t cross without capturing the Collegium’s attention.
    Gina mulled over the problem. The important thing was not to act impulsively. She had a tendency to do that…as with kissing Lewis. Although kiss was an inadequate term for what they’d shared. Her body heated and melted just thinking about it.
    Work!
    As a distraction, she started typing up the information she had for him. She had Lindsay Perez’s identity and Lindsay had some interesting contacts.
    The attack came out of nowhere. The first of Gina’s alerts flashed across her screen.
    She abandoned her report to Lewis and opened the alert. The second layer of her security pinged. Someone was attempting to uncover her identity.
    Good luck with that. But annoyance flickered. Out of respect for Lewis’s judgment, from the first she’d used one of her most secure identities while undertaking this search, and she’d ventured cautiously. Evidently not cautiously enough. The timing couldn’t be coincidence. She’d tripped some flag set by one or more of the Group of 5, and they wanted to know who was snooping.
    However, she’d spent a week setting up this online identity, and the layers and obfuscations she’d employed would keep a hacker occupied a while. Perhaps long enough for her to circle around and identify them?
    If she was lucky, the person coming after her was the group’s secret fifth member.
    She flexed her fingers and started typing. This particular false identity was one she used when she wanted to elude other hackers. It flaunted its credentials, not too obviously, but enough to support the illusion that she was a teenage boy, someone roaming with aimless curiosity into a lot of not-so-obvious areas. People she encountered might subconsciously dismiss this identity as a lesser threat. Boys will be boys, and all that.
    And if they kept pursuing her, well, she’d installed a virus along two of the paths to her true identity. They were the sort of virus a teenage boy would delight in. It lacked subtlety, but the virus taking over