The Sixth Idea

by P. J. Tracy

  Lydia sank down into a chair at the kitchen table. “What’s happening, Detectives? Tell me everything.”

  And Magozzi and Gino did, because she deserved to know. And amazingly, things came out a lot smoother than Magozzi imagined they would, in part because she’d been in on it from the beginning and knew the backstory.

  Unfortunately, all of it was too incredible to comprehend at this point, no matter how you told it, and as traumatized as she was by the nasty surprise she’d found in her basement, Lydia seemed to switch off halfway through the telling. Her eyes went blank and she looked down into her empty coffee cup, just shaking her head. But she came back to life when they started telling her about Ed Farrell’s murder in Cheeton, the other victims who were either murdered or missing, and the connection they all had to American Iron Foundry.

  “American Iron Foundry is where my grandfather worked. And where Chuck’s father worked, only not in Cheeton—they were both on the East Coast. New York and New Jersey. Maybe other places, too. From what I know from my mother, the government manufactured bomb components in plants scattered all over the country. So this is about the bomb after all?”

  “Actually, we think it’s all about the Sixth Idea.”

  “So somebody wants me dead. The same people who probably killed Chuck and Wally and the man up in Cheeton. Because of something I know nothing about.”

  “That’s all speculation, but we’re erring on the side of caution. For obvious reasons.”

  “And you have no idea who wants me dead, or who killed the others?”

  “We’re working around the clock to find out. So are a lot of other people, both law enforcement and private individuals.”

  She let out a weary sigh and started worrying a yarn snowman that was sitting on top of the table. “This is hopeless. Because I don’t know anything. And neither did Chuck. Or Wally.”

  Magozzi saw a single tear splash down onto the oak table and felt his heart squeeze. He and Gino were both as frustrated as she was. The only difference was, nobody was trying to kill them. At least not yet. “Ms. Ascher, this is overwhelming right now, but it’s anything but hopeless. You have a lot of evidence in your basement that might help us . . .”

  “Like what?”

  “Ballistics, for one thing. And the man from the airport. If we can identify him, we’re halfway there.”

  “And what if you can’t identify him? What if ballistics doesn’t tell you anything?”

  Gino clasped his hands together and leaned across the table, and Magozzi let him take over. He was the father of a teenage daughter, a blue-ribbon husband, and he was ultimately more qualified than he was to comfort a woman in distress. “There is an end to this, Ms. Ascher, you have our word. And we’re going to keep you safe until we get to that end. In our line of work, you gather puzzle pieces until you can envision the finished picture, and now we have some more pieces to work with. Maybe it’s the same with your drawing. Like you get the eyes right, but you can’t figure out the mouth until you draw an ear or an eyebrow, and then the whole face comes together, just like that.”

  Lydia cocked her head at Gino. “You have a unique perspective, Detective Rolseth.”

  Magozzi was watching in amazement. With a lame metaphor, Gino had calmed and engaged her. The man had lessons to teach. “Ms. Ascher, you mentioned you had some old papers and photographs that belonged to your grandfather that were similar to the material Charles Spencer showed you on the plane. Perhaps we could go through those with you and see if something grabs our attention.”

  “Of course. It’s in a box right behind your chairs, Detectives. But there’s probably nothing there you haven’t already seen in Chuck’s paperwork.”

  “We never found Mr. Spencer’s paperwork. Almost all of his personal effects were stolen, except for a small suitcase in his hotel room.”

  “Oh. I didn’t realize. Let me get it for you.” She walked around the table and froze, her gaze fixed on the floor. “It was right there,” she said, pointing to an empty corner.

  “Maybe you moved it?”

  Lydia shook her head slowly. “No. No, definitely not. It was there when I left the house today, I’m positive. Somebody stole it. And it obviously wasn’t the man from the airport.” She abruptly leaned between them both and started frenetically shuffling things on the kitchen table, oblivious to the fact that she was inappropriately situated between two strangers, bumping and jostling them.

  She calmed down when her hand found an old paperback. “This is all I have left,” she mumbled.

  “One of your favorites?” Magozzi asked after a skeptical glance at what was clearly a dated pulp fiction romance. His very own aunt, ostensibly a prude of the highest order, had kept a treasure trove of these novels under her bed, which Magozzi had found as a precocious eleven-year-old, and received a sound beating with a flyswatter for his trouble. God, he had hated that woman . . .

  “No,” Lydia interrupted his reverie. “This was in the box my grandfather left to my mother in his will. All those journals with formulas and equations and then this.” She held up the book. “A cheap paperback of nonsense. It’s baffling.”

  She told them what her grandfather had told her mother—to hide the book, to keep it from the eyes of all others, and then pass it on to her own children.

  Magozzi closed his eyes, let his mind ramble wherever it wanted to go. “Someone took the box of journals.”

  Lydia looked down at the table, watching her fingers move aimlessly across the wood-grained surface. “Apparently.”

  “But they missed this.”

  Lydia exhaled a long breath. “I was curious about it, so I took it out of the box.”

  “So they saw the box filled with all the journals and never realized this book was part of it.” He wasn’t making a case, just thinking out loud.

  “Maybe.”

  “It looks like a book you were reading—like a lot of books people read, then lay on a table or chair to pick up later.”

  “This one is a little different.” And then Lydia told them about what her mother had said; about the five-and-dime, the real places her mother had known and lived in, and that she thought her father had written the book.

  “Do you mind if we take this along? We have some friends who might be able to make sense of it.”

  Lydia nodded. “Please. Take it.”

  Gino looked out the window where Deputy Harmon and a few other officers were gathering around a squad car. “Ms. Ascher, we need to speak with Deputy Harmon for a few minutes. He’s arranging a safe place for you tonight. Around-the-clock protection until we can figure this thing out.”

  She let out a shuddering sigh of relief. “I never even thought about where I’d spend the night. All I knew for sure was that I couldn’t stay here.”

  “They’ll do a good job. We’ll make sure of it.”

  “Yes. Thank you, Detectives.”

  Lydia’s yard was bordered with a dense woods shouldered with white pines which were soughing in the wind. It was a cold sound with a brutal accompaniment of icy pellets smacking against any piece of exposed skin.

  Deputy Harmon was getting out of his squad when Gino and Magozzi approached. His face was red from the cold and he kept shifting his weight from foot to foot. “The sheriff is getting everything set up at the motel, Detectives.”

  “You mind if we take a look before we leave?”

  “Hell no. You see something we missed, we welcome the input.”

  They all turned when they heard a vehicle coming down the snowy drive.

  “BCA,” Gino said. “Deputy Harmon, we’d like to stick around until we can get prints on the John Doe.”

  “No problem.” He looked anxiously toward Lydia’s house. “Is Ms. Ascher all right?”

  “She’s fine, but you might want to let her know BCA is about to take over her house.
”

  “You got it, Detectives.”

  Gino smiled a little as he watched him jog up the front walk. “I think Deputy Harmon’s smitten.”

  “Nothing more powerful than the bond between a white knight and a damsel in distress,” Magozzi said and then cringed, because it had come out sounding a lot more cynical than he’d meant it.

  “Speaking from experience?”

  “Nope. Grace may have been running from killers half her life, but she’s never been a damsel in distress. And I’ve never been accused of being a white knight.”

  “Are you kidding? You’re the second best cop on the force after me. Truth, justice, the American way.”

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  Zero studied the faces of his four numerically named colleagues. A week ago, those faces had been animated with confidence and excitement. Today, their expressions were a grim mélange of despair, desperation, and fear. Zero felt all those things, too, but anger trumped every other emotion. Although they were all equals in this legacy venture, he was first in command and things were suddenly starting to fall apart—under his watch. How had such a thing happened with unlimited resources and the finest talent at their disposal?

  Since it was inconceivable that his own leadership ability was the issue, he placed the blame squarely on the shoulders of the other men. He folded his hands together tightly on the table and tried to keep his voice even as he addressed them. “We have a monumental disaster on our hands, gentlemen. We’ve lost two people in the field and two physicists have disappeared into thin air. Lydia Ascher is still a liability, even more so now that she’s involved with the two Minneapolis detectives working with Monkeewrench on the murders of Spencer and Luntz. We’ve all heard the audio from their conversations—they’re getting too close for comfort. Of course, we’re dead in the water now in that regard, because the detectives aren’t using their cell phones anymore, and I wonder why?”

  Three, a skinny, fussy man with a wispy mustache, spoke up. “Monkeewrench. They found our wiretaps—”

  “Of course they did. That was a rhetorical question,” Zero snapped. “For now, forget about Monkeewrench and the detectives. The only thing we need to worry about is keeping this project safe and out of the hands of maniacs. You all understand what is at stake.” He paused, letting that sink in before he continued. “We need to fix this and fix it fast.”

  “Who is killing our people?” Two spoke up. “We weren’t anticipating outside interference, and aside from keeping our systems secure, that’s our biggest problem right now.”

  Zero nodded, reluctantly conceding the point—high-level assassins were difficult and dangerous to retain, and even more difficult to replace, and their roster was down by two. “We need to find out, and we need to take care of it. And we need to stay invisible while we do it. We’re in crisis management mode now, and we goddamn better do this right.”

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  There was a time long ago in Harley Davidson’s life when he’d never aspired to be wealthy or successful or educated—all the things he was now. At sixteen, he’d never aspired to anything except finding a family, and that meant earning the right to fly colors as a Hells Angel, riding free on the open road without a care in the world, surrounded by a band of brothers—a family, for the first time in his life.

  But his brothers in the Angels hadn’t turned out to be the kind of family he’d had in mind, and the love wasn’t unconditional—there were serious strings attached, prices he wasn’t willing to pay. If it hadn’t been for an old biker named Del, he probably wouldn’t be alive right now, hacking into an Interpol server—all in the name of justice, of course. And even if he had survived, without Del, he probably wouldn’t have gone to college in Atlanta, wouldn’t have found his real people—Grace, Roadrunner, and Annie.

  He hadn’t thought about Del in a long time. But it seemed appropriate this Christmas, especially with half of Monkeewrench missing, which for some inexplicable reason was hitting him with melancholia. He’d always thought he loved the holiday so much because it was the perfect time to go way over the top and spread his embarrassment of riches. But it really wasn’t that at all. Sure, Roadrunner could be a real pain in the ass sometimes, especially when they were working on a program together; and Annie was a supreme diva who loved to punch his buttons whenever the opportunity presented itself. But they were his family, his only family, the kind that did give you unconditional love, and he missed them being together as a unit.

  “Harley? Are you busy?”

  “Oh, hell yes, I’m over here committing all sorts of egregious cybercrimes that could put me in prison for a long time. What’s up, Gracie?”

  “I’m doing an autopsy on the malware that took Spencer’s website down. It’s the same variant that corrupted the Chatham’s server.”

  Harley got up from his chair and covered the distance to Grace’s computer station in a few Herculean strides. He crouched down and stared at her screen for a few minutes, then popped back up. “That’s a Stuxnet hybrid, like the one that wiped out a bunch of Iranian nuke centrifuges a few years back. A totally surgical virus.”

  Grace looked up at him. “And a virus that originated with our government. Of course, the Stuxnet genie is out of the bottle now and anybody can riff off it.”

  “Sure. So what’s the timeline on the virus?”

  “The infection started not too long after Spencer’s website went live. He was on somebody’s radar a few months ago. But the Chatham’s server didn’t get compromised until the day he was murdered.”

  “Jesus. Spencer was a dead man walking. They gave his computer cancer, put it in remission, and when the time was right, they killed the website. And him along with it.”

  “And his friend Wally Luntz. And they tried to kill any video evidence that would indicate Spencer’s murder was anything but a simple tourist mugging gone bad.”

  “So who is ‘they’?”

  Grace sighed. “I still can’t trace the source.”

  “Goddamnit, this is turning into a real ball of vipers—” Grace and Harley both looked up abruptly when an angry alarm went off on Harley’s computer. All their computers had very specific alarms—gentle pings or bells or chimes to indicate new incoming information, new connections made by the Beast, and a myriad of other harmless activities their computers engaged in while they weren’t being monitored by their users. And then there were the loud, angry klaxons that warned them whatever they were working on was putting their system in peril of a potential security breach. It was a safety measure they’d put into place to conceal their illegal intrusions.

  “Shit, that’s my Interpol hack,” Harley huffed, running across the room and initiating a self-destruct on the program he had executed.

  Grace dashed after him, and the thirty feet of maple flooring between their stations seemed like a football field. “Are we secure?”

  Harley let out a heavy sigh. “We’re good. Safe.” He reached over to his printer, which was spitting out paper. He scanned the pages for a few moments, then passed them to Grace. “Natalia Smirnova’s Interpol file.”

  THIRTY-NINE

  So what do you think?” Gino asked as Magozzi hopped into the sedan.

  “Jefferson County pulled out all the stops. I don’t think we could have done much better.” He gestured at all the squad cars surrounding the motel, at the policemen and -women making rounds of the property, inside and out. “Nobody in their right mind would go anywhere near this much police presence. Plus, the media’s going to be all over this place in a heartbeat, which is another great deterrent. They might not know what the story is, but twenty-some cop cars surrounding a little cinder-block motel is going to grab some attention.”

  Gino nodded and made a careful turn onto the highway. The roads had been cleared, but there was still an icy sheen of snowpack that the salt hadn’t eaten away yet. “Yeah. Lydia’s going to b
e okay. The only problem is, Jefferson County—hell, no county—can keep this kind of thing up for long. We’ve got a bigger problem, and that’s hanging the sun on this thing, because until we do, our happy hunters are still out there hiding in the dark and our fair heroine is under grievous threat.”

  Magozzi arched a brow at him. “Good God, what cable channel are you watching now?”

  “No channel. Helen’s reading The Mists of Avalon. Aloud.”

  Magozzi grinned. He loved these little glimpses into Gino’s home life. “Well, except for the first part, which was all cop speak, it was kind of poetic, Gino. It’s bad, but still.”

  “Yeah, well, exhaustion has a tendency to warp my mind.”

  Magozzi grabbed one of the cell phones Harley had given them. “I’ll call Monkeewrench and let them know we’re going to drop off Lydia’s book. Maybe they have something new for us.”

  Harley answered on the first ring.

  “Magozzi?”

  “Hey, Harley, I’ve got you on speaker. Gino and I are heading back to the city.”

  “Stop here on the way in.”

  “We were planning on it.”

  “Good. Drive safe and see you soon. Bye.”

  When Magozzi hung up, Gino gave him a sidelong glance. “You’ve never had such a short conversation with Harley in your life.”

  “Something’s up.”

  Once they hit the freeway, the roads cleared up. The plows had been busy and the snow had finally stopped. Still, it took them a good hour and a half to drive to Harley’s.

  Magozzi and Gino had become inured to the spectacle of the Summit Avenue mansion over the years, but no matter how many times you’d seen the place decked out for any given season, the Christmas pageantry always took your breath away. Especially at night, when thousands of tiny lights twinkled in the trees like a galaxy of stars.

  They didn’t have to knock; Grace and Harley opened up the big double doors and ushered them inside. Magozzi didn’t like the way both their eyes were coursing the yard beyond the front steps. He also didn’t like the fact that Harley was wearing his weapon. Grace was never without her gun and he and Gino were used to that, but Harley didn’t possess her level of paranoia and rarely carried. Especially in his own house, which was more secure than most banks.