The Sixth Idea

by P. J. Tracy

  Gino withdrew a foil-wrapped package from his parka pocket, just as Magozzi had hoped he would. “Meatball sub with provolone, still warm. Extra peppers and napkins for you.”

  Magozzi ascended to cheesy meatball nirvana and for a few brief moments all was right and good in the world. After his third bite, he jockeyed into sparse traffic on the boulevard that bisected Gino’s neighborhood. Snow was still falling steadily, gathering in growing clumps on the lilac bowers in the center median. Years ago, the median had been lined with grand old elms, but the few trees that had survived the second major Dutch elm disease outbreak in the nineties had been uprooted by straight-line winds eight years ago. It had been a civic tragedy, and although the lilacs were pretty in the spring, they had an impermanent quality, like most things in the twenty-first century.

  When Magozzi’s phone rang on the sedan’s console, he fumbled for it with messy fingers and it slipped out of his grasp. “Shit. Gino, can you grab that?”

  Gino reached for it and answered. “Hi, Grace. Leo has his mouth full of meatball and can’t talk right now.” He listened for a few moments. “Dahl? Yeah, he’s on the up-and-up, don’t shoot him.” He paused and listened again. “Okay, we’ll see you soon.” He hung up and wiped a smear of tomato sauce off the screen with his glove. “Dahl’s meeting us at Harley’s for a face-to-face.”

  “That was fast. Something must have happened in Fedland.”

  “Yep. Grace said they might have caught a break with Lydia’s book, too.”

  Agent Dahl was already there when they arrived at Harley’s, waiting for them at the door. Grace, Harley, and Lydia were notably absent.

  “So you’re the butler now, Dahl?” Gino asked, his nose upturning at the distant aroma of something baked and sweet. “How did you pull this off? I mean, Harley and Grace know you, but what gives? It took them two years to let us in without handcuffs and blindfolds.”

  “Charm,” Dahl deadpanned. “Pure charm.”

  “Sure.” Gino looked around. “Where is everybody?”

  “In the kitchen. I was told not to leave the foyer until you two arrived. I got past the front door, but that’s where the welcome wagon ended.” He looked up at the big spruce Christmas tree. “Do you know there’s a fifty-caliber handgun hanging from the inner boughs?”

  “Harley gets really creative this time of year,” Magozzi said, moving closer to Dahl. “So what happened with Shafer? Is this an official visit?”

  Dahl shrugged. “No. I’m off the clock until further notice.”

  “So, off the books.”

  “Yes. Which I’m certain is the only reason your friends let me in.”

  Magozzi raised a brow. “But Shafer sent you here.”

  Dahl didn’t answer right away. He didn’t have to. Shafer wanted him here without his hands tied. If Monkeewrench came up with some important, ill-gotten information, Dahl could present it as an anonymous tip and Shafer would have plausible deniability if the shit hit the fan. In that case, Dahl would probably be the fall guy; a rogue agent teetering on the same gray line that Magozzi and Gino often confronted when it came to Monkeewrench. “I’m here to offer whatever support I can,” he finally said.

  Magozzi really didn’t care what the backstory was—Dahl was an extra gun and an extra pair of eyes, and it was a reasonable assumption that they all had the same end game in mind—find the bad guys and keep Lydia Ascher alive. He gestured toward the kitchen, and Dahl and Gino followed.

  Grace was on the phone, pacing the floor, and Harley and Lydia were sitting motionless at the breakfast bar, listening to the one-sided conversation intently. They all gave distracted waves to Magozzi, Gino, and Dahl, but nobody said anything that would interrupt.

  Since the phone call was clearly important and nobody was talking, Gino grabbed a Christmas cookie from a plate on the counter to give his mouth something to do while he waited.

  The room seemed airless until Grace finally hung up and acknowledged the newcomers with sharp blue eyes. “Annie and Roadrunner are on their way to the cemetery,” she pronounced with no explanation.

  “What cemetery?” Magozzi, Gino, and Dahl asked in unison.

  FIFTY-ONE

  Magozzi, Gino, and Agent Dahl chose lookout posts on the main level of the mansion, where they had clear lines of sight to the front gate, the alley in back, and the side yards and carriage house. Their role as guards was painfully redundant, because Harley’s place was so wired up that everybody inside had the ability to constantly monitor security screens from a hell of a lot more angles than three pairs of cops’ eyes looking out windows.

  And far more effective than any human could ever be were the computers that were also monitoring the security screens with far more efficiency. The computer knew when a bunny jumped out from behind a shrub thirty or a hundred feet away and let you know about it the second it happened; the armed men inside would only know if there was a full-on assault of the property, and that just wasn’t going to happen with Harley’s yard lit up brighter than the Vegas strip and a whole lot of cops, on duty and off, trolling the neighborhood and watching the perimeter. And yet computers missed things sometimes, just like humans. And relinquishing all control to machines just didn’t seem right.

  They were all still cavemen at heart, Magozzi realized, protecting their perimeter, protecting their women. A gun was just a modern version of a club. Evolution didn’t have a prayer of ever catching up with technology.

  Magozzi looked away from the front hall window when he heard the soft hum of the elevator descending from the third-floor office. Grace and Harley emerged, carrying laptops. They both seemed calm, but there was an underlying current of urgency to their presence. It wasn’t a social visit.

  “Is everything all right?”

  Grace nodded. “Better than all right. Where are Gino and Dahl?”

  “They’re manning other battle stations down here.”

  One corner of Grace’s mouth twitched so slightly, anybody else would have missed it. “Well, you’re all doing a good job. Not a single barbarian has stormed the ramparts yet.” She stepped closer. “The Beast just found something important, but it’s nothing you and Gino can use and we’re at the end of a trail. Do you trust Dahl?”

  “He wouldn’t have gotten past the foyer if we didn’t trust him. I also have the feeling that his job is on the line just by being here.”

  “Good. Because we need him.” She turned and cocked her head at Harley.

  He walked over to an intercom mounted on the wall and pressed a button. His voice boomed through speakers that echoed through the house. “Calling all knights in shining armor to the front.”

  It took Gino and Dahl roughly thirty seconds to appear. They all clustered around Harley while he toggled up a screen on his laptop. It was dominated by a blinking map, a satellite photo, and a table of encoded computer commands. “Ta-dah,” he said victoriously, waving a big arm toward the screen.

  “What are we looking at?” Magozzi asked.

  “A point of origin for the cyberattacks that took down Charles Spencer’s website and hacked the Chatham Hotel server. The trail ends here. Whoever these bastards are, they bounced us around the globe a few times trying to hide their tracks, but there’s no question in my mind or Grace’s—these are your bad guys. Or at least some of them. We just don’t know who they are. Not exactly, anyhow.” He narrowed his eyes at Dahl. “Of course, we did absolutely nothing illegal to obtain this information, it all came from an anonymous tip.”

  Dahl’s nose was practically pressed against the screen. “Of course. Where is this?”

  “A house in upstate New York.”

  “Who owns it?” Magozzi asked.

  Harley rubbed his hands together. “This is where it gets good and juicy. The owner is listed as a private foundation that just happens to be a nonprofit arm of Silver Dune Technology.”


  “The same company that’s making computer chips at AIF up in Cheeton.”

  “You got it. For a charity, they’ve never been real big on publicity, but their 504C reporting checks out as far back as I could go.”

  “What do they do?” Dahl asked, his eyes still riveted on Harley’s computer screen.

  “Their mission statement is ‘providing technology and infrastructure to developing nations.’ Basically, they set up wireless communication hubs in third world countries and give away shitloads of computers to facilitate commerce in poor, remote areas, so you don’t have to walk a hundred miles carrying a load of yak wool or whatever to find out if there’s actually a market for your stuff in a city center by the time you get there.”

  Magozzi frowned. “Not exactly nefarious. So this charity is some kind of a front?”

  “Ninety-nine percent of it seems legit. It’s the other one percent lurking in the shadows we have to worry about. I might add that they have had generous government subsidies over the years.”

  Gino’s imagination was taking the fast lane to the dark side. “Great. So Silver Dune is some kind of a government front that suddenly decided it would be a good idea to kill U.S. citizens between philanthropic missions.”

  Harley gave Gino a sympathetic look. “You can spin this thing seven ways to Sunday. I’m just telling you what we know right now.”

  “What about the Russian angle? Assuming this is all tangled up with the H-bomb and the Cold War never really ended.”

  “It didn’t,” Grace interjected. “And if this is about the hydrogen bomb, you can be sure the Russians are involved. They were there from the beginning. But the hydrogen bomb went out of style with bouffants, dead in the water as a weapon after the testing ban in 1968. And it’s not like you could hide secret detonations if you were still doing research. Harley and I think the Sixth Idea is about something else.” She looked around the room and preempted the question that was on everyone’s lips. “We don’t know what.”

  Magozzi tapped Dahl on the shoulder. “The New York house is a little out of our jurisdiction and we don’t have legal proof that connects it or the people in it with our homicides. The FBI is the only one who can work this. Think you can convince Shafer to run with it?”

  Dahl was already slipping on his overcoat as he headed toward the front door. “I don’t think he’ll need any convincing.”

  After Dahl had left, Gino clapped Harley on the back. “Stellar work.”

  “Aw, shucks. Grace did most of it. I’m just a pretty face around here.”

  “I’m guessing none of this information came from an anonymous tip like you told Dahl, so how the hell did you really get it?”

  “The short answer? It’s all about mistakes. Almost everybody makes them, overlooks something, forgets to close a door, or maybe they didn’t even know the door was open in the first place. That’s what we laser in on. All it takes is a missing patch on a neglected part of a server that permits an unauthorized command prompt, or a misconfigured firewall rule base, or—”

  “Okay, gotcha. You guys are geniuses, end of story.”

  Harley grinned. “If you say so.”

  Magozzi felt a little uneasy. He knew Monkeewrench took risks all the time in their work; often very dangerous ones and always for the sole benefit of law enforcement and justice in general. Their cat-footed hacking was stealthy and elegant and their bold trespasses over the years had never been detected.

  But no matter how brilliant, careful, or vigilant you were, there were times when you opened a door and a little something either snuck in or escaped, just slipped by without notice, like Harley had just told Gino. And the thought scared him.

  He looked at Grace. “This Silver Dune, we’re obviously talking about some kind of institution. A well-funded one at that, and you broke down their door and connected them to some very nasty business. Are you sure you covered your tracks?”

  Grace gave him a patient smile, the kind reserved for toddlers and naughty puppies. “We did better than that—we left them a little parting gift.”

  Magozzi cocked a brow at her.

  “Let’s just say we gave their system the flu.”

  “Like a virus?”

  Harley snorted. “Hell, we gave their system Ebola. They’re not going to be operational for a while.”

  FIFTY-TWO

  I don’t have a good feeling about this, Annie.” Roadrunner was fidgeting and squirming in the passenger seat of the SUV they’d rented in Rochester.

  Annie kept her eyes on the turnpike as she brushed Roadrunner’s comment aside with a dismissive wave. “Do you honestly think Grace and Harley would ask us to do something that would put us in danger?”

  “I know they wouldn’t. That’s not what I’m talking about.”

  Roadrunner’s anxiety had been palpable the entire hour they’d been on the road, but as they got closer to Oak Hill Cemetery, it was reaching fever pitch, and starting to fray Annie’s nerves. “Oh, now don’t you tell me you’re all het up about visiting a little ol’ cemetery.”

  “Well, it’s not like we’re going to visit a dearly departed relative to pay our respects, we’re basically going to rob a total stranger’s grave.”

  “We are not robbing a grave, we’re following instructions from the grave. That book Grace told us about was a map, and we’re going to execute the last wishes of the gentleman who wrote it because his granddaughter can’t.”

  “It’s creepy. And what if we find something?”

  “That’s kind of the point, sugar. Come on, now, just relax. What we’re trying to do now is hopefully save some living people, which doesn’t leave us time to worry about the ghost of a man sixty years dead.”

  “You believe in ghosts?”

  “Of course not. I was just trying to make the point that we’re on a mission here.”

  Roadrunner sighed, then turned his focus to his phone, swiping through screens. He finally said, “Annie, would you please take the next exit?”

  “But our exit’s not for another ten miles.”

  “Yeah, but there’s a gas station at the next exit.”

  “We don’t need gas.”

  “I know, but I need to get something.”

  Annie obeyed without question, because Roadrunner obviously needed a little cooling down, and if a gas station did it for him, then so be it. As she pulled into the parking lot of a mega-stop, a light, snowy mist started to coat the windshield.

  While Roadrunner trotted inside, she stuck her head out the window and saw thick, dark snow clouds beginning to fill in the sky. Great. This was the part of the B horror flick when angry spirits opened up the heavens and stranded the protagonists in a very bad place where they would ultimately get sucked up into a demonic vortex.

  Grave robbing, she snickered to herself. Such nonsense. She’d known Roadrunner for years, but she’d never even entertained the idea that such an analytical genius might actually believe in ghosts and spirits. As far as she was concerned, there was no point wasting precious time worrying about the possibility of paranormal horrors when there were already more than enough real-life horrors in the world to drive you mad a million times over.

  Don’t ever whistle past a graveyard.

  Why not?

  Because you don’t know who you’ll wake up.

  Annie shivered a little and closed the window. It was getting colder outside.

  A few minutes later Roadrunner trotted back out to the car with a cellophane-wrapped bouquet of sad-looking flowers. They had them at the checkouts of most every gas station or convenience store so the guilty or the rushed could pick up a last-minute peace offering for the aggrieved party in their life while they filled up their gas tanks. She’d gotten a few of those herself, a long time ago, from a man she’d ultimately had to stab to death. Not because of the last-minute, substandard flowers,
of course.

  But the odd thing was, she had always felt sorry for the flowers above all, that they had been singled out as inadequate for a floral shop and had been packaged and sent to languish in places where nobody appreciated them.

  “What on earth, Roadrunner?” she asked, quickly terminating her strange, very dark train of thought.

  “I am not going to visit a grave without an offering.”

  Annie closed her eyes, summoning every last bit of forbearance and patience in her soul. “That’s a very nice gesture.”

  The cemetery gates were open when they arrived—it was one of those grand old East Coast cemeteries that probably had graves dating back two hundred years and trees much older than that. The scrollwork iron fence was ornate and decidedly from a bygone era, but it had been well cared for over the years, as were the grounds. As Annie drove slowly down the plowed road into the cemetery, she saw a truck parked in front of what looked like a maintenance shed, where an older gentleman was sweeping the fresh snow off the front steps. From what she could see, the three of them were the only living souls here.

  She came to a fork in the road and stopped. “Which way?”

  Roadrunner was examining a map of the cemetery he’d printed out at the hotel. “Take a right. That leads to an older part of the cemetery where the mausoleums are.”

  “Are you doing all right, sugar?”

  “I’m fine, Annie. Thanks.”

  And he did seem fine. Calm, almost. “I’m glad to hear that. No offense, but you were a little skittish on the way down here.”

  He looked out the window and gestured. “Yeah, I know. But look at all these tombstones. They’re permanent memories of people, so many people. Generations of them, and they all meant something to somebody. It’s almost . . . peaceful. Pretty. I wasn’t expecting that.”

  Well, Annie did have to admit that the place was pretty and so were the snow-dusted tombstones and monuments and the evergreen wreaths and swags that decorated many of them. And the people below the monuments were definitely in peace, but she’d never found solace walking among them. Or even driving around them. “You were really expecting ghouls?”