“I don’t know what happened,” Katie said, shaking her head. “I didn’t even drink that much last night. I had, like, half a beer tops. I don’t remember anything past that.”
Alex frowned. If that was true . . .
“Do you know anyone in the frat, Katie? Anyone who might have wanted to take advantage of you?”
“I barely know any of those guys. I mean, I’ve seen them around.”
Alex looked down at the mottled linoleum floor. She felt so powerless to help her.
“Is there anyone you want me to call? Anything I can do for you?”
“I’d just as soon no one found out. I’m kind of embarrassed.”
“Are you sure? It can be really important to have some support—”
“It’s fine, really.”
“I get it.”
Katie’s distant expression slackened, and she put her hand on Alex’s, which was resting on the bedrail. “Thanks for being here, though.”
Alex felt in that touch Katie’s deep vulnerability. It was overwhelming to her, who wasn’t the picture of stability herself. But somehow it gave her strength, knowing that she needed to be strong for her friend.
She set her jaw. This wasn’t going to get any easier, and the clock was ticking. “I’m sorry to bring this up now, but I think you might have been drugged.” Katie withdrew her hand, her eyes glazing over again. Alex insisted. “It’s really important for you to get your blood drawn as soon as possible, so that—”
“I’m feeling kind of dizzy,” Katie blurted out. She put her hand on her head as if to steady it, a little too theatrically.
Alex frowned. She’d lost her. “Do you want me to call the doctor?”
“No, I think I just want to close my eyes for a while.”
Alex wasn’t buying it. “Katie, this is important. Please. I just want to help.”
“Maybe I don’t want your help!” She seemed on the verge of a panic attack. “I can’t stand all this questioning anymore. What do you people want from me?”
Alex narrowed her eyes and furrowed her brow. “Did someone else come here to ask you questions?”
“This guy. He kept asking these same questions. How much I drank last night. If I had taken any drugs. If I ever drank or took drugs, and if I was a virgin.”
“Was he with the police? Campus security?”
Katie shook her head, frantic.
“I won’t tell anyone if you don’t want me to,” said Alex, resting her hand on Katie’s shoulder. But her friend flinched at the touch, and she drew it away. “Nobody ever needs to know you’re involved. But I don’t want to let whoever did this get away with it.”
“They’ll come after me,” she said, near tears. “They said if I talked—”
“Someone told you to keep quiet about this? Who?”
“Please, just leave me alone.”
“Give me a name,” Alex insisted. “Just a name.”
“Out!” she yelled, crying. “I’ll scream. I’ll tell them you attacked me. Get out!”
“I’m sorry,” said Alex.
“Just go!” Katie screeched.
Alex shuffled off, closing the door lightly behind her. No one out in the hallway seemed to have heard. Heavy with guilt, she limped her way down the ward hall. She had pushed too hard. But her determination to do something only intensified. By the time she reached the reception desk, she had formulated a plan.
“I think I might have missed a number on my ID in the sign-in sheet earlier,” she told the receptionist. “Can I see?”
The receptionist handed her the sheet. Alex scanned it for Katie’s name. She found it once, next to Alex’s own name on the sheet. Then, a few entries above hers, with a matching patient name—
Adam Groener.
Gotcha.
Chapter 30
Lisa Frieze overslept and drove back up to Springhaven University in the late morning, swigging Dunkin Donuts coffee and swerving through traffic. She drove onto campus wired for action.
She found Vickery waiting for her outside the library.
“Nice of you to join us,” he said, leading the way inside.
“I was up late last night looking into the other Ekklesia cases around the country,” she said. “They’ve all got similar MOs. None of them took direct action, not more than the kind of prank they pulled on Panagopoulos. All of them claim to be working for citizens’ freedom or bringing the guilty to justice. And all of them have a hacking angle.”
“But they all happened at the same time,” he said. “So there’s no way it’s the same people.”
“We’re talking about a massively distributed network of agents,” she said.
They were walking downstairs, bare concrete with plain steel railings. “Where are we going?”
“I want to show you something.”
He opened a metal door and pointed at the frame, specifically at the strike plate.
“Do you see it?”
“I’m not sure what I’m looking for.”
“Here,” he said, pointing closer. “What does that look like to you?”
“Glue. Like we found on the door to the roof of the library. So this was their point of entry.” She looked through the door. It opened into a tunnel that seemed to go for a mile until disappearing in a curve. A set of thick pipes ran through it, and it was warm and misty.
“Steam tunnels,” he said. “They run under every building in the university. It’s where the heating comes from.” He looked down the tunnels. “It’s an awful lot of doors.”
“So their point of entry—”
“Could’ve been anywhere,” he said. “Could be students, service staff. Or neither. Someone who could make the camera feeds disappear sure as heck wouldn’t have too much trouble gaining access here.”
“What’s the access system on these doors?” she asked.
“Keycards,” he said. “With a manual override key.”
“All the tunnels?”
“That I know of.”
She thought for a moment. “If we’re talking about hackers, it would be more in their wheelhouse to clone a card than to make a copy of the key or pick the lock. I’m guessing any use of the keycards gets logged in a database somewhere.”
“I’d guess,” said Vickery.
“I want to talk to security,” she said. “Maybe we can find a clue in the access logs.”
“I’ve got some paperwork to do down at the station,” he said. “But I can put you in touch with the right people.” He told her the on-campus address of the security office. “I’ll give them a call, let them know you’re going to swing by later.”
“Thanks.”
“Are you going back to the city tonight?” he asked as they walked back upstairs.
“I was planning on it,” she said.
“Why don’t you hang around? I know a great little bar off the highway. No college kids, just good beer and good music.”
Her phone rang. Conley.
“Let me get back to you on that,” she said as they parted ways. Then she picked up. “What?”
“Did you look at the service manifest Cotter sent you?” he asked.
“Been busy,” she said. “What did you find?”
“Nothing that called any particular attention,” he said. “But I had the feeling that it wouldn’t. We got it too easily. So I went to the Acevedo building. You know what I found?”
“I suppose you’re going to tell me.”
“They had a service visit from Hornig two weeks ago.”
“Let me guess—it’s not on Hornig’s logs?”
“No,” Conley said. “And I checked the signature on the visitor logs at the building. No match. We had an impostor come in.”
“How did you get access—” she remembered the young receptionist who she had no doubt would’ve remembered him. “Never mind.”
“So I went to see if I could find surveillance footage of our guy,” said Conley. “And you know what I found?”
&nb
sp; “Let me guess,” she said. “It’s gone.”
“How did you know?”
“Do you think Watson’s murder might have anything to do with the Ekklesia?” asked Lisa.
Chapter 31
Morgan woke up in the bed of the old Ford pickup truck as Henri pulled it to a stop. His muscles were sore from the previous night’s walk and his back was aching from the shovel handle that prodded him through his dreamless sleep. The sun was low in the sky, but sleeping in the open truck bed gave him a nasty sunburn.
They were surrounded by more jungle, but the area seemed wilder, and nature was encroaching on the road as if to reclaim it. In the cab, Henri and Yolande argued in French. Morgan tapped on the window. “What’s going on?”
“He will not take us any farther,” Yolande said. “He says this is a bad place. Too dangerous.”
“What’s the danger?”
“This is Madaki’s territory. His militia patrol the roads. He says there is a gold mine just beyond the ridge over there.”
Morgan hopped off the truck bed onto the dirt road, stretching out his legs. Yolande came out as well. Henri drove away, leaving them with nothing but a canteen of water and two cigarettes, one lit. Yolande puffed away as they walked.
“We should have stolen his car,” she said. She finished the cigarette in two minutes flat, lighting the second one with the smoldering butt of the first.
They decided to keep off the roads. They took a right into the jungle, trekking uphill toward the ridge Henri had pointed out.
It was only an hour’s hike in the shade, and once they got going, Morgan’s sore muscles regained their limberness. More mosquitoes, but not quite as much heat. The top of the hill was dense with trees, but Morgan found a rock that extended up over the canopy. Using a tree as support, he hoisted himself up, grunting to pull up his weight to the top.
He overlooked the vast country below, jungle sprinkled with the odd family farm. That was all he saw, except for one thing. In the valley, right at the bottom of the hill, the greenery was interrupted by a gash of bare earth. One of Madaki’s illegal gold mines. Men, women, and children, numbering in the hundreds, dressed in rags, most shirtless under the punishing sun, digging with pickaxes, sifting, carrying baskets or wheelbarrows of dirt.
Yolande, with her limber frame, climbed on the rock in half the time it took Morgan.
“Mr. White’s guns are not there,” she said.
No, but they had their own. The upper levels were patrolled by militiamen, dressed in T-shirts, polos, carrying AK-47s, for the most part—the Kalashnikovs were an infestation in politically unstable third world countries, sold off for quick cash after the fall of the Soviet Union—with a smattering of other rifles and SMGs, handguns tucked into the waist of their shorts. Some of them held leashes tied to . . . “Dogs,” he said. “I really don’t like dogs.”
Morgan did a quick count of the guards. For all the people that were working there, there were no more than fifty. Maybe more like thirty-five.
And on one end of the mine, where it connected to the road—cars. Pickup trucks, sedans, nine all told. They were parked near a cluster of buildings.
Morgan heard shouting below. One of the workers, in flip-flops and a maroon shirt, had taken off running toward the road. The guards mustered, aiming their rifles. The rat-a-tat of the Kalashnikovs echoed in the valley. The man was hit. He stumbled to the ground, clutching his leg, contorting in pain.
The guards circled him, but didn’t shoot. Instead, they loosed the dogs on him.
Morgan looked away. The man’s screaming did not last long.
Morgan and Yolande sat down on the rock, watching the sun disappear behind the mountains. He looked at her face, at her rugged beauty, unflappable even here, lost in the middle of nowhere.
“Beautiful country out here,” he said.
“It is.”
“Are you from around this region? You seem to know your way around.”
“I was born at the foot of those mountains,” she said, pointing to the east.
“I don’t see anything there.”
“No. It is not there anymore.”
He reclined against the rock. “What’s your story? Of all the able-bodied men in his service, how come Jakande picked you for this mission?”
“Do you think he made a poor decision?” she said, in a defiant tone.
Morgan chuckled. “No. I really don’t.” He swatted a mosquito on his forehead. His skin stung from the sunburn.
“I get things done. General Jakande knows that.”
His stomach growled. He took a sip from the canteen and handed it to her—the last of it. “How’d you get the scar?”
She finished the water, letting it drip onto her tongue. “I was a child soldier. Do you need to know more?”
Morgan wanted to, but he could tell she didn’t want to talk. He closed his eyes and felt the gust of wind that was rising, letting it cool his sweltering skin.
“We need to go down there,” he said. “We need guns and a car. They have both.”
“Are you crazy? They will shoot us on sight.”
“I don’t intend to be seen.”
Chapter 32
Scott Renard picked up Lily outside her Cambridge apartment in a white Lexus coupe. She came in out of the cold, red-nosed and chilled, with a huge idiot smile on her face. Why did everything feel so great all of a sudden?
She ran her hands over the leather detailing of the interior. “Is this yours?”
“Rental, while I’m in the city. I’m kind of a car guy.”
He flipped on his turn signal and set off.
“Shut up,” she said. “I love cars. Well, I love the driving part, anyway. We should race.”
“I took a course in stunt driving last year. So you’ll have to forgive me if I end up leaving you in the dust.”
Lily suppressed a scoff.
“What was that?”
“I said, ‘where are we going?’”
“Well, that’s a surprise.”
“Oh, exciting.” She clapped her hands. “You’re not going to take me to a museum, are you?”
“What’s wrong with a museum?” Scott asked.
“Nerd.”
“You were under no illusions about that when you asked me out today.”
Lily smiled. She was giddy. Giddy! Like a bloody teenager!
A car cut them off and Scott missed a light.
“You drive like a girl,” she taunted him.
“I’m being prudent.”
“This is not a car to be prudent in.”
They bantered back and forth as he drove past Longfellow Bridge and then Faneuil Hall. It was so different from Baxter’s imperious manner, his barking orders. Things flowed with Scott. They felt good.
He turned into valet parking at the New England Aquarium.
“I know,” he said. “Kids. Families. Not ideal. But have you ever been here before? It’s my favorite place in the entire city. And it’s not too busy midafternoon.”
She was unconvinced. “I’ll suspend disbelief for now.”
They got their tickets and Scott pulled her right for the main chamber. When she caught her first look of the four-story Giant Ocean Tank, she changed her mind.
“This is beautiful.” They started along the spiral ramp that wound around it.
“I know,” he said. “It’s my favorite thing in the city.” He put his arm around her. “Well, second favorite.”
She pulled him in for a kiss. This got them the stink eye from a teacher leading a group of kids on a tour.
“So you haven’t told me a thing about what you do,” Scott said.
“Uh uh,” she said, wagging a finger. “Work talk’s still taboo.”
“Then you ask me a question.”
“How old are you?” Lily asked.
“Twenty-seven.”
“My God, you’re such a child,” she said. A tiger shark passed the window, but Scott was more interesting.
“How old are you?” He furrowed his brow.
“Twenty-eight,” she said, laughing. “I thought you Silicon Valley rich guys were all after twenty-one-year-old models.”
“The guys after twenty-one-year-olds are the ones who can’t get women their own age to believe their bullcrap.”
“Is that right?”
“I mean, you can dazzle a college girl if you don’t eat ramen noodles for every meal and all your furniture doesn’t come from Ikea, as long as you like the right music. It’s a pretty low bar to clear.”
“And you can get an older girl to believe your bullcrap?”
He laughed. “I like someone who can challenge me.”
“You don’t want a tight twenty-one-year-old body to play with?”
“To the extent that that matters,” he said, looking her up and down with wolfish eyes, “I’ve got all I can handle right here.”
They kissed, pulling apart before things progressed past a G rating in a family venue. They walked in silence, Lily clinging to his arm, watching as a stingray passed, gliding through the water.
“So what’s your story?” she asked as they neared the top. “What makes you, you?”
“That’s a big question.”
“Bigger than this fish tank?”
He half-smiled. “All right. I’ll give you this. I used to think that being good was about being nice.”
“You aren’t nice?”
“I try to be kind,” he said. “There’s a difference. Being nice is not offending people. It’s not making anyone feel uncomfortable. But sometimes being nice keeps you silent when you should speak up. It keeps you from acting when you need to do something.”
“I hadn’t really thought about it that way,” she said.
“It’s this whole spiritual thing.”
“And here my family was happy to attend Anglican services on Christmas and Easter. So you’re religious?”
“I like to say I’m Silicon Valley Buddhist,” he said with a chuckle. “I know it doesn’t have that much to do with real Buddhism, even though we like to pretend it does. But it’s a way to live.”
The tiger shark came close to the glass, to the delight of the nearby kids.
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