For that matter, were these two even in the same location? I had no way of knowing.
The only sure thing was that I couldn’t give in to this latest demand. Not even for Eve. It was one thing to compromise my own safety. It was another to allow them access to the Bureau’s servers. That would put far too many other people in jeopardy. And if I knew Eve at all, I knew she’d back me up on this. There was simply no way.
But the Engineer didn’t have to know that.
I’m stuck here, I wrote. How do you suggest I do this?
You have six hours, he answered. Already, that damn timer of his had popped up again and started counting down.
I need more than that, I wrote.
This is not a negotiation, he told me. In six hours, we find our own way to disappear. Then Eve stays put and she can starve to death while you look for her. Think on that.
A bolt of rage shot through me. I forced myself to set down the phone rather than hurl it across the room. Then I picked up the mug I’d been drinking from and threw that instead. It smashed into a shower of blue shards and coffee, dripping down the wall by the door. And no, I didn’t clean it up. Or care.
I took up the phone again.
Please give me more time, I wrote.
Silence.
Hello? We need to talk about this.
Still nothing. He’d said all he was going to say, and I was left there with no more than the sound of my own shaky breathing. Clearly, the next move was mine to make.
But I had no idea what it was going to be.
CHAPTER 74
AT AROUND TEN, Billy came by. He had an FBI duffel full of my clothes, along with my bike, my indoor trainer, and everything else on my list, with one exception.
“No laptop?” I asked.
“You’re officially off-line as long as you’re here,” he said. “I know that’s like cutting off your oxygen, but you understand.”
There was so much I couldn’t say, and even more on my mind. I wasn’t even sure if I should feel guilty for hiding so much from Billy. It was like a complex moral equation and I didn’t have the skills, much less the presence of mind or the time, to balance it out. All I could do was take this one thing at a time.
“What about my family?” I asked.
“I went by your folks’ place this morning. They’re concerned, of course, but they’re doing okay,” he said. “What about you? How are you holding up?”
“Never better,” I said. Billy didn’t even try to smile at that. “Okay, I’m horrible,” I told him. “I’m going crazy in here. I want to cry and kill someone at the same time.”
He nodded with the calm understanding of a Bureau vet, even if he didn’t know all the particulars of my personal hell that morning.
“Listen,” he said, “I can’t tell you much, but since part of this has gone public, there’s no reason to keep it from you.”
He navigated his phone to a page and handed it to me. What I saw was the Globe’s website, with their own version of the CNN story from that morning. The headline this time was TWEETED FBI KIDNAP CONFIRMED.
“Oh, my God!” I said. I tried to seem genuinely surprised and took a minute to scan the article for anything I didn’t already know. Apparently, the FBI had held a press conference to confirm Eve’s kidnapping, but they weren’t sharing any details about the case.
“We figured we might as well own it,” Billy said. “It wasn’t a bell we could unring.” Then he thumbed toward the door. “But come on. I can at least show you around before I go.”
“Really?” I wasn’t even expecting to get out of the apartment that day.
“Don’t get too excited,” he told me. “It’s the world’s shortest tour.”
The hall outside my room was as empty as it had been the night before. All the closed doors looked exactly alike except for the fire exit, which had an alarmed crash bar and a surveillance camera mounted above.
“Your ID card will get you into your apartment, and into the admin office during business hours,” Billy said. “Other than that, you’re not to go anywhere.”
“Admin office?” I asked.
He pressed his own card to the reader on the door directly opposite mine. The little red light clicked to green, and Billy pushed the door open.
“Welcome to the end of the tour,” he said.
I followed him into a cramped, windowless office. A woman was sitting alone at a U-shaped workstation, and she stood up as we came in. I couldn’t help noticing her desktop computer, as well as the ASUS laptop sitting on her return. I wasn’t sure what that might mean for me, but it was something.
“Angela Hoot, this is Rena Partridge, one of our operations coordinators,” Billy said.
“Angela, hi.” She shook my hand with a reassuring smile. “If there’s anything you need—drugstore run, a message for Billy Boy here, or even just some kind of favorite foods—I’m your gal.”
With her short salt-and-pepper hair and the red glasses on a chain, she seemed like someone’s elderly babysitter, not a high-security-clearance FBI employee. I liked her right away.
“I’ll probably have to take you up on that,” I said. “Thank you in advance.”
If I needed to get online without the Android, this office opened up some possibilities, I thought. Maybe not with Rena’s desktop, which would be hardwired into the building’s network. But the laptop was an option—
“Angela?” Keats said.
I snapped back to attention. They were both looking at me like I’d missed something. Which, for all I knew, I had.
“Hon, you should get some sleep,” Rena said. “You look exhausted.”
I didn’t argue with that. I just thanked her again and followed Billy back out to the hall. He wasn’t kidding about the world’s shortest tour, either. Three steps later, we were standing outside my door like it was the end of some strange date.
Our night together in Portland seemed about a century ago. A past lifetime. Maybe a future one, too, but I couldn’t think about that right now.
“I’ve got to run,” Billy said.
“Of course,” I told him. “Thanks for bringing my stuff.”
He hesitated and tilted his head to catch my eye. “You know this isn’t your fault, right?” he said.
“That’s a complicated question,” I told him. “Maybe one for another time.”
“Right.” He looked at his watch. The clock was ticking for both of us. “I’ll check back when I can,” he said.
And one tick later, he was gone.
CHAPTER 75
NORMALLY, THE BEST way for me to get my head on straight is by hitting the trail with my bike. But “normal” was off the table right now, so I set up my trainer in the middle of the room and started riding in place.
I left the Android where I could see it, in case anything new came in. Then I got a good crank going, put my head down, and tried to synthesize everything I knew into a cohesive plan of attack.
As I turned the various factors over and around in my head like a Rubik’s Cube, I kept coming back to the same idea: geolocating malware. If I could sneak the right kind of self-loading program onto one of the devices these guys were using on their end, I could get back an IP address, and from that a physical location.
Which meant there was a possibility that I could actually find Eve without ever leaving the building.
The real question was how to get this done without them noticing, much less in the next four and a half hours.
I thought about what Eve said to me once: Sometimes you have to look past the code and into the coder. With people like Darren Wendt, that was easy. Darren had all the intellectual depth of a kiddie pool. He couldn’t have been more oblivious to the hacks I sent his way.
These guys were different. Maybe they were typical ego cases for hackers, but they were also smart as hell and well resourced.
Lucky for me, I was smart as hell, too.
I downshifted several gears and cranked the trainer’s resistanc
e until I was riding up a virtual thirty-degree incline. It put an exquisite kind of pain into my quads and glutes, and I told myself there was no stopping until I’d figured this out or reached pure muscle failure, whichever came first.
Sticking with the malware idea, it made sense to target the Poet, not the Engineer. He was the one I knew for sure was in the same location as Eve, since he’d recorded her voice and sent it to me. He also seemed more human. Less focused. More distractible.
I hated to think about what it was going to take to distract him. As he’d said himself, I knew what he liked. But I’d deal with that when I had to.
In the meantime, I focused on the tech aspects of this hack, laying out contingency plans like a flowchart in my mind.
I don’t know how many miles I covered. My thoughts were spinning as fast as those pedals, and I barely noticed as I went from smooth, even strokes to jerky, sporadic pulls. When I couldn’t manage one more rotation, I eased back the resistance and coasted into a cooldown, arms overhead and sweat streaming.
I knew what I wanted to do now. Or at least I knew what I wanted to try. There were no guarantees, but as that ticking timer made abundantly clear, I couldn’t afford to sit around on my ass, waiting for a better idea.
Ready or not, it was time to flip this game.
CHAPTER 76
I DISMOUNTED MY bike, muscles singing, and peeled off my sweaty tee and bra. Then I put on my hoodie and left the zipper down just far enough to make it look like I was trying to start something with this guy.
I turned the Android’s camera on myself then and did what I could to keep from looking completely disgusted. The truth was, I was about 90 percent fearless, but this was well inside my 10 percent.
Before I could change my mind, I snapped a selfie and posted it into the app’s chat thread.
Are you there? I texted.
Even if he responded soon, I figured I could afford a minute away from the phone. That’s what I needed for the next step. It was a gamble, but there was no way through this without taking some kind of risk.
I picked up my card key, slipped silently out of the apartment, and let myself into the admin office across the hall.
“Hey, hon. What can I do you for?” Rena asked, looking up from her keyboarding as I came in.
“I’m really sorry to ask,” I said, “but I was just working out, and it reminded me that I was supposed to pick up my asthma prescription yesterday.”
And no, I don’t have asthma. There was no prescription.
“Are you okay?” Rena asked with the immediate concern of a mother. “Do I need to call someone?”
“I’m fine,” I told her. “But I’d feel better if I had that inhaler, just in case. It’s at the CVS on Mass Ave.”
Already she was stepping out of her low heels and into a pair of Keen slip-ons. “Don’t give it another thought,” she said. “I’ll go now and knock on your door as soon as I’m back.”
“Thank you so much,” I said. I hated lying to this nice lady, but it couldn’t be helped.
Back in my apartment, I closed the door, turned around, and pressed my eye to the peephole.
Rena came out a second later. I watched her head up the hall and gave it another slow ten count, just to make sure she was gone. Then I went right back to her office, grabbed the laptop, and returned to my apartment in one quick loop. The daily security logs would record every time I used my key card, but hopefully that wouldn’t matter by the time anyone noticed.
I checked the Android as soon as I was back. There were no new texts for me, which was just as well. I still had some humps to get over.
I input my work password to hop on the laptop’s Wi-Fi and then used my credit card to buy a copy of the software I was going to need for this. Twelve hundred dollars down the drain. Oh well. It was the least of my worries right now.
The program was called Stego. That’s short for steganography, which is the practice of digitally hiding information in plain sight. In this case, it was going to be one of the selfies I’d send the Poet, embedded with a bit of geolocating malware. As soon as it reached his phone or laptop, it would self-detonate and send back all the information I’d need.
God willing.
Next, I went looking for the malicious code itself. The dark net is full of spyware libraries, if you know where to look. And geolocation isn’t exactly rocket science in that world. It took me all of two minutes to find something I could use, and a few seconds more to drag it into Stego’s source window.
Now I needed the carrier file. A.k.a., the distraction.
I stood up and positioned myself in front of the laptop’s camera. This time, I lowered my zipper all the way, keeping my breasts covered but showing a full highway of skin down the front. If he wanted more than that, he could go screw himself. Literally.
I set the camera to a three-second delay, clicked the shutter, and stood back. After a quick countdown, it snapped the photo I needed. Then I dropped it into Stego alongside the code I’d already delivered and clicked Run.
The software took it from there, knitting my geolocator right into the image, pixel by pixel. A status window opened up a few seconds later to indicate its progress: 5 percent and counting.
For a few minutes, nothing more happened. Then, just as the image clicked over to 36 percent complete on the laptop, a new text scrolled into the Android’s chat screen.
That’s not much, he said. Presumably, he meant the modest little selfie I’d already sent. You can do better.
I wrote back right away, making sure to keep the laptop out of sight of the phone’s camera.
Of course I can, I said. Isn’t that how the game works? It gets better as it goes along.
Why don’t I believe you? he responded.
Believe it. I don’t have time to be shy anymore. If I play along, will you do everything you can to get Eve out alive?
Absolutely, he said. I’m in charge. Don’t worry.
It wasn’t that I trusted his word. Not even a little. It was all about taking a page from this guy’s book and turning myself into the person he wanted me to be. Or at least letting him think that’s what was happening. It was the best way I knew to draw him into a trap of my own making.
Okay then, I said. Let’s play.
CHAPTER 77
THE SOFTWARE WAS reporting in at 68 percent complete by now. I needed to draw this out for however long it took.
I want to see more this time, he said.
Not so fast, I said. It’s my turn to ask a question.
Go ahead.
Are you Hermes?
I knew you were going to ask that, he said. No. Hermes never existed.
So you have no connection to FNC? I asked.
Clever girl. This is why I like you, Angela, he said. Now you go.
I hated to think about what he might be doing with himself right then, but I stayed focused on the big picture. I was spinning a web here. And first chance I got, I was going to suck the lifeblood right out of this bastard.
So I pulled my zipper down a few inches from where it had been in the first shot and posted a new pic.
That’s about a 6, he wrote. I’m still looking for a 10.
Be patient. We’ll get there, I wrote back. My turn. Why are you doing all this? What’s the bigger objective here?
Why do you think there is one? he asked.
Seems like a lot of trouble for nothing.
Who said anything about NOTHING? he wrote. Ever hear of George Mallory?
I hadn’t, and I took a second to look up the name. Wikipedia told me that Mallory had been a mountain climber in the 1920s. The thing he was most remembered for was his famous quote about why he wanted to climb Mount Everest. “Because it’s there,” he’d said.
And weirdly enough, it made perfect sense. Black hat hackers lived by that credo, in their own nihilistic way. They were motivated by doing things that had never been done before, often just for the sake of doing it.
It also echo
ed the Twitter handle from that morning: JustCuz. This was starting to add up.
So you wanted to kill those people because they were there? I asked.
Basically.
Does that mean this app is your Mount Everest?
It was, he said. But now YOU are.
And a thousand invisible spiders went crawling through my stomach. Jesus Christ, this guy was all over the map.
I don’t know what to say to that, I told him.
You don’t have to say anything, he wrote back. Next picture, please.
CHAPTER 78
THE GOOD NEWS was, my Stego image was just about there. I watched the status window as it clicked from 99 to 100 percent complete, and a throbber started cycling on the screen while the software did its final processing.
Anyone there? the Poet texted. I warned you, Angela. Don’t bore me. It won’t end well for Eve if you do.
I’m just deciding how much to show you, I wrote back quickly.
That’s easy, he said. Show me everything.
Finally, a new window opened on the laptop, and I had my finished image. It looked exactly like the original. He’d have to blow it up to wall-size before he’d be able to see any impact from the embedded code.
None of which was my immediate concern. The most vulnerable part of this whole process was in the next step: transferring that infected photo from Rena’s laptop to the Android.
I had no idea if the app would detect that granular a file change or not. If it did, then I’d just wasted two days of hell and was about to lose everything, including Eve. But there was no stopping now.
I turned off the laptop’s Wi-Fi first. Then I slid the phone across the table, keeping it flat, with the camera aimed at the ceiling. I plugged its charger cable into a port on the computer and transferred my spyware-laden selfie to the Android’s photo library as quickly as I could.
Once that was done, I yanked the charger cable and posted my image on the Android so he could see it. Then I turned the laptop’s internet back on and started watching for any incoming reports.
1st Case Page 18