Interference

by Brad Parks

  I immediately felt an ache for this mother, who was so far away from her daughter that her only means of connecting was through this cold, flat screen. I could scarcely imagine being so separated from my little boy, who gave me warm hugs every morning and night.

  And what desperation Bhabhu must right now be feeling, not knowing where her daughter was, wondering why her calls hadn’t been answered.

  I had half a thought about calling Bhabhu and reassuring her, but how? At the moment, I had no more idea where Sheena was than Bhabhu did.

  Or did I? I concentrated on Sheena, picturing her face, trying to feel her presence.

  I closed my eyes, as if that might enable me to get in better touch with the elemental particles that were guiding me.

  But my reverie was quickly interrupted by an authoritative male voice coming from near the front door.

  I didn’t know what it had said. Just that it was loud, demanding, and angry.

  CHAPTER 57

  Emmett was nearing the end of another rereading of Gary Evans’s email.

  The third time through was scarcely more illuminating than the first two.

  Huangpu Enterprises was a subsidiary of MAI Holdings, whatever that was. It built cell phone towers across rural China.

  Yiren Jiang, he of the sickle-shaped eyebrows, and Langqing Wu, with his dragon tattoo, were telecom engineers. Their job was to install and maintain the communications equipment systems in the towers.

  Unanswered by the email: Why would two telecom engineers who worked for a private employer, Huangpu Enterprises—which had no known connection to the Chinese government—come to America to kidnap someone?

  And then who killed them for doing it?

  Emmett was no closer to coming up with answers when he got a call from Sheena’s neighbor Lauryn Ward: Emmett had asked her to call if she saw anything unusual, and there was now a strange car parked in front of Sheena’s place.

  Lauryn said she heard the car door close but hadn’t been able to see who had gone up the walk. But the person hadn’t gone back down, and now Lauryn was pretty certain whoever it was had broken into Sheena’s apartment.

  Emmett closed the email and made quick time toward Sheena’s place, remaining in emergency-response mode until he saw the CRV and recognized it as the one that had been parked outside Brigid’s house.

  After that, he was just curious. He walked up to Sheena’s apartment and found the door had been left slightly ajar, which was auspicious for a police officer who had been called to investigate a break-in, because not even Captain Carpenter would later question whether he had the legal authority to enter the residence.

  He walked in, saw Brigid near the kitchen, and asked:

  “What are you doing here?”

  He realized he should have knocked—or at least made some more noise—when Brigid leaped and clutched at her heart.

  “Sorry,” he said. “Didn’t mean to scare you.”

  He wasn’t sure she had heard him. So he walked closer, until she could see his face better, and repeated his apology.

  “That’s okay,” she said. “I was just . . . drawn here and . . . I thought maybe I’d . . . find something or . . .”

  “It’s all right,” Emmett said. “The neighbor called. She was worried it was a break-in. I need to let her know it’s a false alarm.”

  “I should come with you,” Brigid said. “I really ought to say sorry for scaring her.”

  He did not object. They left Sheena’s door ajar, then walked over to Lauryn’s, offering the appropriate apologies.

  Then Emmett, who was still curious about David Dafashy’s latest revelation, said, “This may seem like an odd question, but does Sheena have a boyfriend?”

  “Boyfriend?” Lauryn asked, looking incredulous.

  “Scott Sugden.”

  “Oh, he’s not a boyfriend. Sheena’s engaged to some doctor in India. I’ve never met him, but he’s going through residency over there, just like my husband here. It’s an arranged marriage, so she’s known since she was, like, six that she was going to marry this guy. Scott is just a friend. Here . . .”

  Lauryn had pulled out her phone and was shuffling through the photos.

  “This is them at Halloween,” she said, bringing up a snapshot of Sheena standing next to a tall broad-shouldered man with a movie-star square chin and collar-length blond hair. She was wearing a flowing red gown. He was dressed as a very dashing pirate.

  “They were characters from The Princess Bride,” Lauryn continued. “Buttercup and Westley. They’d make a totally cute couple. But they’re not.”

  Finally, Emmett understood Dafashy’s game. Create the illusion that Sheena and this beautiful young man were a couple, thus casting Sheena in a bad light. It was straight from the dirtiest page of the sexual harasser’s playbook: when possible, make your accuser look like a hussy.

  Which meant Dafashy was an awful human being.

  But not, necessarily, a kidnapper. Because it meant he still believed he was going to have to go through this sexual harassment hearing.

  Or at least he was smart enough to maintain that appearance.

  Emmett studied the photo of the beaming youngsters, wondering once again where they were now. In hiding, perhaps. With bullets. And, he presumed, a gun—which they hopefully weren’t having cause to use.

  “I take it you still haven’t heard from or seen Sheena?” Emmett asked.

  “No. Nothing.”

  “Would you mind continuing to keep an eye on the place?”

  She promised she would, and Emmett departed along with Brigid. When they returned to Sheena’s place, Brigid showed him the missed nine o’clock phone calls.

  Emmett just grimaced.

  “On another subject, I wanted to ask you about something,” he said. “Early this morning, I got an email from Gary Evans.”

  “The army counterintelligence guy?”

  “Right. He was giving me information about Huangpu Enterprises. This is the company that employed those two Chinese men we found by the road out near Canaan.”

  “Okay.”

  “According to the dossier he gave me, Huangpu Enterprises builds cell phone towers across rural China.”

  “Okay,” Brigid said. “And?”

  “And . . . I don’t know. I can’t figure what it has to do with anything. I was hoping it might mean something to you. Have you ever heard of Huangpu Enterprises Limited? Did Matt ever talk about it?”

  “No and no. Sorry.”

  “These guys who worked there, they were telecom engineers. Their area was the equipment that goes up in the towers. Is there anything in your husband’s research that might have overlapped with what these guys were doing?”

  “How so?”

  “Oh, I’m just grabbing at straws here. This entanglement mumbo jumbo, if this is all about little bits of this and that being able to talk to each other instantly, could they be used to communicate somehow? Were these guys trying to steal something Matt was doing and put it in their cell towers?”

  “I have no idea,” Brigid said. “That’s way beyond my understanding. David might be able to tell you.”

  “David, not Beppe?” Emmett asked, not relishing the thought of contacting Dafashy.

  “He’s the one who understands the technicalities. If anyone would know, it would be him.”

  “Okay, I’ll deal with that later,” Emmett said. “Now, to the issue at hand: What were you doing in here again?”

  Brigid blushed. “I don’t know. Maybe I’m just imagining it, but ever since I woke up this morning, I’ve been feeling something—the way Sheena was feeling something. The feeling led me here.”

  Emmett just nodded. Maybe without context he would have thought this was the stress of her husband’s abduction, making Brigid have delusions. But after having been led to that remote cabin by Sheena’s quantum instincts, he was beyond disbelieving anything.

  “You were at the lab last night,” he pointed out. “You think may
be you got some of this bug in you?”

  “I don’t know,” Brigid said quickly.

  “Well, did you find whatever it was you were looking for? Because otherwise we should probably be moving on.”

  “Right, right. Absolutely. And, no, there’s . . . there’s nothing here. I’m . . . I’m probably just imagining it.”

  Emmett bobbed his head again. “As long as we’re here, I’m just going to have a quick look around, make sure nothing seems out of place. Then we’ll lock up.”

  He strolled through the kitchen, then walked down the short hallway that led to the rear of the unit.

  Brigid followed a few steps behind.

  The first door was for the bathroom. He poked his head in. Mirror. Vanity. Toilet. Bathtub. Shampoos and bath gels and so on.

  He opened the linen closet. The towels were folded and perfectly aligned. A shelf with extra soaps, deodorants, Q-tips, and whatnot had been arranged in neat rows.

  The floor was dedicated to seasonal decorations neatly arranged by holiday, with Halloween being Sheena’s apparent favorite. She even had an electronic atomizer, the kind that could be used with dry ice to create fog for trick-or-treaters.

  Brigid nodded at it. “Looks like she did the haunted-house thing.”

  Emmett murmured agreement, though there was really nothing about this place that was even close to haunted. Everything seemed to be the product of an orderly mind. He moved on to the bedroom, where the bed was perfectly made and the pillows looked like they had been placed with the aid of a laser leveler.

  His last stop was the bedroom closet. Unlike Scott Sugden’s junk-filled hole, this one had been meticulously organized, from the shoe rack on the floor up to the stacks of sweaters above. A small stepladder leaned against the wall to help her reach them.

  There were no bullets. Or guns. Or anything that suggested a person under siege. Whatever mayhem was circling around Sheena Aiyagari’s life, it hadn’t made its way into her apartment.

  Emmett turned toward Brigid, who was lurking in the doorway.

  “All right, I think we’re—”

  His phone rang.

  “—done here,” he said.

  He fished the phone out of his pocket.

  “Webster here.”

  Captain Angus Carpenter, with his usual zest for small talk, began: “Does the name Scott Sugden mean anything to you?”

  “Yeah. He’s a friend of Sheena Aiyagari’s. Why?”

  “Because Major Crime got called out early this morning to respond to another body dumped by the side of a damn road in the middle of nowhere,” Carpenter said. “They just identified the victim as a Tuck student named Scott Sugden. What the hell is going on out there?”

  CHAPTER 58

  Sean Plottner did not bother apologizing that he had woken the bank’s executive vice president from a deep slumber.

  Once the man was done grumbling about it—or, more accurately, once he realized who he was talking to—he began a moving-heaven-and-earth effort to get five million dollars safely delivered to a mountaintop in western New Hampshire, an undertaking that ended with Plottner’s helicopter touching gently down on his helipad.

  Lee went out to retrieve the two metal cases that held the cash, then brought them inside to his boss’s office, setting them on a table, then leaving without a word.

  It was 7:15. Forty-five minutes ahead of schedule.

  Plottner opened the cases, stopping briefly to soak in the sight: brick after brick of hundred-dollar bills, all of it neatly banded.

  He ogled it for an overlong moment, then pulled out his phone, took a snapshot, and Facebook-messaged it to Michael Dillman.

  The reply came two minutes later.

  “Very good. You’ve passed the test. Now for the real thing. First, go to this website.”

  Real thing? What real thing? The five million dollars in front of him wasn’t real?

  Plottner typed the URL into his iPad so he could keep the Facebook conversation going uninterrupted on his laptop.

  He was immediately looking at a small, apparently windowless room. Perhaps it was actually a large walk-in closet. The camera was affixed to the upper corner of the room, opposite the door. It was wide angle, so the edges of the image had some distortion.

  In the middle of the room, two people had been securely bound to chairs—legs, arms, and torso—with a combination of rope and duct tape.

  One was Matt Bronik.

  The other was Sheena Aiyagari.

  “Theresa!” Plottner called out.

  Bronik was wearing the same blood-spattered T-shirt as before. He was staring straight ahead, though there didn’t appear to be much to look at.

  Aiyagari’s clothing also hadn’t changed from when Plottner had last seen it. Her chin was resting on her chest, and her eyes were closed, like she might have been sleeping. The only sign she was still alive came in the slight bobbing of her head with each breath she took.

  On the wall behind them was a prominent digital clock that showed the current time to the hundredth of a second. It was now 7:17:47 and ticking.

  Theresa appeared at Plottner’s door.

  “I don’t want to be the only person seeing this,” he said.

  Whatever Theresa’s reaction was to this sight—a video feed of two bound hostages—Plottner couldn’t be bothered to notice.

  He was already typing.

  “Okay, you have them both. What now?”

  Michael Dillman wrote back immediately.

  “Do you require further proof of life? I want you to feel secure in knowing this feed is legitimate and happening in real time.”

  “It’s fine.”

  “Are you sure? I can have one of them blink a certain number of times, or shake their head. Whatever you wish.”

  “No. I believe you.”

  So what now? Plottner was just starting to type when Dillman’s next message came in:

  “Are you familiar with Zcash?”

  Plottner was, of course. It was a cryptocurrency, one of Bitcoin’s lesser-known competitors. During an overlong dinner in Sonoma a year or two back, he had been subjected to a tech billionaire’s excessive enthusiasms about Zcash’s open-source protocol, the way its transactions were indelibly recorded in public blockchains, the proof-of-work mining that created the currency and sustained it, and so on.

  The stuff that made techies swoon was only so interesting to Plottner. Really, Zcash wasn’t fundamentally different from any other form of money humankind had ever created: it had value primarily because everyone agreed it had value.

  Like Bitcoin, Zcash was a decentralized currency that did not rely on banks, governments, or other potentially unreliable third parties for its value. Unlike Bitcoin, Zcash had privacy features—through an ingenious bit of math known as a zero-knowledge proof—that allowed its users to remain completely anonymous.

  Which meant Michael Dillman could disappear with his five million dollars and never be found.

  So the cash had just been a diversion, a way of testing whether Plottner intended to go through with the exchange—all while keeping him off balance as to how it would actually happen.

  Plottner had been outmaneuvered again. Truly, only a master negotiator could have come up with a scheme so well considered.

  Both irate and impressed, he typed: “Yes, I know Zcash.”

  Dillman’s reply came quickly, like he wasn’t typing, but rather cutting and pasting from something he had already written.

  “Very good. You will note that behind the hostages there are several improvised explosive devices with more than enough material inside to kill both doctors. The IEDs have been placed in a cage bolted next to the door. They have been attached to a timer. But I also have the ability to detonate these remotely, at any time I wish.”

  Plottner squinted at the feed on his tablet. Sure enough, next to the door there was a thick wire cage that might have originally been intended to protect an outdoor security camera. Inside were three l
engths of PVC pipe, roughly four inches in diameter, that had been capped at both ends.

  Pipe bombs. They had wires protruding from them. Some led to the timer. Others led to the door.

  Another message had come in.

  “At no later than 9 a.m., you will transfer five million dollars’ worth of Zcash units into my wallet. If you fail to do so by that time, I will detonate the explosive.”

  Even before Plottner was done reading, the next message had arrived.

  “Once this transaction occurs, the timer will begin. It is set for three hours. When the timer expires, I will provide you the location of the building, and you may safely enter the room. In the meantime, the door will be monitored by motion sensors, pressure sensors, and my own visual inspection. If any attempt is made to open the door before the timer expires, it will set off the explosive. If the power to the house is cut off, it will set off the explosive. Likewise, if there is any effort made to apprehend me, I will set off the explosive. Do you understand?”

  Plottner understood perfectly. Dillman was giving himself three hours to run away. In that amount of time, he could travel anywhere from Connecticut to Canada. He would be impossible to find.

  Which only concerned Plottner so much. Michael Dillman would either get away or not. Justice had seldom been of great interest to Sean Plottner.

  He really only had one concern:

  “How do I know you won’t just kill them the moment you get the Zcash?”

  “You will have the webcam. If at any time during the three hours you or anyone else wants to check on Drs. Bronik and Aiyagari, you may simply click the URL I’ve provided. It’s all the proof of life you need.”

  No more than five seconds elapsed before Dillman wrote:

  “Do we have a deal?”

  Plottner leaned back.

  The only thing to stop Dillman from killing his hostages the moment he received the money—or at any time during the three hours—was merely that it would complicate his escape. He wouldn’t be able to use Bronik and Aiyagari as a kind of shield.

  But that was hardly an ironclad guarantee. Once Dillman was in a place where he felt he was safe, he could set off the explosive.