“All clear here,” one of the cops was saying.
“What about the third floor?” I said. “The nursery and bedroom are up there.”
“Wait here,” Keats told me, and I sweated it out while they checked the other rooms. With every ticking second, I got a worse feeling about this. One cop stayed with me while Keats and Obaje hit the third floor, and the second officer stationed himself down by the open front door.
“I don’t see her!” I heard Obaje say a minute later.
“Nothing over here!” Keats’s voice came from somewhere farther away.
They were both on their way back down when I heard the cop at the front door.
“Excuse me, ma’am, you can’t come in here.”
And then, with a rush of relief, I heard Eve’s voice right on top of that.
“Who in the blue hell are you, and what are you doing in my house?”
I hurried over to look down to where she was pushing her way past the cop through her own front door, folded-up stroller in one arm and Marlena in the other.
“Eve!” I said, and she gave me a steaming look. I knew right away how angry she’d be about whatever misunderstanding had just gone down. Coming into her place with strangers, much less uninvited, was beyond a cardinal sin in Eve’s book. It was, quite literally, an affront to the way she made her living, much less her safety and her way of life.
“Make yourself useful,” Eve told the cop, handing off the stroller before she headed up the stairs. “That goes in the back closet.”
“Ma’am, are you all right?” the other cop asked as she reached us.
“No, I’m not,” she said, glaring at Billy. “I took my daughter for an early-morning walk and this is what I come home to?”
“We got a call that there might be trouble,” the officer told her, but Eve was clearly in no mood for listening.
“Will somebody show these gentlemen some ID and get them out of my house?” she said.
It was like the air had rushed out of me all at once. Thank God she was okay. Despite the false alarm, this was a good reminder to save the worrying for when there was actually something to worry about. The rest was just paranoia, and that’s not a good color on me.
It didn’t take long for Keats to thank the police and send them on their way. A second later, we were alone in her living room, where Billy and Eve threw eye darts at each other.
“What the hell, Eve?” Keats asked. “Why didn’t you return my call?”
“What the hell, yourself?” she answered, bouncing Marlena on her shoulder. “There’s nothing you need me for. I gave Angela everything I had, and she can source it back as well as I can.”
“Don’t condescend to her,” Keats said. “This isn’t the way to get Angela broken in, and you know it.”
I had the sudden impression that it wasn’t the first time they’d discussed me. And now here I was, literally in the middle of it. I appreciated Eve looking out for me the way she did, but the same could be said for Keats. I didn’t want any unfair advantages here.
“And just so we’re clear,” Keats kept going, “how do we know all this communication with Angela isn’t being tracked?”
“Because I’m good at what I do, Billy,” Eve snapped back.
It was getting more uncomfortable by the second, but then Obaje jumped in and cut through it for us.
“Did I lose track of something?” he asked. “I thought we were here to discuss the case, not fight over Angela.”
My face flushed, but he was right, and we all knew it. After that, we sat down at the dining room table for a quick, tense briefing.
It turned out Eve was entirely correct. She had nothing substantive to add that I hadn’t already covered, and she’d sent everything there was to send. But at the same time, I totally understood where Billy was coming from. Just because Eve wanted to position me as the go-to person on this new development, that didn’t mean she needed to ignore his urgent calls.
In any case, Obaje’s point was the most important one. Our focus here needed to be on the case, not each other, and within half an hour, we were getting ready to head back out again, leaving for the office this time.
“You don’t happen to have a burner I could use, do you?” I asked Eve. They’d sequestered all my devices, and I felt naked without at least a phone.
Eve gave me a Silly question look. Then she disappeared into her stash and came back with a new unit, still in the blister pack.
“It’s not exactly state-of-the-art, but at least you’ll be reachable,” she said. “Pull the SIM card and incinerate it when you’re done.”
“Thanks for everything—” I started to say, but Keats was already bellowing from the car.
“Hoot! Let’s go! This isn’t summer camp!”
“Good luck,” Eve said with an eye roll in his direction. A second later, I was running to catch up. It was only 7:00 a.m., but I felt like I’d already put in a full day.
“I don’t suppose we can swing by Starbucks?” I asked as I fell into the backseat behind Keats and Obaje.
“Very funny,” Keats muttered.
I wasn’t joking. But I didn’t ask again.
CHAPTER 56
IT WAS NO picnic, taking that polygraph back at the office. I understood the need for it, but spending forty-five minutes answering the same question eighteen different ways—no, I was not, had never been, and had no plans to be connected to the Free Net Collective or any other known terrorist organization—wasn’t how I wanted to use my time that morning. There was a boatload of work to be done. Now more than ever.
Finally, just as the polygrapher clicked off his machine and I thought I was good to go, his phone rang.
“Yes?” he answered. And then, “Okay, will do.”
My eyes flicked up to the red light on the ceiling camera and I wondered who might be watching.
“You can unhook yourself,” he told me. “Then wait here.”
The Velcro on my arm cuff made a loud ripping noise as I tore it off. “Wait here for who?” I asked. “What happens now?”
“Not for me to say,” he answered on his way out. A second later, I was alone.
After what felt like a long wait, I heard the metal door click open behind me. When I turned and saw SAC Gruss standing there, my heart sank. Whatever the special agent in charge of our field office wanted with me, this didn’t feel like a good sign.
I’d wandered pretty deeply into this case. Maybe more deeply than I should have. If I were taking bets, I would have said it was time to start looking for a new career.
“Quite a morning, huh?” Gruss asked as she pulled back the other chair and sat down.
“Yes, ma’am,” I answered.
She looked like somebody’s mother. I could imagine her at a PTA meeting pretty easily, although I also knew that Audrey Gruss had stared down some seriously intense casework on her way up, including a year in Mosul for the State Department and a key investigative role after 9/11. She was an interesting mix that way.
“Ma’am?” I said. “If it’s okay to ask, am I in trouble here?”
“Not necessarily,” she said.
I wasn’t sure what to make of that, or even how to respond. But Gruss kept going.
“Your IQ is quite impressive,” she said.
“I haven’t been tested since I was twelve—”
“Your track record at MIT, however? Not so much,” she said.
I was starting to realize that SAC Gruss had been watching me more closely than I thought. The question was, did she like what she saw?
“You’ve proven yourself to be an asset, Angela, but I’m honestly not sure what to make of you. I know you’ve been working closely with Eve Abajian,” she said.
“That’s right,” I answered. There was no sense denying it, but no need to go into details that Gruss wasn’t looking for, either.
“So let me ask you this,” she went on. “Are you as smart as you seem?”
“Excuse me?” I said.
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“This database you’ve turned up,” she said. “Is that your work? Or Eve’s?”
I thought about Eve’s advice: Take the damn credit. And I thought about what felt right to me.
Then I split the difference.
“Eve found it and passed it on to me,” I said. “But I’m the one who cracked it open. Most of that legwork was mine.”
It was 90 percent true. Close enough. But Gruss was still just staring at me.
“If I may say so, ma’am,” I tried again, “yes, I’m as smart as I seem.”
Her eyes smiled, even if her mouth didn’t move. Then, like the polygrapher before her, she simply nodded and stood up to leave.
“Is that all, ma’am?” I asked.
“That’s it,” she said. “Keep up the good work. You’re free to go back to your desk.”
I tried not to look as relieved as I felt. I guess this meant I’d passed their polygraph, anyway, not to mention Gruss’s muster.
But I still felt like I was flying blind into a storm.
CHAPTER 57
WHEN I GOT upstairs, the office was on high alert. With the new possibility of involvement by a designated terrorist organization, everything had ratcheted up. Again.
Homeland Security and the Attorney General’s office had been looped in. Emergency plans were already put into place, along with increased server surveillance along the entire Northeast Corridor. Nobody had seen a response like this since the Boston Marathon bombing.
I didn’t know where Keats was anymore, but I spent the rest of the morning running theory and attack scenarios with Zack Ciomek and the rest of the CART team. It was gratifying and frustrating at the same time to hear that a lot of my own instincts paralleled what the higher-ups were thinking—but that they’d also already been tried or rejected.
“What about crashing the app?” I asked at one point. “We could flood it with server requests and at least cripple their operation for a while.”
“We did try crashing it a few days ago,” Ciomek told us. “It bought about an hour of time, tops. My guess is they have cloud-based backups on everything they touch.”
“Which means all they have to do is reload onto a new server and they’re back in business,” Candace added.
“With no data or integrity loss whatsoever,” Ciomek said. “That’s right.”
This was exactly the double-edged sword of cloud-based computing. Measures to increase privacy standards for legal online activity also made it that much harder to pin down and quash illegal operations.
“If there’s a silver lining,” Ciomek told us, “it’s that we at least have a conduit to these people.”
“Online, anyway,” I said.
“That’s right,” Ciomek concurred.
As for finding them out there in the real world, that was another prospect entirely. One that had dogged every resource the FBI had to throw at it so far. And something told me this was going to get a lot harder before it ever got easier.
If it got easier.
CHAPTER 58
WITH EVERYTHING THERE was to do, I didn’t expect to leave the CART, or even my desk, all day. So I was more than a little surprised when Keats pulled me away a few hours later.
“Meet me downstairs,” he said on the phone. “We’re heading to Mass General again. I’ve got a follow-up interview with Justin Nicholson.”
“And you want me there?” I asked. “Not that I mind.”
“I think he needs to see you’re okay.”
I knew that meeting me had spooked Justin pretty badly, right after my name had come up in the course of his attack. It had spooked me, too, but this poor kid was already grappling with the loss of his family. If there was anything I could do to help, I wanted to do it. In fact, there was a certain symmetry to the whole thing. Maybe he needed to see that I was okay, but I needed to check in on him, too.
Or at least I wanted to, given the opportunity.
When we got over to the hospital, we learned that Justin had been transferred to a private room. That was good news. He was sitting up now, breathing without a respirator, and had some limited mobility in his neck. He could croak out a few words, but we set him up with a laptop for the interview. I was next to him like before and read off his answers while Keats asked the questions.
Billy knew enough to use this time efficiently, and he got right to it.
“Justin, could you identify the man who shot you the other night, if you saw him again?” Keats asked.
IT WAS DARK IN THAT HALL. I’M NOT SURE. I DIDN’T SEE HIS FACE, Justin typed out, and I read it to Billy.
“What do you remember about him?” Billy asked. “Any physical traits? The way he held himself? Anything at all?”
HE WAS SHORT FOR A GUY, MAYBE ANGELA’S HEIGHT. AND HE HAD SOME KIND OF ACCENT.
“A foreign accent?” Keats asked. “Anything you recognized?”
MORE LIKE SOUTHERN, I THINK. AMERICAN.
His hands were working the keyboard pretty well, and his eyes were alert. He seemed more alive than before. My guess was that he needed to get this out, and it was helping him to tell his story. Sitting silently in that bed couldn’t be good for his mental state. Not after everything he’d been through and everything he’d lost.
“You already mentioned that he gave you a message for Angela,” Keats said. “Did he say anything else?”
NOT THAT I REMEMBER. EVERYTHING WENT BLACK AFTER THAT.
While Keats took down a few notes, Justin turned to me and typed out another line.
SORRY THIS HAPPENED ANGELA. SUCKS FOR YOU TOO.
Keats wasn’t done, so I didn’t say anything. I just waved a hand at Justin to say, Don’t worry about me. I’m fine.
After another twenty minutes of back-and-forth, we had as much of a description as we were going to get. The suspect was well under six feet tall. He may have been white and may have been in his twenties, as far as Justin had been able to tell, but it was all uncertain. He’d seen no facial hair, scars, or tattoos, either. And no other distinguishing characteristics, beyond the accent.
It wasn’t much, but it was more than we’d had.
“If there’s anything you need, I want you to text me,” I told him. I wrote the number for my new burner phone on a pad by the bed. “And I’m checking on you tomorrow either way, so you might as well ask for something. Otherwise, you’ll just get some tacky teddy bear and a potted plant.”
That got a weak smile. “Thank you,” he croaked out in a hoarse whisper.
“No, thank you,” I said. “And save your voice. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
As we were walking to the elevators, Keats squeezed my shoulder.
“You’re a good person,” he said. “You know that?”
I shrugged it off. “Anyone would do what they could for this guy,” I said.
“Some people, but not everyone,” Billy told me. Given his years with the Bureau, I figured he would know.
Out on the street, my new phone gave an unfamiliar chime. I looked down and saw it was a text notification, with a message from Justin.
Chocolate shake tomorrow? he’d written.
Now it was my turn to smile.
You got it, I wrote back. See you then.
Something about that request, for a simple thing like ice cream, felt hopeful to me. I knew Justin had been permanently scarred. He’d probably never be the same again, but I could tell he wasn’t giving up, either.
He was going to be okay. Maybe not soon, but eventually.
And that was the best news all day.
CHAPTER 59
GEORGE MET ME outside the office again that evening and drove me over to Eve’s. Her place was way more comfortable than mine, but I doubted she was going to be okay with having him inside.
I bought dinner for all three of us, even if he did have to eat his in the car.
“I won’t be more than a few hours,” I told George. I hoped that was true. Working the electronic angles on this case was, for me, a ver
y easy hole to fall into. But I was going to try to get us both back to Somerville before the middle of the night, if I could.
Meanwhile, I settled in at Eve’s array and went to work on the app again, dissecting its code and looking for any new updates I could find.
Eve spent the night coming and going. She’d check on me, answer a few questions, and then disappear again. I could feel her holding back, probably for my own sake. I think what Billy said that morning had stuck to both of us. She couldn’t prop me up forever. At some point, I was going to have to stand on my own, and we all knew it.
That said, I wasn’t above leaning on my other friends for help. So as soon as Eve went to bed, I called and checked in with A.A.
“How’s it going over there on the dark side of the moon?” I asked.
“Frustrating,” she said. “But interesting.”
“Go on.”
“It’s not hard to find people talking about FNC,” she said. “The problem is knowing what to believe.”
“Nothing new there,” I said. The anonymity of the dark web definitely cuts both ways. Anyone can post whatever they like, which means you have to be on your toes about truth versus fiction and information versus misinformation.
Meanwhile, I may not have been able to discuss the specifics of the case with A.A., but as a general topic of conversation, this was fair game. In fact, A.A. and I had discussed the Free Net Collective several times in the past, mostly at MIT and long before I was at the FBI. Anyone with an interest in coding, hacking, and the dark web knew about FNC, at least in theory.
“For whatever it’s worth,” she went on, “most of the chatter is about everything they did before they went underground. Or out to sea. Or wherever the hell they are.”
“So have you been able to find anything current at all?” I asked.
“Again, it’s hard to say,” she told me. “But there is one thing. I found this user who goes by Hermes online. Have you ever heard of him?”
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