“Get us out of here,” she yelled at Dylan as she slid the side door shut.
He jammed the accelerator to the floor.
Looking out the back window, Ananke could see flames licking into the air from the tops of several trees. The house, too, was starting to burn.
She pulled her phone out of her pocket. The screen was shattered but she pushed the activate button anyway. Nothing happened. She grabbed the disposable cell she’d bought to contact Shinji. Thankfully, it had survived her airborne flight through the woods.
She punched in 911 but could barely hear the ring. When she thought she heard the operator’s voice, she said, “There’s been an explosion!” She gave the location as best she could, and added, “The fire’s spreading into the trees! Hurry!”
She hung up, removed the phone’s battery and SIM card, snapping the latter in two, and tossed the pieces out the window. Littering was not something she did lightly, but it was a small crime compared to the forest fire she’d inadvertently started, and reducing the chance of being caught due to a traceable SIM card seemed prudent.
“Take us back to the hotel,” she said. “We have to get out of here before they start evacuating everyone.”
“Evacuating?” Dylan said, his voice muffled but now understandable. “Do you really think they’ll do that?”
“There aren’t a lot of ways in and out of the area. Unless they get that fire under control quickly, the authorities won’t want anyone around. And when they start forcing people out, the roads are going to jam up.”
“But what about the kids? What if they’re in the area?”
“They’re not.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because if they were, then they were killed the day they were taken. Whoever set that trap knew what the explosion would do, so they wouldn’t be keeping their prized bargaining chips anywhere near it. Can you make this thing go any faster?”
Dylan punched the accelerator.
“What about Liesel and Ricky?” Rosario said.
“Right,” Ananke said. “I’m out of phones. Can you call them?”
__________
“AN EARTHQUAKE?” LIESEL asked.
They had stopped thirty feet shy of the Silverado and were looking in the direction from where the sound had come.
“You don’t hear an earthquake without feeling it, too,” he said. “I didn’t feel anything. Did you?”
Liesel shook her head.
“I don’t like this. Come on.”
They jumped into the truck and Ricky started the engine. Instead of dropping it into gear right away, he called Ananke. The line rang several times before transferring to a mailbox that “has not been activated at this time.” He called again. Same result.
“Do you know anyone’s number besides Ananke’s?” he asked.
“I have everyone’s number.”
“Why the hell didn’t I get everyone’s number?”
“Maybe so you wouldn’t bother us?”
“Funny. Can you just try someone else, please?”
Liesel made a call but after several seconds said, “Rosario’s not answering.”
“We should go back to the hotel.” Ricky shifted the truck into Drive.
“I agree.”
They were almost back to Groveland when Liesel’s phone rang.
“It’s Rosario,” she said.
Ricky tried to get the gist of the conversation, but for the most part Liesel only listened.
When she hung up, she said, “They are going to the hotel also.”
“So they heard the explosion, too?”
“Ananke set it off.”
He slammed on the brakes and turned to her. “Is she all right?”
“She is okay. They are all okay. Now can we keep going, please?”
27
WORD OF THE fire had apparently not reached the people in Groveland yet. The town was operating as normal—campers filling their tanks with gas, café patrons eating an early lunch, and tourists walking in and out of the stores.
The fire station also seemed quiet.
Had it not gotten word? Ananke wondered.
What if the phone had been damaged after all, and the operator hadn’t been able to hear her? Or maybe her disposable phone had sent her to a 911 call center not in the area. She was pretty sure there were safeguards against that, but she wasn’t positive.
“Rosario, I need your—”
Lights on the fire station’s front wall began flashing and the doors rolled open. Inside, more lights on the trucks spun beams of red while sirens blared.
“Never mind,” she said.
Ananke hated fire, hated its unpredictability, and most of all the idea of dying in one. She would rather be tortured to death than barbecued alive.
As they pulled into the hotel parking lot, Ananke spotted Ricky and Liesel waiting by Ricky’s truck. There were other people outside, too, guests and several employees of the hotel, all looking east.
“Didn’t your parents tell you not to play with matches?” Ricky asked as Ananke climbed out of the van.
She barely heard him, as her attention was on the dark column of smoke rising above the forest.
“We’ve got to get out of here before the traffic backs up,” she said. “Everyone grab your things and let’s go. You have two minutes.”
They sprinted into the building and were back at the vehicles before the deadline. When they pulled out of the lot, other guests, seeing that Ananke and her companions were fleeing, began running toward their own rooms.
“Go, go, go,” Ananke told Dylan as he turned onto the highway.
They’d made it a few miles west of Groveland when Rosario’s phone rang.
She answered it and glanced at Ananke. “She is.” Another pause. “Okay. Sure.” Rosario held the phone out. “It’s the Administrator.”
Ananke put the cell to her ear. “Yes?”
“Your phone is off.”
“Permanently, I’m afraid.”
“What happened?”
“I landed on it a little too hard after I was thrown into the trees by an explosion.”
“Explosion? The fire?”
“Oh, you know about that, do you?”
“Details, please.”
She updated him on her fun-filled morning.
“You couldn’t have avoided the trip wire?” he said when she finished.
“Are you kidding me with that question? Look, if you want to play could-have/should-have you can hire someone else.”
“My apologies. I’m sure you did all you could.”
“Gee, thanks.”
“Your explosion has changed the situation, however.”
“I’d say. The forest is on fire.”
“Yes, that, too. What I meant is, the kidnappers have made contact again.”
Ananke paused. “Why?”
“They have moved the deadline up to eight a.m. tomorrow.”
“Eight a.m.? Tomorrow? That’s only twenty hours.”
“A little under.”
“How did they deliver the message? Text again?”
“E-mails, but to the same three families.”
“When was it sent?”
“Four minutes after you triggered the bomb.”
“Four minutes? That can’t be a coincidence.”
“No, it can’t.”
“Can you forward the e-mails to Rosario?”
“Already done.”
Ananke finished the call and told the others about the change in deadline. Rosario connected her laptop to her phone and used the cell signal to log on to her e-mail.
“Got them,” she said. She clicked a couple of times, spent several moments reading, and then handed the computer to Ananke.
The recipient’s information was at the top, followed by the sender’s e-mail address—not a name, only a string of seemingly random numbers and letters from one of those free e-mail services.
SUBJECT: Your Daughter
Below this was a list of account numbers, bank names, and routing numbers, all located outside the States in territories with lax customer identification laws.
If the money is not received by 7:59 a.m., then you will be sent a follow-up e-mail with directions on where to find your daughter’s body.
They compared the other two most recent e-mails to the first one. Three words had been changed in each to reflect the name and gender of the child.
“I’ll send these to Shinji,” Rosario said. “He can try to trace the send, and also look into the bank accounts while we’re on the move.”
As Ananke settled back in her seat, she spotted two fire trucks about a mile away, lights spinning. When they drew near, Dylan pulled to the side, waited until they passed, then sped up again.
“Where are we?” she asked.
“Just beyond someplace called the Moccasin Reservoir.”
“I don’t want to go too far until we decide where to go next. I think we’ll be okay now, traffic-wise, so stop at the first good place you see.”
He nodded.
The first good place turned out to be the parking lot of a mini-mart in a town called Chinese Camp. Ricky pulled his truck in beside them.
While everyone else went inside to grab something to drink and use the toilet, Ananke stayed in the van and studied the Google map of the area. By the time the others returned and piled into the van, the westbound traffic on the highway had begun to increase.
“We shouldn’t stay here too much longer,” Ricky said. “That traffic’s going to be bumper to bumper before we know it.”
“You see that?” Ananke pointed at a fork in the highway a few hundred feet to the northwest. “One way takes us back into the mountains, and the other toward Modesto. I don’t know which way we need to go yet.”
“Have you forgotten about your little kaboom, baby? It seems to me that back into the mountains is the last place we should head.”
Ananke held up a finger an inch from his nose.
“This is the last time I tell you. I am not your baby. I am not your kitty-kat. I am not your kitten. My name is Ananke and I am your boss. The next time you say anything even remotely condescending, to me or to anyone else on the team—hell, to anyone else, period—I will have you tied up and inform the Administrator that you’ve decided to go back to prison. Have I made myself clear?”
“I’m a kindhearted man. You’re taking this all the wrong way, baby.”
“So be it,” she said, pulling out her phone.
“Wait, wait. What did I do?”
“You said baby.”
“Did I?”
She started dialing.
“Hold on,” he said. “You don’t need to do that. I get it. No more sweet stuff. It’s a stab to my soul, but I’ll do it.”
She glared at him for a moment longer before putting her phone back in her pocket.
__________
ALL FIVE OF Shinji’s computer stations were working overtime. He’d even had to co-opt some processing power from the computer science department at Cal State Los Angeles, not that the school was aware of the intrusion, of course.
Two of his machines were dedicated to track down as much information as possible about the five bank account numbers the kidnappers were using. Two others were processing camera footage from all sides of Yosemite. The last he was using to analyze the metadata attached to the ransom e-mails.
Since they were all sent through an Internet e-mail service, the IP address associated with the sender was one owned by the service, not the actual computer the sender had used. For most people, that would’ve been as far as they could track things, but not for Shinji.
E-mail services such as the one in this case logged the computer IP address of the sender for their records, even though they didn’t include it in the metadata. Most people didn’t know that. They only knew an e-mail sent from such a place would appear anonymous. That’s why those services were so popular for illegal activities.
Hacking into the e-mail system required exactly two minutes and seventeen seconds. Since Shinji knew the exact moments the e-mails had gone out, he was able to locate them in a flash.
“Good,” he muttered.
The sending IP addresses were identical for all three e-mails. Not particularly surprising, but definitely reassuring. He entered the number into an IP locator website and was presented with the follow results:
Country: United States
Region: Nevada
City: Tonopah
With this came latitude and longitude coordinates. He input these into Google Maps and hit RETURN. The satellite image zoomed in on the town of Tonopah, stopping directly on top of a building labeled STAR TRAVELER MOTEL.
While he thought it possible the kids were being held at a motel, he didn’t think it highly likely. Still, it wasn’t a dead end.
Shinji absently grabbed his can of Diet Mountain Dew, and had it halfway to his mouth before he realized it was empty. He tossed it into the nearly full recycle bin, snatched another from the mini-fridge under his desk, popped it open, and took a gulp.
He then set loose his considerable talents on the motel’s computer system. As soon as he was through the firewall, he verified that the IP address belonged to one of the computers in the business center, and then hunted down the security system. As he had hoped, there was a camera inside the center, no doubt to deter anyone from stealing the equipment. He located the footage from around the time the ransom e-mails had been sent and let it play.
Sure enough, a man was sitting at the appropriate computer at the correct time. His features were hidden by the UNLV hoodie pulled over his head. That would have been disappointing if not for the fact that when he rose, he turned directly toward the camera for a solid three seconds, allowing Shinji to capture a clean image of his face.
Shinji used other motel cameras to track the man’s movement through the building and into the parking lot, where he climbed into a white Nissan Altima and drove off. The car was too far away from the camera to get a full look at the license plate, but Shinji could make out three of the characters. Those and the make and model of the car should be enough to find a match.
The discovery was too good to simply e-mail Rosario, so he reached for his phone. As he did, one of his computers dinged. He rolled his chair over and saw he’d received three hits on the Yosemite video footage. He brought up the clips and watched them.
When he finished the last, he grabbed his phone again. Boy, did he need to call the others now.
28
THE BUNKER
TESSA HERRERA STOOD in the center of the prison, directly below the hatch. She was scared, but not as scared as she’d been that first day when the armed motorcyclists had forced the van down a dirt road, and then made Tessa and the others transfer into the back of a waiting RV.
Her fear had hit its peak when, after they’d been driving for over an hour, the RV pulled to the side of the road and one of their chaperones, Mr. Carter, had been dragged outside. Everyone heard their captors shouting at him, enraged because he hadn’t stopped asking questions since being taken hostage. Mr. Carter pleaded for them to not hurt him, and said he was sorry and that he’d shut up. For a few seconds there was silence, and Tessa thought maybe they were bringing him back in. The bang that rang out next was so loud, they all jumped.
“Oh, God,” Conner had whispered.
Not having grown up in the best of neighborhoods, Tessa knew a gunshot when she heard one.
Moments later they were driving again, only without Mr. Carter in the vehicle.
When the RV next stopped, the students and their two remaining chaperones were blindfolded and led to a ladder they were told to climb down. When they were finally given permission to remove the covering from their eyes, they had just enough time to see they were in som
e kind of long room with curved walls, before the hatch above was shut and the space was plunged into complete darkness.
There they had been ever since.
Tessa had seen enough movies and TV shows to know the kidnappers were interested in a ransom. Why else would they have taken her and the others and stored them away?
They wouldn’t be looking for money for her, of course. Her mom was a bookkeeper for the owner of a small dry-cleaning chain, and wouldn’t have anywhere close to the kind of money the kidnappers would want. And her dad? Well, her mom always said nice things about him, but Tessa had never met him. The same lack of family fortune went for Renata and Mark.
No, the kidnappers were most likely only interested in getting money out of Grace’s and Hannah’s and Nicholas’s families. They were the rich ones. Crazy rich, if Nicholas’s bragging was true, and she was pretty sure it was.
She, Renata, and Mark happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and had no real value to the kidnappers. That troubled Tessa.
That was why she was standing under the hatch. It was the only spot she’d found where she could hear anything from above. Her hope was to overhear some of the kidnappers’ plan and use the knowledge to somehow escape. She knew it was a long shot, but her only other choice was to sit around and wait for whatever was going to happen.
So far she hadn’t learned much. Her biggest discovery had come a few hours earlier when she heard two of the captors called by name—Peterson and Nyland.
In the time since, she had heard nothing, but now she was picking up voices again, male like all the other times. They were too far from the hatch for her to pick up anything except their tone at first, but as they moved closer, words started coming through: slow and driver and can’t and time.
Tessa tilted her head so that her right ear was pointed directly at the hatch.
“…later or could…”
“I don’t…but if we…”
“We need…down. Right now.”
Tessa straightened up, as she thought the hatch was about to open.
The Excoms Page 15