The Child Thief 3: Thin Lines

by Bella Forrest

  Time enough to teach her how to judge the man’s character later. Right now, I needed her on point.

  “So, Gab, those pictures,” I reminded her.

  “And the something more I mentioned,” Nelson added, giving me a significant look.

  I’d forgotten that Nelson was even speaking, but nodded at her to continue. Whatever Nelson had to say, I had no doubt it was important.

  “What is it?” Gabby asked, evidently past the short distraction of Robert and whether he still liked her or not.

  “Little John,” Nelson said. “We’ve been going back and forth on this, but I think we’ve all come to the conclusion that Nathan has something to do with them. The timeline for Little John’s existence also mentions OH’s name, and I don’t think that’s an accident. We also know that Little John has been… rescuing members of OH+, for lack of a better word. And that the only common link there is Nathan himself.”

  “It’s funny you should say that, actually,” Gabby said. “Because I’ve been bored out of my mind, waiting for you guys to get around to actually calling me.”

  She let that hang for a moment, just to make sure that the guilt trip stuck, and I rolled my eyes.

  “And since I didn’t have anything else to do, I’ve been doing research wherever I could,” she finished. “Robin had already asked me to find out anything I could on Nathan, and I doubt I have to tell you how difficult that is when I don’t know his last name—and don’t even know if Nathan is his real first name.”

  “Granted,” Nelson said. “So what search parameters have you been using?”

  “Millionaires,” Gabby answered without hesitation.

  “What?” I asked, surprised. “Why would you jump to that conclusion?”

  She huffed. “Think about it, Robin. Who else would have had the money and the guts to start something like this? It’s not like he could have gone out and applied for a loan at the local bank. ‘Hello, sir, yes, I’m hoping to start a few online portals where some of my friends and I can discuss taking down the government, but I’m a little short on funds when it comes to all the tech and weapons we’re going to need. I mean, we might need airships, special suits, guns, all the computers… military contacts.’ It just makes sense that he was rich to start with.”

  I blinked once, my mind reshuffling all the things I thought I knew about Nathan. Could it have been that he was some rich guy right from the start, and that was how he got all his toys? But that didn’t ring true. I already knew that he relied on donations for a lot of things. Heck, it’s what Jace and I were doing during those first few weeks of my joining OH+—recruiting people who could not only help with future missions, but also bring resources to the table.

  Nathan might have been a millionaire, yeah… but he might also have just been great at networking, rather than spending a bunch of his own money all the time.

  “It could be,” Jace cut in. “I mean, I haven’t known him for long, but I’ve never known Nathan to be short on funds, and there’s always more tech to be had.”

  “And more convenient contacts in the military,” I said slowly, running through all the things Zion and Alexy had in their apartments, and the rapid acquisition of the second-skin suits. “His access to that stuff doesn’t mean that he had the money himself, though. Nathan’s proven that he’s a networking genius. Plus, we know that Alexy came from the military—she said as much. Couldn’t he also have just networked his way into all the stuff? It seems more his style, really.”

  “Anyway, none of that matters, because it doesn’t tell us who he is,” Nelson said practically. “We need to know who he is if we’re going to track him and figure out where we’re supposed to go. It’s a good idea, Gabby, but you know the first rule of research.”

  “Did it get me anywhere,” she said. “No, searching for random millionaires didn’t get me a damn thing. But then I thought if I reduced the parameters a bit…”

  “Good girl,” Nelson murmured, nodding in approval, and I had to stop myself from smiling. It was like watching a professor teach a promising student.

  “And I started searching for millionaires who went off the grid completely,” Gabby finished. “I mean, I don’t know for a fact that Nathan just disappeared from public life, or even that he was a millionaire. Maybe he wasn’t rich at all, or maybe he was and never disappeared, or maybe he did in fact start an underground organization to fight the government, kept making public appearances just to keep anyone from getting suspicious. But I was bored and waiting, with nothing else to do, and those guesses made just as much sense as anything else. I wasn’t getting any hits just by searching his name, but I figured if I could search what he was rather than his name…”

  “And?” I asked breathlessly.

  I could almost see Gabby shrugging. “I didn’t find anything concrete,” she said. “There are lots and lots of rich people who disappeared around the same time, fifteen to twenty years ago. I mean, lots of rich people who just mysteriously stopped appearing in public. And when I tried to look for them, there was nothing interesting. Random notes here and there, questioning what might have happened to so and so.” She paused for a moment, as if she was thinking, and then continued slowly. “But there was one guy. A guy who seemed… I don’t know, different.”

  “How so?” I asked. “Less bragging, more explaining, please, Gabby. We’re on a deadline here, remember.”

  “Right, sorry,” she said, her voice immediately faster. “So, as I was saying, I did some quick searches on a lot of these guys, and I didn’t get any useful hits, but the results were just that: a lack of useful hits. But this one guy was different. Disappeared from public life twenty years ago, just up and vanished. And when I searched him, there were hits. But when I followed them, they led to nothing. Just black holes in the web. Like there were firewalls that were reflecting my own image back at me—walls like I’ve never seen before.”

  I exchanged frowns with Jackie, and then with Jace, but when I looked at Nelson, I saw that she seemed to understand exactly what Gabby was talking about.

  “Next-gen firewalls?” she said shortly.

  There was a pause from Gabby. “I don’t know. I didn’t have any way to research them, and I’ve never actually seen one before.”

  “But they could have been,” Nelson replied.

  “Yes,” Gabby said.

  “In which case you need to watch yourself,” Nelson continued. “Where are you now?”

  “In the middle of the ocean,” Gabby replied. “The same place we always are. I don’t think I was traced, though.”

  “You wouldn’t know,” Nelson replied. “It would have been done by the firewall itself, and it would have been a recording and trace of the actual search, not your particulars. Even so, it could have led back to you. What have you been doing to protect yourself?”

  “Standard proxies. Nothing new or different. And nothing less than what you taught me. How do you know it was a next-gen firewall?”

  Nelson looked up and met my eyes, her expression deadly serious. “Because it’s the same thing I’ve been finding whenever I try to trace any of the events on the Authority’s timeline. Which means that there were once stories about those events on the web, and someone has gone out of their way to block those stories from the public eye.”

  I felt like I’d been punched right in the stomach and coughed. I didn’t understand 99 percent of what Gabby and Nelson had just discussed, but I understood Nelson’s last statement. She was saying that she was finding the same thing when she searched for Little John hits as Gabby had found for hits on this millionaire guy. And that the firewalls they were both running into could track who had made their way onto a given website.

  Gabby and Nelson had both been searching for something that someone was trying to hide, and they’d both run into firewalls that could have marked them. Someone had been setting traps.

  And we had no idea who had done it. But whoever they were, they might be tracking Gabby—and maybe
us—right now.

  33

  “But what does it mean?” Jackie asked for the fifteenth time since we’d gotten off the phone with Gabby. “How are they connected?”

  “Put simply, it means that the millionaire Gabby found is most likely connected to Little John, just because of the similarities in their searches,” Nelson said, leaning over the timeline and putting her finger down to hold her place while she looked up at Jackie. “The firewalls she’s talking about—and the ones I’ve seen on my searches for Little John—are extremely specialized and very difficult to build. They wouldn’t exist on accident, and there aren’t many people who even know how to use them. The fact that we’re running into them during both searches…”

  We’d hung up with Gabby moments earlier, having wrung all the information we could out of her, and after having given her a new assignment: tracking ownership of the house in which we’d found Corona.

  At least with Corona’s house, we had a real address. And though it would have been beyond sloppy for whoever bought the house to leave a paper trail in regard to that address, we were hoping that there might be something there. Something that would give us a direction.

  “After all, maybe she bought that house before she was involved with Little John,” Ant had said when he suggested it. “Before she knew to be careful about stuff like that. Right? But obviously the government knew that something fishy was going on. Maybe they got wind of her meeting with Nathan, and they were already after him, and realized that she was trouble too. In fact…”

  He’d paused there, and I’d filled in the conclusion I’d already started coming to.

  “Corona’s story might not be a cover story at all,” I said quickly. “It might be the truth. Maybe she’s been a rebel for even longer than she’s known Nathan. Maybe she’s the person who had to disappear because she got in trouble with the government.”

  “Which leaves us with the question of what exactly she did to piss the government off so much that she had to disappear,” Ant continued.

  “And how she managed to do it,” I said, staring at the trunk of the tree to help myself concentrate. “Her money must have come from somewhere. Probably her old life. So how did she just disappear with it? If she was rich and pissed off the government, why didn’t they seize her money when she went off the grid?”

  “Maybe they don’t care about the money,” Jackie said with a shrug. “Maybe they care more about the joy”—her mouth turned down in distaste at the word—“of capturing the person they think did them wrong.”

  “But then this random woman appears back in the world, with a ton of money and a pretty flimsy cover story, and if they suspected that she was the same person, or that this new person had ties to a well-known rebel group…” I muttered, putting the ideas into words as I thought of them. “Then they would have had their eyes on her. And she would have known it, or at least suspected. God, no wonder she was so freaked out about the Authority being on their way to her house. She’s seen up close and personal what they do with people they don’t like, and she might have escaped it once already. She must have been terrified.”

  And she’d still taken the time to talk to us, write down a set of directions, and essentially hand us the keys to those motorcycles before saving herself. All so she could keep fighting the government with whatever tools she had at her fingertips.

  I agreed with her on that. I just wished that these guesses gave us a little more to go on.

  “What does any of this tell us?” I finally turned my eyes to the timeline on the forest floor. “How does that help us with our current situation?”

  Jace frowned deeply, staring at the timeline as well, and for a moment I thought he was going to come up with something. But then he shook his head. “It doesn’t,” he said. “It doesn’t give us a damn thing. Just a bunch of dead ends, and that doesn’t help us at all.”

  The unfortunate truth was that he was right. Because we still didn’t have any real locations. No convenient and new addresses that might offer us shelter if Corona didn’t show up in the morning.

  At that moment, Gabby called me again.

  “Yes?” I answered quickly.

  “Robin,” she said. “I’ve got an address for you.”

  34

  The next morning found us on the bikes again, tearing toward Samsfield once more, the seven of us hunched over the handlebars of the motorcycles as we sped through the mist of the early morning. We’d spent the night planning and planning again how we thought this would all go—including what we would do if Corona didn’t show at all—and at this point I thought we could probably all have recited the plan by heart, if we had to.

  And if any one of us didn’t know it by heart, chances were the person next to them would.

  It had been a completely sleepless night, between moving to a new location, the ensuing drama of retrieving the supplies—and finding that the Authority had discovered the cave—the confusion of all the new questions regarding Little John, Corona, and Nathan, and the combination of stress and excitement over what we thought could happen this morning. We’d walked through the timeline at least one hundred times, trying to come up with any way that the points on the line could have connected back to either Nathan or Corona—the only two high-level members of Little John we knew of—or how they might have led to any of their offices or hideouts. As the only one who had ever met Nathan in person, Jace had been called upon time after time to act as judge on some point or another.

  We’d set lookouts, to be changed every hour, to watch for any Authority agents creeping through the forest. We’d hoped that the Authority was on the other side of the forest, but we couldn’t count on it.

  Which was why we’d also been researching the address Gabby had given us. Trying to decide whether it was something we could use, or something that would end up being completely useless.

  It was the location of a house; we’d known that much. But it had been a house in a different city, and not a local one. It was another residence and had been used as a guarantee for the loan on the house in which we’d met Corona. We’d been right about the record still being open to the public, though Gabby’d had to dig a little bit to find it, because no names had been attached to it. Not Nathan’s. Not Corona’s. Not another man who may have been her husband. Instead, she’d found that a Samantha Molin had been listed as owner of the property—but that it was very definitely connected to the enormous house in Samsfield. Which was also in the name of Samantha Molin.

  We had no idea what it meant. But we had the address, and it had quickly become our plan B. If nothing else, it gave us something to shoot for. Another possible location. Because we were all tired of sitting around waiting for something bad to potentially happen. We all wanted action.

  I revved my engine, shot up to drive even with Jackie, and glanced over at her, taking in the small hunched form, the dark clothing, and the helmet that hid only the top half of her face. The girl rode the motorcycle like a pro, and I couldn’t help thinking that in another life, she would have been one of those girls that built and rode her own motorcycles, maybe even had her own brand.

  In this world, though, that was a pipe dream.

  “How much longer, Jackie?” I asked, using the comm in my ear so I didn’t have to shout. I’d taken mine back for this trip with the promise that if anything happened, every one of us with a comm would make sure we grabbed one of the team members without one. I was tired of not being able to communicate with my team.

  And it had been my comm in the first place. A very large part of me thought it unfair that I’d given it up and not gotten it back.

  “Half an hour, max,” Jackie’s voice said directly into my ear. “We’re eating up the miles at this pace, and as long as no one notices us doubling the speed limit and pulls us over, we’re going to get to Samsfield in record time. Well ahead of when Corona asked us to get there.”

  I swallowed heavily and wondered if we should consider slowing down. The
last thing we needed was to get pulled over, and going so fast was almost inevitably going to get us noticed. Then again, we were going so quickly already that anyone else would have trouble catching up with us.

  I hoped.

  I dropped back a bit and left Jackie alone at the front of the pack, so that she’d be able to turn more quickly if anything came up. When Jace drew even with me, he turned his helmet to look at me and gave me a single nod.

  “Anything important?” he asked.

  “Nothing,” Jackie answered for me, via the comm link. “Robin just gets impatient on long rides. Has to constantly be asking when we’re getting there. It’s nothing new—she was like this when we were running missions with Nelson, too.”

  I glared at her, annoyed that she was making it sound like I was some impatient little kid… but then relented. She was mostly right. I just didn’t have that much patience when it came to things like this. Especially when we might find safety on the other end of the journey.

  Instead of answering, I ducked a bit lower over my handlebars, told myself to be patient, and started counting the mile markers as we passed them, trying to keep my brain busy with something other than ideas of how everything could possibly go wrong.

  Jace took the lead as soon as we got off the highway outside of Samsfield. He was, after all, the one in possession of the directions Corona had left. No address, he’d said, just a set of directions. And looking around, I could see why. Because we weren’t in a place where there were any addresses. Instead, we were driving right into a forest—one that looked completely different from the one in which we’d been staying, outside of Trenton. While that forest was made up of old, stately trees like oaks and pines, this one was much… lighter. The trees around us were sycamores and beeches, their leaves small and musical, their bark light. I frowned at that, going back to my schooling years, and tried to figure out why there would be such a big difference in the tree population when we were only a couple hours from where we’d started out.