“You’re a good baby,” she cooed. “Yes, you are. Yes, you are. And you’re going to help Auntie Elizabeth destroy the Hive.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Aram Mojtabai’s eyes darted back and forth as he scanned the final few lines of code. TV always portrayed IT guys and gals as pulling off miracles, and often they did, but the shows never showed how much work it took, especially when it came to code. You couldn’t just whip together something in ten minutes. It took hours, days, to create something new, but thanks to television and movies, people expected computer techs to pull off the impossible in a flash.
Fortunately, in this case, Aram got lucky. The basic software he needed already existed, and the override key Reddington wanted was fairly straightforward. All it needed was a frequency detector, a direct-action virus, and a control system upload. Meld them together, and you were good to go. It was the melding that was the trouble, and that was what Aram was checking now. He had no way to field-test this before he gave it to Reddington, so he was triple-checking his triple-checking.
And through it all, he worried. He worried about Keen and Ressler, held in captivity. He worried about the pressure from Reddington if he failed to get the job done. And he worried about—
“Got an update, Aram?”
Agent Navabi.
She was standing behind him with a reusable mug from a chain store. It filled the air with the fragrant smell of salted caramel latte. Aram’s stomach rumbled, and he tried to remember when he’d last eaten.
“The agents down in South Carolina haven’t found a thing and they’re ready to shove it,” he reported, fairly sure the code on his screen would mean nothing to her. “If it weren’t for the fact that so many of our agents have disappeared, they’d probably have given up by now.”
“Cooper’s getting antsy.” Navabi gestured up at the Director’s office. “He’s fielded two more phone calls from Pavel Rudenko. The guy keeps offering—or threatening—to send in a team of mercenaries called Green Alpha Something-or-Other to find Mala, even though he wouldn’t have any idea where to look. Panabaker’s having fits.”
“Still looking.” Aram changed the subject. “Anything on the Iris Henning murder?”
“Her hyoid bone was broken, and the ME found evidence of petechial hemorrhaging. The decay hid evidence of bruising on her neck, but it was strangulation, no question. The techs didn’t find anything in the apartment. Not a hair, not a thread, nothing.”
“And the bath water?” Aram shuddered.
“Just her… material,” Navabi admitted. “Gruesome work. You couldn’t pay me enough. What are you working on now?”
Damn it. He’d been hoping the change of subject would distract her.
“Something unrelated,” he said.
“Really?” She took a sip of latte. “Keen and Ressler are missing, Cooper said there are no other priorities. Plus Rudenko keeps a lot of Pentagon people happy, and they’re leaning on us. Everyone is working on this case and nothing else. So when you say unrelated…”
“Right, no, yeah,” he said. “I mean, I’m not looking at the case, you know, directly. I’m debugging a search program that I hope will help. So it’s not directly related, but it’s close to being related.” He was babbling, and he tried to make himself shut up, but his mouth ran away with him, like it always did. “So I’m working on the case indirectly. Like when a Sherpa hauls equipment up Mount Everest for the climber and gets to the top but doesn’t get credit for it. I’m debugging code, nothing weird or strange. Just… debugging.”
Jeez, his friggin’ hands were sweating. She looked at him coolly, her eyes empty of any suspicion or doubt. For a moment, he had hope. But with yet another thoughtful sip, Navabi put on her investigator face. Hope died and Aram was dead with it.
“So this program you’re debugging,” she said slowly, “it’s for tracking something.”
“What makes you say that?” he said.
“I’m not a programmer, but I recognize a megahertz frequency when I see it,” she said, pointing.
He licked his lips. When Aram was eight years old, a horse of a boy named Gus Backmeijer had pushed him off his bike and ridden away on it, laughing. When Aram arrived home with bruised knees and a scraped face, his mother had demanded to know what had happened. Aram, greatly ashamed at losing a fight to a bully, had stammered out a story that he had fallen off his bike and flattened the tire, so he’d walked home. His mother hadn’t believed him for a second, and asked for details about the encounter, poking at the holes in Aram’s story until he’d tearfully admitted that Gus had stolen his bike. When Aram’s father had come home, Mother had told him about it, and Father had stormed out of the house. A few minutes later, Aram’s newly scratched and battered bike was back in the garage and Aram received a spanking.
“Only a fool lies to his mother,” Father scolded. “Learn from this!”
Now he was facing down Navabi’s implacable brown eyes as they bored gently into him, just like his mother’s, and he found that both revelatory and disturbing. He sighed and resigned himself.
“Look,” he said, “a couple days ago, I got a call. It was Reddington.”
“Reddington called you?” she all but yelped.
“Sh!” He looked furtively around, but no one seemed to have heard. “Don’t shout it around.”
She brought her head closer and lowered her voice like impending thunder.
“Why didn’t you say something?”
“He made me keep quiet about it.”
“You need to explain that—and be pointy.”
“Pointy?”
“No nattering. And you’re stalling.” She gave him a grim smile. “Besides, you’ll feel better once you talk.”
He sighed and explained.
“So Reddington needs this key and he wants you—us—to keep quiet because if we go in there with guns blazing, he’s afraid we’ll have another Waco,” she summed up.
“That’s about it,” he said. “Are you going to tell Cooper?”
There was a long, awful pause. Aram realized she was going to say yes. His heart sank, but with that also came some relief. He wouldn’t be responsible anymore. Someone else could make the decisions. The burden would lift, he could take whatever lumps the FBI dished out for withholding information, and he could go on as before. Thank heavens. His posture eased as tension slid out of him.
“No,” Navabi said.
“No?” he echoed stupidly.
“I think Reddington’s right,” she said, implacable as a bulldozer. “We’ll have a massacre on our hands if Cooper and Panabaker find out. Keep your mouth shut, do as Reddington asks, and we’ll deal with the repercussions later.”
The tension tightened. “But—”
“What’s he want the key for?” she interrupted pointedly.
Aram pursed his lips. Fine. He had no choice anyway. “I have no idea. But I have to get it there in five hours.”
“And how,” she asked, “are you going to do that when the Sumter National Forest is at least eight hours away by car?”
A pang speared Aram’s stomach, and he checked his watch, a useless but automatic gesture. “Oh my god. I’ve been so focused on just making the key.”
Navabi made a grim face. “You’ll probably have a solution in just a minute.” She nodded at the staircase to the Director’s office. Harold Cooper and Cyntha Panabaker were quick-stepping it down the steps toward them.
Aram’s heart sped up. “Are you going to tell them?”
“I think the tougher question is if you are going to tell them,” she said. “You just can’t hold it in, can you?”
“It’s miserable,” he admitted.
“Just follow my lead,” she said.
It belatedly occurred to Aram that Navabi wasn’t planning to say anything, was even going to help him. His knees went weak. Automatically he saved the new sets of code and fumbled in his desk for a flash drive.
“News,” Cooper said without preamb
le. “Three bodies have washed up on the shore of the Parr Shoals Reservoir.”
That was south of the Sumter National Forest, where Reddington was. Aram’s fingers automatically moved, calling up maps and information on the auxiliary screens.
“The Parr Shoals Reservoir was created by a dam on the Broad River, here.” He highlighted a section of the river south of the reservoir, where the highway crossed the water. “Very dangerous section of water—full of old trees, snags, and even houses that were covered over when the dam went in. Fishing not recommended.”
“May I?” Cooper gestured at the boards, and Aram obligingly backed away, though he kept a nervous eye on his new program. Cooper called up photos of bruised and bloated bodies. All male, all naked. “As it happens, it was a group of adventurous fishermen who pulled these three bodies out of the water. They called the police, and we caught wind of it.”
Aram swallowed nausea. He had seen hundreds of crime scene photos, many of them worse than these, but they still made his stomach roil.
“Our guys?” Navabi asked.
“Probably,” Panabaker said. “The police still don’t know about the manhunt, and we’re keeping it that way. We need to send a team down there to find out for sure and to search for more bodies.”
“We’ll go with them,” Navabi said promptly.
“We will?” Aram asked in surprise.
Navabi stepped hard on his foot. “Didn’t you tell me you had that new sonar device for checking underwater?”
“Oh! Yeah.” Aram coughed. “Yeah, I could totally try that out and look for other bodies.”
“Good,” Cooper said. “Get on the plane with the others. When you arrive, grab a van and head down there. Make nice with the locals, but I want those bodies back here by sunset.”
“We might have to stay longer,” Navabi said casually. “If Aram’s sonar device gives us anything. We’ll tell them all about it when we get down there rather than call now. It’ll save time.”
“Sure, sure,” Cooper said. “Just get a move on!”
Plane, Aram thought, making grateful eye contact with Navabi. And a van. That would let him get down there in a couple hours. Aram tapped his keyboard with chilly fingers, moving the key to his flash drive.
* * *
Three hours later, Aram was driving a van down relentlessly sunny back roads. Tarmac rushed under the van’s wheels, and the open windows let the hot breeze blast through the passenger cabin. Green mountains looked down on lush valleys peppered with clumps of houses and fenced-in farms. Many—too many—of the houses sat on cement blocks, reached by bowed wooden steps. Several looked like they’d been stitched together from a dozen different houses, showing different styles of siding or windows. Aram was no stranger to poverty—Washington DC had more than its share—but this was a different kind of poverty, the kind that was stranded out in the middle of nowhere, unconnected to a chance for something bigger or better. There was no subway, no bus—no escape to a different part of town that at least had a library or the occasional job. This poverty lay hidden, where no one could reach it, and it could reach nothing. It made Aram sadder than anything in the east side tenements in DC.
On the floor beside the driver’s seat was a duffel bag. In his pocket was the flash drive. The latter weighed heavily, as if it were made of lead. Navabi had stayed with the team investigating the bodies, a team that mysteriously didn’t learn that Aram had a fictitious sonar device, or that he was even supposed to be there with Navabi. He had used his ID and Cooper’s name to get a van from the lot at the South Carolina field office after the plane landed, and now he was trying to follow the directions on the cell phone in his lap without getting into a car accident. The van had GPS, but Aram didn’t want to risk using it.
The east entrance to the park was a little more than an hour away. Aram spent the time whistling tunelessly through his teeth and listening to preachers on the radio. Some of them seemed to live in a scarier world than even Raymond Reddington, which said something. That it was a world of their own making was both frightening and cheerless. Aram wouldn’t trade places with any one of them, even now.
Eventually he started seeing signs for the park, and they increased in frequency as he got closer. He also noticed that several times his phone lost the GPS signal and had to hunt for it again. Fortunately, he didn’t need it anymore, not with the steady stream of signage pointing him the way. When he was a few minutes away, he took advantage of a time when he actually had a signal to send a text message to the satellite phone signal he had gotten from Reddington earlier:
Almost there.
He got no response, and had no way to know if the message had gotten hung up in the poor signaling or if Reddington was keeping quiet. Probably the latter, knowing Reddington. Aram blew out his cheeks. This was fireable offense time. This was probably prosecutorial offense time. He should pull over, call Cooper, and come clean.
And then he thought of Reddington’s eyes, with the screaming inside them, and his blood ran cold in his veins. Never mind, then. Besides, he couldn’t get a decent cell signal to call Cooper anyway. Must be the mountains.
He pulled up to the park entrance, paid the entry fee to the smiling ranger, and drove in. Trees closed in around the van, and he put the windows up to make himself feel more secure. A few minutes later he arrived at an intersection. He pulled over, confused. What now? He had no idea which way to go.
A knock came at his window.
Aram yelped in panic and fumbled for his pistol, though he couldn’t remember the last time he had fired it, god, he was supposed to keep current on his training and now he was going to die in this forsaken—
The knock came again. It was Dembe.
Reddington’s bodyguard made a rolling motion with his hand, though no car built in the last fifteen years had a handle for rolling down a window. Aram thumped his chest a couple of times to make sure his heart was still working and brought the window down.
“Move over,” Dembe said. “I will drive.”
About ten minutes later, Dembe was leading Aram toward a falling-down wreck of a house half-buried in the side of the hill. Aram thought Dembe had to be joking. The place looked as though it was going to collapse into itself like a black hole at any moment. Outside the decrepit building was parked a battered brown van that looked like it might puff into rusty dust if someone blew hard on it. As Aram looked, two men emerged from the house. Swiftly they pulled a camouflage tarp over the van and trotted away. In the distance, an engine came to life and tires crunched away.
“Who were those guys?” Aram asked.
“No one you need worry about,” Dembe said.
Seconds after that, when Aram had stepped beyond the falling-down shell and was standing in the well-appointed, airy living room beyond, he resisted the impulse to rub his eyes. It was, he mused, some kind of metaphor, but he wasn’t quite sure what kind.
“Aram!” Reddington emerged from what Aram assumed was a bedroom. “I was wondering how long it would take you. It would be awful if you got lost out here and no one ever found you again.”
“No,” Aram said, clutching the duffel bag to his chest. “I mean, yes. I mean—”
“Don’t forget I charge by the hour,” called a wheezy voice from inside the bedroom. “The world’s most expensive babysitter, that’s me.”
“Understood,” Reddington called back over his shoulder, then said to Aram, “Another associate of mine. Likes his Sudoku.”
“I… see.”
“I’d offer you a drink,” Reddington continued, “we aren’t barbarians here, but I know you don’t touch alcohol, and in any case, we’re in something of a hurry. You did bring what I asked for?” He chuckled a little too loudly. “What am I saying? Of course you did! You wouldn’t come all this way just to disappoint me.”
“No,” Aram said again. “I mean, yes! I mean—here!”
He shoved the duffel bag at Reddington. Dembe quickly intercepted it, put it on the coffee table
, and unzipped it. It held a small laptop computer, a helicopter drone with four propellers, and a video game controller that seemed to have lost a fight with a portable DVD player.
“Excellent, Aram,” Reddington beamed. “What am I looking at?”
Aram swallowed and forced himself to stay calm. Reddington needed him. Reddington wasn’t going to do anything to him. It was all in Aram’s head. But Reddington’s hard eyes still held the screams, and Aram’s mouth dried up.
“Maybe that drink?” he said. “Club soda.”
“With a twist, Dembe,” Reddington added. “As I said, we’re not barbarians here. Now, what is this?”
Aram sipped the fizzy water. His hand shook slightly. “The helicopter drone is the same kind you see people fiddle with on the beach. They send them into the air and take videos of their kids—or of their neighbors undressing at home.”
“I’m familiar with the concept,” Reddington said. “The military loves them, though each one has an explosively short lifespan. What are these devices?”
“This one,” Aram picked up the controller, “controls the drone. Watch.” With the flick of a switch, he activated it. The drone whirred to life and buzzed unsteadily toward the high ceiling. The screen on the controller showed the three men looking up at it from a foreshortened perspective, the sort of view a hummingbird might have of human beings.
“I’m not that great at controlling these things,” Aram admitted. “My nephew has one, and he can send it all over the place. You know that delivery companies are playing with using these. They see a sky filled with drones one day.”
“I look forward to practicing my skeet shooting when that day arrives,” Reddington said. “What’s the other device for?”
Now on territory where he was the expert, Aram felt himself relaxing a little. “Dembe, can you take over this?”
Dembe sent the helicopter drone skimming about the ceiling while Aram booted up the laptop and plugged what looked like a small walkie-talkie into it.
The Blacklist--The Beekeeper No. 159 Page 16