by Aric Davis
CHAPTER 40
Pat’s hands were shaking as he opened the e-mail. It wasn’t his first eyes-only document, though the thrill of seeing what would have been forbidden goods was still fresh for him. It was especially intense at this moment, as he knew this was something special, the linchpin of his scheme to catch Darryl and Terry. The e-mail was going to confirm what sort of websites the dead boys from California and St. Louis had been hooked into. Pat knew in his gut that he was right, but still he couldn’t bring himself to open the electronic document. Around him he could hear his friends—some of the best friends he’d ever had—but they were competitors, too. This was his chance to separate himself. If he was wrong about this, he’d tumble back into the background, and one of them would be the one who figured out where Darryl and Terry were headed next.
When Pat finally opened the stupid thing, the words were sparse but gave him at least hints of the news he craved. They confirmed that computers in both homes had recently posted on video game chat rooms, the dead boys no doubt looking for hints for popular games—likely some of the same games Pat enjoyed and the same chat rooms he himself had used to decipher their mysteries. The boys had both used AOL chat to talk to Darryl or Terry—Pat was sure of that—but the rest of the details were muddled.
With time and resources, Pat could probably comb the site until he unearthed the name Darryl or Terry used in the chat rooms, but he had neither. And besides, Pat needed the men themselves, live online, not merely the name. We need a sting. Get someone who could safely be used by Darryl or Terry and then track down the pair of criminals via their IP address. It would be easy enough to pull off. These guys would be drawn back to the chats like crack addicts, if Pat was right about their MO, and he was more and more certain he was. But could a TK ever be fooled by such a ruse?
That was a problem above his pay grade, he knew. He could crunch data and troll websites, looking for footprints left by people who fit the parameters given to them by Jessica, but he couldn’t be expected to orchestrate a sting operation against a pair of jet-setting telekinetic murderers. Pat stood, garnering a look from Brinn next to him, and then walked to the phone on the far wall to call Jessica. Ten minutes later she was downstairs and the five of them gathered amongst the desks and computers.
“Spit it out,” said Jessica, and Pat nodded.
“My hunch paid off.”
“What does that mean?” Brinn asked.
“I had Jessica get me a federal warrant to track the final web activity of those kids—the suicide and the day care shooters,” said Pat, feeling his face flush. Brinn nodded, but he could tell she was frustrated that the lead she’d told him to ignore had paid off in some way or another. “The warrant revealed that at least one of the boys that shot up that day care was in a video game chat room just before the cops say he went off his nut, and Vinnie was doing the same thing, right up until he decided to rip off his dad.”
“Holy shit,” said Geoff.
“That’s still not proof of anything, though,” said Brinn. “Young boys like video games—hell, I like video games—but that doesn’t mean some TK has been in my head.”
“And there’s still no proof it’s even possible for one to do so,” said Jessica. “What do you think we should do with this information, Pat?”
Pat was having a hard time breathing. His anxiety was reaching levels he hadn’t felt since spilling his milk down the front of his shirt in high school, but he knew he was right.
“We need a sting,” he said. This was met with skeptical looks all around, but he didn’t care. It wasn’t just a hunch anymore. This was the way in. “We need a presence in these forums, some kid flashing money around like an idiot. We need a kid who can fool Darryl or Terry. A special kid. If they’re really controlling people over wires, we need someone who can feed them this shit back and make them believe it. Once we get an IP location, we can nail down their real location and send in whatever cops you call for a job like this.”
“Not cops,” said Jessica. “Cops can only manage the fringe for something like this.” She shook her head. “I know a person we can use to work them, a TK, but I’ll need you to be the face of the op, Pat. This TK knows nothing about the Internet. He can do all of the head bending we need to fool these guys, but the Internet stuff won’t be possible for him.”
“So you want me to let a TK into my head?” Pat asked, the idea horrifying beyond measure.
“No, man,” said Rick, flashing an evil grin. “She wants to let two TKs in.”
“Possibly three,” said Geoff. He was enjoying himself, too.
“Holy shit,” said Pat, the whole weight of what Jessica was asking crashing down on him. She wants to let them go to war in my head, and if anything goes wrong I’ll be a vegetable or worse. “I don’t know—”
“You’ll be fine,” said Jessica. “I just need to make this OK with the TK, set up a lab for you a few floors lower, and then we can start fishing. It shouldn’t take more than a day or two to put into place. We just need to get the TK to say that he’ll help, and the rest of it will fall in line.”
“I seriously want to help,” said Pat, “but I’m not sure I’m cut out for this. I’m just a computer guy. There has to be some badass cop who knows about computers that could do it, or maybe we could just teach the TK the basics of computer stuff. It’s not that hard—I mean, we all learned it, and so have a lot of other people.”
“The TK we’re going to use has been in service for almost fifty years,” said Jessica, “and if I had badass officers who knew as much about computers as you guys do, then I never would have had to get the four of you security clearance and a paycheck. No, Pat. This is your baby, and unless someone else wants to volunteer, you’re going to need to own it.”
“Just accept it, dude,” said Geoff. “We’ve all got your back. It’s going to be fine.”
“Truly,” said Rick, and Brinn nodded. “It’s all good.”
Pat didn’t know where in the fuck they got all their confidence, but he couldn’t figure out any other way to push back. This was going to happen.
“Excellent,” said Jessica, getting to her feet. “You three keep up the therapy session, and I’ll be back in an hour or two.” As she made the doorway, the phone on her belt began to buzz. Jessica grabbed it, checked the number, then stuck it to her ear. “Hockstetter.” She paused. “You’re shitting me. Is this confirmed? One hundred percent?”
Pat felt the lump in his throat rising as he and the other specialists exchanged What the fuck? looks. Whatever this was was big—maybe big enough to make Pat’s chat room sleuthing beside the point.
“No one moves until I say the word,” said Jessica. “No, I am serious. I don’t care! Listen to me, I’ll be in a bird in fifteen minutes, and I should be there right when they’re pulling in. No, make them wait. This is my gig now. This is federal.” She paused again, mimicked throwing the phone, then stuck it back to her ear, shouted, “So get your balls out and handle this!” and hung up the phone.
“What’s going on?” Brinn asked.
Jessica called back to them as she ran from the room. “They’re being held by an undercover officer on some Wisconsin-to-Michigan ferry,” said Jessica. “I need to be there when they disembark so the shit doesn’t hit the fan.”
Jessica was gone then, her fingers punching at the phone in her hand.
“Looks like you got lucky, dude,” said Rick as he smacked Pat in the arm, but Pat didn’t notice the punch or the comment. Freaked out as he’d been by his planned role in their scheme, now that it had been yanked away from him he understood how missing the biggest game of your life would feel.
Jessica had been right. Only fifteen minutes after hanging up the phone with the Grand Rapids, Michigan, FBI office, she was in the air and on the way to Ludington, Michigan, where the SS Badger was to dock. Aside from the flight crew, she was alone in the plane, and
she was shaking with anticipation. This was the real deal, the first capture in a very long time, and she was heading the operation. She was going to save the TRC.
Don’t get ahead of yourself. The fish isn’t in the boat yet, Jessica warned herself, but it was hard not to be optimistic. She was flying, inside and out, even though after all she’d done—heading the operation from the start, putting all the machinery in place, prepping to perform one of the most spectacularly audacious stunts in TRC history to see the capture through—none of it had mattered. The old policy of sitting and waiting had yielded better results than her team of hackers and hundreds of thousands of dollars, but none of that mattered. This was still her success, and besides, what her team had learned could only help apprehending TKs in the future. Especially if Pat’s theories are right, thought Jessica, which, the more she thought about it, seemed pretty likely.
Jessica felt the gun in her jacket. A weapon was a no-no for a normal agent looking to catch a TK, who was certain to turn both it and the agent carrying it to his own uses, but it was a perfectly acceptable risk for a reverse-mute like her. Still, she doubted she’d need it. With no room to run, Terry and Darryl would see the combined police force waiting for them and fold right up. All the officers needed to do was hold their fire, maintain good cover until the arrival of trained TK handlers, and make sure all the civilians ashore were removed in case of a firefight. Should events spin in that direction, time was all that would be needed: Darryl and Terry would run out of ammo and be caught by Jessica and her team, and that would be that.
The cop who called this in was dead, or would be soon. That the cop would die, along with most everyone on the boat, was a foregone conclusion with a TK who hadn’t been isolated and contained. If Jessica could magically cuff the men and slap Tesla Helmets on them for transport to the TRC, she would. In a slightly less magical world, she would have them drugged and on a plane. In this case, though, according to her FBI contact, she had Darryl and Terry on a boat with a single cop’s gun at their heads. Had the cop been trained, he would have called them in and done nothing, let a team that knew how to deal with this wait until the two men were in the middle of nowhere. None of this was the case, however. What she needed to concentrate on was retrieving a living TK. All you need is one of them to survive long enough to get patched up. Still, staring out the window, Jessica couldn’t help but feel a little bad that things were going to come crashing down for so many people.
Jessica forced her eyes from the window and down to her watch. They’d be hitting the tarmac in Ludington in less than two hours, and she was already going over what she was going to say to the two men, how she was going to begin the process of breaking them. These might be the flyover states beneath her, but what she made happen down there would impact the whole country. TKs were among the most important resources in the entire world, and right now the United States government was the only one that could verify that TKs even existed. Already looking past the death and destruction the next few hours were sure to bring, Jessica smiled to herself. She had done it.
CHAPTER 41
Cynthia colored while her mother talked on the phone. Mom was talking to Aunt Laura, who lived in Texas, and from the sound of it, they were both pretty fired up about divorce. Cynthia did what she could to ignore most of it, though. If she wanted to know what secrets Mom was holding, she could easily poke around and just find out. Cynthia didn’t want to know, however. She still wanted Mom and Dad to make things right, and she wanted to move back into the yellow house. She hadn’t seen Dad in over a week, and she missed her friends as well. Aside from Mrs. Martin, North Harbor wasn’t much fun, and even her time with Mrs. Martin had begun to feel more like school than just playing.
Cynthia sketched a little girl with a rainbow flowing from the top of her head. The girl in the drawing had far more colors than were listed on Cynthia’s chart and a much busier root of threads than she’d seen on a real person, but she was connected to at least fifty stick figures, which were surrounding her. After Cynthia had taken over the two men, she hadn’t told Mrs. Martin just how easy it had been. She was quite sure she could have easily handled all four of them on her own and maybe even more. Even though she was very young, Cynthia knew what a great power that must be. Mrs. Martin had needed her to take two of them, because two was the most her teacher had wanted to handle at one time.
Cynthia drew a full spectrum of colors coming from the girl on the page, with different color sequences connecting to the heads of the little people in her drawing. Mrs. Martin had told her about red, purple, blue, green, pink, and yellow. She hadn’t told her young student about black, not exactly, but Cynthia knew what black meant without being told. That was obvious from what happened when she tried to manipulate the black threads over Patrick. They were too ruined to fix. Once they were black, they were dead. Cynthia had a feeling that if she was to see a dead body, like when she’d gone to her great-grandmother’s funeral and there was an open casket, she would see a smattering of black threads coming from it.
“I didn’t want to at first,” said Mom from the kitchen, still ranting to her sister. “Yeah, I know. Now I get it. I do. When you told me about Nick, I said I thought it was ridiculous, but now I know better.” Mom paused, listening to Aunt Laura, and then replied, “Exactly. Exactly. I was wrong, and we both know it. I was a judgmental bitch, and I should have listened to my sister.”
Cynthia drew another stick figure, but this one she connected with just black threads to the girl at the center of the page.
“Well,” said Mom, getting louder now, “that’s what I’m going to do. He wanted to have fun, and now I’m going to take him to the goddamn cleaners. Eye for an eye, if you ask me. I mean, we bought that business together! If I’m going to be fighting for scraps in the world, then I’m going to get what I worked half my life for.” Mom paused, and Cynthia picked another stick figure at random and colored over its lines, switching them from pink and blue to black. She smiled at her work and then heard Mom say, “He’ll figure it out, you know? That’s what men do—they figure stuff out, like how to keep a piece of ass on the side. Now I’ll give him something else to figure out. It’s called, ‘Give me all of your money.’ If I’m lucky, he’ll talk to a lawyer, realize he doesn’t have a leg to stand on, and we can just work everything out in family court.” Mom sighed. “That would be the best for everyone involved. I mean, think of Cynthia. If he cares about her at all, he’ll agree that this is what’s best.”
Cynthia slowly slid her crayons back into the box, then slid the black one halfway out. She knew that neither Mom nor Dad had her abilities, knew they weren’t weavers in the same way that Mrs. Martin had known she was the second they met. She stared at the box of crayons, stared at her drawing, and then took the black crayon the rest of the way out of the box and got to drawing. When she was done, all of the little stick figures were connected to the girl in the middle, but now all of their threads were black. She understood things she never should have, and she knew if she looked at Mom she’d see threads of blue, red, yellow, and purple. Cynthia drew and drew and drew, and when she was done, the only color on the page was black.
CHAPTER 42
“I said take a fucking seat,” said the man with the gun, the badge at his waist now visible, and it took only a glance around the deck for Darryl to see that everyone but him and the cop were sitting. “I’m serious, asshole. Take a fucking seat, and get your fucking hands in thggggnnnnnnnhhh—”
The cop dropped like he’d been hit in the head with a hammer, the gun clattering to the ship’s upper deck and away from him, and then the cop was shaking like an unmedicated epileptic moments after smelling sour oranges. Darryl hit him again, hard, before walking to the pistol and picking it up.
“Come on, Terry,” said Darryl as he stepped over the prone cop. Darryl considered the gun, his finger flexing on the semiauto’s trigger, then tossed it back to the deck and hit the cop again.
>
“Holy shit,” said one of the kids behind them.
“I said fucking come on.”
Terry stood—Darryl knew it without looking back at him—and the pair of them walked to the door and slid down the steps to the next deck. Here, people were milling about and preparing to dock, oblivious to the mess above them, while Darryl and Terry were gliding through the crowd like a hot knife through butter.
“What the fuck are we going to do, Darryl?” Terry asked as they moved to the next staircase.
“Whatever we have to.”
They moved past a large window. Inside, this floor was packed with young kids and their tired parents, and Darryl focused on a young mother near the back of the boat, sitting next to a sleeping baby in a stroller. He hit her as hard as he’d hit the cop, as hard as he’d ever bent anyone, and then grabbed the stroller. Terry shook his head while he and Darryl slipped away with the baby and the mother fell from her seat.
“What the fuck are you doing?” Terry asked as they moved back to the stairs they’d just come down, but Darryl said nothing in return. Terry already knew, and there was no reason to waste his breath on the words. Darryl hauled stroller and baby both up the stairs.
The voice over the loudspeaker returned as Darryl hurriedly pushed the stroller toward the bow of the boat. He handed off the stroller to Terry by shoving it in front of him and letting go. As Terry scrambled after it, Darryl could hear a humming noise as the ship approached the dock and could see police stationed by their cars, ready for them. Darryl took a deep breath and then was in the air above the ship, then descending to hover over the cop he’d left twitching on the deck. The man had settled down, was lying peaceably with a small crowd around him, and Darryl dove into him. One of his eyes was closed, most likely to never open again, and the cop was breathing harder than Darryl would have liked. Touching the wounded man with every bit of his skill, Darryl made the cop sit up.