I scanned the lunchtime crowd for eavesdroppers, but Mike’s news loosened at least a few knots in my back.
“My people still want to meet your people. Let’s leave it at that,” Mike said.
“Don’t hold your breath.”
“Was that a pun, or a threat?”
“Poor choice of words,” I said. “What’s the bad news?”
“Your fan club. We know how many—six. We know who. But we can’t account for all of them.”
“How many can’t you account for?”
“Two.”
“That’s not bad.”
“You don’t know what these kinds of people can do. One is an honest-to-God danger. The other is exponentially worse.”
“Oh,” I said. “What are you doing about it?”
“We’re trying, but the three we rounded up aren’t cooperating.”
“So the last two want to talk to me about something I didn’t even do.”
“That’s it,” Mike said. “You know a little about computers and this social media stuff, right?”
“Just enough to be dangerous to myself.”
“You heard of Tumblr?”
“Heard of it. Some kind of blog thing. I’ve never used it.”
“Research it and look for the lawyer.”
“Cryptic, but okay.”
“We need to end this.”
“Sure,” I said. “Work faster.”
I dumped my soda and went looking for a drug store, where I bought another cheap phone. Outside, I transferred Amanda’s number into the new device, removed the battery from the old one, and walked back to my truck two blocks away. Along the route, I tossed the used phone into a trashcan outside a pizza place.
I hadn’t expected Mike to tell me it was safe to come in. I understood that was unlikely to happen so quickly. But I really hadn’t expected to hear that Empaya Iba had no long-distance power. I mean, it made sense. All of the action I knew about had taken place face to face, literally within a few feet. Lyle. The cowboys. The muggers.
So, if the bad guys closed in before I took off for parts unknown, I’d be no use at all until we were face to face. By which time, I could already be dead.
Chapter 49
Hacked
T and Amanda chose a perfect hideout. Situated off a one-lane road northeast of Bozeman, it was surrounded by wooded ravines; the nearest neighbors were nowhere in sight. The access road twisted and turned to a small clearing in front of the porch that stretched the width of the house. The drive continued about one hundred fifty feet to a stable. Scraggly pines dotted the area.
Potential attackers would have to get up close and personal for a clear shot. On the other hand, they would have a lot of cover as they made their approach.
As I drove toward the house, I thought I would get the Webley out and fire a few practice shots, just in case.
The next day, we sent T off on his own to U Big Sky with a laundry list of things we needed to know. The Tumblr thing Mike had suggested. Charles Simons’ emails, which didn’t reveal anything to me. And anything that would reveal the identities of our pursuers, preferably with DMV photo IDs.
Our not knowing who they are and what they look like gave them the upper hand. We could bump into them and never know it. Meanwhile, they knew what Amanda and I looked like. Advantage, bad guys. But they had no idea about T. Advantage, good guys, as long as T and I could get along.
He seemed happy to be leaving us, or at least me. That made me wonder why he wanted to hang out with us at all, unless he and his bastard father were working some angle together. I sensed he was uncomfortable hanging around me since his choking spell the day before.
Amanda gave him $5,000 in cash to buy computer equipment. I thought that excessive and said so. She stared me down. After all, it was her money. I wondered if we would see him again. Either way, I guessed it was okay. If he came back, he would have to account for the money. If he took off, we would be rid of him and could move on to a new hideout, someplace one or two states away that he wouldn’t know about.
Amanda and I took separate trips into town in the truck. We figured it best not to be seen together. She bought groceries; I restocked our getaway supplies.
I studied a book of topographical maps I had picked up on my run to Missoula. I plotted escape routes in every direction. None of them looked easy.
*
The kid rolled in just before dawn the next day and headed straight to bed. He reappeared at lunch time, shaved, showered and showing no signs of wear from the night before.
Amanda poured him a dark cup of French press and sat at the kitchen table with us.
“Here, Amanda, here’s your change,” T said, pulling a wad of bills and receipts from his jeans pockets.
“There should be about three hundred, and there may be a piece of paper with a phone number on it. I want the paper back. I met this great woman. Brains and a body to match. Wow,” he said.
“So, what did you find, other than a girl?” I asked.
He sipped steaming coffee.
“Okay. So, the Tumblr page your friend Mike pointed you to was blank. But when I hit the Ask Me Anything link, instead of the usual email form, I got another link to a page.”
“Okay,” I said. “So, what was on that page?”
“Six names and a military unit designation, the 348th Service Standards Office. Sounds bureaucratic, doesn’t it? I love those kinds of operations. They are either real bureaucrats and thus have no computer security to speak of or they’re covering something up.”
“Which are these guys?”
“The covering-up kind, but their computer security still sucks. By the way, the head of the 348th is a guy named General Markus Brant. Ever heard of him?”
“I might,” I said, immediately thinking of Cecilia Brant.
“Well, whoever he is, when you search military Web sites for that name, it triggers a tracking worm. I had to reformat my laptop twice to get rid of it, and I ended up moving to the university library to use their computers. That’s how I met Jenny.”
“Who’s Jenny? Were you traced?” I asked.
“Jenny’s the girl I mentioned. Brilliant. Just brilliant. She saw me reformatting the laptop and asked what my problem was. I told her I was just looking for info on an American general I had heard of, and the military site put a tracker on me. She suggested we try the library and offered to help. After I bought her coffee and a nice lunch, of course.”
He looked at Amanda for her approval.
“Good idea,” she said with a smile.
“No kidding. I never could have done all the searches as fast as I did without her.”
“You told her what we were doing?” I asked.
“No,” he said in a way that made me doubt him.
“So, what did you two come up with?” I asked as neutrally as I could.
“Well, that’s where their security sucks. They all have wives or girlfriends, and the women have social media profiles.”
He shook his head.
“Big weak spot, wives and girlfriends.”
He didn’t notice Amanda’s frown—and the irony of using a woman he’d just met to help him.
“So, we got photos and home towns, and addresses and phone numbers. Jenny called all the women, pretending to be with FedEx with a package for the guys. Blah, blah, blah. One of them said her husband had been killed in a training accident a few days ago. His photo matches one of the guys who visited the lawyer, Simon.”
“How do you know that?”
“Simon snapped photos of both guys and sent them to you, Sebastian.”
“What photos? I wasted days cracking Simon’s email account and the files turned out to be nothing but information I already had.”
I thumbed my tablet open and punched in my password. I had a point to make to this arrogant kid.
“We’ll come to that later, Sherlock,” the kid said.
“You didn’t tell me NSA was after you.”
I gave him a look that said, Prove it.
“Yeah, well, I’m pretty sure at least one of the guys chasing you is NSA. If he is, he’s the dangerous one. They don’t take prisoners, you know. Or if they do, they don’t release them.”
“What do you know about NSA?” I asked.
“I’m a computer hacker. Every hacker knows about NSA. We spend half of our lives trying to hide from NSA,” he said. “Smart people who want to live don’t mess with NSA.”
“Is NSA following you now?” I asked.
“Not me. At least not any more than any other American. You, however, they are after personally, by name.”
“How do you know?”
“Your dead lawyer left a cloaked photo file of a license plate. The car his visitors used belongs to the NSA office in Denver.”
“NSA has a Denver office?” Amanda asked. “Their headquarters are in Maryland, just outside of Washington. Aren’t they, Sebastian?”
I nodded gravely and stopped fiddling with my tablet. The kid clearly knew way more than I. It was time to listen and learn.
“Every part of the federal government has an office in Denver,” T said. “It’s part of the nuclear attack contingency.”
“How do you know?”
“I sat through Colorado state history in high school,” he said. “I know. Back in the bad old days, somebody decided to spread the government around in case of a nuclear attack on Washington. As a result, Denver has about the largest group of federal employees outside of Washington.”
I considered the implications.
“All I saw were text files that contained information Charles had already told me. See.”
I turned the tablet so he could read the emails I’d pulled up. He turned it back to me without even looking.
“Amateur,” T said. “Clearly the lawyer was smarter than you, Sherlock.”
“Kid, everybody’s smarter than me,” I said, thinking back on everything that had happened since I landed in Borneo.
“I suppose you missed the audio file as well?”
“There was no audio file,” I said.
“You never wondered how a file could contain just three paragraphs of text and take five minutes to download?”
“No,” I said. “When I accessed the email account, I was sitting in a forest in the middle of the night stealing a Wi-Fi signal and worrying about two big dogs. I figured either the connection or my computer was slow,” I said.
“No,” T. said. “That was an audio file.”
He smiled as he spoke to Amanda. She smiled back.
“Your lawyer was good. The file had his whole meeting with those two bozos. He just sucked information out of them and gave away nothing. He got photos of them, their license plate, voice prints. He was really good,” T said.
Amanda nodded sadly.
“What else have you got?” I said.
“Isn’t that enough?”
“Hey, it’s great. So, Mike gave us six names and a unit number. Did you find out anything about the unit?”
“Just these six guys and General Brant connected to it. And two of the six names are connected to NSA in Denver. That tells me the whole unit is NSA.”
I put my head in my hands. How could we ever hide from NSA, Uncle Sam’s digital vacuum cleaner?
Chapter 50
Persuasion
Maj. Sturgeon did not like torture.
He didn’t think it was effective in most situations. People would say anything to stop or avoid pain. The present case, however, was an exception.
Almost no one can stand to see a loved one hurt, especially if the loved one blubbers and begs for help. And the major’s partner, Team Charlie Asset Alpha, could make an injury look much more serious and painful than it was.
He was doing that very successfully with twenty-seven-year-old Mrs. Thomas Kingston, apparently the fourth woman to attain that position. Asset Alpha had ripped her nightgown down to her navel, popping buttons, just for effect. He cut one bra strap, exposing a melon-shaped breast. Now he was running a scalpel back and forth over the top of the breast, drawing thin lines of red blood.
It was time to wrap this up.
Mr. Kingston, we asked you for information—very politely, we thought—at your office, and you lied to us.”
Sturgeon stood over Kingston, gagged and bound to an antique mahogany Queen Anne chair in his own bed room.
“We know you spoke to your first wife recently. We know she is traveling with a man we very much want to meet. We know you got money out of a safe deposit box for her. We know you sent that money to her with a rather disreputable-looking young man. We know he went to Montana. We have his license plate number, and we will have him one way or another, but our time is limited.”
That was part of the process, Sturgeon thought. Speak softly, rationally, almost sympathetically. When the threat comes, it sounds inevitable, so why not give in?
“Tell us where he is going. Who he will meet. And we will inject you and your wife with a sleeping concoction that will knock you out for about twelve hours. When you awake, we will be gone from your lives forever.”
Kingston pleaded with his eyes. The blood on his wife’s naked breast had stolen all his courage.
“Failing that,” Sturgeon said, “my colleague will slice off your wife’s breasts one layer at a time. After each layer, he will apply a mixture of salt and vinegar to the wound. Just so you can understand her pain, we will also cut small slices out of your thighs and apply the same liquid, which by the way is completely sterile and will not cause infection. It does, however, hurt like hell.”
Mrs. Kingston, bound and gagged like her husband, flailed her head wildly, her eyes begging her husband to cooperate.
“My colleague will now demonstrate. We will ask the questions one last time, and you can make your decision.”
Sturgeon turned to his partner. “Mr. Alpha, proceed.”
Asset Alpha whipped the blade across Mrs. Kingston’s chest, exposing a layer of white fat below the red muscle. In a second smooth motion, he sprayed clear liquid from a three-ounce plastic bottle.
Mrs. Kingston’s head whipped back against the chair, her cheeks flushed, nostrils flaring, eyes bugging out in agony. Tears poured down her cheeks, and she slumped forward, her torso heaving.
Sturgeon ripped the duct tape back from Kingston’s mouth, leaving a two-inch swath of brilliant red from ear to ear.
“Okay. No more,” Kingston said. “Don’t hurt her anymore. I’ll tell you everything I know.”
Tears trickled down his cheeks as he watched his young wife weep. In that instant, he hated Amanda Cox Campion even more than the two men who held him hostage.
“Mr. Alpha, please prepare the sleeping medicines,” Sturgeon said. “Make sure you include a strong painkiller for Mrs. Kingston. You can bandage her up after Mr. Kingston shares his knowledge with me.”
Asset Alpha ducked into the marble-lined master bathroom with a book-sized black canvas case. Within minutes, he returned, two syringes in his gloved hands.
“Make them comfortable for twenty-four hours,” Sturgeon said with a wink. “We have a long drive up to Bozeman.”
Chapter 51
Trap
Amanda broke the silence around the kitchen table.
“How long do we stay, Sebastian? T and I rented the house for a month. We can extend with a week’s notice.”
The tattoo burned, and I rubbed it, irritating it more.
“I guess we stay until we see a need to move on. We stay prepared to run. We’ll check in with Mike from time to time,” I said.
“Do we need to set up some kind of security for ourselves, take turns keeping watch, things like that?” Amanda asked.
T interrupted.
“Don’t worry, Amanda. I have that all figured out. I’ll get to it just as soon as I get a Wi-Fi network going.”
“How do you propose to do that?” I asked
.
“Come see what I bought.”I nodded at the laptop he’d brought to lunch.
“You bought a $4,500 used computer,” I said.
“That? That’s nothing. Two hundred bucks,” he said. “I got a new mother board, some RAM chips and a bigger power supply for another two hundred bucks. When I get done with that, it’ll be worth two thousand.”
He drained his coffee mug.
“Come on. The neat stuff’s out in the car.”
T had packed his old Subaru Outback floor to ceiling with boxes of electronics. We unloaded a satellite dish, miles of wire, and two dozen boxes that looked like they held coffee mugs but weighed almost nothing.
“Be careful with those,” he said. “They’re motion sensors. They’re sensitive.”
I laughed. He gave me his petulant look.
“Motion sensors. Sensitive,” I said. “Not a pun?”
He continued with the look.
“Okay, not a pun.”Next, he handed me three shotguns and eight boxes of ammunition.
“Think you have enough ammo?” I said.
“You can’t shoot what you don’t have,” he said, smugly.
Point taken.
“What are these for?” Amanda asked.
“Shooting people,” T said. “Two people, in particular, I hope.”
“Do you know how to use them?”
“Yeah. Point the open end away from you. After that, it’s all good.”Amanda would not be put off.
“I mean it. Do you know how to shoot without hitting one of us?”
T backed out of the rear seat of the car and faced her.
“No. But I figure your boyfriend does. I suspect he can teach us whatever we need to know. You can do anything you want when these guys find us, but I plan to have some way to shoot back. Nobody gets a free shot at me.”
Amanda placed a hand on his arm and nodded. She turned and walked empty-handed onto the porch and into the ranch house.
“Any idea why she’s so sensitive about the guns?” T asked.
“No, but I don’t think it’s about the guns,” I said. “You really can’t shoot?”
“I knew some guys in gangs when I was a teenager, but that’s not shooting. Can you teach us, like I said?”
The Mark of the Spider: A Black Orchid Chronicle Page 25