“Oh my God,” I whisper, and immediately begin a search through all of Epicurus’s archives.
I find what I want within seconds. All I had to do was search for huge file sizes – three, four, even five-hour-long videos.
I’m not going to tell you what’s in them, because it would give you nightmares. I know what I see is going to plague me for the rest of my life.
They say serial killers keep trophies. Epicurus apparently makes home movies, and there are over a hundred of them, edited together seamlessly from a dozen different camera angles.
I inspect a couple of the videos briefly, just to confirm my suspicions, and have to force myself not to vomit.
What’s unfathomable to me from a strictly computer geek angle is that there’s not any special security for them. They’re tucked away in a remote corner of his computer network, but there are no passwords guarding them. If I was in the possession of something that could get me the death penalty, I think I would go to greater lengths to safeguard it.
But then again, if you’re one of the richest people on the planet, and you’re a megalomaniacal serial killer who hasn’t been caught for twenty years, and you have some of the world’s most powerful people in your back pocket, maybe you think the laws no longer apply to you. That laws are for ‘regular people.’
I decide right then and there that I’m going to remind Epicurus he’s ‘regular people,’ just like everybody else. Actually, I’m going to remind him that he’s the scum of the earth, and the laws for ‘regular people’ are going to destroy him.
I copy all the videos into my online vault, along with the political contribution records. As they upload, I rig a failsafe system so that everything will be made public within twelve hours unless I enter a horrendously complex password. We’re talking Wikileaks, the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, the Department of Justice… everybody.
In case I don’t make it out alive, I want the world to know who this murdering asshole is, and who he’s been cozying up to.
92
Then I switch back to the plan. Because what I really want is for me and Grant to come out of this alive.
First I make a series of preparations that are absolutely necessary. For instance:
Audio of me saying various things, in case I need to distract Epicurus but can’t speak aloud. I’m inspired by my Al Pacino soundboard, so I use the program to record a bunch of elements I think I might be able to string together into a semi-coherent conversation.
Also, five-minute-long video loops of blank footage for every outside camera on the property. That’s so Dominique and I can approach the mansion undetected by Epicurus’s security detail – at least as long as they’re only watching the video cameras. Running across any guards face-to-face will be a different matter.
A list of usernames and passwords for all of Epicurus’s computer systems, courtesy of the NSA’s backdoor.
Then I bring up schematics of Epicurus’s house. How’d I get them? From Grant’s online vault of client blueprints. I found them the night I met him, when I was seeking revenge for him stealing my phone and walking out on me after sex. I never thought they would come in handy, but then, I never thought I would be sneaking onto a serial killer’s estate to rescue the man I love, either.
JP pores over the blueprints on my laptop.
“You’re familiar with how Grant designs his trap doors, right?” I ask. “I mean, he did one for you back in your Paris apartment – can you tell where they are just by looking at the blueprints?”
“I believe so… oui… here… and here… here is the safe room, it would appear…”
He points to an unlabeled square in the center of the mansion, and then we all glance at the video feed of the plastic-coated room. It’s got to be the same place.
“Is there a way to get into that room?” I ask.
“Oui… this… how do you say… air duct… this leads to the ceiling over the room.”
“Can you direct me through all that?”
“Oui. But… I can go instead,” JP offers. “You can stay here.”
“No,” I say firmly. “You’re more than capable of controlling Epicurus’s security system. And when the FBI shows up, if they arrest whoever is here, then I need to be able to continue hacking from the mansion.”
JP frowns. “We have an agreement with the FBI asshole not to be arrested.”
“Don’t worry, Mailin will cover for us. But I’m pretty sure any deal we had with Duplass went out the window when Dominique punched his lights out.”
“I did what you told me to do!” Dominique exclaims.
“I know, I know. Calm down.”
“I would be better to go through the secret compartments than you,” she sniffs.
I shake my head. “I need you to be the decoy. You’re the parkour queen – you can get into the house a dozen different ways, plus you can shoot any guards you run into. I can’t.”
“He does not seem to have so many guards,” Dominique says. “We have only seen the two with Grant. Perhaps you and I both may go through the secret – ”
“Shh,” JP shushes her, and points to the computer screen.
The two bald bruisers in suits are wheeling Grant through the house on the hand truck. Grant still has the duck tape wrapped all the way around his head and mouth.
They enter a gigantic library with an arched ceiling, vaulted windows, and dozens of book shelves interspersed with works of art framed beautifully on the wall.
I frown, then direct the security camera to zoom in more closely on one of the paintings. Something about it seems familiar…
There are three figures: a highly realistic portrait of a woman seated at a piano, a long-haired figure seated with his back to the viewer, and a standing woman who might be singing.
Motherfucker.
It’s the Vermeer from Grant’s collection, one of the two paintings Epicurus had his thugs take with them when they raided the penthouse in New York.
The other was a van Gogh, a seascape with a dozen figures and a single boat –
There it is, five feet from the Vermeer.
Epicurus has both of the paintings hanging on his library wall.
The temerity.
The audacity.
The unbelievable balls on this guy.
But despite my disbelief, I can’t dwell on the paintings. The bodyguards have pushed Grant across the entire library, and now they’re knocking on the seemingly ordinary wall at the far end of the room.
In the plastic-wrapped room, Epicurus crosses over to a door that looks like it belongs on the inside of a meat locker. He taps a seven-digit code on a numerical pad on the wall: 619382#.
I make special note of the code – just in case.
After a tiny beep, Epicurus twists the door’s metal handle.
Back on the library security camera, a section of the wall – camouflaged with a shelf full of books – swings open, and the two bruisers wheel Grant into the plastic-wrapped room.
“Secure him to the bed,” Epicurus orders. “But before you do… punch him in the solar plexus.”
Helpless to do anything but tense his abs, Grant steels himself as one of the gorillas punches as hard as he can below the sternum. Grant immediately hunches over, obviously in agony. Taking advantage of his weakness, the henchmen unlock Grant from the hand truck and bind him to the table. Grant tries to fight back, but that undefended punch took too much out of him, and the bastards strap him down without too much trouble.
“Leave us now,” Epicurus says. The glee in his voice is unmistakable.
The two thugs waddle out of the room with the empty hand truck in tow and close the door.
Epicurus reaches for a scalpel on the table, then approaches Grant.
I hold my breath in horror. Dominique puts her hands to her mouth.
“Hold still, or this will hurt,” Epicurus says, and raises the blade to Grant’s face.
He makes the smallest nick in the duck tape
, then rrriiiiips the grey strip off.
“…OW,” Grant says, with a fair amount of comedic delivery.
Epicurus replaces the scalpel on the table, then balls up the duck tape and throws it in a corner of the room.
“By the way, nice paintings,” Grant says. He’s talking about the Vermeer and van Gogh.
“Do you like them?” Epicurus asks. “I picked them up practically for free.”
“‘Practically’?”
“Well, I did have to pay ten million to the deliverymen. But even then, they were a steal,” Epicurus says smugly.
“I’ll bet they were.”
Shit.
If anybody ever sees these recordings – and if my plan works out, they will – the subtext is obvious: Epicurus stole the paintings from Grant.
I rewind all the cameras in the room to when Grant still had the duck tape around his head. There will be a highly suspicious jump in the video, but – oh well. We’ll be lucky if we all live long enough for anyone to question us about it.
By the time I’m recording again, the conversation has moved on to something I didn’t catch.
“…have a lot of time to explore the issue over the next 24 hours,” Epicurus says.
My heart jumps.
Twenty-four hours gives us plenty of time. Twenty-four hours is excellent.
Well… relatively speaking.
“Twenty-four? Seriously?” Grant asks flippantly. “Are you really that bad at this?”
“No… I’m that GOOD at this. I have taken every precaution to keep you alive as long as possible.” Epicurus wheels an IV stand over next to the bed. “I have 12 liters of O negative blood ready for transfusion, just to make sure there is no possibility that you bleed out.”
“Wow. Thanks,” Grant says sarcastically.
“Oh, I plan to enjoy this for a very, very long time. You will be my masterpiece. No expense has been spared.”
“I’m sure those guys who captured me would’ve liked you to spare a little more. Twenty million for, what, 15 mercenaries, plus expenses? Come on, Dieter. You paid me almost that much to design this dump, and I didn’t have to fly overseas with a naked guy on a cart to do it.”
“They agreed to work for a price, and that price is what I gave them.”
“To tell the truth, I’m surprised you let them walk away. Now there’s 15 assholes out there who know what you look like and exactly where you live. Once the paycheck runs out, they’ll be back and asking you for more than 20 million, I guarantee.”
Epicurus snickers. “Oh, they won’t be back. In fact… they’re never going to leave.”
…what?
Grant seems confused, too. “What are you talking about, ‘never going to leave’?”
“Those stacks of money they loaded onto their plane? The centers were hollow and filled with incendiary devices. My men are waiting in the hangar to detonate them, then finish off the survivors.”
“Check the feed,” I tell JP hurriedly.
JP finds the video of the hangar area. Sure enough, the mercenaries’ plane is engulfed in flames. Ten men in body armor – Epicurus’s guys, no doubt – use machine guns to mow down anybody who stumbles out of the plane’s smoke-billowing doorway.
“Putain d’merde,” JP whispers.
“I think they have more than two guards,” I say to Dominique with a heavy dose of gallows humor. She just shudders.
“You’re insane,” Grant’s voice says, and this time there’s no flippancy. Just sheer horror.
“No, I’m thorough. You might be wondering, ‘Why waste 20 million dollars and a jet plane just to get rid of 15 witnesses?’ Because the illusion had to be impeccable, or they would have suspected something. And that would have led to far more trouble.”
“Actually, I was wondering, ‘What kind of an asshole kills 15 people?’ But then I remembered we’re talking about YOU.”
“Keep making your jokes while you can, Mr. Carlson. It will be much harder when you don’t have a tongue.” Epicurus picks up the jumper cables connected to the car battery and sparks them against each other. “I thought we would start with something that won’t cut, or burn, or leave any SERIOUS damage. What do you think?”
I force myself to turn away from the screen.
“Okay,” I say nervously to Dominique. “Time to go.”
93
I am on the land surrounding Epicurus’s property, and I am running for my life.
More accurately, I am running for Grant’s life.
There are pre-recorded video loops on all the surveillance cameras on the property. If Epicurus has someone watching the cameras, all they will see is a grove of orange trees and grassy fields, instead of a twenty-something chick hauling ass.
Thank God I told Marcel I wanted jeans and tennis shoes. This would be a complete travesty if I were in a skirt and heels.
I’m also wearing Grant’s backpack, the one we jumped out of the New York skyscraper with. Inside is my laptop, two tubes of superglue, a GPS chip, a cell phone, and Mailin’s government-issued handgun.
In my hand is one of the other pistols. I don’t really know how to use it, other than point and pull the trigger, but I have it just in case.
In case of what, I don’t want to consider.
Dominique should be about 500 feet to my left. The McMansion abuts Epicurus’s property, and we started off at different ends of the property. She’s heading for the north part of Epicurus’s compound, and I’m heading for the south.
I’m pretty sure she’ll get there first. I feel like my lungs are on fire.
“You are approaching… something strange,” JP’s voice says in my ear. “Many small buildings.”
“Any guards?”
“I do not see any.”
I forgot to mention that I’m wearing Duplass’s Bluetooth earpiece. It’s the only remotely helpful thing about the son of a bitch.
JP’s acting as my guardian angel. Both Dominique and I are carrying GPS chips, and he’s tracking both of us at the same time, giving us heads-ups on what’s coming our way. He’s the only person who can see what’s really being transmitted through the surveillance cameras – not to mention he has blueprints of the house.
As I crest the ridge, I find out JP wasn’t wrong with the ‘something strange’ comments.
It’s a zoo.
Epicurus has a goddamn zoo on his property.
It’s a series of metal cages filled with jaguars, tigers, lemurs, monkeys, and exotic birds. I race past them as the animals snarl and shriek at me.
A peacock is walking around uncaged, but it hustles out of my path as I race past. Its feathers fan out in a beautiful display of territorial outrage.
I’m reminded of a line from my college lit 101 course: In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure-dome decree…
“Anybody up ahead?” I huff and puff.
“No one,” JP says. “You are well until the house.”
Ha.
‘Well until the house.’
I don’t bother to correct him. I figure it would be tempting fate to do so.
Far off to my right, I hear a gunshot.
Dominique.
I hope it’s her shooting an asshole, and not an asshole shooting her.
The grounds are clear ahead of me, so I keep running.
Three hundred feet away I can see the house. Between me and the mansion are beautiful gardens filled with blooming tulips, magnificent roses, and beautifully sculpted bushes that would have made Edward Scissorhands jealous.
“There is a door in the center, do you see it?” JP asks. “Go there.”
I run through the flowers and topiaries until I reach a set of French doors.
There is a soft buzz from the lock, courtesy of JP. I put my hand on the doorknob and turn it.
The door opens.
I’m inside.
It’s a beautiful sunroom, with furniture that looks like it was pilfered from Versailles.
Outside in the distance
, I hear BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM.
Dominique must have encountered the thugs from the hangar. Now there’s a gunfight.
It feels strange to do so, but I say a prayer for her as I run inside.
“Where to now?” I whisper.
“There is a door to the right. Go there.”
I head for the only door to my right, open it, and find a dimly lit passageway.
“Go into the hall… one, two, three doors on the left… open it…”
And so begins an odyssey through the bowels of Epicurus’s hideout.
In many ways, it reminds me of the twisted search through the skyscraper that led us to Connor and Lily. Go into a closet here, remove that panel there, crawl into the air-conditioning duct…
Until I hear the words I absolutely did not want to hear.
Not from JP, but from other voices in the room behind him:
“FBI! PUT YOUR HANDS UP!”
94
The FBI strike team has reached the McMansion.
I know it’s all part of the plan, but it scares the shit out of me nonetheless.
I stay motionless in the air duct, trying to fight off mounting claustrophobia, as I listen to the male authoritarian voices question JP.
“What are you doing?!”
“I am helping my friend stop a killer – ”
“What’s that?! What’s that on your computer?!”
“It is the house on the property next to us – the killer’s house – ”
“What are you doing?!”
“I told you, I am helping – ”
“Who’s your friend?! What are they planning on doing?!”
I pull the Bluetooth device out of my ear and hang up my cell phone. JP can’t help me anymore.
I slide the laptop out of my backpack and use my password list to log on to the house’s wireless internet. Within 90 seconds, I have full control of every surveillance system on the property.
I map my position using Grant’s blueprints of the house. I’m directly over the room where Grant and Epicurus are, and about ten feet away from where JP said the trapdoor should be.
The Billionaire's Redemption (The Billionaire's Kiss, Book Five): (A Billionaire Alpha Romance) Page 25