by Reece Hirsch
Chris searched the faces of the tourists filing in and out of the hotel for a glimpse of Zoey or Red Sun. He couldn’t help but dwell on what the man was capable of. Zoey had told him what Geist’s body had looked like after Red Sun had tortured him.
That was not the work of a professional. That was the work of a psychotic.
As Red Sun marched her through the crowds of Union Square, Zoey searched for a policeman or an armed security guard she could call out to. She did not want to get an innocent bystander killed, but if she saw someone with a weapon and a clear shot, she was willing to risk her own life to stop her abductor.
It was a short walk to the parking garage beneath the green oasis of Union Square, a park ringed by the tall buildings of Macy’s, Saks, and hotels like The Westin St. Francis. They took an elevator down four floors into the dark and dingy parking garage. The only other occupant of the elevator was a young man in his early twenties who looked like a college student. In a display of standard elevator etiquette, no one made eye contact. Zoey was particularly scrupulous about avoiding the young man’s gaze because she realized that if Red Sun thought she was signaling him in any way, he would be dead before the elevator doors opened.
The elevator pinged. Red Sun glanced at the man and apparently concluded that his obliviousness was not an act. He led Zoey to his rental car, a white Ford Focus.
Once she had regained some of her composure after the shock of seeing Red Sun in the lobby, she began to study him. He seemed like a nondescript guy, in his tan windbreaker and khakis, with a round, bland face. But there was something different about him, and it wasn’t just the fact that he was holding her at gunpoint.
It was the way he looked at her. All women are students of the way men look at them. Men try to be that perceptive, but they usually aren’t that sensitive and, in any event, men are easier to read. They are genetically hardwired to be visually stimulated, to be fetishists.
Zoey knew when a man was looking at her breasts or her ass or her legs or, for the kinkier sorts, her feet. She also knew when a man was trying so very hard not to look at her in that way. But the way Red Sun looked at her was different, and she perceived it right away. His eyes roved over her body with an avidity that had a sexual charge to it, but it was not sexual. Maybe she was imagining it, but she thought he was looking at her like she were a toy he wanted to disassemble to see how it worked.
Red Sun clicked the key fob and popped open the trunk of the car with a beep that reverberated in the cavernous, concrete parking garage.
“Give me your cell phone,” he said.
She handed it over, and Red Sun removed the SIM card, wiped it down for fingerprints, and then smashed it on the pavement, shattering the screen. Then he patted her down quickly.
After glancing around to confirm no one was observing, he lifted the lid of the trunk and said, “Get inside.”
Once more Zoey scanned her surroundings for someone who might help.
“Do it now or I’ll shoot you right here,” he said.
Zoey climbed inside the trunk. When she was halfway in, Red Sun shoved her forward, and she smacked her forehead on the underside of a car stereo speaker. The trunk shut with a whump, and she was in darkness.
46
When the trunk slammed shut, Zoey was overcome for a few moments by the blind, animal panic of claustrophobia. She screamed and kicked at the inside of the trunk. Her thoughts raced.
I’m going to die here.
I can’t die here.
I’M GOING TO DIE HERE.
This is not how I die.
Zoey was not someone who had given a lot of thought to her death, but she felt an overpowering sense that the fate that seemed to be awaiting her was wrong, a mistake. A Chinese hit man was something out of a movie or a video game. Such things did not belong in her life and did not deserve to play the key role in its final act. It was like an implausible twist ending in a book. It hadn’t been set up properly. There was no foreshadowing, nothing in her past that would have made it seem just, or at least ironic. That was the difference between art and life. It didn’t have to make sense. It didn’t have to satisfy anyone’s expectations, much less her own.
The ignition turned over, and the car began to move, backing out of the parking space. Zoey tried to steady herself after the exertion of kicking against the inside of the trunk.
The car turned in slow arcs as it climbed through the levels of the parking garage. She realized that this was a critical juncture. The car had to move slowly, and they were probably near people who were walking through the garage to or from their cars.
Zoey began screaming, hoping that one of the shoppers outside might hear and call the police.
“Help! I’m being kidnapped! I’m in the trunk!”
She realized that the trunk was muffling much of the sound, along with the rumble of the engine. She needed to do something more to be heard.
Zoey examined her surroundings, which were dimly lit by the red of the brake lights and the faint illumination that filtered in through the seams of the trunk lid. Everything grew more discernible as her eyes adjusted. Wasn’t there supposed to be a release inside a car trunk to permit someone inside to pop the lid? She thought she had heard that somewhere.
Zoey ran her hands around the sides of the trunk until she found what appeared to be a button. She pressed the button, but nothing happened. She pressed it again. Same result. She pressed it a dozen, two dozen times, but it was broken. Red Sun had known that he was going to stash her in the trunk. He had probably disabled the release.
This is not how I die.
THIS IS NOT HOW I DIE.
Zoey stared at the brake light and realized how easy it would be to punch it out. She adjusted her body around in the trunk so that she could kick out the red plastic brake light cover. After a few hard kicks, it popped off.
The car was still slowly circling upward through the garage.
How many levels have we passed through? We were four floors down, and he’s probably passed through at least two, maybe three. The car will be out of the garage soon, which will make it much harder to attract someone’s attention.
Zoey shifted herself around again in the trunk until her face was in front of the broken brake light. She could see that it was brighter outside now. It was actual sunlight, not fluorescents. The car was in the top level of the garage.
She placed her lips right up against the hole she had made and screamed, “Help! I’m in the trunk! I’m being kidnapped!”
Apparently, this was loud enough for Red Sun to hear, because the car came to an abrupt stop—so hard that it hurled Zoey to the back of the trunk.
The trunk popped open, and she saw Red Sun holding a crowbar. She saw him pull back, his face contorting, just before the blow landed.
When Zoey came to, she couldn’t see through one eye, which was encrusted in blood. She tried to raise her hands to touch her face, but they were bound together with a zip tie. She wanted to scream, but a rag had been shoved in her mouth.
The brake light cover was back on and, from the dark shadow across the plastic, it appeared to have been secured with duct tape. She wanted to kick it out again but her feet were also tied together.
Even with the zip tie, she was able to raise her hands and gingerly touch her face. She wanted to know if she had lost an eye and was relieved to find that it was just blood from a cut on her forehead. She blinked and rubbed at her eye until she regained her full vision.
There was a steady humming sound. The car was on a freeway now and seemed to be moving at full speed. She tried to extricate herself from the zip tie on her hands, but it was no use.
Zoey stopped struggling and lay there listening to the sounds outside to see if she could tell where they were. She might have been able to guess the route if she hadn’t been unconscious from the blow. Because she didn’t know how
long she had been out, there was no telling how far they were from Union Square. All she could hear was the hiss of tires.
Then Zoey remembered. She reached down and found that the HealthBot device was still strapped to her ankle. Samples of the new device had been given to several members of the firm’s staff when the device’s maker, FrostByte, celebrated its IPO. It monitored her walking mileage, heart rate, temperature, and geolocation—and stored that health data on a cloud server. That meant someone somewhere had access to that data and could trace her whereabouts.
But how could she reach out to that someone?
Zoey recalled a bit of Morse code—like many hackers, she was a student of cryptography. Morse code was one of the simplest codes imaginable, but that was exactly why it still had its uses.
She pressed the on-off switch on the HealthBot once, then paused, then switched it on and off three more times. In Morse code, she hoped that each on-off might be viewed as a dot. Four dots equals the letter h.
A space between letters was represented by a space three times as long as a dot, so she paused for three beats, then switched the device on and off again. One dot stood for the letter e.
Next came the letter l—dot-dash-dot-dot. On-off. Two beats. On-off. On-off.
Finally, a three-beat space between letters, then the dot-dash-dash-dot to signify the letter p.
H-e-l-p.
She recognized that the chance that someone would notice her signals was slimmer than the chance of someone finding a message in a bottle tossed in the sea by an island castaway. FrostByte’s cloud server probably stored terabytes of data, and most of it was never actively reviewed.
But it was something. She had to do something.
47
Without Zoey, the firm’s forensic lab seemed achingly quiet and empty to Chris. This time he saw no point in hiding or wasting time trying to gain access to someone else’s forensic lab. If Red Sun wanted to come for him here, let him come.
Chris tried to reach Paul Saperstein so that he could obtain BD’s help in tracking Zoey and Red Sun. He phoned and emailed but was told firmly but politely that Saperstein was not available, no matter how serious the matter.
Next Chris dialed up Charlie McGuane, one of his former colleagues from the Department of Justice’s Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section, to see if he could help track the location of Zoey’s burner phone. McGuane’s secretary said that he was in a meeting, but Chris said to tell him it was urgent, and he took the call.
“Hey, buddy, I assume that you’re calling to pay me back for helping you out a while back. Since it’s taken you so long, I figure you’ve been shopping for something special. Maybe a bottle of Pappy Van Winkle. That was a hint, by the way.” A few months before, McGuane had pulled some phone records for Chris that helped him in a prior case involving a hunt for a team of hackers plotting cyberterrorism.
“Not today, Charlie, but soon. And Pappy is overrated. Just because it’s hard to find, doesn’t mean it’s the best.”
“Now you’re just being provocative.”
“I need a cell phone tracked. A burner.”
“You know the DOJ is not your personal investigative unit. You don’t get to play in our sandbox. Not anymore.”
“It’s an emergency. An abduction.”
“You try the police?”
“It just happened, and I don’t think I could convince them to move on this fast enough.”
“Are you okay?”
“Not really, but I don’t have time to talk about it. I just need this now. The phone’s probably been disabled, but I have to know for certain.”
There was silence on the line, then Charlie said, “Okay, give me the number, and I’ll see what I can do. I’m going to put you on hold, okay?”
“Thanks.” Chris knew that Charlie’s first instinct was to make him squirm a bit before granting a favor, so he clearly recognized the tone in Chris’s voice. On a typical day, Charlie would have taken some time to goad him about his move to the private sector.
As he waited on hold, Chris noticed the traces of Zoey’s presence scattered around the lab. Her magazines, her bulky headphones, a sports water bottle, and a lanyard with the membership card for the fitness club she never used.
A few minutes later Charlie returned. “Sorry, buddy, but I got nothing. Or not very much. That phone is out of service; somebody must have removed the SIM card. The last time that phone pinged a cell tower was at 3:25 p.m. today, and it was somewhere in Union Square.”
“Okay. That’s what I figured. Thanks anyway.” Red Sun had probably taken the phone off Zoey and removed the SIM card as soon as he grabbed her.
“Does the person who was taken have any other devices? These days everything you own seems to be broadcasting something to someone. What do they call it? The Internet of Things. Whatever happened to devices that just did their damn jobs and shut up?”
“No, no, I don’t think she had anything else on her.”
Then Chris was struck by what he had just seen—Zoey’s seldom-used fitness club card. Zoey hated going to the gym—and that was why she had started wearing a HealthBot device around her ankle. It wasn’t visible, so he wasn’t sure if she was still wearing it or not. By the same token, it was also the sort of thing that might slip by Red Sun when he frisked Zoey. If she was wearing the HealthBot, it would be storing her geolocation data on a cloud server.
“Chris, you still there?” Charlie asked.
“Yeah, I’m here, but something just occurred to me. I have to go, but thanks for the assist.”
“I’m all about customer service,” Charlie said. “Take care of yourself.”
Chris wasn’t sure if he would be able to obtain Zoey’s geolocation data from FrostByte, but he knew exactly where to direct the inquiry. First, Chris examined the privacy policy posted on FrostByte’s website. Then he dialed up Paul Saberhagen, FrostByte’s privacy officer. He and Saberhagen had been on a panel together at an International Association of Privacy Professionals conference in DC, where they had discussed big data. Ten years ago privacy officers had been a rarity, but now nearly every Fortune 500 company had one, and the IAPP was their club.
Saberhagen was a goateed, bespectacled man with a professorial demeanor. Over drinks after their session, Chris had learned that his hobby was river kayaking. Saberhagen seemed like a nice enough guy, but he struck Chris as cautious by nature, like most good compliance professionals, and that could pose a challenge.
“Chris Bruen! To what do I owe the pleasure?”
“I have a favor to ask. A big favor.”
“Really.” Chris could already hear the reticence in his voice. “What sort of favor?”
“Your HealthBot device records geolocation data, doesn’t it?”
“That’s right.”
“And it’s stored in the cloud, right?”
“Also correct. We use the geolocation data to determine which ads to deliver to users. We have deals with fitness clubs, vitamin shops, athletic-wear places, that sort of thing.”
“I believe that Zoey Doucet, the head of my forensic lab, has been abducted. And I believe she may be wearing a HealthBot.”
“Jesus. What happened?”
“It’s a very long story, and I’m not at liberty to tell it. Attorney-client privilege.”
“Fair enough. So you’re looking to track her?”
“That’s right.”
“Of course I want to help, but let me think this through. As you know, we can’t violate the terms of our privacy policy.” When a company like FrostByte describes how it uses and discloses personal information in a website privacy policy, then it is legally obligated to abide by those terms. And if a company breaches the promises in its privacy policy, then it may be subject to an enforcement action by the Federal Trade Commission or a state attorney general for engaging in
unfair or deceptive business practices. A privacy officer who authorized disclosures in violation of the privacy policy probably wouldn’t remain a privacy officer for long, so Saberhagen’s wariness was understandable.
Chris was ready for Saberhagen’s response. “I understand completely. You have to answer to your board and management—and your principles. If a privacy officer doesn’t play by the rules, who will? That’s why I took a look at your privacy policy before I called. There’s a provision that says you can use personal information if necessary to protect the safety of your users.”
Saberhagen was silent for a moment. He was probably pulling up and reviewing the policy himself.
“Hmm. Yes, that’s right. That was intended to permit us to cooperate with law enforcement, but it could be read more broadly than that.”
“There’s no question that this is a safety issue.” Chris found it hard to say the next sentence. “In fact, I’m not even sure if she’s still alive.”
Chris could almost hear that statement sinking in.
“Of course I can help,” Saberhagen said. “So her name is Zoey Doucet. Is that Zoey with a y?”
“Yes. Zoey with a y. D-o-u-c-e-t.”
“Let me call you back.”
Chris paced around the forensic lab, willing the phone to ring, and about ten minutes later it did.
“Well, I found something interesting,” Saberhagen said. “It appears that she may be using the device to send a signal.”
“How so?”
“Someone is turning the device on and off over and over again in what seems to be a timed pattern.”
“And what is the pattern? Read it to me like numbers. Let’s call a simple on and off a one. A two-beat pause is a two. A three-beat pause is a three.”
Saberhagen studied the patterns. “It seems to be a phrase that’s repeated over and over. The phrase is, one-one-one-one-three . . . one-three-one-two-one-one-three . . . one-two-two-one.”
“It’s Morse code.” It had been a while since Chris had worked with Morse code, so it took a minute for him to work it out. “And the message is ‘Help.’ Clever girl. That’s her. She was alive when that signal was sent. Is the message still being transmitted?”