As Stetson watched the mayor deliver his eulogy, he spotted in the corner of his eye something that did not belong, a flicker in his periphery. He turned and saw a woman standing at the edge of the crowd, pressed against the edge over the lake. She wore a red blouse, a denim short-skirt. Red hair pulled into a messy ponytail that hung over her shoulder. Her skin was pale-blue in the cold. She was smoking a cigarette and blew the smoke from the side of her mouth, where it rose like a ghost looking over her before the wind took it away.
It took Stetson a delayed second to place her in his memory. And the moment he did, he wished he were close enough to ask her what the hell she thought she was doing here. He wished he were close enough to tell her to have some goddamned respect. Close enough to tell her this was her fault, all of this, and she ought to be fucking ashamed coming here. Close enough for the words to hit her like buckshot.
Of all people. That woman, this place. He felt dizzy with all the curses and screams that sprung and festered in his lungs.
He felt Mindy reach into his coat pocket. She wrapped her fingers around his curled fist and gently squeezed his hand. She had a special gift: she knew when he needed her to bring him back to the moment. And all it ever took was just this, her hand touching his.
He turned back to the stage, but he kept the woman-in-red fixed at the farthest corner of his vision. Just in case.
“Yes, we could argue,” the mayor said, his voice rising like a preacher at a tent revival, “over whether the Kingfisher was a hero or a criminal vigilante. But this argument overlooks one fundamental truth. None of us here today can say whether or not the Kingfisher was a hero. What we say does not matter one way or the other. What we say today are just whispers in the cold wind. Because we do not decide who is a hero. None of us here. We do not.”
The woman-in-red was standing akimbo now. Stetson saw her face peel back in a grin, like this was just the funniest goddamn thing she had ever heard.
She couldn’t do that.
Stetson pulled away from Mindy and began pushing his way through the crowd. He no longer felt the cold as a fury grew like a wildfire in his gut and soon spread throughout the rest of his body. He felt Mindy reach after him, her fingers brushing off his coat, but he was already in motion. Nothing in the world could stop him.
“Heroes are named by history and judged by the future,” the mayor said. “We cannot say if history will remember the Kingfisher as hero, criminal, or even nothing at all. It may not matter one way or another. What we can do is stand here, shoulder to shoulder, and marvel at the fact that one man whom very few, if any, of us ever knew, brought us here together on this freezing day in this beautiful, resilient, miraculous city. Whatever you think of him, we are here together, and it is beautiful from where I stand. I wish you could see what I am seeing.”
Stetson forced himself through the packed crowd. He saw the woman pull another cigarette from a pack she kept in her bra, and now Stetson felt an electric collision inside his skin, a total holy rage ready to erupt, and my God, how he wanted it to erupt. He moved faster, pushing aside anyone standing in his way, ignoring the shouts and murmurs. His eyes and body and soul dead-fixed on that woman’s peevish grin. And suddenly he knew what he would do when he finally reached her. He would push her over the edge of Promontory Point, and her body would collapse on the ice below. She would tumble through the freezing water like the deadweight she always was.
How dare she interrupt a moment in history with her presence?
“We spread his ashes today over Lake Michigan as a symbolic gesture and also a reminder,” the mayor said. “This is not the end of a story, but the beginning of a new one. This is the story the Kingfisher has given us to finish, so how will we finish it? This is the question we must leave with. And as I have the honor to spread these ashes, as they disperse and as we return to our homes, I hope that we can take a moment to pause. Remember this day. Because this is the day that Chicago stood silent and together. How will we finish it?”
Stetson was just several bodies away from her, and he saw her turn over her shoulder. He looked at her. She looked at him. And she smiled even wider. But at that same moment the crowd broke formation and began to shuffle back in the direction of the city looming behind them. He continued to push through them, but there were so many of them now. When he finally reached the outskirts of the crowd, he looked around for her. He could not find her anywhere. She had dissolved somewhere into the crowd.
In her place was only the lake, which stretched out before him. Frozen-white and seemingly infinite.
He felt a hand grasp his shoulder and he spun around to see Mindy looking back at him, her cold-pink face equal parts worry and affection.
“Where’d you go?” she asked.
He started to answer, but he stopped himself. She would not understand, because he also did not understand. He felt as though he had just woken from a strange, undreamt dream. He turned over his shoulder and saw a crowd of people lingering along the edge of the lake, looking down at a roiling cloud of ash scattering against the ice.
So instead he said, “I came here.”
“I know you always wanted to see him, Gregory,” Mindy said, reaching her hand into his pocket, wrapping her fingers around his. “I’m sorry this is the way it finally happened.” She joined him in watching the ashes disperse, squeezing his hand tighter.
And he did his best to smile for her, something that had never come naturally to him, even when he felt like it should.
He had never told Mindy that he had seen the Kingfisher. Countless times. He had never told Mindy that he been nearly killed by the Kingfisher, that he had shaken the Kingfisher’s hand, that he had seen the Kingfisher reduced to a hollow skein of a man, that the Kingfisher sometimes called him by his first name, that the Kingfisher had called him from a pay phone just yesterday to thank Stetson one last time for what he did for him and Stetson only replied, “Be well.” And although Stetson knew that the ashes currently dispersing across Lake Michigan were not the Kingfisher’s, Stetson was already beginning to believe what Mindy had said: he had pushed his way through a mourning crowd to see the Kingfisher one last time. Because, Stetson thought, he would never see him again.
38 9-1-1
“GIVE ME PHONE NUMBERS OF THE HOSTAGES,” Wren said, sitting down at the table. Marcus sat at the end of the table, looking out the window. Jeremiah stood behind her, but she felt energy radiating from his skin like some nuclear reactor ready to blow. Tillman brought her laptop in front of Wren. An old Dell model, processing speed akin to a circuitry of molasses. But it would work. “It doesn’t matter if they are already—you know. Just give me the phone numbers.”
Tillman retrieved a folded envelope from her pocket and laid it in front of Wren. Phone numbers scratched in black ink. “Paulina’s and Penny’s numbers.”
“Paulina,” Wren repeated, holding the envelope. The girl whose face Wren had sought among the city’s lost but never found. The girl who somewhere was bleeding from a gunshot wound in a dark room.
Marcus reached in his pocket and withdrew a folded-up business card. He pushed it across the table. Wren unfolded it. MISS MAY PIECEWORK. A number at the bottom in fine print. “I also have Peter’s number. I think I also still have Walter William’s number somewhere on my phone.”
“So what’s your plan here?” Jeremiah asked Wren. He was now nervously pacing the kitchen in an oblong and erratic orbit, his head swiveling so as to keep trained on her computer screen.
“I’m going to do a SS7 hack and see if any of these numbers are still traceable.”
“SS7?” Tillman asked. “What is that?”
“It’s essentially a metanetwork for cell phone providers. It’s where all the data transmits. There’s a glitch in the system that makes it possible to get access to the locations of cell phones.”
“I take it this is illegal,” Jeremiah said.
“Is that going to be a problem?” Wren asked, clearing the laptop’s hard dr
ive in hopes of maximizing the processing speed.
Jeremiah didn’t answer, which she took as a no.
Tillman’s laptop felt foreign beneath her fingertips. Simply navigating through the hard drive, she was striking wrong keys, closing wrong programs. Any of these minor errors would prove disastrous during the actual hack. She wished she had her own laptop, but it was probably already confiscated, locked away, sealed in an evidence bag in anticipation of a trial that would strip her of whatever life she might have otherwise lived.
“Won’t the FBI already have done this?” Tillman asked. “I’m sure they already know the identities of Walter Williams, Penny, and Paulina. They may even have identified May by now.”
“It’s possible,” Wren said. “But they’re more likely to go directly through Stingray channels with coordination from the NSA. It’s more accurate and doesn’t require decryption, but it would probably take them longer.”
“Gibberish,” Jeremiah said, passing in a figure eight across the kitchen tile.
Wren continued, unfazed. “I’m assuming the FBI has already traced the cell phones of the hostages they’ve identified and not come up with much. But I’m also going to assume they haven’t run a trace on May’s phone yet, and if it’s true that this Peter guy is taken, too, then I’m sure the FBI doesn’t know it yet. What I’m saying is that hopefully May or Peter’s phones give us a location.”
“What happens if they don’t?” Jeremiah asked.
“Then that’s when we go to Plan B.”
“Which is?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t thought of it yet.”
Marcus rose from his chair, gesturing for Jeremiah and Tillman to follow him. “Let’s give her some space.”
* * *
There is headspace and there is cyberspace and only when Wren hacks do the two collide. Her physical surroundings gradually deteriorate while her fingers gloss over the keyboard. Even so, Wren feels the waiting presence of Tillman, Detective Combs, and Marcus. They are maintaining a respectful distance, all of them congregated in the living room in sort of a para-circle, and she senses the weight of their stares, but she lets them slide from her. Water from a duck’s back. She slips deeper into a world that is not this one. A world of digital intensities, stratified in algorithms she creates without thought, because this is a world she knows better than any other.
An SS7 hack is so easy that she’s almost disappointed. Like knocking on a door and it swinging wide open. But once inside, it’s vast, seemingly endless expanses of raw data lapping at distant, planetary shores. She pictures herself as a single data point navigating a three-dimensional model of the world. Because in cyberspace, history is joined to the future. There are numbers. Columns and rows. And her eyes are connected to her fingers, which are connected to her racing thoughts, which are connected to her lips as she whispers to the world she has fallen into. She enters the first number—Walter Williams’s number—and executes the search. She waits as the humming machine beneath her fingertips answers her demand. Nothing. She isn’t surprised. The phone must have been destroyed. She enters Penny’s number. Nothing. She tries Paulina’s. Nothing. All of their phones, severed from the world. A grim, metaphysical parallelism Wren chooses to ignore for the time being. She tries May’s number, allowing herself to feel optimistic. But it comes up empty. No location. She types in Peter’s number, already planning her next step from here—perhaps braving the NSA systems and trying to hack into Stingray, a veritable suicide mission that probably wouldn’t yield anything anyway—but to her surprise, she finds Peter’s triangulated location point. If the gunman did, in fact, have Peter hostage, either Peter didn’t have his phone with him or it hadn’t yet been destroyed. But there is no room for hypotheticals, because even from the subterranean depth of cyberspace, there is allowance to hope. The gilded architecture of systems processing, geolocation maps of the known world waiting, it’s all momentarily peaceful and quiet. Because she is merely a data point detached from the voice she hears shouting over all the others as the numbers thin on the screen. It is her voice and she is saying, “I got something.”
* * *
She was seated in front of the computer, fingers aching. She double- and triple-checked the map on the screen, zooming in.
Jeremiah rushed forward and leaned over her shoulder. His energy was palpable as he rocked backward and forward. He strode over to the window that led out to the fire escape. The window was pitch-dark. She had no sense of how much time had passed. And for a moment, she worried that none of it mattered, that it was too late.
“What time is it?” Wren asked.
Jeremiah checked his watch. “About an hour to midnight.”
“What is this?” Tillman asked, joining Jeremiah behind Wren, leaning forward to stare at the computer screen. “Is that where the hostages are?”
Marcus remained in the living room, standing there with his hands in his pockets, watching from a measured distance.
“I can’t be sure,” Wren said quietly, as if she might scare away the two-dimensional map on her computer screen. “It’s an approximate location of Peter. Or at least an approximate location of Peter’s phone.”
Tillman nodded, the crack of a smile unrealized.
“How approximate are we talking?” Jeremiah asked.
“It’s a triangulation of the phone’s location based on its proximity to cell towers nearby. In Chicago, I’d say it’s pretty accurate. On the safe side, I’d say it’s within a two-block radius of this location?”
“It would take too long to search two city blocks,” Jeremiah said. “Even with a full police force. Where even is this?” He squinted at the map.
Wren zoomed and readjusted over a bird’s-eye view of Chicago, the location marker pinned to the near South Side, six blocks away from their current location. “Hyde Park,” she said. The location marker was pinned just six blocks away from her own apartment. If this was where the hostages were, she had been so close and hadn’t even known it. It felt sickening that she had slept within a ten-minute walk of a horror she could not yet fully fathom.
“We don’t know for sure that Peter is taken, though, do we?” Jeremiah asked.
“Wait.” Tillman pushed Jeremiah out of the way and leaned over Wren’s shoulder. She jabbed her finger at a point on the screen. “Zoom in right there.”
“That’s the Armada,” Wren said, zooming in on the flattened image of the otherwise towering building. “It’s a hotel.”
Tillman stood up, rushed into the living room, and returned holding a pair of running shoes. She began untying them with shaking fingers.
“What are you doing?” Jeremiah asked.
“That’s where Penny had his interview,” Tillman said. “The Armada. Paulina picked him up to take him there. It was late at night. They must have been abducted when they arrived.”
“How would they have been abducted in a hotel? There are security cameras, staff.”
“Because they never made it into the hotel,” Tillman said, tying her shoes. “The gunman isn’t filming those videos inside a hotel. He must be filming them in the parking garage next to the hotel. It’s where Paulina would have taken her father.” She leaned over and pointed at the screen. A gray structure next to the Armada.
Wren recognized it. The train she took to work passed right in front of the very garage. Just this morning, she had probably seen it pass behind the sunlit window while a homeless man hawked tabloid papers in the aisle. He’d read the headlines at full volume, repeating them, as though each iteration would turn over new intrigue. And she’d been there, just a hundred yards away, staring absently at the pallid concrete structure as it faded out of view. But here it was again, a two-dimensional figure before her eyes.
There passed a silence in which Wren was aware of each second. It was how she pictured the moments after pulling a pin from a grenade and twirling it on your finger. Each movement forward, irreparable and distinct.
“It isn’t far from
here,” Tillman said.
Jeremiah didn’t say anything in response. He reached calmly into his pocket for his phone.
“What are you doing?” Tillman asked.
“I’m calling the station. I’m going to give them the address.”
“How are you going to explain how you got it? They’re going to know that you were working with her,” she said, nodding at Wren.
He swiped his finger across the touch screen. “I’ll tell them she found the location while we were driving or something like that. They won’t ask questions just yet. It doesn’t matter anyway. We’re running out of time.”
“Don’t,” Tillman said, reaching out quickly and prying the phone from his hands, holding it away from him.
“What the hell are you doing?” he shouted.
“I’ll call them,” Tillman said. “I’ll tell them I told you to come to my apartment with her.”
“Why?”
“You have a job with the department. I don’t. You got promoted to detective. I didn’t. Besides, they’re not going to call me back to work anytime soon. Not ever. You know it and I know it.”
“Tilly, don’t do this,” Jeremiah said.
She began dialing.
“Jeremiah should call,” Marcus said from the living room, where he had been perfectly silent all the while. Wren had forgotten he was even there. He strode forward into the kitchen, head slung in midthought. “He’ll call and tell them Wren gave him the address of the gunman. He’ll tell them that she hacked the gunman’s email address yesterday from Stetson’s email when she hacked the ME report. He’ll tell them that she was able to figure out his location and she gave him the address after they left the station. It’s best that way. It makes the most sense.”
The Reign of the Kingfisher Page 34