Nest

by Terry Goodkind

  “Right now, because of the way you look at the world, the way you analyze and question everything, the way you work out all the possibilities, you’re sitting there thinking that you still don’t know for sure if you might not be sitting in a car with a rare predator who has hunted you down and now that he has looked into your eyes and seen you for who you are, is lulling you into complacency and intends to kill you.”

  Kate felt a chill, as if he had looked into her soul, as if he could read her mind. No one before had ever been able to read her so well or so accurately. It bordered on being creepy.

  She felt the sudden, urgent need to shift the subject off of her. “So you weren’t trying to save the world, then, working for the Mossad?”

  He rubbed his eyes. She thought he looked tired.

  “I try to find people with your ability. It not only saves your lives, but those lives you save through your ability. The Mossad listened. They wanted my help. They wanted to save those innocent lives.”

  Kate thought of the way she had helped AJ, and because of that, lives might be saved. It was difficult to turn away when you knew that you could make a difference. It sounded like Jack felt that same way.

  “But you’re right. As much as I would like to, I can’t save the world,” he said. “As much as you would like to, you can’t save the world. Each of us does what we are driven to do.

  “I guess my kind, if I have a ‘kind,’ doesn’t like seeing your kind slaughtered. While you can’t save the world, the world still needs those like you who have the courage to see evil. Most people don’t want to see evil. You can’t help seeing it, but you have the courage to recognize it.”

  “Are there many of my kind left?”

  “Not many. Too few.”

  “Have you been successful at helping them?” She glanced over at him, his face lit by the dash lights as day was turning to night. “Have you helped those you can find stay alive?”

  He stared off into the distance. “Not as often as I would wish. I found one a few months back. A young man. Sharp, brilliant even. He grasped the things I was starting to explain to him. He was beginning to comprehend the connections of it all and his link in those connections. The world was new and bright and fascinating to him.”

  “Were you able to help him?”

  Jack was still staring off at nothing. “I’m the one who found his body. It was a horrific scene. It always is. I don’t know how they found him, but they did. The new, bright, fascinating world was over for him. A predator had ended it.

  “I didn’t learn about your brother in enough time to get out ahead of whatever is happening. I tried to warn AJ to be extremely careful to protect him.”

  Kate nodded. “She told me.”

  He looked down at his hands. “But I didn’t learn about him soon enough. I hope that, with you, I have.”

  At hearing the anguish in his voice, Kate swallowed back her own sense of helpless terror. He saw the look on her face.

  “Sorry, I’m not trying to frighten you.”

  She accepted his apology with a nod. “What is it that you think could be changing? You said something was changing.”

  He gestured out the side window after a few moments of silence. “What do you see out there?”

  Kate glanced out the window. “I don’t know. The city. Lots of streets and houses. Why? What do you see?”

  “Ceaseless brutality and depravity—every sort of evil growing stronger,” he said, almost to himself. “Anarchy.”

  “You think evil is growing stronger?”

  “Those streets are controlled by gangs. Hundreds of gangs. Thousands of gang members. Tens of thousands. All of those neighborhoods are controlled by gangs. They didn’t used to be that way. We let that evil grow. The people who live there are virtual prisoners. Right here in the middle of civilization.”

  “Criminals are nothing new,” Kate said. “Some streets have always been dangerous.”

  “To some degree, yes, but more and more cities are now controlled by violent gangs. They spread drugs like an infection. They rule through fear and intimidation the way feudal barons ruled. They rape, torture, and murder indiscriminately. They have no remorse. They have no empathy for others. To them, other people are just slabs of meat.

  “They are, quite simply, ruthless killers and they will kill anyone for any reason or for no reason. Or just for the fun of killing another living human being so they can watch them die. It is not yet anywhere near as bad here as it is in other places, like Mexico. But one day it will be.

  “Consequences are gradually fading. A corroding civilization increasingly turns a blind eye to it, or explains it away, or even justifies it. We simply learn to live with it.

  “For every killer who is put away for life, ten more killers spring up. For every impotent new law, they become more lawless. For every difficult battle won, a dozen more are lost.

  “Despite everything, evil grows more vicious.”

  “Like I said, that’s nothing new,” Kate said.

  He shook his head. “It’s hard to see a trend when you’re in the middle of it, especially trends that span hundreds of years. Yes, there have always been killers and there always will be. There has always been a back-and-forth balance between those who kill and those struggling to be above killing.

  “In the middle of a trend, everyone’s focus is too narrow. You have to be able to see those connections in all of mankind,” he said. “Not just what’s out there.”

  “The police work hard to stop gangs,” Kate said. “They know the problem and are working to get it cleaned up.”

  Jack shook his head. “If you believed that in your heart, you would buy the kind of car you would like to have, not the kind of car that helps hide you from predators.”

  “You’re saying that you think some of the people out there are born to be killers and given an opportunity they will kill?”

  He smiled to himself, as if she had said something ironic. “Not even close,” he said, cryptically.

  “What do you mean?”

  He gave her a look like she’d asked for it. “Dozens or even hundreds of young girls on the internet will pick out a victim and torment them relentlessly, constantly urging them to kill themselves, goad them into suicide.

  “Dead is dead. Killing is killing. People can make excuses all day long, but those twelve-year-old girls are killers just the same as the thugs out there on those streets. Each ended another person’s life. Were each of them born to be killers? Why do you think supposedly innocent girls would do such a thing?”

  Kate was at a loss for an answer. “I can’t imagine.”

  “What is it they share with the gang members out there on those dark streets?”

  Kate lifted her hands from the wheel in a helpless gesture. She had no answer.

  “You think about it,” he said, “and let me know when you have an answer.”

  Kate knew he was getting at something, but she didn’t know what. As for the twelve-year-old girls, she had never been able to understand that sort of thing.

  She had survived being twelve, but she tried not to think about what was out there, off the interstate, in that dark warren of streets and neighborhoods, those no-man’s-lands where even the police feared going. AJ had told her how dangerous it was, even for police, to go into those neighborhoods. In a civilized city, there were places even the police dared not go.

  And Jack was saying that there was some connection to twelve-year-old girls on social media?

  If there was, she didn’t see it.

  Yet Jack was right; it was part of why she drove a nondescript car. She didn’t want trouble to see her. She didn’t want to catch the attention of evil. She knew it was dangerous out there, but there was nothing she could do about it, except, like everyone else, try not to be noticed. It was just the way the world was.

  She realized that he was right. There was no saving the world. The world was going to do what the world was doing to do.

 
All she could hope to do was save herself and as a result the lives that her ability might save in the future.

  “So, how does all of this tie together? What are the connections that link everything? What is it you intend to write about in your new book?”

  “Tell you what, why don’t I explain it when we talk to AJ?”

  Kate nodded. AJ, too, would want to know what he had to say.

  Kate glanced up at the exit sign for O’Hare Airport spanning the interstate as they drove under it. “We’ll be to my house soon, and then AJ’s place isn’t far.”

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  “So how did you find out about John?” Kate finally asked as they drove on through the darkness. The traffic had thinned out a bit and was finally moving at a good pace, but it was still a snaking river of lights.

  Jack Raines smiled. “Trying to find the answers to those things you don’t understand, those things that trouble you. Like I said, it’s part and parcel of your nature.”

  Kate had hoped that asking the question out of the blue would trip him into answering before he’d had a chance to think about it. It was a technique she sometimes used in her security investigations. It worked pretty well for most people. It hadn’t worked with Jack, so she asked him directly.

  “Jack, I’d like to know how you found out that AJ was working with my brother. She didn’t tell you who she had found with that ability because she was protecting him, and she certainly couldn’t have told you about me since we hadn’t even met when you talked to her. How did you find out about John and me?”

  “It wasn’t all that hard,” he said.

  “I didn’t ask how hard it was, I asked how you found out.”

  “I hacked Detective Janek’s phone.”

  Kate was taken aback. “Hacked her phone?” She glanced over at him. “What are you talking about?”

  “When AJ called me, she told me that she was working with a person who could do the things I described in my book. That was part of the purpose of the book—to help me discreetly locate people like her so that I could try to help. She said that she had tested this man with photos printed from film negatives and he never missed a killer among the photos, so I knew this was an important contact.”

  “But AJ told me that she never told you anything about my brother, not even his name. I believe her.”

  “She was telling you the truth. Once she had convinced me that she really was in contact with one of these people, and that she was using him to help her find killers, I had what I needed.”

  “You used your contacts in the Mossad to help, didn’t you?”

  “No. I could have, but I didn’t need to for something that easy. AJ had already given me what I needed.”

  “That easy? What do you mean? What did she give you?”

  “She gave my editor her cell number and email address. Once I had those, I simply hacked into her iPhone account—”

  “What do you mean ‘simply’? I have it on good authority that iPhones have bulletproof encryption and not even the FBI or NSA can hack into them.”

  “There are hard ways to do things, and then there are easy ways,” he said. “Trying to crack the encryption is the hard way.”

  Kate turned on the blinker to change lanes past slower traffic. “So what’s the easy way?”

  “I cracked her iCloud account—”

  “How could you do that?”

  “Easy. Go to iCloud. To get into your account, it asks for your password. I said I forgot my password. I needed AJ’s birthdate which was easily findable on a social network. Then it asks a few personal questions. In AJ’s case, the first ‘security’ question asked for her ‘ideal job.’ That one only took me one try. Detective. Next it asked what city she was born in. Chicago. With that, I was in. How hard is that? I didn’t even need to use any brute-force software to break her password.”

  “And that got you into her iCloud account?”

  “Sure. How do you think celebrities get their private photos stolen and posted all the time? Even difficult passwords can be bypassed by answering personal questions and it’s usually pretty easy to find what you need simply by going through their social media. I advise you not to keep any naked photos of yourself on your phone.”

  Kate shot him a look. “Why would I have naked photos of myself on my phone?”

  “Not saying you would—your kind wouldn’t. I’m only saying that other people do that, and more often than you would think.”

  “Okay, so you got into her iCloud account. Knowing AJ, I’d bet there were no naked photos of her there, so how could you possibly find something in there that could lead you to my brother?”

  “Once I was into her account, I was able to track the location of her phone through its GPS, so I knew where she was at all times.”

  “But how?”

  “I hate to say it again, but it was easy. Apple calls it ‘Find My Phone.’ It shows you exactly where the phone is at all times. You can even zoom in and tell what room of their house someone is in. Since I knew she was working with someone with the ability to recognize killers, and she told me that it was outside police procedures and that she hadn’t told anyone at the department, I knew that she would have to do it after work.

  “I kept track of her locations through her phone day and night, and from that I established patterns.”

  “What good would that do you?”

  “Well, I could see where she spent the night, so that told me where she lived. I could even see her move around in her house. I could see where she slept all night so I even knew where her bedroom is in her house.

  “I could see her going to a number of different locations throughout the day. Those locations changed throughout her work week, so I knew those were most likely different cases she was working. She would sometimes spend several days at one location, or repeatedly returned there, no doubt investigating a murder.

  “Then, I could see her go back to one spot on a regular basis during the day. The map showed that to be her precinct where she has an office—northeast corner of the building, by the way.

  “I now knew where she lived. I knew where she stopped for coffee in the morning. I knew where she worked. I knew how she moved about. I could see her going about her life and work. I now knew how her locations fit patterns.

  “Then there was this one place where she went quite often, always in the evening. She frequently spent several hours there. It didn’t fit the pattern of her work and home life.”

  Jack held up a finger to make the important point. “I knew, therefore, that it had to be the home of the person she was working with, outside her official work, the person she had called me about, the person who could identify killers. It was then a simple matter of finding out who lived there: John Allen Bishop.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Kate muttered, shaken by how easy it had been to track down her brother.

  “I had already spoken with Everett on the phone and knew that his ability was sketchy. I had hopes that even though it was weak, he might have family members and it might be stronger with them. The ability runs in families.”

  Kate nodded. “AJ told me.”

  “I needed to see him to try to find out how much he was actually able to do, and see if I could find out the names of his relatives, so I flew out to Nevada. I needed to look into his eyes.

  “By the time I got there he was already dead. The sheriff referred me to Everett’s lawyer. He was able to give me the names of the only next of kin: John Allen Bishop and Kate Bishop. In between working on my book and searching for some others like you, I called John’s house, but could never get hold of him.”

  “John was afraid to talk on the phone. He often wouldn’t answer it when it rang,” Kate said. “So then you heard from AJ?”

  Jack nodded. “When AJ called me about this person she was working with, she didn’t tell me his name, so I didn’t know at the time that he was a relative of Everett. Once I eventually traced her activity I disc
overed it was Everett’s nephew, John. I was looking for another person at the time and was traveling, so by the time I connected all the dots, it was too late.

  “That leaves you as Everett’s only other living relative. I had your number from Everett’s lawyer.”

  “Why use my home phone and not my cell?”

  Jack arched an eyebrow at her. “What did I just tell you about how easy it is to track cell phones? Location isn’t the only information you can get. I didn’t want to put you in any danger by possibly exposing your cell, which could be hacked.”

  “Oh,” Kate said as she checked the mirrors before changing lanes and passing a slow-moving truck.

  “I called your house a couple of times, but you didn’t return my calls. Then I found out that John had been murdered, which meant that there was an imminent threat, so I flew out here immediately to try to keep the people who murdered him from murdering you.”

  “So that’s why you said that I’m not as safe as I thought I was.”

  “That’s part of the reason,” Jack said. “Fortunately, you keep yourself pretty difficult to trace. Most of the information on you has been wiped from the internet. That’s probably why the killer went after your brother first. He was easier to find.”

  That news gave Kate a pang of anguish on top of her sense of guilt for feeling that she hadn’t been there for John.

  “If you never met Everett, how can you be certain he had the same ability as my brother and me?”

  “Well, the killer removed his eyes, the same as he did to John, so that’s certainly an indicator. Although, like I said, I didn’t think it was as strong in Everett, degree doesn’t really matter to this kind of killer.”

  Kate swallowed at the memory. “Why would they do such a thing? Why remove the victim’s eyes?”

  Jack looked off into the night for a time. “They have their reasons.”

  Because his answer sounded so haunted, Kate decided not to press him about it. Besides, she wasn’t sure she wanted to know.

  “The kind of predators who kill people like your brother are intelligent, they are ruthless, and they are relentless,” Jack said, still staring off into the darkness. “They will be coming after you. It’s a game for them.”