by A. J. Thomas
“Hello?” he answered, not even trying to keep his voice from shaking. He didn’t give a fuck if the men around him knew he was scared.
“Raymond?” Carmen’s voice sounded far away, scratchy. And annoyed.
“Carmen?” Ray let out a breath he didn’t realize he was holding. “Carmen, are you okay?”
Through the static, he caught a few words. “… sunburned… and the girls are bored stiff…. Mrs. Ramirez from across the street called… my house is under siege?”
Nothing she was saying made any sense. “Carmen, where are you?”
“Joshua Tree,” she announced, the words coming through crisp and clear. “And there’s hardly any reception in a quarter of the park. Even where there is reception, it sucks. Is that better?” The sound muffled again. “No! Get down! Only Mommy climbs the boulder!”
“Joshua Tree?” Ray laughed out loud, so relieved he wanted to cry. “The national park? What the hell are you doing there?”
“Hiking, mostly. And getting the kids out of San Diego until things calm down. Everyone’s so on edge with Sophie gone, and every day there was more violence on the news. Even if they can’t understand what’s going on, the stress isn’t good for them. And it’s dangerous to take them camping out here during the summer, of course. But Mrs. Ramirez across the street just called and said there are a hundred police cars outside my house. Do you know what’s going on?”
“I’m at your house right now. I’ll take care of it, all right? You need to stay there, do you hear me? Stay there. Go hiking. Go climbing. Don’t come home.”
“Is Sophie….” The phone crackled again.
“I’ll take care of it,” Ray said again. “Just stay there.”
A loud beep announced that the call had been lost. Ray dropped his head back, smiling like an idiot.
“She okay?” Elliot asked, right beside him.
Ray swallowed and took in a huge gasp of air. “She’s camping,” he laughed. “She wasn’t here. The kids weren’t here.”
“Just Sophie and Holland, then? She said he’d kill Carmen and the kids, though.”
“She did,” Ray laughed. “I’ve never been so happy to be lied to in my entire fucking life.”
“Come on.” Elliot spun him around and steered him toward the front door. “We’ve got to talk.”
Ray stopped walking when he realized Elliot was taking him back to the motor pool SUV. “Where are we going? What about statements? Reports?”
“St. Claire said it can wait. Hathaway made one stop before he left the FBI field office. Want to guess why?”
Ray didn’t need to give it a lot of thought. Hathaway had just ended his career and become a wanted felon. He wouldn’t have walked away without something to fall back on. “He took Sophie’s laptop. Who the hell regulates access to secure evidence over there?”
Elliot nodded slowly. “He’s been working with the NSA staff to figure out what’s on that laptop. He’s checked it out a couple of times over the last week. We’re following St. Claire and the rest of my team to Hathaway’s address.”
“We are?” Ray’s eyes bulged. “She’s okay with me being involved?”
“She’s willing to say that it was an unfortunate mix-up in the final report. Get your ass in the car, we’ve got to hurry.”
“Your boss is awesome.”
Ray hung back nervously as Elliot and a team of special agents raided a small townhouse an hour north. Elliot came out ten minutes later, and Ray knew, just from the slight shake of his head, that the townhouse was empty. As he watched the FBI agents arguing in a small circle, he pulled out his phone, desperate for something to do with his hands, something to do with his thoughts.
The text message notification at the top of his phone was blinking. Ray swiped his finger down the screen of his phone, opening the message. A grainy picture of Sophie, her mouth covered in duct tape and her eyes glaring furiously at the camera, appeared on his phone. Below the picture was an address off Interstate 8, a time, and detailed instructions to arrive alone if he ever wanted to see his cousin again. Ray bit back the urge to shout for Elliot, to scream that they had to move. He kept his mouth shut and began to analyze every potential outcome.
He knew the address was near the outskirts of the city, off the highway before the city disappeared and the desert rose in a series of arid mountains that became the Cleveland National Forest. It wasn’t desolate, but the small stores and suburbs that were out there didn’t extend more than a mile beyond the interstate exits. He pulled up the address on his phone’s GPS, and with a satellite overview, he saw that the address looked like nothing more than a shed, but from the way the road curved with the land, he suspected it would back onto a sandstone wall. It probably had an open view of the highway it overlooked and an unobstructed view of the access road leading up to it. It would be an easy location to secure, and since it was still on the I-8 corridor, there would still be cellular coverage and regular Internet access, which Hathaway would need if he wanted to lay claim to the money Sophie stole from Alejandro.
Still feeling numb, Ray texted back a single word. Why?
The reply came before they even made it downtown. Your head’s worth more than hers.
Ray couldn’t slow his frantic thoughts as Elliot drove back toward downtown.
Elliot was pensive, clenching the steering wheel in a white-knuckled grip. “I guess there’s no point in saying I’m sorry. But I am sorry.”
The comment ripped Ray from his thoughts. “What have you got to be sorry about?”
“Hathaway.” Elliot braked fast and swerved to avoid rear-ending the car ahead of them. “If it weren’t for me, he wouldn’t have found them.”
“You don’t know that,” said Ray. “Think about it logically. Luca Garcia wanted that laptop. Alejandro wants it, I’m sure. Sophie and Holland wanted it badly enough to risk exposing themselves and to risk pissing me off. But even the NSA guys had trouble decrypting the hard drive. What good would that laptop be to anyone without Sophie? If it hadn’t been Hathaway, it would have been someone else. Now the only question is, which side is Hathaway working for?”
“Garcia,” said Elliot immediately. “His guys came after me in my own home, and they couldn’t have gotten my address from anyone outside of work. And he was the one who was supposed to send a city PD unit by the hotel to check on you.”
“I’m not suggesting he didn’t sell us both out, but I’m not so sure about who he sold us to.”
“Alejandro killed the guys at my place.”
“Yeah, so? Do you think that means he didn’t order them there to begin with?” Ray laughed.
Elliot’s eyes narrowed. “But why would he kill his own guys?”
“Would you have sat there listening to him convince you that there was a leak inside your agency if you didn’t have a reason to think he was on your side?”
“But he was right.”
“I’m not disputing that. But Alejandro doesn’t play fair, El.”
“All right. So there’s no way to know who he’s planning to deliver them to. What do we do?”
Ray held his palm over the outline of his phone in his pocket. “I don’t know,” he whispered. “Food. Rest. Then we’ll go from there.”
At Hayes’s apartment, Elliot made him a tomato sandwich without a word. Eating it made Ray feel warm and anxious. He didn’t know how Elliot knew he loved tomatoes, but knowing Elliot paid so much attention, that he cared enough to bother, left Ray feeling like a bastard for not telling him about the text message.
And it made him more determined than ever not to say anything. Going into Carmen’s house this afternoon had been torture, not just because he expected to find his sister and her family shot dead behind their front door, but because just imagining Elliot getting hurt left him feeling as if he’d been shot himself. He hadn’t been able to focus, to think, and he knew he wouldn’t have been able to react with his normal speed or precision.
When they finished ea
ting, Ray dragged Elliot to bed without a word. He undressed Elliot himself, then took him slowly, each of them stretched out on their sides so Ray could plaster every inch of his body to Elliot’s, so he could hold him while they made love. After, Ray held Elliot close and breathed in the sweaty scent of his hair until he felt Elliot’s breathing even out.
Ray watched Elliot sleep for a few quiet moments, then slipped away. It was already ten o’clock, and if he was going to have a chance in hell of surviving to come back to Elliot in the morning, he had to make some phone calls and start heading out of town.
Ray knew the area was filled with hiking trails and old sections of road that had been blocked off by gates to make walking paths. He cut the lock on a Forest Service gate on one of the roads and drove along the broken concrete of what had once been a two-lane highway, stopping when he was about a quarter of a mile above the address in the text message. He had a little over half an hour before all hell was going to break loose, so he worked his way down the loose gravel slope as quickly as he dared, catching himself before he tumbled over a six-foot drop over the road below. Less than a dozen feet down the road, set back against a hill, was an older trailer house that was on a crumbling foundation. There were lights on in the living room, but the sharp angles of the lights meant they were probably from flashlights or a lantern rather than from powered lights. Somewhere inside the trailer, Ray heard a low hum that reminded him of camping trips with his dad and sister when they were kids. His dad would always complain about the big RVs running electrical generators throughout the night, and he still recognized the hum.
Ray slipped up to one of the lit windows, stayed flush to the wall, and glanced inside. The room beyond was gloomy and dark. He recognized Hathaway’s bulky form standing over a makeshift desk made by setting a piece of half-rotten plywood over a faded recliner. Sophie’s laptop was open on the plywood, casting a cold blue light through the room. Sophie herself was huddled in a corner, her ankles and wrists handcuffed, and then handcuffed together so she couldn’t move.
At the computer, still in the same blue jeans and tweed jacket he’d worn when Ray watched Elliot interview him, was Professor Holland. Ray moved down to the window closest to them, surprised that a jagged triangle of glass was already missing from the windowpane.
Holland was typing frantically, watching three different tiny windows of text on the screen. He hit a combination of keys over and over, then slapped the keyboard and groaned.
“Now what’s wrong?”
Holland gestured at the screen and shook his head, as if Hathaway might have a chance in hell at interpreting the streaming code sections. “You don’t understand what I have to go through to remove these encryption keys. She set this up as a trap for that worthless little twerp Garcia. All of the files still on the hard drive are designed to generate a new encryption key for every file every time someone tries to access them without the original key. And every time it does, it accesses the network again, too. It’s probably starting another series of transfers, but without the encryption key, I can’t tell what the hell it’s trying to do.”
“Yeah, I get it. Every time you try to hack it, it moves the money somewhere else. I’ve spent the last week listening to smarter guys than you explain it. But you said you already had the damn key.”
“I have her.” Holland snapped his head toward Sophie. “It’s her program, her encryption algorithm. I wasn’t kidding when I said you’d need her.”
“There are headlights.” Hathaway moved toward the front window, staying well to the side.
Ray almost cursed out loud and ducked down to check the time on his phone. He was still supposed to have twenty minutes. He moved to the corner of the house where he could see the road beyond. Sure enough, a single set of headlights was slowly making its way up the side of the canyon, taking each switchback carefully. The car stopped in the shadow of a long cottonwood tree, nearly a half a mile and one switchback down. The headlights stayed on, but the dome light didn’t flash. Ray slipped back to the window quietly.
“Personally, I can’t believe the dipshit was stupid enough to actually show up. Looks like you might be off the hook, Holland. I’m going to go out and say hello. If you’re not in that seat when I get back inside, I’ll shoot you in the foot.”
Holland rolled his eyes and went back to typing.
Instead of leaving, though, Hathaway knelt in front of Sophie. Despite being hogtied with three pairs of handcuffs, she still managed to glare at him. He peeled the duct tape off her mouth, just far enough for her to speak. “I have to admit, I didn’t think he’d show up.” Hathaway smirked. “I wonder if he would have come if he knew how much of a bitch you really are?”
“If you think it would matter, you don’t know Ray very well.” She managed a soft laugh. “He doesn’t put anyone above his job. Not his sister, not the people he fucks around with, not me. If he’s coming, he’s coming to arrest us all. And you’ll be lucky if it’s him, because he will just arrest you. If it’s my big brother, he is coming to kill us all.”
“I guess we’ll see.” Hathaway rocked to his feet, drew his gun, and slipped out the door.
Ray listened to the crunch of gravel along the road for a few moments, then moved back to the corner of the house. He saw the bulky shadow of Hathaway’s back disappearing into the underbrush beside the road. He wasn’t moving down to the car at all, but staying in sight of the house, waiting to ambush whoever was coming up the road.
But no one was coming up the road. The headlights of the car were still on, but the interior was still dark. Ray didn’t think anyone had actually gotten out.
Ray wouldn’t be able to move around the house to the door without walking straight into Hathaway’s line of sight. It was dark, but this far from the city the stars provided enough light to spot movement and shapes. He went back to the window and stepped into the dim light shining through.
A slight wave was all it took to get Sophie’s attention, and when she saw him through the glass, her eyes went wide. To her credit, she didn’t cry out, but she did shake her head as subtly as she dared. Ray nodded and slipped back when Holland turned toward Sophie.
“What?”
“You,” she giggled. “He’s going to kill you, you know. Whether you manage to break my encryption or not, that guy’s not going to let you go.”
“You’re not as tough as you think.” Holland’s eyes narrowed. “I know you never gave a damn about me, and you played Luca just the same, but I know you care about your fucking cousin. Do you really think you’ll be able to stand there and watch him die?”
She smiled. “I think it won’t matter. I’m surprised you haven’t figured it out yet, Nathan. The answer is right there on the screen.”
“The answer?” Holland curled his fingers into claws, as if he was trying to strangle the air in front of him. “You still think this is a fucking game?”
“Have you ever played Monopoly?” she asked, out of nowhere.
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“I used to watch my brothers and my cousins play when I was little. They stopped playing because of my cousin Ray, and do you know why? When I asked my brother, do you know what he told me?”
Holland shook his head and let out an exasperated sigh. “What did he tell you?”
“Alejandro told me that they stopped playing because Ray won. Permanently. Ray and Alejandro both always played to win, but as they got older, they realized that the real winner isn’t the one who ends up with the most paper money or the most property, not even the one who ends up with a whole city of little plastic houses crowding their section of the board. The winner,” her smile turned dark, “is the one who can step away from the game and smash the board.”
“This isn’t a fucking game, Sophie! You’re throwing your life away, and mine! Luca’s dead because of you, and you don’t even care!”
“You’re right.”
“Why can’t you just be reasonable about this?”
He smacked the laptop screen.
“I am being reasonable.” Her tone was surprisingly calm. “I told you, there’s no other way. I just want to make things right. I can’t even get a job trying to make up for the things my brothers have done, just because they exist.”
“You told me you could still get to the money!”
She smiled brightly. “I lied. It’s scattered. In about a year, the algorithm will run its course, and the transfers will stop in random banks and be divided evenly into every account owned by a registered nonprofit organization held by each bank. I knew Luca would try to get to it before Alejandro killed him,” she nodded to the laptop. “I knew he would. So instead of saving the original source code, I modified it a little. Every time you manage to access an individual set of wire transfers, or whenever the algorithm is interrupted for any reason, the money in those transfers is deleted. It’s all just numbers. If the algorithm stops, even if I try to stop it, it all resets to zero.”
Holland shook his head slowly. “You’re a good liar, but not that good. You wouldn’t have locked yourself out of the program. Without that money, we’ve got nowhere to go! Either your psychotic fucking brothers or Luca’s family will find us. Even if you’ve got them both convinced you had nothing to do with it, we’ll be killed in the crossfire!”
“Probably,” she admitted. “But so long as Alejandro wants his money and Luca’s father wants revenge, they’ll never stop trying to kill each other. My little bid to make the world a better place.”
“You want to know something really fucked up?” Holland glared at her. “If the NSA hadn’t turned you down because of your brothers, you never would have passed their psychiatric exam, you fucking bitch!”
She just giggled. “Keep trying new encryption keys. See how well that works for you. At this point, I’d estimate that every time you try to access an individual data packet, about a hundred grand disappears.”