by Drew Murray
Copyright © 2020 by Andrew Murray
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, businesses, locales, or persons living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
ISBN 978-1-60809-388-5
Published in the United States of America by Oceanview Publishing
Sarasota, Florida
www.oceanviewpub.com
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
For Christine
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
There are a number of people that have been part of bringing this novel to life, and I’d like to thank them here.
To my family for their unwavering support. Especially Christine for being the first reader, most dedicated fan, and the finest partner in life that anyone could ever ask for. We are the best team.
To Melissa Edwards for seeing the potential in the book and appreciating Will Parker for all that I imagined him to be. Your support and advice has been indispensable. To Pat and Bob Gussin and everyone at Oceanview. What a privilege to get to work with such a talented team of professionals! To Benee Knauer. Your sage editorial advice taught me a great deal I will never forget.
To Kelley Armstrong for being a guide, a coach, and sometimes even a counselor. You were always encouraging without ever letting me take any shortcuts. You said I’d thank you for it later, and here I am. Thank you!
To John, Bev, Pat, and Clarissa from my writing group for their crisp and constructive feedback on early drafts.
To my fellow thriller authors who provided hard-earned wisdom from experience. It was invaluable, and I appreciate every bit of it. Simon Gervais, Kim Howe, Kathleen and Michael Gear, Sandra Brannan, Heather Graham and her husband, Dennis, thank you very much.
To Betsy Glick, Public Affairs Specialist at the Federal Bureau of Investigation in Washington, D.C., and the agents at the New York Field Office for taking the time to share information with me and other writers about the incredible work done by their agency. Any errors in procedural details are for artistic purposes and entirely my own.
Finally, to all my friends who have been a part of the journey to getting this book finished in all the many different ways you showed it, you were there when I needed you. You know who you are, and I can’t thank you enough.
CHAPTER ONE
< March 10, 2011 >
The night I was supposed to fly to Japan, I didn’t know how little time I had left before my personal apocalypse. Had I, there’s one thing I would have changed. The one thing that wakes me in the night, my teeth clenched so tightly I think they’re going to crack. The one thing that puts blood on my hands and a death in my ledger. The one thing that won’t let me go.
I wouldn’t have made a mistake.
Yeah, I know, everyone makes them, and all that. But not me. I started my first company before I could drive. The company I really became known for, the one that became a household name, came later. Valued at over $1 billion pre-IPO, CastorNet is what the Valley calls a unicorn. They’re not as rare as they once were, but people still sit up and pay attention when they’re run by a guy in his twenties.
That wasn’t enough for me. I wanted a place in the history books. When I got to Japan, I’d close a deal that would put my name alongside Jobs, Gates, and Zuckerberg.
While I was supposed to be popping the cork on a bottle of Cristal on our private jet, I was instead sipping a stale, green smoothie, huddled around a computer screen in the dark with a hairy, bearded guy, trying to get the FBI off my back without blowing everything up.
“The payload’s been delivered. Coming online now,” said the hairy guy. The glow of the monitor reflected off his wild beard, giving him a spooky profile in the dim room. “What are you going to tell the guys at Fukushima Semiconductor when you don’t show up to complete the takeover?”
Jack Walton. My right hand, and oldest friend. The Woz to my Jobs. Brilliant programmer, but like the legendary Wozniak he didn’t have a head for business. Building CastorNet was all me. He was the only person I could trust with what we’d agreed to do for the FBI. If word got out, it would be a disaster.
“I’ll make it in time to close the deal. I’ll take the jet when we’re finished here. I just won’t have time to check in at the hotel, which means I’ll have to shower at the airport.”
“Noble sacrifice, considering this deal’s going to make you a billionaire,” said Jack, noting the distaste in my voice. “But first, wherever this guy is, we have to find him.”
“We will. Then that FBI dude, what was his name? Salazar something …”
“Burke,” said Jack, rolling his eyes. “Special Agent in Charge Salazar Burke.”
“Whatever. Details,” I answered, waving my hand back and forth. “Then we can get on with Fukushima while Burke takes credit for our genius.”
The Agent had shown up on our doorstep from the LA Field Office with a problem. This sick fucker, Bruce Sterling, had kidnapped a girl named Kate Mason, right out of her college dorm. The FBI said he’d taken some other girls before, all of whom turned up dead, and in each case, he’d used our software to livestream his exploits with them. While the media hadn’t gotten a hold of the story, they could.
The negative press from that revelation would be bad, but I was sure Ace Prior, our Operations guy, would be able to contain it. He’s good and calm in front of the camera. Then Burke showed me and Jack pictures of Sterling’s previous victims. It’s easy to stand on your high moral ground when it’s just an ideal. Words on a page. Or in a mission statement. But when you see the things Burke had to show, it changes you. It hits you on a level deeper than intellect, right at the part of your brain that evolved from a furry little mammal whose drive was survival from predators.
Burke told us he had to find Sterling before he did those things to this Kate girl. It didn’t matter who Kate was or where she came from. You see someone facing that kind of horror, you help. But that doesn’t mean you have to throw away everything you’ve spent years building. CastorNet’s most valuable product was secure, private messaging and live video streaming. Which meant if anyone found out what Jack and I were doing for the FBI, we’d be finished.
“Will, the marketing push on privacy starts tomorrow,” said Jack, tugging on his beard. “Are you sure it won’t get out that we have a back door …”
“Don’t call it a back door.”
“What should I call it?”
“A trap door.”
“Will, that’s not a real thing! You can’t just make it a thing because you want to.”
“I bet I can after the Fukushima deal closes. It’s totally going to be a thing.”
“Maybe then,” acknowledged Jack with a sigh.
“It’s just you and me in this room, and the minute this is over we get rid of the trap door,” I said, checking the time on my iPhone. “Get the patch in a critical release and send it tomorrow.”
“Send me the patch, and I’ll get it in the queue.”
“You have it. It’s in the same directory as the change to the payload.”
This is the reason I needed to be there: to make sure stuff gets done. Developers, even brilliant ones like Jack, need to be managed.
“I don’t have it,” Jack said. “You made the changes to the payload.”
I felt a knot twist in my stomach.
In the fi
nal push to version 1.0, we had a hackathon to complete the first Beta version. Back then, a lot of people chose to work from home. Jack thought that made it easier for people to work for twenty-four hours straight. I thought it made it easier for people to get distracted.
So, I embedded a routine in our software to monitor the developers. It took a picture using their own webcam, with the message “Don’t get distracted. Get back to work!” along with their physical location.
I thought it was hilarious. Jack called it “demotivating.” Whatever. It worked.
Now we were using that app to get a location on Sterling and give it to the FBI. One quick change to the code to suppress the message pop-up on Sterling’s screen, and we were ready to go. Without that change, Sterling would know immediately that someone had found him. What would he do to Kate then? And who would he tell about our trap door?
“I didn’t do it,” I said, swallowing hard. Jack was about to tell me he misunderstood me and everything’s fine. “I was busy with the Fukushima deal all day. You made the changes to the payload.”
“I know what I did, Will, and I didn’t make the changes. This is your Trojan, not mine. I told you that. After the daily stand-up.”
“But you tested it.”
“There was no test!” said Jack, typing frantically to bring up the code. “Why would we need to test your code? You’re a genius. You hate it when I test your code.”
Good point. Totally true.
“So, change it now,” I said, leaning over his shoulder, “quick!”
“I’m working on it,” he said pounding the keyboard hard enough to rattle the empty can of Red Bull on the desk. The screen changed as a swarm of text and numbers appeared in the editor. “Okay, here’s the code—where do I go?”
I grabbed Jack’s chair, rolling him aside. “I’ll do it. Get on the phone to Burke. Tell him we need more time.”
Any second Sterling could trigger the trap door, and seconds later that message would appear on his screen. The pictures of Sterling’s victims flashed through my mind in a staccato slide show as I scanned the code. I just needed a minute to block out the pop-up message and then force the update onto Sterling’s machine. Messy, but it would work.
I remember every app I ever wrote, and this was no exception. My fingers a blur on the keyboard, I found the message module and started commenting it out. Before I could finish, I heard a distinctive, warbling ringtone. A special ringtone I’d set up on my phone so I’d know I had another funny webcam shot of an intern. Only now it wasn’t going to be an intern and it would be anything but funny. For a second my fingers froze, my mind forming this idea that maybe I hadn’t heard it.
“Did it just happen?” Jack asked from the other side of the desk, phone in hand, shattering my illusion.
I pushed back from the workstation, the knot in my stomach tightening into a wave of nausea. I took out my iPhone. There was a message.
The picture showed what looked like the unfinished basement of an old house. A chair sat empty in front of a concrete wall, floor beams just visible at the top of the frame. In the corner was the get-back-to-work message, along with the IP address and physical location on a map. The app had worked.
But without the changes I’d been frantically working on, the same message I was looking at was also on Sterling’s screen.
“What do we do?” Jack was pale underneath his hairy face, the blueish glow of the monitor making him look like a corpse.
“Is that on mute?” I whispered, pointing at the phone.
“Yes,” said Jack.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes!”
“Then we do nothing.”
“What?” Jack threw his arms up in the air.
“What can we do? The second Sterling touches the computer, the message disappears and no one else will ever know.”
“Are you serious, Will? What about the girl?”
“Get Burke there!” I said, handing over my iPhone with the location.
“What if they can’t get there?”
“Tell them to hurry!”
Burke must have come on the line because Jack started talking very rapidly. I pulled up the livestream console and punched in Sterling’s ID. Online but inactive. Maybe he’d booted up his computer and walked away. A red button turned green, crushing my hopes. He was launching a live feed. My finger hovered over the mouse. I wanted to stand up and walk away, but I couldn’t. I had to get control of this somehow. Time, that’s all I needed.
“Burke says local PD SWAT are on the way,” said Jack. “But it’s going to be a few minutes.”
I clicked the button. The video stream came up. The chair was still empty.
“Is that live?” he said, looking over my shoulder. “Can we hear anything?”
I reached out and turned up the volume on the expensive self-powered external reference speakers I’d bought for every workstation in the office. Not even Facebook had them. All we heard was the sound of a fan running. Perfectly reproduced, but still just background noise.
“See? He’s not even there,” I said, clapping my hands. “If he had the stream on auto-launch, maybe the message was already gone.”
I tried to calm my breathing. I’d been here before, on the edge of disaster, but it always worked out and there was no reason to think this time would be any different. Jack and I stared in silence at the screen. One minute. Two. Ten. We watched the minutes tick off on the clock in the corner of the screen. Where was the damn SWAT team?
Then came a new sound. The low grinding of something being dragged, combined with the shriek of metal on concrete, perfectly clear through the expensive speakers.
A person backed into the frame. A big guy, wearing a golf shirt with sweat stains under the pits. He looked unkempt. Messy. Unclean. My upper lip lifted in disgust. Gross.
The man spun around, stepping back to reveal another chair. Metal. But this one wasn’t empty. I recognized Kate Mason from her pictures. She was bound and gagged, her eyes as wide as golf balls, threatening to burst out of her head. Her chest rose and fell rapidly, taking panicked, shallow breaths. She strained against the rope holding her in place. I recognized the rope as the round, multi-layered type from the climbing gym.
“Tell Burke to hurry up!” I shouted, my voice cracking.
The door opened behind us and a tall, thin man popped his head in. Ace Prior.
“Will, I think you need to look at the news. It’s Japan.” There was a warning tone in his voice, but I didn’t have time for it.
“Not now!” Jack and I thundered in unison. Ace held up his hand and backed out of the door.
Jack went back to the phone, begging Burke to hurry. On-screen, Sterling pulled the empty chair into the frame and sat down in it. He threw his arm around Kate’s shoulders like a brother. No. Too intimate for that. Like a boyfriend. A shiver went down my spine making me shift in my seat.
“SWAT’s one minute out,” said Jack from the desk. “They’re getting into position.”
Bruce Sterling’s dirty face broke into a smile, revealing a mouthful of surprisingly white and perfect teeth. I clenched my jaw, recoiling from the screen. Something about his smile made me want to hurl up that stale green smoothie.
Please hurry, I silently repeated over and over in my head. There was still time. There had to be. SWAT was outside for fuck’s sake. What was taking so long?
Sterling leaned forward into the camera, looking right into the lens. His gaze penetrated my soul from a thousand miles away. He licked his lips and cleared his throat like a predator preparing to feast.
“I’m not distracted,” he said with a wink. “Let’s get back to work.”
Get back to work. The message. He’d seen it! Time was up.
“Tell them to go,” I shouted at Jack. “They’ve got to go now!”
Sterling leaned back into his intimate embrace of Kate.
“So, what do you think, Kate? Are you my opus? My final masterpiece? Why don’t we go ou
t with a crescendo?” he said, his eyes sparkling with excitement.
When he raised his hand again, it held a long, cruel-looking chef’s knife. He leaned in, nuzzling Kate’s pale, unblemished neck, pressing the knife flat to her chest as it rose and fell. I covered my face with my hands but I couldn’t stop myself from peering through my fingers.
“They’re going now,” said Jack. “They’re going in!”
From those stupid, expensive speakers, I heard a distant crash followed by the flat crack of explosions. But with a final flash of the knife it was too late.
“Oh God!” groaned Jack behind me.
I screamed. I know I did, but to this day I can’t remember what it was I screamed. Maybe it was nothing. Maybe it was just a guttural, feral howl that carried more emotion than words. But I know it was loud. I’d made a stupid, rookie, intern-level mistake not double-checking the code and now I watched a young woman let out her final breath in a silent scream. There was blood, so much blood.
The door to Jack’s office opened one more time.
“Will. Jack. You need to see this.” Ace again. He looked upset. Despite his calm demeanor, Ace had a stubborn streak. He was known to sometimes refuse to take no for an answer. By the cross of his arms, this looked to be one of those times.
“Not now,” I gasped. Jack was too busy silently sobbing into his palm to say anything at all.
“Yes, now!” said Ace. “You said Fukushima Semi is right next to the nuclear power plant, right?”
“What?” I couldn’t shift gears to connect to what he was saying.
“There’s been an earthquake in Japan,” he continued, undeterred.
“So what? They happen there all the time.” More explosions and muffled shouting bellowed from the reference speakers as the SWAT team crashed into the room. I reached over and turned the volume down.
“Are you playing video games?” he asked, throwing his hands up in the air.
“No,” I said through clenched teeth.
“Yeah, well this earthquake triggered a tsunami,” Ace continued. “A big one. And it just hit the Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear power plant. The reactor’s in meltdown.”