Buried Secrets (14 page)

I had to go for the muscle first. The computer guy wasn’t likely to be much of a threat.

Once Mongo was out of the way, I’d find out whatever I could from Gigabyte.

My bare feet were still damp and a little sticky and made a slight sucking noise as I lifted them off the floor. So I approached slowly, tried to minimize the sound.

In a few seconds I was ten feet away from the intruders, hidden behind a column. I inhaled slowly and deeply. Holding the shaver in my right hand and the plug in my left, I pulled my right hand back, stretching out the coiled cord like a slingshot.

Then hurled it, hard, at the side of the bigger man’s head.

It made an audible crack. His hands flew up to protect his face, a second too late. He screamed, tipped back in the chair, and crashed to the floor. I jerked at the cord, and the shaver ricocheted back to me.

Meanwhile the computer guy was scrambling to his feet. But I wanted to make sure the big one stayed down. I launched myself at the guy, landing on top of him, and jammed my right knee into his solar plexus. The wind came out of him. He tried to rear up, flinging his fists at me without much success. He gasped for breath. He did manage to land a few punches on my ears and one particularly hard one on my left jaw, painful but not disabling. I aimed a drive at his face with everything I had. It connected with a wet crunch. I felt something sharp and hard give way.

He screamed, writhed in agony. His nose was broken, maybe a few teeth as well. Blood spattered my face.

In my peripheral vision I noticed that the weedy computer guy had clambered to his feet and was pulling what appeared to be a weapon from his jacket.

During the brief struggle, I’d dropped the electric razor, so I reached for the heavy weighted Scotch-tape dispenser on my desk. In one smooth sharp arc, I hurled it at him. He ducked, and it clipped him on the shoulder, the roll of tape flying out as it thunked to the floor.

A miss, but it gave me a couple of seconds. The weapon in his right hand, I saw now, was a black pistol with a fat oblong barrel. A Taser.

Tasers are meant to incapacitate, not kill, but take my word for it, you don’t want to get zapped with one. Each Taser cartridge shoots out two barbed probes, tethered to the weapon by thin filaments. They send fifty thousand volts and a few amps coursing through your body, paralyzing you, disrupting your central nervous system.

He hunched forward, Taser extended, and took aim like an expert. He was less than fifteen feet from me, which indicated he knew what he was doing. Fired from twenty feet away, the electrical darts spread too far apart to hit the body and make a circuit.

I leaped to one side and something grabbed my ankle, causing me to stumble. It was the beefy guy. His face was a bloody mess. He was groaning and pawing the air, arms swarming, bellowing like a wounded boar.

The thin sallow-faced one smiled at me.

I heard the click of the Taser being armed.

Sweeping the big black Maglite flashlight from the edge of my desk, I swung it at his knees, but he was quick. He dodged just in time. The Maglite missed his kneecaps, struck his legs just below with a satisfying crack. He made an
ooof
sound, his knees buckling, and roared in pain and fury.

I reached up to grab the Taser from his hands, but instead I got hold of the black canvas tool bag on his shoulder. He spun away, aimed the Taser again, and fired.

The pain was unbelievable.

Every single muscle in my body cramped tighter and tighter, something I’d never experienced before and just about impossible to describe. I was no longer in control of my body.

My muscles seemed to seize. My body went rigid as a board, and I toppled to the floor.

By the time I could move, two minutes or so later, both men were gone. Far too late to attempt to give chase, even if I were able to run. Which I certainly wasn’t.

I got up gingerly, forced myself to remain standing, though I wanted only to sink back to the floor. I surveyed the mess in my apartment, my anger building, wondering who had sent the two.

And then I realized they’d been considerate enough to leave some evidence behind.

32.

The SIG was still under the bed.

The Smith & Wesson nine-millimeter was locked away, as a precaution, in case someone found the SIG. Concealed beneath the bluestone tiles of the kitchen was a floor safe. I popped the touch latch to lift one of the tiles, dialed open the safe, found the contents—a lot of cash, various identity documents, some papers, and the pistol—intact.

They hadn’t found it.

They probably hadn’t even looked for it. That wasn’t what they were here for.

I gathered the things the intruders had left behind in their haste to leave, including a black canvas tool bag and my dismantled cable modem. And one thing more: a little white device connected between one of the USB ports on the back of my computer tower and the cable to my keyboard. The color matched exactly. It almost looked like it belonged there.

I’m no computer expert, by any means, but you don’t have to be an auto mechanic to know how to drive a car. This little doohickey was called a keylogger. It contained a miniature USB drive that captured every single keystroke you typed and stored it on a memory chip. Sure, you can grab the same data with a software package. But that’s a whole lot trickier now that most people use antivirus software. Had I not had reason to look for it, I’d never have found it.

Inside the case to my cable modem I found a little black device that I recognized as a flash drive. I had a feeling it didn’t belong there either.

I called Dorothy.

“They knew you were meeting with Marcus,” she said. “And they didn’t think you’d be home.”

“Well, if so, that means they weren’t watching us.”

“You’d have detected physical surveillance, Nick. They’re not stupid.”

“So who are they?”

“I want you to put that keylogger back in the USB drive, okay?” I did.

“Do you know how to open a text editor?”

“I do if you tell me how.”

She did, and I opened a window on my computer and read off a long series of numbers.

Then I took the keylogger out of the USB port and inserted the little device from the cable modem. And repeated the process, reading off more numbers.

“Hang on,” she said.

I waited. The two spots where the Taser prongs had sunk in, on my right shoulder and my left lower back, were still twitching and were starting to get itchy.

I heard keyboard tapping and mumbling and the occasional grunt.

“Huh,” she said.

“Yeah?”

“Oh, now, this is interesting.”

“Okay.”

“The electronic serial numbers you just gave me? That’s law-enforcement-grade equipment. Whoever broke in was working for the U.S. government.”

“Or using government equipment,” I pointed out. “They weren’t necessarily government operatives themselves.”

“Fair enough.”

Though now I had a fairly good idea who might have sent them.

Even before I arrived at the Boston field office of the FBI, Gordon Snyder had figured out who I was. He knew why I wanted to talk with him, and he knew I was working for Marshall Marcus.

Who was the target of a major high-level FBI investigation. And I, as someone employed by Marcus, was probably an accomplice.

Which made me a target too.

Snyder had flat-out told me that the FBI was tapping Marcus’s phones. They were probably monitoring his e-mail as well. Which meant he knew I’d driven up to Manchester. He knew I wasn’t home, that it was safe to send his black-bag boys.

I recalled Diana’s warning:
Watch out for the guy. If he thinks you’re working against
him, against his case, he’ll come gunning for you
.

“Can you pull up the video for my home cameras?” I said. “I want to see how they got in.”

When I moved in, I’d had a security firm put in a couple of high-resolution digital surveillance cameras outside the doors to my loft. Two of them were hidden dummy smoke detectors, and a couple of Misumi ultra-mini snake IP cameras were concealed in dummy air vents. They were all motion-activated and networked into a video server at the office.

How this worked exactly, I had no idea. That wasn’t in my skill set. But the surveillance video was stored on the office network.

She said she’d get back to me. While I waited, I searched the apartment for more equipment, or even just traces, left by Gordon Snyder’s team.

When Dorothy called back, she said, “I’m afraid I don’t have the answer for you.”

“Why not?”

“Take a look at your computer.”

I walked back to my desk and saw what looked like four photographs on my screen, still photos of the stairwells outside the front and back doors to my loft. Each, I saw, was the video feed from a different camera. Beneath each window were date and time and a jumble of other numbers that didn’t seem important.

Somehow she’d put them on my computer remotely.

“How’d you do that?” I said.

“A good magician never reveals her secrets.” The cursor began moving on its own, circling the first two windows. “These first two didn’t get any action, so forget them.” They disappeared. “Now watch.”

The remaining two windows grew bigger so that they now took up most of the monitor.

“They entered your apartment at 8:22 P.M.”

I glanced at my watch. “Okay.”

“So here we are, 8:21 and … thirty seconds.” Both windows advanced a few frames, and suddenly a red starburst appeared in the middle of each one, blooming into a red cloud that obliterated the entire image.

“Laser zapper,” I said.

“Exactly.”

After a minute the picture returned to normal.

Then there was nothing to see but an empty stairwell.

“So we still don’t know how they got in,” I said. “But this tells us something useful.”

“What, they knew how to dazzle the cameras? It’s all over the Internet.”

“No. They knew where the cameras were.”

“Why do you say that?”

“No fumbling around. Quick and efficient. You can’t blind the cameras if you can’t find them. They knew exactly where to look.”

“So?”

“The cameras are concealed,” I said. “One in a smoke detector, and one in an air vent.

The smoke-detector camera isn’t all that original, if you’re familiar with what’s on the market.

But the air-vent one—that’s custom. It’s a fiber-optic camera that’s like a quarter inch thick.

Takes some serious skill to hit that one first time.”

“So what’s your point?”

“They got hold of the schematics. As well as my password.”

“Maybe from the security company that put them in.”

“Possibly. Or maybe from my own files. Right there in the office.”

“Not possible,” she said. “I’d have detected the intrusion, Nick.”

“Maybe.”

“Not maybe,” she said, defensive. “For sure.”

“Put it this way,” I said. “Not only did they know exactly where my cameras are, but they were able to disarm the system. Meaning they knew the code.”

“From your security company.”

“The company doesn’t know my code.”

“Who does?”

“Just me.”

“You don’t keep your code written down anywhere?”

“Just in my personal files at the office,” I said.

“In your file drawers?”

“On my computer. Stored on our server.”

“Oh.”

“You see?” I said.

“Yeah,” she said, and the other line rang. I saw from the caller ID it was Diana.

“Someone’s gotten into the office network.”

“Or else we’ve got a leak,” I said. “Let me take this.”

I clicked over to Diana’s call.

“Nick,” she said, her voice tight. “I just heard from AT&T. I think we’ve found our girl.”

33.

Not until Alexa went away to boarding school did she learn that other kids, normal kids, didn’t have the kind of dreams she did. Others dreamed of flying, like she sometimes did, but they also dreamed about their teeth falling out. They dreamed of getting lost in mazes or realizing, with immense embarrassment, that they were walking around school naked. They all had anxiety dreams about having to take a final exam in a class they’d forgotten to attend.

Not Alexa.

She dreamed over and over about crawling on her belly through an endless network of caves and getting stuck in one of the narrow tunnels, thousands of feet underground. She’d always wake up sweating and trembling.

The thing about phobias, she’d learned, was that once you had one, some small part of your brain was always working to justify its existence. To show you why your phobia made perfect sense.

Wasn’t it logical to be afraid of snakes? Who could argue with that? Why wasn’t it logical to fear germs or spiders or flying in an airplane? You could die any of these ways, right?

It wasn’t like your brain had to work very hard to justify any of these phobias.

Being in an enclosed space was the most deeply terrifying thing she could imagine. She didn’t require logic. She just
knew
.

Like a magpie forever gathering shiny little scraps, her mind collected the most horrifying tales, things she’d read about or heard from friends, stories that proved her fears were legitimate. Things most people barely noticed, she filed away obsessively.

Stories from history books of people who’d fallen ill during the Plague, gone into comas, declared dead. Stories she wished she could unread.

Coffin lids with scratch marks on the inside. Skeletons found with fistfuls of human hair clenched in their bony hands.

She’d never forget reading about the Ohio girl in the late nineteenth century who got sick and her doctor thought she’d died, and for some reason her body was placed in a temporary vault, maybe because the ground was too frozen to bury her, and when they opened the vault in the spring to put the body in the ground, they found that the girl’s hair had been pulled out. And that some of her fingers had been chewed off.

The girl had eaten her own fingers to stay alive.

Her English teacher at Exeter had made them read Poe. It was hard enough just trying to understand the guy’s writing, the strange words she’d never heard of. But his stories—she couldn’t bear to read them. Because he was one of the very few who actually got it. He understood the terror. Her classmates would say things like “That’s one sick dude,” but she knew that Edgar Allan Poe saw the truth. “The Fall of the House of Usher” and “The Cask of Amontillado”—all those stories about people being buried alive—she couldn’t bring herself to finish them. How could anyone?