Authors: Sandra Brown
“Nicholas is an outside consultant,” Jeff told them both. “The Bureau uses him for, uh, special incidents.”
“I’ve heard your name,” Bristol said to me as we shook hands. “One of your cases is textbook at Quantico.”
Beth rolled her eyes, turning back to the screens. Something I couldn’t quite decipher played across her face as she pretended to ignore me completely.
The tension in the air between us was hard to miss. She was probably struggling with the urge to leap over the cubicle and have her way with me.
As the song says, that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.
“We’ve narrowed the video feed to the city, but no farther,” she said, all business. “Running through a tri-proxy, and from there it’s random. The Vesuvius, Buckingham’s and Altair’s, all three hotels offer free wireless. Then it all rotates again. It hasn’t landed long enough to grab it.”
A crude map of Las Vegas came on-screen. A red line kept moving, breaking off and starting over, an electronic Mobius strip.
On the left monitor a photograph came up on-screen, a posed school photo.
“The victim?” I asked.
“She and her parents came through the city yesterday, on the way to visit grandparents. As near as we can tell, the abduction occurred this morning, around 2:00 a.m.,” Beth said.
The child’s face rang a bell, but I couldn’t quite place it.
“Thirty minutes ago, this showed up on the internet,” she said.
I looked at the screen.
The little girl was in a Winnie the Pooh sleeper, sitting in a chair. The video quality was excellent. A wide leather strap held her in place.
She looked so tiny, so terrified.
The focus shifted to reveal an adult, height indeterminate, dark pants, white dress shirt and a full-face Frankenstein monster mask.
“Step right up!” he crowed as the features of the mask remained frozen. His voice was distorted but understandable.
“For auction tonight,” he continued. “One fresh young thing, guaranteed! Opening bid is forty million dollars! Think about it,” the creature went on. “For a mere forty million, you can own everything! Absolutely everything! You control it all, baby, all! If any police are watching this, don’t waste time trying to get a voiceprint. You won’t get a thing.”
“The website didn’t exist until half an hour ago,” Beth said. “The video plays, the address changes. Plays again, another change.”
An agent yelled into the room, “It’s happening!”
A television screen in the conference room showed an empty conference room waiting for people to arrive. “Nicholas—” Jeff turned to me “—this is closed circuit, direct link from Washington, eyes only. You understand?”
I nodded. On the screen, a distinguished-looking man came into the room, his eyes raw from lack of sleep. Or from crying.
I realized why I had almost recognized her, and glanced over at Jeff.
He nodded and whispered, “His granddaughter.”
A voice came over the speakers. “Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States.”
* * *
“‘Any attempt to invoke the Twenty-Fifth Amendment, she dies,’” the President read from a sheet of paper in front of him. “‘Any anything, she dies.’”
“What’s the Twenty-Fifth Amendment?” someone in the back asked.
“The President has the ability to remove himself from office if he deems it necessary,” Beth explained.
Jeff stepped closer to me, his voice dropping even lower than before. “Her name is Angela Frazell.” Jerking his head at the screen, he continued. “His daughter married some big-shot financier.”
“I remember now. It was a big society wedding, lots of press. What about the Secret Service?” I asked.
“Three agents assigned to the family are dead. The Service is looking to drink this guy’s blood when they get their hands on him.”
“What’s he trying to do?” I asked, jerking my thumb toward the other monitor.
“He’s selling her,” Jeff told me. “To the highest bidder.”
At my puzzled look, he continued. “This isn’t a child-porn thing,” he said, referring to past incidents we’d worked on together. “He’s gotten bids from al Qaeda, Red Brigade, Afghanistan and Beirut.”
“Terrific.” A terrorist group holding the president’s granddaughter hostage.
“I spoke with the director personally—she classed it Code Black. You were my first phone call.”
Code Black
was Bureau slang for
Gloves Off
. It was a major step for an organization that prided itself on following the rules.
“Thanks. I think.”
“We’re good…you know that. You helped put together the Cyber Crime Division at Quantico,” Jeff said. “But this is beyond words.”
Agent Bristol was in front of a computer screen. “We’ve got an email, guys,” he said as he clicked the mouse before anyone could stop him. “It’s headed ‘If You Think I’m Kidding.’”
Bristol turned pale, his eyes bulging. Making an odd noise in the back of his throat, he flew out of his chair and sprinted for the men’s room.
No one said a word.
I’ve done a few stupid things in my day. According to Beth, doing stupid things is a specialty of mine.
In the interest of maintaining my status as Idiot of the Year, I leaned over and looked at the screen.
* * *
This is evidence, I told myself, using it as a mantra. This is data, nothing more. Only evidence. This is just evidence.
I jammed my hands into my pockets so no one would see them trembling.
The little girl in the photo wasn’t Angela.
She’d been someone, though.
Beth slid into the seat Bristol had vacated so abruptly, smothering her own shock.
“Print it out,” I said. “Headers, route info, everything. Get one of the tech guys in here and freeze that computer.” I was aware she knew procedure, but I couldn’t seem to stop talking.
She glanced at Jeff. “For the interim,” he said softly, covering his own emotions, “in this area, if it comes from Nicholas, it comes from Almighty God. Okay?”
She nodded, and a couple of mouse clicks later, she handed me the papers.
I took the last page, the one with the photograph on it, and without looking deliberately fed it into a nearby shredder.
I just needed a copy of the email to work from, and had no desire to see that image again in this lifetime.
What was left was:
From: [email protected]
Subject: If You Think I’m Kidding
Date: October 31, 5:25:47 AM PST
Received: from xm 2120.in.gotcha.com
(xm2.in-fec.whodaman.iamyerdaddy.com([218.41])
Bristol came back, looking embarrassed.
No one said a word about what had happened.
“He’s clever,” I said. “It says ‘whitehorehouse’ instead of ‘whitehouse.’”
“Which means?” Beth asked.
“He’s routing all over the place, but skilled enough to do his own headers,” I told her. “He’s making all this up in the original email. By the time it reaches us, it’s so scrambled there’s no telling where it came from.”
“Anything else?”
“He’s having fun, being cute,” I said. “He wants us to know he’s smarter than we are, there’s nothing we can do. His kung fu is better than ours. We can use that against him.”
I headed for a private area. “I need a secure network line,” I told Jeff over my shoulder. “No firewall, total isolation. I need room to move.”
Beth followed me. “You’re on to something.”
“Maybe, but not enough to go into it yet.”
She leaned against a desk, folded her arms and looked at me. Almost as tall as me, stunningly beautiful, cheekbones that could cut diamonds. “Nicholas, right now, I’m willing to listen if you tell me it’s invaders from Mars.”
“How did we get here?” I asked her as I set my case on the table.
“What do you mean?”
“Last time I saw you,” I said, unpacking my laptop, “you were going to be an actress.”
She bit back a laugh. “I was an actress. Two straight-to-video slasher movies. Victim Number Four in the first one, the Unsuspecting Wife in the second.”
“Have to start somewhere.”
“No nudity limited my options,” she said. “I realized it wasn’t for me, so I went back to Virginia, finished law school and applied to the Bureau.”
“No nudity?” I echoed. “I don’t recall you as the shy type.”
Her cheeks reddened. “You were an exception. In a lot of ways.” She stared at me for a moment, and then said, “I transferred to Quantico a year ago. Here I am.”
“Older yet wiser, one assumes.”
She neatly turned the tables. “And you? When did you change your name?”
“The day we signed the papers, I came back for a bit. If your last name’s Bianco and you call Vegas home, people jump to wrong conclusions,” I said as I powered up the computer. “Moved to Houston a while back. I came back this week on vacation.”
“Just happened to be here?”
“Pretty much, yes. Ironic, isn’t it?”
“Are you married?” she asked, ignoring my comment.
“One broken heart per lifetime is sufficient, thank you.”
“Nicholas…”
“I’m sorry, that was out of line,” I said. “Ancient history.”
Silence hung between us for a moment.
“You’ve done well,” she said. “I’m surprised we haven’t crossed paths before.”
“It’s a big Bureau,” I replied, not looking at her. “I’ve had some luck.”
“I’d say better than ‘luck,’” she said. “You’re famous.”
“Damn, I was going for infamous.”
“They talk about you around here like you walk on water. Jeff said you’re one of the best cyberslingers he’s ever known.”
“One of?” I repeated. “Can you imagine that?”
She shook her head slowly. “You haven’t changed a bit.”
I turned to face her. “How about we talk about this over dinner before you go back?”
“Don’t waste your breath, Nicholas,” she said firmly. “We are not getting back together after all this time.”
“Never even occurred to me.” Innocence personified. “Dinner. Nothing more.”
“We’ll see.”
I didn’t look at her as I connected the secure line to the laptop. “He’s hopscotching on their systems and bouncing the signal around on a VWAN.”
“In English?”
“Sorry,” I said, covering both subjects. “Virtual Wide Area Networks communicate over the same line, but each one is a separate and distinct entity.”
“Like that movie last year?” she asked, mentioning a popular film where a glamorously beautiful FBI agent had her life invaded by a serial killer. In the movie, the bad guy controlled her home, car and life via the internet. What I remembered most about that movie was laughing a lot at the technology.
“Sure. Like the BAU has its own G-5 to fly from case to case,” I said, referring to a weekly television series where a team of stunningly attractive “profilers” has a private jet at their immediate disposal.
She laughed. “If we leave the office, we practically hitchhike.”
“Be nice if life worked the way it does in the movies.”
She said nothing for a moment, then, “What are you thinking?”
“Buckingham’s and Altair’s are a few hundred yards apart,” I said, working the keyboard. “The Vesuvius is the point of the triangle. Ask Bristol to work that.”
“Why him?”
“He’s embarrassed.”
“He just became a father,” she said. “I think he’s reevaluating his career choice.” She paused. “You were pretty calm.”
“I’ve seen worse.”
“Worse?”
“How long have you been with the BAU?”
“Two years.”
“Then you know it can be an ugly world out there.”
She didn’t reply directly to that. “Anything else?”
“An IV line of coffee would be good.”
She smiled. “As I said, you haven’t changed one bit. I was going to find some myself. Still take it black?”
“Please.”
I saw her put her hand on Bristol’s shoulder, lean down and speak to him. When she walked away, the color was coming back into his face.
I brought up a program that wasn’t supposed to exist, and launched it. The tracer lines formed on the screen.
Someone shouted from the other room. The video feed was active again.
Angela sat quietly, the fear in her eyes reaching through the screen. The kidnapper was now wearing a full-head Count Dracula mask.
Good, I thought. He’s cocky enough to play with us.
He picked up the microphone again. I got closer to the screen.
No wires.
I turned back to the desk, lost in thought.
“What is that?” Beth asked as she set a cup of coffee on the desk, looking at my screen.
“I call it Piranha.”
“And it does what?”
“Hunts. Like piranha up a river.”
Agent Bristol came into the room, holding a sheet of paper. He handed me a printout. “One of the other guys has been tracing IP addresses and the physical locations,” he said.
I took a quick look at it. “Give all this to SAC Keyes,” I said to him, handing it back, “and get some agents down there. Contact the network admins of those hotels. We’ll need their help. You go with them.”
“Me, sir?”
“You. I want someone I can count on ramrodding this.”
Bristol looked at me for a moment. “Yes, sir.”
“No need to call me
sir,
” I said. “I’m not your boss.”
“I realize that,” he said as he left the room.
His words hung in the air for a moment.
Beth turned to me. “That was nice of you.”
I shrugged it off. “He’s not the first guy who booted over a photo like that. He won’t be the last. The day you stop being sickened is the day to get out.”
“I sent it to Quantico to see if they could identify it,” she said.
The Justice Department keeps a running database of obscene and violent photographs confiscated over the years. If there was a match, they could solve an old case.