by Toby Neal
“Secondary cam installed and operational. Two unsubs in exterior room, armed,” Sophie whispered.
“Roger that. Return to base when camera secure.”
Sophie opened the black tool backpack she’d carried in for the operation. Inside were a battery-operated cutting saw, pliers, and the camera equipment’s plastic case. She stowed the drill in the backpack and glanced at the two open windows of the video feed, now streaming wirelessly to the surveillance van parked outside the apartment building.
The little girl rolled over, looking at the ceiling, the rabbit clutched in her arms.
“Mama,” she whispered. “Mama.” Her eyes were black holes in the low-resolution image. Tears shone on her cheeks. Sophie felt something painful tug at her as she read the girl’s lips. She endured a flash of unwanted memory.
Something was happening in the other video feed.
Both men had picked up their phones and were reading what looked like a text message. Sophie saw them look up at each other, and through the floor beneath her, voices rumbled to accompany her lip reading.
“The FBI is onto us. You ratted us out!”
One of the men leapt to his feet.
“No, you did!” the other one yelled. “You even got the payoff!”
Sophie whirled and grabbed the saw out of the tool backpack. She ran back to the hole directly above the child even as her earbud crackled with orders for the rescue team. “Move, move, move!”
Sophie flipped on the saw, set at top speed, yanked off the vacuum piece that suctioned out the dust. She brought the chainsaw-like tool down, whining like a dentist’s drill. The saw bit into the wood, tearing though it like an electric bread knife through dinner rolls. She hauled the saw up out of the hole, threw it out at another angle, and drew it toward the end of the last cut.
The girl only had moments.
Sophie made the third cut of a triangle as the room below echoed with yelling, then the deafening bam-bam-bam of the kidnappers firing on each other.
Sophie leapt to her feet, threw aside the saw, and, hoping like hell the child had the sense to get out from under the hole appearing in her ceiling, she leapt with both feet and all her weight onto the rough triangle she’d made.
The fall was short and hard and she landed facing the closet door as she’d planned, knees bent to absorb the landing, the mattress taking some of the shock.
She hadn’t landed on the child. That was all she cared about as a tumult of wood, drywall and dust followed her down. She drew her weapon, and the closet door opened.
Sophie fired at the dark silhouette in the doorway. She fired until the shape fell backward out of sight, and then she spun to find the girl.
Anna Marie Addams had folded herself into the corner of the closet and her rabbit was tight against her chest. She lifted her head, eyes huge. Sophie squatted down, touched Anna’s hair and whispered softly, “Don’t look. You’re safe now. But don’t look. And put your fingers in your ears.”
Anna obeyed, putting her head down over the rabbit and her hands over her ears. Sophie turned and faced the door, blocking the girl with her body.
“Package is secure,” she said into the comm.
Her earbud crackled. “Roger that. Breaching the apartment.”
Sophie felt Anna shudder with terror, pressed against the back of her legs, as the door cannon boomed in the exterior of the apartment.
This time the doorway filled with nothing but a man’s arm, firing into the closet. Sophie fired back, but her breath was stolen by a blow to the chest that knocked her back against the child and the wall.
Sophie felt Anna squirming beneath her. She couldn’t speak, couldn’t breathe, and an endless long moment passed as black spots filled her vision and her hands scrabbled for the Velcro closures of the vest. Then hands lifted her off of the child, dragged her over the bodies in the doorway, and ripped open her Kevlar vest.
Sophie’s diaphragm finally started working and she dragged in a breath. Her squad commander, Agent Gundersohn, leaned down into her face. “You’re okay, Agent Ang. The vest caught the round.”
“Demon spawn of a pox-ridden sailor,” she cursed in Thai, her voice a thin wheeze.
“What?” Gundersohn cupped his ear.
In the closet, Anna was screaming.
Sophie hauled herself to her feet. Her ears rang from the gunshots in the enclosed space. Her ankle buckled when she stood and it hurt like hell to breathe—but Anna was screaming. She stumbled back into the closet, pushed her way through the two team members trying to calm the girl, and dropped to her knees in front of the child.
Anna’s head was down and her hands were still over her ears. A high-pitched cry ululated from her tiny body. Sophie put her hand on the child’s head and leaned close, into the screaming.
“Hush, you’re safe now. They’re gone.”
A second later the shrieking stopped. The rigid little body uncurled. The small white arms reached out. Sophie stood up with the child in her arms.
“Don’t look,” Sophie whispered.
Anna pressed her wet face into Sophie’s neck and shut her eyes, clinging like a baby monkey with her arms and legs. Sophie carried the child past the two sprawled bodies in the doorway, past the pizza containers and fallen beer cans and the man with his throat ripped open by bullets, leaving arterial spray across the couch. Past the black-clad Hostage Rescue Team members in their FBI-emblazoned Kevlar. Down the hall and a flight of stairs, through the push-handled exit, across the foyer of the building, out the glass front door, onto the sidewalk, and into the sunshine.
The Information Technology Lab was cool and quiet, the light dim, the carpet sound canceling. The hiss of air conditioning and the low hum of computers at work were welcome relief after the chaos of the afternoon. Sophie opened the tool backpack and took out each item, wiping it down, replacing it carefully. She wrapped the cords, stowing each device in its compartment, clean and tidy.
Hours earlier, Sophie had ridden in an ambulance with Anna to be checked out at the hospital and have her own injuries treated. The child would not let go of her. The trip had been emotionally harrowing, as was the scene when the girl’s parents burst into the cubicle in the emergency room.
The girl’s mother swept Anna off Sophie’s lap and into her arms. Tears flowed as the father joined their hug, but when Sophie tried to get up and quietly leave, Anna reached out and grabbed her arm. “No. Don’t go.”
“I have to. Your mama and daddy are here now.” Sophie gently peeled the little fingers off.
“Here. You need Bun-Bun to take care of you.” Anna thrust the stuffed rabbit, damp with snot and tears, into Sophie’s arms.
The woman raised brimming eyes to Sophie. “Thank you for saving our daughter’s life.”
Sophie had walked out with the rabbit tucked under her arm, battered but feeling good. Done cleaning and stowing her equipment and debriefing completed, Sophie got into the pearl-colored Lexus SUV her father had given her upon graduation from the FBI and went home, protocol after an injurious shooting incident.
The penthouse apartment she lived in belonged to her ambassador father, who was threatening his long-planned Hawaii retirement any day now. She entered her elegant building’s elevators from the parking lot, and as the doors shut, she realized she was tired. She was both physically and emotionally sore, worse even than after one of her mixed martial arts fights.
Maybe it wasn’t such a bad thing that Special Agent in Charge Waxman had sent her home. She’d hooked the kidnappers’ phones up to a write blocker extraction device that copied their contents for easy review on another computer, and the results would be available for her to work on tonight at her home computer lab, a clone of her FBI workspace.
She heard the patter of Ginger’s toenails inside the red lacquered door as she unlocked it. The lab bounded into the hall the minute the door was opened. In spite of two rounds of obedience school, Ginger continued to be impulsive and embarrassingly affectionate. As
much trouble as the dog was, the Lab’s joyful enthusiasm was a balm to her soul.
Sophie grabbed Ginger’s leash off a hook by the door as the big dog lashed her legs with a happy tail. Sophie had a pet service walk the dog every day around noon, but Ginger still acted like they’d been parted for years anytime Sophie returned.
They walked down the cooling sidewalk in the rich blue of evening in Honolulu. The moist, plumeria-scented air touched Sophie like a gentle hand, and vivid orange clouds massed in the darkening sky of sunset between the high-rises. She felt the swing of her stride loosening tight, hurt muscles. Exercise had always been the way out of pain for her.
Fellow pedestrians smiled at Ginger or petted the dog as they passed. Being a dog owner had changed Sophie’s life. She felt like a real part of her neighborhood. She’d hardly noticed the colorful section of Honolulu she’d lived in before she’d adopted Ginger from the Humane Society. Now she knew every fire hydrant and strip of grass for blocks around her building, and all the people who liked dogs: old Mr. Arakawa at the corner store who wanted to pet Ginger daily, Missy Kaina who ran the coffee shop and saved bones for Ginger, and the twin Vietnamese toddlers who belonged to the woman who ran the nail salon and pasted their identical faces against the glass door in rapture as Ginger passed by.
Back at her apartment, Sophie fed the dog and freshened the water bowl before stripping off her clothes and dropping them straight into the washer along with the filthy stuffed rabbit. She padded naked across the burnished teak floors of the immaculate space, enjoying the view through massive seamless windows. The moon gleamed a silver path over the burnished black sea, gilding the iconic silhouette of Diamond Head in the distance.
After her shower, wrapped in a dragon-embroidered silk robe that her aunt had sent her from Thailand, she sat down at her home office station, a networked duplicate of her FBI work bay, ringed in three monitors.
Sophie’s computer friends were waiting. The one she’d named Amara was currently sifting through the copied hard drive of a laptop that had been brought in for evidence, Janjai was running a write-blocker from another computer, and Ying, with the most powerful processor, was secretly running an off-the-books copy of her Data Analysis Victim Information Database, DAVID.
DAVID was supposed to be locked up in the Bureau vault under technical review, awaiting approval to be used. She’d built the program herself here in her home lab, used it on a few cases and, when she’d had to disclose it, the Bureau confiscated the program.
But not before she made her own copy.
DAVID was just too good to be mothballed forever due to concerns about consent and confidentiality that were unlikely to be resolved. Built off the FBI’s Violent Criminal Apprehension Program, DAVID went one better than ViCAP. The program was able to burrow through mountains of online data and local law enforcement firewalls to look for commonalities and keywords, detecting crime patterns nationwide. Using a confidence algorithm, DAVID developed probability ratios, an invaluable tool assisting Sophie in narrowing down variables on a case.
Sophie turned on the three computers that matched her rigs at work in exact configuration with an electronic key fob she’d developed. As the rigs hummed into life, she reflected on the barren months she’d spent trying to comply with SAC Waxman’s dictum that she not work on FBI business anywhere but in the office due to security concerns.
That dry period had led to her getting Ginger, a decision she couldn’t regret even as the dog padded in, belched, and swiped Sophie’s leg with a raspy tongue before flopping at her feet under the desk. She’d also discovered her love of hike-running the gorgeous trails of Oahu, and she couldn’t regret that either. But in the end she’d caved in to her compulsion to be online working cases at any hour of the day or night.
The security issue was a real one, so Sophie had turned her skills to developing an encryption for her rigs with so many layers to it that she was almost ready to submit it to one of the hacker festivals as a challenge—but like her mixed martial arts fighting, as long as she was with the FBI she couldn’t draw attention to herself with public displays.
She pulled up the kidnappers’ phones’ content list and ran a simple comparison program that isolated the phone numbers the phones had in common on their contacts list. Following that, she input the text messages’ content and crosschecked senders.
The fatal text message the kidnappers had received had originated at the same number. Someone had set them up against each other. She now had a number for that unknown caller. She put on her headphones, logged into her own virtual private network to mask her location and IP address, input the number, and dialed.
The phone rang and rang. No voicemail. She ran a location algorithm but it came back User Unknown. “Probably a burner,” she muttered.
It was time to put DAVID to work. She switched to Ying and checked in with DAVID’s monitoring subprogram, looking for trends. Months ago, she’d input a variety of law enforcement and news agencies and set them to be monitored with keywords. These were running constantly in the background via DAVID. When a statistical probability trend was tripped, the information landed in an ‘attention cache’ for her review, DAVID’s terminology for collection of query data.
She checked the cache now, scanning through a series of probability ratios on crimes that DAVID had matched to perpetrators with known modi operandi from the ViCAP database. She routed these to appropriate agents in their respective states. Her FBI colleagues across the U.S. had come to count on this data sifting from Sophie, which she had explained as a simple subroutine that operated off keywords.
DAVID was never mentioned, and if some suspected Sophie was still using the rogue program, no one checked too closely. Her intel was too valuable to be dismissed.
A red alert icon pulsed next to a probability ratio in the cache box set to Honolulu, keyword “simultaneous.”
She frowned, and clicked on the alert. Her kidnapping bust was listed already. The bare bones of her case as her SAC had entered it popped up, but DAVID was able to compare and analyze only information that had been inputted, and hers was too fresh for much to be available. However, a second case was listed in the cache. DAVID had discovered another trend: rival gang leaders in Hawaii were murdering each other at a statistically unlikely rate.
“What does that mean?” Sophie leaned forward as she pulled up the threads of the news items that had tripped the alert. She scanned the articles.
Two rival gang leaders, one from the Tong Triad and one from the Boyz, had shot each other alone in an alley in Waikiki. No witnesses, and no other gang members involved. Similar occurrences had happened on the Big Island, in Kona and Hilo. A total of six gang members had canceled each other out.
Sophie sat back, giving her eyes a rest by focusing them on the view of the city’s sparkling lights seen through the nearby window.
The gangs would be scrambling to reorganize themselves. This provided an opportunity for both law enforcement and rivals to pick off the groups that weren’t able to replace their leaders.
Her phone rang. FRANCIS SMITHSON appeared in the ID window.
“Hello, Dad.”
“Sophie.” Her father had a resonant, Morgan Freeman-like voice. The sound of him saying her name summoned him immediately in her mind’s eye: his strong-featured brown face, a little creased with age but still handsome, silver wings developing over his ears in black hair cropped as short as hers.
“Nice to hear your voice. What’s new in your world, Dad?” He’d always wanted her to call him the American name for father even when her mother had objected early on. Remembering the constant frosty atmosphere of her parents’ silent warfare growing up, she was glad they’d finally divorced when she was at boarding school in her teens.
“I’m coming for a visit next month. Hope you can fit me into the apartment.”
Sophie smiled. “That would be wonderful! And of course, your bedroom always awaits. This is your place, not mine.”
�
��Well.” He harrumphed. It was an old argument. She still sent him a monthly rent check, which he then stuck in a pile, un-cashed, and returned to her on his visits. “I’ve put my retirement papers in. So we are going to be roommates, one way or another.”
“I look forward to it, but I’ll believe it when I see it.” He’d been threatening to retire for years, but kept getting sucked in by the latest drama of his ambassador job. Currently he was stationed in what he called “that hotbed of iniquity,” Washington, D.C.
“How’s the hound?” Her father had been surprised when Sophie brought Ginger home from the Humane Society, but had fallen in love with the Lab when he’d met her on his last visit.
Sophie looked down. Ginger looked up, eyes liquid with adoration, tongue hanging. “She’s fine. It’ll be great for you to take her out during the day when you’re here. She’ll love that.”
“So. I have news about your mother.”
“Oh?” Sophie frowned, her eyes on Ying’s screen. She had DAVID open and working now, burrowing into the actual case files on the gang murders—hence the confidentiality concerns of the Bureau and other law enforcement agencies. Her screen filled with gory crime scene photos from the Honolulu murder.
The Triad leader had fallen in the gutter, his bloody head propped up by the curb at a strange angle. The Boyz leader, in a characteristic black shirt with a red bandanna, had fallen face down. A blood pool spread beneath him.
“She’s not feeling well.”
“Not feeling well” was code for Sophie’s mother’s depression, sometimes so bad she wouldn’t get out of bed for days at a time.
“She’s often not feeling well. And I didn’t know you two were talking.” Pim Wat Smithson was an elfin beauty. To see Sophie’s tall, muscular black father beside her petite, exquisite Thai mother was to see two completely different examples of humanity, not just in looks, but in temperament. Sophie knew she was their combined DNA in every way: similar in build and intelligence to her father, but with her mother’s facial features, golden skin, and tendency to depression.
