by Toby Neal
The dog dropped flat, Sphinx-like. Intelligent brown eyes fixed on him, waiting.
“Patrol.”
Anubis bounded up and trotted out of the tech lab the Ghost lived in most of the hours of most of his days. When Anubis was in patrol mode, he couldn’t be petted or spoken to. He had a job to do, one he took seriously.
The Ghost turned back to his computers. He had several monitors ranged in front of him and multiple feeds running. He smiled, thinking of how well his latest project was going. The business more than paid for his lifestyle.
Anubis returned and sat beside him, sleek legs folded like springs. He flipped the dog a treat. “Good boy.”
He knew the route Anubis would have taken: around and through the sprawling apartment with areas for all of the Ghost’s interests: the double reinforced security door and entry foyer, state-of-the-art home gym, movie theater with recliners and surround sound speakers, a comfortable seating area around a coffee table for those rare times he had visitors, a gourmet kitchen, the tech lab, and of course, his bedroom.
A timer went off in the corner of one of his screens, set to remind him he had a rehearsal with the Hawaii Symphony. He got up, stretched powerful arms above his head, rotated his neck and wrists, and fetched his violin case from where it hung on a peg on the wall. He could never bear to be parted from it for long.
Anubis looked mournful, dropping to the floor and resting his head on his paws as the Ghost changed briskly in the walk-in closet in his gigantic bedroom.
“I’ll be back in a few hours, boy.” Securing the last button of his neat dress shirt, tucking it into tailored pants, he checked his appearance in the mirror. People told him he looked like that action hero from recent movies, but he thought he was better looking. He was taller, with an excellent body, and none of the debauchery around the eyes.
He strapped on his ankle rig weapon and picked up the violin case and his keys. Anubis followed him to the door, and the Ghost held his hand out.
“Gimme five.” Anubis raised a paw and touched his hand. He rubbed the dog’s chest briefly, then, snapped his fingers. “Patrol.”
Anubis bounded away. He’d be in guard mode until the Ghost returned. The Ghost undid his various security measures with a button on his phone and stepped reluctantly out of his fortress into the night.
Chapter Four
Sophie sat down at her computer bay at the FBI offices the next morning and activated her clone rigs. While they whirred into life, she sipped a strong cup of Thai tea from her Thermos mug. The tea was sweet with honey and black as she could make it. The faint scent of jasmine rising from it never failed to remind her of her childhood home in Thailand.
They’d had a large family house, built in the traditional wooden style on raised pier posts with sharply peaked rooflines to handle frequent rain. Inside, the house was all gleaming surfaces of native woods. Inlays, carving and parquet work in shell, coral, and stone-decorated windowsills, and the floors were covered in luxurious matting and carpets.
The main house was divided into a series of mini-dwellings where different constellations of her mother’s family lived. She and her parents had lived in one set of rooms on the side of the terrace facing the Ping River. Her grandparents lived in another subset of rooms, and there was a servants’ suite as well.
The house was on a raised knoll, safe from annual flooding even with the monsoons, and Sophie had loved to sit on a bench in the window and watch flat-bottomed boats poling, sailing, or motoring by on the smooth, fecund, jade-green water.
The family spent time together in the central terrace in the middle of the house. The raised courtyard-like platform was built around the trunk of a huge magnolia tree that provided shade. Chairs, benches, and toys made the terrace a great place to play with her aunt Malee’s children, who shared a nearby suite of rooms.
That early time in her life couldn’t be more different from her current urban, high tech, isolated life. But her computers were all the company she wanted or needed, she told herself firmly, looking at the pile of hard drives on her work station awaiting her attention.
Ken Yamada, crisp in FBI gray, strode through the pneumatic doors of the lab and over to her bay. “Welcome back, Sophie. We have a meeting with Waxman to kick off the day.”
“What about?” Sophie glanced at Yamada, alert.
“Reviewing where we are on the kidnap case. We’re still treating the case as though this situation is part of a bigger network as the tip-off email indicated, but so far Gundersohn and I aren’t finding anything to support that.”
“Okay. I’ll be there shortly.” Sophie wanted to check her query caches before the meeting.
“Make it quick.” He turned and left with his graceful stride.
Sophie turned back to her computers and opened up DAVID.
She pulled up her bank of keywords. She’d set DAVID to keep up its roaming monitoring of the words simultaneous, murder, killing, confession, accusation, shooting, and disclosure. She didn’t remember why she’d thrown simultaneous in there. It stood out from the rest of the keywords like the anomaly it was. And yet, including it had shaken out patterns no one would have put together otherwise.
DAVID had also answered her query about the probability of the three cases having a commonality: 64%.
Not as high as she’d expected, but still a likelihood. Now if she could only figure out what that commonality was. She wished she had more time to come up with something useful for the meeting, but in checking her trace programs, she hadn’t anything to bring to the table except that her kidnapping case was “probably” 64% related to some other interesting cases that DAVID had brought up.
Only she wasn’t supposed to be using DAVID.
Sophie sipped the tea, shutting her eyes. Something had tipped the gangsters off that they were being double-crossed, and they had acted on that information. Someone had done the same with the corrupt stockbrokers. They’d been manipulated into outing each other somehow, as had Anna’s kidnappers.
But how?
She wasn’t going to know until she found out how they’d been communicated with, and how they were all connected to each other. She didn’t have enough in the cache to mount a real investigation to take to Waxman yet, but this situation would certainly qualify as an FBI case if she could find those answers, crossing state lines and even crime genres as it did.
She set DAVID to searching for commonalities between the disparate cases. All this took time, because DAVID could work only with the parameters it had been given, which meant that she had to pause, consider, and look for databases to search and variables to enter.
Sophie plugged the write blockers into the new pile of hard drives from other cases. She would have to work on all this and check on what DAVID had collected on Assan Ang after the meeting.
A few minutes later, Sophie slid into her chair next to Waxman in the conference room. The meeting was underway, but the SAC acknowledged her with a nod. Ken Yamada and Gundersohn sat across from her.
“We’re doing a recap of the kidnapping case so far.”
“Yes, sir.”
“How is your injury?”
“Just a bruise, sir, and I’ve had plenty of those.”
“Excellent. Ken, would you put up notes for us on the whiteboard.”
Ken stood and straightened his lapels, uncapping a pen. “Initially we focused on evidence collection at the scene and tracking the lessee of the apartment where the kidnapping was staged. Through interviewing the building manager, we determined that the apartment had been rented on a month-to-month basis with cash. The whole building is owned by a corporation, Takeda Industries. A real estate company manages the units.”
“We are still operating under the assumption that the tipster who emailed this kidnapping in is telling the truth, that there’s a network of professional kidnappers,” Gundersohn said. “Which is going to guide our decisions to probe deeper than just the suspects that died at the scene.”
�
�Speaking of, it would have been nice for you all to leave at least one of them alive so we could interview him.” Waxman smiled, a humorless twitch of the mouth.
“Couldn’t be helped,” Gundersohn rumbled. Sophie was glad he’d chimed in on that. Next to Waxman, Gundersohn was the most senior agent of the Honolulu team and Waxman had never questioned his judgment that Sophie was aware of.
“Well, the other great thing would be to have a lead on this mysterious tipster, or even what set the kidnappers off in the first place. Agent Ang, got anything for us?”
“I’m afraid not, sir.” Sophie fiddled with the controls on the monitor that marked her seat at the table. Crime scene photos of the dead kidnappers filled the screen, sprawled in the graceless poses of the unexpectedly dead. “I’ve explained to the team before about source information concealment in online tracking. Whoever sent us the tipster email knew what he was doing. I also extracted any relevant information I could find off the kidnappers’ phones and identified that they received simultaneous text messages, telling each of them that they’d been betrayed, and that others had been paid off. I did retrieve the source number of that text message off the phones, but it led back to a burner.”
“What I wonder is: who sent those kidnappers text messages at the same time? And who’s our anonymous tipster?” Ken said.
“Do you think it could be the same person?” Waxman asked.
“But how would the tipster, who knew about this operation somehow, maybe through a connection to the family or some other way—how would that person have the kidnappers’ numbers?” Sophie said. She was thinking of the coincidental cases—a connection she hadn’t narrowed down yet, and couldn’t disclose anyway. “Maybe someone monitoring the situation is the tipster,” she said, thinking aloud.
“But even if he were, one presumes he notified us out of an altruistic motive to save the child. Why would he then endanger that child by sending those text messages to the kidnappers? If you hadn’t been exactly where you were and thought of a quick way to rescue her, Anna Addams would be toast right now,” Ken said.
“I know. It doesn’t make sense.” Sophie inclined her head.
“The ransom drop wasn’t completed, so we have no further leads than the bodies and the evidence in the apartment,” Waxman said, rolling a pen between his fingers.
“If I may, I’d like permission to go see the victim’s family whenever someone from the team is going out to interview them.” Anna’s face had been on Sophie’s mind more than she wanted to admit. She wanted to see how the little girl was doing, and return the rabbit to her.
“I’m going out to the victim’s house today.” Ken was making notes in a column of Tracking Leads. So far there wasn’t much in the column. “I’ll let you know when I go. Gundersohn is meeting with the medical examiner to go over the bodies of the kidnappers and see if they tell us anything, but we don’t expect much since we know how they died.”
“What about the trace in the apartment? Anything there?” Waxman had a line between his brows.
“Nothing that doesn’t go back to the three kidnappers,” Gundersohn said. “But we’ve found their prints in the system, so after the ME’s and home visit, Ken and I plan to visit their addresses.”
“Let me know if you need any help with that,” Sophie said.
“The prints of the deceased are loaded into the case file already,” Gundersohn told her. “They had false identification with them but the prints came back to solid IDs in the system. Career criminals, all three, with sheets ranging from breaking and entering to armed robbery. None of them busted for kidnapping before, but that doesn’t mean they haven’t done it before.”
“So to conclude, there’s no indication that this particular kidnapping is part of a larger network.” Ken capped the dry erase marker with an air of finality.
“Let’s check in tomorrow and see where we are then.” Waxman retracted the screens with the press of a button. “Dismissed.”
Chapter Five
Sophie put on her headphones and, to the opening strains of Beethoven, organized herself by making a checklist in one of her apps.
Done with that, and waiting on notification from Ken to go visit Anna and her family, she took a minute to check the cache for what DAVID had collected on Assan Ang.
Sophie read the news articles in Chinese, just to keep from getting rusty in her third language. There was a lot of information about his high profile life in Hong Kong, including a wedding announcement. His new bride looked tiny and way too young, and Sophie stifled a stab of compassion as she looked at the grainy black and white image of the two standing stiffly.
She discovered that Ang had regular shipments of “agricultural products” shipped to Europe and the U.S., even Hawaii, from Thailand. It might be worth a call to the DEA to see if anyone had checked the contents of those shipments, but she needed something hard if she was going to make a move against him.
She went back to the query in DAVID looking for a common denominator among the three “simultaneous” cases, and frowned as she saw a name pop up: Security Solutions.
She opened a file and began shunting information into it about the company. It appeared to be a multi-pronged agency that offered anything a client wanted from round-the-clock guards to Internet security for their data systems. Scrolling through the Meet our Staff column, she paused her mouse over a familiar face.
Lee Chan. She knew that face, that name. The smiling young tech had gone to programming classes with her in Hong Kong. She remembered his eager, awkward manner. It was nice to see he’d found a good job as Vice President of Tech Operations.
What was the connection between this company and her kidnapping case? She narrowed the search query parameters in DAVID. Once she was able to introduce that bit of information to the team, she could broaden the investigation to include that company without disclosing her use of DAVID. It was worth a call to her former classmate to try fishing for a little more.
She hit the phone feature on her headphones and asked to be put through to Chan.
“This is Lee Chan.” His voice still sounded young and eager.
“Lee! Hello. This is Sophie. Sophie Ang, from Hong Kong.”
A pause. “Sophie! How nice to hear from you. Are you in the United States?”
“Yes, right here in Honolulu. I found you on the staff listing for Security Solutions. I thought I’d reach out and say hi.”
“Well, I’m so glad you did. Um—is there something I can help you with?” Chan must have run through his mental repertoire of why she could be calling and come up with how little they had in common.
“Yes, as a matter of fact.” She fiddled with her mouse. Sophie wasn’t glib, so she was afraid she sounded a little heavy-handed as she said, “I’m thinking about looking for a new job. I’ve heard good things about Security Solutions. What kind of company are they to work for?”
“They’re great.” There was no mistaking the enthusiasm in Lee’s voice. “Management is innovative, the monitoring software we’re developing is state of the art, and we get stock options. Don’t have any openings right now, but I’ll keep you in mind if we are hiring any new techs. Got a number for me?”
“Great.” Sophie gave him her personal cell number, wondering when she was going to have to disclose that she was with the Bureau. “Any downsides?”
“I’ve been with them four years. They’re expanding into Asia, and the top management is gone a lot, so I end up working with a VP I don’t care for much, but I’ve got my own department so it’s not too bad. What are you doing these days?”
“Oh, thanks so much. I just wanted to see if it was worth putting in an application,” Sophie said. “Keep me in mind!” She hung up with a cheerful goodbye.
Sophie stood beside Ken on the wide, bluestone lava steps of the island style mansion where the Addams family lived in the upscale subdivision of Kohala. She hadn’t had time to go home to get the rabbit.
Anna’s mother, Belle Addam
s, opened the door. Sophie had reviewed the file on the family prior to the visit because she hadn’t remembered the parents’ names in the welter of emotion upon meeting them at the hospital. They held up their cred wallets. Belle’s wide blue eyes went straight to Sophie’s face.
“Agent Ang! I’m so glad you’re here. Anna is constantly asking for you.”
“She is?” Sophie smiled. “I’ve been wondering how she’s doing.”
“Please, come in.” Belle made a gracious gesture. They went into a sunken living area with glass sliders that overlooked a lush backyard with a pool. “She’s actually at an appointment with her counselor right now. Dr. Souza. She’s an expert in childhood trauma work. We’re seeing Anna come out of her shell more each day.” They sat on soft leather couches with Belle facing them. “Her father took her to the appointment,” Belle said. “We’re taking turns because she’s going every day.”
“That’s good.” Disappointment weighted Sophie’s stomach that she wasn’t going to see the little girl, but that made a personal visit to bring the rabbit back doubly important.
Ken cleared his throat. “We have some follow-up questions because, even though the kidnappers are deceased, we need to find out how they targeted your family. Do you mind if I tape this interview?”
“Of course not. Ask me anything. I’m just so glad you did what you did.” Belle smiled at Sophie. “Anna thinks you are her guardian angel.”
“Just doing my job.” Sophie lowered her eyes in embarrassment. “I’m lucky I was in a position to act quickly.”
“Well, speaking of that. We wouldn’t have known your daughter had been kidnapped if a tipster hadn’t emailed the FBI. Why didn’t you report the kidnapping?”
“A tipster told you?” Belle’s eyes grew wide. She addressed Ken this time. “I bet that ‘tipster’ was Charlie, my husband. We weren’t supposed to communicate at all with law enforcement. When we first gave our statements to you and your partner, we told you this. They used one of those voice distorters to call us, and sent a snippet of Anna’s hair and her nightgown, threatening more pieces if we didn’t wire the ransom payment into a numbered bank account.” She blinked rapidly at the memory. “Anyway, I never would have allowed Charlie to take that kind of chance, but he must have decided to tip you off anyway. I’ll kill him when he gets home.”
