by Dan Ames
According to records, the house was owned by a shell corporation called H. Cide Enterprises.
The guy was good at mass murder, not so much at stand-up comedy, Mack thought.
He hung back and watched the armed response team in action. They hit the front door, announced themselves, then used a battering ram to knock the door inward.
The team raced inside and Mack heard what deep down he suspected they might find.
Silence.
When the all-clear was given, Mack entered the building.
It was a beautiful brownstone with lovely hardwood floors, immaculately painted trim and wainscoting.
The ceilings were high, the windows large and beautiful, letting in a tremendous amount of light.
It was also completely empty.
No furniture. No people.
Nothing.
Except for two items in the middle of the living room.
The first was a dead man hanging by the neck from an exposed beam. He was dressed like an office worker on casual Friday. Khakis and a dress shirt. He was in his socks with a pair of penny loafers beneath him.
Judging by his face and the odor in the room, he had been dead for at least several days.
The other item sat on the floor next to the dead man, a dozen feet or so from the breathtaking marble fireplace.
A complex system of hard drives. They were all connected and Mack watched the blinking green and yellow lights on a sophisticated display.
Mack’s phone buzzed and he answered as crime scene techs began arriving and taking control of the room.
It was Hopestil Fletcher.
“His name is Terry Piechura,” she said. “Moody tracked him down. He was a hacker turned investor. Very wealthy but with an almost invisible past. All we know right now is that he and a woman named Chloe Jamison were charged as juveniles with a series of escalating crimes and then they both disappeared.
“She’s the Collector,” Mack said without hesitation. “The janitor who snatched Rebecca Spencer was a woman. It’s got to be her. And judging by the setup here–“
He paused.
“Mack?” Fletcher asked.
“How did Moody track him down so fast?” he asked.
“What the hell does that mean?” Fletcher said. “She’s the best we’ve got in cyber crimes. She’s a genius.”
Mack shook his head.
“Have her double-check the trail that led her to this guy. Did any of it recently come online?”
He heard Fletcher sigh.
“What is it, Mack?”
Mack walked away from the room and back out onto the street. “Listen, I’ve tracked these guys all my life. They don’t commit suicide. They just don’t. Sure, there has been a case or two, but ninety-nine percent of the time, they don’t.”
He thought back to some of his cases.
“ They see themselves as victims, forced to kill by other people,” he continued. “There is no guilt. No fear of prison.”
“So you’re saying this is a set-up?” Fletcher said.
As he spoke the words, he suddenly realized how strong his conviction was.
“Yes, it absolutely is.”
FINAL LIQUIDATION
49
Bernard Evans’ hands were shaking he was so excited.
The girl was beautiful. Better and sexier than anything he could have imagined.
“Hello,” he said.
She looked at him, her face set in stone.
He approached her, saw the table in the next room with his favorite bottle of scotch, and some assorted toys, including a riding crop, handcuffs, ball gags, cock rings, butt plugs and nipple clamps.
Evans felt himself getting hard.
He approached the beautiful girl and placed his hand along her cheek.
She looked up at him, her face meek. Her eyes terrified.
She was warm.
And then he slapped her.
It was a quick backhand that rocked the girl’s head and snapped her neck backward.
Evans went to the table and poured himself some scotch.
He was going to take his time with this one.
Get every penny’s worth.
50
Mack was back in Moody’s workspace. There was a big picture of Einstein with the tagline “Think Different” and the Apple logo.
“I’ve got a team rechecking the information that led us to Piechura,” she said. “In the meantime, I’m focusing on finding that girl.”
“Good. I have a feeling both avenues will lead us to her,” Mack said.
“The best way in was through Starkey’s system. From there, it was easy to crack the first layers. But after that, things got quite a bit more complicated.”
Mack pulled a chair up next to Moody’s elaborate workstation.
“We’re crawling the trail,” she said.
“How?” Mack asked.
“It’s too complicated for me to thoroughly explain. Let me put it this way, whoever built this system knew what they were doing. They created millions of dead ends and false paths so that no one could find out where the money ends up. Now, some bright young man years back invented these things called spiders, in cyber form, that do nothing other than scurry along all of these paths, looking for daylight, so to speak. Most spiders would never be able to find their way through this. But since we’re part of the government and we actually employ the best hackers in the world, we don’t have ordinary spiders. We have super spiders.”
“Super spiders,” Mack echoed.
“Yes. There are several species of super spider employed by the FBI. Each breed does something a little bit differently than the others. I mentioned that most of them were designed to chase down blind leads.”
“Yes,” Mack said.
“Well, there is another kind that instead of hunting, is a little bit more of a gatherer.”
“What does it gather?”
“To keep it simple, I’ll call them data points,” Moody explained. “Basically, as the other spiders rule out some of the dead ends, these gatherers then go about throwing a cyber ring around the remaining possibilities and look for shared data, in pattern form. The more points that coincide, the clearer the pattern. In this case, one pattern seems to have become clear.”
“What’s the pattern?”
“Cell phones.”
Mack was surprised. He hadn’t expected something as mundane as cell phones to be a key discovery in an intense cyber hunt.
Moody nodded. “I won’t explain the algorithm because it would take hours, but basically at the same time some of these switchbacks were activated, a corresponding activity almost always followed suit, via cell phones.”
“So who do the phones belong to?”
“It’s not that easy,” Moody said. “They are no longer in service. Probably disposable. But while we can’t say who they were, we can say where.”
She turned to a map and pointed to Colorado.
“Right here.”
It took only a moment to realize that she was pointing to nearly the exact same spot on the map where the bodies had been found.
51
Evans was ready.
He wanted to be patient, but he also knew that he had limited time.
He walked over to the girl who was still sitting on the bed. He grabbed her hair, pulled her face toward him and kissed her as she struggled to pull away from him.
“I’m going to fuck you so many times your pussy will be worn out,” he whispered to her. He licked his lips. She tasted like sugar.
He grabbed her by the throat, pushed her back onto the bed, rolled her over and pulled down her pants.
Evans gasped. Her ass was creamy white, milky like a farm girl.
The girl was flat on her stomach, her arms spread wide over the bed.
Evans unbuckled his pants.
He dropped his pants to the floor, then his underwear. He stroked his dick.
He climbed onto the bed and straddled the girl.<
br />
This was going to be-
Evans felt the girl twist underneath him and he was glad. He liked it better when they fought.
But then he realized the girl was on her side and her arm was coming up from the edge of the bed.
There was something in it.
He felt a stabbing pain in his side and looked down to see a piece of wood buried in his side.
Evans suddenly had trouble breathing.
It was like some giant weight was on his chest.
The girl pushed him off the bed and he landed on the floor, looked up as he saw the girl swing a lamp at his head. It connected.
Then darkness.
52
Mack picked up the phone and got Fletcher on the line.
“What is it?” she said.
“Moody found the trail back to Colorado, near the site where the kids’ bodies were discovered.”
“So what are you thinking?” she said.
“I’m thinking that’s where the killing location is,” he said. “I think people put in orders online, and then arrangements are made for the killing to take place somewhere in Colorado. And that’s where they dispose of the bodies.”
“What do you need?”
“We’ve got a team scrambling from Denver. Who knows what they’re going to find out there.”
“Are you still not buying that suicide?” she asked him.
“Absolutely not. The more I think about it, the more convinced I am that whoever is behind this is way too smart for something like that. I think they knew we were getting close and they made a sacrifice to throw us off the trail.”
“Or maybe it was one of those rare instances where the psychopath finally does kill himself.”
Mack realized she was just playing devil’s advocate.
“No. This isn’t over,” he said.
53
Rebecca was shaking. She couldn’t believe what she was seeing. A guy on the floor surrounded by blood, and now bleeding from the head. His eyes were wide open, too.
Had she killed him?
She didn’t know. But what she did know was that if that woman came back and found the guy dead, well, Rebecca had a pretty good idea of what would happen.
The woman would kill her, no doubt.
This was no political kidnapping with a ransom involved. Rebecca understood that, now.
All along, they had planned to do horrible things to her.
Which meant she had to find a way to get out.
Rebecca tried the door but it was locked, as were all of the windows.
She went back to the dead man on the floor.
His pants were still on the floor, too. She picked them up and dug through the pockets, nothing. Completely empty.
How could that be?
Then she remembered that he had gone into the other room.
Rebecca went to the table where she saw what she instantly understood to be sex toys.
And there, at the edge of the table, was a wallet, some car keys and a phone.
But the phone wasn’t a cell phone, she could tell that. It was a little bigger and heavier.
Her heart was beating a million miles a minute as she picked it up, realized it was off, and powered it on.
It felt like an eternity waiting for the phone to power up. Were there cameras in the cabin? Probably.
She looked around but didn’t see any.
At last the phone lit up and she looked at the display.
It was a touch screen.
But not like one she’d seen before.
Still, she managed to call up the keypad.
She hit 9-1-1 and pressed the phone to her ear.
Surprisingly, she heard a voice on the other end of the line.
GOING OUT OF BUSINESS
54
“We just got a 9-1-1 call from a girl claiming to be Rebecca Spencer,” an agent announced in the middle of the war room.
“Is it her?” Mack asked. “Verification?”
“We don’t know,” the agent said.
Mack looked at Moody. “Does the location match?”
The room fell silent.
“Yes,” Moody said.
Immediately the room descended into a frenzy of activity as the exact location was sent to the SWAT team which had already been scrambled from Denver.
“It’s a remote location,” the agent said. “We’re choppering them in. They should be there in about twenty minutes. We’ll have full audio and video here,” he said pointing to the screen in the war room.
“Tell them to hurry,” Mack said. “And be careful. There may be someone waiting for them.”
55
There was a camera in the cabin.
With a feed that led to a control room in Butterfly’s compound.
The problem was, after Evans had slapped the girl and gone to get a drink, Butterfly had stopped watching.
It wasn’t that she couldn’t watch, far from it. But the murderous rampages had become boring and commonplace to her.
So once she knew that Evans was locked in the cabin with the girl, she didn’t really care what happened. Still, it was part of her job to monitor, and make sure nothing went wrong.
All Butterfly had done was check her encrypted computer for messages from The Owner, then stripped and cleaned her Colt 911.
After that, she went and took a look at the monitor.
It took her a moment to realize what she was seeing. The customer, Bernard Evans, on his back on the cabin floor, surrounded by blood, some sort of long, jagged piece of wood sticking out of his side and a lamp on the floor next to his head.
The girl, standing in the middle of the room with a SAT phone in her hand.
Butterfly felt a brief moment of disbelief, and realized she had made a second mistake. How had Evans gotten a SAT phone past her?
She shook her head, fear beginning to tingle throughout her, and then a vibration ran through her body, followed by a thrumming sound in her ear.
And then she made yet another realization.
Choppers.
56
It wasn’t her capture. Or the interminable time spent in the back of a vehicle. It wasn’t even killing the man. He deserved that. No, years later, when Rebecca looked back at her ordeal, one thing stood out as the most terrifying moment.
The waiting.
She stood in the middle of the cabin, the SAT phone in her hand, the dead man on the floor behind her.
There was no way out. The door was locked and she guessed it could only be opened from the outside with one of the cards the woman had used.
Rebecca stood in the room. The phone in one hand. The shard of wood in the other. She had pulled it out of the dead man’s body.
The sound of helicopters reached her ears and a faint glimmer of hope blossomed inside her chest.
She watched as blood dripped from the piece of wood onto the cabin’s floor.
And then she heard the sound of footsteps outside.
An image of the woman flashed in front of Rebecca’s eyes.
She gripped the piece of wood so hard it cut into her hand.
If it was the woman, Rebecca would throw herself at her, no matter what. Even if the woman had a gun.
Rebecca didn’t care.
She would rather die than be a captive again.
57
There was no hesitation on Butterfly’s part.
She had grabbed her bag even as a message came through on her phone. It was the worst news she could have gotten.
Butterfly ran.
Out of her cabin, through the back woods and down a steep draw.
There was a vehicle five miles away accessible only through the steepest terrain and far enough from the cabin to avoid detection yet close enough to a rural highway.
With effortless ease, she slid the backpack onto her shoulders mid-stride and ran beneath the thick canopy of trees toward the waiting vehicle. It was a trail she was familiar with as it was part of her daily training routine
. She knew every bump in the trail and now, she ran it faster than ever before.
For years she had been devoid of most emotion. But now, as she ran, a tear escaped the corner of her eye. A murderous rage rose inside her.
Her friend, the only human being in the world she had allowed herself to love, was gone.
The message that had come through on her phone told her that. It was a code they had agreed on should either one be in danger of being killed or captured.
But he had included one more piece of information.
The name of the person responsible for their downfall.
58
“They had to break a door down, but they got her,” the agent said.
Mack was watching through the helmet cam of one of the SWAT team members. All he could see was a clearing with a collection of small cabins and what looked like a main house.
“Must have been some kind of resort. Or hunting lodge,” Mack said. “Let’s find out who owns it, immediately.”
“We’ve got an ID on the dead man,” another agent said, a phone pressed to his ear. “Bernard Evans, CEO of Burn Software.”
“Jesus,” Mack said.
“This is interesting,” Moody said.
Mack walked over to where the computer specialist stood, in front of a large computer screen showing rapidly radiating codes and symbols.
“What is it?” Mack said.
“One of the spiders had gone directly to Evans’ network.”
“That makes sense if he was one of the customers,” Mack said.
“I know but here’s what’s interesting. Someone is killing the spiders and shutting down the system.”
Mack considered that for a moment.
“Could Evans have preprogrammed his network to self-destruct if he was caught?” he asked.
“No, a lot of it can be automated, but what you’re seeing here is someone manipulating these searches in real-time.”
