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by Raymond Khoury

  Fingering Daland was as the man behind the curtain wasn’t easy. Maxiplenty used a highly sophisticated network of servers located around the world along with a seemingly infinite process of IP spoofing to disguise both the site itself and those using it. When two of his users successfully swapped murders, the US Attorney’s Office went into overdrive. It took the techies at Quantico’s Cyber Division lab weeks to finally crack his invisibility cloak and secure enough evidence to ensure an arrest stuck. Evidence we now finally had, as of four hours ago, along with the signed confessions from both murderers. Which is why we were here, waiting for word that power had been cut to Daland’s house before we stormed in.

  We weren’t alone. The whole team, including a couple of specialists from Cyber Division, was waiting close by, equipped with night vision goggles and, with a bit of luck, a little less frozen than us. The aim was to disconnect all the computer equipment—along with any battery backups—before we turned the power back on and began the bagging and tagging. I didn’t want Daland to have the tiniest window in which to hit some kind of nuke switch and wipe his hard drives.

  So here we were, poised, waiting for the engineers from Jersey Central Power & Light to tell us they were ready to hit the switch. They were fairly used to being called out at ungodly hours this time of year. The bad weather and overloading from seasonal light displays meant they had to be available 24/7. Still, it was taking longer than I expected.

  “Heads up, Reilly,” a voice announced through my earpiece. “Looks like it’s feeding time at the zoo again.”

  I looked out through the near whiteout on the other side of the windows and saw the now-familiar pizza delivery car with half a plastic forty-eight-inch pepperoni sticking out of the roof glide past.

  “More pizza?” Nick grumbled, peering out through the windshield. “How in God’s name can he eat so much pizza and stay so thin? Bastard.”

  I turned to face him, a slight grin on my face. “Maybe he doesn’t chase it down with a bowl of lasagna.”

  My partner was fairly legendary for his appetites, particularly when it came to Italian food and generously proportioned blonds. The former had provided something of a distraction when the latter ended up getting him divorced. Nowadays, he was happy to indulge in both, having finally come to terms with the court-appointed bi-weekly weekends with his eleven-year-old son. He’d also stuck with the spinning classes. I lost that bet, along with most of Twenty-six Federal Plaza.

  “What’s wrong with having a pizza as a starter? That’s how they do it in Italy, you philistine.”

  I smiled. “Maybe he’s got a gym in there.”

  His face got all bent out of shape. “At home? Alone? What’s the point of that?

  “The point of exercise being to meet the babes, right?”

  “D-uh. But, hey, if I get to live a couple of extra years, that’s cool too.”

  The delivery guy kept his engine idling as he hurried up to the door and rang the bell.

  The snowflakes were getting meatier.

  I adjusted the screen brightness on the laptop sitting at my elbow. I concentrated on the feed from the camera showing the house’s front door.

  Jake Daland—elegant as ever in a short, silk kimono over a deep V-necked white T-shirt that exposed a mat of black chest hair—opened the door with the same calm, nonchalant demeanor. No stepping halfway through the door, no furtively peering to left and right. Zero interest in what was outside the house at all. Either he knew we were out here and didn’t care, or—and though possible, it was by now fairly improbable—he didn’t have a clue that he’d been under surveillance for days.

  Daland took the pizza box and handed the delivery guy some money. The delivery guy seemed a bit thrown. They exchanged a few words as he struggled with his oversized puffer coat, fishing through its pockets, then shook his head, the cash in his outstretched hand.

  “What’s he doing?” Nick asked.

  “Daland must have handed him a large bill and the kid doesn’t have enough change.”

  Nick shrugged. “We’re so on the wrong side of the law.”

  They exchanged a few more words, then Daland waved the driver inside. The guy went in and the door closed behind him.

  Moments later, the delivery guy re-emerged. He was holding a gift-wrapped box from his most loyal small-hours customer.

  Nick said, “Now he’s giving the guy a Christmas present?” He shook his head. “I’m telling you, Sean, we chose poorly, man. Poor-ly.”

  The delivery guy got back in his car and drove away.

  It was at that precise moment that my earpiece burst back to life. “We have a go. All teams: get into position.”

  Nick and I climbed out of the Expedition. We were wearing Kevlar under our FBI parkas, even though I thought it was highly unlikely we’d meet any armed resistance. Four SWAT members were already skulking up to the house’s front door, while two other agents, Annie Deutsch and Nat “Len” Lendowski, climbed out of another unmarked vehicle and approached from the opposite direction. We had other men covering the rear of the house. The tech specialists would wait till the house was secure.

  We fell in behind the SWAT guys. “One in position,” I said into my cuff mike.

  “Two in position,” came the confirmation from the rear of the house.

  “Hold,” the voice in my ear said. A brief moment, then it came back. “In five. Four. Three.” Two seconds later, the Christmas lights on Daland’s roof snapped off as the power was cut.

  We flipped down our night vision goggles and drew our sidearms as the SWAT team leader swung his battering ram through the door, but just as we were about to follow them in, an alarm burst to life inside me as my brain spontaneously highlighted something I’d seen as I walked up to the house.

  Something I’d barely noticed out of the corner of one eye.

  Lying innocuously by the edge of the curb, obscured by the shade of some parked cars, barely noticeable: a flash of red ribbon.

  The Christmas gift that Daland had given to the delivery guy only minutes earlier. Discarded, tossed away like garbage.

  I was electrified with the feeling that something was wrong.

  “Nick! Car —now,” I shouted as I pulled off my goggles and stepped back, toward the sidewalk. I saw Deutsch and Lendowski looking at me, all confused, and just waved them on. “Go, go, go!”

  They disappeared into the house as I passed the gift and jabbed a finger toward it, telling Nick, “The gift’s a prop. He faked us out.”

  We hurried into the Expedition, Nick’s face shooting me a sizeable question mark as I slammed the big SUV into gear and floored it.

  We fishtailed away from the curb, with me shouting over the revs, “The delivery guy’s still in the house. Daland drove off in the pizza car.”

  Nick shook his head. “Bastard’s got a couple of minutes on us.”

  The roads were covered with snow, but the four-wheel drive of the Expedition was rock solid as it ate up the miles. There were no cars driving around, not at that hour, and we soon hit an intersection. I stopped, clueless about which way to go.

  “He knows he’s burnt,” I said. “Which means he knows everyone else is burnt too. So where’s he going?”

  Nick rubbed his face, trying to force his brain into gear. “Daland knows we’ll be looking for the car and it’s not the most discreet ride. He needs to ditch it fast.”

  “Yeah, but where? And swap over to what?”

  The onboard satnav flickered through screens as Nick worked it. I couldn’t wait for it to suggest some answers. I scanned the road’s surface and could just about make out a set of thin tracks that turned left.

  I followed.

  Nick watched as I turned onto another residential street, then his attention went back to the navigation system. Thick walls of snow were now making it increasingly difficult to see where we were going. Even at full speed, the wipers were straining against the weight of the heavy flakes and the trail I was following was gettin
g progressively more shrouded by the new snow.

  We were going to lose him.

  I adjusted the traction control. “He can’t stay out in this. Either he’s got somewhere to lay low nearby or he’s got a fallback drive stashed somewhere.”

  Nick shook his head and said, “I can’t see him having that much foresight. Doesn’t seem in character.”

  I nodded. “A cab, maybe? Or maybe he’s ordering an Uber.”

  Nick grabbed the car radio’s mike. “I need the location of all twenty-four-hour cab companies around the target’s house.”

  Moments later, the radio squawked, “Millpond Cabs, corner of North Main and Church.”

  The radio squawked again, another voice this time. It was Lendowski. “Daland’s in the wind,” he said. “The pizza guy is freaking. Daland told him he needed to avoid an angry boyfriend. Told him the angry guy’s girlfriend was in the bedroom and gave him three hundred bucks. Reilly, where the hell are you?”

  So it wasn’t about change after all. Not that it mattered.

  Nick nudged my arm and pointed urgently to the left. I swung the Expedition accordingly, heading west as Nick answered for us both. “We’re closing on him. You and Deutsch secure the house.”

  “Already done. Power’s back on.”

  “Are we good?” I asked.

  “We’ve got several computers. The hard drives were already over-writing. He had battery backups, but tech disconnected them. There’s also a laptop, but it’s got no hard drive.”

  “He pulled it. It must be on him. That’s what we need.” I gunned the V8 engine, the four-wheel drive now winning a one-sided battle against the fresh snow.

  The houses were larger now. Set farther back from the street.

  Nick pointed up ahead. “Five hundred yards more, then we need to cross over North Main onto Church.”

  I was scanning every alleyway as we moved. I peered into a lot shared by a fitness center and a gas station. Nothing.

  “Sean, right there!” Nick shouted as he opened his window to take a better look. I slowed the SUV to a crawl.

  A narrow street ran about thirty degrees off our position. Almost completely obscured by snow-covered trees was the top of a giant pepperoni pizza.

  I swung the Expedition to the left, ready to turn right in another fifty yards.

  Nick gestured toward the fast-approaching junction.

  A single vehicle was midway through a left-hand turn onto North Main Street.

  As we got level with the vehicle, a Toyota Camry, I registered the “Millpond Taxicabs” livery. The cab had pulled away before I could look inside.

  I spun the wheel around, breaking hard. The Expedition skated a few feet in the original direction of travel, then completed the U-turn as the wheels regained traction.

  “That’s him.”

  Nick hit the siren as I swung the Expedition into the empty oncoming lane, accelerated beyond the Camry and swerved back into its path.

  The cab’s driver hit the brakes. Its wheels locked and the Camry slammed into Nick’s side of the SUV, blocking his door.

  I climbed out of the Expedition, pulled my sidearm, and edged around the front of the stationary SUV.

  The shotgun-side rear passenger door opened and Daland emerged, both hands high over his head.

  “Down,” I barked. “On your knees!”

  Nick had climbed over the seats and was now covering the taxi cab’s driver, who had stepped out of the Camry, both hands in the air.

  Daland dropped to his knees, shouting, “Easy with the guns! I’m unarmed.”

  I stepped toward him. “The hard drive. Where is it?”

  “What hard drive?”

  The taxi driver turned toward me, all panicked and jittery. “He threw something out the window as we turned out of Church.”

  Daland lowered his head, then turned toward the taxi driver, his face tight with anger. “They watch everything you do, every website you read, every keystroke you tap in. They know everyone you talk to, everything you buy. They own you. And you’re no one. Imagine what they do with people who matter.”

  I held my position as Nick moved to cuff Daland. “Save the rant for your Twitter feed.” I gestured at the taxi driver. “Show me.”

  He led as we jogged back toward the junction with Church, our footfalls crunching in the snow.

  The radio squawked as I called it in. “Target secure, repeat, target secure. We’ll meet you back at the house. And tell the pizza guy his car is safe.”

  The snow was falling heavier now and sticking to the ground with purpose, but it didn’t take long. We found the hard drive, half-buried in the snow, by the base of a fence.

  I brushed some snowflakes from my face, enjoying the sharpness of the freezing air as it hit my lungs.

  It was good to be done with Daland. It always felt great to close out an assignment successfully. We’d done our part. From here on, the ball was in the DA’s court. Right now, though, that familiar euphoria was tainted by something else, a foreboding about what I needed to get back to.

  I looked up at the snowflakes, watched them cascade down onto my face which tingled under their gentle, cold stings, and shut my eyes.

  The season, I sensed, really wasn’t going to be particularly jolly.

  2

  Boston, Massachusetts

  Dr. Ralph Padley was a creature of habit, or so he liked to tell himself.

  To his wife, colleagues and students, he was a massive control freak with borderline OCD—and, more often than not, just a massive pain in the ass.

  This last year, though, his finely-orchestrated life had been thrown into chaos by something over which he had no control. That, combined with the absolute dread he felt at knowing that his days were now quite literally numbered, had only made him even less bearable.

  The only person other than Padley who knew the origins of his near-pathological need for control was the psychoanalyst he had been seeing once a week for over a decade. When Padley was eleven—fifty-eight years ago almost to the day—he had failed to save his seven-year-old brother from drowning in a swimming pool during a family holiday at his grandparents’ place in St. Augustine, Florida. He blamed himself. After all, he was the older brother who was supposed to take care of his younger sibling. His sense of guilt, according to his shrink, made psychological, if not emotional or practical, sense, but Padley couldn’t help it. His nascent personality was more significantly affected by the fact that his parents concurred with his sense of guilt and decided he was indeed to blame. The failure of either parent to restart their son’s heart—and both were family doctors—had seeded an idea that would later flower when Padley selected his specialism after his initial four years of study at Harvard Medical School.

  Before the prognosis, before he’d started losing weight and his skin had taken on a jaundiced tint, Padley had stuck to a rigorous routine. Nowadays, as well as the regular weekly appointment with his shrink and Sunday mornings in church, he went swimming four times a week, attended a concert of classical music once a month and made love to his wife every other Saturday. This last routine suited his significantly younger third wife very well, as it meant she always knew when she’d be free to nip next door and unleash her libido on one of Boston’s leading theatre critics, who despite a host of effete mannerisms and other evidence to the contrary—enough to convince Padley that his neighbor had zero interest in his wife—was most definitively not gay.

  Padley was a Professor of Medicine (Cardiology) at Harvard, a post he’d held since 1985. As a surgeon, he’d saved many lives. He’d also taught many others who’d gone on to save even more lives. Over the years, he’d taken no small dose of solace in knowing that. He’d always considered it some kind of atonement for the other work he did, the work only a handful of people knew about.

  The work that had the exact opposite effect on its subjects.

  It had all started when he was his early thirties, at a time he was deep into some potentially ground-br
eaking research in the field of cardiovascular pharmacology. His declared aim was to create a next-generation drug that could maintain a stable cardiac rhythm—a “pacemaker in a pill” that would, within a generation, render both pacemakers and beta blockers obsolete as interventions for heart attacks.

  The world of medical research being as secretive and competitive as it is, Padley kept his work to himself. Five years and hundreds of lab rats later, however, his experiments took a wrong turn and he ended up creating the very opposite of what he was looking for.

  The discovery first confounded, then terrified, him.

  For a while, he struggled with what to do about it. He considered destroying any evidence of his work and forgetting about it. He knew the latter would be impossible and came close to doing the former several times, but he also found that impossible. The potential for his discovery was simply too powerful to ignore. He decided on another tack. Being a staunch patriot at a time when his country was embroiled in hot and cold wars all over the globe, Padley contacted the CIA. They promptly dispatched someone to interview him and turned out to be very, very interested.

  The understanding was simple. He would be paid handsomely to continue to work covertly on perfecting his discovery and its delivery methods while carrying on with his official work at the university.

  Not long after, the scope of his secret work was broadened.

  He’d led a double life ever since. Compartmentalizing his life like that didn’t present a problem for someone as maniacally organized as he was. It was actually quite a thrill to feel part of a covert, select group of people who were doing great things for their country. He enjoyed the meetings he was called to attend and, despite not knowing much about a couple of members in that group—not their real names, not a thing, in fact, about their lives—he’d felt a strong sense of kinship with them all and, by extension, with the agency.