And get the business end of a Glock .40 caliber handgun jammed under my jaw.
“Hello there, Mr. Hughes,” says the man with the iron-gray hair. His eyes, I note, are exactly the same color. “Now say good night.”
The butt of a shotgun cracks hard against the back of my skull. Stars explode in my vision, flashing pinpricks of pain. The room slips sickeningly sideways.
The last thing I see is Tabby, handcuffed, being dragged away by a knot of armed men.
Why is she smiling?
Everything goes black.
Twenty-Eight
Tabby
After a short flight on a C-130 military plane, I’m seated at a table in a small, cold room in a government complex in the middle of who knows where. I had a black hood over my head when they brought me in, but they took it off, and now I can observe my surroundings.
Cement floor. Cinderblock walls. Cement ceiling inlaid with a row of florescent lights. The black plastic eye of a closed-circuit camera high on the wall in one corner.
A glass of water sits on the table to my left. Beside it is a sleeve of Oreos, which I find amusing. Apparently, the government wants you to have a tasty snack before they start with the waterboarding.
At least they removed the handcuffs.
The door opens. A man walks in. Caucasian. Thirtyish. Built. He’s tall with shaggy reddish-blonde hair, handsome with the exception of acne scars pitting his cheeks. His suit is black, as is his skinny tie. I’ve never seen eyes that color, pale amber, like honey. He looks like a friendly ginger tabby cat, which I know is intentionally misleading.
Beneath his suit, there’s a bulge on his left ankle and one on his right hip. Tabby cats who wear guns strapped to various parts of their bodies are anything but friendly.
He sits on the edge of the table, casually tosses a manila file folder my way. It lands with a dull slap against the steel tabletop, slides a few inches, spilling pages from the sides.
“Is that me?” I ask, eyeing the file.
Shaggy nods.
“It’s pretty thick.”
“You’ve led an interesting life.”
I cock my head and appraise him. “So have you, I bet. What’s that accent? No, let me guess. Appalachia?”
He watches me with those unusual eyes. “Twenty years ago. You’re the first person in fifteen to catch it.”
We stare at each other. Without a hint of emotion, his gaze takes me in, moving over my face, my hair, my body, finally settling on my wrist. “Interesting timepiece.”
“Thank you.”
“Family heirloom?” His voice is faintly amused.
“Something like that. I’m surprised you didn’t confiscate it.”
“In my experience, plastic Hello Kitty watches usually aren’t cause for alarm.”
I smile, and the stare-off resumes. After a while I ask, “So are you going to tell me your name or should I just keep calling you Shaggy like I’m doing in my head?”
“You aren’t scared,” he notes.
“That’s not really my thing.”
“Right now it should be.”
“My ride’s on the way.”
His expression doesn’t change. “No one is coming to rescue you.”
“I never said it was a rescue,” I reply, holding his gaze. “But someone is definitely coming.”
“Really? Who?”
I have to give it to him, this guy has an amazing poker face.
“Not into suspense, huh?”
He smiles for the first time. He has good teeth, straight and pearly white, like a movie star. “On the contrary. I’m all about suspense. Mysteries too. Like that cryptophone we took off you. Über mysterious. Never seen anything like it. Programmed in Sanskrit, encryption ciphers that blow all current known protocols away, even ours. Where’d you get a hold of technology like that? Bangalore? The Chinese?”
I blow a scornful breath through my lips. “I didn’t ‘get a hold’ of it. I made it.”
An infinitesimal pause follows. “I see.”
“You don’t believe me.”
“Perhaps if you elaborated.”
“Oh, you want schematics? Sorry, didn’t bring them along.”
Shaggy’s smile grows wider. “That’s all right. We’ll get them from your home office. We’re searching it now.”
I can tell he expects me to gasp or go pale or lose my shit in some visible way, but as I already called Juanita from the bathroom at the hotel before Connor and I went back to the studio and told her to flip the red switch on the wall in my office that would melt down all the hard drives on my computers and fry every circuit board on every other piece of electronic equipment I own, I’m sitting pretty.
Hopefully the rest of the house didn’t get melted down along with the computers, but I never finished decorating anyway.
I say, “You don’t have to walk around like that, you know.”
“Pardon?”
“With a face like a hundred miles of bad road. They have lasers that can fix acne scars now. There’s no need to be mistaken for Tommy Lee Jones. I mean, you’re a good-looking guy. The procedure probably isn’t even that expensive. One, maybe two grand? You’d be Brad Pitt.”
“He’s a bit of a douche, though, no?”
Now I’m smiling. “Totally. Why you’d leave Jennifer Aniston for that psychotic witch Angelina Jolie I have no idea.”
Shaggy shrugs. “Angelina is probably better in bed.”
“Well, yeah, but you just fuck crazy. You don’t marry it.”
After a moment wherein we simply stare at each other, Shaggy decides to get down to business. “There are things we don’t know. We’d like you to fill in the blanks.”
I make a face. “Uh-oh. The royal ‘we.’ I’m in trouble now.”
“For instance, when did you first discover Søren Killgaard was your brother?”
Slam! goes my heart against my breastbone. The friendly tabby cat just unsheathed his claws.
After I catch my breath, I say, “He’s not my brother.”
Shaggy opens the file with one finger, lazily lifts up a page to read something. “Half brother. I stand corrected.” He lets the file drop closed, folds his hands in his lap, turns his golden gaze back to my face. “The unfortunate product of your father’s brief affair with a Norwegian student of his.”
I swallow. It feels like someone shoved a fistful of gravel down my throat. “Dutch,” I whisper. “The student was Dutch.”
We stare at each other. He doesn’t look so friendly anymore.
“The plane crash that killed your parents.”
Knowing what’s about to come, I close my eyes.
“Forensics determined that interference with the airplane’s onboard navigational system was the cause of the accident. Someone hacked into the in-flight entertainment interface, and from there…”
He snaps his fingers. Poof! “But you already knew that, didn’t you?”
I open my eyes and glare at Shaggy. “News flash: I hate rhetorical questions. Fuck off.”
“You had evidence that your half brother caused a plane crash that killed two hundred thirty-five people, including your own parents, and you did nothing with that information.”
“Incorrect. I told the police about it. They thought I was nuts. At the time of the incident in question, he was thirteen.”
“And by all accounts already a sociopath.”
“All accounts? Like whose? The FBI didn’t even know he existed until a few days ago.”
“We aren’t the FBI.”
No, they aren’t. The NSA is the agency that has the entire planet wire-tapped. Emails, Facebook posts, instant messages, phone calls—they record it all in cooperation with every major technology provider and sift through the data at a speed of seventy quadrillion bits per second. It would take the average home PC twenty-two-thousand years to do what their supercomputer at their headquarters in Maryland can do in the blink of an eye.
They’re Big Brother’
s big brother.
I can’t sit anymore. I jerk to my feet, start to pace, chew a hangnail on my thumb. Shaggy isn’t concerned by my sudden need to rove around. He just watches me, tracking my every move with those cagey alley cat eyes.
“When I knew him—”
“At MIT.”
“Yes! Shut up, will you, I’m getting things off my chest! Where was I? Oh yes. When I knew him, Søren was always taking credit for things. Anytime anything malfunctioned anywhere in the world—a roller coaster that went off its tracks at an amusement park in Paris, a broken water main that flooded a subway tunnel in Amsterdam, plane crashes, train derailments, terrorist bombings—you name it, he claimed it was his doing. If he could’ve figured out a way to take credit for going back in time and shooting JFK, he would have.”
I swing around, enraged by all the memories, and look at Shaggy. “I thought he was full of shit!”
Shaggy replies calmly, “Until you found out he wasn’t.”
Yes. Until I found out he wasn’t. Which is when everything fell apart.
I turn my back, fold my arms over my chest, and stare at the cement wall.
Shaggy keeps talking in this light, casual tone of voice, like we’re two girlfriends having tea. “The FBI’s theory is that you two met at MIT, and then lived together and hacked together until you had some kind of falling-out. After which Søren got payback for whatever you’d done to piss him off in the form of pinning the Bank of America job on you, and then he vanished. It’s a solid theory, but the real question is, what caused the falling-out?”
When I don’t respond, he asks, “Would you like to hear my theory?”
“Fuck no with a capital F-U-C-K.”
“I think you tried to kill him.”
Shaggy, you dick. This guy has X-ray vision. He sees through me even better than Connor does.
I exhale, hard. “In my defense, he really had it coming.”
He ignores that. “I listened to the tape of the call between you two. Creepy stuff. ‘Pet?’ ‘You’ve made me wait so long?’ The way he said your name? I think your brother was in love with you, to the point of obsession. Still is, by the sound of it.”
Between gritted teeth I say, “Half brother.”
He ignores that too. “I think he constructed an elaborate web of mind fuckery with you, little fly, right in the middle. And by the time you realized that everything in your life had been manipulated by him, that he’d been pulling the strings all the way back from the deaths of your parents when you were eight years old to the death of your uncle when you were seventeen—which led to the foster home, which led to him rescuing you from the foster home—you were so far down the rabbit hole, you didn’t know how to find your way out. And so, like every wild thing does when it’s cornered, you lashed out.”
“You got all that from reading a file, huh?”
Apparently his little speech is over, because he doesn’t add anything else or answer my question. He just sits, waiting.
And because this game is coming to a close, I decide to tell him the truth.
I turn to look at him. “Are you familiar with 50 Shades of Grey?”
Shaggy doesn’t bat an eyelash. “The kinky sex book. My girlfriend loved it. Used to read it out loud to me in bed. Good stuff. And?”
“And,” I say, looking him in the eye, “Søren Killgaard makes Christian Grey look like a Disney prince.”
Another pause while he absorbs my words. “So in addition to being a sociopath, he’s a sadist.”
“If the Marquis de Sade and Steve Jobs had a love child, it would be Søren. He’s brilliant, he’s brutal, and he likes to break things.”
“Again, and?”
“And he consumed me.”
Shaggy waits, those amber eyes burning.
I turn back to the wall. Every beat of my heart is a little earthquake inside my chest.
“There’s no other way to describe it. He fed on my loneliness like a snake feeds on a mouse. I was blinded by him. By his brilliance. By his mind, the way it worked. At the beginning—even though I knew something was wrong with him, that he was broken—I was so grateful that he took me in when I had no one else, that he protected me from something so terrible and stood up for me when no one else would, that I pushed aside my doubts. I went to live with him—”
“In a home owned by Professor Alfredo Durand.”
My stomach tightening, I glance at him.
He says, “We had a little chat with your professor after the FBI did. He said you two were the brightest minds he’d ever encountered. Huge potential to change the world. So he took you under his wing and gave you the keys to the kingdom. Twenty-four-seven access to the best computer science and artificial intelligence lab on the planet.”
“Which would have cost him his job if the university had found out.”
“So you protected him during the investigation by saying you’d been living in your car.”
I say forcefully, “Too many innocent people have paid for Søren’s sins. I wasn’t about to let Professor Durand be another one. He was a good man, trying to do a good thing. He had no way of knowing he’d made a deal with the devil.”
Shaggy nods thoughtfully. “Okay. Back to the devil.”
I blow out another hard breath, drag my hands through my hair. “He acted like my best friend in the world. That’s what he said we were, best friends. Brother and sister. Two peas in a pod, so lucky to have found each other. And to his credit, he was a perfect gentleman.” My voice gains an edge. “At first.”
In the silence, I feel Shaggy searching for words. “How do I put this delicately… He forced you?”
“No. Or else I would have stabbed him much sooner. No, Søren would never take a woman against her will. He thought that was beneath him. Something only animals would do. And besides, he was beautiful. He had plenty of willing playmates.”
I shudder at the memory of all those girls who’d arrive at the house smiling and coy in the evening, and leave in the morning walking gingerly, with bruises mottling their lovely necks.
“At first I thought it was all in my head, these little…attentions he would pay me. I mean, we were related, for fuck’s sake! He showed me the DNA tests that proved it. It couldn’t be happening. Only it was. And at seventeen, I had no frame of reference for how to deal with something like that. Something so…gross. It was just gross and twisted and unbelievable, and I kept pushing the thought away, and we kept working together, learning new hacks, creating new code, planning…”
Shaggy asks sharply, “Planning what?”
My exhalation sounds as if it comes from the body of a hundred-year-old woman. “The kind of Utopia only the truly naïve or insane believe can exist. Countries without borders. Societies without governments. Freedom and equality for everyone, of every race, color, and creed.”
“And you thought you could do that through hacking,” Shaggy says flatly.
I turn and look him in the eye. “If every electronic system on the planet went down, how many hours would it be before total chaos ensued? No lights, no refrigeration, no goods being transported because no fuel could be pumped from gas tanks. No hospitals. No medicine. No food. No Internet. No phones. No emergency response teams. No police. No infrastructure.
“Modern society is a sand castle, and all it would take to bring it crashing down is one good wave. That wave is the failure of technology. Knock out a single transformer manufacturer and just nine of our fifty-five thousand interconnected electrical substations, and all the power goes out in the US for eighteen months. Eighteen months. My best guess? At least half the population wouldn’t survive it.”
After a moment, Shaggy says, “Yes. Those equations have been run.”
“So you see my point.”
“All right. So you were an idealistic teenager, and he was your pervy older brother—”
“Half brother!”
“Excuse me. Pervy half brother with a penchant for sadomasochism and hobbies that i
ncluded plotting the downfall of society and trying to get into his little sister’s panties. Excuse me again,” he says, seeing the violence in my eyes, “Half sister’s panties.”
“In a nutshell,” I say stiffly, “yes.”
“So what was the tipping point? What made you decide to take him out?”
I drop into the chair and slouch down. Looking at its scarred surface, I say dully, “When I discovered that he used some of my code, software that I had written, to hack into a military satellite and intercept a drone conducting surveillance over Kandahar. He changed the coordinates, gave it new orders.” My voice drops. “The drone was armed with a Hellfire missile.”
“What was the target?”
It’s almost unbearable to do it, but I look up and meet his eyes. “A grade school. He bombed a fucking grade school. When I confronted him, he said he was doing a service to humanity by killing future terrorists. I could choke on the irony of that.”
Shaggy doesn’t even have the good grace to look disgusted. “When was this?”
“December 25, 2007.” When I swallow it tastes like ashes. “He said it was his Christmas present to me.”
I have to look away for a moment to compose myself before I can continue. “Before that, it was all talk. At least, I thought it was. He’d say casually, ‘Tabitha, did you see the news today? Bomb went off in the British Prime Minister’s office,’ and he’d smile. I’d roll my eyes and tell him he was full of shit. It was a game he liked to play. A little deception. The boy who cried wolf. Only ultimately I realized it wasn’t a game. I mean, for him it was. For everyone else, it was deadly real. But until the end, I had no idea that he was really…that he was capable of…”
I swallow, take another deep breath. “Once the cat was out of the bag about the drone, he told me the truth about the crash my parents died in. When we first met, he showed me letters between my father and his mother, detailing their secret affair. He said he’d found them along with the DNA tests after his mother died, and was overjoyed to discover he had a sister. What he left out was that his mother went into a deep depression after my father rejected her when he found out she was pregnant. A depression that years later led her to commit suicide.
Wicked Sexy (Wicked Games Series Book 2) Page 24
