Dean swore quietly on his end. “I wanted to talk to you about that. When you met Max, you said he mentioned something called the Assassin Market. I looked it up. This thing is real.”
Jake stopped pacing. “So what is it?”
“An assassination website, with bounties placed on people’s heads.”
“And I’m on it?”
“I don’t know,” Dean replied. “I haven’t been able to find it or log in. But it explains a few things.”
“Okay, but right now I need to understand what happened.” Jake started pacing again. “Eamon says I called him, but I didn’t. And he called me on the VOIP phone, except it wasn’t really him. What the hell, Dean?” Either Dean’s security didn’t work, or Dean was really in on this somehow.
“You got a call from this thing pretending to be your brother?” Dean asked.
“Yeah, and it came from the phone number you gave me for my brother’s VOIP phone. I checked when the call came in.”
“Let me think,” Dean replied.
In the silence of the room, the sirens outside seemed louder. More fire engines and police were arriving. They were at risk of being evacuated, if nothing else. “Think faster,” Eamon demanded, looking out past the curtains again.
“The only way it could have spoofed the call is if it somehow found the numbers for those phones,” Dean said. “Those are encrypted, so there’s no other way to get in once a connection is made. Did you use the security precautions like we talked about, to make sure your brother was your brother?”
“More or less,” Jake replied. “I asked what we had for breakfast in the hotel room.”
“Did you use a one-time pad?”
“No.” Jake rubbed his eyes with one hand. “I didn’t.”
“This is for real, guys,” Dean said quietly on the phone. “You gotta take this security seriously.”
“How the hell did it find out so quickly?” Jake fumed. This thing seemed supernatural in its abilities. How could they beat something that knew everything?
“Do you have any computers, any other cell phones in the motel?” Dean asked. “I told the runner who contacted your brother before you arrived to give everyone strict instructions to leave their cellphones and electronic equipment behind. Just to use what I sent you. What’s in the motel room?”
Jake scanned the room. It was dated. An old TV on the dresser, not even a digital cable box. “Nothing.” He looked at Elle.
She shook her head. “I left everything, like I was told.”
“What about Anna?” Dean asked over the cellphone. “Does she have an iPad, any gadgets, toys?”
Elle shook her head again. “No, nothing—” Her eyes went wide. “Oh, my God.”
Jake stared at her. “What?”
“That phone we gave Anna for Christmas, your old cell phone. She likes to carry it around, you remember, like she’s a big girl?” Elle’s hands came to her mouth. “She was walking around, talking on it, telling me she was chatting with her friend. I thought it was an imaginary friend, you know how she is…”
Elle stood straight up and jumped two steps to the adjoining door, cracking it open. “Anna?”
“Anna,” Jake called out, “could you come in here?”
No response. Elle swung the door open. “Anna!” she yelled, stepping into the room.
“Anna?” said Jake again, louder. He glanced at Eamon, and both of them rushed into the next room.
“Anna?!” screeched Elle, already on her knees, looking under the bed. Tears in her eyes, ligaments straining in her neck, she looked up.
“Jake, where’s Anna?” she cried, wild-eyed. “Where’s our baby?”
31
Hong Kong Harbor
China
“What’s going on?” Jin demanded. The small boat she’d been dumped into—just before the explosion—skimmed across the water, with Hong Kong’s skyscrapers visible in the smoggy distance.
Wutang stood in front of her, next to the large tattooed man who drove the boat, and another man sat in the co-pilot chair. He swiveled around to watch Jin and Wutang, his face expressionless. A handgun rested carelessly in his lap.
Standing in front of her, Wutang reached into his pocket and pulled out a switchblade that snicked open. He stepped toward her. “Please don’t move,” he whispered.
Jin jumped back, her eyes wide. “No, stop…”
In one motion Wutang leaned over her and cut something from the back of her shirt. Putting the switchblade away and raising his hands in surrender, he backed away slowly. “Sorry, this was the only way.”
“Only way for what?” Jin sputtered as he crushed something between his fingers. “What was that?”
“A tracking device.” Wutang held it closer for her to examine. A tiny flash of metal inside a fabric tag. “They were listening to us. Sorry for hitting you. It was the only way to get us out of there.” He sat opposite her, and threw the crumpled bug overboard. “Chen was a plant for the group that kidnapped you. We had to make it look convincing.”
The bow hit a large wave, sending a shock of spray into the air that rained down on them. Jin wiped the saltwater from her face. “Make what look convincing?”
“Your death.” Wutang cocked his head to one side. “And mine. Had to remove us as a threat vector…at least for a while. We”—he flicked his chin at the man driving the boat—“were the ones that placed the big bets on the Assassin Market for you and Chen.”
“What?” Jin pushed away from him. “Why?”
“I found out that Chen’s mother is sick. Dying. He needed quick money. I hacked into his crypto accounts and found huge deposits.”
Jin wanted to get up and smack Wutang across the face. He’d scared her to death. She’d been kidnapped twice in a week, and the second time hadn’t been any better than the first. But her escape from that abandoned apartment building had seemed a little too easy, not to mention the convenient fact that they’d been left alone in Hong Kong for a few days.
So Chen was an informant? All that time in his apartment had been a play to extract information? She revealed everything to Chen.
But not quite everything.
The hit on the social media monitoring system. Jake O’Connell. He was alive.
On the other hand, who the hell was Wutang? Or this new version of Wutang? She’d always had the impression he was a shy programmer nerd. Kidnapping her and staging an explosion, faking their deaths? Removing threat vectors?
“And who are these guys,” Jin demanded, “your Triad gangbanger buddies?”
She had to admit, even though anger felt white hot inside her as she glared at him—he did seem tougher, more dangerous. More exciting. And relief at not being dead washed through her.
“Not Triad,” Wutang replied, “these are Yakuza.”
Yakuza? Japanese organized crime. Jin frowned. “What are they doing here?” And how on Earth did he know them? She’d heard stories about the Yakuza, some brutal, but also how they were the first ones to bring relief after earthquakes and tsunami.
“It started with Yamamoto, remember? He was head of Japan’s largest hedge fund.”
“So he was in with gangsters?”
“Not exactly.” Wutang pointed at the seat beside her—could he sit there?—and Jin nodded. He stepped over, slid in beside her. Now he wouldn’t have to yell over the engine. “Have you heard of sokaiya?”
Jin shook her head. She felt Wutang’s warmth and inched closer.
“It’s the name for the large-scale, institutionalized bribery practiced by the Yakuza in Japan. They buy shares in a publicly listed company, then start digging up dirt on the company leadership. After that, it’s a case of ‘give us money, or we’ll show up at meetings and embarrass you.’”
Wutang looked up and then back at her. “It’s sort of a way of keeping management honest. To combat it, Japanese companies tend to hold all their shareholder meetings on the same day—over 90% of the Tokyo stock exchange do it. Holding all thei
r meetings on the same day made it difficult for the gangsters to be everywhere at once.”
“And what does that have to do with anything?”
“Last year, the Yakuza bosses noticed a drop-off in business. Someone was muscling in on their territory. Someone who was able to attend a lot of shareholder and board meetings at the same time.”
Jin connected the dots. “Bluebridge.”
“We think so. Seems to be connected to something called InformDAC, an autonomous corporation that pays people to supply compromising information on senior executives. Yamamoto must have figured it out, like the Yakuza did. Bluebridge executives were attending dozens of meetings, some simultaneously. Using it to control Japanese businesses.”
“So this chatbot software is spoofing Bluebridge executives?”
Wutang shook his head. “We think the chatbot technology comes from Bluebridge. Looks like they’re purposely using it to mimic their executives. Not an obvious case of fraud, as they could argue they were attending the meetings by proxy.”
“But it would be enough for Yamamoto to want to take it to the heads of the banks, and the fact that this was corrupting senior Chinese and Japanese officials.”
Wutang nodded.
“And so they killed him.”
“That’s right. The Yakuza were tracking Yamamoto. They wanted to find out who was stealing their business, and how and why. When he was killed, they shadowed Shen Shi, found you. They knew that the State Security Ministry had planted Chen. They were watching him, so they knew when to capture you.”
“So you’re not Yakuza?” Jin asked.
Wutang laughed. “Me, Yakuza? Are you kidding? No. But by the time they grabbed me on the street, I’d already figured out Chen was dirty. I was getting ready to escape with you. They came up with this plan, said we had to make it look convincing.”
Jin smiled, her little bubble burst. She liked imagining Wutang as a secret agent gangster. “So where are we going now?”
“They want to stop whoever or whatever is cutting in on their business. They want us to stop it.”
Jin moved another inch closer to Wutang. “Us?” she asked, shivering.
“Us.” Wutang smiled and put an arm around her.
They cleared the harbor, and the tattooed man glanced over his shoulder at them, smiling, the rising sun glinting off his gold-capped front teeth. Turning back to the front, he slid the speedboat’s throttle forward and the engine roared, the acceleration pushing them back into their seats. The boat rocketed off across the water, skipping over the waves into the sunrise over the South China Sea.
AUGUST 23rd
Tuesday
32
Super 8 Motel
Schenectady
“Good afternoon, Bluebridge Corporation. How may I help you?”
It sounded like Cindy, the receptionist Jake had encountered when he stormed the Bluebridge offices less than a week ago. Jake’s phone was wired into the laptop Dean gave him, which was bouncing his call through a dozen anonymous connection points over the net. Dean had set it up remotely.
“I’d like to speak to Mr. Henry Montrose,” Jake grunted, trying to keep his voice even.
“Mr. Montrose isn’t in the office today,” came Cindy’s singsong voice. “Can I take a message?”
“No.” Jake’s voice went up an octave. “I need to speak to him immediately.”
“I’m sorry, but who is this?”
“He knows who this is,” Jake barked.
Jake paced back and forth, a wire stretching from the VOIP phone in his hand to the laptop perched on top of the TV. He glanced at Elle sitting on the foot of the bed next to Eamon, his brother’s arm around her. She trembled, her eyes bloodshot and full of tears. Jake felt empty—no fear anymore, not for himself—except maybe it wasn’t emptiness he felt.
Rage filled him.
A pause on the other end. “Excuse me, sir? He knows who this is? Who is this?”
“Listen Cindy, get that goddamn piece of—”
Click. Click. “Mr. Jake O’Connell?”
This was it. This had to be the machine. “Where’s my daughter?” Jake screamed into the phone, spitting onto the handset as he held it in front of him. He put his ear back to the phone.
“Mr. O’Connell, this is the New York Police Department, Special Investigative division,” came a calm voice after a few seconds of airtime. “Mr. O’Connell, you need to surrender yourself. Threatening Bluebridge exec—”
Jake hung up. “Jesus Christ,” he muttered.
He glanced at the gold cross hanging around his brother’s neck. It had been a long time since he’d gone to Church, but he missed it now. He felt like crawling into a sanctuary, confessing his sins, begging for divine intervention. It seemed to be his only hope for saving his daughter.
“What…what happened?” Elle stammered. “Did it say anything? Do they have Anna?”
“The police picked up the call. At least it sounded like the police. They must be monitoring the lines there.”
“Did the police say anything about our daughter?” Elle was frantic.
Jake scowled. Threw the phone on the bed. “No.”
Nothing.
There had been no demands. No mention of ransom.
They’d torn through the rooms looking for Anna—or any sign of where she might be—until Mick, one of Eamon’s guys, came in and asked what was going on. They said Anna was gone. He smiled and told them she’d gone downstairs to meet Jake. Mick’s smile faded when he noticed Jake, glaring at him from the back of the room.
Jake had grabbed Mick by the throat and pinned him to the wall.
They got the full story.
When Anna went outside, Mick asked her what she was doing. She told him her dad was on the phone, and he wanted her to go down to the lobby. This was before Jake and Eamon returned. She handed the cell to Mick, who talked to both Jake and Eamon. They said they were downstairs; that all Mick had to do was make sure she got down the stairs okay.
Mick had been in tears, not understanding what happened. The machine had fooled him. They hadn’t told any of Eamon’s guys the whole story, they hadn’t had time, so Mick had no way of knowing.
“What did you do?” Elle screamed at Jake.
He pulled her close and let her hit him. Pulled her sobbing face into his chest.
Their daughter was gone, vanished without a trace. The call to Bluebridge—a last-ditch effort—had accomplished nothing.
Then Jake’s phone pinged. At first he ignored it, but it pinged again. Flipping it open with one hand, he clicked on a message from an unknown caller.
A video.
Anna’s faced filled his screen. “Hi, Daddy”, she squeaked, smiling. “The nice lady told me you would meet us here.” She was in a featureless white room. The video ended as abruptly as it had started. No explanations.
“What does it want?” Elle took the phone from him, slumped onto the bed and started watching the video of their daughter over and over.
Jake finally explained that they thought it might be a machine that was hunting them. A machine running a human network. Why hadn’t he told her everything immediately? Half-truths were as damning as lies. In the end, she hadn’t much cared—she wanted her daughter back.
There were no demands, but Jake could guess what it wanted. “It wants what Sean sent to me in that package.”
The copy of the Bluebridge core, with the banking algorithms from Donovan and Viegas’s death certificate, made for some damning evidence. They just had to do something with it.
“Can’t we give it to them...or it?” Elle asked. “You’re risking your life, our daughter’s life!”
She didn’t need to tell him. The thought kept drilling its way deeper into his head.
“It’s not that simple,” Eamon replied. “We have no leverage. How would it know we haven’t copied the information? How is this ever going to end?”
“Our daughter has been stolen,” Elle cried. “Can’t we
call the police? We need to do something. Anything.”
“You want to call the police?” Eamon shook his head. “Bring them here? We’ll all be thrown into jail. And if we’re thrown in jail, no way we can avoid Joey Barbara’s guys.”
“That doesn’t matter anymore,” Elle said quietly. “We just need to get Anna back.”
“We can’t call the police,” Jake replied to her, just as quietly. “Not yet, anyway.” There was no way he was letting anyone take his family away from him. He was going to fix this, protect them. Somehow.
But the walls were closing in.
Anonymous death squads, the mafia breathing down his neck, half a dozen federal agencies on a manhunt for him and his family—and this machine knew exactly where Jake was. It wasn’t afraid of getting him arrested, so why weren’t the police here already?
Jake felt like he was stuck in a mirror maze, herded, prodded, and corralled between the fences to the slaughterhouse, pushed deeper and deeper into a labyrinth with only one exit. He had to figure out a way to get outside of the lines he was being painted into, to figure out how to create a second exit.
One he wasn’t being pushed toward.
But how?
There was one last option.
He went to the backpack Eamon had brought him from the old motel and fished into a side pocket, produced a card. He’d managed to hold onto it throughout all his misadventures. “I’m going to call this guy. We need help.”
Eamon stared at the card, frowning, until he recognized it. It was the business card FBI Special Agent Tolliver had given Jake back at the house. “You’re going to call the Feds? They’re hunting for you. You’re going to call them?”
“This guy, Tolliver, you remember? He came to my house before this whole thing really kicked off. Said he was investigating Bluebridge, said he was operating outside of normal channels.” Jake threw his hands wide. “You have any better ideas?”
“Christ, Jake, that’s playing into their hands.” Eamon pointed at his own chest. “You’ve already got all the FBI you need right here.”
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