Open Secret

by Fiona Quinn

  A man walked up to them and asked Avery for her phone. Avery turned to Rowan.

  “Diagnostics,” he said.

  She handed it over, not fully understanding what that meant. She wondered what they were looking for. She noticed they didn’t ask for either Lisa’s or Rowan’s phones.

  On the elevator, Rowan looked down at her with a half-smile and sent her a wink. He was obviously distracted, though. His cogs almost audibly whirring. His mind was as busy as hers was.

  Now, here they were in a plush conference room. A woman named Margot gestured them in with an open hand. The guy tapping at his computer was introduced as Nutsbe. Nutsbe Crushed, to be exact, but that was probably more information than Avery wanted to know about the man.

  Rowan and Lisa moved over to confer with Nutsbe.

  A man with a white waiter’s coat brought in a trolley with sandwiches and fruit.

  “Have you had dinner?” Margot asked and extended her hand to the cart.

  Avery wasn’t hungry for food. For answers? Yes, for that she was starving. “Not right now, thank you.”

  Margot pulled out a chair. “Why don’t you have a seat. They just need to put their oars in the water.”

  Lisa lifted her head from Nutsbe’s computer screen. “I know your anxious, Avery. One step at a time, okay?”

  Avery nodded and sat in the seat Margot had indicated. Something upsetting was on Nutsbe’s computer screen. Avery could see it plainly on both Lisa and Rowan’s faces.

  Rowan tucked in and was now scanning through something on Nutsbe’s screen. The three were talking in tones designed not to carry.

  Avery had no idea what was going on.

  Someone had broken into her house, locked Sally in the basement, destroyed her belongings, and spray painted cuss words all over the walls. Someone had done that to Lisa and to Rowan. How would anyone put the three of them together? Why would they be targeted for such an attack?

  First Rowan and Lisa, then her. Significant?

  Two FBI agents and an editor. Significant?

  “Is this about Taylor Knapp?” she asked. It was the only conclusion that drew straight lines for her.

  Everyone stilled and turned to her.

  “If it is, I have some things I want to share.”

  Lisa, who was hunkered over the computer, slowly stood. “Okay. Thank you.”

  “Taylor Knapp is a pen name as you know. But she’s working with someone who speaks English as a second language. Some of the things I have learned have led me to believe that this isn’t a book. This is a plot.” Avery closed her eyes, centered herself. “This is not a book plot. This is a something dangerous plot.”

  “Okay.” Lisa sounded a bit too much like this was light and fluffy girl talk, when her body conveyed danger. Her eyes hard and focused.

  Rowan sat out of Avery’s view.

  “Let’s start with the English as a second language part,” Lisa said.

  Avery looked over to the white board on the side wall. “May I write on there?”

  Margot stepped forward and handed her a dry erase marker.

  Avery stood and walked over, her whole body tingling. “I met Taylor Knapp this past Monday and saw her again Tuesday. Both days I tried to get some information from her to give to my boss at Windsor Shreveport, an outline, a character list, anything. She gave me nothing. She told me she’d give me an update on Saturday—today. And she did. It was a big file. Too many words for someone to be able to concoct in three days. It was a file of highly specific notes. As I read through them, they sounded off to me. The English was good, just off.”

  “Do you have the notes with you?” Lisa asked softly as if she didn’t want to stop Avery’s train of thought.

  “Yes, it would be good if you all could see them to make my point.” Avery walked back to the table and pulled her computer from her purse. “Is there a place I could forward these?”

  “If you’ll pull up the file, I’ll hand your computer to Nutsbe,” Margot said.

  Avery did that and waited for instructions.

  “While he’s downloading, do you know Taylor Knapp’s legal name?” Lisa asked.

  “This is what I know.” Avery moved back to the white board and pulled the cap off the marker. “She said that she went to the University of Michigan. She had a Russian roommate who majored in Anthropology and minored in women’s studies.” Avery made a list just like she did when she was working on a book, and she needed to make sure the details all lined up. “That roommate is living in America under the radar because she is afraid to go home to Russia and her visa has run out. The roommate’s name started with the sound Kah or Cah sound.” Avery noted this, then turned to the room. “Taylor would start to call her by name and stop herself. I don’t know what year, but Taylor looks like she’s in her mid-to late-twenties. Taylor is the second pen name that this woman has used. Well, I only know of one other.” Avery turned back to the board. “She also used the pen name Tyler Krill. She used it when she developed a school shooter video game that was about to go to market but got pulled after there was public backlash.”

  Nutsbe was grinning hard as he tapped on his computer.

  “Those are some good details, Avery,” Lisa encouraged.

  “I’m an editor. I have to remember tiny details. Which leads me to two things that made me particularly worried. One, our publishing house is Windsor Shreveport. Windsor is Patrick Windsor. He’s married to Inge Prokhorov who is Bulgarian. Inge helped Taylor Knapp get her book contract with our publishing company without going through the normal channels in the regular way, which means having a manuscript submitted by an agent. Also, even though I’m a romance editor, Inge Prokhorov told Taylor to insist that I be her editor, and Taylor should stipulate she wouldn’t work with anyone but me. There must be a reason.” Avery sought out Rowan’s eyes. “Don’t you think?”

  A screen came down. The plotting notes flashed into place.

  “Yes, I think,” Rowan said.

  The room fell silent.

  Avery watched the people in the room read through the information on the screen.

  After a few minutes Lisa asked, “Is this what you thought it would be, Rowan? I’d say you hit the nail right on the head.”

  “Yes. This looks right,” he said.

  “On Monday and Tuesday of this week,” Avery continued. “I met with Taylor Knapp with the goal of producing some indication that Taylor was indeed moving forward with her contract. I asked for anything she could give me. Anything at all. She said to me, ‘I’m still waiting.’ To which I responded, ‘I don’t understand.’ She said, ‘Which is fine. Look, you said Saturday, right?’ then, ‘You need my outline by Saturday, you’ll have it by then.’”

  “Which you did,” Lisa said.

  “Fifty thousand words. From zero to fifty thousand focused, systematized words. In three and a half days. I don’t care if you’re the Forest Gump of literature, that can’t happen. These were delivered to her, and she passed them on to me. I can’t imagine another scenario. And they were written by someone who speaks English as a second language.”

  Avery turned to the screen. “Okay, your English lesson for today. Listen to this phrase at the top of the page. The one I highlighted—'Have three people discuss this—choose a bad big man’. Does that seem weird?”

  Avery sidled over to the whiteboard where she wrote:

  Quantity or number

  Quality or opinion

  Size

  Age

  Shape

  Color

  Proper adjective ex nationality

  Purpose or qualifier.

  “This is how people who speak English as their mother tongue, order their adjectives without thought. I once had a woman who wrote beautiful prose but her mother language was Portuguese. When I edited her work, I had to be hypervigilant for these mistakes. So this list always holds except when there’s a repeated sound. Listen to the phrase ‘the big bad wolf’, according to this chart, the q
uality of the wolf that he is ‘bad’ should come first but we would never say the ‘bad big wolf’ like the ‘bad big man’ in the notes because it’s just weird. In words that repeat a sound ‘i’ typically comes before ‘a’ or ‘o’ – zig zag, hippity hop.”

  “The person who wrote these notes is not the person you know as Taylor Knapp,” Lisa said.

  “That’s my point, yes.”

  “Good thing you’re an editor, I never would have figured that out,” Lisa said.

  “Here are some other pieces that I’ve learned.” She turned to write on the board. It’s one of the ways she could see a story unfold. And quite frankly, the intensity of the people in this room was overwhelming. “Taylor said the Russian roommate had charged her a thousand dollars to write notes for her original concept, The Unrest video game, using her anthropology background. These notes were not made by that woman. Well, no. I don’t have those notes to look at. These notes were not made by that Russian roommate, but she’s still significant. I’ll get to that in a minute.

  “How do you know it wasn’t the Russian roommate?” Lisa asked.

  “The Russian roommate grew up in America, and so we should suppose that she speaks like a native. She’d never make the mistake of ‘bad big’. Taylor told me that her ex-roommate not only gave her the notes for The Unrest but software code that was developed by the roommate—this is too hard, I’m just going to call her ‘Katya’ to have a name.” She wrote the name and drew an arrow to Taylor. “Katya told Taylor that she had a PhD boyfriend from Germany. That boyfriend, out of the goodness of his heart, wrote some code that Katya also gave to Taylor.”

  “What kind of code?” Lisa asked.

  “Okay, I’m not a computer person so see if this makes sense to you. The code was to show Taylor how the game could both collect data from a specific user, and use data that had been collected by the Internet about a specific user to help filter that user’s experience in the game. The goal was to put those users who had the same world views onto like-minded playing teams.”

  “Any clues about who this PhD could be?” Lisa asked.

  “Taylor said he lived in Munich and worked for or was somehow associated with Fast Forward, the producers of Taylor’s video games.” Avery moved to a clean portion of the board. She wrote out the name Katya and drew a circle around it. From there, she added spokes: one for notes, one for PhD boyfriend and code, one for Fast Forward and producers, the last one for Windsor Shreveport. “Katya also told Taylor she should present this as a three pronged campaign of book, music, and video game. To that end, she introduced Taylor to Patrick Windsor.” She tapped the board on the name of her publishing house. “Well, no, she introduced Taylor to Patrick Windsor’s wife, Inge Prokhorov. Inge Prokhorov took Taylor’s manuscript to her husband, Patrick Windsor. Patrick Windsor then gave her a contract.”

  That had meaning. Everyone in the room leaned forward, and the intensity went up another three notches.

  “Oh, one more.” Avery drew another spoke and wrote “band.” “Katya also knew of a band who then wrote the music.”

  “Of course she did,” Lisa said.

  Avery focused on Lisa. “I can’t figure out why that’s significant.”

  “Music is often used to indoctrinate the listener with an ideology. It’s a new way of branding hate,” Lisa said. “Taylor talked to you about her code? How the game is developed?”

  “A little, yes.”

  Rowan looked over at Lisa. “I know that’s what excites you, but we have a lot to debrief Avery about, can we get to that later?”

  “Sure,” Lisa said. “Where should we go from here?”

  “I’ll tell you where I’d like to go from here,” Avery said. “Why was my house destroyed along with yours and Lisa’s?”

  “In a minute, Avery.” Rowan looked at Nutsbe then back to her. “First, we need to show you something. I think maybe you should sit down for this.”

  Chapter Forty-One

  Rowan

  Saturday Night

  Iniquus Headquarters

  Titus, Honey, Margot, and Nutsbe had been low key, and Rowan appreciated it. They blended into the background, facilitating as Lisa and Rowan directed the conversation with Avery.

  Back at Avery’s house, Lisa had taken Titus and Honey aside and had given them details about the attack on Rowan during his run, and both of their houses, including the photos, police reports that she accessed from her computer, and the names and contacts for their FBI colleagues who were investigating the case.

  They’d sent those details ahead to Iniquus Headquarters.

  Rowan knew that Iniquus had computer systems that rivalled the Intelligence Community. He hadn’t been prepared for how fast this team could work.

  “In our job, lives can depend on seconds not minutes,” Nutsbe had said. “We’re geared to work fast and go hard.”

  No kidding.

  Rowan was grateful the FBI had signed this contract. Iniquus didn’t have red tape to tangle them up and slow them down. The team just put their heads down and stormed the castle.

  In a calculated move, Rowan walked over to sit beside Avery.

  This wasn’t going to be pretty.

  When they had walked in and Nutsbe had flagged them over, he had shown Lisa and Rowan the video. They needed to tell Avery about this, and they’d come up with a plan. Nutsbe had said he’d be the one to rip off the bandage.

  Cowardly, maybe, but Rowan preferred it was Nutsbe who showed her the video. Rowan didn’t have the intel or the next steps that Iniquus did, so this made sense.

  At least he could give Avery some physical and moral support.

  “Ma’am,” Nutsbe began. “You mentioned that you’re a romance editor and that you were assigned to work on the Taylor Knapp book specifically by Inge Prokhorov.”

  “That’s right.”

  “One of the jobs that we do here at Iniquus is to protect people. We protect their physical person, their assets—their house, for example. And we also protect their reputations.”

  Avery nodded.

  “In the last few years, this has become more and more complicated. But we have some pretty good ways to mitigate issues that come up.”

  “Okay…”

  “For example, social media. We have ways to search for attacks, track them, and to intercede where necessary.”

  “Okay…” Avery was shifting around in her seat now. Her brain worked fast, and as she had said it herself, if you gave Avery any situation, she could tell you with a snap of her fingers fifteen ways that things could go to hell in a handbasket.

  Rowan was sure that Avery’s mind had churned up at least that many.

  “When we received your name for this assignment a few days ago—”

  “Days ago?” Avery interrupted and looked Rowan’s way.

  “The Iniquus team was hired to work on a case that includes Taylor Knapp, and you were listed as a possible informant.”

  “Lisa…” Her voice trailed off.

  “Was assigned to talk to you,” Rowan said.

  Avery focused back on Nutsbe and nodded her head that he should go on.

  “I entered your information into my program. And we got a hit this morning. We’ve already taken action—”

  “For godsake, Nutsbe, spit it out,” Avery said. “I’m breaking out in hives listening to you.”

  Nutsbe reached over and clicked his computer.

  The screen changed to a video of Avery and her mother in what Rowan now recognized as Mrs. Goodyear’s bedroom.

  Avery was dressed in a thin cotton nightgown. She wasn’t naked, but with the way the light was shining, you could see a lot. Too much. She leaped into the frame, her hand came up and slapped across her mother’s open mouth. Until this point, there had been no volume, whatever Mrs. Goodyear had been saying was not included on the video. It looked like she was screaming, or maybe singing. “Don’t you dare open your mouth. Do you hear me?” There was another blank space where Avery wa
s saying something but there was no sound.

  Mrs. Goodyear fought against Avery. “Avery Grace Goodyear, how dare you manhandle me?”

  “Get up,” Avery ordered.

  “What? No. Leave my room this instant.”

  Avery reached for her mother’s wrists, planted a foot on the bed, and now, leaning out of the camera view, she yelled, “Get up!”

  There was a blip where the video had been edited.

  “Here you go, open up.” Avery’s face was determined, her voice tense, her hands shaking.

  Rowan had seen her mother hit Avery in the head with the hair brush—had seen with his own eyes what that looked like. Had felt sympathy. Having watched the video repeatedly now, he still couldn’t believe how volatile, how physical, how difficult it had been for Avery. His heart went out to her.

  Mrs. Goodyear sealed her lips in a tight pucker.

  Avery reached for her mom’s jaw but Mrs. Goodyear twisted her head to the side.

  “I swear to God, Mom, you’re going to take these pills and go to sleep if I have to sit on you and force them down your throat.”

  “Why?” Mrs. Goodyear’s voice trembled with emotion. Fear and sadness filled her eyes. “Why are you brutalizing me? Why are you helping them?”

  “Take your pills, and we’ll both get some rest.”

  “No!” Mrs. Goodyear put her fists up like she was going to throw punches.

  Avery lunged forward, grasped Mrs. Goodyear’s face. Mrs. Goodyear’s mouth popped open.

  Shaking, Avery shoved the pills down the back of her mom’s throat then released her.

  Ginny was sobbing.

  The video ended.

  “What? How?” Avery shook her head.

  Nutsbe moved his chair to the edge of his desk where Avery had a better line of sight. “My analytics suggest that this video was taken from your phone when control of your phone was accessed remotely. Did you have your phone in the room that night, do you remember?”