The Adversary (A Chris Bruen Novel Book 1)

by Reece Hirsch

  “Back up for a second,” Chris said. “If you have information about the function of the virus, then you must have determined the point of entry, so that you could watch it operate. That means it might be possible to create a security patch and limit the damage, right?”

  “Maybe if we knew the equipment that was being targeted, we could …” Ed stopped in midsentence as a mechanical, clacking sound came through the speakers.

  Ed’s face contorted in a frozen rictus, teeth clenched. Then they saw the two small dart-like electrodes attached to filament wires that protruded from his shoulder. He had been incapacitated by a Taser. Ed’s mouth worked for a moment like he was trying to say something, but no sounds came out. Then he slumped over his keyboard, looming into the camera frame.

  “We can see you!” Chris shouted. “We’re calling the police!” But, in fact, all they could see of the assailant was a pair of black pants, a blue-striped dress shirt, and a pair of black leather gloves.

  They heard the attacker moving about the apartment, out of view. Then the attacker’s hand reappeared in frame, now holding a hypodermic. He jammed the needle into Ed’s neck and injected a full chamber of a milky solution. Ed’s hands continued to twitch for an endless, stomach-churning moment, but then he stopped moving.

  They heard movement in the apartment for another minute or two, then the attacker returned and picked up Ed’s wrist, checking for a pulse. Seeming to find none, he let Ed’s wrist drop limply beside the keyboard. The attacker rolled Ed aside in the desk chair. He approached the computer.

  Chris and Zoey watched for a glimpse of the killer’s face, but their view of the murder scene was cut off as the screen went black. The last thing they saw was two black-leather-gloved hands closing the laptop.

  CHAPTER 27

  Chris felt like a swimmer caught in a riptide, dragged downward into the depths with no light, no sound, and no oxygen, carelessly smashed on the ocean floor, sustaining injuries that couldn’t yet be inventoried in the rushing moment. Gradually, the buzz of voices and clinking of glasses and silverware returned, and he found himself still staring at the laptop where he had witnessed Ed’s death.

  And as soon as Chris managed to gain a degree of control over his shock at what he’d seen, the guilt hit. He was responsible for Ed’s death. He had allowed him to become involved as an accomplice in their flight. Chris was not by nature a violent person and, as an attorney, he believed in the legal system, but when he finally caught up with the person who was responsible for Sarah’s kidnapping, and now Ed’s murder, legal remedies would not be good enough.

  Chris could see that Zoey’s cheeks were wet with tears. He reached across the table and put his hand over hers. They sat like that for a while.

  Eventually, he recognized that it was dangerous for them to stay so long in a public place. “We need to get out of here,” he said. “And there’s a call I have to make.”

  Zoey nodded as Chris took her arm and they walked out of the café into the streets of Belleville. The sidewalks were more crowded now, as the clubs were filling for the evening. Chinese characters glowed in neon reds and greens on a row of shop signs. The lurid colors seemed to match his agitated state of mind.

  As they walked, Zoey pulled herself together enough to start asking questions. “Who do you think killed him?”

  “It could have been Enigma or one of his crew. Maybe they knew Ed was making progress in figuring out how to stop the virus.”

  They stepped into a narrow alley that felt as dank and claustrophobic as a cavern. Chris dialed an international call to the San Francisco Police Department hotline using his burner phone and left an anonymous message that Eduardo de Lamadrid had been murdered in his apartment at 230 Folsom Street. Chris also told the officer that he needed to alert FBI agent Michael Hazlitt so that they could search Ed’s apartment and computer for evidence of his work in unpacking the Lurker virus. The officer sounded understandably confused, but he let Chris talk, and the call was being recorded. Chris was fairly certain that Ed’s attacker would have found and removed all of Ed’s work product, but there was a chance that the agents would find information that could be used to develop a security patch. At least the work being done on the virus by BlueCloud’s security team had not been lost.

  When the officer on the line asked whom he was speaking to, Chris hung up.

  “I couldn’t just leave him there in his apartment. It might have taken days for someone to find him.”

  “I understand,” Zoey said.

  Chris had considered calling Hazlitt directly and explaining everything that he had learned about Lurker in the hopes that it might convince him that they weren’t terrorists. But he couldn’t bring himself to do it. Chris feared that Enigma might somehow intercept his call to the FBI as he had the last one. His first offense had cost Sarah a finger. He didn’t want to learn the penalty for a second offense.

  They walked the streets in silence for a while until Chris’s thoughts returned to the task at hand. He checked his watch. The meeting at Père Lachaise was only forty-five minutes away. They headed down Rue de Belleville and then Boulevard de Ménilmontant toward the cemetery. The neighborhood’s cultural hodgepodge was evident in the shops they passed, from an Algerian restaurant to a Greek grocery to a Chinese bookstore.

  Finally, the imposing white marble gates of Père Lachaise Cemetery came into view. It was the most exclusive address in Paris, home to the wealthy and famous, but no one was in a hurry to take up residence. Chris had bought a map of the cemetery at a tourist shop, and now they wound their way in a misting rain through the impressive mausoleums and markers toward Sa’edi’s grave.

  “You know that this is another trap, don’t you?” Zoey said.

  “Yeah, but I don’t see what choice we have but to walk into it with our eyes open,” Chris said.

  Père Lachaise Cemetery on a rainy day in January was a study in shades of gray. Gray marble headstones, gray paving-stone path, charcoal clouds heavy with rain, rows of bare, ashen trees lining the path, and pearly gray light to dimly illuminate it all. They passed the graves of Jim Morrison, Chopin, Oscar Wilde, and Edith Piaf as they followed the maze-like cobbled paths through the cemetery. A stone angel atop a mausoleum spread its wings above them, drops of rain beading on her face like tears.

  Chris pulled out the map and examined it. “It’s grave number 35. I think it should be around this corner.”

  Zoey checked her watch. “We only have five minutes.” The rain was only a mist, but Zoey’s hair now hung in a mass of dark curls around her face.

  Chris led the way, steps clicking on the paving stones.

  After rounding a corner, Chris stopped in the middle of the path and turned in a circle. “This should be it,” he said.

  Zoey took one side and Chris took the other, examining the gravestones.

  “Over here,” she said at last.

  Chris stepped up behind her next to a low, black iron railing and saw a small headstone that read:

  Gholam-Hossein Sa’edi

  January 4, 1936–November 23, 1985

  “So, what now?” Zoey asked.

  “We look closer,” Chris said. But first he scanned the cemetery for someone approaching to meet them. The walkways were empty. The light rain was enough to keep the tourists away.

  He stepped over the railing and inspected the grave. There was a six-foot-long gray marble slab with a matching headstone flanked by two urns. Chris examined the grass around the grave and looked behind the headstone. Nothing.

  Chris tried to lift the lid of one of the urns, but it was a solid piece of sculpture and did not move. Next, Chris rolled the heavy marble urn on one side to see what was underneath. Again, nothing.

  “Do you think they really intended to make contact with us?” Zoey asked. “Maybe this was all a waste of time.”

  “I don’t think so,” Chris said. “They’re probably watching us right now. They wanted us to be at this place for a reason. Maybe becaus
e it suggests that we’re sympathetic to some anti-Islamist movement. Maybe Enigma is trying to create a backstory for us that will make it easier for the government to turn us into scapegoats later.”

  Chris noticed a scuff mark on the marble around the second urn, the kind of mark that suggested that it had been recently moved. He turned the base of the sculpture on one edge and rolled it. Zoey saw the white letter-sized envelope first and picked it up. She tore it open and held it out to Chris so that they could read it together. The message was written in black marker and read:

  EXIT THE CEMETERY BY THE MAIN GATE. GO TO 33 BOULEVARD DE MÉNILMONTANT, SUITE 225. THE DOOR WILL BE UNLOCKED. YOU HAVE FIFTEEN MINUTES—THE CLOCK STARTS NOW.

  Once more, Chris scanned the cemetery but he could not spot whoever was observing them. Then he turned to Zoey and asked, “Do you remember the path we took to get here?”

  “You’re the one with the map,” Zoey said. “Everything here looks the same to me.”

  Zoey was right. The cobbled path lined with funeral statuary looked like every other route they had taken since they entered the sprawling necropolis.

  “Let’s start this way,” Chris said, pointing back the way they had come.

  He knew that if they made one wrong turn on the way out, they would miss the kidnappers’ deadline. If that happened, Sarah might die.

  They retraced their path through Père Lachaise without a word, with Chris leading the way.

  After a few minutes, they reached a fork in the path. Chris studied the cheap tourist map but didn’t see any markers or landmarks that he recognized. Zoey stared at him. She knew that he was guessing and she knew the stakes. This was Chris’s decision to make. Chris pointed to the left down one of the identical paths just as a pellet-like rain began to fall.

  As they set out again, Zoey said, “I would have chosen that one, too.”

  In a matter of minutes, they could hear the sounds of the street and knew that Chris had guessed correctly. They emerged from the hushed spell of the cemetery and were back among the car horns and street noise of Belleville.

  Thirty-three Boulevard de Ménilmontant was a narrow, inauspicious office building that was an exemplar of a badly dated seventies-modern style. It looked like the sort of place where failed French accounting firms went to die. They climbed the stairs to the second floor, where Chris noted one video camera in the lobby, another in the stairwell. There would be a record of their visit.

  There were three offices off of a short hallway with worn, mottled chocolate-brown carpeting. The last door on the right displayed a small brass plaque that read “225.” Chris checked his watch. They had made it in almost exactly fifteen minutes.

  Before he could try the doorknob, Zoey asked, “Are you sure this is a good idea?”

  “Not at all,” Chris replied.

  EPISODE 5

  CHAPTER 28

  Chris drew his gun and tested the door of Suite 225. As the note had indicated, it was unlocked.

  He turned the knob and the door slowly swung open to reveal a small, dingy but fully operational office. The fluorescent lights were on overhead. The computers were running. Some screen savers bounced images of a generic corporate logo. On other monitors, the screen savers hadn’t even activated yet. The office must have been occupied only minutes before.

  There was a smell of burnt coffee from a simmering coffee pot. A tinny radio somewhere in the rear of the office was playing “Lisztomania,” a bouncy, upbeat song by the French pop band Phoenix. But there was no one in the office. It was as if everyone had just gotten up from their desks and walked out. It occurred to Chris that Enigma might have cleared the office with a bomb threat—or an actual bomb.

  Chris stepped inside. He couldn’t tell what sort of business was conducted there, and his French wasn’t good enough to read the papers strewn across the desks.

  “It’s kind of like a ghost ship,” said Zoey, who was right behind him. “A really boring and corporate ghost ship.”

  Chris walked among the desks and back to a small kitchen in the rear of the office. He found the radio there and turned it off.

  Zoey called to him from the other room. “Chris, come here. I found it.”

  There was a large, blue Post-it note on the screen of a desktop computer that read: “CHRIS AND ZOEY—PRESS PLAY.” On the screen was a gray command box with no text.

  “This looks like some kind of custom programming,” Chris said. “Otherwise, the command box would include some explanation of its function.”

  “So what now?”

  Chris was down on his knees examining the computer and its wiring, checking for explosives. There was nothing out of the ordinary.

  He stood up. “I’m going to click it. But you should step outside into the hallway. Just because there was no bomb the last time we did this—”

  “I don’t need to be persuaded,” Zoey said. Although she deflected, Chris could see the anxiety in her face. She stepped into the hallway and peered around the corner.

  Chris sat down at the desk. His hand hovered over the mouse. He knew that following this series of electronic clues from Enigma was like playing Russian roulette with a keyboard. Sooner or later, he would press a key or click a mouse and be blown to bits. The question was, was this the time?

  He extended his fingers in front of him and noticed them trembling. But if he walked away, what would happen to Sarah?

  Chris rested his right hand lightly upon the mouse. Then, in the silent office, it was possible to hear a distinct click as Chris pressed Play. The gray command box disappeared from the screen.

  And then—nothing.

  “What happened?” Zoey asked from the doorway.

  “Nothing that I can see.”

  Chris’s prepaid cell phone rang. He examined the display, which showed “UNKNOWN CALLER,” then answered.

  “Chris.” It was Enigma.

  “We met your deadline. We did what you wanted. What now?” Chris asked.

  “You just sent an email to the office of the Mayor of New York City announcing that there will be a catastrophic cyberattack on the city on the night of January 14.”

  After a stunned moment to absorb that statement, Chris said, “No one’s going to believe that.”

  “I think they will. The security cameras will show you and Zoey entering the office. Don’t bother trying to destroy them. The images are already stored with the security company. When you clicked that button, it sent an email through an account that was set up using your personal information. You may have been viewed as a significant national security threat before, but I’d like to be the first to congratulate you on hitting the top of the most wanted list.”

  Chris tamped down his anger. “Is Sarah still alive?”

  “Yes, she’s fine. But you don’t have much time to talk.”

  “And why is that?”

  At that moment, Chris and Zoey heard distant sirens. It sounded like an entire battalion of gendarmes. The sirens were in stereo, coming from the streets outside and, faintly, through the phone’s speaker. Enigma was in Paris, and apparently not that far away.

  “You called the police,” Chris said flatly.

  “Yes.”

  “I’m going to find you.”

  “Maybe. It doesn’t look too promising right now, though. Personally, I’m kind of hoping you escape. I’m going to miss this when it’s over.”

  Chris hung up the phone. “That’s for us,” he said to Zoey, waving a finger in the air to indicate the sirens. “We need to leave now.”

  The building was modern enough that it didn’t have windows that opened or a fire escape. The sirens were much louder now below. He looked out the window and saw the white-and-blue hatchback patrol cars pulling up in front of the building.

  Chris and Zoey dashed out of the office and, in the hallway near the elevators, found stairs. After dashing up three flights, they faced a metal door. Luckily, it wasn’t locked. It made Chris wonder for a moment whether someone w
anted them to follow this escape route, but there was no time for second-guessing. They stepped out onto the black tar-paper roof of the building, which looked out on a panorama of dingy apartment buildings. A light rain was still falling, and the wind was gustier than it had been at street level. The 20th arrondissement was filled with tightly packed structures. It was only a jump of four feet across and six feet down to the roof of the neighboring building. The four-foot gap seemed much larger, though, if you looked down to the pavement five stories below. The sense of vertigo hit him even stronger as his eye followed the raindrops down and he imagined his clawing, plummeting body doing the same.

  “If I go first, I can catch you,” Chris said.

  He didn’t wait for an answer, jumping across to the next building and tumbling awkwardly as he landed on the neighboring roof.

  “Are you okay?” Zoey asked.

  “Fine. Come on,” Chris said, wincing. “Don’t think about it.”

  But Chris could see she was thinking about it. Then, after one last glance back at the entrance to the roof, Zoey took a couple of quick steps and pushed off, her feet spinning beneath her in black Converse All Stars.

  She didn’t get quite enough distance on her jump—she was going to hit the ledge rather than land cleanly on the rooftop. Chris locked his arms around Zoey as she came down and threw himself backwards, pulling her away from the ledge. She landed heavily on top of him, and they both lay gasping for a moment.

  Chris eyed the ledge of the building above them, expecting to see the police appear at any moment. He slipped his hands under Zoey’s arms and supported her as they made their way around a corner, getting out of view of the police. Fortunately, it was an easy jump onto the next adjoining rooftop. From there, they entered a stairwell and descended to the street. Emerging onto Boulevard de Ménilmontant, they were about a hundred yards away from the building they had entered. Down the street, there were now nearly a dozen patrol cars with lights strobing and sirens bleating in alternating tones.