Most important, Vince couldn’t be dead. That was what he had been told. But it couldn’t have happened. It didn’t happen.
So all of this had to be an impossibly bad dream, a nightmare of the sort that Francis Deegan hadn’t experienced since he was maybe three or four years old. And this man standing before him now, this absurd caricature with curly tufts of white-blond hair around the side of his balding head, dressed in a tight, black leather body suit – well, he couldn’t be real either. No way.
‘I’m very angry at you! I’m good and pissed!’ Mr Potter yelled right in Francis’s face. ‘Why did you leave me?’ he screeched. ‘Why? Tell me why? You must never leave me again! I get very scared without you and you know that. You know how I am. That was thoughtless of you, Ronald!’
Francis had already tried reasoning with the madman – Potter, he called himself, and no, not Harry. Mister Potter! But reasoning didn’t work. He’d told the raving lunatic several times that he had never seen him before. He wasn’t Ronald! Didn’t know any Ronalds! That had earned him a series of full-handed slaps across the face, one so hard that it bloodied his nose. The dweeby, Billy Idol-lookalike freak, was a lot stronger than he looked.
So out of desperation, Francis finally whispered an apology to the creep. ‘I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I won’t do it again.’
And then Mr Potter was hugging him fiercely and he was crying all over him. Wasn’t this too weird? ‘Oh God, I’m so glad you’re back. I was so worried about you. You must never leave me again, Ronald.’
Ronald? Who the hell was Ronald? And who was Mister Potter? What was going to happen now? Was Vince really dead? Had he been killed tonight back at the college? All of these questions were exploding inside Francis’s throbbing skull. So actually it was easy for him to cry in Potter’s arms, and even to hold on to him for dear life. To press his face into the fragrant black leather and whisper over and over again, ‘I’m so sorry. I’m so, so sorry. Oh my God, I’m sorry.’
And Potter answered, ‘I love you too, Ronald. I adore you. You’ll never leave me again, will you?’
‘No. I promise. I’ll never leave.’
Then Potter laughed, and pulled away sharply from the boy.
‘Francis, dear Francis,’ he whispered. ‘Who the hell is Ronald? I’m just playing with you, boy. This is just a game of mine. You’re in college, you must have figured that much out. So let’s play games, Francis. Let’s go out to the barn and play.’
Chapter Sixty-Five
I received a strange e-mail from Monnie Donnelley at my temporary office. An update of sorts. She hadn’t been suspended, Monnie said. Not yet anyway. Plus, she had some news for me.
Need to see you tonight. Same place, same time. Very important news. – M
So I arrived at the Command Post Pub just past seven and searched around for Monnie. What was this mysterious news she had? The bar area was crowded with customers, but I spotted her. Easy – she was the only woman. I also figured that Monnie and I might be the only non-Marines in the Command Post.
‘I couldn’t talk to you over the phone at Quantico. Does that suck or what? Whom do you trust?’ she said when I walked up to her.
‘You can trust me. Of course I don’t expect you to believe that, Monnie. You have news?’
‘I sure do. Take a load off. I think I have some good news, actually.’
I took a stool beside Monnie. The bartender came and we ordered beers. Monnie started up as soon as he walked away. ‘I have a good friend at ERF,’ she began. ‘That’s the Engineering Research Facility at Quantico.’
‘I know what it is. You seem to have friends everywhere.’
‘That’s true. I guess not at the Hoover Building, though. Anyway, my friend alerted me to a message the Bureau got a couple of days ago, but dismissed as a crank call. It’s about a website called the Wolf’s Den. Supposedly, you can buy a lover at the Den, as in, have someone abducted. The site is supposed to be impossible to hack into. That’s the catch.’
‘So how did he get in? Our hacker.’
‘She’s a genius. I suspect that’s why she was ignored. Want to meet her? She’s fourteen years old.’
Chapter Sixty-Six
Monnie had an address for the hacker in Dale City, Virginia, only about twelve miles from Quantico. The agent who’d fielded the original call hadn’t followed up very well, which bothered us, so we figured the agent wouldn’t mind if we did his job for him.
I wasn’t actually planning on taking Monnie along, but she wouldn’t have it. So we dropped her SUV off at her house, and she rode with me to Dale City. I’d already called ahead and spoken to the girl’s mother. She sounded nervous, but she said she was glad the FBI was finally coming to talk to Lili. She added, ‘Nobody can ignore Lili for long. You’ll see what I mean.’
A young girl in black coveralls answered the front door, and I assumed it was Lili, but that turned out to be wrong. Annie was the twelve-year-old sister. She certainly looked fourteen. She beckoned, and we stepped into the house.
‘Lili is in her laboratory,’ said Annie. ‘Where else?’
Then Mrs Lynch appeared from the kitchen and we introduced ourselves. She had on a plain white blouse and a green corduroy jumper. She was holding a greasy spatula, and I couldn’t help thinking how casual the domestic scene was. Especially if what Lili thought she had come upon was actually true. Had a fourteen-year-old found a possible trail that would lead us to the kidnappers? I’d heard of cases solved in stranger ways. But still…
‘We call her Dr Hawking. Like Stephen Hawking? Her I.Q. is up there,’ said her mom, waving the cooking utensil upward for emphasis. ‘Smart as she is, Lili lives on Sprite and Pixie Stix. There’s nothing I can do to influence her dietary habits.’
‘Is it all right if we talk to Lili now?’ I asked.
Mrs Lynch nodded. ‘So I guess you’re taking this seriously. That’s so wise with Lili. She’s not making any of this up, believe me.’
‘Well, we just want to talk to her. To be on the safe side. We’re not sure that this is anything, really.’ Which was true enough.
‘Oh, it’s something,’ said Mrs Lynch. ‘Lili never makes a mistake. She hasn’t so far anyway.’
She pointed the spatula down the hall. ‘Second door on the right. She left it unlocked for a change, because she’s expecting you. She instructed us to stay out of it.’
Monnie and I headed down the hallway. ‘They have no idea what this could be, do they?’ she whispered. ‘I almost hope it’s nothing. A false lead.’
I knocked once on a wooden door that sounded hollow.
‘It’s open,’ came a high-pitched female voice. ‘Come.’
I opened the door and looked in on a pine bedroom suite. Single bed, rumpled cow-pattern sheets, posters from MIT, Yale and Stanford up on the walls.
Seated behind a blue halogen lamp at a laptop was a teenage girl – dark hair, eyeglasses, braces on her teeth. ‘I’m all set up for you,’ she said. ‘I’m Lili of course, of course. I’ve been working on a decryption angle. It comes down to finding flaws in the algorithms.’
Monnie and I both shook Lili’s hand, which was very small and seemed as fragile as an eggshell.
Monnie began, ‘Lili, you said in your e-mail to us that you had information that could help with the disappearances in Atlanta and Pennsylvania.’
‘Right. But you found Mrs Meek already.’
‘You hacked on to a very secure site? That’s right, isn’t it?’ Monnie asked.
‘I sent out some stealth UDP scans. Then IP spoofing. Their rootserver bit on the false packets. I planted a sourcecode for the sniffer. Finally hacked in using DNS poisoning. It’s a little more complicated, but that’s the basic idea.’
‘I get it,’ Monnie said. Suddenly I was very glad she was there with me at the Lynch house.
‘I think they know I was on with them. Actually, I’m sure of it,’ said Lili.
‘How do you know that?’ I asked Lili.
‘You didn’t get into too many specifics with Agent Tiezzi. You said you thought someone might be “for sale” at the site.’
‘Yeah, but I blew it, didn’t I? Agent Tiezzi didn’t believe me. I also admitted I was fourteen, and a girl. How dumb of me, right?’
‘I won’t hold it against you,’ Monnie said and smiled kindly.
Lili finally cracked a smile too. ‘I’m in big trouble, aren’t I? Actually, I know that I am. They might already know who I am.’
I shook my head. ‘No, Lili,’ I said to her. ‘They don’t know who you are, or where you are. I’m sure they don’t.’
If they did, you’d already be dead.
Chapter Sixty-Seven
It was so eerie and strange, being in the young wunderkind’s room – with her life, and her family members’ lives, possibly in great danger. Lili had been a little coy in her message to the Bureau, so I understood how the tip might have fallen through the cracks. Also, she was fourteen years old. But now that we’d met and spoken to Lili one-to-one, I was sure that she had something real that could help us.
She’d heard them talking.
Someone had been purchased while she’d listened.
She was afraid for herself, and for her family.
‘Do you want to go on-line with them?’ Lili suddenly asked in an excited voice. ‘We could! See if they’re together now. I’ve been working on some cool anonymizing software. I think it will work. Not sure though. Well, yeah, it’ll work.’
She smiled broadly, showing those beautiful braces.
I could see in her eyes that she wanted to prove something to us.
‘Is this a good idea?’ Monnie leaned in and asked me.
I pulled her aside, I lowered my voice. ‘We have to move her and the family anyway. They can’t stay here now, Monnie.’
I looked over at Lili. ‘Okay. Why don’t you try to get on-line with them again. Let’s see what they’re up to. We’ll be right here with you.’
Lili talked constantly as she went through the various steps to get the site’s passwords and encrypted protection. I didn’t understand any of what the fourteen-year-old had to say, but Monnie got most of it, and she was enthusiastic, supportive, but mostly impressed.
Suddenly, Lili looked up in alarm. ‘Something’s all wrong here.’ She went back to her computer.
‘Oh shit! God damn them!’ she swore. ‘Those creeps. I can’t believe this.’
‘What’s happened?’ Monnie asked. ‘They changed the keys, didn’t they?’
‘Worse,’ Lili said and kept tapping out commands very rapidly. ‘Much, much worse. Awhh horsespit. I can’t believe it.’
She finally turned away from the glowing screen of her laptop.
‘First, I couldn’t even find the site. They set up this very cool, very dynamic network – it was in Detroit, Boston, Miami, bouncing all over the place. Then when I did find it, I couldn’t get on. Nobody can get into the site except them.’
‘Why is that?’ Monnie asked. ‘What happened between a couple of days ago and now?’
‘They installed an eye-scan. It’s almost impossible to fool. The whole thing is run by this guy who calls himself Wolf. Wolf’s a very scary dude. He’s Russian. Like a wolf from Siberia. I think he’s even smarter than I am. And that’s fucking smart.’
Chapter Sixty-Eight
The next day I worked in the Strategic Information and Operations Center (SIOC) conference rooms on the fifth floor of the Hoover. So did Monnie Donnelley, who still felt as if she were in limbo. We were keeping what we had found out quiet so that we could check out a few things. The main room was humming around us. The abductions were the major media story now. The Bureau had taken an incredible amount of heat in the past few years; they needed a win. No, I thought, we needed a win.
A lot of important Bureau people were at the group meeting late that night: they included the heads of the Behavioral Analysis Unit-east and BAU-west, the unit chief of the Child Abduction Serial Murder Investigative Resource Center (CASMIRC), the head of Innocent Images in Baltimore, an FBI unit dedicated to finding and eliminating sexual predators on the Internet. Stacy Pollack led the discussion again; and she was clearly in charge of the case.
In spite of all the heavies present, the briefing was non-eventful, since not much had happened that day.
‘I want to get approval for a reward, maybe half a million,’ said Jack Arnold, who ran BAU-east. No one commented on the proposal. Several agents went on making notes or using their laptops. Actually, it was de-spiriting.
‘I think I have something.’ I finally spoke from the back of the room.
Stacy Pollack looked my way. A few heads popped up, reacting to the group’s silence more than anything. I rose at my seat.
The FNG had the floor. I introduced Monnie, just to be cute. Then I told them about the Wolf’s Den and our meeting with fourteen-year-old Lili Lynch. I also mentioned the Wolf, who, according to Monnie’s findings, might be a Russian gangster by the name of Pasha Sorokin. His pedigree was hard to trace, especially before he moved out of the USSR. ‘If we can get inside the Den somehow, I think we’ll find out something about the missing women. In the meantime, I think we need to put more heat on some of the sites already identified by Innocent Images. It seems logical that the pervs using the Wolf’s Den might visit other porn sites too. We need help. If the Wolf turns out to be Pasha Sorokin, we’ll need a lot of help.’
Suddenly Stacy Pollack was interested. She led a discussion in which both Monnie and I were given the third degree. It was clear that we threatened some of the other agents in the room. Then Pollack made a decision.
‘You can have resources,’ she said. ‘We’ll watch the porn sites, twenty-four, seven. Thing is, we have nothing better at this point. I want our Russian group out of New York on this, too. I can’t quite believe Pasha Sorokin would be personally involved in this, but if he is, it’s huge. We’ve been interested in Sorokin for six years! We’re very interested in the Wolf.’
Chapter Sixty-Nine
During the next twenty-four hours, over thirty agents were assigned to surveillance of fourteen different porn sites and chat rooms. It had to be one of the most lurid ‘stakeouts’ ever. We didn’t know exactly whom we were looking for – other than anyone who happened to mention a site called Wolf’s Den, or possibly the Wolf. In the meantime, Monnie and I were gathering all the information we could about the Red Mafiya, and especially about Pasha Sorokin.
At four that afternoon, I had to leave. The timing couldn’t have been much worse, but there wouldn’t have been any good time for this. I’d been asked to attend a preliminary meeting with Christine Johnson’s lawyers at the Blake Building in the Dupont Circle area. Christine was coming after little Alex.
I arrived at a little before five-thirty and had to fight the tide of office workers streaming from an unusual twelve-story structure, which actually rounded the corner where Connecticut Avenue met L. I checked the downstairs registry and saw that the tenants in the building included Mazda, Barron’s, the National Safety Council, several law offices, including Mark, Haranzo, and Denyeau which represented Christine.
I trudged to the elevator bank and pushed a button. Christine wanted custody of Alex Jr. Her attorney had arranged for this meeting in the hopes of eventually resolving things without going to court or possibly resorting to Alternative Dispute Resolution. I had talked to my attorney in the morning and decided not to have him present since this was an ‘informal’ meeting. I tried to have only one thought as I rode the elevator to the seventh floor: do what is best for little Alex. No matter what, or how it might make me feel.
I got off at seven and was met by Gilda Haranzo who was slim and attractive, dressed in a charcoal suit with a white silk blouse knotted at the throat. My lawyer had competed against Ms Haranzo and told me she was good, and also ‘on a mission’. She was divorced from her physician husband and had custody of their two children
. Her fees were high, but she and Christine had gone to Villanova together and were friends from back then.
‘Christine is already in the conference room, Alex,’ she said after introducing herself. Then she added. ‘I’m sorry it’s come to this. This case is difficult. There are no bad people involved. Will you please follow me?’
‘I’m sorry it’s come to this too,’ I said. I wasn’t so sure that there weren’t any bad guys, though. We’d see soon enough.
Ms Haranzo led me to a mid-size room with gray carpeting and light blue fabric walls. There was a glass table with six toney, black leather chairs in the center of the room. The only things on the table were a pitcher of iced water, some glasses, and a laptop computer.
A row of tall windows looked out on a view of Dupont Circle. Christine was standing near the windows, and she didn’t speak as I entered. Then she walked over to the table and sat in one of the leather chairs.
‘Hello, Alex,’ she finally said.
Chapter Seventy
Gilda Haranzo slid into her seat behind her laptop, and I chose a spot across from Christine at the glass conference table. Suddenly, the loss of little Alex seemed very real to me. The thought took my breath away. Whether it was a good decision or not, fair or unfair, Christine had walked away from us, moved thousands of miles away and hadn’t been to see him once. She’d knowingly relinquished her parental rights. Now she’d changed her mind. And what if she changed her mind again after that?
Christine spoke again. ‘Thank you for coming here, Alex. I’m sorry about the circumstances. You must believe that I’m sorry.’
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