1st Case

by James Patterson

  I barely breathed during the pat-down. One guard searched me while the other watched the monitor, scanning my things on their way through.

  Please, please, please—

  “Okay, you’re good to go,” the first guard told me. “Grab your stuff and follow the agent inside.”

  I kept my poker face and slid the phone into my pocket. Then I followed Konrad Palumbo onto the sixth floor’s main hallway as they buzzed us through.

  Just inside, she swiped her ID to get us past yet another security door. This one led to an enclosed staircase. It was just a single flight, up to the seventh floor and back out again.

  We came into a much shorter corridor than the one below. I counted five beige steel doors on the left and four on the right, with an alarmed fire exit at the far end. It was easy to imagine this little wing as a kind of secret compartment within the much larger federal building. I didn’t even know that the Bureau had offices on seven.

  I followed Konrad Palumbo down to the last door on the right. She held her ID up to the card reader. The little red light turned green with a click, and she pushed the door open.

  “This is you,” she said. “Home sweet home … ish.”

  Inside, there was a carpeted space with a platform bed, a couch, a bathroom, and a tiny kitchen, including a full bag of groceries on the counter. It was basically a little studio apartment, minus the windows.

  “More like cave sweet cave,” I said. “How long am I going to be here?”

  Konrad Palumbo shrugged. “I’m not going to lie. You’re going to get bored.”

  I wish, I thought, and fingered the phone-shaped bulge in my pocket.

  “Write me up a list of things you’d like from your apartment,” she said. “Support staff will check in with you about incidentals, and psych services will be by first thing in the morning.”

  “Psych services?” I asked.

  “It’s protocol, with the death of an agent,” she said. “And listen, I’m really sorry about George. It’s a horrible thing that happened to him.”

  “Whoever did it deserves to die a slow, painful death,” I said for the benefit of whoever was listening in through that phone. “I’d kill them myself if I could.”

  Agent Lisa Konrad Palumbo narrowed her eyes at the intensity in my voice. She was trained to pick up on small changes like that, I’m sure, but she didn’t call me on it, which I appreciated.

  I started scribbling down a quick list for her. Clothes, shoes, a few toiletries, laptop …

  “Can this include my bike and indoor trainer?” I asked.

  “I don’t see why not,” she said.

  It was the one thing I knew I’d want, if I had to be cooped up. Without some kind of exercise, I was going to go completely mental in there.

  “Now try to get some sleep,” she said.

  “I will,” I told her.

  But that was just another lie. I had no intention of getting any sleep. Just the opposite, in fact.

  This was going to be the all-nighter of my life.

  CHAPTER 70

  AS SOON AS I’d locked the door behind Agent Konrad Palumbo, I took out the phone and checked for messages. There were none.

  Anyone home? I tried.

  There was no immediate answer, and no reason to wait around for one, either. They knew how to reach me, obviously, and they were taking their time doing it. I had no idea what to expect from them, or for that matter, when to expect it.

  My best move was to get as much done as I feasibly could in the meantime. That meant not letting myself get overwhelmed with worry about Eve. Yes, there was sufficient cause to be afraid that the very worst could happen—that she wouldn’t be coming back again. That was possible for any number of reasons, including the ones I could think of and, even more frighteningly, some endless number of reasons I couldn’t even begin to foresee.

  But obsessing about all that wasn’t going to do a thing to up Eve’s chances of getting through this. Logically speaking, Eve and I would both be better off if I kept myself focused and productive.

  So I moved on to the next thing I knew how to do. I went looking for Hermes.

  The Android was fully functional, which meant I could get online as much as I wanted. I just had to do it consciously. I was living in a virtual fishbowl now, but if these guys were as smart as they seemed, this was exactly what they’d expect me to do.

  I worked from memory, going back to every technology board, every chat space, and every seamy little dark net hangout I could think of where I’d seen signs of Hermes before.

  The last time I’d tracked him, he’d all but advertised himself as a key player in this case. There had been signs of him everywhere I looked.

  Now it was just the opposite. I spent a tedious three hours going page to page without finding a single indication that Hermes had ever existed. It was like someone had gone around scrubbing out every footprint and eating every bread crumb that had been all over the trail before.

  Which meant one of two things to me: either our killers had pulled up stakes and moved their operations yet again, or the supposed connection between these sext murders, Hermes, and the Free Net Collective was just an elaborate bit of fiction.

  My money was on the latter. Hackers do it all the time, laying down false leads as a smoke screen while they go about their real business elsewhere.

  And Hermes hadn’t just been some garden-variety smoke screen, either, I realized. He’d been a trap. One that I’d fallen for, just like the half-baked wannabe they’d probably pegged me for.

  I hated myself for the position we were in. Eve never would have fallen into this if it hadn’t been for me. Her words came filtering back into my mind now. If it’s this easy, it means they wanted you to find them, she’d told me. And she’d been right. Devastatingly so.

  With any luck, Keats’s team was way ahead of me on all of this. Maybe by dawn, they’d have Eve home again and the killers would be in custody—or dead, for all I cared.

  But until I knew any better, this little covert operation of mine was full steam ahead.

  CHAPTER 71

  I DIDN’T MEAN to fall asleep.

  When I jerked awake, it took me a second to recompute where I was, and why. Everything flooded back in a nasty rush. The phone, set to vibrate, had woken me up. A new message had just come in.

  Hey Angela. Wanna talk?

  They’d been watching me sleep, hadn’t they? It was a disgusting feeling. But I also knew that any contact was better than none.

  I’m here, I wrote back.

  Any luck finding Hermes? he asked.

  No, I answered. But you already knew that, didn’t you?

  You were pretty obvious.

  I wasn’t trying to hide. I was trying to get you to talk to me.

  Well here I am. Did you get much sleep?

  Where is Eve? I wrote.

  I asked you a question first.

  According to the Android, it was just before 9:00 a.m. The last I remembered, it had been coming up on seven. I could feel the last forty-eight hours dragging on me like a literal weight.

  I slept a little, ok? Where is Eve?

  She’s right here with me. Safe and sound.

  WHO ARE YOU? I pounded out. If we’d been talking on the phone, I would have been screaming at him by now.

  I’m nobody! he wrote. Who are you? Are you nobody, too?

  A chill razored up my back. Even I recognized that line. It was from an Emily Dickinson poem.

  This wasn’t the cold, authoritarian voice of whoever had sent me running around the city the night before. This was the poetry lover. The chameleon who had seduced Gwen Petty, and Nigella Wilbur, and Reese Sapporo by becoming whoever they needed him to be online.

  We’d known for a while that there was more than one of these guys. Now the picture was becoming clearer. This was the chatty one. And the other guy was … what? The engineer? The executioner?

  What do you want? I asked.

  Send me a pic,
he said. I’ll make it worth your while.

  This app is programmed to take a picture every 10 seconds, I wrote. Why do you need me to send another one?

  Don’t play dumb, he said. That’s not the kind of pic I mean. You know what I like.

  It was getting seedier by the second. He was right. I did know what he liked. I’d seen more than enough of it in the leering, predatory sexts he’d traded with his young victims.

  At the same time, I thought, if that’s what got this guy off, it meant there was something he wanted that I could control. That meant leverage, and even a tiny bit was more than I’d had up to now. So I tried to work it.

  I need proof that Eve is still alive, I said. Then we can keep going.

  What kind of proof? he asked.

  Let me speak with her.

  That’s not going to happen. But since you’ve been good, hold on.

  I’m not sure how long I sat there, waiting to hear back. I thought about what Billy had told me on my very first day with this case. The clock is always ticking, he’d said.

  It had never felt truer than it did just then. Every minute that passed now was one more minute Eve had to spend in hell.

  Finally, just when I started to wonder if he was playing me—was he ever going to come back?—I got word. Instead of a text or a photo this time, an audio file scrolled into the Android’s chat thread, and I hit Play right away.

  What I’d received was a recording of Eve, her voice flat and emotionless as she read back the most recent text exchange.

  “‘I need proof that Eve is still alive. Then we can keep going.’ ‘What kind of proof?’ ‘Let me speak with her.’ ‘That’s not going to happen. But since you’ve been good, hold on.’”

  That was it, only eight seconds long. But it meant she was alive! Just hearing her again filled me with the energy I needed to keep going.

  I listened to the recording three more times, straining for any background noise that might give me some clue about where they’d taken her. There was nothing to extract, and before I could try a fourth time, the screen refreshed, the audio file disappeared, and a new text took its place.

  Satisfied?

  Why are you doing this? I asked.

  Not so fast. It’s your turn.

  For what? I asked, even though I knew.

  It’s called show and tell, he wrote. You show, I tell. Every pic buys you a new question. Fun, right?

  I could feel my desperation, rising inside me like mercury. I didn’t want to go down this path, but I had to be able to say I tried everything, for Eve’s sake.

  Before I could respond either way, a sharp knock came at my door. I flinched, then went to look through the peephole. A woman I’d never seen before was standing in the hall.

  “Who is it?” I asked.

  “Angela, I’m Dr. Ann L. Johnson,” she called back. “I’m here from psych services.”

  Dammit! I’d forgotten she was coming. And it wasn’t like I could send her away, as much as I would have liked to.

  “Just a minute!” I said as a quick series of new messages scrolled onto the phone in my hand.

  Sounds like you have company

  We’ll play later

  This is just getting interesting

  Don’t blow it now, Angela

  CHAPTER 72

  DR. ANN L. JOHNSON had an easy, chic kind of vibe going on, with her pleated pencil skirt, three-quarter-sleeve cardigan, and a beautiful floral print scarf that would have made my mother jealous. I could easily imagine her as the headmistress at some tony New England boarding school.

  After some initial chitchat that I figured was meant to put me at ease—like that was ever going to happen—we sat down at my little kitchen table for the psych evaluation I assumed she was there for.

  She asked how I was feeling about George, about Eve’s disappearance, and about the case in general. I answered honestly but superficially, never forgetting that someone else could be listening in. The whole thing was as uncomfortable as it was unavoidable.

  And then, inevitably, Dr. Johnson wanted to talk about my least favorite subject: me.

  “I’ve spoken a bit with your superiors here,” she said. “It sounds like you’re quite an eager learner.”

  “Is that a euphemism?” I asked.

  “It is, a little bit,” she acknowledged.

  I’m not a fan of shrinks. I’d been sent to a few in my adolescence, probably to make sure I wasn’t child-geniusing my way to a career as a psychopath. And while I’m sure they were all perfectly good docs, they always made me feel like an animal in a zoo.

  Still, I knew what Dr. Johnson was looking for. So I cut to the chase for both of us. The sooner we got this over with, the better.

  “What can I say? Some people overeat. Some people gamble or drink,” I told her. “I overdo. I overthink, and always have. But that’s also part of what’s gotten me this far, especially for someone my age.”

  “It’s true. Your resume is extraordinary,” she said.

  “That wasn’t a dig for compliments,” I told her. “What I’m saying is that I wouldn’t walk away from that part of myself, even if I could.”

  She only smiled at that, which made me want to scream.

  “Angela, let me start over with you,” Dr. Johnson said. “You tend to go all in, on just about anything. Am I right?”

  “Fair enough,” I said.

  “Has anyone ever spoken to you about impulse control? Or prescribed any medication for that kind of thing?”

  I paused, actually taking it in. Impulse control? Medication?

  “I thought we were supposed to be talking about George and Eve,” I said.

  “I’m merely suggesting that it’s possible you’ve succeeded so spectacularly in spite of these tendencies, not because of them,” she went on. “In which case, just imagine what you might accomplish without them.”

  I couldn’t argue with that and wasn’t going to. Her logic wasn’t the problem. It was her timing. I just didn’t want to be having this conversation.

  She went on. “I’m not telling you to pretend there’s no crisis,” she said. “But maybe this sequestration will help you pull back on the throttle a bit. Just take a conscious breath or two. Give your mind some space to process all of this.”

  “Do I have a choice?” I asked, looking around my little cave. “I’m in the ultimate time-out here.”

  “That doesn’t mean it’s lost time,” Johnson told me. “It’s just a matter of what you want to do with it.”

  On that we agreed fully. I couldn’t wait for her to leave.

  She stayed a little longer anyway, offering something to help me sleep (no, thank you) and asking about a convenient time for her to “drop by” again. Like I was going anywhere soon. The fact that I got all the way to the end without completely losing my shit felt like as much of an accomplishment as I could hope for.

  Finally, she got up to go. I walked her out to the hall and promised that I’d think about everything she’d said. Then I shut myself up in my room and turned back to the real task at hand:

  Hacking my way out of this corner I’d gotten myself into.

  CHAPTER 73

  ANOTHER STRING OF messages was waiting for me after my session with Dr. Johnson.

  The first one just read FYI.

  Then came a screen capture from a Twitter account under the name JustCuz.

  Hey @FBI! Any luck finding #EveAbajian? Didn’t think so.

  The tweet, stamped for five thirty that morning, had been posted with the picture of Eve they’d sent me the night before, mouth taped and eyes wide. It gave me the same hollow feeling in the pit of my stomach as it had the first time I saw it.

  And there was more. The third message was a link to a CNN story with the headline FBI ABDUCTION TWEETED BY ALLEGED KIDNAPPERS.

  Authorities are following up on a disturbing tweet that appeared briefly online Wednesday morning. The single posting, from an account held under the username JustCuz, re
ferenced the unconfirmed kidnapping of a Boston-area FBI employee and included a graphic picture of the alleged victim. The tweet has since been taken down by Twitter.

  CNN has learned that the victim in question is Eve Abajian, a cybersecurity analyst and consultant with the FBI’s Boston field office. Witnesses confirmed that police were called early this morning to the street outside of Abajian’s home in South Boston, where the body of retired federal agent George Yates was found in his car, following an apparent execution-style shooting. Calls to the FBI for comment were not immediately returned.

  My little safe house was starting to feel like a bomb shelter. Everything was blowing up out there and I was stuck inside, listening to the explosions.

  These guys knew exactly what they were doing. They knew the tweet would be taken down, and they knew it wouldn’t matter. Once it got out, the media machine would treat it like the catnip it was meant to be.

  What do you want from me? I messaged back.

  I didn’t expect a quick answer, but I got one.

  We want you to help us disappear.

  Disappear? What did that mean?

  How? I asked.

  Cable this phone to any networked computer at the FBI. We’ll take care of the rest.

  That’s when I knew I was talking to the other guy. The one I’d started to think of as the Engineer, as opposed to the Poet. This one was all business and no chat.

  What about Eve? I asked.

  You do your part and she walks away.

  Why should I believe anything you say? I wrote.

  Not my problem, he answered. Your call.

  They had to be making this up as they went along. They couldn’t have known ahead of time where I’d be taken. But now they were trying to capitalize on it.

  Or at least this guy was.

  Were the two of them even talking to each other at this point? Were they deliberately trying to confuse me? Playing me off of each other?