What Comes Next

by John Katzenbach

His head reeled. Adrian felt beaten and twisted by what he knew and what he saw. He tried to steel himself inwardly, to maintain control.

  Wolfe started punching keys. The hooded girl disappeared, replaced by a search website. He continued to punch keys, then paused, as he stared at the information that came up in front of them. Wolfe wrote down a sequence of numbers on a pad of paper. Then he went to a second search engine and typed those in spaces conveniently provided. A third screen came up, demanding a fee for the inquiry. “You want me to run it?” Wolfe asked.

  Adrian looked up, not unlike a tourist staring at the Rosetta stone, knowing that it was the key to languages but unable to comprehend how.

  “I suppose so.”

  They waited through an authorization for his credit. Within a few seconds they were accessing a site that also wanted a screen name and password. Wolfe typed in the now familiar Psychprof followed by Jennifer.

  “Now, that’s damn interesting,” Wolfe said.

  “What is?”

  “Someone really knows his way around computers. I wouldn’t be surprised if there was some really top-of-the-line hacker connected to this site.”

  “Mister Wolfe, please explain.”

  Wolfe sighed. “Look at this,” he said. “The IP address changes. But not too fast.”

  “What?”

  “It’s possible to put in links, shift the IP address from place to place, especially running it through server systems in the Far East or Eastern Europe that are very difficult to trace because they cater to less than legal activities. Of course, the problem with doing that is you raise an electronic red flag, professor. If you set up your site so that the IP address changes every two or three minutes, then it’s pretty damn clear to any Interpol people—and even more clear to their computers—that someone’s doing something nasty, which, as you can imagine, grabs their attention. Next thing you know, you have the FBI and CIA and MI6 and German or French state security all over your little porn site. Don’t want that. No sir. Don’t want that at all.”

  “So . . .”

  “Whoever set this place up is pretty clever and he must have known that. So he’s got just half a dozen servers set up. Look, he bounces back and forth between them.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means that it’s a trick to backtrack. And my guess is, if you do the GPS search on all of them, you will find a bunch of computers sitting in an empty apartment in Prague or Bangkok. His main broadcast is emanating from somewhere else. It would take the cops—or a bunch of Delta guys working for the CIA if we were talking terrorists here—time to figure out the real where, if you follow.”

  Adrian looked at the screen.

  The real where. He thought the sex offender had been strangely literate.

  He paused, and a question seemed to flow through his thinking. It had an obvious quality.

  “Are there any IP addresses here in the States for that website?” he asked.

  Wolfe smiled. “Ah,” he said slowly. “Now, finally, the professor is learning.”

  He clicked on some keys.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Two. One in”—he hesitated—“Austin, Texas. I know that one. It’s a big pornography server. Handles dozens of watch me webcam sites and dozens of post yourself and your girlfriend fucking sites. Let me see where the other IP address is listed.” He punched keys and then said, “Well, I’ll be damned.”

  Adrian stared at the GPS coordinates the computer had found.

  “That’s a New England cable system,” Wolfe said.

  Adrian thought for a moment, then spoke very quietly.

  “Where is that, Mister Wolfe?”

  A rapid-fire click-click-click filled the room.

  The screen changed and more GPS information arrived on the screen.

  “You want to know where Whatcomesnext.com is broadcasting to the Web, this program will tell you.”

  Wolfe punched another set of keys. Yet another GPS location appeared on the computer. Adrian stared, memorizing numbers. He told himself, Get them straight. Don’t forget. Don’t show him anything.

  “Have I earned my twenty grand?” Wolfe asked. “Because, professor, it’s late.”

  “I don’t know, Mister Wolfe,” Adrian lied. “It’s a fascinating process. I’m impressed. But I agree with you. It’s very late and, you know, I’m not as young as I used to be. I will meet you tomorrow and we can continue this.”

  “The money, professor.”

  “I need to be sure, Mister Wolfe.”

  Wolfe clicked the keys and the hooded girl jumped to the screen in front of them.

  Both men stared at the girl. She shifted position, bringing her legs up underneath her, as if shivering with cold.

  Wolfe moved slightly, like someone charged with watching two things at once and worried that either one might slip something past him. His wariness was in his eyes and in the tone of his voice. Adrian thought he should simply continue to lie, as much as he needed, but he knew that Wolfe wasn’t buying very much of it, if any.

  “I will bring a portion. Consider it an honorarium, Mister Wolfe. Although I doubt that we’ve found what I’m looking for.”

  Wolfe leaned back, stretching like a cat awakened from sleep. Adrian couldn’t tell whether the sex offender even cared about believing him. He—or more precisely his credit card—had opened up a few new avenues for Wolfe to travel. Whether he gave a damn about little Jennifer or Adrian or anything other than his own interests was unlikely.

  “Sure,” Wolfe said, making no effort to hide his skepticism. “If that’s not little Jennifer, then whoever it really is is someone who needs a hand, professor. Because I’m thinking that what comes next for this little gal is going to be damn unpleasant.”

  Wolfe laughed. “Get it?” he said. “A little late-night pun. No wonder the place is called Whatcomesnext.”

  Adrian rose. He took a last look at the figure of the hooded girl, though he somehow believed that by leaving her behind with the sex offender, encased in Wolfe’s computer, he was consigning her to evil. As he watched, it seemed to him that she was reaching out, through the screen, directly to him. He didn’t move—at least he didn’t think he moved—because he didn’t want Wolfe to know how energized he felt. As with one of his poems, he started to silently repeat the GPS coordinates over and over. At the same time, in the back of his head, he could hear Brian issuing commands: Do this! Do that! Get going! Time is wasting! But it was not until he heard his dead son whisper You know what you see that he forced himself to turn away from the picture and shuffled out of the sex offender’s house.

  39

  Michael was seated at a scarred white Formica kitchen table that wobbled unsteadily, one leg just millimeters too short, a laptop in front of him, taking what he liked to think of as endgame notes. The bouncing table irritated him, so he took a 9mm pistol out from beneath his belt, ejected a single live round, and by wedging the bullet under the short leg managed to steady the surface.

  “Mister Fix-it,” Linda called out as she passed through an adjacent room.

  Michael grinned and continued to work. Outside the window above a sink littered with filthy plates and glasses he could see a cloudless, afternoon blue sky. Thankfully, the ground would still be soft from early season rains and the slow process of melting snow in the northern regions, where summer took a long time to arrive. That was where he was heading. He wasn’t exactly sure when—maybe the next day or the day after—but very soon.

  Number 4, he thought, was growing old.

  Not old in terms of years but old in terms of interest. While he knew that she definitely had good days left, and there was always the possibility that a novel twist to the story would occur to them, which might drag things on longer, he also knew the audience had to be left with a sense of completion. This w
as tricky. The clients had to be satisfied but teased. There had to be both an ending and a promise.

  Linda was the business brains, and she had explained this to him. “Repeat customers are the lifeblood of any enterprise.” He liked listening to her when she adopted her junior executive tone of voice. She usually did this when they were naked and the contradiction between their unbridled sex and her dedicated, mechanical, well-thought-out observations excited him.

  He wanted to get up from his chair and embrace her. She usually melted when he showed spontaneous Valentine’s Day greeting card affections.

  Michael was halfway out of his seat when he stopped himself.

  More planning. Less distractions. End Series #4 strong.

  He almost laughed out loud. Sometimes sexy is simply getting the job done.

  He turned away from the window and got busy applying his organizational qualities to designing the disposal of Series #4. He took time to map out a route leading more than two hundred miles away from the farmhouse that would take him deep into Maine’s Acadia National Park. It was a spectacularly wild area that the two of them had scouted two summers earlier like a dedicated granola and wheat germ pair of young outdoorsy types—deer, moose, eagles winging through the air, fast, frothy rivers filled with wild salmon and trout, and totally isolated.

  The state forest was crosshatched with old and abandoned logging roads that penetrated deep into the wilderness. He needed truck access, even if this meant traveling across rock-strewn, rutted, overgrown roads.

  He would need privacy.

  It was a fitting place for Number 4 to spend her coming years. Not much chance she would ever be found—and if some stray hiker came across bleached bones dug up by wildlife, well, by that time they would be on to Series #5 or maybe even Series #6.

  Michael worked hard to identify all the police substations along his anticipated route. He’d determined the patrol routes for all the state police barracks along his drive, as well as the local cop departments that covered the rural areas he would pass through. He’d even checked on the staff and operating hours for any park ranger stations. He made an Internet inquiry at the American Automobile Association about traffic stops along the path he expected to follow and identified the hours least likely to result in being pulled over. It was the sort of preparation he enjoyed—keeping lists, making rapid computer searches. He sometimes thought he should have been a mountain climber who led expeditions to the highest and riskiest peaks. He was meticulous and filled with the energy of numbers. It gave him a sense of precision about death.

  He also made a list of the right equipment—shovel, saw, hammer, pickax, wire—for Number 4’s last few scenes. He did not know if he would actually use everything he listed, but he believed in preparation for all contingencies. He checked the small, handheld Sony mini-HD video camera that he would take with him on Number 4’s last ride. He had backup batteries and extra tapes and a small tripod that he could mount the recorder on. He made a note to spray the connecting clamp with some WD-40 to make sure it was operating smoothly.

  When he’d finished with every detail, going over each element two or three times in his head, he pushed away from the table and went to find Linda.

  She was at the monitors, yawning and stretching with exhaustion, halfheartedly watching Number 4. Michael paused. He could sense that some part of her that connected with Number 4 had come loose. He did not assign this to the rape she had dutifully, expertly filmed.

  He had two lists, a His and a Hers. Linda read through both rapidly, nodding in agreement.

  “You leaving now?” she asked.

  Michael glanced at the monitor where Number 4 was huddled. “This seems like a good time,” he said.

  “Hurry back.”

  “There are still final-scene details to work out,” Michael replied.

  In her hand she had another sheet of paper, a partial script that Michael had written the day before. She’d added some elements of her own, like a producer going over a screenwriter’s first rough draft. The margins on the page were cluttered with Linda’s pinched, elegant handwriting.

  “I know,” she said. “I’m just not satisfied we’ve got it right yet.”

  She walked him to the door and the two of them hesitated. This was the first time they had been apart since the first hours of Series #4. Indeed, during the duration they had hardly even been outside, so that the light breeze and mild temperatures riding on the clear air were heady, intoxicating, and they breathed in clarity.

  Michael looked around at the old farmhouse. It was a battered place, dusty and much the worse for wear.

  “We’re lucky we haven’t spent the entire series sneezing and coughing in this old dump,” he said. “I won’t be sad to move the hell out of here.”

  Linda squeezed his hand. “Don’t be long,” she said.

  “I won’t be. You need anything from town?”

  The conversation was typical of any young couple in love parting while one ran some boring weekend errands.

  She shook her head. “No. I’m good.” She glanced around. From where they stood, she could see trees lining a distant field, waves of green grass, and weeds cluttering a rolling countryside stretching back beyond the ramshackle faded red barn where they’d parked their Mercedes. Broken wooden fences and rusted barbed wire stood marking enclosures that had once held cows or sheep. The long dirt and gravel drive up to the farmhouse wound through haphazard bits of leftover forest, which hid the main road from their sight and created a partial tunnel. The nearest adjacent home was close to a mile distant and barely visible through underbrush and tree branches. Like so many places in New England that fall into disrepair, the setting looked both old-time idyllic and worn and tired. That was the beauty of it, Linda realized; concealed within all the age and splintering, they had created an ultra-modern world. The surroundings were a perfect camouflage for what they were doing. “Look, I don’t want Number Four to hear the truck starting up. The thing makes a racket. You know, rattle, rattle, ka-pow, clickety-click, vroom. So count to ninety before you turn the ignition key. That will give me enough time to play something that distracts her.”

  Michael thought that Linda often anticipated small but significant problems. “All right,” he said. “I can’t believe you would criticize my truck, it’s been totally reliable.” He joked and they smiled like any pair of lovers amusing each other with back-and-forth banter. “Okay. Ninety seconds, starting . . .” They both began to count, only Michael started at ninety and was going backward while Linda began with one and started up. They giggled like a pair of first-graders.

  “Again,” he said. “But from ninety . . . down.”

  She was shaking her head, tossing her hair back in the breeze. Then she started to count out loud as she made a rapid about-face and headed into the farmhouse. Michael scurried across the damp, muddy ground to the old truck, counting silently with each step.

  They were having fun again. They could both see the end of Series #4 and this made them both relieved and excited.

  As he settled behind the wheel, he imagined Linda at the computer. Music? he wondered. Maybe the playground again?

  Whatever she chose, it would erase any noise he made with the truck pulling out.

  Actually, Linda combined the two. Still counting out loud, she had settled down at the main computer bank and punched up some keys. First she played the sound of someone banging loudly on a door, which made Number 4 twist about suddenly on the bed. This was instantly blended with the raucous opening chords of Led Zeppelin’s “Communication Breakdown.” She saw Number 4 cover her ears with her hands, which was difficult but just possible with the handcuffs and chains that now made up the limits of her freedom.

  Michael hurried through the warehouse home and hardware store, pushing a large orange shopping cart and purchasing many of the same materials he
’d used to burn the stolen van.

  He tossed items into the bed of the truck like a number of other do-it-yourself types and contractor’s assistants who were exiting the store along with him. He was aware that the chain had security cameras by the doors, in the aisles, and out in the parking lot. He kept his hat scrunched down on his head and his chin tucked in. He had turned his shirt collar up. He didn’t want any of the items traced back to the store, and he didn’t want any cop going over the tape and maybe identifying the truck.

  Everything had to be erased. It was a constant fight for him to identify even the smallest of items that might serve for a link. Hair stuck in a comb? That might provide DNA. Fingerprints on the slick surface of a tabletop? He worried about some cop connecting prints to his old teenage arrest report. A sales receipt from a high-end New York City camera store? He always paid cash, no matter the cost. The hard drives from their computers? They needed special disposal attention. Hard work, he thought, making sure that absolutely nothing is left behind when you disappear.

  Michael stopped at a self-serve gas station and fueled up both his truck and half a dozen red plastic canisters with gasoline. He topped off all the tanks.

  Graves to dig, trails to burn, he thought. Tickets to purchase. He knew he had to work out times and distances, dovetail them with airline flights and auto miles.

  Disassembling Series #4 was as difficult as planning it. The timing was tricky. Everything he had built had to be taken apart and erased. Lots of work, he thought, and coordinated efforts. Never quite enough hours in the day to do it all.

  He drove, sticking religiously to the speed limit.

  The farmhouse was several miles out of the small town, down a side road and just visible from the highway. As he pulled in, Michael could not imagine what it looked like when it had been a functioning farm. Now it was awaiting the arrival of a wealthy type who would want to rebuild it with high-end European kitchen appliances and imported hardwood floors, wrought-iron chandeliers from Vermont Castings and probably with a home theater in the basement that had once been Number 4’s cell. The house was perfect for some rich city couple looking for an isolated weekend retreat. They would want to replace one sort of theater with another. They would get out of the demands of their busy lives and want a place surrounded by nature—not wild nature but tamed ex-farmland nature—where they could have guests and watch Blu-ray movie discs and have no idea what real drama had been created in the very same spot. Everything about the rebuilt farmhouse would be fake and contrived. And in Michael’s imagination this trite and trendy couple would not have the slightest clue as to what truth had actually been witnessed in the same location.