by Adam Hamdy
Ash looked across the helicopter and smiled. They were in custody and she was facing a disciplinary investigation, but they finally had a viable suspect and were no longer in the frame for murder. Wallace knew Ash would consider this a win, but he wasn’t so sure. Ash was the only person who’d managed to keep him safe and he had a feeling that they wouldn’t be together for very much longer.
Hector spent the first ten minutes of the flight on the phone to an agent called Alvarez, who, Wallace surmised, was in California leading the West Coast investigation. Hector told Alvarez about Max Byrne, taking care to highlight Ash’s role in identifying him as a suspect. Wallace got the feeling that, despite their run-ins, Hector was a fan of Ash and that he was laying groundwork to help her fend off any charges.
‘Hector,’ Ash yelled across the chopper, ‘I’ve been thinking. If we really want to find Max Byrne fast, there might be a better way than putting out a national alert.’
‘And what would that be?’ Hector asked.
‘Let’s get people working for us,’ she replied. ‘You ever seen a missing person campaign go viral?’
Hector shook his head.
‘Get hold of Kate Baxter. She runs Nightfile.’ Ash paused, noticing Hector’s brow furrow at the mention of the name. ‘Yeah, I know. Let’s just say she owes me a favour,’ she continued, ‘Ask her to run a story about how Max Byrne has escaped from a psychiatric hospital, how he poses a risk to himself. Find the cutest, most sympathetic photo of him, and use the truth. He’s a troubled military veteran who poses a danger to himself. Play for people’s hearts; make it sound like he’s a tragic war hero who fell apart when he lost his sister. He’s a wounded man who could commit suicide at any moment. Tell Kate to make some calls to her media contacts and get the story pushed hard. We get Twitter, Facebook – the world – looking for our man.’
Hector stared at Ash impassively for a moment, before nodding at Nelson. ‘Get me Kate Baxter,’ he said.
Ash sat back and smiled at Wallace; she’d just scored another win. With creative thinking like that, it was easy to see why Hector wanted to help her stay on the team.
52
Dan Alosi turned his black AMG on to Cresta Via Lane and lowered his window to wave at Nate, the uniformed security guard, who raised the barrier. Alosi drove on, following the road as it snaked along the spine of the ridge overlooking Portola Valley. Alosi had chosen the area for its proximity to the Facebook Campus so that on nights like this, when he’d been in the office past midnight, he could make it home inside half an hour. The custom-modified Mercedes hugged the road as it climbed the ridge. It was approaching one a.m. and there were no other vehicles to be seen, just the lush California vegetation caught in the brilliance of his headlights. Alosi had always prided himself on being a workaholic, but the load he faced in the coming weeks depressed him. It wasn’t the quantity that weighed him down; it was the terrible event that had caused the increased workload. Zach Holz had been with Facebook for eight years, and Alosi considered him a close friend. Zach’s wife, Ali, was utterly devastated and Alosi could tell that the boys didn’t fully understand what had happened. Nobody really did. According to news reports Zach might have been a victim of a serial killer. The FBI had sent a team to interview Zach’s colleagues, but the agent who’d questioned Alosi, a guy called Alvarez, had been very evasive when pressed on the subject.
It was a dangerous world, which was why Alosi believed in being careful. Security was another benefit of Cresta Via. The wealthy residents had clubbed together to build a gated security checkpoint at the start of the private road, and the guardhouse was staffed twenty-four hours a day. Alosi knew that the residents’ money made them targets, and, never one to believe in taking risks, he’d deliberately selected the house for its inherent security advantages. It was located at the end of Cresta Via, which minimised passing traffic, so that anyone coming up to his house wasn’t there by accident. The three-hundred-yard driveway meant the house was well hidden from the road, and the modern concrete construction had enabled Alosi to add a number of fortifications when he moved in. He’d installed a panic room and blast shutters across every window and door in the property. The building and any occupants could withstand a prolonged assault, but, with a three-minute alarm response time from the guardhouse and a full security team guaranteed to be on the premises within fifteen, Alosi never envisaged having to battle-test his fortifications.
He sped along his tree-lined driveway and pulled on to the gravel in front of his rectangular bunker of a house. He parked the AMG between his Tesla and his Ferrari 488 GTB, and then checked his phone as he walked towards his home. The search for Max Byrne dominated his Facebook timeline, with dozens of people posting a link to a Nightfile special bulletin and a photo of the former soldier. Alosi had never met Max’s father, Steven, but knew him by reputation. His standing within the tech industry and the tragic death of his daughter had given him a degree of notoriety.
The biometric scanner beside the entrance flared as a strip of light wiped over Alosi’s palm, and the painted blue front door clicked open an instant later, triggering the alarm countdown.
‘Deactivate,’ Alosi said as he stepped inside and shut the door. The countdown ended with a single tone, and he started across the lobby, the hard heels of his custom-fitted Foster & Sons shoes tapping the white marble. When he heard an unfamiliar noise coming from the front door, he stopped and turned; it sounded like air hissing out of a tyre.
The explosion blew the door off its reinforced hinges and knocked Alosi on to his back. Dust and debris filled the vaulted lobby as he struggled to his knees, his eardrums aching with a numbness that silenced the world around him. He could not hear the sound of the masked man in the long coat as he walked over the wreckage and invaded his home, but he recognised the bleak figure from an artist’s drawing that had featured in press coverage of the Pendulum killings. Sound started to return, first in the form of a high-pitched ringing that Alosi suspected was an after-effect of the explosion. The sound inspired a thought, and Alosi looked at the alarm panel beside the door, his eyes locking on the red panic button. Realising he had to reach that button, he pushed himself to his feet and started running, but the masked figure was faster. He leaped, lashed out and caught Alosi with a Kevlar-plated forearm that clotheslined him and sent him tumbling on to his ass. A second, more precise blow delivered to the top of Alosi’s head knocked him down completely. As the world bubbled and swirled, Alosi saw something he did not understand. Just before he passed out, he watched Pendulum walk over to the alarm panel and press the panic button.
53
If Pendulum had intended to incapacitate the New York Field Office’s investigation, he’d failed. The Bureau had multiple contingency locations that it could deploy to in the event of a terrorist attack, but Ash had never expected a computer virus to force such a move. She surveyed the functioning chaos of the tenth floor of Police Plaza, the closest contingency site, and watched as sixty agents and administrators took calls from all over the country. Nightfile’s story and dozens of planted tweets and Facebook posts had been shared tens of thousands of times, which had led to the search being picked up by local and national news. A photo of Max Byrne, looking every inch the hero in full dress uniform, was clogging Facebook timelines and Twitter feeds, creating an army of thousands of unwitting bounty hunters. According to people phoning in, Max Byrne had been seen in each of the fifty states and the current tally of sightings topped two thousand. The agents and administrators sorted the calls into obvious hoaxes, low probability and high probability, before coordinating with local law enforcement to check out every single one.
After she and Wallace had been debriefed, Ash had convinced Hector to let her answer a phone on the basis that they needed every available body and, now that they had a viable suspect, she had no reason to add to her burgeoning disciplinary file. Wallace had persuaded Hector to delay the handover to the WitPro team until morning, and Ash could tell that the E
nglishman only felt safe with her. He was currently curled up on a makeshift bed in a side office, and Ash could see him through the glass partition, sleeping soundly.
Hector was somewhere else in the building, interviewing Steven and Philicia Byrne. All Ash’s attempts at manipulation had failed to get her in the room, but she wasn’t too disappointed. It was a relief to be back on the team in any capacity. Still, Ash thought, it wouldn’t hurt to run a fresh pair of eyes over the case, so she pushed her swivel chair away from the chipped desk and picked her way through the rows of Bureau personnel until she reached Parker, who sat near Nelson and Hale. The three of them acted as extensions of Hector’s will and supervised the search for Max Byrne. Ash noticed a stack of folders on Parker’s desk.
‘Hey,’ Ash smiled at Parker as he hung up his phone.
‘What do you want?’ he asked impatiently.
‘To feel useful,’ Ash replied.
‘Field calls,’ Parker suggested. ‘Getting the world searching for him was your idea.’
‘You mind if I take a look at the files?’ Ash tried. ‘While I’m fielding calls.’
‘Solomon says your suspension won’t come through until morning,’ Parker observed. ‘That means you’re still an agent. An agent who will make my life a living hell until she inevitably gets her way. Right?’
‘Probably,’ Ash responded honestly.
‘Go ahead,’ Parker nodded at the files. ‘Let me know if you find anything.’
He answered his ringing phone, as Ash gathered up the stack of files and returned to her desk. She started flipping through the first file, which contained background information on Kye Walters. Her phone rang and she answered it, absent-mindedly noting the details of an alleged sighting of Max Byrne as she studied everything the Bureau knew about the young victim from Garrison.
‘I don’t understand,’ Philicia Byrne said, her voice tinged with apprehension.
‘Your son paid someone to impersonate him for two years, a former Ranger called Mike Rosen,’ Hector replied, studying the people opposite him. Max’s parents seemed genuinely unsettled. Philicia was more demonstrative and her eyes welled with tears as she nervously played with the hem of her dress. Steven was silent, but he cast around the room with the disbelief of someone deeply troubled by the revelations. Steven’s lawyer, Alan Cook, sat next to him. Hector knew the bald-headed, eagle-faced man as one of the most fearsome criminal attorneys in New York. Philicia’s lawyer, Stephanie Ross, a sombre woman with straw-blond hair, whispered something to her client.
‘That’s impossible,’ Philicia objected. ‘I visited him in hospital.’
‘Tell me about those visits,’ Hector urged.
‘Max’s doctor emails me with a visiting time,’ Philicia responded. ‘We always meet in the grounds. By his favourite bench.’
‘It’s the same for me,’ Steven admitted.
‘Our initial investigation suggests Max has been forging his doctor’s emails and infiltrating the grounds in order to meet with you. Didn’t you think it was strange you never saw him on a ward?’
‘No. Of course not. They encourage patients to use the grounds,’ Philicia protested. ‘Why would he lie to me?’
‘Having an imposter in the secure unit bought him an air-tight alibi, but you’d have caused problems if you hadn’t been able to visit your son, or worse, recognised the imposter. So we think your son manufactured your visits in order to maintain his alibi,’ Hector explained.
‘I don’t believe it,’ Steven Byrne spoke at last. ‘Max was angry, but he wouldn’t do this.’
The bare-walled interview room fell silent as Hector worked up to his next question. ‘Your attorneys will have informed you that your son is now the principal suspect in the so-called Pendulum killings,’ he said finally.
‘No,’ Philicia objected, her eyes welling with tears. ‘Max wouldn’t hurt anyone.’
‘Max served in the Seventy-Fifth Rangers,’ Hector continued. ‘He was dishonourably discharged—’
‘That was a misunderstanding,’ Steven broke in. ‘Max didn’t understand that politics has no place in the military.’
‘His file says he was accused of attempting to subvert his unit,’ Hector added. ‘He worked for you, Mr Byrne, before your daughter’s death. He’s had combat training and is an expert with computers. If it hadn’t been for his supposed incarceration, he would have been a suspect right out of the box. I’ve got to ask; did either of you know anything about what he was doing?’
Philicia responded with an indignant look and Steven shook his head sadly. Alan Cook leaned over to speak quietly to his client, and Hector was sure he heard the words ‘full disclosure’.
‘We’d like to show you what we’ve found,’ Steven said at last.
‘I had my people make inquiries before we came in,’ Alan added, producing a document from his briefcase. ‘We discovered that someone has been accessing the fund my client established for his son.’
Hector looked at the document Alan handed him: a bank statement which showed a series of offshore transfers.
‘The fund was endowed with forty million dollars when Max was twenty-one,’ Alan continued. ‘As you can see, six million is missing, transferred overseas. We’re working to find out where that money went.’
‘The Bureau would like to help,’ Hector replied.
Steven nodded and Alan echoed the gesture. They had no choice; the disclosure meant the fund now became part of the investigation and was most likely how Max Byrne had been financing his activities over the past two years.
‘Thank you,’ Hector acknowledged. ‘I’m sorry, but I’ve got to ask this.’ He paused, certain that his next question would be painful for both parents. ‘Can you think of any reason why Max might have killed his sister?’
Philicia looked away, distraught, and Hector saw fury flush across Steven’s face.
‘Max did not kill Erin,’ Steven responded emphatically.
‘I’m sorry to ask the question, Mr Byrne, but how can you be so sure?’ Hector pressed.
Steven stared at Hector with hard indignation. ‘My son did not kill his sister,’ he seethed. ‘He loved her. He would never do that. He was with me that night.’
The ensuing silence was broken by the sound of a ringing phone.
‘Are we done here?’ Steven asked as he reached into his pocket and produced his cell. ‘I need to take this.’
Hector nodded, and Steven and his lawyer left the room.
Philicia watched her ex-husband go, her eyes brimming with tears and bewilderment. ‘Max adored Erin. She was his little angel,’ she told Hector. ‘You’ve got this all wrong. There has to be another explanation.’
Ash saw Hector rubbing his eyes as he entered the large office. He looked like a man who’d had a difficult couple of hours, but Ash needed to know what he’d learnt from Max’s parents, so she hurried across the room to intercept him. Hector grimaced slightly when she crossed his path.
‘I can’t tell you anything,’ he said instantly.
‘That’s OK,’ Ash lied. ‘I was looking through the files.’
Hector glanced over at Parker and rolled his eyes.
‘He didn’t have a choice,’ Ash informed him. ‘I was looking through them and I noticed something weird. All the victims posted suicide notes apart from Zach Holz. He doesn’t fit the pattern.’
‘Maybe by the time he got to Holz, he knew we were on to him and decided there was no point trying to cover it up?’ Hector suggested.
‘Maybe,’ Ash conceded. ‘But it doesn’t fit the pattern, and I think it should be excluded. It might throw us on to the wrong track. Holz could have been killed for a different reason, or he might be the victim of a copycat.’
‘Why don’t we just exclude everything that doesn’t give us an easy answer?’ Hector snapped. ‘I’m sorry,’ he added quickly. ‘It’s been a long night.’
‘You’ve got links to organised crime with Bonnie Mann and Ken Pallo. Mann owed a lot of mo
ney in Vegas. The guy Pendulum tried to frame as Wallace’s accomplice, Leo Willard, he and his colleague Eli Landsman were found murdered outside Vegas. His boss, a small-timer with a long record, Rusty Hausman, said Leo and Eli were last seen driving Bonnie Mann home. Ken Pallo had dubious investors, many of them indirectly connected to the underworld.’
‘You think these are mob hits?’ Hector asked. ‘What about Wallace? Or the kid upstate? The British farmer?’
Ash shook her head in frustration. ‘I know. It’s a stretch, but nothing fits them all. Without a common motive, we have no idea where he’s going to strike next. He told Wallace and me that he needed more time. That means he’s not finished.’
Hector patted her on the shoulder. ‘I appreciate the effort, Chris, but let’s focus on finding Max Byrne. We get him and I’m sure we’ll fill in all the blanks.’
The large digital clock hanging from the wall displayed a time of 04:47. Hector pushed past Ash and carried on towards Parker, who had just taken a phone call. Ash saw Parker’s expression change and knew that he’d heard something important, so she jogged to catch up with her boss and drew alongside as Parker collared him.
‘We’ve found Max Byrne,’ Parker announced. ‘He’s in a house in Portola Valley, just outside San Francisco, and he’s got a hostage.’
Ash’s head was shaking before she’d even consciously registered her disbelief. This guy didn’t take hostages.
