[A Thousand Faces 01.0] A Thousand Faces

by Janci Patterson

  When I stepped out onto the floor, I found a row of closed office doors. This was what I needed. With the power cut, the security cameras should be down. I checked the door handles.

  The first two doors were locked, but the third swung open. I found a woman sitting behind her desk, bent over a pile of papers. Her lights were off, but there was plenty of light streaming in her window to work by.

  "Pardon me," I said to her. "Just checking the lighting." Then I pulled the door closed again.

  I sighed. Sam would be turning the lights back on any minute, so I needed to find a private workstation, quickly. I moved back down the hallway, checking doors again.

  Then I found it. An office with a name placard on it: Sam Weisner. I tried the door; it was unlocked.

  I stepped into Sam's office just as the lights turned back on. The computer didn't come back on by itself, so I had to start it up and then quickly type in the sequence Kalif had given me, which was only slightly different from the one I'd used before. I wished I had time to text Kalif to make sure he'd gotten in, but I barely had time to step back into the hallway and close the door before Sam appeared at the end of the hallway.

  "Are we finished here?" he asked.

  I glanced around, like I was still surveying. "Everything looks up to code."

  Sam gave me a satisfied smirk. "Then I'll walk you out."

  I wavered. I already had the main thing I'd come for. But if I wanted to make the most out of my visit, now was the time for the long shots. It was unlikely that Circom would be holding my parents on site, but if they were, the quickest way to determine that would be to try to look over every inch of the place.

  "I need to check the basement," I said.

  "We don't have a basement," Sam said.

  I nearly peed my pants. Mike would have known that. He'd have looked at all the building plans before he came, but in my haste, I'd forgotten.

  On the other hand, that was also what he would say if they did have a basement, and had captives hidden inside it.

  I crossed my beefy fireman arms across Mike's broad chest. "No boiler room?" I asked. "No climate control down there?"

  Sam gave another longsuffering sigh. "We do have some utility access, yes."

  I smiled. "If it's got access, it has to have lighting," I said. "Let's check it."

  Sam followed after me, looking like a scolded puppy. I hadn't been managing my persona well enough; Mike would have done all this with a jibe and a joke, instead of making Sam feel like he was being bullied.

  The boiler room was a dead end, literally. When I had Sam cut the power, the room was utterly black except the tiny green strips of emergency lighting on the stairs and below the door. When the lights turned back on, I searched for doors, street access, anything that might allow prisoners to be held below the Circom building. I found nothing.

  Then I had another thought. "I'll just need to check the parking garage, and I can be on my way."

  Sam raised an eyebrow at me. "Of course."

  The parking garage was adjacent to the building, and Sam had to unlock a control closet to get to the breakers and shut down the power for me. While he worked the breakers I walked up and down by way of the stairs.

  As I rounded the corner up to the third floor, I froze. A row of four black vans were lined up on the far side, each indistinguishable from the one that had driven away with Mom and Dad. I curbed the impulse to tug at the van doors, as if Mom and Dad would still be inside.

  This is it, I told myself. Think. I made note of the license plate numbers, so I could write them down when I got back to the car. I wished I could tattoo them on my skin, but unnatural marks were outside of my shifting capabilities, and holding on to a complex pattern of freckles would be harder than remembering the numbers.

  I forced myself to breathe. I could always come back, in a different persona—with forensic equipment, even, if that's what it took. That was the benefit of being a shifter; I could nearly always try again.

  Instead I walked up behind the vans, taking a good look at the area around the plates. On the one parked farthest from me, I found what I was looking for—grey, rectangular marks on the paint at the edge of the license plate. I bent over, running my hand over it. It was tacky to the touch.

  I pulled my hand back, like it had been burned. These were remnants of adhesive, left by pieces of tape.

  "Will that be all?" Sam asked.

  I jumped. I hadn't seen him come up behind me. Startling like that was out of character for Mike, and now I'd let Sam see me examining the van. I wanted to use Mike's muscled arms to shake Sam by the shoulders and demand to know where my parents were. I wasn't much stronger in Mike's body than I was in my own, but I was a good bit taller than Sam. I might have gotten the information from him on intimidation alone.

  That would give me away, though, and I was on Sam's turf. Who knew where his black-clad assailants might be hiding. I couldn't imagine Sam did his own dirty work, but if he suspected me of being a shifter, he wouldn't be standing this close without backup somewhere nearby.

  Time to go. I'd done enough damage for one day.

  I forced myself to give Sam a friendly smile, and clapped him on the shoulder with a heavy hand. "Looks great. Thanks for the tour."

  Sam gave me a sharp nod. I hoped for my sake that my fake smile looked more real than his. "Any time," he said. Though he clearly meant otherwise.

  I texted Kalif with shaking hands when I got safely back to the car, but didn't receive a response. He was probably absorbed in digging up the information he needed. I didn't know how much time I'd bought him; he was probably in a rush. I hoped he was working quickly, because this was the one—the company that had my parents. It had to be.

  When I got back to Kalif's house, I didn't run into either Aida or Mel. The door to Kalif's room was closed, so I knocked once.

  "Come in," Kalif said. He was hunched over his computer, his screen a wash of text, but he paused to check my hand.

  I leaned over his shoulder. "Find anything?"

  Kalif didn't look up from his computer. "Yes," he said, opening a different window. "These are some emails from one of the site managers to an external contractor, talking about borrowing a van for some shipping the night your parents disappeared."

  I drew a sharp breath. "That's it," I said. "That's the van, right? I saw four just like them in the Circom parking garage, and one of them had tape residue next to the plate."

  Kalif nodded. "It looks like the one."

  I rubbed my temples. "So all we have to do is follow the contractor and we'll find my parents, right?"

  "That's what I'm doing. The name for the contractor didn't turn up much, but I tracked the IP address from the email. It's routed to hide its origin, and the masking is pretty intense."

  "But you can track it, right?"

  He wobbled his head from side to side.

  "Cut the modesty," I said. "It doesn't become you."

  "I know," Kalif said. "Believe me. But whoever set this up is not just good. He's amazing. I haven't seen security like this in a long time. Maybe ever."

  I collapsed on the bed. "You don't need to sound so excited about it."

  "Seriously, though. I could spend months pulling this apart."

  I pulled off my shoe and threw it at him. It struck him in the shoulder, and he looked at me over his shoulder. "Sorry," he said. "I know we don't have months. I'm working on it."

  I dragged myself off the bed and looked over his shoulder. "I'm not going to spend days waiting for you again. Give me something to do."

  "This is seriously tough," he said. "I mean, take a look at this for instance. The IP address looks like it's coming from Ecuador. I follow it there, and it looks like it's coming from Taiwan. Those are the same locations I use to mask our emails. So is it a coincidence, or is this guy showing me mirrors of my own system? If he can do that, I need to figure out how."

  The blood drained out of my face. "What do you mean, your own system?" />
  "My own security work," he said. "The way I've masked our IP."

  I climbed off the bed and put a hand on his shoulder. "And you checked our system, right?" I said. "To make sure that's not where the emails came from?"

  He looked up at me, and all the thrill drained out of his eyes.

  I squeezed his shoulder harder. "Right?"

  He turned around slowly in his chair, looking at the data. "No way," he said.

  He opened up his own server files, poking through them. After typing in a password, he found it. A copy of the email he'd been tracing.

  "The best security you've ever seen, huh?" I said. On another day, I would have ribbed him for that for hours. But today, we just stared at the email, sent to Circom from Kalif's very own server.

  "One of us borrowed the van," I said, trying to piece it together. "The van that was used to kidnap my parents."

  Kalif's hand shook as he pointed at the top of the screen, to a sender email address I didn't recognize. "It was my mother," Kalif said. "The person who borrowed that van the night your parents disappeared was my mother."

  Fourteen

  We both stared at the screen in silence. This couldn't be right. They'd been a step behind us, but I'd thought it was because they were playing it too safe, protecting themselves. "If your parents wanted to kidnap mine," I said, "they could have taken them out of their beds. They could have drugged them—we eat at your house all the time. Why botch the job?"

  "They wouldn't," Kalif said. "There's got to be another explanation."

  I waited. His eyes crinkled as he focused on the screen.

  "Not coming up with anything?" I asked.

  He shook his head. "I will if you give me a minute."

  "There has to be one," I said. "This was too theatrical. That's not the way your parents work. It's almost as if . . ." A realization sank through me like a stone to the bottom of the ocean.

  Kalif looked at me. "What?"

  My head throbbed. There was no reason to grab my parents in the middle of a job unless they were trying to throw someone else off their trail. It couldn't be my parents they were trying to fool—they'd been captured, so they weren't looking at the security tapes.

  But there was someone else Mel and Aida had to worry about.

  There was me.

  "They knew I'd go looking for my parents," I said. "That's why they borrowed the van. They were setting up a story, one that I could follow to Eravision, and to Megaware, and to Circom . . ."

  Kalif closed his eyes. "But you wouldn't look here."

  I balled my fists, ready to punch them square into Aida's jaw. It was classic diversion. My parents trusted Aida and Mel. I wanted to trust them, too, so I didn't stop to think that the pieces of evidence diverting suspicion away from them might have been planted by them, for just that purpose. "But when we looked at Circom, we found the email," I said. "They left a trail. They wouldn't have done that if they thought we were going to look."

  Kalif shook his head. "My parents both encrypt their email, so that I can't read it."

  I stared at him. "They know how to do that?"

  "No. They hired someone to build the program for them. It was good work."

  "But you did read it."

  Kalif waved his hand at me dismissively. "I broke through their encryption long ago. Took me a good month, though. It was a real challenge."

  I sank onto a stool. "But if you've been in your parents' email all this time, why didn't you know about this before?"

  "I don't ever read it," Kalif said. "I just wanted to see if I could break into the program. I've never had a reason to use it until now."

  I stared down at my hands. "I can't believe I didn't see this."

  Kalif held up his hand. "It's still hypothetical. There could still be other explanations. Think about it. There's no reason for my parents to want yours to disappear. It was their idea that we all work together in the first place. And why now, after all this time?"

  I rolled my shoulders back. He was right. Answering one question didn't make the whole story true. The folds could go even deeper than that. Maybe all the evidence pointing to Aida and Mel was also a setup, placed there by someone who wanted to frame them.

  After all, there'd been more than two assailants at Eravision the night my parents disappeared.

  I closed my eyes. "If your parents did it," I said, "who were they working with? And where are my parents now? We don't hold people for long periods of time—it isn't secure. Are they . . . ." The word dead hung in the air, unsaid.

  Kalif put a hand on my arm. "Hey. We don't kill people, right? So if my parents did it, that'd be good news. Your parents would still be alive."

  I shrugged. Anyone who double crossed us like that might be playing by a different set of rules. "You should look through the rest of their email," I said. "See if there's any more evidence."

  Kalif nodded, but his fingers tightened on my arm. "I need to tell you something, though. Something I probably should have told you before."

  Blood drained from my face. "What?"

  He looked down at the floor. "Remember that other shifter girl I told you about? Helene?"

  I spoke slowly. "Your parents were working with her father. So?"

  Kalif rubbed his eyes. "They just disappeared one day. They all ran a job together, and the next day, the whole family was gone."

  I blinked. "You said the mom wasn't a shifter."

  Kalif looked up at me, his face suddenly taking on all those hours of exhaustion. "She wasn't. But regular people can disappear, too."

  I bit my lip. "Why didn't you tell me about that?"

  He shook his head, staring. "I didn't think anything of it," Kalif said. "Shifters disappear. The ones with normal spouses relocate their relatives. It happens. But if my parents did something to yours . . ."

  I nodded. "They might have done the same thing to your friend and her family."

  Kalif's voice was quiet. "Right. I just thought you should know."

  I wanted to ask how this could have happened without him knowing, but he was obviously upset enough about the fact that it had. I took his hand and squeezed it. "Let's start looking."

  I sat down beside Kalif at his desk, and he pulled up his parents' emails. We all used multiple addresses, one for each new persona. That was a lot to manage, so Kalif had them all route to a single inbox for each of us, covering the forwards, of course, so no one could follow the trail. I leaned over his shoulder, watching as he ran the same searches he'd used for the Circom data. He came up with a series of emails from Sam involving the vans. These were sent after my parents disappeared, on the same day that Mel told me they were cutting loose from the client.

  I don't understand what you thought you were doing, one of them said. Using our van to kidnap Cambrian and Delacruz? What the hell kind of frame job is that?

  So Sam probably wasn't in on it. That was a shame; it meant my dislike of him was mostly unfounded. "Did they answer?"

  "I don't see a reply," Kalif said.

  "Would they have deleted the emails?" I asked. "That's what I would do if I'd been doing something suspicious."

  "Maybe," Kalif said. "But even if they used a scrubber on the files, I have backups." He started typing.

  I paced back and forth behind him. Then he swore.

  "What?" I asked.

  Kalif gripped the edge of the desk. "There are some deleted emails. But more than that, some of the files from the mission log have been deleted."

  "Okay," I said. "And?"

  He threw his hands in the air. "What do you mean, 'and'? They deleted files on my server."

  I sighed. That seemed a little beside the point. "Clearly that's bad."

  "It is bad," Kalif said. "No one messes with the files without me noticing."

  "But you didn't notice until now."

  Kalif glared at the screen, but I was pretty sure he meant the look for me. "Rub it in."

  I put a hand on his shoulder. "I'm not trying to
criticize you," I said. "It's a big server, right? Of course you didn't notice."

  "Yeah, thanks." Kalif hunched forward. That was clearly not the answer he was looking for.

  "Can you recover the files?"

  "Of course. That's not the point."

  "Pull them up on your laptop when you do," I said. "I'll go through them while you keep looking."

  Kalif worked for a minute, his fingers striking the keys harder than was strictly necessary. After a minute he switched to the laptop, then handed it to me. I settled in on his bed, with the screen facing away from the door. I hadn't heard either Mel or Aida in the house, but given what we were doing, we couldn't be too careful.

  What if they returned before we'd verified our suspicions? I wanted to spit the truth in their faces, to confront them and make them explain.

  But I'd have no way to recognize the truth among their new lies. If I didn't have sufficient evidence, they'd deny everything. It was smarter to wait until we were sure. Then we could plan what the next move should be.

  I started with the files. "These don't look important," I said to Kalif. "It's just some mission my parents ran." I remembered it, vaguely. They'd been working on personas to break into a factory in Stockton, to steal a prototype microchip. At the last minute, Mom got wind that the person they'd been studying was fired, which marked both the last moment they had to impersonate her, and the best moment to frame her for the theft. They'd left late at night, on only a few hours notice, but after that, Mom had told me everything was smooth sailing.

  I read over the whole mission twice, in case there was some clue there as to why Aida and Mel would have taken my parents, but I couldn't find anything.

  "What about the emails?" he asked.

  I looked through them. Most were spam, and a couple further complaint emails from Sam, including a threat to get his lawyers involved. He wouldn't do that, of course, but he must have felt pretty powerless if he made the threat. It was hard to feel sorry for him, though, since he'd only hired us for revenge.

  There were a few emails from last week that caught my attention—a whole chain between Aida and someplace called Asylum. I'm sending the profiles over today, Aida wrote. They should arrive tomorrow by mail, so watch for them.