Exacerbyte (Ellie Conway Book 3)

by Cat Connor

  Rowan nodded.

  “I’m thinking he used the bugs on you to track the band and arrange his kidnappings accordingly.” While he was so interested, I thought about taking the opportunity to share the photographs with him. The whole idea of telling him that someone was watching him and me turned my stomach upside down. I looked at Sam. He was engrossed in what he was doing. True to form, he felt my eyes on him and he looked over.

  I indicated he should take Doc and go make coffee or something. He stood, stretched, and excused himself.

  There was a danger that I’d chew through my lip as I searched for the best way to introduce the pictures and the complex issue they opened.

  “What’s the matter?” Rowan asked.

  I held up a finger. It wavered in mid air as I tried to tell him. I could feel the weight of the words and the knowledge that his career could be at stake should the public ever know the origin of the pictures.

  “Hey, Ellie … whatever it is, it can’t be that bad.” He sank to his knees in front of me and I wanted to throw up. How could he be so wrong?

  “Talk to me.”

  Did he think I didn’t want to? I wanted the floor to open up and swallow me.

  “Please.”

  Words don’t fail me. I couldn’t decide if I was going to choke, or trying not to gag.

  “How much do you believe … any publicity is good publicity?” I asked, knowing I was asking the question of one of the most private celebrities on the planet.

  He didn’t say a word, not one word.

  “Hawk has left photographs. He started leaving them in Christchurch, stuck in the door of my hotel room. The last lot he had placed on my kitchen counter. You’re in some of them.”

  Rowan never flinched; his eyes remained locked with mine.

  “No one knows about the photographs except Delta team. We don’t release sensitive case information to the media.”

  My tongue played with the stitches in my mouth while he weighed up my words.

  Finally he spoke. “Thank you.”

  I blinked. “Thank you?”

  “Yes, thank you. You don’t have to worry. Even if they did leak out, I’m not going to be running screaming because our names are linked in the press.”

  “But having them linked by a child trafficking terrorist?”

  He shrugged. “Not much difference between him and the paparazzi.”

  He had a valid point. The difference could come down to the semantics of predation.

  Thirty-Six

  Last Man Standing

  It was still dark on Tuesday morning when Lee and Misha checked in to report they’d located the wrappers from the pens. Lee had something else to report, which seriously spooked me.

  “Ellie, we found two photos stuck in the doorjamb at Rowan’s place.”

  My eyes closed hoping there would be no spinning as I readied myself for the next part of his sentence.

  “One of Rowan standing in your hallway, carrying coffee cups and one of Carla, sitting on a bed brushing her hair.”

  “That’s not possible,” I muttered. Except I knew the picture of Carla was possible. I knew the GPS in the pen would’ve sent our location to Hawk when I visited Carla with the freaking pen in my pocket. What if he planted something before we moved her? I wanted to smack my head into the wall. I couldn’t be sure Carla was safe, all because of that stupid pen.

  “He’s walking toward the living room with four coffee cups, some kind of balancing act.”

  “How the hell is that possible?”

  “My advice to you is … check the hallway for a camera and get out of the house. Say nothing that could be overheard.”

  “All right, we’ll see you soon,” I replied and rapidly tried to think of somewhere to meet, somewhere safe, somewhere unknown. “I’ll text you in ten.”

  That seemed the best option and least chance of anyone eavesdropping.

  We hung up. I tapped Sam on the shoulder and indicated his laptop. He handed it over. I opened the notepad and typed, We’re being watched. Could be a camera in the hallway, then showed the note to Doc, Rowan and Sam.

  Sam nodded as he read it and after a few minutes of key tapping, he opened a window on his computer screen. I recognized it as a program we used to eavesdrop on electronic signals. A few minutes later a picture that looked exactly like my hallway flicked up on the screen. Doc and Rowan gathered around him and watched. I walked into the hallway then back, pretending to check the front door. The angle of the picture gave us a location so I knew roughly where the camera would be. Above the door was a clock, the camera had to be concealed near it. Whoever was watching saw us coming and going. I couldn’t see anything without staring straight at it and that would’ve given too much away.

  “Volume,” I whispered to Sam. He turned it up.

  “Good coffee Rowan,” I said in my usual speaking voice. Before I’d finished, the sound streamed into the room via the laptop.

  I nodded at Sam. He turned it off.

  Dammit, the pen in Lee’s pocket masked the signal from the freaking camera. Fuc’n pen.

  On a piece of paper I wrote, ‘Get your jackets, we are out of here.’ I slid the paper toward the men.

  Rowan took the pen and wrote, ‘Can’t you take the camera down?’

  I replied, ‘It’s too late, he’s seen and heard too much.’

  We grabbed everything we needed and left the house. Rowan’s car was on the street so was Doc’s. Sam’s was behind mine in the driveway.

  “Whose car?” Rowan asked.

  “Not yours or Doc’s, they’ve been sitting on the street … this guy likes bombs and knows where Ellie lives,” Sam replied.

  Rowan blanched. I shook my head at Sam. He’d obviously forgotten Rowan was a civilian; bombs tend to scare normal folk. On the qt, they didn’t do wonders for my sense of security either.

  “Let’s take Sam’s,” I replied with a reassuring smile.

  I jumped into the front passenger seat and opened my laptop on my knee. Rowan climbed in the back. Sam drove. I called Lee as we approached the first intersection.

  “Meet us at work,” I said then hung up.

  Sam smiled. “Good thing that’s where I was headed.”

  “Looks like Crowe did more than upload a program to run Mac’s webcam and leave pictures on my counter.” I remembered what Noel told me about Crowe.

  Someone told him I wasn’t home. Our mole? I had the GPS pen. Hawk would’ve known where I was. But Lee borrowed the pen at the airport and didn’t give it back until after the break-in. So Hawk wouldn’t have known I was home until he heard Lee talking to me on the phone. What else did I do or say with that pen around?

  I’d had the pen since we left New Zealand. He wasn’t just one step ahead, he was all over us.

  The email alert chimed as we pulled into the underground garage an hour later. I opened it to find it was a photograph. This time it was the guy we knew as Hawk waving from stairs that led to an airplane. The time and date stamp said it was only fifteen minutes earlier.

  “He’s leaving!”

  I called Caine. “He’s leaving, looks like Dulles International airport, the picture is fifteen minutes old.”

  “I’ll make some calls,” he replied.

  I hung up.

  “Come on, let’s go,” I said, willing my voice to remain calm. “Rowan, I’ll show you where our office is.”

  There was nothing to say as we walked to the stairs and began the climb. Halfway up, Rowan asked how much further there was to go and why we didn’t take the elevator.

  Doc stepped in. “She has an illogical hatred of elevators.”

  Doc didn’t mention that having BPPV made that hatred more pronounced because the movement unbalanced me. For that I was grateful.

  Rowan laughed. Yay me, I live to amuse.

  We climbed the rest of the stairs in silence. The knowledge of the photograph at the airport severely dampened my mood. I wanted this over. I wanted him caught. Pr
eferably, I wanted him dead. Eye for an eye. I wanted to rip his arms off and beat him with the soggy ends.

  My phone rang as we walked the carpeted hallway to our offices. It was Caine.

  “You’re going to love this. No Hudson Hawk was on any passenger list, but a Harry S Stamper was.”

  “Armageddon … he’s changed his name.”

  The song I’d heard in Christchurch came rushing back. Aerosmith, ‘I don’t want to miss a thing.’ It meant more than I first thought. That was my first hint at Armageddon.

  “Want to know where he’s going?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “Syria.”

  The weight I’d felt lift when we found the kids, hit me so hard I struggled for breath. It crushed me.

  I flung open my office door, smacking it back against the closest desk. I kicked the waste paper bin across the room so hard it dented the wall.

  Sam sat on the edge of his desk. Doc plonked himself into Lee’s chair and Rowan hovered in the doorway. I threw my chair into the wall behind my desk smashing a hole through to the next office.

  “Fuck!”

  Thirty-Seven

  We Weren’t Born To Follow

  Tuesday had been a long day of wading through transcripts and evidence reports. The only good thing I could see in Hawk leaving was that Carla was safer. I didn’t believe for one second that she was completely safe. I still hadn’t uncovered the mole. My suspicions were my suspicions and I hadn’t shared them. We knew from the chat room that the person using the screen name DaveAddison, was in the Middle East and the person using MaddieHayes, was in Virginia. It stood to reason that Addison was Hawk and he was gone. But who was Hayes? We were still waiting for some more evidence reports. Until they arrived and we truly had nothing more to follow, by way of leads, the Butterfly murders file was active. I pulled up a report from New Zealand police. The passport used by Weinberg was a fake, as we’d suspected. Police discovered a netbook in his hotel room and analyzed his activity. They found a link to a chat room. The same unofficial Grange chat room we’d been investigating. Stephanie Harris’s work computer was also subject to the same forensic analysis. Again, they found a link to the chat room; evidence that suggested she was frequently in the room. She also belonged to the official site. That didn’t please me.

  A property owner found Abbey Jenkins’s mother dead in an empty apartment. Police sent me the scene photographs. I could almost smell the chlorine in her hair through the paper. I was very glad I didn’t have to visit that crime scene in person. I’ve seen enough of Hawk’s handiwork to last a lifetime. The face told me it was Hawk’s work. Peaceful. Drugged prior to death.

  “Don’t give me that look,” I greeted Noel, as he sat in my office drinking FBI coffee. I was feeling more than a little cantankerous.

  “What look?” Gerrard asked, inspecting the transcript from the unofficial Grange chat room that I handed him.

  “That you-know-better smirk you are so famous for.”

  His eyebrows rose incredulously. “Have dinner with me tonight?”

  “My father warned me about men like you.”

  He smiled. “Your father trained me.”

  “And you want to have dinner?”

  He shrugged lightly. “The alternative this pretty boy pop-star?” He waggled a handful of pages at me but didn’t wait for an answer. “Apart from riveting dinner companionship, what else can I do for you?”

  “Let me talk to David Dunn and that jerk we picked up in Christchurch. The one who called himself Tom Mix. Harvey Bauer, wasn’t that his name?”

  “Why?”

  My turn to give an incredulous eyebrow lift. “Because this is my case. I’ve lost Hawk. I need to know what they know.”

  He shook his head. “You think I’m withholding information?”

  Did I think that? No. I thought the right questions weren’t being asked but knowing how good Gerrard was at interrogation, maybe it wasn’t my smartest thought.

  I dropped my bomb. “There’s a mole in the FBI.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Someone told Dunn how to find me and possibly warned him I was about to arrive at Cassandra Smith’s home. The only person who knew where I was that day was someone attached to Delta.”

  “Do you know who?”

  “I think so. Proving it will be difficult now. But I think I know.”

  “Let me talk to Dunn again and see what I can find out in the light of this new information,” Noel offered.

  “Okay. Now tell me why Grange is so interesting to NCIS and the CIA.”

  “His name keeps coming up and we have ongoing Marine involvement in this case. It’s a precaution. We’re doing our jobs.”

  “I’m doing my job too.” I leaned back in my chair. “So it’s got nothing to do with nuclear weapons?”

  He smiled, raised one eyebrow and said, “Dinner. You need to eat sometime.” His immediate dodging of the question spoke volumes.

  “I do. I’ll take a rain check.” I also needed to sleep but I wasn’t about to do that either.

  He nodded. “All right, you know how to reach me.” On that note, the next best thing to Jethro Gibbs strode out of my office.

  I stared down at the transcripts. What was I missing? I wondered where else in the World Wide Web he trolled for children. Disney sites? Barbie? Nah. He needed vulnerable victims, ones desperate and malleable. Band chat rooms were clever. Pose as someone they can’t resist or better still as a mother figure or just a friend. Smart. Picking a Grange chat room might’ve been clever right up until we arrived.

  Lee was at his desk writing up reports.

  “Hey. We need to investigate this Grange chat room more thoroughly.”

  “What have you found?” he asked.

  “I don’t know exactly.” I thumbed through the papers again. “At least one woman claims to know the person calling himself Dave Addison. And another seems convinced but doesn’t claim to know him personally.”

  “You want to know how well they do know this person?”

  “Yeah. Physical addresses of the most frequent members. I need to know if that woman has spoken with him on the telephone, met in person, webcammed or is this blind faith and only chat room and email?”

  “Hawk used a woman before; could be doing so again.”

  “Could be. Last time she was a willing participant. Are these women, or are they idiots?”

  “You heading down some sick, twisted curve ball road here Chicky Babe?”

  “I think so.”

  I’d gone to the dark side. I stared at the papers on my desk and allowed myself to visit the worst case scenario.

  Someone tapped on the office door, then opened it. Doc walked in.

  “How goes the fight?”

  “Slow,” I replied. “Grab a chair; tell us what we’re missing.”

  Doc pulled up a chair next to my desk.

  “I’m signing into that unofficial Grange chat room.” Something twinged and prodded at me. “Do we still have agents in that room?”

  “Nope. They were pulled when we lost Hawk; they turned over information to the Lost Innocence Initiative. You were right about a predator using the room and that it wasn’t anything to do with Hawk.”

  I signed in as Otherwisecat. Lee grabbed his laptop and signed in as well. Sitting staring at the babble in the chat room wasn’t exactly riveting stuff. It was akin to watching a Days of Our Lives episode. Two women declared they would kill for Rowan. Two planned to stalk him on the remainder of the Drifter tour. Several read fan-fiction on some site. They were eager to share the link with me. I opened it in another tab and discovered it was more like fan-porn. Nasty.

  Doc seemed to enjoy it. “Imaginative stuff.”

  The conversation in the chat room turned to Facebook. I swear I could hear squealing as they typed using more exclamation points than anyone could ever need.

  It didn’t take more than a few questions to ascertain if any of the women had jobs capable
of feeding their stalking. I was curious. They weren’t CEO material but it seemed that manufacturing plants paid quite well; they had money to burn when it came to the band, so why not belong to the official site?

  I thought back to the infrequent concerts I’d attended in my life, while two woman discussed being in the first five rows at every concert in Europe. That was serious money. It was also a serious addiction. Then I realized they did belong to the official site as well as this fake one – they couldn’t get tickets like that without being a fan club member. I wondered how far they would go to make sure they always had concert money on hand. David Addison’s screen name popped up.

  Lee typed quickly then said, “I’m running a ping and trace on his IP address, Ellie.”

  I waited with escalating impatience, while women fawned all over him. He started asking how many of them had children.

  “He knows I’m here,” I said. “He’s recognized my screen name.”

  Lee agreed.

  Two seconds later a private message box opened on my screen. “A message from Addison.” I proceeded to read it out to Lee. “‘They’re too easy.’”

  “Nice, are you going to reply?”

  “Yep. This is my reply. ‘I’m sorry don’t think I know you.’”

  Lee laughed.

  A reply came back very quickly. “He’s annoyed. He says, ‘Did Christchurch mean nothing to you?’ ”

  “You going to reply?”

  “No. Where is he?”

  “He’s routed his signal through several proxy servers across Europe, it’s almost resolved. He’s in Syria.”

  “Look at the room!” I said. “He’s trying to find out who has kids and who is going to a concert in Dubai next month.”

  “They have that much money?” Lee replied.

  Not these women apparently, but four of them suggested friends from the United Kingdom who were going and taking their twelve- and thirteen-year-old daughters.

  “We need to shut this guy down.” I private messaged all the women in the chat room and told them I was an FBI agent and that they were talking to a predator. Lee was working on having the room closed by the owners of the chat platform. He’d left his laptop and was on the phone talking to someone about the chat room.