The Schwarzschild Radius

by Gustavo Florentin

  She wished she had bought a present for Achara. All the niceties of life had dropped away since Olivia’s disappearance. What were her parents going to say when they saw this person who was the image of their own daughter, but wasn’t their daughter? Would that help or hurt?

  They would have to accept her, like it or not. Olivia had, Rachel did, and so would they.

  Then there was the matter of telling her that Olivia had vanished and that it was Rachel who had been talking with her these last few days. She would be greeted with one great joy and another terrible blow. She figured they’d stay at her dorm for the night and call the folks in the morning before coming by.

  The Belt Parkway West was backed up seemingly for miles, as usual. Where were all these people going at this ungodly hour? After ten minutes of sitting in traffic, Rachel called the airline to confirm the arrival time, something she should have done before leaving. It was on time. That was a relief. Fifteen minutes later, she passed the bottleneck―a fender bender.

  Rachel wished she could clone herself to do everything that needed to get done. She wanted to be a full-time student. When this was over and Olivia was back, she would sit and read Byron, Keats, and Shelly late into the night. She could minor in English Lit.

  Cars speeded up. The overhead sign said, TRAFFIC MOVING WELL. Just twelve days ago it was flashing the Amber Alert for Olivia. Her disappearance had caused only a ripple in the scheme of things. Already she was fading away.

  It all depended on the files she downloaded off those perverts’ computers. Every instinct told her that one of them knew where Olivia was. There had to be something on one of those PCs that pointed to her fate. She went over the faces of those men one by one. Could one of them have actually abducted Olivia? No doubt some of them had sex with her. But where could she be? Certainly not in any of the homes she had gone to. She had to be found at some point. Rachel didn’t want to go there, even in her thoughts, because thoughts were things and she wanted to deny the thought of her sister’s death any power.

  Joules was on file-decrypting duty tonight and she hoped he could find something by tomorrow. He was her only ally in the world. Everything Rachel had done might come out in court one day. Her parents would die of shame, and Rachel just hoped they would understand why she had done it. But she couldn’t think of that now. One of her sisters was coming home.

  Rachel entered the airport and looked for Cathay Pacific Airlines on each sign she passed. She had to hit the high beams every time she approached a sign to quickly scan the dozen or so airlines listed on each. She thought she’d missed it when she spotted it. Terminal Seven.

  She took the turn for short-term parking and stopped at the booth to get her parking stub. The machine dispensed a ticket which she put behind the sun visor.

  There was plenty of parking, as expected, and she pulled up to a light pole a hundred yards from the Arrivals Building. Her watch said 2:15 a.m. She exited the car and walked briskly toward the crossing that led to Arrivals. She felt a bitter-sweet joy at the prospect of actually seeing Achara, of having had a hand in bringing her home. She was so close now.

  Rachel hardly noticed the white van that pulled up next to her as she entered the shadow of the overpass. The driver opened the door and shot her with a Taser. Rachel collapsed to the ground convulsing, her body curling up like a burning leaf. In a flash, a man exited the vehicle and tossed the girl into the back seat, then sped away.

  t was time for her to carry out the plan. If caught, Tong would cut off her nose and ears, and lock her in a room with mirrors. He had done this before and some of the girls committed suicide. Those who didn’t kill themselves had to work with a burlap bag over their heads like prisoners condemned to hang and charge only twenty-five baht because they had no faces.

  Her sister had explained how to search for a flight on Expedia.com and Travelocity.com. Once she decided on a flight, she would have to go to a travel agent and buy the ticket with cash. Achara had considered doing all that after she escaped, but there would be so little time. The less she had to do, the better were her chances of escaping.

  The e-ticket would be waiting for her at the airport, so there would be no chance of Tong finding it. It was almost 2:00 p.m. and time to go fetch beer. Yesterday she had exchanged some dollars, so she would have cab fare to get to the travel agency quickly. It was nine kilometers away, so eighteen round trip, twenty minutes each way through traffic.

  Tong appeared at her door and made a drinking motion with his hand. She got up and extended her hand for the money.

  The beverage warehouse was in the opposite direction of the travel agency and she had to be seen walking in the direction of the warehouse. She went to the end of the block and took a cab to pick up the beer, then took another cab to the travel agency. She had called the agency the day before and was told she had to bring her passport and any required visa. She told them she was an American citizen. First there was a silence on the other end. Okay, then just the passport.

  In the cab with two cases of beer and dressed like a street urchin, she resolved to act like an American.

  She unloaded the cases on the curb and paid the driver, then hauled the beer into the doorway of the agency, so no one would steal them.

  “I called yesterday. I’m here to buy my plane ticket to America. I am an American,” she announced. She was instructed to sit.

  “You speak perfect Thai,” said the lady.

  “I just received my citizenship and was here to visit poor relatives. Here are two flights I am interested in.” She pulled a scrap of paper from her pocket. The lady glanced briefly at it, then looked at her.

  Achara felt she wasn’t being received like an American.

  “I want an e-ticket.”

  “Passport?”

  She slid it across the desk.

  The lady looked it over, feeling the paper, inspecting the photo.

  “This is completely blank. It has no entry stamp.”

  Achara had forgotten about that.

  “I lost my passport and they gave me a new one.”

  “You have the police report and the consulate certification of the new passport?”

  Achara’s mind raced.

  “I… I don’t have that with me now.”

  “It’s a problem when the passport is not in order.”

  The pretenses were falling away quickly.

  “How can we solve it?”

  “Two-hundred.”

  “Fifty.”

  “One-fifty.”

  “Seventy.”

  She slid the passport back to Achara.

  “Eighty-five or I go to another agency. There are many agencies here.”

  The lady nodded and extended her hand. Achara counted out the money twice and handed it over, then selected a flight.

  “Aisle or window?” asked the agent.

  “Which is cheaper?”

  “It’s the same price.”

  “So what difference does it make?”

  “Wait. Let me see something. Neither is available. Very short notice. So you get a middle seat.”

  “That’s fine if the price is the same.”

  “Sixteen-hundred-twenty-nine USD.”

  The girl counted out the money three times.

  “This is your receipt. The e-ticket will be waiting for you at the airport.”

  Achara took a cab to the Internet café and, for the second day in a row, there was no sign of her sister. She didn’t want to waste money again calling the cell phone number she’d been given. She purchased a card and entered one of the phone booths.

  “Hi, this is Rachel. Please leave a message at the beep and I’ll get back to you as soon as possible. Thanks.”

  The girl looked at the number and dialed again. Same message. How could she have given her the wrong number? What would happen if she arrived at the airport and there was no one to pick her up? The police would arrest her and send her to Guantanamo. She resumed her vigil by the PC. A working cam wa
s available today, too.

  She looked at the clock. They would notice her gone this long. She wrote an offline message and also sent it as an email.

  Dear Sis,

  I received everything you sent me. Thanks from the bottom of my heart.

  Here is the flight. Singapore Airlines Flight 3244 to New York. Arrives at JFK Airport September 17 at 5:30 p.m. New York time. God bless you.

  Achara

  oules unscrambled an image of an Asian girl, about seven years old, having sex with a fat, white guy who was covering his face with a towel. The other pictures were along the same lines. Group sex with three girls, bondage, suspension. There were also .avi files. One was a video of the same man having sex with the girls in the stills. From the sounds the girls made, they were definitely in a foreign country.

  Next, he decrypted a text file that was layered in a picture of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers. It read like an autopsy. In clinical language, it described the dismemberment of Kirsten Schrodinger, along with photos taken at various stages of the process. There were horrific expressions on the victim’s face, so she was still living while this was being done to her. Then he found the video of her killing.

  Usually impassive, Joules felt nausea creeping over him, along with the realization that Rachel had been in the home of this monster. He didn’t have McKenna’s number, but he knew from Rachel that the detective worked out of the 20th precinct. He minimized the SubSeven program to google NYPD 20th Precinct. It was then that he noticed the Norton Internet Security red alert. No, can’t be. But it was. He opened the Norton Security program and saw that Rachel’s firewall was disabled. He held on to the last hope that she was using IP anonymizing software, but of course, she wasn’t. It was her real IP address, traceable in seconds. He quickly opened Event Viewer Security and confirmed what he had already guessed. Her laptop had been successfully attacked. Joules shook his head at the enormity of Rachel’s blunder.

  He tried Rachel’s cell and left a voicemail. Then he went to her house and was told by her father that she was there last night, but had left sometime later and taken her car. They had tried calling her all morning, but she wasn’t answering her dorm number.

  His mind, so wired to see patterns and relationships between numbers, couldn’t escape the conclusion that Rachel was now in the hands of the man who had butchered Kirsten Schrodinger.

  Joules dialed the 20th precinct in Manhattan and asked for Detective McKenna’s cell number. He got through and told him what he had found.

  “Where’s Rachel now?” asked the detective.

  “No one knows. I just came back from her house and her parents told me she was there last night and went to bed. She was gone in the morning. I just left a voicemail on her cell. Let me try again.”

  The detective looked at his watch. Eight o’clock in the morning.

  “Still no answer,” said Joules.

  “Can you send me what you’ve found?” He gave Joules his email address.

  The detective stared at the images and only his lower lip reacted.

  “How did you get these?”

  “I decrypted it off a PC Rachel hacked into.”

  “Whose PC?”

  “The priest. Father Massey. I also realized that Rachel was doing this hack without changing her IP address.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Whenever you do a hack, you should use IP anonymizing software. That changes your IP address, so that it looks like you’re hacking from Poland or Hong Kong or Argentina. If you don’t do this, it would take ten seconds to geolocate your PC. Just plug the IP address into ip2location.com and a map with your location comes up. It even has precise latitude and longitude.”

  “Oh, Christ.”

  “It gets worse. Rachel was having problems finding the files she was looking for and thought her firewall was the problem. So she disabled it. With her firewall disabled and her IP exposed, she became the target of a counter hack. And it succeeded.”

  “He hacked into her PC?”

  “Right. At that point he knew exactly where she was and who she was.”

  he sniper perched on the rooftop of the apartment building had a clear view of the street below and the events that would shortly unfold.

  McKenna could see the perimeter unit at both ends of the street consisting of marked police cars to seal off escape and keep bystanders out. The surveillance team made a final pass of the house in the unmarked car and in the distance, the raid team’s caravan approached.

  Massey’s Bensonhurst home was deserted when police broke down the door, but a phone number led them to a realtor and this Richmond Hill house.

  In a few moments, the raid team would storm the building. There hadn’t been much time to plan this operation, but the SWAT guys were used to working on short notice. Just a few hours earlier, they had received authorization to carry out this mission after evidence had been presented pointing to Massey as the killer of Kirsten Schrodinger. Given the viciousness of the murder, this raid was classified as extremely dangerous despite the absence of any known accomplices.

  If the Wallen girl was a hostage, it would change everything. It would mean waiting, negotiating, a siege.

  A raid on Transcendence House came up empty a few minutes before. Thank God for that. No one wanted a hostage situation with fifty or sixty kids involved. Another damn Waco incident.

  The teams performed a final check of their Browning High Power pistols and H&K MP-5 submachineguns. In their Metro-vests, Nomex hoods and Bolle goggles, they looked like divers, and McKenna thought that was appropriate. Some of the creatures they went after came from the depths.

  The vans stopped two houses away. Instantly the doors flew open with explosive power. Each team of six men took up their positions in the front and rear of the structure. The metal grille door was ripped out with a Ram-it. The device was then reversed and with two men swinging it, slammed into the wooden door, leveling it. In the rear, two men entered through a window assisted by a ladder.

  The men poured into the house, quickly securing the living room, kitchen, and dining rooms. The second floor team gave the clear sign for the bedrooms, bathroom, and stairwell. The team on the first floor descended to the basement. Instantly, the Sure-fire lights on their weapons illuminated the darkness.

  The place was barren. No furniture, no people. It was like someone had just moved out. Broom clean. The final Code Four was announced and the assault team withdrew.

  McKenna, who had been following the assault by radio, moved in with the search team.

  There was no sign of a violent struggle, just the echo of their footsteps. There hadn’t been enough time for a security leak. Massey must have simply figured he was getting a visit. He’d have no place to run, that was certain. The guy had made the cover of Newsweek, for crying out loud.

  Detective McKenna returned upstairs. At least no one had gotten killed here.

  But just as he was letting himself relax, he noticed a small smudge of blood on the gray carpeting. There was another a few feet away and by the dining room, there was a third. He signaled his men.

  Then McKenna passed a window and saw two of his men lifting black plastic trash bags in front of the house. The bags seemed to have a bad weight to them and McKenna’s stomach told him something. When he got outside, the men were already inspecting the contents.

  There, in three plastic bags, were the dismembered remains of a body.

  etective McKenna felt sick at the thought of calling the Wallen parents to tell them he had found their daughter chopped up and distributed among three Hefty garbage bags. He had glanced inside the bags, but they were a dark, bloody mess, and had sent them on their way. Now it was the long wait for confirmation from the lab. There was nothing he could do to make himself forget this for even five minutes. He’d been at this job for twenty-one years and now wished he’d retired last year.

  One of the cops had asked why the killer would be so stupid as to leave bags full of body parts in fr
ont of the house. McKenna shook his head and answered the question in his own mind. Not stupid. Arrogant.

  They found Massey’s car in the garage of the Richmond Hill house. No trace of anything inside, except for the trunk lined with a plastic drop cloth. The airports had been alerted to detain him if he tried to fly.

  They recovered Massey’s laptop from the Bensonhurst home and gotten a court order to get into his Yahoo account. Now, he and his men were combing through hundreds of emails for some clue to his whereabouts.

  They checked out the realtor and the landlady of the Richmond Hill house. They were clean. Massey had obviously rented the place out to serve as an execution chamber.

  He opened Massey’s Yahoo Messenger. He had a dozen aliases. Newyorkerboy, Crush007. This guy spent a lot of time online. McKenna printed out the address book contact list. Most of these people had to be kids. What adult sits for hours and chats with other grown men? Christ.

  Chat archiving was enabled for all his contacts, so McKenna was able to read the exchanges. The conversations sounded like two thirteen-year-olds talking. Movies they had seen. Parents. School. Lousy teachers. They all started out the same and all ended the same―with sex talk.

  Some of the chats referenced photos that were sent. He correlated those dates with the dates in the “sent” folder to find the pictures, but they were all gone. They could be recovered from the Yahoo servers. Nothing ever got erased.

  “Check out every person on this list.” He gave the paper to Aldo Marchese.

  McKenna’s cell went off. He held his breath.

  “We did a cross check of the art dealer’s phone calls and Massey’s office number came up,” the voice said.