“Orbits has joined the field team,” the Administrator reported.
“And she accepted him?”
“She wasn’t happy about it, but she understands the need.”
“And the mission?”
“They’ve only been in the area for a couple hours, so nothing yet.”
“What are they—”
“Apologies, sir,” the Administrator said as the light for the emergency line on his phone began blinking. “May I put you on hold for one moment?”
When Monday nodded, the Administrator muted the video link and picked up his phone. The call lasted just over two minutes. When it was completed, he reactivated the video chat.
“That was one of the people I have with the families,” he said. “A ransom demand has been received. Ten million per child.”
“Interesting. And the deadline?”
“Seventy-two hours from”—he checked the time on his computer—“thirteen minutes ago. The ransom note came by an e-mail, and was sent only to the three families with the means to pay it. So far nothing has been received by the other three families.”
“Thirty million dollars. That’s quite a—”
“No, sir. Sixty. They want ten for each of the six children or none will be returned.”
“Is that so?” Monday said. “Keep me informed.”
“Of course.”
22
SIERRA NEVADA MOUNTAINS, CALIFORNIA
AS SHE WAS getting ready to go to bed, Ananke received the Administrator’s message about the ransom demand and the deadline. She called the others and switched their rendezvous time from four a.m. to three a.m. She would have liked to move it up even earlier, but they had to get some rest. With under three days until time ran out for the hostages, who knew when they’d get the opportunity to rest again.
But sleep came in dribs and drabs, her mind still agitated by Ricky’s presence. That he had such an effect on her was her own damn fault. She should have never become involved with him in the first place. All the warning signs had been there, on giant, horizon-filling billboards that she’d chosen to ignore. She’d been seduced due to her admiration of his skills and a bad-boy phase that was now, thanks to Ricky, behind her.
Could she work with him? Yes. They’d been on the same job the previous summer, the same one she’d helped Quinn on. Technically they’d been on conflicting sides, but she had avoided killing him then so she figured she could probably keep from sticking a knife in him now. It would have been nice, though, if the Administrator had informed her ahead of time that Ricky was the hunter. She’d almost lost her cool in front of the others, and she couldn’t have that if she was running things.
Before her alarm rang at 2:30, she was up and on the phone with Shinji.
He gave her the rundown on what he’d found out about her team members, all of which confirmed what Ananke already knew or sensed about them. He then moved on to the Karas Evonus. “The registration is legit, but I can’t find anything but a PO box address in Panama for the company who owns it, so it’s got to be a cover for something. I can keep digging if you want.”
“I do, but I’m going to need you to back-burner it for a while. I’m going to connect you with Rosario, and I want you to help her out. She might be a little resistant at first, so give her some of your charm.”
“I have charm?”
“Fake it.”
Ananke arrived at the van a minute before Rosario and Liesel got there. They shared nods but no one said anything. The peaceful silence changed the moment Ricky and Dylan walked out. The two men were in the middle of a one-sided conversation—Ricky talking, Dylan sleepily listening and nodding. As they neared, Ricky let out a loud belly laugh, as if he’d just said the funniest thing ever.
“Volume,” Ananke whispered harshly.
“Sorry, sorry,” Ricky said. “I was just telling Dylan here what RocketMan did on that—”
“Ricky, shut up.”
“You got it. Sorry, kitten.”
She glared at him.
“I mean, sorry, boss.” He flashed a toothy smile.
She took a deep, centering breath and then looked at Rosario. “I want you to stay here and work on those satellite images and see whatever else you can dig up. I’ll send you Shinji’s number, the guy I was talking about. He knows you’ll be calling him.”
“Shinji?” Ricky bellowed. “Hey, I like that guy. Tell him—”
“Ricky,” Ananke growled.
“—hi from me,” he finished in a faux whisper.
Ananke pulled out her phone and texted Shinji’s contact information to Rosario. “If you really can’t work with him, let me know,” she said as Rosario’s phone buzzed.
Rosario looked skeptical but said nothing.
Ananke turned to Ricky. “You’ve been briefed?”
“About the kids? Yep.”
“And can I assume you have a vehicle? Or did someone drop you off?”
“Nobody drops Ricky off.” He pointed across the lot at a dark blue Chevy Silverado crew cab.
“They gave you a truck?” Dylan said. “Now that’s just not fair.”
Her gaze still on Ricky, Ananke said, “Go hunt. Any lead you find, you let me know right away.”
He bowed deeply. “As you wish, milady.”
He twirled around and headed toward the truck.
“Liesel and Dylan,” Ananke said, “let’s do some of our own hunting.”
__________
WITH THE TRAIL almost three days cold, Ananke decided to focus their initial efforts on buildings in the disappearance zone where the kids might have been taken. Even if they’d been kept someplace only temporarily, there might be clues to where they’d gone next. But at house after house they found nothing.
After they’d been at it for almost two hours, they pulled into the parking lot of an abandoned motel.
“Doesn’t look like anyone’s been here in ages,” Dylan said as he parked.
It was the kind of place where guests stayed in individual cabins. It had undoubtedly been nice once but now was beyond repair. The central building where the front desk would have been lay in the middle of the complex next to the lot. Its windows had been knocked out years ago, and the roof sagged between rafters like a hammock.
As Ananke opened her door, she said to Dylan, “Kill the engine. It’ll go faster if we’re all looking around this time.”
“Wait, wait, wait,” he said with a smile and a shake of his head. “I’m the driver, remember? Not the gun-toting, haunted-house investigator. That’s your job.”
“And I’m the boss,” Ananke said, smiling back. “Now get out.”
As Ananke led Dylan and Liesel up to the main building, the van beeped, signaling its locks had been engaged. She shot a look at Dylan.
“I don’t know about you,” he said, “but I’d like it if no one was waiting for us inside when we come back.”
“Like who?”
“It doesn’t matter who. Are you telling me this place doesn’t give you the creeps?”
Ananke snorted and stepped across the threshold. A warped reception counter stretched across the room toward the back, but whatever else had been in there was gone. They searched the rest of the building but found nothing of interest.
When they exited, Dylan headed toward the van.
“Where do you think you’re going?” Ananke said. “There’s more.”
“Not the cabins,” he said, not hiding his dread.
“Yes, the cabins.”
The first two cabins were as unhelpful as the main building. When Ananke reached the third, however, she paused outside the entrance. The layer of dust on the threshold was nowhere near as thick as she’d seen elsewhere. Shining her flashlight inside, she saw dozens of recent footprints and three large rectangular areas where there was also little dust. The spots were side by side and the right size and shape for sleeping bags.
As interesting as the discovery was, the recent occupants could have been anyon
e—hikers, campers, someone wanting to avoid paying for a hotel room. And though she knew the marks had been made in the last week, no one had done her the courtesy of writing the actual date in the dust.
“Ananke,” Liesel called from outside. “Come look.”
Ananke found Liesel along the side of the third cabin, pointing her flashlight at the ground. Smack dab in the center of the halo was a tire track.
“A street bike,” Dylan said, looking over their shoulders. “You call tell from the tread pattern.”
“There are two more.” Liesel swung the beam and revealed the additional marks.
Dylan examined them for a moment. “Street bikes again, different tire brands, though. The tracks are pretty wide, so I’d say the bikes are substantial. Maybe touring bikes, something like that.”
“Is this it, or did you find others?” Ananke asked.
“No others,” Liesel said.
Three sets of tracks. Three imprints of sleeping bags inside.
Without moving, Ananke followed the tracks with her light back to the area in front of the cabins, where they turned and disappeared from sight.
Still no way to know if they had anything to do with the missing kids.
They searched around cabin three a bit more, but discovered nothing else useful. While Liesel and Dylan checked the remaining cabins, Ananke called Rosario.
“Find anything?” she asked.
“It turns out that it was cloudy on the day of the kidnapping, so all visual spectrum satellite images are useless. There is, though, an NSA satellite in the vicinity that photographs in alternate spectrums. Unfortunately, it is not directly overhead, so the images we are interested in are at an angle. This means the mountains block a lot of the view, but there are parts of the road we can see. Shinji is going through it frame by frame now.”
“So he’s working out for you?”
“He is…useful so far.”
Ananke grinned to herself. “I have something else for you to check out while you’re looking at images.” She told Rosario about the motorcycles. “Just want to rule out the possibility they had anything to do with this.”
“We do not need the satellites for that. Security camera footage would be faster. Let me see what I can hack into. It should be easy enough to establish if the motorcycles were in the area or not.”
__________
ROSARIO HAD EXPECTED Shinji to be another wannabe hacker who could do a few tricks but was otherwise worthless. As a test, she’d tasked him with breaking into the NSA satellite database, figuring it would tie him up for hours. She then set about hacking into it herself.
She was still working on the secondary firewall when Shinji called back and told her he was in. Her response was at first disbelief, and then surprise after he provided her a pathway into the satellite’s data.
Either he’d been lucky or he was better than she was. Considerably.
After she finished talking to Ananke, she initiated a new video chat with Shinji.
“Anything?” she asked.
“I found a clear view of the road about five miles west of the Conifer Lodge. The van never showed up. I even went an hour beyond when I should have seen it. Nothing.”
“Show me the location.”
She heard Shinji clicking a few keys before a map appeared on her screen, with a marker hovering over the spot he’d described.
“You are sure you did not miss the van?” she asked.
“You can look at the data yourself, if you want. But you’re not going to find anything.”
He was probably right, but she didn’t know him well enough to take him at his word. “Send it to me.”
“Oookay.”
She could hear him typing for several seconds. A second after he stopped, a message box appeared on her screen, asking if she wanted to accept a file transfer.
“I converted it to a single movie,” he said. “You can speed it up, slow it down. Whatever you want.”
“Thank you.” She initiated the download, then said, “We have something new to look into.”
“What is it?”
She passed on Ananke’s request. “We’ll take fifteen minutes to find as many of the security cameras as we can. After that, we divide them between us and search footage in a twenty-four-hour window before and after the van left the lodge. If we do not see any motorcycles that fit the description, or we do but they leave the area before the van disappeared, then we do not worry about them.”
“That’s still a lot of footage. I could automate the process. Set one of my computers to check all the cameras.”
“You have an image recognition program that will do this?”
“I do.”
“How fast?”
He paused. “Twenty minutes to get it running, then five minutes per camera processing.”
“Accuracy?”
“About ninety percent.”
That wasn’t perfect, but a ten-percent error rate seemed a fair enough exchange for not wasting time they could spend on something else.
“Let’s do it.”
They found nine cameras in their target area, seven of which stored footage far enough back to be useful. While Shinji dealt with the footage, Rosario reviewed the satellite info he’d sent and confirmed the van had not driven past. She texted this information to Ananke and turned her attention to looking into the backgrounds of the missing kids and their chaperones.
The three rich kids all went to private schools and were stars in one way or another—debate, student government, and track. The lower-income kids went to public schools, where it would be generous to say extracurricular programs were limited. What they shared was their level of intelligence. All were part of gifted programs and had IQs above 140. This, apparently, had gained each of them membership in an organization called Point Five, a kind of nouveau Mensa club, which sponsored the retreat.
A soft bong signaled Shinji wanted to reconnect. She accepted the request, and then returned her attention to the article about Point Five.
“I found them,” Shinji said.
Rosario blinked and looked at the chat box. “The motorcycles?”
“Uh-huh.”
“In our time frame?”
“I have them on three different cameras in Groveland, driving toward the abandoned motel late on the afternoon before the kidnapping.”
“Faces?”
He shook his head. “All wearing helmets.”
“License numbers, then.”
“The only camera with a decent angle didn’t have the resolution to pick them out.”
“Did you see when they left?”
“They didn’t leave.”
“They must have stayed longer than the search window. Expand the parameters and find—”
“Already expanded. Had my analyzer concentrate on footage from the camera with the best shot of the road, and ran through everything recorded up to just a few minutes ago. The motorcycles never went back west.”
“You’re sure it didn’t miss them?”
“Positive. They either dumped the bikes somewhere and left in another vehicle, or they drove out a different way.”
“How many other ways out are there?”
“Based on their last known location, four. But three are minor roads, partly dirt, partly paved, and lots of twists and turns. Difficult for anyone who doesn’t know the area to navigate. Plus not great on those kinds of bikes. The only other way would be to drive through Yosemite and exit the east side to highway 395. I have my computer searching for cameras on that route right now.”
“Okay. Let me know.” As she reached to disconnect, she paused. “Shinji.”
“Yeah?”
“Good work.”
He nodded and the chat window shut off.
When he called back forty-five minutes later, his answer was unchanged.
The motorcycles had driven into the area the day before the kidnapping but had never driven out. It still wasn’t proof the riders had anything
do with the kids’ disappearance, but it was troubling.
Rosario reached for her phone.
__________
AS SOON AS she hung up, Ananke shared Rosario’s news about the motorcycles with Liesel and Dylan.
“So more missing people?” Dylan asked.
“Or they were involved and left their bikes behind,” Ananke said. “Or maybe hauled them out in a truck.”
“Or they are still camping in the mountains,” Liesel said.
“Or that, too.”
Ananke stared out the front window of the van, across the parking lot at the Conifer Lodge. The sun had risen about thirty minutes before, but it was still too early to go noising around inside.
“Uh-oh,” Dylan said.
Ananke glanced over and saw that he was staring at a sheriff’s car heading their way.
“You don’t think they’re coming for us, do you?” he asked.
“Start the engine,” Ananke said, her gaze glued to the approaching car.
Dylan turned the ignition. “We can’t outrun him in this.”
“You are a driver,” Liesel said. “You will outdrive him.”
“Right. I’ll try to remember that.” He grabbed the transmission, ready to drop it into Drive.
“Wait,” Ananke said.
The sheriff’s car had slowed. When it was still half the lot away, it swung in a wide U-turn and pulled to a stop at the curb. Two deputies climbed out and went inside the lodge.
Dylan shut the engine off. “Maybe they’re just getting something to eat.”
“Let’s hope so. But we don’t go in until they leave.”
The wait wasn’t long. Five minutes after the deputies entered the lodge, they came back out.
“Is that your friend?” Liesel asked.
Ananke groaned.
Walking between the deputies, hands cuffed behind his back, was Ricky Orbits.
23
JUST AFTER 3 AM AGAIN
RICKY KNEW ANANKE was only playing it up for her crew.
No way she could still be mad at him. Their breakup had been at least three years ago, and had happened because of a simple misunderstanding. He hadn’t actually liked either of the girls he was with when Ananke found him. Well, liked, sure—that redhead, whatever her name was, had been particularly talented. But not liked-liked. He’d just been blowing off some steam. What was wrong with that?
The Excoms Page 12
