by Reece Hirsch
But there was no point in dwelling on what she had lost and what she might yet lose; she needed to keep her head in the game.
When she left the modern airport’s secure area, carrying nothing but a computer bag, a woman with long, glossy black hair who looked like a local brushed past her. In Spanish-accented English she said, “Follow me.”
The woman did not look back but strode briskly out of the airport to the parking lot. It was chilly outside, and Zoey wished that she’d packed a jacket.
She followed the woman until she climbed into an Audi. Zoey paused for a moment and considered whether it might still be possible to back out.
No, it’s too late for that.
If she turned around now, Damian would figure that she was working with the feds and had reached out to him solely to identify his hiding place. Zoey did not think that Damian was a killer by nature, but she believed that he would probably kill to protect his hiding place.
Besides, did she have any better hope of survival?
Zoey walked around to the passenger side of the Audi and climbed in.
“Hi, I’m Zoey. And you are?”
“We’ll do names later.”
“When will I see Damian?”
“I’m taking you to him. It’s going to take a while.”
“You guys don’t make it easy, do you?”
The woman directed her gaze squarely at Zoey for the first time. “No, we don’t. That’s why we’re not in prison. I want you to know that I told Damian he never should have brought you here. It’s a threat to all of us.”
“I guess he didn’t listen to you then.”
This drew a second glare that Zoey could feel even in the gloom.
They drove south in silence through a river valley as dusk descended. To their right stood a jagged volcano, emitting a plume of black smoke high above them. Her driver did not seem alarmed. This was apparently commonplace.
The landscape was a brilliant jungle green, aside from the brown of the mountains. Eventually, the jagged ridges of the Andes vanished as their field of vision dwindled down to the cone of the headlights, but Zoey could still feel the hulking presence of the mountains.
The woman drove on for two hours as the roads climbed upward and grew narrower. Passing cars became less frequent. Eventually, even the driver couldn’t stand the silence and turned on the radio. Only one staticky station managed to reach the far reaches of Ecuador. And it played an incessant playlist of . . . Katy Perry and Taylor Swift. For once those pitch-impaired pop tartlets were a welcome reminder of home.
“I know you’re not going to tell me where we’re going, but can you tell me how much longer?” Zoey asked.
“Less than an hour. This is where we pull off,” the driver said, veering off of the main road onto a slightly narrower road that led up into the hills and then down into a valley.
The car slowed down to a crawl over a twisting two-lane that was more like a broad single lane and required negotiation between oncoming drivers. The driving was made even more treacherous by the wispy fog that filled the hollows of the mountain roads. Fortunately, no one else traveled the road at that late hour. The locals probably knew enough to avoid the hazard.
Zoey saw a few lights ahead and, after they rounded another bend, could make out a small town spread out across a valley under another looming mountain. It was nearly midnight, and there were few lights visible.
“What’s this place called?”
“Loja.”
They passed through an old district of the town that seemed to date to the Spanish colonial period, with cobbled streets and carved wooden balconies. Then they entered a residential neighborhood and parked the Audi in a garage attached to a single-level house consisting of an unsightly combination of brown brick and concrete block. Zoey climbed out, stiff from the forced confinement of hours of driving and two solid days of flights.
Her escort rapped on the door, and it was immediately thrown open by a man in his midthirties with dyed-blond hair that needed a touch-up and a snaggle-toothed grin.
“And you must be Zoey.”
Zoey’s knowledge of British accents derived mainly from the bands that she had followed over the years. If she had to guess, she would say that Damian was from the North, possibly Manchester.
“Damian.” As with so many of her hacker acquaintances, she had never met him in person.
“You look pretty much how I expected you to look,” he said. “Always nice when that happens.”
“If you say so,” Zoey said. “But I’m not usually a blonde.”
“Neither am I,” Damian said. “The things we do as fugitives, huh? We’ll have to compare notes later on shades of Miss Clairol, won’t we?”
Zoey smiled, still a little too tense to laugh.
“Come on in,” Damian said. “You must be knackered.” To the sharp-featured woman who’d driven Zoey, he said, “Did you stop to eat?”
“No, she didn’t ask, so I thought better not to risk it.”
“We have to be better hosts than that, now don’t we?” He turned to Zoey. “Zoey, meet Maria.”
Maria scowled.
Two men sat on a couch in the living room, furiously working gaming consoles in front of a large flat-screen TV. The first was a scrawny kid in his midtwenties with a long, pale, oblong face. He gave the impression of a teenager even though he was clearly older than that.
The second gamer was sort of the inverse of his companion, probably also in his midtwenties, but with one of those faces that looked prematurely hardened and old. He had deep-set dark eyes, lined, weathered skin, and thin lips. Zoey couldn’t tell whether he was angry at her or whether his face just naturally fell into a “resting bastard” pose.
“Meet Serge and Roland, the last members of our little crew. Video games are a big deal here. We can’t afford to be connected to the Internet, so we only use stand-alone technology.”
“That must be hard.”
“You’ll see. First week here I felt like my brain was going to explode without Internet. It’s a little easier now.”
“Better than the alternative, though, isn’t it?” Zoey asked.
“If you mean fifteen to twenty in a federal prison, yeah, better than that.”
“I think I know you, don’t I?” said Roland, the mean- and hardened-looking half of the pair.
“I don’t know, do you?”
“The Centinela Bank thing.”
“Yep, that was me.”
“Do you know me?”
“I don’t think I’ve heard of a Roland.”
“I use a handle—Horashow.”
“Oh, right,” Zoey said. “I know that name. Nice to meet you.” Now Zoey knew without doubt that staying with Damian wouldn’t be safe. If message board chatter meant anything, then Roland, in addition to being a brilliant coder, was a borderline psychopath. Damian was clearly running with a more dangerous crowd than she had anticipated.
“Was it really necessary for you to go all the way to Bumfuck, Ecuador, to escape the law?” Zoey asked Damian, careful not to show any fear to Roland or his couch mate.
“Keep in mind,” he said, “we didn’t just steal from a company, we took down the bleedin’ Federal Reserve. They want to make an example of us, ’cause if people don’t trust that the Fed’s secure, then what have you got? And Loja serves our purposes for now. It’s obscure and isolated—even for Ecuador.”
“If they haven’t found you yet, maybe they’ve given up.” When she glanced back at Roland, he was still staring at her.
“Have they given up looking for you?” Damian asked.
“No.”
“You think they’re ever going to?”
“Point taken.”
“So what is it that brings you here, Zoey? We can hear the long version tomorrow, but right now I’d really like to hear the highlights.”
Zoey saw no reason to withhold the truth from them, so she explained what she knew about who was pursuing her and the existe
nce of the mysterious agency that was like the NSA, but not the NSA.
When her story was done, Maria said, “I knew this was a mistake. I didn’t think it was possible to bring any more heat down on us, but I guess I was wrong.”
“Damn, Zoey.” Damian took a swig of beer and fell back on the couch, ignoring Maria. “I had no idea.”
“It’s a good story,” Roland said, tilting his head as if sniffing the air. “But there’s no way to verify it.”
“Maria’s right,” Damian said. “I don’t think you appreciate what a big exception we made bringing you down here.”
“That you made for her,” Maria said from the kitchen.
“It wasn’t a unanimous vote, as you can see,” Damian said to Zoey. “You’re lucky that Roland and Serge voted with me. They were getting bored and wanted company. Didn’t you, boys?”
Serge’s fingers paused over the console and he gave a noncommittal shrug. That pause was enough to seal the fate of his video game avatar, who loosed an anguished cry as he died in a hail of automatic-weapon fire.
“So why did you take me in?” Zoey asked. “Surely it wasn’t just boredom. Not that I’m complaining.”
“No, you’re right,” Damian said. “We have some plans, and we think you might be a good fit for them. But first you’re going to have to go through a bit of a vetting process.”
“What sort of vetting? We didn’t talk about that.”
“We didn’t have an opportunity to talk about much of anything,” Damian said. “But it was you who rang my bell, wasn’t it? Look, we can deal with all of that tomorrow. Tonight you need to eat and sleep.”
Maria brought in a tray with a cup of tea and a pork sandwich. Zoey ate half the sandwich in a couple of bites and took a big swallow of the green tea.
“This is good,” she said.
“Maria’s the only one here with any talent in the kitchen,” Damian said. “And I don’t mean that in any sexist way.”
Maria smiled and shot him the finger.
Zoey’s eyelids grew heavy. She didn’t realize just how tired she had been, but it was hitting her now. A moment later she realized she was feeling more than drowsy. Maria had drugged her tea. Her eyes drifted down and she stared at its murky currents. A milky substance swirled in the cup.
“You’re crashing, girl,” Damian said. “Like the Hindenburg.”
“What did you give me?” she said, the words slow and gummy on her tongue.
“We call it Ecuadorean truth serum,” Damian said. “We’ll let it work its magic, and then we’ll have ourselves a chat.”
14
Sam and his team had eliminated five out of nine possible escape routes that Bruen and Ayres could have taken, leaving twenty hotels where they were likely to be staying. It was only a matter of time before the pair was located, but then they caught a break and were afforded a shortcut. Zoey Doucet, the director of Bruen’s computer forensic lab, used their “secure” website to contact Chris.
They used an encrypted Skype connection, but the Skeleton Key program decrypted it with ease, enabling Sam to watch the pair’s Skype videos in tandem on side-by-side monitors. Bruen was in a hotel room that wasn’t immediately identifiable, but Sam would come back to those images later.
The fugitive lawyer hadn’t shaved and looked haggard.
“Are you okay?” he asked, his voice thick with anxious emotion.
“Yeah,” said Zoey, who appeared pale and looked as if she hadn’t slept for a month. “I’m in an airport. I’ll be getting on a plane soon to meet Hull. Outside the US. How about you? Are you safe?” As she awaited Bruen’s response, she nervously gnawed the inside of her lip.
Sam had no idea who “Hull” was, but he intended to find out.
“I’m in a hotel in the city. I’m okay for now, but we’re going to have to make a move soon. How about you? Do you think Hull can be trusted?”
“‘Trust’ is not a word I would use.”
“Don’t tell me where you’re going,” Chris said. “I couldn’t guarantee that I wouldn’t tell them if I’m caught. I imagine they’re pretty good at that sort of thing.”
“You shouldn’t talk like that.”
“Sorry.”
“How long before we see each other again?”
“I wish I knew, but I have to believe there’ll be an end to this. And even if it doesn’t end and we have to stay gone, I’ll eventually come and find you when it’s safer.”
“It’s never easy for us, is it?”
Chris smiled and shook his head. “If things don’t work out with Hull, reach out to me here.”
“Okay. How’s Ayres? You two bonding yet?”
“After a fashion. We shouldn’t stay on this connection for long, even though it is secure.” He paused. “Stay safe, Zoey. Love you.”
She cocked an eyebrow. “Look at you, getting all emotionally honest. Now I know we’re in trouble. Love you too. See you on the other side.”
The screens went dark as the Skype connection terminated, and Sam was left with an uneasy feeling. At the NSA, surveillance was divided into analysis of metadata or content. He liked it better when he was conducting what he thought of as “cold” surveillance—sifting through and analyzing metadata to find the empirical evidence of a connection. If two people dialed the same phone number, then you could reason that both parties probably knew the person at that number. That sort of information was empirical and relatively unambiguous.
In metadata surveillance Sam never heard the subject’s voice or saw their face. Never sensed the fear and panic of the hunted. Never heard their point of view. He had never liked conducting content analysis of communications. Content was much harder to analyze in bulk and more emotional to witness. More upsetting.
His job was so much easier when he could reduce a human being to a series of data elements. Now Chris Bruen and Zoey Doucet lived in his head as actual people, people who were afraid but were also loyal and quite obviously in love. Actions and tendencies were predictable from a statistical standpoint; emotions and feelings were not. Even his own.
Sam’s reverie was interrupted when he detected a movement reflected in his monitor. He spun around and saw a tall man with sparse black hair staring at him.
“Sorry, I didn’t realize you were there,” Sam said.
“You weren’t supposed to.” He extended a hand. “Anton Corbin.”
Sam shook his hand, then regretted being so accommodating. “I don’t mean to be rude, but are you cleared for this area?”
“I am. I’m leading the hunt for Bruen and Ayres. The ground pursuit, anyway. I thought it was about time we met. Looks like you just had a breakthrough.”
Sam had seen Corbin’s type before among the field agents—the gregarious, friendly, workmanlike killer. He turned his chair around to face Corbin. “Yeah, Bruen reached out to Doucet using the secure site that they set up—”
“Which is really not so secure,” Corbin said.
“Right.”
“Fascinating work that you do here,” Corbin said. “You’re like Bruno Ganz in Wings of Desire.”
“I don’t follow you.”
“It’s a German film by Wim Wenders. Ganz plays this angel who walks the streets of Berlin, listening in on everyone’s thoughts. He’s with them in all their most private moments, but they can’t see him and he can’t touch them.”
“Sounds very . . . low-key.”
“Oh, it is,” Corbin said. “But very beautiful . . . contemplative. You should watch it sometime. I think it might strike a chord.”
“I don’t think anyone has ever compared me to an angel,” Sam said.
“Me neither.” Corbin gave a rueful laugh. “There’s actually a sadness in knowing too much, isn’t there?”
Sam didn’t like the personal nature of this conversation, and he found Agent Corbin strangely discomfiting. “Like I said, I’ve never seen the movie.”
Corbin shot him a disappointed look. “So what do we know ab
out their locations?”
Sam was relieved to get back to the task at hand. “Doucet seems to be in a US airport, probably SFO or Oakland. She was about to board a flight, so she’s probably already gone. Bruen, on the other hand, is in a hotel, and we have a fairly complete view of his room. We’ll study those images.”
“Do you have any idea who this Hull person is?” Corbin asked. “That seems to be the key to locating Doucet. She’s going to meet him.”
“I have no clue,” Sam said, “but we’ll work on it.”
Corbin nodded. “Can you cue up the video again? From the start.”
Sam clicked his mouse and moved the video to the beginning and slowed down the speed so that it crept forward a frame at a time.
Corbin pointed at Bruen’s side of the screen. “There. That’s a leather binder, probably the room service menu. It’ll have the hotel’s name on it.”
Sam froze the frame and magnified the binder, but the image was not high-definition and it degenerated into an indecipherable brown blob.
“Not helpful,” Corbin said.
Sam brought his face to within inches of the monitor. “Wait, there on the nightstand. There’s a little folder, like the kind that the front desk uses for card keys.”
He focused on the folder, then focused a bit more, until the number 201 could be made out.
“Room 201,” Sam said.
“But what hotel?”
“I have an idea,” Sam said. “We’ve currently narrowed down the search to about twenty hotels in the vicinity of Van Ness Avenue. This looks like a decent enough place, the kind of hotel that will have a website and photos of the rooms.”
Corbin was nodding. “So all we have to do is match the decor.”
“Exactly.”
Sam spent ten minutes examining hotel websites until he found a photo of a room that had precisely the same headboard on the bed that was in view behind Bruen in the video. “Got it. He’s at the Guthrie Hotel.”
