by Ken Fite
Landry shook his head. “Jordan, you’re being treated as a suspect. For all I know, you’re involved in this somehow.”
I stood. “Damn you, Bill,” I yelled. “You know my involvement. Jim Keller is a friend of mine. He’s like a father to me. He trained me to become a SEAL and I owe him everything. You know all of this.”
“Take a seat,” Landry finally said.
I sat back down and composed myself before continuing. “While Agent Davis and I were being brought in, I heard dispatch reference a code 20. A newsworthy event. What happened? Is the senator okay?”
Landry hesitated and then pulled back one of the chairs and took a seat at the table. “The kidnapper made contact.”
I was shocked to hear this. “What did he say?”
“He didn’t call us or the media. He posted a video online. He was masked and held a sign that said Execution at dusk. Then the camera panned to the senator. It was brief, but Keller looked bad. Maybe unconscious.”
“Where was the video taken?”
Landry shook his head.
“From inside the kidnapper’s van, we think. His location was identified as being a few miles away from the warehouse.”
I crossed my arms, set them on the table, and leaned in. “Bill, you have to let me help you. Look how far I got with absolutely no resources. I found the warehouse before your guys got there. Nobody knows Keller better than I know him. Please—we only have a few hours until sundown. Give me a chance,” I said with conviction.
Landry stood and pushed the chair in. “I don’t have to do anything,” he said as his tone changed. “You should have left the investigation to us. And like I said, you could be feeding me a bunch of BS right now. We’ll know soon.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Landry turned around when he got to the door. “Agent Mallory will be in soon. You need to tell him everything. If he suspects you’re lying or withholding the truth on anything, he’s got authority to call in help to make you talk. You don’t want him to do that. I want to know everything, Jordan. The United Center, David Mitchell, John Burnett, the flash drive. Everything.”
Landry left and the door closed. There was absolutely nothing I could do now. The senator would be executed in a matter of hours, the FBI had no leads, and I was stuck in a holding room unable to help. I had never felt so helpless in my life. I sat in the cold room with my hands holding the back of my head with my elbows resting on the table. I had tried my best. I had to face the reality that I wouldn’t be saving Jim Keller from certain death today and that my journey was over.
FIFTY-FIVE
NINETY MINUTES AFTER Landry left, I once again heard the familiar sound of an entry code being punched into the keypad outside my holding room. I expected to see Agent Mallory walk in with a notebook and voice recorder to begin debriefing me. Instead, Bill Landry walked in.
“What’s wrong?” I asked. “Did you find something on the flash drive?”
“Agent Mallory has someone working on the drive. That’s not why I’m here,” he said and took a seat at the cold steel table across from me.
Landry hesitated for a moment, then began to tell me why he came back. “We brought the kid in. After CPD talked with him, we had an officer drive him over. He was nervous and admitted to doing drugs over the past twenty-four hours. He didn’t want to say much, but Mallory calmed him down and got him to open up and tell us what he remembered about Keller. We talked about the warehouse and what he saw the man do to the senator. After he started to relax, he remembered something he was supposed to tell us. He said he was so distraught over his escape, he forgot all about it.”
“What did he remember?” I asked, wishing I could have had a chance to talk with the kid myself.
Landry thought for a moment. It seemed like he was hesitating, unsure if he was making the right decision in talking with me. After a few seconds, he continued. “The young man said that Keller gave him a message to deliver should he be able to get away.”
I stared at Landry, trying to figure out why he was telling me this. “What was the message? What did he tell the kid?”
Landry looked at me. “Send Blake Jordan.”
I leaned back in my chair, processing what he had just told me. Landry pushed his chair away from the table, crossed his legs, and put two hands on his knee. He looked me over, trying to gauge how I was going to respond, but I kept my composure. I wondered how the FBI was going to handle the request.
“There’s no way that kid would have known who you were,” said Landry. “It seems that Keller wanted you to assist in rescuing him.”
I shook my head. “No, he wanted me to lead the rescue. I told you, nobody knows him better than I do.”
Landry looked like it pained him to say the next words that he spoke. “Listen, Jordan. I’m willing to let you help the FBI on a provisional basis, but you play by my rules. You go off the rails or keep us in the dark on anything and you’re finished. Understood?”
I nodded. “Understood.”
“I want us involved in everything. I’m assigning Mallory to work with you. I’m giving him authority to make decisions on my behalf. You need to do something, you go through him. No exceptions.” Landry started to leave the holding room. “You’ll work from here,” he added before he reached the door.
I stood and stopped him from leaving. “I want Agent Davis brought to me. I need access to that flash drive, and I need you to call DDC and have them send me an analyst named Morgan Lennox so he can take a look at the drive. And I want to talk to that kid when you’re done with him.”
Landry stared at me for a moment before responding, “I’ll make a call and order a transport for Lennox. Agent Mallory will be right in.”
I stopped him again. “What about the charges against Agent Davis?”
“I can’t do anything about DDC, she still works for them. That’s Shapiro’s call. I understand he’s not a big fan of yours, so I think it’s safe to say you’re finished there. I know Roger. He doesn’t backtrack on decisions. As far as your charges go, now that DDC has turned you over to us, that’s our call. So I guess we’ll need to see how you handle the next few hours. Find the senator and I’ll go easy on you. And if you don’t—” he said before I interrupted him.
“I will. I’ll find him. And I’ll get him back alive.”
FIFTY-SIX
A SHORT TIME later, Jami was brought in. “Are you okay?” I asked, and she gave me a hug and sat down.
“Fine,” she said curiously. “But why aren’t they keeping us separated anymore? What happened?”
I explained as much as I could as quickly as I could. I told her about the kid and the message Keller had given him about me. I told her I’d just spoken with Special Agent in Charge Bill Landry and how he had agreed to let me assist the FBI on a provisional basis.
“What about the charges? Did they drop them?” asked Jami.
“That’ll be up to Shapiro.”
“What are they going to do to you?”
“Landry said it depends on whether or not we save the senator in time.”
Jami looked confused. “What do you mean by in time?”
Mallory entered the room. I didn’t have a chance to break the news to Jami about what the kidnapper was planning to do in just a few short hours.
“We meet again,” he said as he walked up to the table where we were seated, and Jami moved her chair over to give the agent room to sit down and join us.
“Let’s level-set to make sure the three of us are on the same page on what’s happened so far and align on next steps, since you’ve already proven not to be able to follow basic instructions,” he said as he opened a manila envelope, started thumbing through loose papers, and found a pen in his shirt pocket.
“You know we have the kid. His name is Tre. He’s right down the hall. Chicago PD brought him over a little while ago. CPD gave us a copy of their notes and we drilled down from there to probe and try to find out what else he
knew. The kid was nervous, but after a while, I got him to talk. He said he remembered a message that the senator had given him to deliver—send Blake Jordan—that’s what Keller told him. And this information has ruled you out as a suspect in Keller’s kidnapping and is why we’re having this conversation, okay?”
Jami and I nodded.
“Shortly before the two of you were brought in, the kidnapper released a ten-second video.”
“The code 20 we heard on the way in?” asked Jami.
“Yes. The kidnapper plans on executing Senator Keller at dusk.”
Jami leaned forward. “Tonight? That’s in just a few hours!”
“It is, so we don’t have time to waste. Agent Jordan has been given provisional status by the Bureau to lead the recovery efforts, but understand, as Landry has already explained, you are under my authority. That means you involve me in everything. You break that protocol and I will cut you off immediately.”
“What about the drive? Were you able to find anything on it?” I asked.
“Not much,” Mallory said. “Encryption’s hard to get around. But we did find your name in the sections we were able to decrypt. Whoever the drive belongs to was doing a lot of research on you. Any idea why?”
“No idea,” I said as Mallory pulled a flash drive out of an inner pocket of his jacket and placed it on the table.
Jami picked it up.
“This isn’t the same drive.”
Mallory nodded. “It’s a copy. We need to keep working on the original.”
“Did Landry speak with Shapiro about Morgan Lennox? I need him to look at this drive,” I said.
“He’s on his way. Given how close we are to DDC, he should arrive any minute now. As soon as he gets here, we’ll check him in and bring him to you. What else do you need right now?”
Jami looked at me and I knew we were thinking the same thing. We needed to go to the source. “I want to talk to the kid,” I said, and Mallory nodded again. Jami stood and walked around the table and took a seat next to me.
“I’ll get him now. And remember,” Mallory said, knocking on the framed two-way mirror that lined the wall to the right of where Jami and I were sitting as he got up to leave. “Keep me involved in everything.”
FIFTY-SEVEN
JAMI AND I met with the kid while we waited for Morgan to arrive and get checked in. He told us his story, how he and his friends often went to the warehouse to smoke and drink and how his friends had ditched him yesterday. I asked about the initials scratched into the pipe. He said he didn’t see Keller do it. I wondered if Keller had even made the marks.
Morgan was escorted in just as we wrapped up with the kid and he was taken out of the room.
“I try to distance myself from the two of you, but you just find another bloody way to pull me back in,” Morgan said with a half-smile before he set his laptop bag on the table and sat down with us.
“It’s good to see you, too,” said Jami and handed him the flash drive.
“But seriously, Blake. Shapiro’s not happy about this at all. I have to go back and work with these people when this whole thing is over, you know. You’re making things very difficult for me.”
Morgan grabbed the drive from Jami. “What’s this?” he asked and held the drive up to his eyes for a closer look.
“I found it at the warehouse, in the room the kidnapper was working from. We need to know what’s on it,” Jami explained.
“The Bureau took a look and found my name referenced on the drive, but they weren’t able to decrypt most of it,” I added.
“Your name? The kidnapper knows who you are?” asked Morgan.
“I don’t know what it means,” I said. “Maybe it’s a listing of the agents that would be at the United Center.”
Morgan unzipped his bag and pulled out his laptop. “Let’s give it a go, then, and see what we can find.”
Mallory walked in as Morgan booted up his computer, and helped him connect to the Bureau’s system. I almost forgot he was watching our every move and listening to our conversation through the glass.
“Did either of you hack into my phone this morning?” I asked, taking the opportunity to ask both men the question that had been bothering me for the last few hours.
“No, Reed asked me to work on something else, but I would have known if anyone at DDC had been asked to do that,” said Morgan.
“We tried to access your phone, but it was off the grid. I assume you turned it off and removed the battery because we weren’t even able to turn it back on. Why did you do that, anyway?” Mallory asked.
“I thought one or both of you might try to locate me, and I wanted to stay dark long enough to get to Keller without you interfering,” I said, and Jami looked at me. She knew I wasn’t telling them the whole story. The truth was somebody did hack into my phone, I was sure of it. And my name was found on the flash drive. Is it possible that the kidnapper knows more about me than I thought?
“Okay, Blake, I’m seeing data, but it’s all gibberish, as I expected. I’m going to run a process to apply a number of cryptographic keys and try to bypass the encryption scheme,” he said. Morgan ran the process, and as it took over his screen, he leaned back and crossed his arms as he waited for it to finish. After a few minutes, Morgan sat back up.
“Alright, I’m in,” he said, and Mallory looked shocked.
“I’ve had my guys looking at this for almost two hours, how’d you access the drive so fast?”
Morgan shrugged and kept staring at the screen. “There’s a problem, I’m not finding any geolocation data in any of the files. It should be here, but I’m not seeing it. Are you sure this is the right flash drive?”
“No, it’s a copy,” Mallory explained.
“Well, I need the original,” Morgan said, raising his voice, and he pulled the drive out of the laptop and slid it across the table to Mallory, who got up and left the room. I wanted to tell Morgan more about my phone, how someone had tried to track me earlier that morning. But I didn’t know who else might be watching us from behind the two-way mirror. Maybe Landry. Maybe Shapiro. But Jami gave me a look that told me she knew what I was thinking. That if my name really was on that flash drive, and if the kidnapper had tried to track me, it could only mean one thing.
This is personal.
FIFTY-EIGHT
MALLORY BROUGHT US the original drive and handed it to Morgan. He inserted it into his laptop and got to work, running his process on the drive as he did before. “That’s more like it,” Morgan said as it started to run. “The file sizes seem larger, so that’s a good sign. It means there’s extra data in them.”
It took a few minutes to run, so Morgan took the opportunity to ask Mallory about the Bureau’s data security measures. “What kind of firewall do you have set up here?”
Mallory crossed his arms. “Next-generation firewall with an intrusion prevention system. No information can get out of the private network. We can’t even send anything to another field office without an override code.”
Morgan nodded. A few seconds later, the process he was running stopped. “Okay, it’s done. There’s a ton of files on here, Blake. I’m going to need to parse the data and perform an export of the terms found inside each of the documents and then isolate the GPS coordinates for where the files were created to understand what we’re dealing with. Shouldn’t take long at all.”
Two minutes later, the export was running. “I can see the results come in real time as it runs.”
We were all anxious to understand what was on that drive and the locations where the files were created. “Jordan is a prominent term; it’s coming up a lot. I think he used this drive for researching information online. It has a web browser installed on it. Any internet activity would be recorded on the drive, not the computer used.”
“What kind of time frame are we looking at for last activity?” I asked.
“Just a few hours ago, Blake. He visited the Mitchell Wire and a few other news websites. There
’s no other activity in the cache before then. He must have been in the habit of clearing it after each use. But I can still get to the search history.”
I watched as the export script continued to run on the laptop, and Morgan started to perform additional searches as part of his analysis. He typed in road, street, and avenue. Anything to find an address before he’d start looking at names.
“What else are you seeing?” I pressed.
“Still looking. I’m seeing a Sayre Avenue.”
I leaned in closer. “That’s the warehouse where Keller was being held. What else?” I asked before Mallory chimed in.
“I think this is good and something we need to look into, but we have just a few hours until sundown. I suggest we focus on finding the locations where the files were created first; then we data mine to look for any names or addresses that may be on the drive that we can investigate. If we can find where the files were created, we might be able to find the location of the kidnapper.”
Morgan looked at me.
“Fine,” I said, and Morgan started working on skimming the GPS coordinates.
In a matter of minutes, Morgan built another process to run concurrently with the parsing script that was running in the background. I saw Morgan look at Mallory and then at the two-way mirror directly in front of him before speaking. “The coordinates for where the files were created are north forty-two sixteen by west eighty-six twelve.”
Jami’s eyes narrowed. “Where is that?”
Mallory stood and looked at the mirror. “Did you get that?” he asked, and I saw the mirror shake as someone on the other side knocked on it twice.
“Alright, we’re done here,” said Mallory. He put his right hand on the gun latched onto his belt and walked toward the door, and I stood. Morgan frantically typed on his laptop as Jami looked at Mallory in disbelief. Bill Landry and Roger Shapiro entered the room and joined Mallory at the door.
“This is over,” Landry said as Agent Mallory walked past them and disappeared.
