by Toby Neal
Sophie said goodbye. Anxiety about her ex-husband, stirred up by the interview with LaSota, resurfaced as she settled in at her apartment after giving Ginger a brief outing. She needed to do something about Assan.
She keyed on the computers and while they booted up, she fixed a cup of tea and let herself remember him. He’d always been immaculately groomed, with a blocky face and deep-set eyes, so dark they were almost black. His sensual mouth held a cruelty not immediately evident.
Sophie had told herself he was handsome and rich, and it was the best she could hope for in an arranged marriage that she was cooperating with to please her mother. He’d given her a diamond bracelet and been gentle with her virginity on their wedding night, and she’d been hopeful and happy until after the honeymoon—when he took her to his apartment in Hong Kong.
Sophie shook her head to banish the memories and took a restorative sip of tea. Her fingers flew over the keyboard as she set up a secondary monitoring cache on Assan.
He was an importer-exporter with dual citizenship in Thailand and China, and he’d used that to bring all sorts of goods back and forth. Sophie had always wondered if his business was clean of contraband, but she’d never wanted to attract his attention by looking into it. Now, she needed to stop him from destroying another young woman’s life, and the best way to do that was to use DAVID to find some dirt on him.
DAVID began sieving a number of items for review into the cache. Sophie shunted them to her FBI rig for tomorrow when she was back at work. She took a quick look at the “simultaneous” search, and frowned to see that there was yet another anomaly loaded in.
Several stockbrokers participating in an insider trading scheme had turned each other in—at the same time.
“Strange,” she muttered. This new case had nothing in common with the other crimes, beginning to look fortuitous for law enforcement as kidnappers shot each other, gang leaders offed each other, and now stockbrokers turned each other in. It smacked of some kind of manipulation, and probably through technology. But what was the common thread?
She needed to find a way to get a look at the phones from the gang leaders. And maybe a call to the SEC to find out more about the way the stockbrokers had set each other up was in order, but it would have to wait until tomorrow. That agency kept decent business hours.
Sophie set up a query in DAVID about the probability that the cases were related, and while that worked, she put on her headphones. Ginger rested her head, appealing, on Sophie’s leg. She’d been taken out briefly, but hadn’t had a real walk.
The headphones beeped with an incoming call and she didn’t check the caller window before answering. “Special Agent Ang.”
“Sophie. It’s Alika.” That familiar deep voice, with its trace of warm humor.
“Yes.” Sophie’s voice came out flat and wooden, which is how she sounded when she was surprised. Surprised, and a little bit terrified.
He cleared his throat, laughed a little. “Okay, then. Happy to hear from me, I can tell. Well, remember how I asked you if you wanted to do something? Go for a run? I thought we could do a few miles before the gym tomorrow evening. If you’re coming, that is.”
Sophie stared at her monitor unseeing. “I planned to go to the gym.” She still sounded stiff, even though this wasn’t a real date. Just a run before their usual workout, something he might have suggested when he was coaching her. Nothing to be freaked out about, as Marcella would call it. “That sounds fine.”
“Okay!” He injected his voice with cheer. “I’ll see you tomorrow then.” He hung up.
“Flea-bitten meat-stealing mongrel covered in the spit of a thousand angry butchers,” Sophie hissed in Thai. “Dammit.”
It occurred to her for the first time that Alika might not be the only one sending mixed signals.
Work finally done, Sophie brought the clean, freshly washed stuffed rabbit to bed with her. “No, Ginger,” she said, as the dog looked at the soft, fuzzy animal longingly. “This is special.”
Holding the rabbit as she got into bed, she had a flash of memory of her own kidnapping. The closet she’d been kept in was smaller than the one that held Anna, and no nightlight had been provided to ward off the dark. She’d cried at first, and called for her father. Even at seven, she’d known that her mother couldn’t help her. Sophie still remembered the door opening, the figure silhouetted there.
“Shut up,” the man said. “Or I’ll shut you up myself.” He’d cracked his knuckles as he said it. But he must have felt a little sorry for her, because he’d thrown a fabric doll into the closet. Sophie had wrapped her arms around the soft shape and been able to get to sleep.
She fell asleep with the rabbit in her arms, and dreamed of hunting viruses. All night she chased shifting patterns of electricity down the long gray corridors of a vast mazelike motherboard, frustrated that they were always out of reach.
The Ghost made a hand signal, and the Doberman came to him. Anubis’s coat had a sheen to it like oil on the surface of black water, and he sat so perfectly still, ears pricked, that he reminded the Ghost of the Egyptian god he’d named the dog for. “Anubis, down.”
The dog dropped flat, Sphinx-like. Intelligent brown eyes fixed on him, waiting.
“Patrol.”
Anubis bounded up and trotted out of the tech lab the Ghost lived in most of the hours of most of his days. When Anubis was in patrol mode, he couldn’t be petted or spoken to. He had a job to do, one he took seriously.
The Ghost turned back to his computers. He had several monitors ranged in front of him and multiple feeds running. He smiled, thinking of how well his latest project was going. The business more than paid for his lifestyle.
Anubis returned and sat beside him, sleek legs folded like springs. He flipped the dog a treat. “Good boy.”
He knew the route Anubis would have taken: around and through the sprawling apartment with areas for all of the Ghost’s interests: the double reinforced security door and entry foyer, state-of-the-art home gym, movie theater with recliners and surround sound speakers, a comfortable seating area around a coffee table for those rare times he had visitors, a gourmet kitchen, the tech lab, and of course, his bedroom.
A timer went off in the corner of one of his screens, set to remind him he had a rehearsal with the Hawaii Symphony. He got up, stretched powerful arms above his head, rotated his neck and wrists, and fetched his violin case from where it hung on a peg on the wall. He could never bear to be parted from it for long.
Anubis looked mournful, dropping to the floor and resting his head on his paws as the Ghost changed briskly in the walk-in closet in his gigantic bedroom.
“I’ll be back in a few hours, boy.” Securing the last button of his neat dress shirt, tucking it into tailored pants, he checked his appearance in the mirror. People told him he looked like that action hero from recent movies, but he thought he was better looking. He was taller, with an excellent body, and none of the debauchery around the eyes.
He strapped on his ankle rig weapon and picked up the violin case and his keys. Anubis followed him to the door, and the Ghost held his hand out.
“Gimme five.” Anubis raised a paw and touched his hand. He rubbed the dog’s chest briefly, then, snapped his fingers. “Patrol.”
Anubis bounded away. He’d be in guard mode until the Ghost returned. The Ghost undid his various security measures with a button on his phone and stepped reluctantly out of his fortress into the night.
Chapter Four
Sophie sat down at her computer bay at the FBI offices the next morning and activated her clone rigs. While they whirred into life, she sipped a strong cup of Thai tea from her Thermos mug. The tea was sweet with honey and black as she could make it. The faint scent of jasmine rising from it never failed to remind her of her childhood home in Thailand.
They’d had a large family house, built in the traditional wooden style on raised pier posts with sharply peaked rooflines to handle frequent rain. Inside, the house was all
gleaming surfaces of native woods. Inlays, carving and parquet work in shell, coral, and stone-decorated windowsills, and the floors were covered in luxurious matting and carpets.
The main house was divided into a series of mini-dwellings where different constellations of her mother’s family lived. She and her parents had lived in one set of rooms on the side of the terrace facing the Ping River. Her grandparents lived in another subset of rooms, and there was a servants’ suite as well.
The house was on a raised knoll, safe from annual flooding even with the monsoons, and Sophie had loved to sit on a bench in the window and watch flat-bottomed boats poling, sailing, or motoring by on the smooth, fecund, jade-green water.
The family spent time together in the central terrace in the middle of the house. The raised courtyard-like platform was built around the trunk of a huge magnolia tree that provided shade. Chairs, benches, and toys made the terrace a great place to play with her aunt Malee’s children, who shared a nearby suite of rooms.
That early time in her life couldn’t be more different from her current urban, high tech, isolated life. But her computers were all the company she wanted or needed, she told herself firmly, looking at the pile of hard drives on her work station awaiting her attention.
Ken Yamada, crisp in FBI gray, strode through the pneumatic doors of the lab and over to her bay. “Welcome back, Sophie. We have a meeting with Waxman to kick off the day.”
“What about?” Sophie glanced at Yamada, alert.
“Reviewing where we are on the kidnap case. We’re still treating the case as though this situation is part of a bigger network as the tip-off email indicated, but so far Gundersohn and I aren’t finding anything to support that.”
“Okay. I’ll be there shortly.” Sophie wanted to check her query caches before the meeting.
“Make it quick.” He turned and left with his graceful stride.
Sophie turned back to her computers and opened up DAVID.
She pulled up her bank of keywords. She’d set DAVID to keep up its roaming monitoring of the words simultaneous, murder, killing, confession, accusation, shooting, and disclosure. She didn’t remember why she’d thrown simultaneous in there. It stood out from the rest of the keywords like the anomaly it was. And yet, including it had shaken out patterns no one would have put together otherwise.
DAVID had also answered her query about the probability of the three cases having a commonality: 64%.
Not as high as she’d expected, but still a likelihood. Now if she could only figure out what that commonality was. She wished she had more time to come up with something useful for the meeting, but in checking her trace programs, she hadn’t anything to bring to the table except that her kidnapping case was “probably” 64% related to some other interesting cases that DAVID had brought up.
Only she wasn’t supposed to be using DAVID.
Sophie sipped the tea, shutting her eyes. Something had tipped the gangsters off that they were being double-crossed, and they had acted on that information. Someone had done the same with the corrupt stockbrokers. They’d been manipulated into outing each other somehow, as had Anna’s kidnappers.
But how?
She wasn’t going to know until she found out how they’d been communicated with, and how they were all connected to each other. She didn’t have enough in the cache to mount a real investigation to take to Waxman yet, but this situation would certainly qualify as an FBI case if she could find those answers, crossing state lines and even crime genres as it did.
She set DAVID to searching for commonalities between the disparate cases. All this took time, because DAVID could work only with the parameters it had been given, which meant that she had to pause, consider, and look for databases to search and variables to enter.
Sophie plugged the write blockers into the new pile of hard drives from other cases. She would have to work on all this and check on what DAVID had collected on Assan Ang after the meeting.
A few minutes later, Sophie slid into her chair next to Waxman in the conference room. The meeting was underway, but the SAC acknowledged her with a nod. Ken Yamada and Gundersohn sat across from her.
“We’re doing a recap of the kidnapping case so far.”
“Yes, sir.”
“How is your injury?”
“Just a bruise, sir, and I’ve had plenty of those.”
“Excellent. Ken, would you put up notes for us on the whiteboard.”
Ken stood and straightened his lapels, uncapping a pen. “Initially we focused on evidence collection at the scene and tracking the lessee of the apartment where the kidnapping was staged. Through interviewing the building manager, we determined that the apartment had been rented on a month-to-month basis with cash. The whole building is owned by a corporation, Takeda Industries. A real estate company manages the units.”
“We are still operating under the assumption that the tipster who emailed this kidnapping in is telling the truth, that there’s a network of professional kidnappers,” Gundersohn said. “Which is going to guide our decisions to probe deeper than just the suspects that died at the scene.”
“Speaking of, it would have been nice for you all to leave at least one of them alive so we could interview him.” Waxman smiled, a humorless twitch of the mouth.
“Couldn’t be helped,” Gundersohn rumbled. Sophie was glad he’d chimed in on that. Next to Waxman, Gundersohn was the most senior agent of the Honolulu team and Waxman had never questioned his judgment that Sophie was aware of.
“Well, the other great thing would be to have a lead on this mysterious tipster, or even what set the kidnappers off in the first place. Agent Ang, got anything for us?”
“I’m afraid not, sir.” Sophie fiddled with the controls on the monitor that marked her seat at the table. Crime scene photos of the dead kidnappers filled the screen, sprawled in the graceless poses of the unexpectedly dead. “I’ve explained to the team before about source information concealment in online tracking. Whoever sent us the tipster email knew what he was doing. I also extracted any relevant information I could find off the kidnappers’ phones and identified that they received simultaneous text messages, telling each of them that they’d been betrayed, and that others had been paid off. I did retrieve the source number of that text message off the phones, but it led back to a burner.”
“What I wonder is: who sent those kidnappers text messages at the same time? And who’s our anonymous tipster?” Ken said.
“Do you think it could be the same person?” Waxman asked.
“But how would the tipster, who knew about this operation somehow, maybe through a connection to the family or some other way—how would that person have the kidnappers’ numbers?” Sophie said. She was thinking of the coincidental cases—a connection she hadn’t narrowed down yet, and couldn’t disclose anyway. “Maybe someone monitoring the situation is the tipster,” she said, thinking aloud.
“But even if he were, one presumes he notified us out of an altruistic motive to save the child. Why would he then endanger that child by sending those text messages to the kidnappers? If you hadn’t been exactly where you were and thought of a quick way to rescue her, Anna Addams would be toast right now,” Ken said.
“I know. It doesn’t make sense.” Sophie inclined her head.
“The ransom drop wasn’t completed, so we have no further leads than the bodies and the evidence in the apartment,” Waxman said, rolling a pen between his fingers.
“If I may, I’d like permission to go see the victim’s family whenever someone from the team is going out to interview them.” Anna’s face had been on Sophie’s mind more than she wanted to admit. She wanted to see how the little girl was doing, and return the rabbit to her.
“I’m going out to the victim’s house today.” Ken was making notes in a column of Tracking Leads. So far there wasn’t much in the column. “I’ll let you know when I go. Gundersohn is meeting with the medical examiner to go over the bodies of the kidnappers and
see if they tell us anything, but we don’t expect much since we know how they died.”
“What about the trace in the apartment? Anything there?” Waxman had a line between his brows.
“Nothing that doesn’t go back to the three kidnappers,” Gundersohn said. “But we’ve found their prints in the system, so after the ME’s and home visit, Ken and I plan to visit their addresses.”
“Let me know if you need any help with that,” Sophie said.
“The prints of the deceased are loaded into the case file already,” Gundersohn told her. “They had false identification with them but the prints came back to solid IDs in the system. Career criminals, all three, with sheets ranging from breaking and entering to armed robbery. None of them busted for kidnapping before, but that doesn’t mean they haven’t done it before.”
“So to conclude, there’s no indication that this particular kidnapping is part of a larger network.” Ken capped the dry erase marker with an air of finality.
“Let’s check in tomorrow and see where we are then.” Waxman retracted the screens with the press of a button. “Dismissed.”
Chapter Five
Sophie put on her headphones and, to the opening strains of Beethoven, organized herself by making a checklist in one of her apps.
Done with that, and waiting on notification from Ken to go visit Anna and her family, she took a minute to check the cache for what DAVID had collected on Assan Ang.
Sophie read the news articles in Chinese, just to keep from getting rusty in her third language. There was a lot of information about his high profile life in Hong Kong, including a wedding announcement. His new bride looked tiny and way too young, and Sophie stifled a stab of compassion as she looked at the grainy black and white image of the two standing stiffly.
She discovered that Ang had regular shipments of “agricultural products” shipped to Europe and the U.S., even Hawaii, from Thailand. It might be worth a call to the DEA to see if anyone had checked the contents of those shipments, but she needed something hard if she was going to make a move against him.
