by Sean Black
Mike hopped off the conference table. “Nothing. We don’t discuss clients with outside parties.”
That was the answer he’d expected but he chose to ignore it. “You think he’s connected to this?”
That got a reaction. Mike’s face flushed. “No, I do not. I think the idea is ridiculous. We’re on his side. He’s relying upon us, and Carmen in particular, to make sure he’s a free man.”
He could have pointed out that a second ago Mike had said he didn’t discuss clients. “I asked if you thought he was connected in some way. I didn’t ask if he did it.”
“You mean, is someone trying to undermine his trial?”
He nodded.
“Possible, but it seems like a naive strategy. There are other defense lawyers if he loses one. Listen, Ryan, we’re all devastated by this. I’m sure you are too.”
He had no idea but Lock’s main emotion wasn’t devastation. That wouldn’t get Carmen back home safe. He was white-hot angry, but he knew he had to channel it.
He stared out of the window to the street below. People were snaking their way along the sidewalk, going about their day. He doubted more than a few hundred people had given the crime more than a passing thought. As the days passed that number would dwindle.
“We have one of our own investigators working this,” Mike continued. “He’s looking into every possibility we can think of.”
“Which investigator?” He knew Carmen and the firm used a half-dozen investigators to unearth evidence for them. Most were former LAPD or came from other branches of law enforcement.
“Carl Galante. I’m sure he’d like to sit down with you. See if there’s anything you might have noticed.”
“That’d be fine.” Carmen had mentioned Galante to him in passing. He’d gleaned two things about him: he was good at what he did, but a difficult man to work with. She’d also hinted that he’d left the police department in San Diego under a cloud of suspicion that he might have been on the take.
“Great. I’ll have someone in the office set it up. Now, unless there’s anything else . . .”
“Just the one thing,” Lock said, stepping forward, closing the space between them.
“What is it?”
“I plan on finding whoever did this, and when I do, I just might need a good attorney myself. If the kidnappers contact you, or anyone else in your office, you can pass along a message from me. If they hurt Carmen, I’m going to find them, and when I do, I’m going to kill them. Slowly.”
Mike stared at him. “I’m not sure that’s a good message to be passing on.”
“Just make sure you tell them.” He walked toward the conference-room door.
“Can I ask you something?” Mike said.
Lock turned back toward him.
“Are you sure you don’t know who might be behind this?”
21
As a kidnap victim, Carmen Lazaro had one distinct advantage. She had spent a lot of time around criminals. They were her clients and, as such, she had grown to know, if not to fully understand, how they thought. She was hoping some of that knowledge might be enough to keep her alive.
Carmen had defended four kidnap cases. Three had been gang-related: gang members abducting other gang members or their family. Those could be considered more as abductions because the motive often extended out beyond payment of a ransom to revenge or payback for some slight, real or imagined.
The other case had been a more straightforward kidnap for ransom. Or, at least, that was how it had started before it descended into a raging torrent of violence that had culminated in the deaths of a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, his wife and their two young children. The man she had defended in that case had told her he knew it was going to end in murder when his accomplice had used both their real names in front of the victims.
So far Carmen didn’t know the names of either of the men who had taken her. She was clinging to that as a sign they didn’t plan on killing her. Not just yet anyway.
They were playing this, as far as she could tell, like people who didn’t want her to identify them. Which suggested they expected her to finish this thing alive.
The flip side was that they didn’t talk to her. Not beyond issuing instructions. Any time she tried to strike up a conversation, to establish rapport with them (something else she knew was key to her staying alive), they shut it down or simply ignored her. Today, when the taller of them came in to give her lunch, it seemed it wasn’t going to be any different.
When they’d finally hunted her down, they had blindfolded her. They’d also been wearing masks so she couldn’t see their faces. She knew from their hands and necks that they were white. One had the slight trace of a Southern accent. The other sounded like he was from somewhere out west, maybe Oregon or northern California.
She was being kept in a bedroom of a house somewhere remote. She never heard any outside noise. Nor were there any traffic sounds, apart from what she assumed was their vehicle, which she could hear arriving and leaving. The only window in the room was blacked out: heavy material had been tacked around the frame.
There was a metal bedstead, a mattress, a chair that was secured to the floor, and a bucket to use as a toilet. The room was carpeted. The walls were bare and painted a sickly yellow. Light came from a floor lamp in the corner.
When she was alone, she was cuffed and shackled to the bed. Sometimes they would move her to the chair and shackle her there. That morning she had been blindfolded, and led outside to walk around. One had guided her by the elbow so she wouldn’t fall.
She had been told that trying to escape was pointless. Even if she did get away, there was nowhere to run to. No one for miles around. Nothing she had heard contradicted that. And the way they had said it was so matter-of-fact that she didn’t doubt them.
All of this was miserable. But it gave her hope. It meant they were taking it seriously. In her experience, serious criminals were rare, but easier to deal with. They knew all about risk and reward. Most of all they knew that killing someone, unless you had no choice, was not a good move.
Now she heard footsteps outside. A key turned in a lock and the door opened. The footsteps grew louder. She felt hands at her ankles as the shackles were removed. The hands moved up, unlocking and removing the handcuffs.
“Get up slow,” said the Southern man’s voice.
She did as she was told. She rubbed at her wrists as she stood.
“I’m going to take off the blindfold now,” he said.
She nodded to let him know that she understood. She closed her eyes as he did it. That way she could open them slowly and let her eyes adjust to the harsh light from the lamp.
When she opened them, the man was wearing the same mask. But, this time, he was standing back from her. He threw her a newspaper, a copy of that morning’s Los Angeles Times. She tried to scan the headlines, to see if her kidnapping was on the front page, but it was hard to focus.
“Hold it up, front page facing me,” he said.
He held up his cell phone, a red light blinking to show that it was recording.
“Okay, say your name, and let them know you haven’t been harmed. Then tell them they will receive further instructions soon.”
“Who’s they?” she asked.
His free hand fell to a Taser gun, tucked into a pouch on his waist. The message was clear and didn’t require any embellishing with words.
“This is Carmen. As you’ll see from the newspaper I’m holding, I’m currently safe and unharmed. You will receive further instructions soon.”
He stopped recording and put his cell phone away. “Good. That was good.”
“How long do you plan on keeping me?”
His eyes stared at her from behind the mask. “Just do what we say, when we say it, and everything’ll be fine. That’s all you need to know.”
“How much is the ransom you’re asking for? Because my family, they’re not rich.”
His hand rested back on the Taser. He unclipped
the top of the pouch and took a step toward her. She saw the ripple of his biceps under his black T-shirt. “Are you and me going to have a problem?”
“No,” she said, her voice cracking despite herself. “Not at all.”
“Glad to hear it, because if I need to hurt you, I will.”
The way he said it, with no emotion, and no flare of anger, Carmen believed him.
22
Are you sure you don’t know who might be behind this?
The question turned over in Lock’s mind. He had pressed Carmen’s boss to explain what he meant. Why would he even ask him something like that? Did he know something that Lock didn’t?
He hadn’t gotten any kind of answer. And he wasn’t going to. The man was a lawyer, practiced in the art of being evasive when he had to be. All he’d said was that someone in Lock’s position must have made a lot of enemies. He didn’t know of anyone who would want to hurt Carmen but perhaps there was someone who wanted to hurt him, and they could do that via her.
It sounded like bullshit. Like he’d made a slip. But he’d quickly backtracked and Lock knew he wouldn’t get any more out of him. He left the office before things got really heated and promised he’d speak with their investigator, Carl, as soon as he was available.
He called Carl on his way out of the office. It went to voicemail. He left his number and asked him to call as soon as he got the message. His next call was to Ty. He answered immediately. Lock put him on speaker.
“You have any news?” Ty asked.
“Nothing worth knowing.”
“Gimme what you got anyway.”
Lock brought him up to speed with his visit to Carmen’s firm. As he spoke, his phone pinged. An email.
The sender’s address was a string of letters, symbols and numbers. The message line read: “Proof of Life.”
“Ty, hang on.”
“You want me to call you back?”
“No. Stay with me. I just got an email that might be from the kidnappers.”
Ty lapsed into silence. Not something he was noted for.
Lock tapped open the email. There was no message in the body. Just a link.
It could be a virus. Or some kind of hoax. It had come to his private email rather than the company’s general information or enquiry address, but his email wouldn’t have been that tough to track down if someone was determined.
“There’s no message. Just a link.”
“You sure this is from the kidnappers, Ryan?”
“I don’t know. But I guess there’s only one way to find out.” If it was a virus he could have someone he knew clean up the damage for him.
His index finger hovered over the link. He hesitated. The email’s title said that Carmen was alive. Proof of life was a standard kidnap-for-ransom protocol. Kidnappers didn’t usually offer it up first. It was a bargaining chip they held: a small, but powerful piece of psychological power.
There was something else in the mix. Proof of life had to be in the form of evidence. A phone call. A photograph. A video. Something that was material, tangible and, above all, credible.
And evidence, no matter how carefully it had been constructed, contained information: clues that could be used against the kidnappers. Proof-of-life material had been used in many cases to locate the victim or victims. It had also been used after the kidnapping was over to identify and capture those responsible.
The one thing he knew so far. These kidnappers were not only highly motivated, and prepared to absorb a high level of risk, they were also highly skilled.
He pulled his finger back from the screen, and closed the email inbox. “Ty?”
“What did it say?”
“I don’t know yet. Meet me at the strip mall on Lincoln in an hour.”
Ty immediately picked up on where Lock was about to go with this. That was the benefit of working with someone for so long. You created an understanding that saved time and words. “Li’s place?”
“You got it.”
23
A shotgun across his lap, Point pecked two fingers at his laptop keyboard. Rance was pacing back and forth, one eye on the live feeds from their cameras, the other on Point.
“Goddamn it,” said Point.
“What?” Rance asked.
Point swiveled round on the chair, got up and propped the shotgun in the corner. “He opened the email, but he didn’t click through to the link.”
“You’re shitting me,” said Point.
“Wish I was.”
“See, I told you we should have just embedded it in the email. That way he would have watched it by now.”
Point’s features darkened. They’d already had this discussion. More than once. “And I told you that if we did that it’s harder for us to remotely delete it.”
“Maybe he thought it was spam. Or someone trolling him.”
“Or,” said Point, “maybe he’s smarter than we figured.”
24
Li Zhang was a grey-hat hacker. That meant he didn’t use his considerable hacking skills to commit crime, but neither did he stay entirely within the lines of what was legal. His family had fled Communist China years ago, and their experience had given him a healthy distrust of authority. That had made him the perfect asset for Lock and Ty.
Lock had thought about letting the LAPD know about the email but had decided to wait. For one thing he still didn’t know if it was genuine. For another, kidnappers usually got tetchy if you shared information with the cops. As he had no idea whom he was dealing with, he had made the decision to err on the side of caution.
Grabbing his cell phone, Lock walked to the back of the strip mall and knocked at the door. Ty opened it and nodded him inside. He followed him down a stub of corridor and into a back room. It was dark, apart from the light thrown up by various monitors and screens. Racks of computers, motherboards, and hard drives took up almost every available inch of wall space.
Li was perched on a stool at his workbench. He spun round as they came in.
“I already brought Li up to speed,” Ty told him.
Lock handed the cell phone to him. The young hacker took it, turned it over a few times in his hand and placed it on the bench. He nudged past them to one of his wall racks and grabbed a plastic storage box. He opened the lid and began rooting around among a mass of cables. He pulled three out, trying to locate one that was compatible with the data port of his cell phone.
“Unlock the phone for me, please,” he said.
Lock stepped over to the bench and tapped in the four-digit code. Li frowned. “Four three two one. Really?”
Lock shrugged. He had a point. It wasn’t the best code.
“When I get through with this you should let me run a review of the security on all the devices you use. They probably have more holes than a colander,” said Li.
“What about this?” Lock said, pulling him back to the task in hand.
“It came into your email?” Li asked.
He tapped the screen where the icon for Lock’s email was. It opened. A few new messages had already come in. They could wait.
“You opened it already?” said Li.
“Is that bad?” he said.
“They’ll know you opened it, that’s all.”
“But I didn’t click through on the link,” he told Li. “I know they can set things up so they’re zapped once they’re opened. I thought you could make sure that doesn’t happen.”
“And maybe get us more information about who sent it and where they are.” Ty added.
Li had the cell phone plugged into a black plastic tower. The screen of his main monitor lit up with lines of scrolling green text. Lock was getting dizzy just looking at it, never mind working out what, if anything, it all meant.
“I’ll do my best. But it depends on how sophisticated these people are with this stuff. Assuming this is even them.”
His fingers flying lightly over the keyboard, Li set to work. It seemed to take an age before he was ready to open the link.
The room was warm and growing warmer by the moment. Lock could feel a line of sweat forming at the bottom of his neck and beginning to roll down his back.
The worst part of a kidnap was the paralysis. Both Ty and he were used to being active, and staying on the front foot. Now they were chasing ghosts. Hopefully Li could change that by giving them something, anything, to work with. Because right now they had jack.
“Okay,” Li said finally. “We’re good to go. I already started a trace on the email. And if anything’s there when I click through on this, it’ll be saved to the hard drive, along with whatever information there is.” He glanced over his shoulder at Lock and Ty. “Ready?”
Lock nodded.
Li clicked on the link. It opened in a separate window in the corner of the large monitor that was still filling with incomprehensible text.
A video player popped up in the new window. For the first few seconds there was black screen then Carmen appeared. She was standing alone in a darkened room with a light directed at her. She looked tired, but otherwise in good health. There was no sign of any bruises, cuts or abrasions that he could see.
She stared straight down the lens. “This is Carmen. As you’ll see from the newspaper I’m holding, I’m currently safe and unharmed. You will receive further instructions soon.”
The video ended less than half a second after she had uttered the last syllable. It cut back to black, then finished.
Li was staring at the screen. He tapped at some keys. He turned round to face them. “Good call. They had it set to auto-delete from that website as soon as it was viewed. But, don’t worry, I saved it.”
That he’d made the right call didn’t mean Lock was happy. They had the video, and it might contain clues that would lead him to Carmen. But it wasn’t anything he could count on.
Li startled as the cell phone rang. It was still hooked up to his cable.
“You want to get that?” he asked Lock.
“Answering won’t mess with what you’re doing?” Lock asked him, wanting to be certain.
