Control: Out of the Box (The Girl in the Box Book 38)

by Robert J. Crane

  CHALKE: Working on it. Will have updates soon. Including some that will be fit to print.

  His phone pinged. A reply from Chase – the metas had checked in, but weren't on site.

  Good. He didn't want any visible tie to these people. They were, after all, set to be wet works, as they called it in the industry. He didn't want to be seen anywhere near them.

  CHAPMAN: Excellent. Let's show her what real power is, shall we? We ruin her life, drag her down...and then, when we've got her where we want her, I've got some people grouping up – a team, you might say – to deliver the coup de grace, and remove Sienna Nealon – and the president – from our list of problems for good.

  CHAPTER NINETY-THREE

  Sienna

  Wrapping up the scene didn't take too long. I got the locals sorted out quickly with statements, forensics was working the scene, and thus my task was over in minutes.

  I thought about reporting to Chalke, but passed on it. The FBI surely had agents on the way, but we were somewhat isolated, remote, and I already had the locals on the task. Hopefully they'd be mostly done by the time I made it back to HQ, but I couldn't rule out the possibility Chalke would gum up the works on that.

  After all, she and her posse had just tried to kill me. Again.

  And failed. Again. That had to be galling.

  I got in the car and shut the door. Hilton was anchored hard into the back seat. I'd borrowed full body cuffs from the locals after doing another full search of her and bagging her personal belongings as evidence. I had it all wrapped up in my front seat, Hilton was bolted down in the back, and I was ready to kick this investigation into the endgame.

  She stayed mercifully quiet on the drive back into DC, only a few mewling sobs coming out at various points during the journey. We drove along sun-soaked highways, the endless green fields turning into suburbs, and finally giving way to the Potomac and a swift crossing, traffic surprisingly light until I remembered it was Saturday.

  We moved through the District of Columbia smoothly, stopping only for traffic lights, the flow of traffic not unreasonable, though thicker than it had been out in the countryside. Hilton continued to let out the occasional mewl, sobbing softly in the back seat.

  I was only a few blocks from the J. Edgar Hoover Building when I felt a soothing calm flow over me. My muscles relaxed, my eyes closed for a second, and when I realized what it was, I shook my head, tried to shake it off.

  Take it easy, Sienna.

  That was not the voice of Brianna Glover, though, sneaking into my head.

  It was the voice of someone almost as familiar.

  A soft knock at the window might have prompted a gun-draw, full freakout response from me under normal conditions.

  As it was, after I'd felt the soothing, the warning, I just turned my head and looked.

  Then I smiled. And hit the unlock button.

  “Hello, Sienna,” came the warm, soft voice of my visitor as he stepped into my car and shut the door behind him.

  “Didn't expect to see you here,” I said, still basking in the wave of calm feels he'd projected into my mind before he'd come up to the window. “...Doctor Zollers.”

  CHAPTER NINETY-FOUR

  Chapman

  There was a hustle and bustle happening as Chapman loaded into the SUV limo. His bodyguard corps was down to just Chase riding in the car with him; Veronika had regrouped with the new recruits nearby in case of a Sienna Nealon emergency, but he was determined to be here, alone, deniably away from the others in case everything went to shit with them like it had with Phinneus and Tyler and maybe Kristina – no one had heard from her since the car wreck, after all.

  “Short ride to the airport, boss,” Chase said brusquely as she took her seat. “Response team is going to be behind us. Deniably far but reasonably close.”

  “Great,” Chapman said, opening up his laptop. He doubted Nealon would make a move on him now, but he wanted to check in with Devin just in case, so he gave him a quick ping over their communicator app.

  Devin came online in a second, making a motion for Chapman to put on earphones without saying a word. Chapman sighed, but did so, putting in his cordless Bluetooth ear buds. “What?” Chapman asked.

  “Glad you're jacked in, I got a couple things to tell you,” Devin said, the video picture a little squiggly. The car surged into motion, reminding Chapman that they probably didn't have 5G here. Whatever, like Chase said, it was a short trip. Once he was on board his jet, he'd have fast satellite communications.

  “Don't keep me in suspense,” Chapman said, scanning a few of his other ongoing communications to see if anything was boiling.

  “Right. We have no current location on Nealon.”

  Chapman froze, sitting straight upright like someone had replaced his spine with a long shaft of metal by shoving it down his neck. “Beg pardon?” he asked, in lieu of, What the hell do I pay you for, then?

  “She's offline,” Devin said. “No phone that we can track, though a conversation we intercepted from her partner's phone suggests she's got one. Furthermore...I think she arrested her partner. For betraying her.”

  Chapman shook his head, blinking a few times to analyze that. “She figured it out, then?”

  “Based on our eavesdropping over the partner's phone mic...yeah. Seems like. Now the phone is off and we don't have it fully penetrated with software like we did Nealon's, just the light corruption of the regular Socialite app, so we can't turn it back on.”

  “So she's out there and we've got nothing on her position,” Chapman said. “Am I hearing you right?”

  “Not exactly,” Devin said, voice straining, his pasty face contrasted with his patchy beard. “I'm hacking my way into the FBI vehicle tracking system right now. It's not tough, but it'll be a few more minutes.”

  Chapman blinked again. “You're...hacking the FBI? To track her vehicle?”

  Devin froze, looking like he'd gotten slapped in the ass. “Uh, yeah...if that's okay?”

  “It's fine so long as you don't get caught,” Chapman said, turning his attention to the next thing. Ah. His loser contact in Silicon Valley had come through. All it took was waving money. Figured. “What else?”

  “I instituted a lookback on some of our accumulated data,” Devin said. “Applied a wider filter to the facial recognition of all the film we've captured of Nealon since the program's inception. Figured what the hell, might turn something up, right?”

  “Did it?”

  “It did,” Devin said, and the file popped up in Jaime's window. “One potential match that was kinda big – remember when she got wrecked by that big meta that broke into our headquarters?”

  Chapman smiled at that; the Grendel, as it had been called, had messed her up repeatedly. “Which time?”

  “When it broke into the Inquest affiliate on Long Island,” Devin said. “Nealon actually died on scene. The company's security cams caught it, and I broke their encryption at the time as kind of a side project. Didn't add it to the footage roll until now, though, but here's what we came up with.”

  Still frames of what looked like paramedics walking down a darkened hallway wheeling a gurney popped onto the screen. A male, a female, the guy looked to be in his late thirties, early forties...the woman...well, it was hard to say from the grainy footage, but she was definitely older.

  “The paramedics?” Chapman frowned, studying the image.

  “Yep – or at least the guy,” Devin said. “Check out this shot of Nealon leaving the White House after the big China press conference.”

  A picture popped up of Nealon getting into a car. Uber, presumably, because she was getting into the back.

  Wait–

  “This is after the Chinese incident?” Chapman asked. “On the ship?”

  “Yes,” Devin said, smiling.

  Chapman sat back against the limo SUV's seat. “Her phone was at her place.”

  “In the fridge, probably, yeah.”

  “So...who called her a
ride?” Chapman asked, staring at the picture suspiciously. “Sorry, I guess it could have been one of the people from the White House...go on.”

  “I agree, I think it's suspicious, because this pickup? Was blocks from the White House. Watch.” The picture sprung to life.

  Nealon was outside the White House, walking out of the security gates. She had her head down, wasn't obviously looking for anyone, just casually walking along. There was no traffic on this avenue, at all, but she seemed to be charting her own course, threading through the pedestrians and down another street...

  “I think she's walking over a couple streets. Where she could get a cab, see?”

  Chapman nodded. “But again, why not just have the White House call her one?”

  Devin smiled. “Right.”

  She walked right over to the street, and then, seemingly out of nowhere, this car pulled right in front of her. After a brief duck down to see who was inside, she got right in, no questions asked.

  “See?” Devin was grinning. “If she doesn't have a phone, that's not her driver, and she's just getting in a car with a stranger, right?”

  Chapman nodded. “So you think this is...?”

  Devin changed the angle, and suddenly they were looking at the driver's side. The street lights were on, shining brightly against the window on the driver's side, but part of the man's face was visible, and the facial recognition isometric grid popped up, zooming the photo close and then popping up a side-by-side with the EMT from New York.

  Chapman stared. Leaned forward, concentrating at the laptop, trying to look closer.

  “It's a 54% match based on this,” Devin said. “We never get a great shot of him again, and he disappears off our radar after dropping her off. No accessible cell phone with Socialite in the car, and our ability to look back and trace him prior to entering Nealon's web is nonexistent. Lots of the cameras we can access have already purged the recording, so this was the best I could put together.”

  Chapman stared at the pictures of the man, side by side. “That's him. That's him and he's working with Nealon. But who is he?”

  “Not sure,” Devin said. “Maybe you can get the FBI to look at him, because I'm pretty limited. He doesn't match anyone in the Socialite user database, he doesn't appear in any user pictures, even in backgrounds, that I can find. Which takes some real doing, y'know? Our users are taking pictures everywhere! He should have, theoretically, shown up somewhere, unless he's a monk living in a cave.”

  “This is some damned fine work, Devin,” Jaime said, nodding along.

  “Hang on a sec,” Devin said, shifting his attention of screen. “Oh! I got the FBI tracker for her vehicle active. Hold tight.”

  Chapman popped over into Escapade on his phone while he waited. Needed to keep the others updated, after all.

  CHAPMAN: Think we have something on one of Nealon's co-conspirators. Turns out she got a ride home from the White House the other night from a guy who also appeared as an EMT at the scene of her slaughter in New York back in December when she was up against that Grendel.

  KORY: That's not suspicious at all, lol.

  CHALKE: Get me a photo to run through the database?

  CHAPMAN: Working on it. Though I might be able to run it through FBI without your help. ;)

  He put the winky face in there just to see if it infuriated her. It did.

  CHALKE: The last thing the FBI needs right now is a security breach of our networks. Send it to me.

  CHAPMAN: You don't want deniability?

  CHALKE: ...Fine. Just don't let it be found.

  “I own the internet,” Chapman muttered under his breath, and saw Chase pretend to look away. Of course she'd heard him.

  “Hey boss?” Devin popped up on his screen. “I do have a location on her car. But...”

  Chapman stared at him, furrowing his brow in anticipation. “But,” was always a problem.

  “...But I, uh...” Devin looked off to the side. “There's a, uh...”

  “A problem,” Chapman said, cutting right to it. “I got that. Define it for me.”

  “Might be easier to just show you,” Devin said, and boom, a screenshare invitation popped onto Jaime's laptop. He took it, and seconds later Devin's window appeared.

  It took him a second to decode, mentally, what he was seeing. Security cam footage, obviously.

  The FBI SUV was similarly obvious. It was right there, in the foreground, sitting at a traffic light. Someone was barely visible in the back seat, behind the tinted glass. The partner, presumably, under arrest and cuffed.

  But in the driver's seat...

  “What the f...?” Jaime whispered.

  “I know, right?” Devin asked. “I mean...I don't know that I've ever seen anything...like this. Ever.”

  Because instead of a normal face for the person sitting behind the wheel of the FBI vehicle, there was a pixelated head, not unlike...

  “Is that...?” Chapman peered at the pixelated image.

  “I think, yeah...” Devin said, and he seemed to be caught somewhere between awe of what he was watching and dread for having to tell his boss this...well, this. “I think it's...Ms. Pac-Man.”

  Because there, where the face of Sienna Nealon should have been, in the driver's seat of the FBI car, was, instead, a pixelated, grayscale representation of the video game icon, as though it had been pasted over her entire head. As he watched, the car started to move, and right along with it, perfectly as if she were attached to the pixelated creation by the neck, it moved with her, covering her face entirely.

  “So...and this is the real bad news...” Devin said. “It's blocking our facial recognition of her. Completely. Coupled with the fact we can't seem to access her cell phone, well...”

  “Once she leaves that car...” Chapman finished for him, cold dread building in his gut, “...we won't be able to track her.”

  CHAPTER NINETY-FIVE

  Sienna

  “It's nice to finally see you again in the flesh,” Dr. Zollers said, a small, warm, knowing smile across his friendly face. “It's been a few years.” He sat languidly, utterly relaxed, in the passenger seat of my FBI SUV, acting like we were safely back in his office rather than riding across the nation's capital, a place I'd nearly been killed multiple times yesterday.

  “I want to hug you, but the light just turned green,” I said.

  “Later,” Zollers said with that still-knowing smile.

  “Umm...who is this?” Hilton asked from the back seat, making me wish I'd stuck a black bag over her head and a gag in her mouth.

  “Shhhh,” Zollers said, giving her but a glance. “You're not going to remember any of this, so why trouble yourself with it? Take a little nap.”

  “Yeah, okay...” Hilton said, and she was out in seconds, snoring quietly.

  I took us up the block, watching the gray federal buildings pass by, dated as all hell, peak 1970's concrete aesthetic all the way. When I got to the next light, it turned red, and for once in my life, I did not road rage as I came to a stop.

  Instead, I threw the car in park, unbuckled my seatbelt, and practically hurled myself at Dr. Quinton Zollers, taking care not to crush him in a Sienna-power hug. He hugged back, and man...did it feel good.

  I slipped back into my seat after a six count, taking care not to outstay my welcome. Also, the SUV's console had bitten into my ribs as I'd stretched to make the hug happen, so I was eager to let that pain subside. “What are you doing here?” I asked, only a little surprised to see him.

  “Harry asked for my help on your behalf,” Zollers said. “There's a hotel portico up ahead. You're going to drive under it and I'm going to get out with your prisoner.”

  I gave him a sidelong look. “I trust Harry remembers they have a surveillance web, hacking cameras all around me to watch the people who get close to me. Which you now are.”

  “He's got it under control,” Zollers said. “Well...he and your...other friends.”

  I nodded once. “I'm out in th
e open now. Had to activate my facial block.”

  Zollers nodded once. “You're moving into the endgame now. The pieces are coming into place on their side, and they're going to come at you with everything.”

  “That your professional opinion?” I asked. “Or is that a message from Harry?”

  “Both,” Zollers said, nodding at a hotel ahead on the right. He was right, there was a portico driveway right there.

  I pulled in, and he started to get out, but I grabbed his hand – just for a second, to stop him. “Thank you,” I said. “For everything. I know you were in Russia last year, during the Revelen thing. I, uh...” I bowed my head. “...I wish helping me wasn't like a full-time job, with so many adverse consequences. I mean, between that, and Rose, and this...”

  “If you average it out,” Zollers said, sporting a small smile as he climbed out of the car, and beckoned to Hilton, who surged awake, “it's really only a week a year, maybe. That's not so bad.”

  “I suppose,” I said, tossing the keys to her cuffs back to Hilton. Now that Zollers was here, I had no fear of her escaping. She unlocked herself calmly, almost zombie-like, because I was sure he was exerting pressure on her mind to keep her docile. “But I wish I was more of a positive rather than always being a negative. You're sweet, but it's gotta get tiring helping me.”

  He helped Hilton down from the SUV, and she stood there on the sidewalk next to him, unmoving, as he slammed the back door shut and came back to the front, looking in at me. “Something you should realize...”

  “Hm?” I asked, that swell of self-pity making a fortress around my heart. “What?”

  “Helping you,” Zollers said, “means helping save the world. Pretty much every time.” He gave me a small smile. “And the rest of the time, I keep you running so you can save others. A week a year? And a few counseling sessions while I'm sleeping?” He smiled through the open door, then shut it, but I could still hear him, even over the engine accelerating as I drove away.