Buried Secrets

31.



I wasn’t scared, either. I was pissed off, outraged at the audacity of these two intruding into my living space. Messing with my computer and my new flat-screen TV.

Most people feel a jolt of adrenaline and their heart starts to race. Mine slows. I breathe more deeply, see more clearly. My senses are heightened.

If I simply wanted them to leave, I’d only have to make a sound, and they’d abandon their black-bag job and slip out. But I didn’t want them gone.

I wanted them dead. After we’d had a conversation, of course. I wanted to know who’d sent them, and why.

So I backed into the bathroom and stood there for a moment, still dripping on the floor, considering my options, thinking.

Somehow they’d gotten in without setting off the alarm. They’d managed to defeat my security system, which wasn’t easy. The front door was ajar, I noticed, and one of the big old factory windows was open. I doubted they’d entered through the window, on that busy street. That would have attracted all kinds of attention, even at night: I was on the fifth floor. But to have gotten in through my front door meant knowing the code to disarm the system.

Obviously they hadn’t expected me to be home. Nor did they see or hear me come in through the service entrance at the back of the loft, which I seldom used. They hadn’t heard me showering at the other end of the apartment: In this old building, water constantly flowed through the pipes.

My only advantage was that they didn’t know I was here.

Looking down at my pants, heaped on the bathroom floor, I ran through a quick mental catalogue. Just the usual objects that can be used as improvised weapons, like keys or pens, but only at close range.

This was a time when a little clutter might have been useful. At first glance, I saw nothing promising. Toothbrush and toothpaste, water glass, mouthwash. Hand towels and shower towels.

A towel can be an effective makeshift weapon if you use it like a kusari-fundo, a Japanese weighted chain. But only if you’re close enough.

Then I saw my electric razor. I’m normally a blade guy, but in a rush, electric is faster. Its coil cord was about two feet long. Stretched to its full length it would probably reach six feet.

I slipped on my pants, unplugged the razor, then padded silently, stealthily, into the main room.

I had to go for the muscle first. The computer guy wasn’t likely to be much of a threat. Once Mongo was out of the way, I’d find out whatever I could from Gigabyte.

My bare feet were still damp and a little sticky and made a slight sucking noise as I lifted them off the floor. So I approached slowly, tried to minimize the sound.

In a few seconds I was ten feet away from the intruders, hidden behind a column. I inhaled slowly and deeply. Holding the shaver in my right hand and the plug in my left, I pulled my right hand back, stretching out the coiled cord like a slingshot.

Then hurled it, hard, at the side of the bigger man’s head.

It made an audible crack. His hands flew up to protect his face, a second too late. He screamed, tipped back in the chair, and crashed to the floor. I jerked at the cord, and the shaver ricocheted back to me.

Meanwhile the computer guy was scrambling to his feet. But I wanted to make sure the big one stayed down. I launched myself at the guy, landing on top of him, and jammed my right knee into his solar plexus. The wind came out of him. He tried to rear up, flinging his fists at me without much success. He gasped for breath. He did manage to land a few punches on my ears and one particularly hard one on my left jaw, painful but not disabling. I aimed a drive at his face with everything I had. It connected with a wet crunch. I felt something sharp and hard give way.

He screamed, writhed in agony. His nose was broken, maybe a few teeth as well. Blood spattered my face.

In my peripheral vision I noticed that the weedy computer guy had clambered to his feet and was pulling what appeared to be a weapon from his jacket.

During the brief struggle, I’d dropped the electric razor, so I reached for the heavy weighted Scotch-tape dispenser on my desk. In one smooth sharp arc, I hurled it at him. He ducked, and it clipped him on the shoulder, the roll of tape flying out as it thunked to the floor.

A miss, but it gave me a couple of seconds. The weapon in his right hand, I saw now, was a black pistol with a fat oblong barrel. A Taser.

Tasers are meant to incapacitate, not kill, but take my word for it, you don’t want to get zapped with one. Each Taser cartridge shoots out two barbed probes, tethered to the weapon by thin filaments. They send fifty thousand volts and a few amps coursing through your body, paralyzing you, disrupting your central nervous system.

He hunched forward, Taser extended, and took aim like an expert. He was less than fifteen feet from me, which indicated he knew what he was doing. Fired from twenty feet away, the electrical darts spread too far apart to hit the body and make a circuit.

I leaped to one side and something grabbed my ankle, causing me to stumble. It was the beefy guy. His face was a bloody mess. He was groaning and pawing the air, arms swarming, bellowing like a wounded boar.

The thin sallow-faced one smiled at me.

I heard the click of the Taser being armed.

Sweeping the big black Maglite flashlight from the edge of my desk, I swung it at his knees, but he was quick. He dodged just in time. The Maglite missed his kneecaps, struck his legs just below with a satisfying crack. He made an ooof sound, his knees buckling, and roared in pain and fury.

I reached up to grab the Taser from his hands, but instead I got hold of the black canvas tool bag on his shoulder. He spun away, aimed the Taser again, and fired.

The pain was unbelievable.

Every single muscle in my body cramped tighter and tighter, something I’d never experienced before and just about impossible to describe. I was no longer in control of my body. My muscles seemed to seize. My body went rigid as a board, and I toppled to the floor.

By the time I could move, two minutes or so later, both men were gone. Far too late to attempt to give chase, even if I were able to run. Which I certainly wasn’t.

I got up gingerly, forced myself to remain standing, though I wanted only to sink back to the floor. I surveyed the mess in my apartment, my anger building, wondering who had sent the two.

And then I realized they’d been considerate enough to leave some evidence behind.





32.



The SIG was still under the bed.

The Smith & Wesson nine-millimeter was locked away, as a precaution, in case someone found the SIG. Concealed beneath the bluestone tiles of the kitchen was a floor safe. I popped the touch latch to lift one of the tiles, dialed open the safe, found the contents—a lot of cash, various identity documents, some papers, and the pistol—intact.

They hadn’t found it.

They probably hadn’t even looked for it. That wasn’t what they were here for.

I gathered the things the intruders had left behind in their haste to leave, including a black canvas tool bag and my dismantled cable modem. And one thing more: a little white device connected between one of the USB ports on the back of my computer tower and the cable to my keyboard. The color matched exactly. It almost looked like it belonged there.

I’m no computer expert, by any means, but you don’t have to be an auto mechanic to know how to drive a car. This little doohickey was called a keylogger. It contained a miniature USB drive that captured every single keystroke you typed and stored it on a memory chip. Sure, you can grab the same data with a software package. But that’s a whole lot trickier now that most people use antivirus software. Had I not had reason to look for it, I’d never have found it.

Inside the case to my cable modem I found a little black device that I recognized as a flash drive. I had a feeling it didn’t belong there either.

I called Dorothy.

“They knew you were meeting with Marcus,” she said. “And they didn’t think you’d be home.”

“Well, if so, that means they weren’t watching us.”

“You’d have detected physical surveillance, Nick. They’re not stupid.”

“So who are they?”

“I want you to put that keylogger back in the USB drive, okay?”

I did.

“Do you know how to open a text editor?”

“I do if you tell me how.”

She did, and I opened a window on my computer and read off a long series of numbers. Then I took the keylogger out of the USB port and inserted the little device from the cable modem. And repeated the process, reading off more numbers.

“Hang on,” she said.

I waited. The two spots where the Taser prongs had sunk in, on my right shoulder and my left lower back, were still twitching and were starting to get itchy.

I heard keyboard tapping and mumbling and the occasional grunt.

“Huh,” she said.

“Yeah?”

“Oh, now, this is interesting.”

“Okay.”

“The electronic serial numbers you just gave me? That’s law-enforcement-grade equipment. Whoever broke in was working for the U.S. government.”

“Or using government equipment,” I pointed out. “They weren’t necessarily government operatives themselves.”

“Fair enough.”

Though now I had a fairly good idea who might have sent them.

Even before I arrived at the Boston field office of the FBI, Gordon Snyder had figured out who I was. He knew why I wanted to talk with him, and he knew I was working for Marshall Marcus.

Who was the target of a major high-level FBI investigation. And I, as someone employed by Marcus, was probably an accomplice.

Which made me a target too.

Snyder had flat-out told me that the FBI was tapping Marcus’s phones. They were probably monitoring his e-mail as well. Which meant he knew I’d driven up to Manchester. He knew I wasn’t home, that it was safe to send his black-bag boys.

I recalled Diana’s warning: Watch out for the guy. If he thinks you’re working against him, against his case, he’ll come gunning for you.

“Can you pull up the video for my home cameras?” I said. “I want to see how they got in.”

When I moved in, I’d had a security firm put in a couple of high-resolution digital surveillance cameras outside the doors to my loft. Two of them were hidden dummy smoke detectors, and a couple of Misumi ultra-mini snake IP cameras were concealed in dummy air vents. They were all motion-activated and networked into a video server at the office.

How this worked exactly, I had no idea. That wasn’t in my skill set. But the surveillance video was stored on the office network.

She said she’d get back to me. While I waited, I searched the apartment for more equipment, or even just traces, left by Gordon Snyder’s team.

When Dorothy called back, she said, “I’m afraid I don’t have the answer for you.”

“Why not?”

“Take a look at your computer.”

I walked back to my desk and saw what looked like four photographs on my screen, still photos of the stairwells outside the front and back doors to my loft. Each, I saw, was the video feed from a different camera. Beneath each window were date and time and a jumble of other numbers that didn’t seem important.

Somehow she’d put them on my computer remotely.

“How’d you do that?” I said.

“A good magician never reveals her secrets.” The cursor began moving on its own, circling the first two windows. “These first two didn’t get any action, so forget them.” They disappeared. “Now watch.”

The remaining two windows grew bigger so that they now took up most of the monitor. “They entered your apartment at 8:22 P.M.”

I glanced at my watch. “Okay.”

“So here we are, 8:21 and … thirty seconds.” Both windows advanced a few frames, and suddenly a red starburst appeared in the middle of each one, blooming into a red cloud that obliterated the entire image.

“Laser zapper,” I said.

“Exactly.”

After a minute the picture returned to normal.

Then there was nothing to see but an empty stairwell.

“So we still don’t know how they got in,” I said. “But this tells us something useful.”

“What, they knew how to dazzle the cameras? It’s all over the Internet.”

“No. They knew where the cameras were.”

“Why do you say that?”

“No fumbling around. Quick and efficient. You can’t blind the cameras if you can’t find them. They knew exactly where to look.”

“So?”

“The cameras are concealed,” I said. “One in a smoke detector, and one in an air vent. The smoke-detector camera isn’t all that original, if you’re familiar with what’s on the market. But the air-vent one—that’s custom. It’s a fiber-optic camera that’s like a quarter inch thick. Takes some serious skill to hit that one first time.”

“So what’s your point?”

“They got hold of the schematics. As well as my password.”

“Maybe from the security company that put them in.”

“Possibly. Or maybe from my own files. Right there in the office.”

“Not possible,” she said. “I’d have detected the intrusion, Nick.”

“Maybe.”

“Not maybe,” she said, defensive. “For sure.”

“Put it this way,” I said. “Not only did they know exactly where my cameras are, but they were able to disarm the system. Meaning they knew the code.”

“From your security company.”

“The company doesn’t know my code.”

“Who does?”

“Just me.”

“You don’t keep your code written down anywhere?”

“Just in my personal files at the office,” I said.

“In your file drawers?”

“On my computer. Stored on our server.”

“Oh.”

“You see?” I said.

“Yeah,” she said, and the other line rang. I saw from the caller ID it was Diana. “Someone’s gotten into the office network.”

“Or else we’ve got a leak,” I said. “Let me take this.”

I clicked over to Diana’s call.

“Nick,” she said, her voice tight. “I just heard from AT&T. I think we’ve found our girl.”





33.



Not until Alexa went away to boarding school did she learn that other kids, normal kids, didn’t have the kind of dreams she did. Others dreamed of flying, like she sometimes did, but they also dreamed about their teeth falling out. They dreamed of getting lost in mazes or realizing, with immense embarrassment, that they were walking around school naked. They all had anxiety dreams about having to take a final exam in a class they’d forgotten to attend.

Not Alexa.

She dreamed over and over about crawling on her belly through an endless network of caves and getting stuck in one of the narrow tunnels, thousands of feet underground. She’d always wake up sweating and trembling.

The thing about phobias, she’d learned, was that once you had one, some small part of your brain was always working to justify its existence. To show you why your phobia made perfect sense.

Wasn’t it logical to be afraid of snakes? Who could argue with that? Why wasn’t it logical to fear germs or spiders or flying in an airplane? You could die any of these ways, right? It wasn’t like your brain had to work very hard to justify any of these phobias.

Being in an enclosed space was the most deeply terrifying thing she could imagine. She didn’t require logic. She just knew.

Like a magpie forever gathering shiny little scraps, her mind collected the most horrifying tales, things she’d read about or heard from friends, stories that proved her fears were legitimate. Things most people barely noticed, she filed away obsessively.

Stories from history books of people who’d fallen ill during the Plague, gone into comas, declared dead. Stories she wished she could unread.

Coffin lids with scratch marks on the inside. Skeletons found with fistfuls of human hair clenched in their bony hands.

She’d never forget reading about the Ohio girl in the late nineteenth century who got sick and her doctor thought she’d died, and for some reason her body was placed in a temporary vault, maybe because the ground was too frozen to bury her, and when they opened the vault in the spring to put the body in the ground, they found that the girl’s hair had been pulled out. And that some of her fingers had been chewed off.

The girl had eaten her own fingers to stay alive.

Her English teacher at Exeter had made them read Poe. It was hard enough just trying to understand the guy’s writing, the strange words she’d never heard of. But his stories—she couldn’t bear to read them. Because he was one of the very few who actually got it. He understood the terror. Her classmates would say things like “That’s one sick dude,” but she knew that Edgar Allan Poe saw the truth. “The Fall of the House of Usher” and “The Cask of Amontillado”—all those stories about people being buried alive—she couldn’t bring herself to finish them. How could anyone?

Why was her fevered magpie mind dwelling on all those awful stories?

After all, she was living her own worst nightmare.





34.



“Her phone’s on and transmitting,” Diana said.

“Where is she?” I said.

“Leominster.” She said it wrong, like most people new to the state. It’s supposed to rhyme with “lemming,” almost.

“That’s an hour away.” I looked at my watch. “Maybe less, this time of night. How precise a location did they give you?”

“They’re e-mailing me lat-and-long coordinates, in degrees and minutes.”

“Okay,” I said. “That could be as big an area as a thousand square meters, the way these things work. But once I’m there I can start searching for likely locations.”

“Give me ten minutes.”

“Go back to bed. Otherwise, you’ll be a wreck tomorrow. I got this.”

“Technically, I put in the request. I’m not allowed to pass on the information to someone outside the Bureau.”

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll drive, you navigate.”

* * *



I QUICKLY gathered some equipment, including the Smith & Wesson and a handheld GPS unit, a ruggedized yellow Garmin eTrex.

As we drove, I told her what had happened in the hours since I’d seen her last: the surveillance tape at the Graybar Hotel, the guy who’d spiked Alexa’s drink and driven her away. Her “friend” Taylor Armstrong, the senator’s daughter, who’d cooperated in the abduction for some reason I didn’t yet understand. The streaming video. Marshall Marcus’s admission that he’d taken money from some dangerous people in a last-ditch attempt to save his fund, though he lost it all anyway.

Diana furrowed her brow. “Let me check the phone detail records.” She began scrolling through her BlackBerry.

“Yeah, I’d like to know when the last phone call was, in or out.”

“The last outgoing call hit the tower in Leominster at two thirty-seven A.M.”

“Almost twenty-four hours ago,” I said. “How long did it last?”

More scrolling. “About ten seconds.”

“Ten seconds?” I said. “That’s pretty short.”

I heard her scroll some more, and then she said, “The last call was to nine-one-one. Emergency. But it doesn’t look like the call ever went through. It hit the tower, but it must have been cut off.”

“I’m impressed. She must have been pretty spaced-out from the drugs, but she had the wherewithal to try to call for help. What calls did she receive around then?”

“A bunch of incoming, between three in the morning to around noon today.”

“Can you see who they’re from?”

“Yeah. Four different numbers. Two landlines in Manchester-by-the-Sea.”

“Her dad.”

“One mobile phone, also Marcus’s. The fourth is another mobile phone registered to Taylor Armstrong.”

“So Taylor did try to call. Interesting.”

“Why?”

“If she was trying to reach Alexa, that may indicate she was actually worried about her friend. Which indicates she might not have known what happened to her.”

“Or that she was feeling guilty about what she’d done and wanted to make sure Alexa was okay.”

“Right,” I said. For a long time we didn’t talk. There was no quick way to Leominster. No shortcut. I had to take the Mass Turnpike to 95 North and then onto Route 2. Leominster is on Route 2, an east-west highway that winds through Lincoln and Concord and then keeps going west to New York State.

But I wasn’t too concerned about the speed limit. I had a federal law-enforcement officer in the front seat next to me. If ever I had a chance of beating a speeding ticket, this was it.

It had started to rain. I switched on the wipers. The only vehicles on the road at this time of night were trucks. An old tractor-trailer was just ahead of me, rubber mudguards flapping, sheeting water onto my windshield. I clicked the wipers faster and changed lanes.

I began to sense her looking at me.

“What?” I said.

“Why is there blood on your collar? And please don’t tell me you cut yourself shaving.”

I explained about the break-in at my loft. Gave her my theory that Gordon Snyder was behind it. As I talked, she shook her head slowly, and when I was done, she said, “That’s not FBI. That’s not how we work. We don’t do that kind of stuff.”

“Not officially.”

“If Snyder wanted to monitor your e-mail, he’d do it remotely. He wouldn’t send a couple of guys in to do a black-bag job.”

I thought for a moment. “You may have a point.”

We went quiet again. I was about to ask her about what had happened between us—or almost happened between us—earlier in the day, when she said abruptly, “Why is her phone still on?”

“Good question. They should have turned it off. Taken out the battery. Better yet, destroyed it. Anyone who watches crime shows on TV knows a cell phone can give up your location.”

“Maybe they didn’t find it on her.”

“Doubt it. She had it in the front pocket of her jacket.”

“Then maybe she hid it somewhere. Like in the vehicle she was abducted in.”

“Maybe.”

A black Silverado was weaving between lanes without signaling.

“I’m glad we reconnected,” I said. It came out a little stiff, a little formal.

She didn’t say anything.

I tried again. “Funny to think we’ve both been in Boston all these months.”

“I meant to call.”

“Nah, where’s the fun in that? Keep the guy guessing. That’s way more fun.” I wondered if that sounded resentful. I hoped not.

She was silent for a long moment. “Did I ever tell you about my dad?”

“A bit.” I knew he’d been killed while tracking down a fugitive, but I waited to see what she’d say.

“You know he was a U.S. Marshal, right? I remember how my mom always lived with that knot in her stomach, you know—when he left for work in the morning, would he come home safe?”

“Yet you risk your own safety every day,” I said gently, not sure what she was getting at.

“Well, that’s the life I signed up for. But always having to worry about someone else? That’s more than I can stand, Nico.”

“What are you saying?”

“I’m saying we had an understanding, and I knew I wasn’t abiding by it.”

“An understanding?”

“We were supposed to be casual, no strings, no pressure, no commitment, right? But I was starting to get in a little too deep, and I knew that wasn’t going to be good for either one of us.”

“Is that what you told yourself?”

“Do we really have to do this?”

I couldn’t help thinking about all that had been left unsaid between us, but all I managed was “You never said a word about it.”

She shrugged, went quiet.

We were driving along an endless, monotonous flat stretch of three-lane highway somewhere west of Chelmsford, through miles and miles of scraggly evergreen forest, steeply banked on either side. The broken white lane markers were worn. The only sound was the highway hum, a faint rhythmic thrumming.

“They didn’t ask me to go to Seattle,” she said softly. “I put in for a transfer.”

“Okay,” I said. It could have been a cool breeze from the window that was numbing my face.

“I had to pull myself out. I thought I saw my future and it scared me. Because I saw what my mom went through. I should probably marry a CPA, you know?”

For a long time no one spoke.

Now we were zooming along Route 12 North, which seemed to be the main commercial thoroughfare. On the other side of the street was a Staples and a Marshalls. A Bickford’s restaurant that advertised “breakfast any time,” except apparently at two in the morning. A Friendly’s restaurant, closed and dark too. I pulled over to the shoulder and put on the flashers.

She looked up from the GPS. “This is it,” she said. “We’re within a thousand feet of her phone right now.”