“You’re not wrong.” She turned her attention back to the printed lines. “Still, we should stop trying to make sense of the words as a whole and look at them as separate pieces of information. Think of them as data points.”
She couldn’t explain to Toro that breaking down configurations—whether in language, numbers, or visual images—was her superpower. She had always had a gift for pattern recognition, and the Army had refined it. Her assignments with the Rangers had also given her the ability to discern and solve codes in life-and-death circumstances.
Like those they were in now.
“Why would there be commas after every third word?” she muttered to herself after a few moments. She started to get a sense of something floating just out of reach. “What if the phrases make no sense because they’re not supposed to?”
“That would mean somehow the words do,” Toro said.
And then it hit her. “Every third word is followed by a comma,” she said, her excitement growing.
“Rules abound angry freedom,” Toro said, reading from the paper. “I don’t follow.”
“Look at the first word in each phrase,” she said.
Toro bent his head down again. “Break mirror beside door.”
She grinned at him. “Now that makes sense, doesn’t it?”
He nodded appreciatively. “Yes, it does.”
She strode to the open doorway and peered outside, checking the corridor in both directions. “Don’t want anyone sneaking up on us again.”
She had allowed the cobra and the envelope to distract her long enough for Doc to get the drop on her. Never again.
Toro joined her, laying a palm against the warped surface of the mirrored panel adjacent to the doorway. “I can’t feel a latch.” He pushed against the perimeter of the panel. “It doesn’t open when it’s pressed either.”
“The note said to break it.”
“If that’s what it meant.”
She gave him a look.
He sighed. “All right. That has to be what it meant.”
“We could shoot it, but I’d rather not announce our location.”
Toro reached into his boot and slid out the butterfly knife. “When this thing is closed, the handle makes a decent hammer. I could smash it. But it’s still going to make noise.”
“Less than a gunshot,” she said. “Go ahead and try with the knife.”
Toro wrapped his hand around the handle and pulled his arm back.
“Wait,” she said. “Make sure you only hit it with the metal. Keep your palm as far from the striking end as possible.”
“You’re worried about me.” He lifted a brow. “You still love me after all.”
He was trying to keep up the pretense in case Nemesis wasn’t onto her, but Dani didn’t see much point. “I just don’t want you to get cut,” she said. “We’ve got no first aid, and you’re zero help to me if I have to carry your ass through this maze.”
“Fine.” He adjusted his grip and brought the end of the knife down hard against the center of the mirror, smashing a hole straight through.
They both peered inside.
“Can’t see anything in there,” Dani said. “Break out the rest of the panel.”
They both turned their heads away to avoid flying shards as Toro punched repeatedly. When he stopped, a large section of the mirror was missing, with jagged pieces around its edges and more scattered on the floor.
Dani poked her head through the entry door to see if anyone was coming to investigate the source of the noise. Satisfied they were still alone for the time being, she watched Toro reach in and yank at a wrapped parcel duct-taped to the wall behind the spot where the mirror had been.
He wrenched it free and held it up to her. “Think it’s a bomb?”
She rolled her eyes. “Don’t give Nemesis any ideas.” Then she answered his question. “If it is, we’re already screwed. I’m no bomb tech, but I’ve probably had more experience with IEDs than you.” She held out her hand. “I’ll open it. You can wait outside the room if you’re worried.”
“And miss the potential for a grisly death?” He passed her the parcel. “No way.”
He watched in silence as she began to unwrap the package.
“Attention, everyone.” The baritone voice Dani had come to despise echoed through the space.
She and Toro froze, staring at each other.
“I have an announcement,” Nemesis continued. “Two traitors are among you. The woman in the game with you is a spy. Because the bull brought her with him, I am putting a million-dollar bounty on both their heads. Of course, you have to survive and escape to collect.” After a brief pause, the transmission ended with a parting shot. “Happy hunting, everyone.”
“Obviously, Nemesis overheard your comment,” Dani said, voicing her earlier conclusion. “And he doesn’t care who dies.”
“I fucked up,” Toro said, dragging a hand through his hair.
Dani interrupted the apology that followed, which would serve no purpose in the battles to come and wasted valuable time. “You know the Colonel’s crew,” she said. “Is there any chance of reasoning with any of them about this?”
“Anyone with a gun will shoot us on sight,” he said without hesitation. “If they don’t have a weapon, they’ll find another way to kill us.”
She smiled. Nemesis had overplayed his hand. Toro—whatever his original intentions had been—was now fully committed to work with her thanks to the bounty. She did not share the thought with him, nor did she express her firm belief that Nemesis would live up to his name, creating more hazards and obstacles for them than anyone else. They both had targets on their backs, and an attack could come from any direction at any time.
“Something was odd about the announcement,” she said to him. “Did you notice that Nemesis didn’t use either of our names?”
He nodded but offered no thoughts on the matter.
“You were ‘the bull,’ and I was either ‘the woman’ or ‘the spy,’” she said, pressing her point. “It’s like he didn’t want to identify us. There must be a reason, but I can’t figure it out.”
Toro shrugged. “We all go by nicknames or code names. Everyone knows who he was talking about. Makes no difference what we’re called, does it?”
“Wait a minute,” she said. “How would he know your code name?”
Toro blinked. “No clue.”
“This is about your group.” She thought back to the first announcement. “Remember when he said we were all killers?” At Toro’s nod, she continued. “He knows exactly who you all are and what you do. I was an acceptable addition because he thought I was the same.”
“Your point?”
“I want to know who Nemesis is and what’s behind all this.”
“That’s a luxury we don’t have at the moment,” Toro said. “We can figure it out in our spare time if we ever find a way out of here. Right now I’m focused on surviving, and I suggest you do the same.”
“I can multitask,” she said. “Besides, I think learning what’s really going on can only help us survive.”
“Suit yourself,” he said. “But you can’t understand the mind of a madman.”
Still bothered by the enigma that was Nemesis, she tipped her head toward the package still clutched in her hand. “Better find out what’s inside before someone tries to claim the bounty.”
CHAPTER 39
Wu sat beside Assistant Director Hargrave in the JOC at 26 Fed. Before leaving the Bronx, he had called his top cybercrimes specialist to get him up to speed on the new development, while Flint scheduled a briefing for everyone involved in the investigation.
Mouth open and eyes fixed on the wall screen, Hargrave slowly placed his mug of coffee on the conference table. “Did you see the size of that fucking snake?” he said into the silence that pervaded the room.
In all the years they’d worked together, Wu had never heard his supervisor utter an obscenity. That more than anything else he could have said betrayed the turmoil brewing underneath his tightly controlled exterior.
“At first I wasn’t sure the avatars were Agent Vega and Gustavo Toro,” Hargrave said. “But if anyone could handle a king cobra, it would be a former Ranger.” He gave his head a disbelieving shake. “She was fearless.”
“Unlike Toro,” Flint said. “He did everything short of running out the door, screaming.”
“Can’t blame him,” Hargrave said. “I don’t like snakes, either, and that one was a monster.”
“Well Toro sure as hell didn’t run from the guy with the knife,” Wu said before turning to Sanjeev Patel, the cybercrimes expert he’d connected with Axel Vega. Patel had followed Axel’s instructions, using a computer unconnected to the FBI’s secure server to access the game on the dark web.
“Can you show the assistant director the feed from earlier?” Wu asked him.
Patel, who had set up camp in the ops center, was positioned at the laptop he’d linked to the wall-mounted display they’d been watching. The oversize screen was also separate from any computer equipment other than the laptop.
“I managed to capture everything that happened from the very beginning,” Patel said. “Looks like the game went live fairly recently, so I’m caught up.” He reversed the recording at high speed, stopping at Wu’s instruction.