“And her mother certainly didn’t pay to have herself killed,” Wu said. “This is the proverbial smoking gun.”
“Oscar Brinkley hired the Colonel and his team to kidnap his wife and daughter,” Flint said.
“You think the son of a bitch made killing his wife part of the deal?” Dani asked.
“It was the whole deal,” Flint said. “The kidnapping was a pretext for murder.”
“But why drag his teenage daughter into it?” Dani said, unable to believe anyone could be so callous. “She’d be traumatized.”
“Exactly,” Flint said. “Oscar Brinkley was stone cold. He couldn’t put himself in his daughter’s place to understand how being kidnapped and held captive would destroy her sense of security.”
“And he didn’t comprehend how much losing her mother would hurt Megan,” Wu added. “Imagine being raised by a father like that.”
“We found evidence in one of the other folders that Brinkley wanted to divorce his wife but didn’t want her to get half his fortune,” Johnson said. “He stood to save more than a billion dollars by killing her.”
Dani grasped the depth of Brinkley’s ruthless cunning. “If she has an accident or dies under suspicious circumstances, everyone looks at him. But if she’s the victim of a horrible crime—one that also harms his daughter—who would question it?”
“No one,” Wu said. “Because no one would be so heartless as to have his own child abducted.”
“The guy was a piece of work,” Flint said. “But he was strategic. He made sure the FBI wouldn’t get to the bottom of it. He didn’t pay the full ransom, giving the Colonel an excuse to shoot his wife; then he sends the rest of the money without telling the case agents he was doing it.”
Another piece clicked into place. “That’s how he paid them for the hit,” Dani said. “If anyone looked at his finances, he could explain how and why his money was transferred to an offshore account.” She brought her palm down on the table. “That’s how he paid the Colonel. It was right under everyone’s nose.”
“So why keep incriminating evidence?” Patel said. “All this documentation . . . it’s a digital confession.”
“I have a theory,” Wu said. “People in Brinkley’s position are subject to blackmail. He probably wanted to keep evidence on hand in case the Colonel—or anyone he worked with—ever decided they wanted more money for their continued silence.” He lifted a shoulder. “The Colonel and his men would think twice before blackmailing someone who had evidence they’d committed murder.”
Everyone paused to consider his words.
“His daughter must have stumbled onto the information,” Dani said after a few moments. “She worked on the defense contract with him. He had a secure server to avoid corporate espionage, but he had to allow her access. She’s clearly brilliant at codes, puzzles, and ciphers. She must have seen encrypted files and looked on it as a challenge.”
“That’s what we thought,” Patel said. “She cracked his encrypted files, read them, and made a copy for herself on a flash drive.”
Flint nodded. “And when she reads what’s in the files, she goes batshit.”
“How can we be sure she was the only one behind the game?” Johnson asked no one in particular.
“While I had the link to the game in the control panel, I uploaded everything that hadn’t been destroyed into a quarantined server for an in-depth analysis,” Patel said.
Dani braced herself for an onslaught of technobabble.
“The dark web version of the game was heavily edited,” he continued. “I didn’t know she referred to herself as Nemesis until I reviewed the raw footage from the internal server.”
Dani tilted her head in thought. “Why would she hide a fake name?”
Patel responded with a question. “What do you think of when you think of the word nemesis?”
“A relentless adversary,” she said. “Someone who believes you should suffer, but for a specific reason.”
“You’re talking about revenge,” Wu said.
“Nemesis is the Greek goddess of revenge.” Patel paused for emphasis. “That’s goddess. Not god.”
“Female, not male.” Dani closed her eyes for a long moment. “If I had remembered that, I might have figured out who was behind this a lot sooner. I thought of the game maker as our nemesis, but Megan viewed herself as the Nemesis, exacting vengeance on everyone who had wronged her.”
“She was brilliant, you know,” Patel said quietly. “She never released them to the public, but she designed her own virtual escape room games that were filled with riddles and clues.”
“I can see how she would become obsessed with escaping after being held captive when she was a teenager,” Flint said. “It’s sad she got warped into something dark by circumstances.”
“Not circumstances,” Wu said. “Circumstances imply an accidental twist of fate. Megan was twisted by her father.”
Dani thought back to her first meeting with Megan. “She tried to pin it all on her father by posing as his prisoner in the silo.” Another thought occurred to her. “What about Senator Sledge?” she asked. “That’s how this whole thing started. How does he fit in?”
Johnson pulled up another screen. “These are more recent financial transactions.”
There were records of wire transfers over the past three years going from Oscar Brinkley’s account to the Colonel’s, followed by copies of cryptic texts indicating that the money had reached its final destination in the Cayman Islands. Another file tied the offshore account to Senator Sledge.
“You remember the steganography in the picture of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle?” Johnson asked. When everyone nodded, she pulled up another document. “This is the information that was hidden in that image. The funds eventually ended up at an offshore account affiliated with the senator.”
“Megan Brinkley had to be the original source who called the senator’s chief of staff,” Dani said. “But Nathan Costner told his friend the caller was an older male. How did she pull that off?”
“Figured that out this morning,” Patel said as if he’d been waiting for the question. “In the process of transferring the data, I discovered whatever verbal commands I entered into the system came out in the voice of Oscar Brinkley.”
“Come again?” Dani said.
“That’s how Megan did it,” Patel said. “Voice-cloning software embedded in the game.”
Dani closed her eyes, recalling the dreaded sound of Nemesis. “Everyone heard a baritone male,” she said. “Who would suspect it was a young woman talking?”
“I think that’s why Megan kept her father alive as long as she did,” Patel said, answering another nagging question before she posed it. “She would have used his voice to call Colonel Treadway to lure him into the trap, but she might have needed him in case the software failed or glitched. She could force him to say any random words that weren’t in the database in case it was necessary.”
“A backup plan,” Dani said. “Insurance in case something went wrong with the software.”
Once Megan killed her father, she could no longer use him to create voice commands or dialogue. Raised by a cold and calculating father, Megan had learned by example from the best.
“From the timeline, it appears the senator took bribes over the past three years but wasn’t involved in the abductions a decade ago,” Dani said. “What’s going on with Sledge?”
Wu spoke up quickly. “You’re not assigned to that part of the case, Vega.”
“I get it,” she said. “Need to know only.”
Wu glanced at his watch. “The senator is getting some visitors right about now. There should be a breaking story on the six-o’clock news tonight.”
She gave him a knowing smile. Wu had obviously orchestrated one of the FBI’s signature multiple-warrant services. There would be images of raid-jacketed Feds carrying boxes of files out of the senator’s many office locations throughout the state. When he finished crapping his boxers, Sledge would speed-dial every contact on his extensive list.
But this time it would do him no good.
She recalled that her boss and Flint had both been evasive during the flight back to New York. “You explained how you found me by searching through decommissioned missile silos,” she said. “But how did you know where to start looking?”
“There’s something you should know, and I’ve waited until you recovered a bit more to share it,” Wu said. “Have you been in touch with your family?”
“I was planning to visit them tonight,” she said, completely thrown by the non sequitur. “They know I was on an assignment, but I didn’t tell them how long I would be gone. They won’t miss me for another—”
“Well, I have,” Wu cut in.
Icy fingers of dread crept down her spine.
“I spoke to your brother yesterday,” Wu continued. “I asked him not to reach out to you until we had a chance to talk.”
“How do you know Axel?” she said, heart hammering.
“I’ve been to your aunt’s apartment in the Bronx,” he said. “After he asked me to come.”
“Wait . . . what?” She could not make sense of the collision of her two worlds.