Special Agent Adler whistled as he blew a gust of air between his teeth. “We need to get you some rest and start debriefing. There’s so much I want to know.”
“Not yet. I want to meet Father . . . Gabriel Clark when that plane lands.” I ran my fingers over my face, and as I did, I recognized the familiar disconnect with the tips of my fingers. Lowering my hands, I turned them over, showing them to Special Agent Adler. “See my fingers?”
“Yes, we’ve been seeing a lot of that.”
“No, don’t you get it?”
“What?”
“I want an alert sent out to all the area hospitals, homeless shelters, airports, police, everywhere.”
“Jacoby, I don’t understand. We have all the followers corralled from the campuses.”
“We don’t have Sara. I refuse to believe she’s dead. Have the FBI tell all the places I just mentioned that we’re looking for women who have no fingerprints.”
“As soon as they get the fire extinguished—”
“No, let’s say she escaped. If she did, she could be wandering about. If she is, she could be picked up and that is the way to identify her.”
“I’m not sure that’s a good idea. There’s more you need to know. Let me show you something that we’re only beginning to understand.”
I nodded, and waited for Adler to make his way around his desk and back out into the evidence room.
An hour later, as I drained my second cup of coffee, I continued to read and follow the magnitude of evidence compiled within this room. The caffeine was essential. I was currently going on twenty-four hours without sleep and the adrenaline from Benjamin’s and my escape was quickly dissipating. Undoubtedly the emotional roller coaster of the last four days was taking its toll.
I’d lived in The Light for three years, and Special Agent Adler was right. My work had paid off. Because of me nearly a thousand people would now be free to live real lives, no longer manipulated by a narcissistic psychopath. However, as I followed the leads and information accumulated on the large boards, I was flabbergasted by what I hadn’t known.
“So what the hell are the Shadows?” I asked, my brow furrowed in confusion.
“The Light outside of The Light,” Agent Brady explained. He was a young man, part of the small obscure team at Quantico on the special task force that investigated The Light. His knowledge was as profound as mine. Instead of living it, he’d infiltrated The Light through cyberspace, through the dark web. Admittedly I felt a pang of jealousy when I learned that he’d discovered so much without putting himself or those he cared about at risk.
“It’s an interesting phenomenon,” Brady went on. “When you were first sent in, we had no idea that there were even three campuses. We’d identified the Western Light, but not the Northern. Your final correspondence nearly two years ago confirmed its existence.”
I remembered making that call. I’d been living at the Northern Light for a time and felt the need to at least notify the FBI that the campus existed. I’d made that call from Bloomfield Hills on a burner. Thankfully, those cell towers weren’t monitored like the ones at the Northern Light or even the Western; there was too much cell activity to identify unknown users.
“It wasn’t until we started following the cyberactivity from the Northern Light that we were able to identify a connection out in the real world.”
“The dark,” I said mindlessly.
“Excuse me?” another young agent asked.
I looked up from the aerial photograph of the Bloomfield Hills mansion. “The real world, in The Light it’s referred to as the dark, the area beyond The Light.”
Adler had been right. It would take me weeks of debriefing to give up all the information I’d obtained, because some things, like the term the dark, seemed like common knowledge to me. The FBI had people to help scour my thoughts and memories. I was more concerned about the deprogramming. Obviously I was in need of that too.
“Yeah, we’ve heard that term. Well, the cybertrail led me to the dark . . .” Brady’s voice trailed away as he hit keys on a keyboard and a large screen came to life.
I pinched my brow and stifled a yawn. “Yes, I understand the term the Shadows, but who or what are they?”
The screen became a map of North America. The three campuses were identified.
Brady went on, “The cyberactivity has been the strongest and the easiest to identify from your campus. It’s the isolation. A lot of the activity was intercampus communication. At first that was difficult to intercept. The firewalls were commendable, hell, better than some used by our government. They were layered, even triple encrypted. We’d make it through one only to be stopped by another.”