The Short Drop (12 page)

“You weren’t lying about the library,” said Hendricks. “It’s going to be a bitch trying to cover all the exits and the nearby streets with just the three of us. Never mind not being seen. And that doesn’t account for shifts and sleep.”

“Can Abe send more troops?”

“He could, but we run into that other problem. We stake out that library with an army and we’ll stand out like Girl Scouts in Las Vegas. And local PD might not be good for a lot, but I guarantee if we set up camp at a public library that kids frequent, we are going to wind up with a Maglite shoved way, way up our ass.”

“So we’re screwed?”

“Not entirely. I set up perimeter cameras. They’re motion-activated, but I’ve got coverage on all three doors. It’s not ideal, but we’ll get faces going in and out. If he even goes in or out. Nothing to rely on.” He flicked ash into the gutter. “We sure could use some of that cyber-ninja voodoo of yours.”

“Cyber-ninja voodoo?”

“Isn’t that why you’re here?”

“Hendricks, can I ask you a question? Did you work this kind of thing in the LAPD?”

“Did I work missing children? I had my share.”

“Did you find many of them?”

Hendricks looked at him. “I answer, you going to go scurrying for the bathroom again?”

“Forget it.”

“Generally, you got forty-eight hours. After that, if you do find a kid, they’re not breathing.”

“So do you think there’s any chance Suzanne’s alive?”

Hendricks lit another cigarette.

“No,” he said. “No, she’s been dead a long time. I think the doer didn’t know who he was grabbing. I think he turned six shades of bitch when he found out he had a senator’s daughter. Once he understood the magnitude of the shit he was in, he didn’t waste any time in killing her and dumping the body.”

Gibson groaned. A low-throated moan that he didn’t realize he was making until Hendricks interrupted him.

“Hey, you asked.”

“I know,” Gibson said. “So what are you doing here?”

“It’s my job.”

“Come on.”

Hendricks dropped his cigarette, slid off the hood, and crushed it out with his heel.

“It’s important to the boss. So it’s important to me. Plus, and this is just me talking, but I don’t care for pedophiles. And I especially don’t care for clever ones that think they’re slick, sending taunting photographs of their victims. So what am I doing here? I’m here to put my foot on this guy’s throat. That’s what. And since we’re on the subject, why are
you
here?”

“In case she’s not.”

The perpetual grimace left Hendricks’s face, and he became honest and serious for a moment. “You don’t want to go doing that.”

“What?”

“Believing she’s alive. Not for one second.”

“Why not?”

“’Cause once you start, you don’t stop. Hear me. Hope is a cancer. One of two things happens. Either you never learn the truth, in which case it gnaws down to the bone until there’s nothing left, or worse, you do, and you go through that windshield at ninety because hope told you it was okay to make the drive without a seat belt.”

“So assume the worst.”

“Forty-eight hours ended a long time ago. So buckle up. All I’m saying. Find some other reason to be here.” With that, Hendricks went into his room and shut the door, leaving Gibson with his thoughts.

And with Hendricks’s cell phone, which the ex-cop had forgotten on the hood of the Cherokee. Gibson stared at it, calculating how long he’d have. Thirty minutes? Probably less. Was it worth the risk? Yes, he decided. Always have a plan B, even if you never needed it.

He snatched up the phone and shut himself in his room. He connected the phone to his laptop and started the program. One eye on his monitor, one ear listening for the sound of Hendricks’s door opening. The worst outcome was if Hendricks came out to look for it, it wasn’t there, and it magically reappeared afterward. Then Gibson would be cooked.

Twenty-seven minutes later, the phone was back where Hendricks had left it.

How was that for some cyber-ninja voodoo?

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

It took Gibson until Tuesday night to finish his program. WR8TH hadn’t put in another appearance, but his virus continued its relentless journey through the FBI memoranda and documents that Rilling kept uploading onto their servers, lest WR8TH become suspicious if the flow suddenly ceased.

Jenn stopped by Gibson’s room periodically to check on his progress.

“What do you need from us?” she’d asked the first morning after he began work.

“Three hots and a cot.”

“Any requests?”

“Breakfast at breakfast. Dinner at dinner. Surprise me at lunch.” He handed her a Summit Diner menu. Then he ushered her out of his room, flipped the “Do Not Disturb” sign, and locked himself inside. With the shades drawn and the air-conditioning dialed down to witch’s tit, it felt like a subterranean cave cut off from the outside world. He’d always thought more clearly when he was cold and bundled up.

Properly situated, he sat himself down in front of his laptop, put in his earbuds, and worked for what proved to be two straight days.

First things first. He needed the specs of the library’s network. He pinged the library and ran a scan of the available ports. He felt vaguely foolish hacking a public library in central Pennsylvania. He still had a fairly heavy rep in the insular community that gave a crap about such things and doubted very much this would add to the legend of BrnChr0m. It was a bit like Al Capone extorting a kid’s lemonade stand.

His scan finished and beeped, displaying its analysis. He read it with a frown. Usually you could count on rinky-dink networks like a public library to employ bottom-feeding IT personnel who were lazy or incompetent or both. Operating systems were often two generations out of date and hopelessly unpatched. Such networks were like big, friendly dogs; if you petted them they would roll right over and show you a dozen security vulnerabilities.

Unfortunately, in Gibson’s continuing quest never to catch a break, he seemed to have arrived in a municipality that took its IT seriously. The library network was running a current version of Windows and, by the look of it, was freshly patched with a firewall just for good measure. Gibson sighed and sipped his coffee. It wasn’t an elaborate setup, but it was professionally maintained. He’d just have to do it the hard way.

Instead of ten minutes, it took him two hours to get the specs that he needed. He liked what he saw. He knew the software and hardware inside and out, and the fact that the network was well maintained would actually make writing the program easier if he found a way to piggyback on the wireless network’s infrastructure. He closed his eyes and visualized how he could exploit it. He sat there until he had it in his mind, and then a small smile creased his lips. He opened his eyes, cranked up his music, and began to write.

Programming wasn’t really his strong suit; he liked the intellectual challenge and the cold logic of code, but it wasn’t what made him good. Contrary to the public’s misconception, hacking was not a duel between two fast-typing programming geniuses. In the movies, it was always this overdramatized, adrenaline-fueled high-wire act—hackers with guns to their heads, given sixty seconds to hack some impenetrable network. Lightning-fast keystrokes and split-second timing.

The actual penetration of a secure network was about as far from exciting as exciting got. It was slow. It was tedious. And it required patience and a painstaking attention to detail.

There were those who had an innate feel for a machine’s language and could ferret out possible exploits as if they had a sixth sense. But a secure network was much more than just machines. It was also the people who operated and maintained those machines. Nine times out of ten, the easiest path into a secure computer network was not the hardware or the software, but the wetware—the people. And that was where Gibson excelled.

Gibson had always had a gift for looking at a secure network and the people who operated it, then seeing the fault lines between the two. He found the fissures between proper security procedure and the shortcuts people took because they didn’t think anyone was paying attention. Ignorance, curiosity, habit, laziness, greed, stupidity—computers were only as good as the people operating them, and there was always a weak link. To Gibson, hacking computers was boring. But hacking people? Now, that was fun.

But in a pinch, he was a capable coder too. He just wasn’t especially fast. So when he was finally done coding and debugging his program and ran a successful test, it was past eleven on Tuesday night. He hadn’t slept but for a few hours on Sunday night, and the lack of sleep had cooked him.

Gibson ran his fingers through his hair and stuck his head out his motel room door. Hendricks greeted him and stubbed out a cigarette. The few times Gibson had left his room to clear his head, Hendricks hadn’t been out smoking. He almost missed him.

“Tell her it’s done,” he said wearily.

“Okay.”

“I’ll test it tomorrow.”

“Okay.”

“Anything happen since yesterday?”

“Nats lost.”

Gibson crawled into bed in his clothes. In a perfect world, he would have slept for eighteen hours. In the real one, he slept for six and tossed and turned for three more as his body tried and failed to sleep through all the caffeine. By nine, he was showered and shaved, gear packed. He stepped out blinking into the morning sunshine.

Hendricks and Jenn had been busy. In the last forty-eight hours, they had fine-tuned Hendricks’s camera array, which now not only covered the library’s entrances but also all the approaches to the library. Jenn had scouted the neighborhood for low-profile spots that provided some privacy and were still in range of the library. Hendricks had cameras trained on those too.

“Bad news is that the library’s core demographic appears to be white men between forty-five and sixty,” Hendricks said.

“Yeah, we’ve got photos of twenty-six men entering the library since Monday morning who fall within our profile’s age range. We sent them back to DC. Maybe we’ll get lucky.”

“You think he’s one of them?”

“Hendricks thinks not. I’m on the fence.”

“I just don’t think this guy would hang around the library reading periodicals,” Hendricks said. “Doesn’t fit for me. I think he does his thing, keeps a low profile, and gets out of there.”

“And I think he may be so comfortable on his home turf that that’s exactly what he would do,” said Jenn. “But we’ve got so few data points on this creep that it’s kind of academic. He’s going to blend in unless we have a way to pick him out. Which brings us to . . .” She trailed off.

“My program,” Gibson said.

“Does it work?” she asked.

“I think so. But I won’t know for sure until I get it out in the field.”

“Can’t you test it first?” Hendricks asked.

“I have, to an extent, and it works as a simulation without crashing, but unless you want to wait while I build a dummy of the library’s network, then there’s no way to know for sure without just going ahead.”

“How does it install?” Jenn asked.

“Thumb drive. Just need to get into the librarian’s office for two minutes.”

“Sounds doable. Hendricks and I will go take care of it. You hang back here, and we’ll let you know when it’s installed, and you can fire it up remotely and see if it works.”

“Yeah, that’s probably a bad idea,” Gibson said.

Jenn paused, started to get angry, and stopped herself. “Why? Is it too complicated for us poor Luddites to operate?”

“No, actually it’s just one mouse click.”

“Then what?”

“Well, you said the library is full of guys that match our perp, right?”

“Right . . .”

“Well, what if he’s one of them?”

“That’s kind of the point,” said Hendricks.

“I think it’s a mistake to assume that he doesn’t know what you both look like,” Gibson said. “You need to be careful showing your faces around the library any more than you already have.”

“How could he know what we look like?” Jenn asked.

“Well, he’s been in ACG’s database for weeks.”

He watched Jenn digest his statement.

“Christ,” she said. “Our employment files.”

“Our photos,” Hendricks said.

“Still want me to hang out in the motel?”

The Carolyn Anthony Library might be small, but the people who worked there obviously took great pride in their work. Gibson looked around, taking the lay of the land. It was well maintained, clean, bright, and inviting. It made you long to sit down and read a book. Bear would have been in heaven here. The front door opened into a small, cheerful atrium where new releases were arranged tastefully on wooden display racks.

Behind the main desk, a middle-aged woman checked books back in to the system, thick arms swaying as she worked. Her hair was cast in a brittle perm that looked like the unholy union of a microwave and caulk. She paused, greeting him with an austere nod, and went back to her task. The stacks were tight, densely packed columns of books that disappeared toward the rear of the library. To the left was a row of carrels, each with an old CRT monitor. A neatly worded sign gave instructions for requesting computer time from the librarian on duty. A wide set of stairs led down to the “Children’s Section.” To the right was a reading area with armchairs and footstools. All but one of the chairs were occupied by a group of retirees who looked like they were permanent fixtures.

Gibson wondered if one of them was the man they were hunting. He wanted to stare at each of them closely, study their faces. See if he could pick the man out even though he knew better than to believe that you could see that kind of evil on a man’s face. The man who abducted Bear a decade ago and somehow managed to keep that secret all these years—there would be nothing about his face to give him away. He would be the last person you would suspect. After all, he didn’t drag Bear into his car. She got in willingly, because she didn’t see a face that frightened her. It would have only been afterward that the mask came off.

Maybe that was why hacking this Podunk library in this Podunk town felt so daunting to him. It was, by any objective measure, a simple job. But he was on edge. The man who knew Bear’s fate knew this place, knew it well, and had been here within the last two weeks. He might not be here this moment, but this cozy little library was still the key to a profound secret.

And maybe Hendricks was right—that the secret had only one inevitable ending—but there would still be a modicum of justice if they managed to catch this guy. Not for Bear—there was no justice for the dead, Gibson knew. But perhaps for the living it would restore some sense of balance. No, he didn’t believe that either. There was no redress for a crime of this magnitude. If Bear were dead, then finding her abductor would only serve to answer questions better left unasked. Who had taken her? Where had she been held? How had she suffered and died?

His thoughts began to turn to Ellie, but he forced them away. Under no circumstances would he allow himself to imagine his daughter in Suzanne’s place.

Since blending in wasn’t really an option, Gibson had taken the opposite tack—stick out painfully. He thought the ugly, mismatched sports jacket and tie and rumpled chinos were a nice combination. He looked like someone trying to make a good impression and failing miserably. Gibson had identified the librarian, Margaret Miller, and, through Google-stalking her, had found her son, Todd. Breaking into the library’s office to install his program was an option, but a bad one. Far easier if Mrs. Miller invited him back there.

He looked nothing like Todd, but that was fine. He didn’t need to look like him as much as visually suggest him. In most of his photos, Todd Miller looked like a bit of a dweeb. Gibson’s clothes were an homage to Todd’s total lack of fashion sense. Gibson also parted his hair neatly to one side in the way Todd favored.

He stood just inside the front door of the library, looking around in a panic.

“Can I help you?” she asked.

Gibson swung around and gave her his best, neediest look.
Take pity on me,
it said.

“I sure hope so. Is Mrs. Miller here?”

“I’m Mrs. Miller,” she said. “What can I do for you?”

“I’m really sorry. I know this is a weird request. But someone at the gas station suggested I ask you . . .” He let his voice crack.

“Ask what? What is it?”

“Well, I have a job interview in forty-five minutes. Up at the ski resort.”

“Forty-five minutes? Oh, my. You need to hurry.”

“I know, ma’am. I drove up from Hagerstown this morning. It’s for an assistant-manager position. My uncle knows someone up there and put in a good word for me. But, well, I overslept, and I ran out the door without my résumé. It’s right on the kitchen counter,” he said and gestured futilely at the imaginary kitchen counter that had callously kidnapped his résumé. “The resort was real particular too. God, my uncle set up the interview; he’s going to kill me if I blow it.”

He got busy staring at the floor sheepishly but watched Margaret Miller’s face out of the corner of his eye for hints as to how he was doing so far. Not well by the stern look on her face.