Sam and Hayward visited a computer store. It was decked out in early super-sleek, all glass and polished wood minimalism. Salespeople wore the obligatory über-cool monochrome tee and jeans and had various electronic gadgets strapped to their persons.
Sam tried to slow her heart rate. Her stomach felt queasy. She fought the urge to look over her shoulder every other second. Do I look nervous? Probably. She sure as hell felt nervous. Perhaps it had something to do with the all-points bulletin circulating the United States with her mug on it.
Sam didn’t like the lack of customers in the store. It was too easy to stand out, even with the ball cap pulled low over her eyes and her red locks covered by a dark brown wig.
Hayward wasn’t fond of the idea either, but there were few alternatives in the modern world. You certainly couldn’t use your own computer. The feds had figured out how to outsmart the obscuration programs. It wasn’t real-time, but they could pinpoint your location in a matter of hours. Internet cafés had gone the way of the dodo, and federal institutions had long ago wised up to the library trick. They had tracking software running in the background of just about every computer in just about every library in the country. In fact, the founder of a famous underground Internet shopping site had met his fate via a library Wi-Fi system.
“Just browsing,” Sam said to the über-eager clerk who sidled up with a too-easy and too-greasy greeting. The clerk adhered to his training, which meant he didn’t take the hint to buzz off, but few people could wear annoyance as convincingly as Sam. The clerk soon busied himself elsewhere.
Hayward found a sleek-looking Apple knockoff and typed a memorized IP address into the browser window.
Sam’s nervousness intensified. She walked casually away while the browser page loaded. She didn’t want to draw attention to whatever might appear on the screen, and she wanted to appear as though she really was browsing. She wandered to an adjacent table and fondled the products idly while Hayward typed his authentication credentials.
Sam couldn’t see Hayward’s computer monitor, but she knew the page had loaded. His body tensed and his face lost its color. His eyes glistened. His jaw clenched and one hand closed into a white-knuckled fist.
Sam returned to Hayward’s side. She had to stifle a gasp. A video loop was playing. Two torture victims, one male and the other female. Their bodies were in terrible shape. The girl had been violated. Sam could see in the victims’ eyes that the spark of life had been beaten out of them. They were as close to dead as anyone she’d ever seen. They had given up hope, and the end was just around the corner. Say what you wanted about the spiritual side of things, but when a person lost interest in living, they didn’t tend to hang around much longer.
She put her hand on Hayward’s back. She wanted to say something comforting, but nothing came to mind that didn’t feel trite or hackneyed. She settled for silence.
He wiped tears from his eyes and got to work. Sam would have employed Dan for what came next, but she couldn’t risk involving him. Calling via burner from halfway around the globe was one thing, but calling from within the city would have been madness. She was also afraid of getting Dan collared for aiding and abetting.
Hayward pecked away, sparing occasional furtive glances in the direction of the clerk, hoping no one would notice the green font against a black background that indicated Hayward was somewhere deep in cyberspace.
He accessed a decryption program available on the Dark Web. It was probably invented by someone in the US government but subsequently stolen and disseminated, for a tidy profit of course, by a Russian hacker. The program exploited a trapdoor in every digital photography and video device. The trapdoor was mandated by the federal government. There was a war on terror going on, etcetera, and you couldn’t be too careful. Liberty was nice, but security was necessary, so security won every time.
The trapdoor did the following: it ensured that regardless of the device’s settings, any digital video or photograph taken by any device sold in the United States contained the precise location where the video or photo was shot. The latitude and longitude were encoded and the data was embedded inside the digital pixels.
The feds knew how to decode the location data. Consequently, so did the Russian hackers, and so did anyone who happened to purchase a copy of the decryption program on the Dark Web.
A few keystrokes later, the coordinates appeared in a little pop-up window. Sam wrote them down on the palm of her hand with a ballpoint pen. Whoever posted the videos had also typed an address into an encrypted message sent to Hayward’s account along with the video link. A quick Google search verified the two sets of coordinates—the address in the email message and the location data encrypted in the video of Katrin and Joao—matched to within a dozen meters. Sam felt confident they had found Katrin and Joao.
Hayward pointed at the email message. It said, “9 p.m.”
Hayward closed the windows and erased the computer’s cache to cover his tracks. Sam tucked her arm in his, and they walked out of the store with far more nonchalance than they felt.
As they crossed the parking lot, Sam nudged closer to Hayward. It was the closest she’d come to wanting to hug him genuinely, not for show. Those images of Katrin and her father were too awful for anyone’s eyes.
They returned to the relative safety of the stolen car. Sam thought of the Cagliari safe house, and Hayward’s description of Maria Ferdinand-Xavier’s murder, and of the location they’d just discovered. She didn’t have a good feeling. “You know this is a trap,” she said.
Hayward nodded. “Of course it is.”
“You don’t seriously plan to give yourself over to Grange, do you?”
“Not in a million lifetimes,” Hayward said.
Sam smiled. She had wondered whether his promise to Grange was a bluff. But will it make any difference in the end? Grange still held all the cards, and Sam was having trouble envisioning a happy ending. Even if they somehow managed to free Katrin and Joao from the Agency muscle, then what? Spend the rest of their lives looking over their shoulders, waiting for Grange’s men to come knocking?
The Agency was somehow involved with a criminal organization, and she and Hayward knew about it. The risk to the CIA was enormous—what would stop Sam and Hayward from testifying before Congress or talking to the FBI about the Agency’s criminal affiliations? Only one thing would guarantee there would be no blowback. Grange would want the slate wiped completely clean. He would want everybody dead.
Her thoughts turned to Brock. He’d certainly be out of jail by now, released on his own recognizance at best, or on house arrest at worst. Knowing he was so close, so available, was excruciating.
Soon enough, she told herself.
But she had a tough time believing it.