“I want a lawyer,” Rachel whispered.
She couldn’t be sure exactly what they were up to. She wasn’t formally under arrest, but it still felt as though she were. A lawyer seemed appropriate.
While his partner drove and kept an eye on the road, Agent Hernandez twisted around to peer back at her from the front seat. “What did you say?”
“I said I want a lawyer,” she repeated more forcefully.
He nodded, his lips pursed. “Are you sure? Lawyers are expensive. You don’t have much of a nest egg.”
“You looked at my bank records.” She said it without accusation or heat. It was just a fact.
“We looked at everything,” he told her.
“So,” Rachel snapped, “all of that stuff about how you have kids, too, and you feel for me — that was all just crap, I guess?”
Hernandez’s expression darkened and he glowered at her. “I do have kids. That’s why I’m doing this. So that they can grow up in a safe and orderly world.”
“A safe and orderly world where they get to hunt and kill other children,” she said. “How special for you.”
Hernandez sneered. “Watch your mouth, Professor McKinney. We’re still being nice.”
“This is nice? I hate to imagine what nasty looks like.”
He settled back into his seat, turning away from her. “You won’t have to imagine,” he promised.
*
They took her to the local police station but marched her in through the back door. She knew — vaguely — something of police booking procedures. Harlon had been arrested a couple of times early in their dating days, usually for defacing Confederate monuments. She knew that she should be processed with the desk sergeant, fingerprinted, face-scanned and photographed.
None of that happened.
Instead, they took her through a series of dark, empty corridors that wound like a maze in the bowels of the precinct. And for the first time, she began to fear. If they’d intended on merely arresting her and using her for leverage against Cassie, they would be following procedure. Instead, they were wending their way through a labyrinth, heading toward the minotaur, with no Ariadne in sight.
“Where are we going?” she demanded, fighting to keep a tremor out of her voice. These men only understood strength. They had no sympathy for damsels in distress.
“You’ll see,” Hernandez said.
Finally, they opened an obstinate old door and ushered her into a small room that stank of mold and rust. A broken mirror took up most of one wall, a chunk of missing glass allowing her to peer into the next room. An old, disused interrogation room, then.
There was a rickety table in the center of the room, lit by the overhead spasms of a single, unreliable light bulb. Hernandez’s partner, who hadn’t spoken a word, appeared in the doorway with a very sturdy chair. He placed it behind the table and guided Rachel into it with surprising gentleness.
They don’t want any bruises on me. No evidence. Does that mean they’re definitely going to let me go or that they want the body to be staged a certain way?
The equanimity with which she approached the notion that her own government — sworn to protect her and her rights — was planning to murder her didn’t even shock her. It just seemed natural at this point. They’d sentenced her daughter to death; why not her, too?
“Professor McKinney.” Hernandez’s partner had a surprisingly mellifluous voice. He could have been an opera singer. Even the spoken word sounded musical. “I am Special Agent Jason Khartouk. If you truly want a lawyer, of course it is your right to have one. But we hope we can clear this up without such complications.”
“What’s going on?” she asked warily.
“You’re not under arrest,” Hernandez told her. “We took you into custody to get you here and to talk to you privately.” He glanced over at Khartouk and a silent handoff took place.
“As I’ve told Agent Hernandez and every other NSA agent I’ve ever met: I didn’t know anything about Harlon’s work. I could barely understand it. He didn’t leave anything behind that you people haven’t already taken.”
Khartouk planted his fists on the table, leaning forward. “We’re not sure about any of that. We found references in some of your husband’s notes to something he called ‘a perfect encryption.’ He also made reference to ‘The Purloined Letter.’ ” Edgar Allen Poe’s famous story about a missing letter that actually turns out to be in plain sight. Harlon didn’t usually go in for literary allusions, but when he did he used them properly.
“I don’t know anything about —” she began wearily.
Khartouk cut her off. “That’s a conversation for another day. We’re here to talk about your daughter.”
“What does she have to do with Harlon’s purloined letter?”
A tight smile. “Please don’t play dumb. It’s unbecoming. This is about the Hive. Contrary to popular belief, we government stooges can walk and chew gum at the same time.”
She imagined how it had happened: Level 5 girl goes missing. Government wants to get involved. And, hey — look! It just so happens we already have some NSA goons watching the family anyway. How convenient.
“Professor McKinney, your daughter is in deep, deep trouble,” Khartouk was saying. “And this isn’t just about her. It’s about the integrity of the entire Hive system. Now, eventually the mob will find her. And it will be ugly. But if you help us get to her first —”
“You’ll what, expunge her record?” Rachel said it a little more nastily than she’d intended, but there was a slight lilt of hope in her voice. Could they do that? Would they? Why else would they be here?
Hernandez clucked his tongue. “Your daughter broke the law. Run, sure. Show how clever you are, lead the mob on a merry chase, yeah, OK. But she ditched her phone. She went off the grid.”
“Wouldn’t you, if you were running for your life?”
A sigh. “There’s a bigger picture here. The social good. The stability of law and order.”
“The death of a child.” Rachel pulled her shoulders back as she said it. “Even the Romans had the decency to kill them as infants, before they could speak.”
Hernandez’s lip curled and he stepped closer, but Khartouk cleared his throat. Hernandez stepped back.
Good cop, bad cop, Rachel told herself. Hernandez slaps you around and Khartouk stops him so he gains your sympathy. Don’t fall for it. They’re both bad cops.
“For Cassie to do as good a job as she’s done hiding,” Khartouk said in his calming, musical voice, “she must have had help. Witnesses report an adult woman with her at the campus. Your campus,” he said pointedly. “And RideHop reports a rental car was sent to your apartment with a destination of, once again, your campus. It’s all pretty incriminating, and I know you’d like to explain it to us.”
Rachel bit her lip. Bryce had said “we” (whoever we was) had hacked away evidence of her ride. So much for that. There was no winning scenario here. She obviously wouldn’t tell them a damn thing about Cassie, but she couldn’t wish away the evidence they had either. And Hernandez was right: lawyers were expensive, and she didn’t know any, in any event. She wouldn’t risk her meager savings and her life on a name plucked from Google or Yelp. The wisdom of the crowd didn’t seem all that wise these days.
Her best bet, she reasoned, was to give them just enough to get them to let her go. Then she could try to figure out a plan of action, in her own home, not under a naked light bulb in the dank basement of a police precinct.
“Sometimes kids — especially kids in trouble,” she said after a measured moment, “do stupid things, like use their parents’ credit cards and accounts to order car services.”
Hernandez’s contempt for her was as blatant and obvious as his knitted eyebrows and the furrow between them. Khartouk, though, merely nodded, as though perfectly happy to buy this line of bullshit.
“That’s true,” he admitted. “Kids do all sorts of crazy things. Like BLINQ filthy comments about the president and his family. Because let’s not forget, Professor — that’s why we’re here.”
“Don’t do this,” Rachel said. “Not to Cassie. Look, you can rip my apartment to shreds, take everything Harlon ever touched. That’s what you want, right? That’s what you’ve always wanted. But please, leave my daughter alone.”
Khartouk smiled too smoothly. “We can multitask. Right now, we’re interested in Cassie.”
Right now. So it would never end is what they were telling her. They would hunt her not just until they found Cassie, dead or alive, but until they found Cassie and whatever it was they wanted from Harlon. Rachel decided to change her approach.
“Were you young once, Agent Khartouk?”
His smile did not falter. “A long time ago, yes. A different world. But even then, my parents knew to keep me in line.”
“So this is all my fault? I’m a bad parent?” She was on comfortable ground now. Sure, they could argue about her parenting skills. She was a mom — she was used to people telling her she was doing it wrong.
“There’s being a parent,” Hernandez snapped, “and there’s aiding and abetting a felon.”
“These theoretical children of yours, Agent Hernandez: Wouldn’t you do the same for them, if you were in my shoes?”
Hernandez grimaced and took a step toward her. She didn’t actually think she was in any danger until Khartouk suddenly stepped between them and backed Hernandez up. Hernandez waited a beat and then closed the door. The room was no darker, but suddenly seemed so much smaller.
Khartouk turned around, facing Rachel again. He looked crestfallen, disappointed. “You’re not going to tell me anything, are you, Rachel?”
She wasn’t Professor McKinney any longer. And the door was closed. The door was closed and she was alone with two men who did things for a living.
It took a while to swallow and find her voice. “It doesn’t matter what you do to me,” she said, her voice hoarse. “I don’t know where Cassie is. I really don’t.”
Hernandez crossed his arms over his chest and leaned against the door. Khartouk stroked his jawline and regarded her for several protracted moments.
“The problem, Rachel, is this: I don’t believe you.”
“I can’t help that,” she replied.
Khartouk chuckled. “I think you can. I think you can help that by telling me the truth. And I think I know how to get you there.”
Rachel’s spine stiffened. “Just so you know: it’s been proven that physical torture is ineffective. The subject will tell you anything you want to hear in order to make the pain stop.”
Khartouk seemed taken aback. “Physical torture? We’re not monsters, Professor McKinney. We’re the United States government. Trust me when I tell you that we are not going to lay a single finger on you.”
Back to Professor McKinney. Still, she wasn’t sure she could believe him … but she wanted to. Both because he seemed so incredibly, almost innocently, earnest (that voice!) and also because she really, really did not want to be tortured. She didn’t know much. She didn’t know where Cassie had gone or how long she’d stayed there or whom she was with, but she did have one teeny, tiny piece of data that the NSA lacked. She knew a name.
Bryce.
“I have nothing to tell you,” she said. “Nothing you don’t already know.”
“Again, I want to believe you, but I don’t. I can’t. It’s my job not to.” Khartouk glanced over at Hernandez. “Lights.”
With a sweep of his hand, Hernandez flipped the switch and doused the room in darkness. Rachel clenched her jaw, holding back the scream that pounded for attention and release at the back of her throat. They hadn’t done anything yet. They hadn’t touched her. She couldn’t crack this soon. But it was so dark, so suddenly dark, and there were two powerful men with weapons not far from her.
A light flickered, partly illuminating Khartouk. It was his phone, she realized. He tapped at the screen and then aimed the phone at the far wall, projecting an image there. It took her a moment to realize —
“You know what this is?” Khartouk asked calmly. Musically.
She did. A slightly blurred image of her with two-year-old Cassie. The first time Cassie had ridden a carousel, at Glory’s Island, the amusement park near Rachel’s parents’ house. Rachel was wearing a yellow sundress that she hated — it bared her shoulders — but which Harlon adored. “You look like Theia,” he’d told her. The Greek Titan of myth, the mother of the sun. Classical allusions were the way to her heart.
Cassie wore the cartoon-themed jumper she could never be without at that age. She wanted to sleep in it, and they’d compromised by letting her curl up with it like a blanket. One day a week, she was allowed to wear it, and this was that day. Her daughter was perched on a lovingly rendered seahorse, her eyes open wide with glee, her arms flung into the air as Rachel held her around the waist.
Harlon had snapped the picture. A good day. Why were they showing it to her? To remind her of what she’d lost and what she could still lose? She knew already.
“You have my pictures,” she said evenly. “I’m not surprised.”
“Do you know how human memory works, Rachel?” Khartouk asked rhetorically. “No one does, really. Take forgetting, for example. We take it for granted that we’ll forget things. But why? Why should we forget things, and why are we OK with it? We don’t even understand the process — do memories decay? are they interfered with by other memories? — but we just accept it.”
“Now I know how my students feel when I lecture them,” Rachel said, and feigned a yawn.
Hernandez snorted nastily in the dark. Khartouk stared at the photo for a long moment. Then, without a word, he tapped at his phone. A dialogue box came up, two buttons duplicated on the projection:
DELETE PHOTO
CANCEL
He tapped DELETE PHOTO and the picture disappeared. Blank white light projected on the wall.
Was this supposed to intimidate her somehow? Showing her a photo of her daughter and then deleting it?
“Memories,” Khartouk said. “Sometimes they’re lost or dim and we jump-start them with evidence. With photos or souvenirs. But what happens if that evidence goes away? Our brains aren’t infinite storage areas. Without prompting, what do we remember? How long do we remember it? How well?”
If there was a point to this, Rachel didn’t know what it was.
“Take out your phone.” It was Hernandez speaking this time. “And show us that picture.”
A million snarky, rebellious replies clawed their way up her throat, but she did as he’d bidden. Flicking through her photo album, she couldn’t find the picture, though.
“It must not be on my phone,” she said. But she thought all her photos were on her phone. Harlon had set up some kind of cloud account. Everything was supposed to be there.
“What about this one?” Khartouk asked. He’d projected another photo, this one of Rachel and Cassie at a toy store. Beaming together at the camera as Harlon snapped away.
“Right here,” she said, bringing up the pic. She held out her phone to show them.
Khartouk nodded and once again brought up the DELETE dialogue. The photo vanished from the wall. “Check it now,” he said.
She turned her phone so that it faced her again. She was no longer looking at the toy store picture. It was now a photo from later in the day, when Cassie had tried her first milkshake. Chocolate, of course. (Or, as she pronounced it then, “chockit.”)
Rachel swiped back, but the toy store photo was gone.
Clever. They could control her phone. But everything was backed up in the cloud.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Khartouk said. “You’re thinking, But I have backups.” He sighed sadly. “No. You don’t.” He projected another photo and started swiping through. In a blur of motion, Cassie went from newborn to her first steps to her first birthday …
“See, we, uh, liberated some technology from Google. Related to image lookups. Now, when I delete a photo here” — he waggled his phone in the air — “a bot goes out into the web and finds every instance of that same photo. Every single copy. Every backup. On your computer at home. On your phone. In the cloud. Every copy. And destroys it. Overwrites it with ones and zeroes to a military-grade deletion spec so it can’t be recovered.” He paused to let his words sink in. “Those pictures are gone forever, Rachel. You will never, ever see them again. Except in your memories. Which” — he shrugged — “we’ve already discussed.”
Rachel realized that she’d gone cold. Her body was trembling — the phone in her hand shook. It couldn’t be true. But she had the evidence literally in her own hand.
A photo of Cassie on her first birthday, face cake-smashed. Icing everywhere. Took forever to wash it out, a screaming one-year-old hopped up on sugar, thrashing in the bathtub and then it was gone, deleted. Rachel let out an involuntary moan.
Cassie at two, caught in a moment of repose, staring far off into the distance, something so ancient and knowing and unknowable in her eyes, captured magically, serendipitously, and then, in less than a blink, the photo was gone.
“No!” Rachel screamed. “No!” She lurched up out of the chair but managed to rise only a couple of inches. At some point, Hernandez had come up behind her, and his hands caught her shoulders, shoved her back down into the chair.
She trembled, watching through tears as Khartouk calmly called up and obliterated moments from her life at random. Harlon’s fortieth birthday disappeared into the ether. Cassie’s first day of kindergarten. Her own baby shower. Gone, gone, gone. All as Khartouk musically narrated each image before consigning it to oblivion with a casual tap of his finger.
“Imagine if your daughter dies, Rachel. Imagine if she dies and you don’t even have a picture left to remember her by.”
It went on endlessly. She didn’t know how long. She lost count of the number of pictures. How many pictures do parents take of their children? Surely hundreds in those first soft, sleepless months alone. And over Cassie’s lifetime? How many thousands?
Rachel watched Cassie’s third-grade dance recital disappear. She held on furiously, clenching her fists. Every part of her yearned to scream out Bryce’s name, to give them the single piece of data she had in her possession that could end this.
It would be easy to do.
It would be so easy to do.
*
They returned her to the apartment some indeterminate time later, with a stern warning not to leave the state without contacting them first.
She’d lost track of the time and of how many photos — and which photos — they’d deleted. At some point during the hellish process, she’d stopped begging. She’d just become one protracted moan, her eyes no longer focusing, not even able to steal one final look at the photos as they erased them from her world for good. Eventually, Khartouk had sighed, shut off his phone and said, as though to a disinterested third party, “She’s no good to us. She doesn’t know anything.”
Now, sprawled on the floor of her apartment, her mind refusing to function normally, she felt as though a flu bug racked her body. She lay there for too long, then managed to drag herself to the sofa. With a heroic effort, she used the arm of the sofa to pull herself up to her knees.
And fuck them, she decided.
Fuck. Them.
She’d resisted. She hadn’t given them Bryce’s name. She’d held out as they’d erased Cassie, sacrificing the certain past for the hopeful future.
Harlon’s voice rang in her head. Telling her what to do. She stood and made her way to her laptop. Paused. Then she went to the coat closet, where the cable guy had installed the modem and wireless router. With a fierce cry of victory, she yanked out the power cords.
Your laptop can still pick up other Wi-Fi signals, Harlon told her. It’s not safe.
She returned to the laptop. Flipped it open. From her desk, she scrounged around until she found a USB key. The size of her photo library was much, much tinier than it had been earlier that day. Choking back a sob, she copied what remained to the USB drive. No Wi-Fi on that. No way to erase it remotely. At least, not that she knew of.
It wasn’t much. They could always just take the USB key from her. But it was something. It was something and she would take it.
There was something else she would take, too.
Control.
*
Once she was safely ensconced in her office, behind keycard access and university security officers, Rachel’s fingers drummed over her laptop. There was an idea stewing inside her, one that her brain was a little too afraid to consider. It was risky. But what wasn’t right now? She tapped some keys, made some movements. She watched as if from afar.
Rachel had never read #UniversityMoms before. Then again, she could count on one hand the number of hashtag threads she had read. Once, before Harlon had died, he and Cassie had made her look at #ClassicsProfessorsBeLike, and the comments had in equal parts infuriated and amused her.
She browsed through the thread. The university had pretty good benefits for working parents, including on-site daycare and various support groups, but this thread consisted of minor complaints, general encouragements and — Rachel’s fingers hovered over these conversations — a philosophical thread about the changing role of mothers in their children’s lives today, as technology was helping them evolve into adults more quickly than in the past.
Her fingers flew. She posted before she could really think about whether that was the smart thing to do. Then again, it didn’t matter if it was smart. It just had to be effective. It just had to be something she could do, a task she could complete, instead of waiting for the inevitable breakdown that was sure to come as she watched the world hunt down her only child.
She published it and watched the comments roll in.
*
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Posted by: McKinneyR
I need help from other moms. You might be the only people who understand, who can help stop this. Because, like me, you’d do anything — ANYTHING — for your kid.
My daughter is 17, and she did something stupid. I did stupid things when I was a kid, too. I don’t know a single adult who hasn’t. But we didn’t have the world watching us back then. I’d say that makes us lucky.
Think of the worst thing you ever did back then. And now think of how you would feel if the world had seen it. Think of how you would feel if the world had permission not just to determine your punishment but to dole it out, too.
That’s what’s happening to my daughter right now. My only child is running for her life. Cassie is just a kid. She deserves to learn from her mistakes, to grow and contribute to the world. She doesn’t deserve this.
As parents — mothers — we have a moral obligation to keep our kids safe. To create a world that’s safe for them. And yet … we live in this world of online justice, where every move we make is up for public debate. Imagine if it were your kid. Imagine if your child was missing because a bunch of strangers decided she’s not worthy of life.
Help me, moms. I’m begging you. Help me save my kid.