Abby woke before dawn, stiff and aching but rested. Reality crept back, terrible memories of the previous day, and when she sat up, her hand brushed the stock of the SIG Sauer. The touch of the gun removed the last vestiges of hope that this might have been a vivid nightmare.
A nightmare, yes. But not the kind you woke up from.
She rose and stretched, the sound of her popping joints loud in the empty house. Her throat throbbed and there was pressure behind her eyes and under her jaw that promised the arrival of a cold. Hardly a surprise; she’d spent one night bedded down in wet leaves and the next on the wood floor of an empty house. She went into the bathroom and splashed her face with water, then cupped her hands and drank. The water had a mineral taste to it, but that was fine, and the cold of it soothed her throat. She walked back out and stood on the second-floor landing. Moonlight filtered down from above, and she followed it up the stairs and into the third-floor master suite. She sat on the floor there and stared at the shadowed trees as the moonlight gave way to gray and then to rose hues and then the world was back, though it didn’t feel like the world she knew. Abby was alone in a strange house in a strange town, sitting in a bedroom that contained absolutely nothing but a scoped rifle she’d stolen from a murdered friend.
How many hours had it been since she’d grudgingly boarded the train to Boston to meet with Shannon Beckley?
A different lifetime. But she’d been in this situation before, in a way. More than a few times.
The first time she’d flipped a car, it had been in New Hampshire. She’d known her tires were thin, but there were seven laps left and she was sitting in third and although her engine was overmatched by the two cars in front, she was sure she could beat them. She’d gotten outside on turn two and the car in front moved to block her while the leader shifted inside to attack the straightaway, and Abby saw a gap opening like a mistake in a chess game. It was going to be tight, and it was going to test what was left of her tires, but she could do it.
She’d made the cut to the inside and then the back wheels drifted and she knew it was trouble but she tried to ride it out, punching the accelerator, eyes locked on that closing gap. When the contact came from the back of the driver’s side, she wasn’t ready for it. It knocked her car to the right and then the tires were shrieking as they tried to hold on to the asphalt like clawing fingernails. Then she was airborne. And dead.
Or that’s how it had felt. A detached sense of foolishness—You had third, and third was fine—paired with the certainty of death.
The car had flipped twice before it hit the wall, but somehow she was upright when it was done, and people were reaching for her and shouting and a stream of fire extinguisher foam was pounding against her.
She was sitting on the gurney in the back of the ambulance, the doors still open, offering a view of the track, when she thought: This was my last race.
She’d been wrong about that too.
Either you quit or you picked yourself up and moved on. For a long time, Abby’s greatest asset had been her ability to get back behind the wheel after a wreck and feel right at home. You wrecked again; of course you did. You expected death again; of course you did.
But you kept on moving. Up until Luke, she’d always been able to do that.
Up until Luke, she’d also always been alone in the car.
She was alone again now, and there was wreckage behind her, but she knew these feelings. There were similarities between what had happened to her yesterday and what had happened to her on the track; anyone who said otherwise had never flipped a car at 187 miles per hour, never walked out of a cloud of flame.
You survived only when you kept moving. Yesterday, Abby had done that. She’d been all instinct and motion. That had felt right to her. She’d felt more right, in fact, than she had in a long time, which was a damned unsettling realization.
Today she did not feel right. She was frozen and indecisive. Did she call David Meredith to learn what they’d made of the scene, see if she could trust him? Maybe they’d found enough to back up her story already. Maybe she’d slept on the floor in a vacant house for no reason. She needed the internet, but she’d crushed her phone back at the service plaza. She’d have to risk taking the Tahoe out so she could find a Walmart and pick up a burner phone with cash.
“You’re an idiot,” she said aloud, voice echoing off the hardwood floors and empty walls. She shook her head, got to her feet, and went down the steps to the bathroom where she’d stowed the bag of iPhones from Savage Sam. She took them back upstairs, where she figured the signal would be best, sat down in front of a wall outlet, separated the phones and paired them with chargers. Three phones and only two chargers. She plugged two in and waited for them to power on. Only one was protected by a PIN code, but it had no signal, as if it were old and forgotten or maybe its owner had suspended service on it. It would still work if connected to Wi-Fi, though, and the PIN code would be easy enough to defeat; you just reset the phone to factory settings.
One problem there—people were being murdered over whatever was on these phones, and deleting that material didn’t seem wise.
The other phone was functional but had absolutely no personal data. Maybe Savage Sam had wiped it clean in preparation for selling it? Or maybe Oltamu had wiped it clean for other reasons?
She picked up the third phone, and something felt wrong about it immediately. The weight was off. It was in a simple black case with a screen protector, and it looked for all the world like the others, but it was too heavy.
She brought the charger to the base of the phone but couldn’t find the port. She turned it over, looking to see how she’d missed the charging port on a phone that looked like a twin of her own.
It wasn’t there.
An electric tingle rode up her spine.
The top of the phone had a power button that looked standard. When she pressed it, the screen lit up, and the display filled with what appeared to be the factory-setting background of a new iPhone. She hit the home button, expecting to be denied access, but she was greeted with a close-up image of Tara Beckley’s face. Tara was smiling uncertainly, almost warily, into the camera, and behind her was a dark sky broken by a few lights from distant buildings.
Below the photo were the words Access authentication: Enter the name of the individual pictured above.
When Abby tapped the screen, a keyboard appeared. She moved her thumb toward the T on it, then stopped. She wasn’t sure what she was opening here. If this phone actually belonged to Tara Beckley, it was a strange and poor security feature—a selfie asking for your own name? Then there was the question of the weight, which was decidedly different from a standard iPhone’s. She pulled off the case and checked the back and found no Apple logo and no serial number. If it was a phone, it was a clone, a knockoff. But if it wasn’t a phone…what did it do?
It had one hell of a battery, that was for sure. It had been at the salvage yard for a week and had no charging port, and still it ran without trouble. Definitely not the iPhone of Abby’s experience. But it looked like one. Would it act like one? Would it ring?
She picked up the phone that actually functioned and plugged it back into the charger. Then she went downstairs, out of the house, and into the crisp autumn day. The wind was coming in off the sea, and the smell of salt was heavy in the air. She could hear waves breaking on rocks. Down there, beyond the trees, it would be violent, but up here it sounded soothing.
She found the Hammel College case file in the backseat of the Tahoe and scanned through the loose pages and old photographs, all of it feeling surreal and distant—the idea that this had once been merely a job for Hank and her seemed impossible, laughable. It was the whole world to her now.
College administrators had provided the paperwork that had been given to the conference coordinator; it included two phone numbers for Oltamu, helpfully labeled office and mobile, and a note saying that the doctor preferred to be called before nine or after three.
Abby didn’t think Oltamu would mind the disturbance anymore.
She took the contact sheet, went back upstairs, punched the mobile number into her one working phone, and called, staring at the bizarre clone phone with Tara Beckley’s face on the display.
It won’t ring, she thought, but then she heard ringing.
She was so surprised that it took her a moment to realize it was from the phone at her ear.
She was about to disconnect the call when the voice came on.
“Hello?” A man, speaking softly and with a trace of confusion. Or fear.
Abby looked at the phone as if she’d imagined the voice. The call was connected. She had someone on the line.
“Hello?” the man said again.
Abby brought the phone back to her ear and said, “I was looking for Dr. Oltamu.”
There was a pause, and then the voice said, “Dr. Oltamu is unavailable. May I ask who’s calling?”
Abby hesitated and then decided to test him. “My name is Hank Bauer.”
Pause.
“Hank Bauer,” the man echoed finally, and Abby thought, He knows. The name means something to him.
“That’s right,” she said.
“And what can I do for you, Hank?” A bad impression of friendly and casual.
“Dr. Oltamu is dead,” Abby said. “So who are you and why are you answering a dead man’s phone?”
The silence went on so long that Abby checked to see whether the call was still connected. It was. As she started to speak again, the man finally answered.
“Would this be Abby Kaplan?”
“Good guess. Now, what’s your name?”
“That’s not important.”
“Of course not.” Abby got to her feet and started pacing the empty bedroom, the phone held tightly. “Give me another name, then—give me the kid’s name.”
“The kid.”
“That’s right. Tell me who he was and I won’t need your name. I want him.”
Another silence. Abby glanced at the display again—she’d been on the phone for thirty-seven seconds. How long was too long to stay connected?
“Do it fast,” she said.
“I’ve got no idea what kid you’re asking about. Or why you called this number.”
“Then why did you answer?” Abby knelt and punched the home button on the clone phone, which brought up the picture of Tara Beckley. She was ready to tell the man on the other end of the line what she had, ready to try a bargain, but she stopped herself.
She thought she understood now, understood the whole damn thing—or at least a much larger portion than she had before.
I’ve been there, she thought, looking at the photo. The background over Tara’s shoulder showed spindled shadows looming just past her pensive, awkward smile. Shadows from an old bridge. Abby had paced that same spot with a camera. That place was where this photo had been taken. Hammel College’s campus was just across the river.
“You got the wrong phone,” Abby said.
“What does that mean?” the man said, but his voice had changed, and he hadn’t asked the question out of confusion—he was intrigued. Wary, maybe, but intrigued.
“The one you just answered doesn’t matter,” Abby said. “The one I’ve got does. It might not even be a phone, but it’s what you wanted. It’s what you need now.”
When the man didn’t speak, Abby felt a cold smile slide over her face. “You took two of them,” she said. “You took Tara Beckley’s phone and Oltamu’s. That was the job. Other than killing him, of course. The job was to kill him and take the phones. I don’t know why, but I know that’s what you were trying to do. But there were three phones, and you didn’t know that. That’s the problem, isn’t it?”
“Why don’t you explain—”
“You missed one,” Abby said. “And if you want it, you’re going to need to give me the kid who killed Hank. Think we can make that trade?”
“I bet if we meet in person, we can work this out. Quickly. How about that, Abby? You’re in some trouble, and I can ensure that it ends. You need some serious help.”
“And you need that phone. So make a gesture of good faith. Tell me his name.”
Pause. “I’d be lying if I told it to you. There’s my gesture of good faith. Whatever name he’s going by now, I don’t know it.”
For the first time, Abby believed him. “I need to come out of this alive,” she said.
“You will.”
“I’ll believe that when you tell me where to find him.”
No response. Abby looked at the phone again. What if the call was being traced? How long was too long? “Make a choice,” she said.
“Okay. All right. But it will take me some time. And I’ll need to know you’ve got the phone and where you are. You tell me that, I’ll put him in the same place. How you handle it then is up to you.”
“What do you call him?” Abby said.
“Huh?”
“Forget his real name. What do you call him?”
Another pause, and then: “Dax.”
“Dax.”
“Yes. But it won’t help you. Trust me, he’s not going to be located under that name.”
“That’s fine. You want the phone, you’ll put him where I can find him. Agreed?”
“Tell me something about the phone.”
“It’s a fake, for one.”
She could hear the man on the other end of the line exhale. “A fake?”
“Yes. It’s built to look like an iPhone, but it’s not one. Now—ready to make a deal on giving me your boy Dax?”
“Yes.”
“Great. Then I’ll call back. From a different number.”
“Hang on. Tell me where you—”
Abby cut him off. “End of round one. Answer when I call again.”
“Hang on, hang on, don’t—”
Abby disconnected and stood looking at the phone. Her hand was trembling. She powered the phone down. She didn’t want it putting out any sort of signal.
Who the hell was that? Who answered Oltamu’s phone?
Not Oltamu, that was for sure. And not a cop.
The options left weren’t good.
She sat beside Hank Bauer’s rifle and picked up the fake phone, trying to imagine what had made it worth killing for and what Tara Beckley had understood about it when her photo was taken. The smile was uncomfortable, forced, and the man she’d been with had been killed a few minutes—seconds?—later. Tara had been sent spinning into the river below and then rushed to the hospital, where she now lay in a coma. But there was a difference between uncomfortable and afraid, and as Abby looked at her face, she was sure Tara hadn’t been scared. Not yet, at least. Maybe after, maybe soon after, but not in the moment of that photograph.
Access authentication: Enter the name of the individual pictured above.
She hesitated, then typed Tara and hit Enter.
The display blinked, refreshed, and said Access denied, two tries remaining.
“Shit,” Abby whispered, and she set the phone down as if she were afraid of it.
As if? No. You are afraid of it.
People were being killed over this thing, and for what? Something stored on it made sense, but wasn’t everything cloud-based now? What would be on the phone that couldn’t be accessed by a hacker? Hacking it seemed easier than leaving a bloody trail of victims up the Atlantic coast. She stared at the device as if it would offer an answer. It couldn’t. But who could?
Oltamu.
Right. A dead man.
“Why’d they kill you, Doc?” she whispered.
She couldn’t begin to guess because she didn’t know the first thing about Oltamu. That was a problem. Abby was out in front, but she didn’t know what was coming for her.
Look in the rearview mirror, then. Pause and look in the rearview.
To get answers, she would have to start with the first of the dead men.