Abbey slept late after going to bed at nearly three in the morning, as she usually did. It was after eleven o’clock when she woke up in her top-floor apartment. She blinked, trying to drag her mind from groggy sleep. She was many things, but she was definitely not a morning person. When she finally hauled herself out of bed, she went first to the kitchenette to start a fresh pot of coffee, and then she stripped off her T-shirt and underwear to take a shower. But on her way to the bathroom, she stopped.
Standing naked in the middle of her apartment, she heard a disruption outside the building. It was close and loud. Drums beating. People chanting and shouting. It sounded like a large protest of some kind. This was DC, where someone was always protesting something, but it was unusual to find them in the Mount Pleasant neighborhood, which was mostly residential.
Abbey stole closer to the window to take a look. When she glanced down, she spotted a crowd of what looked like two hundred or more people squeezed into the tree-lined parkland and spilling out into the nearby street. They were all looking up at her building and shouting something in a singsong chant. It took her a moment to decipher what they were saying, and then she gasped and jumped back out of sight.
The crowd was singing: “Wake up, Abbey.”
She slapped her hands against her face and shook herself, trying to understand what was going on. She wondered if the crowd had spotted her at the window, and the people in the park confirmed that they had, because suddenly she heard an incessant hammering of debris pelting the glass. Rocks. Eggs.
People were throwing things. At her!
What the hell was happening?
Abbey glanced at the nightstand and spotted her phone, which she typically turned off when she slept. Still naked, she ran and turned it on and waited impatiently for the phone to grab a signal.
When it did, she stared in confused horror at the impossible numbers on the screen.
She had 1,672 unread emails and 891 unread texts. She had 112 missed phone calls and 89 voice mail messages.
With her stomach squeezed by nausea, she opened the text app and rifled through the messages. Nearly all were from unknown callers—strangers who’d somehow found her phone number—and the messages they’d sent scared the hell out of her. There were bizarre accusations. Explicit photos and memes. Vile names and insults. Dozens of rape threats and death threats.
Jesus!
Abbey clicked over to her voice mail. She turned on the speaker to listen to the first of the multiple phone messages. The woman’s voice had a British accent, and the message itself made no sense to her at all.
“Abbey Laurent, this is Marjorie Steele with the BBC in London. That tweet you made last night is blowing up around the world, and I was hoping you could join us for a radio interview.”
The reporter left her number, and Abbey deleted the message.
Tweet?
The sickening feeling in the pit of her stomach intensified, because she’d sent no tweets last night. What was going on? She opened the Twitter app on her phone, and the first thing she noticed with horror was the list of trending hashtag topics. The very first was:
#isabbeyawakeyet
Oh, my God, they were talking about her! Then she noticed that her Twitter account had more than twenty thousand notifications. Comments. Tags. Retweets. It took her only a few seconds to locate the tweet to which seemingly everyone in the entire world was replying. When she read it, her mouth fell open in shock.
@abbeylaurent_ 2:47 am
FIFTH time my car has been broken into in the past month. AYFKM! Shit, I’m so sick of this city. When are the cops going to get a clue? We know who’s doing this! Little tip: it ain’t people who look like me. GOOD NIGHT, I’m going to bed.
Abbey’s whole body trembled, and she sank to the floor. She curled up into a ball and began mumbling, “Holy shit, holy shit, holy shit.”
This could not be real. This could not be happening to her.
“I didn’t post that!” she screamed to the empty apartment. At two forty-seven a.m., she’d been reading a Jeffery Deaver novel in bed, with her phone off. But that didn’t matter. It was her account. It even sounded like her—not the wildly racist message, but the slightly drunk tone and the casual syntax. Whoever hacked her account had mimicked her style perfectly. This was an Abbey Laurent tweet.
But it wasn’t.
Unable even to get up from the floor, Abbey reached for the remote control to turn on the television set. She tuned to MSNBC, and she wasn’t surprised to see her face staring back from behind the anchor desk. Her photo, the one they usually ran with her freelance articles. Red hair. Smiling, like nothing in the world was wrong. Looking incredibly white.
The chyron headline was: dc writer’s racist tweet erupts.
“Fuck!” Abbey shouted.
And then it got worse. She listened to what the anchor was saying.
“Now, as most of you know, tweeting out this racist garbage wasn’t enough for Laurent. Around the same time, she called in to the overnight talk radio show on WMAL, and she let loose a rant that wasn’t limited to 280 Twitter characters. Most of this has to be bleeped out for profanity, but you’ll get the drift.”
Then they played a staticky recording of a phone call, interrupted occasionally by a talk show host trying to break in with his own comments, and Abbey recognized her voice. In between the bleeped-out racist slurs and swear words, it was definitely her. Anyone listening, anyone who knew her, would confirm it.
And yet it was not her.
She’d been asleep at the time.
But who would believe that? If she said the woman on that phone call wasn’t her, if she said that her Twitter account had been hacked, they’d laugh. That was every guilty person’s lame defense.
Abbey pushed herself off the floor and went to the shower. She left the water on cold, and she sat on the white tile, letting the spray pour over her shivering body, mixing with the tears on her face. Her mind was a blur, a blank. All she could think was: Her career was dead. Her life was over. In a few hours, while she slept, she’d become the Most Hated Woman in America. Maybe the world.
How?
Why?
But she already knew the answer. What had Iris called them? The Pyramid. These were people who could make a witness video disappear from the internet. These were people who could invent an alias for a dead woman and wipe her off the customs records. These were people who could post fake statements from nonexistent people in Germany and keep news of a murder out of the European press.
Abbey had asked too many questions.
Whoever killed Deborah Mueller, whoever covered it up, had decided that Abbey was getting too close to the truth. Now they’d come to shut her down.
Abbey shut off the shower, but she stayed where she was. Panic wouldn’t help her. She had to think. She had to make a plan. But she didn’t know how to get answers in the middle of a firestorm.
“Think,” she said to herself. Step by step. What to do. Where to go.
First, a hotel. She couldn’t stay here. Her apartment was now ground zero for protests, and as soon as she showed her face outside, she’d be mobbed. She had to get away unseen, and then she could rent a room somewhere else in the city for a few days.
Second, a car. The mob had probably surrounded her car. She’d need to find another.
Third, money. She needed everything she could get her hands on to tide her over for a few days. Cash. She’d have to find a branch of her bank and withdraw everything she could. The less she used her credit cards, the better. Every time she handed over her card, they had a way to track her.
Fourth, a disguise. Definitely a disguise.
Abbey left the bathroom and quickly got dressed. She didn’t know how much time she had to get away. It was a security building, but sooner or later, the impatient mob would find a way inside and swarm the place until they found her door. She packed a few things in a travel bag, then stuffed her red hair under a tweed newsboy hat and covered her eyes with large sunglasses. She’d color her hair later when she had time, to make herself less noticeable when she was out on the DC streets.
When she was ready to go, she switched off her phone again—she didn’t know if they had a way to track her—and checked the apartment hallway. It was still empty. She took the stairs to the second floor, then made her way to the apartment of a retired woman she sometimes met for tea and chess. Mrs. Lovell answered the door, and it was obvious from the reaction on her face that she’d been watching the news.
“Abbey, oh, my God—” the woman began.
“It’s a mistake. It wasn’t me.”
“Well, I couldn’t believe that it was.”
“I need your help. Actually, I need your balcony.”
Mrs. Lovell understood immediately. She waved Abbey toward the back of her apartment, which faced the rear of the building. Her second-floor balcony was just a few feet above the alley. Abbey gave her a smile and a hug, and then she ran to the apartment’s patio doors and slid them open. The angry shouts of the protesters could still be heard on the other side of the building, but back here, she was alone.
Abbey climbed over the balcony and dropped to the alley below her, twisting her ankle as she landed. Not letting that slow her down, she limped past rows of garbage bins and garage stalls. When she got to the opposite end of the street, she stopped, tucked her head down, and shot a quick glance toward the crowd a hundred yards away. No one saw her. Turning her back on the mob, she hurried down 19th Street and lost herself in the DC neighborhoods.
Getting away was one thing, but she was on her own, hunted by an angry mob, with no way to prove that she was innocent. She had no allies. No one on her side.
God, she missed Jason.
She would have done anything to have him with her right now. If there was one man who could help her through this nightmare, it was Jason Bourne. But he was out of her life. She had no way to reach him and no idea where he was.