“The Pyramid didn’t just manipulate the story,” Bourne said as they drove northeastward toward the Georgia state line on I-85. “They created it. They used Lennon to start the fire, and they must have known there were people in that building. Murder was the point all along. That was the key to getting Gage out of the race and swinging the election. And this woman Louisa knew all about it. If she was planning to tell the story to Peter Chancellor, it’s no wonder they had to get rid of her.”
“But who was she?” Abbey asked. “We still don’t know anything about her. Chancellor said she came from Varak’s bot farm, whatever that is. But he didn’t know anything more than that.”
Bourne was quiet as he considered the problem. He kept his eyes on the mirrors, making sure they hadn’t picked up a tail outside Atlanta. It was late, and there were only a few other cars sharing the interstate with them. He stayed close to the speed limit, not wanting to draw any attention from the highway patrols. Ahead of him, he saw a glint of water under the starlight as they crossed the bridge at Lake Hartwell. A highway sign welcomed them to South Carolina, and he took the first exit past the bridge. He bypassed the welcome center, which would be routinely checked by police, and instead used the next overpass to head for a state recreation area that bordered the water. He drove deep into the park until he found an empty campsite near one of the lake’s inlets.
“Do you want to spend the night here?” Abbey asked.
“Yes. We should rest, even for a couple of hours. But I’ve also got an idea about how we can find out more about Louisa.”
“What is it?”
“We don’t know her name, but we do have her picture. So it’s possible we can find her online that way.”
“You mean a photo-matching search?”
“Yes, but it has to run deeper than that. This isn’t just about Google results. We need a hacker who can access databases we can’t get to.”
“Do you have someone in mind?”
“I do, but you won’t like it,” Jason said. “Do you remember Aaron Haberman? We used him when we were in New York together two years ago. He worked for Carillon Technology, but of course, they went belly-up after the Medusa operation. I’ve kept track of him since then, just in case I ever needed him again.”
“Haberman?” Abbey remarked with a disgusted curl of her lip. “Wasn’t he the prick who dredged up nude photos I sent to a college boyfriend? You want to call him?”
“He’s a sleazebag, but he’s good.”
She rolled her eyes. “Well, don’t tell him I’m with you. You’re the only one who gets to see me naked these days.”
Jason smiled. He opened a video call and punched in a number from memory on his burner phone. He wasn’t surprised that Haberman answered immediately. Like most hackers, he kept odd hours. He could only see the man’s head and shoulders, but he saw enough to know that Haberman was shirtless, with a bony chest and matchstick limbs. The two-tone frames of his glasses were purple and red, and his oversized mop of curly hair had streaks in the same colors. His eyes shot with annoyance to the portion of his computer screen where he’d answered the incoming call, and he didn’t immediately recognize Bourne’s shadowy face in the darkness of the Bronco.
“Who the fuck are you?”
“You don’t remember me, Aaron?” Bourne said. “I’m crushed. We’re old friends.”
The twentysomething tech’s eyes narrowed as he stared at the screen, and Jason could hear him typing furiously in the background. Haberman had the odd ability to type one-handed, because with his other hand, he lifted a middle finger at the screen.
“You,” he muttered. “How’d you get this number? Nobody has this number.”
“We have mutual friends.”
He clucked his tongue in disgust. “CIA?”
“You sold your soul to the government after Carillon,” Bourne said. “The government likes to keep track of the souls it owns.”
“What do you want?” The hacker continued to type at a frenzied pace. “And what the fuck are you doing in South Carolina, Bourne? Oh, and you can tell the Canadian bitch I know she’s with you, so she doesn’t have to pretend. By the way, tell her she’d love to see the photo I just transferred to my screen saver.”
Haberman snickered.
In the SUV next to Jason, Abbey’s mouth fell open in shock. She was about to scream a profanity back at the hacker, but he held up a hand to silence her.
“Let me guess, photo recognition on the highway traffic cams?” Jason asked. “I’m clued in to your magic tricks, Aaron.”
The hacker shrugged. “That, plus cell phone towers. And just so you know, the plates on that Bronco you’re driving don’t match the vehicle they’re registered to. So tell your girlfriend to keep her tongue in her mouth this time, or maybe I’ll call the South Carolina cops and tell them where they can find a stolen car.”
“And maybe I won’t tell the IRS about the corporate accounts you skimmed and transferred to crypto when you were helping the FBI shut down Carillon,” Bourne told him.
Haberman’s face flushed. He pushed his glasses up his nose. “Tell me what you want. I’m busy.”
“Busy jerking off,” Abbey muttered. “No wonder the little perv types one-handed.”
“I heard that! I fucking heard that! What did I say? Tell her to shut up!”
“Zip it, Aaron,” Bourne told him. “We’re looking for someone. A woman. The photo’s on my phone, but I assume you already hacked my photo library while we’ve been talking.”
Haberman shrugged. “Yeah, sure I did. Pretty boring stuff. I thought maybe you’d been taking some new naked pics of your girlfriend. She still keep the lawn mowed down south?”
Jason reached out and put a hand over Abbey’s mouth, because she was about to erupt. “Don’t piss me off, Aaron. You really wouldn’t like the consequences. Just find the woman. I need to know who she is.”
“She’s dead,” the hacker replied with another shrug, because he was already running the search. “She was murdered in DC.”
“I know she’s dead, but her name’s not Deborah Mueller. Her name’s Louisa, but that’s all we know about her. I want to know who she really is and where else she’s been and who she’s been hanging out with in the last year or so.”
“All right, give me a sec.”
Haberman blacked out his screen so they couldn’t see him anymore, but they could still hear the tapping of keys. A few seconds later, they heard swear words mumbled under his breath, then another flurry of keystrokes. Five minutes passed, then ten, which was an unusual amount of time for the hacker to be stumped. Finally, his annoyed face reappeared on the screen of Bourne’s phone.
“Well, you always give me the cute ones, Bourne. This is fucking weird, I’ll tell you that.”
“What is?”
Haberman shook his head. “First of all, I don’t find a Louisa anywhere in the world who matches her face. No way she hasn’t had public records somewhere along the line, but they’re all gone, or they’ve been tampered with.”
“Tampered with? What does that mean?”
“That’s the other thing that’s pretty wild. I’ve only found a handful of photo hits of her in various databases—literally not even ten—but I also found those same exact photos with different faces in them. I.e., not her anymore. She’s been replaced. In one pic, there’s this Louisa, but in every other version I find, it’s somebody completely different. And not the same person each time, which makes it even harder to track.”
“How is that possible?” Bourne asked.
“They’re deepfakes. Really good ones. Somebody has been meticulously calling up online images of this woman and erasing her out of existence. They’ve been thorough. Only a few of the originals made it back to me, mostly because the search recognition is marginal. I’m pretty sure it’s her, but there’s only a sixty-odd-percentage match. The one thing I’ll tell you is that it seems like she’s been a bad girl.”
“Meaning what?”
“The places I’ve found her seem to be mostly where shit’s happened,” Haberman said. “Since you’re not far from Atlanta, I’m guessing you know about her and the fire. She was there when that building went up last year. But I’ve also got her in Budapest where those dissidents were jailed a few months ago. And in Minnesota when there was some kind of pipeline explosion that killed a couple of protesters. Also in Wuhan in late 2019, which, shall we say, is really interesting.”
“But nothing about her identity? Who she was, where she worked?”
“Not a thing.”
Bourne frowned. “Okay, send me what you found.”
“Pics are on the way. And with that, we’re done. All debts are paid. Right?”
“Almost,” Jason said. “If you’ve got any pictures of Abbey, delete them. Hard delete, Aaron, gone from the internet. Got it?”
The hacker scowled. “Got it.”
Bourne hung up the phone. Abbey leaned over and kissed him. “Thank you for that.”
“He won’t do it.”
“I know, but you tried.”
Jason opened the photo library on his burner phone, and he saw that several new images had arrived there. With Abbey leaning in close to him, they went through each of the pictures carefully, enlarging the images as far as they could without completely losing the resolution. But most told them nothing. In several, Louisa’s face was blurry, barely recognizable, and she was part of a crowd where she didn’t seem to be interacting with anyone else. In others, she was alone, in settings neither of them could identify. None of the pictures gave them a clue as to who she really was.
Then Bourne stopped.
He swiped back to an earlier picture, and this time, he focused not on Louisa, but on another woman half-cropped out of the shot. He could only make out part of her profile. She was talking to someone else who was out of the camera frame, and she was nowhere near Louisa, who stood in the shadows behind her. But Louisa’s eyes were clearly trained on the other woman in the picture.
“Do you see it?” Bourne asked Abbey. “Do you recognize her?”
“I don’t think so,” she replied with a frown. “Can you zoom in?”
Jason enlarged the photo again, and Abbey whistled under her breath.
“Saira Kohli.”