“I’m scared.”
“I know,” he says.
“Are you scared?”
“I’m…okay. I’m concerned. This will be figured out. I’m sure.”
He strokes her fine hair, a part of him still wondering how he—with brown hair, and Amy, with black hair—managed to come up with this little blond princess. Not an angel, good Lord, no, not with her temper and her insane curiosity and daring—like the time she saw a Bugs Bunny cartoon and climbed up on the garage roof, black umbrella in hand, convinced she could come down like an eight-year-old parachutist.
In his daughter’s profile, Tom sees the outline of Amy’s face, first time they met. It was at an afternoon college lecture series in Maine—where, full of himself and a year into his first journalism job at the Boston Globe, he pontificated on the state of the world and the military—and at a following reception, she came up to him in her Army uniform, a sergeant.
“Nice lecture,” she said. “Too bad fifty percent of it was bullshit.”
Stunned but instantly attracted to her smile and bright eyes, he said, “Which fifty percent?”
“Take me out to dinner, and I’ll tell you,” she said.
And he did just that, and for years afterward.
Denise stares up at him, still looking like a much younger version of her mother.
“Why did they take us, Daddy?”
“Because…they want something. And we’re going to be traded, like when you trade those Magic trading cards.”
“What do they want?”
“I don’t know.”
Denise rolls over and now he’s stroking her forehead. “Who are they, Dad? I mean…they’re so scary. And it hurt. It really hurt when they zapped me.”
“I don’t know who they are, either. I’m sorry.”
He takes his hand away from her smooth forehead, and she scrunches her face, like she’s trying not to cry.
“Dad?” she asks.
“Yes, hon?”
“Will Mom and her friends rescue us?”
Tom says, “I’m sure.”
“The Army. I bet those bad guys kidnapped us because of Mom and her job.”
“Maybe,” Tom says. “In the meantime, let’s see if we can’t rescue ourselves.”
“Huh?”
He rubs the side of her face. “We’re smart. We’re tough. Maybe we can figure out a way of escaping. What do you think?”
She nods, barely smiling. “That sounds good. I’ll start thinking, okay? And when we get out, maybe you can call Mrs. Millett. About Mister Banjo.”
He now rubs her belly. “Sure. That sounds great.”
Now she’s smiling and he turns away, because he’s afraid he’s going to choke up in front of his daughter, who is relying on Daddy to save her. And who believes—and makes a good case—that this kidnapping is due to Amy’s work in the Army.
But Tom knows better, and the guilt is threatening to consume him.
For he has secrets, secrets he’s been keeping from Amy.
And he’s terrified they will end up killing him and Denise.
CHAPTER 9
IN THE kidnap note that I’ve left behind at the house, I was warned not to contact any military or law enforcement personnel.
But they didn’t say anything about public libraries.
I’m at a computer terminal in the corner of the Kingstowne Library, which on the outside looks like an outlet mall—no doubt because it was built in the Landsdowne Centre shopping complex—and on the inside has lots of bright colors and white ceilings and open shelves. I grew up in a small town in Maine, and our library was one of those places donated by Andrew Carnegie, a dark, Victorian-style building with lots of brick and turrets. Sometimes, when the librarian dozed, I’d play hide-and-go-seek with my gal pals.
Back then, there were no computers, but this library has a nice little section for public use, and I’m hard at work, believe it or not. A few years ago the president and the secretary of defense made a big deal of transferring millions of dollars from our DoD budget to help upgrade computer systems in libraries across the country. Yay, everyone said. But there might have been a few nays if folks realized that in all this upgrading a back door was installed in the software for the use of nosy intelligence officers like myself who were stuck somewhere in flyover country or on the run.
Call it defense in depth, or increasing the stability of vital DoD intelligence services, or another few bricks in the wall-to-wall surveillance of everything we do in the States, but all I know is that it works, and I need it.
I go to an obscure federal government website about protecting rare flowers and click on a tiny gray box in the lower right-hand corner, which brings up a log-in box. I gain access by using my name, Army service number, and password.
There’s a host of options available to me but first on my list is getting a readout of all surveillance cameras in and around Kingstowne, including those at service stations (like our friendly Sunoco from down the way), ATMs, drugstores, malls, banks, private homes, private businesses, and anywhere else with a view of the busy streets of Fairfax County. That program is called TANGO TRAPPER.
Once I “caught” the carpet-cleaning van going down our street, I saved the blurry photo, then repeated the process when it exited. And then I caught it one more time, just as it was heading onto exit 169A north on I-95.
Three catches.
Enough.
I go to another program, feed in the three blurry photos. Wait.
Wait some more.
Deep in some heavily guarded and secure server farm out there somewhere, things are hard at work.
Do I know exactly what is going on?
Nope.
But I’m not worried.
I take a moment and look around the pretty and safe library. A number of kids sitting at the tables, or gliding past the crowded shelves. Seeing a blond girl working at a round table stabs at me so hard that I have to turn around and look elsewhere.
Once upon a time, places like these that contained books and knowledge were stored in heavily fortified monasteries in Europe, to protect them from the barbarians.
Now the barbarians are no longer at the gates. Thanks to the wonders of this century, the barbarians could reach across half the globe and give you a deadly tap on the shoulder with a digital finger. Viruses, malware, phishing…
I go back to the screen, using the program called BORAX.
There’s my target van, sharpened up, clean, and looking fine.
ABLE CAREPT CLEANERS, ALEXANDRIA.
With a local phone number painted below.
The van looks legit.
Stolen?
Probably.
I’ll look into that later.
With the sharpened photo of the van in my digital grasp, I send it along to another complicated tracking program that uses algorithms, predictive software, traffic analysis programs, and other cool stuff to watch vehicle traffic on the nation’s roads, from highways to dirt paths, as long as there is a surveillance camera in the area. This one is called CYCLOPS. I imagine some bored bureaucrat somewhere in Crystal City, whose job it is, all day long, to assign code names to various programs.
Do I know the intricacies of the CYCLOPS program?
No.
Just like the sweet kids wandering around out in the safe confines of this library don’t know how their handheld devices work.