“Down!” he said, in a hushed but urgent voice.

  Kate hurried to the brick wall and hid behind a tall stack of freight pallets. The warehouses were much deeper than wide, nearly the length of a football field from front to back. The alley was barely wide enough for two vehicles, and as far as Kate could tell, the only way out was the way they had come in. There was no streetlamp, or at least not a working one, and the moonlight did little more than create confusing shadows in what seemed like an endless black tunnel. But as Kate’s eyes adjusted, she could make out Diego’s silhouette ahead of her. He was hiding behind a Dumpster, pistol at the ready. He signaled for her to be quiet, which made her even more aware of how heavily she was breathing.

  Kate calmed her nerves and listened. It had sounded as though the gunshot had come from the alley, outside the warehouse, but it wasn’t easy to pinpoint a single gunshot. Diego signaled her forward with a wave of his hand. His hiding spot behind the Dumpster was better than hers, and she eagerly came to join him, moving as quickly and keeping as low as possible.

  “I want you to stay right here,” he whispered.

  Kate nodded in agreement.

  Diego raised his pistol and stepped out from behind the Dumpster. Through an opening between the wall and the Dumpster’s edge, Kate watched him move deeper into the alley, his every move like a trained law enforcement agent. Roll-down steel shutters covered the windows and doors that faced the alley. Corrugated boxes, flattened and stacked for disposal, one on top of the other, rose in cardboard towers. Diego took cover behind one of the stacks about twenty feet ahead of Kate. He listened. Kate listened harder. There was only silence. Diego stepped out carefully from behind the cardboard tower and started forward.

  A shot rang out. Diego went down, dropping to the pavement somewhere on the other side of the stack of crushed boxes. He was completely out of Kate’s line of sight, making it impossible for her to know if he was alive or dead. Kate had to make a decision, but the possibility that Diego was only wounded, in need of help, eliminated one option.

  She couldn’t turn and run.

  With her back pressed to the brick face of the building, Kate poked her head around the corner, peering cautiously down the black alley. She took another step forward, then stopped. There was a noise from the other side of the stack of flattened cardboard boxes, where Diego had fallen. If Diego was alive, she couldn’t tell; and if his shooter was lying in wait on the other side, she couldn’t tell, either. She took cover behind the stack, her heart pounding.

  A chorus of sirens whined in the distance. Police were on the way. Diego must have called. That meant he was alive on the other side.

  Two more quick shots rang out, which popped in the stacked cardboard. Kate hit the deck and saw a man running away from her. The woman in the red dress was with him. He turned and fired again in Kate’s direction, still running. Kate log-rolled across the alley, and she didn’t stop rolling until she bumped right up against Diego’s body. She was looking directly into his eyes.

  “How bad?” she whispered.

  He tried to speak but didn’t answer.

  Kate checked his pulse. Weak, but still beating. The wound was to his upper thigh. He’d had the initial presence of mind to rip a rope-like fastener from the stacked boxes and make a tourniquet, but the blood loss had pushed him into near unconsciousness. Kate checked the tourniquet. Another gunshot pierced the darkness, the bullet whizzing overhead. Kate braced for more gunfire, but she heard only the echo of footfalls on asphalt. The shooter was making a run for it.

  “Go,” said Diego.

  “I can’t leave you here!”

  Ahead, in the darkness, a stack of boxes toppled to the pavement. Kate took aim with her pistol, ready to fire.

  “Kate?”

  She recognized the voice, and Kate’s heart leapt into her throat. “Patrick?”

  He hurried toward her and immediately saw the gravity of the situation.

  “It’s my friend Diego,” said Kate. “He’s hit but alive.”

  The police sirens in the distance grew louder.

  “I chased Liu toward you,” said Patrick, using the name he’d given him. “But I never fired a shot. He has Olga.”

  “No one ran past us,” said Kate.

  “There’s no other way out of this alley, except—”

  They raised their eyes toward the sky at the same time. Liu was four stories above them on the fire escape ladder. Olga was with him.

  “You stay with your friend until the cops get here,” said Patrick.

  “Patrick, you can’t—” she started to say, but the look in his eyes said the matter was not debatable.

  “I promised Olga I wouldn’t leave without her,” he said.

  Kate squeezed his hand, so proud and yet wanting to tackle him and make him stay put.

  “Please be careful,” she said, and he was on his way.

  Chapter 65

  Patrick ran to the fire escape ladder, grabbed a rung, and started climbing the warehouse wall. As he stared up into the night sky, with countless rungs to go, the long and narrow ladder triggered a childhood memory of a picture book Kate had read to him as a toddler, Papa, Please Get the Moon for Me. For one scary moment, he wondered if his life was flashing before his eyes.

  He was halfway up. Liu was at least three stories above him, and Patrick looked up just as he pushed Olga up onto the roof of the building. Patrick kept climbing. Liu fired a shot from the top of the ladder. The bullet skipped past Patrick against the brick wall. He pressed his body as close to the ladder as possible and looked up. No sight of Liu. The moon was above him, but this was definitely no children’s book. Patrick shook off the distraction and summoned the courage of the U.S. Army Rangers who stormed the cliffs at Pointe du Hoc in support of the Omaha Beach landings on D-Day in the face of enemy fire.

  Patrick, lead the way! he told himself, borrowing the Rangers motto he’d heard a thousand times in his Call of Duty video games.

  Holding a gun was slowing his climb, so he tucked it in his belt. Hand over hand he ascended the ladder, reaching the top in a minute or so, stopping just below the roofline. Only at this height did he realize that the back of the building was built on the edge of a steep gorge in the hillside. Death was likely if he fell from the ladder into the alley; it was an absolute certainty if the fall were from the roof into the ravine.

  Patrick removed the gun from his belt. With pistol in hand, he slid himself up and over the top rung, slithering onto the roof on his belly to avoid making a target of himself. The roof was flat and barren as a desert, save for a few exhaust vents and pipes protruding from the tar-and-gravel surface. His gaze swept the entire roof, or at least as much as he could see from his worm’s-eye perspective. He saw no sign of Liu or Olga. Slowly, he raised his head for a better look.

  The roof was tiered, he discovered, with two levels, both flat. He was on the lower tier, alone. Another ladder led to the higher tier, toward the rear of the building—where Olga had to be with Liu. Patrick jumped to his feet and ran to the second ladder. He kept his gun in hand this time, climbing as quietly as possible. There were only ten rungs, and he stopped when his eyes were level with the second-tier roofline.

  “That’s far enough,” said Liu.

  Patrick froze. The elevated tier of the roof ran the entire width of the building, but it was a mere ten feet from Patrick’s place on the ladder to the back of the building. Liu was standing at the very edge of the roofline. Olga was in front of him, looking terrified with the barrel of his pistol burrowing into her right cheek.

  “Hurting Olga gains you nothing,” said Patrick.

  “Lay your pistol on the roof or she gets a bullet.”

  “Don’t!” shouted Olga. “He got what he wanted! He got the flash drive!”

  Patrick didn’t move.

  “Now!” said Liu, as he pressed the gun harder against Olga’s face.

  The utter terror in her eyes left Patrick no choice. He rested his weapon on the roof.

  “Let her go,” said Patrick. “Keep the flash drive and go. I won’t stop you. I don’t care if you get away.”

  “You and I both know that whatever is on that flash drive is worthless.”

  “That’s not Olga’s fault.”

  “No. It’s yours.”

  “I had nothing to do with what Mr. Peel delivered on that flash drive.”

  “You’re the one who said to bring Code Six as ransom. Code Six is made-up bullshit, isn’t it, Patrick? You told him to deliver bullshit code.”

  Patrick was silent.

  “Don’t get me wrong,” Liu said with sarcasm. “I can see why you’d want to play hero and keep the real code out of the hands of the Chinese government. As if it’s any less dangerous in the hands of your own government.”

  “You’re never going to get it,” said Patrick.

  “Not from Peel, that’s for sure.”

  “Not from anyone,” said Patrick.

  “That’s where you’re wrong. Like I told Jeremy: we could buy it, or we could steal it. Might as well make a buck.”

  “Your logic may have worked with him. But I’m not for sale.”

  “That’s a shame.”

  The police sirens he’d first heard in the alley were getting closer. All he had to do was keep the situation stable for a few minutes more.

  “Just let her go. Please.”

  “I have every intention of doing so,” said Liu. “And in case anyone asks, be sure to tell them: I did it for Kate.”

  Before Patrick could react to those words, Liu pivoted, flung Olga around, and pushed her off the building.

  “Olga!”

  Patrick pulled himself up over the top rung and grabbed his pistol. Liu took one last look at him, and Patrick braced himself for the explosion of gunfire, but there was no sound at all. Liu turned and faced the deep gorge in the hillside behind the building.

  And then he jumped.

  Patrick ran to the roof’s edge. The gorge behind the building cut even deeper into the hillside than he’d thought—so deep that the warehouse roof was actually above the moving cables that ran the gondolas. Another hundred feet below the cable, at the very deepest point of the rocky ravine, beneath the glowing lights of a passing gondola, Patrick caught a glimpse of a red dress. His heart ached, and he could barely believe his eyes. Slowly, his gaze shifted to the gondola that had just passed below the roofline, and he saw the most sickening sight.

  Atop the car, riding to the safety of the next gondola platform, was a cold-blooded killer who deserved to die.

  Chapter 66

  Kate rode with Diego in the back of the ambulance to the emergency room.

  Imbanaco Grupo Quirónsalud clinic was ten minutes away from Siloé, so the hospital’s surgical staff and seventeen operating rooms were no strangers to gunshot wounds. Enrique was coming out of surgery as Diego was going in. Kate called her father from the hospital waiting room. She told him that she and Patrick were safe, that Peel was dead, and that Enrique was on the mend. He had just one thing to say.

  “I want you on the first flight out of Cali.”

  “I’m already booked. It leaves at eight a.m.”

  “That’s not soon enough. I’ll hire a private jet.”

  “Dad, it’s almost eleven o’clock here.”

  “I can have you out of there by midnight.”

  Kate hesitated. “I can’t leave yet. Patrick is still at the morgue. He wants to say a proper goodbye to Olga.”

  “Fine. Then he can stay. You’re coming home.”

  “Said the father to his eleven-year-old daughter.”

  “I just want you safe,” he said.

  “I risked my life to come here and get Patrick. I’m not leaving without him.”

  “This is getting silly. All this for a prostitute?”

  Kate swallowed her anger, but not entirely. “She was a victim of sex trafficking. A victim of your ex–business partner. So I’m going to hang up now, Dad, and try to forget what you just said. I’m flying home tomorrow with Patrick, after he says goodbye to Olga.”

  “I’m sorry, Kate.”

  “Good night,” she said, and the call ended.

  A text message came a few minutes later. Patrick had left the morgue and purchased a prepaid cellphone so that Kate could reach him. Diego was just about to come out of surgery, but with the general anesthesia, both he and Enrique would probably sleep through the night. Kate was exhausted and had yet to check out of her hotel. She texted Patrick back to let him know that Enrique’s adjoining room was available, if he wanted to catch some sleep before their flight in the morning. He swung by the hospital via Uber, and they shared a ride to the hotel.

  “I’m so sorry about Olga,” said Kate.

  He was casting an empty gaze out the car window. “Thanks.”

  Kate wanted to say more, but she remembered all too well how she felt after seeing her mother at the morgue. She decided to let him bring it up, but he didn’t. At least not directly.

  “Have you figured out what Project Naïveté Two is?” he asked.

  “I know it includes a scraping tool to collect personal information.”

  “Not just information. It collects virtually every form of human expression, verbal or nonverbal, and translates it into code. The code is personalized to every technology user and becomes a personal sentiment library. The goal is to have a personal sentiment library for every person under the age of thirty who uses technology.”

  “For what?” she asked.

  “Somewhere in those libraries is the future CEO of Buck. The future chief justice of the Supreme Court. The future president of the United States. And on and on.”

  “So the idea is, what? Blackmail these people when they grow up and reach positions of power?”

  “This isn’t about extorting or embarrassing someone for something stupid they did as a child. We’re talking about knowing what that person fears. What that person values. What makes that person tick. That kind of window into the adult psyche starts by building a personal sentiment library in the formative years.”

  “Let me guess: the more expressive a user is on social media, the more robust his or her personal sentiment library will be.”

  “Yep.”

  “And we all know that the more expressive user isn’t going to be a ‘him.’ It’s a ‘her.’”

  “That’s a fact. Teenage girls, especially, are way out in front of boys in sharing what the industry calls sentiment data.”

  Kate was beginning to connect the final dots, but it wasn’t easy to say it. “After my mother died, I visited Sandra Levy to find out why she was trying to steal code. If I were to tell you she said she did it for her daughter, what would you say?”

  “I’d say she told me the exact same thing.”

  “When?”

  “Right before she was arrested. She knew the FBI was closing in. She needed to line up someone on the inside to take the baton from her and stop Naïveté Two. She chose me.”

  “How did she expect you to stop it?”

  Patrick turned his gaze away from the window and looked at her directly. “Expose it. Give people hard proof of how their own government intends to handle the next generation of leaders. Make them understand how it would be even worse in the hands of a hostile nation.”

  “Do you think Peel was on to you? Is that why he sent you to Colombia?”

  “Probably. My only regret is getting your mother involved.”

  The car entered the hotel motor court and stopped. “What did you just say?” asked Kate.

  Patrick climbed out of the backseat. Kate followed him into the lobby and to the reception desk.

  “Getting my mother involved in what?”

  “This mess.”

  The receptionist gave them an extra key to Enrique’s room, and Patrick started toward the elevator. Kate continued after him.

  “Patrick, you’re not nine years old, and I’m not your teenage babysitter. You can’t just drop a bomb like that and walk off. Talk to me.”

  He stopped midway through the lobby, looked at her, and spoke in a voice mixed with anger and apology—but the anger was at himself. “I screwed up, Kate.”

  Kate wasn’t sure she could handle what he was trying to say, but this was Patrick, and she forced herself to be patient. “Tell me what it is. Nothing is unfixable.”

  “It’s not that I wanted to hide anything from you. It’s like I’m figuring out I screwed up in real time—as I’m talking to you right now.”

  Kate was about to lose it. “Patrick, just tell me.”

  “I was in a tight spot,” he said. “To stop Naïveté Two, I needed the highest credentials in the company. I could think of only one way to get them.”

  “You stole them?”

  “‘Borrow’ was the word I used with your mother.”

  “My mother never had any credentials to borrow.”

  “I know. I figured that if your father’s mistress was able to access his credentials, so could his wife.”

  Kate looked away in disbelief, then back. “There’s so much wrong with what you just said. First of all, my father didn’t have credentials to Naïveté Two. And Sandra Levy was not his mistress.”

  “I know that now. That’s where I screwed up. I went to your mom. I told her what I thought was going on.”

  “Told her what? I want to know exactly.”

  Patrick struggled, then answered. “I told her that Sandra was using your father’s credentials to access Naïveté Two.”

  “Oh, my God. You made her think my father was sleeping with Sandra Levy.”

  “I’m sorry. Sandra told me she got the credentials by ‘playing the boss.’ I assumed she meant your father.”

  “She meant Jeremy Peel.”

  “Yes. We all know that now. But back then, I was just thinking the same thing everybody thought about Sandra and your father.”

  “That they were having an affair.”

  “Yes. I didn’t even realize what I’d done until now. That’s not an excuse. You have every right to be furious with me. But I want you to know that your mother was so brave, Kate. I told her how awful this project was, especially for girls and young women. I told her Sandra was doing it for her daughter. And you know what she said?”