Then came a screen capture from a Twitter account under the name JustCuz.

  Hey @FBI! Any luck finding #EveAbajian? Didn’t think so.

  The tweet, stamped for five thirty that morning, had been posted with the picture of Eve they’d sent me the night before, mouth taped and eyes wide. It gave me the same hollow feeling in the pit of my stomach as it had the first time I saw it.

  And there was more. The third message was a link to a CNN story with the headline FBI ABDUCTION TWEETED BY ALLEGED KIDNAPPERS.

  Authorities are following up on a disturbing tweet that appeared briefly online Wednesday morning. The single posting, from an account held under the username JustCuz, referenced the unconfirmed kidnapping of a Boston-area FBI employee and included a graphic picture of the alleged victim. The tweet has since been taken down by Twitter.

  CNN has learned that the victim in question is Eve Abajian, a cybersecurity analyst and consultant with the FBI’s Boston field office. Witnesses confirmed that police were called early this morning to the street outside of Abajian’s home in South Boston, where the body of retired federal agent George Yates was found in his car, following an apparent execution-style shooting. Calls to the FBI for comment were not immediately returned.

  My little safe house was starting to feel like a bomb shelter. Everything was blowing up out there and I was stuck inside, listening to the explosions.

  These guys knew exactly what they were doing. They knew the tweet would be taken down, and they knew it wouldn’t matter. Once it got out, the media machine would treat it like the catnip it was meant to be.

  What do you want from me? I messaged back.

  I didn’t expect a quick answer, but I got one.

  We want you to help us disappear.

  Disappear? What did that mean?

  How? I asked.

  Cable this phone to any networked computer at the FBI. We’ll take care of the rest.

  That’s when I knew I was talking to the other guy. The one I’d started to think of as the Engineer, as opposed to the Poet. This one was all business and no chat.

  What about Eve? I asked.

  You do your part and she walks away.

  Why should I believe anything you say? I wrote.

  Not my problem, he answered. Your call.

  They had to be making this up as they went along. They couldn’t have known ahead of time where I’d be taken. But now they were trying to capitalize on it.

  Or at least this guy was.

  Were the two of them even talking to each other at this point? Were they deliberately trying to confuse me? Playing me off of each other?

  For that matter, were these two even in the same location? I had no way of knowing.

  The only sure thing was that I couldn’t give in to this latest demand. Not even for Eve. It was one thing to compromise my own safety. It was another to allow them access to the Bureau’s servers. That would put far too many other people in jeopardy. And if I knew Eve at all, I knew she’d back me up on this. There was simply no way.

  But the Engineer didn’t have to know that.

  I’m stuck here, I wrote. How do you suggest I do this?

  You have six hours, he answered. Already, that damn timer of his had popped up again and started counting down.

  I need more than that, I wrote.

  This is not a negotiation, he told me. In six hours, we find our own way to disappear. Then Eve stays put and she can starve to death while you look for her. Think on that.

  A bolt of rage shot through me. I forced myself to set down the phone rather than hurl it across the room. Then I picked up the mug I’d been drinking from and threw that instead. It smashed into a shower of blue shards and coffee, dripping down the wall by the door. And no, I didn’t clean it up. Or care.

  I took up the phone again.

  Please give me more time, I wrote.

  Silence.

  Hello? We need to talk about this.

  Still nothing. He’d said all he was going to say, and I was left there with no more than the sound of my own shaky breathing. Clearly, the next move was mine to make.

  But I had no idea what it was going to be.

  Chapter 74

  AT AROUND TEN, Billy came by. He had an FBI duffel full of my clothes, along with my bike, my indoor trainer, and everything else on my list, with one exception.

  “No laptop?” I asked.

  “You’re officially off-line as long as you’re here,” he said. “I know that’s like cutting off your oxygen, but you understand.”

  There was so much I couldn’t say, and even more on my mind. I wasn’t even sure if I should feel guilty for hiding so much from Billy. It was like a complex moral equation and I didn’t have the skills, much less the presence of mind or the time, to balance it out. All I could do was take this one thing at a time.

  “What about my family?” I asked.

  “I went by your folks’ place this morning. They’re concerned, of course, but they’re doing okay,” he said. “What about you? How are you holding up?”

  “Never better,” I said. Billy didn’t even try to smile at that. “Okay, I’m horrible,” I told him. “I’m going crazy in here. I want to cry and kill someone at the same time.”

  He nodded with the calm understanding of a Bureau vet, even if he didn’t know all the particulars of my personal hell that morning.

  “Listen,” he said, “I can’t tell you much, but since part of this has gone public, there’s no reason to keep it from you.”

  He navigated his phone to a page and handed it to me. What I saw was the Globe’s website, with their own version of the CNN story from that morning. The headline this time was TWEETED FBI KIDNAP CONFIRMED.

  “Oh, my God!” I said. I tried to seem genuinely surprised and took a minute to scan the article for anything I didn’t already know. Apparently, the FBI had held a press conference to confirm Eve’s kidnapping, but they weren’t sharing any details about the case.

  “We figured we might as well own it,” Billy said. “It wasn’t a bell we could unring.” Then he thumbed toward the door. “But come on. I can at least show you around before I go.”

  “Really?” I wasn’t even expecting to get out of the apartment that day.

  “Don’t get too excited,” he told me. “It’s the world’s shortest tour.”

  The hall outside my room was as empty as it had been the night before. All the closed doors looked exactly alike except for the fire exit, which had an alarmed crash bar and a surveillance camera mounted above.

  “Your ID card will get you into your apartment, and into the admin office during business hours,” Billy said. “Other than that, you’re not to go anywhere.”

  “Admin office?” I asked.

  He pressed his own card to the reader on the door directly opposite mine. The little red light clicked to green, and Billy pushed the door open.

  “Welcome to the end of the tour,” he said.

  I followed him into a cramped, windowless office. A woman was sitting alone at a U-shaped workstation, and she stood up as we came in. I couldn’t help noticing her desktop computer, as well as the ASUS laptop sitting on her return. I wasn’t sure what that might mean for me, but it was something.

  “Angela Hoot, this is Rena Partridge, one of our operations coordinators,” Billy said.

  “Angela, hi.” She shook my hand with a reassuring smile. “If there’s anything you need—drugstore run, a message for Billy Boy here, or even just some kind of favorite foods—I’m your gal.”

  With her short salt-and-pepper hair and the red glasses on a chain, she seemed like someone’s elderly babysitter, not a high-security-clearance FBI employee. I liked her right away.

  “I’ll probably have to take you up on that,” I said. “Thank you in advance.”

  If I needed to get online without the Android, this office opened up some possibilities, I thought. Maybe not with Rena’s desktop, which would be hardwired into the building’s network. But the laptop was an option—

  “Angela?” Keats said.

  I snapped back to attention. They were both looking at me like I’d missed something. Which, for all I knew, I had.

  “Hon, you should get some sleep,” Rena said. “You look exhausted.”

  I didn’t argue with that. I just thanked her again and followed Billy back out to the hall. He wasn’t kidding about the world’s shortest tour, either. Three steps later, we were standing outside my door like it was the end of some strange date.

  Our night together in Portland seemed about a century ago. A past lifetime. Maybe a future one, too, but I couldn’t think about that right now.

  “I’ve got to run,” Billy said.

  “Of course,” I told him. “Thanks for bringing my stuff.”

  He hesitated and tilted his head to catch my eye. “You know this isn’t your fault, right?” he said.

  “That’s a complicated question,” I told him. “Maybe one for another time.”

  “Right.” He looked at his watch. The clock was ticking for both of us. “I’ll check back when I can,” he said.

  And one tick later, he was gone.

  Chapter 75

  NORMALLY, THE BEST way for me to get my head on straight is by hitting the trail with my bike. But “normal” was off the table right now, so I set up my trainer in the middle of the room and started riding in place.

  I left the Android where I could see it, in case anything new came in. Then I got a good crank going, put my head down, and tried to synthesize everything I knew into a cohesive plan of attack.

  As I turned the various factors over and around in my head like a Rubik’s Cube, I kept coming back to the same idea: geolocating malware. If I could sneak the right kind of self-loading program onto one of the devices these guys were using on their end, I could get back an IP address, and from that a physical location.

  Which meant there was a possibility that I could actually find Eve without ever leaving the building.

  The real question was how to get this done without them noticing, much less in the next four and a half hours.

  I thought about what Eve said to me once: Sometimes you have to look past the code and into the coder. With people like Darren Wendt, that was easy. Darren had all the intellectual depth of a kiddie pool. He couldn’t have been more oblivious to the hacks I sent his way.

  These guys were different. Maybe they were typical ego cases for hackers, but they were also smart as hell and well resourced.

  Lucky for me, I was smart as hell, too.

  I downshifted several gears and cranked the trainer’s resistance until I was riding up a virtual thirty-degree incline. It put an exquisite kind of pain into my quads and glutes, and I told myself there was no stopping until I’d figured this out or reached pure muscle failure, whichever came first.

  Sticking with the malware idea, it made sense to target the Poet, not the Engineer. He was the one I knew for sure was in the same location as Eve, since he’d recorded her voice and sent it to me. He also seemed more human. Less focused. More distractible.

  I hated to think about what it was going to take to distract him. As he’d said himself, I knew what he liked. But I’d deal with that when I had to.

  In the meantime, I focused on the tech aspects of this hack, laying out contingency plans like a flowchart in my mind.

  I don’t know how many miles I covered. My thoughts were spinning as fast as those pedals, and I barely noticed as I went from smooth, even strokes to jerky, sporadic pulls. When I couldn’t manage one more rotation, I eased back the resistance and coasted into a cooldown, arms overhead and sweat streaming.

  I knew what I wanted to do now. Or at least I knew what I wanted to try. There were no guarantees, but as that ticking timer made abundantly clear, I couldn’t afford to sit around on my ass, waiting for a better idea.

  Ready or not, it was time to flip this game.

  Chapter 76

  I DISMOUNTED MY bike, muscles singing, and peeled off my sweaty tee and bra. Then I put on my hoodie and left the zipper down just far enough to make it look like I was trying to start something with this guy.

  I turned the Android’s camera on myself then and did what I could to keep from looking completely disgusted. The truth was, I was about 90 percent fearless, but this was well inside my 10 percent.

  Before I could change my mind, I snapped a selfie and posted it into the app’s chat thread.

  Are you there? I texted.

  Even if he responded soon, I figured I could afford a minute away from the phone. That’s what I needed for the next step. It was a gamble, but there was no way through this without taking some kind of risk.

  I picked up my card key, slipped silently out of the apartment, and let myself into the admin office across the hall.

  “Hey, hon. What can I do you for?” Rena asked, looking up from her keyboarding as I came in.

  “I’m really sorry to ask,” I said, “but I was just working out, and it reminded me that I was supposed to pick up my asthma prescription yesterday.”

  And no, I don’t have asthma. There was no prescription.

  “Are you okay?” Rena asked with the immediate concern of a mother. “Do I need to call someone?”

  “I’m fine,” I told her. “But I’d feel better if I had that inhaler, just in case. It’s at the CVS on Mass Ave.”

  Already she was stepping out of her low heels and into a pair of Keen slip-ons. “Don’t give it another thought,” she said. “I’ll go now and knock on your door as soon as I’m back.”

  “Thank you so much,” I said. I hated lying to this nice lady, but it couldn’t be helped.

  Back in my apartment, I closed the door, turned around, and pressed my eye to the peephole.

  Rena came out a second later. I watched her head up the hall and gave it another slow ten count, just to make sure she was gone. Then I went right back to her office, grabbed the laptop, and returned to my apartment in one quick loop. The daily security logs would record every time I used my key card, but hopefully that wouldn’t matter by the time anyone noticed.

  I checked the Android as soon as I was back. There were no new texts for me, which was just as well. I still had some humps to get over.

  I input my work password to hop on the laptop’s Wi-Fi and then used my credit card to buy a copy of the software I was going to need for this. Twelve hundred dollars down the drain. Oh well. It was the least of my worries right now.

  The program was called Stego. That’s short for steganography, which is the practice of digitally hiding information in plain sight. In this case, it was going to be one of the selfies I’d send the Poet, embedded with a bit of geolocating malware. As soon as it reached his phone or laptop, it would self-detonate and send back all the information I’d need.

  God willing.

  Next, I went looking for the malicious code itself. The dark net is full of spyware libraries, if you know where to look. And geolocation isn’t exactly rocket science in that world. It took me all of two minutes to find something I could use, and a few seconds more to drag it into Stego’s source window.

  Now I needed the carrier file. A.k.a., the distraction.

  I stood up and positioned myself in front of the laptop’s camera. This time, I lowered my zipper all the way, keeping my breasts covered but showing a full highway of skin down the front. If he wanted more than that, he could go screw himself. Literally.

  I set the camera to a three-second delay, clicked the shutter, and stood back. After a quick countdown, it snapped the photo I needed. Then I dropped it into Stego alongside the code I’d already delivered and clicked Run.

  The software took it from there, knitting my geolocator right into the image, pixel by pixel. A status window opened up a few seconds later to indicate its progress: 5 percent and counting.

  For a few minutes, nothing more happened. Then, just as the image clicked over to 36 percent complete on the laptop, a new text scrolled into the Android’s chat screen.

  That’s not much, he said. Presumably, he meant the modest little selfie I’d already sent. You can do better.

  I wrote back right away, making sure to keep the laptop out of sight of the phone’s camera.

  Of course I can, I said. Isn’t that how the game works? It gets better as it goes along.

  Why don’t I believe you? he responded.

  Believe it. I don’t have time to be shy anymore. If I play along, will you do everything you can to get Eve out alive?

  Absolutely, he said. I’m in charge. Don’t worry.

  It wasn’t that I trusted his word. Not even a little. It was all about taking a page from this guy’s book and turning myself into the person he wanted me to be. Or at least letting him think that’s what was happening. It was the best way I knew to draw him into a trap of my own making.

  Okay then, I said. Let’s play.

  Chapter 77

  THE SOFTWARE WAS reporting in at 68 percent complete by now. I needed to draw this out for however long it took.

  I want to see more this time, he said.

  Not so fast, I said. It’s my turn to ask a question.

  Go ahead.

  Are you Hermes?

  I knew you were going to ask that, he said. No. Hermes never existed.

  So you have no connection to FNC? I asked.

  Clever girl. This is why I like you, Angela, he said. Now you go.

  I hated to think about what he might be doing with himself right then, but I stayed focused on the big picture. I was spinning a web here. And first chance I got, I was going to suck the lifeblood right out of this bastard.

  So I pulled my zipper down a few inches from where it had been in the first shot and posted a new pic.

  That’s about a 6, he wrote. I’m still looking for a 10.

  Be patient. We’ll get there, I wrote back. My turn. Why are you doing all this? What’s the bigger objective here?

  Why do you think there is one? he asked.

  Seems like a lot of trouble for nothing.