Invasion of Privacy

11

The next morning Mary sat on the edge of her bed reading the newspaper. The headline read “FBI Agent Killed in Dripping Springs Shoot-Out.”

“Veteran Special Agent Joseph T. Grant was killed yesterday in the line of duty. The shooting took place at approximately 3:15 p.m. outside of Dripping Springs on the grounds of the former Flying V Ranch. FBI spokesperson Donald G. Bennett stated that Grant was interviewing an informant deemed cooperative and unthreatening when the informant drew a weapon and shot Grant in the chest. The informant, whose name is being withheld due to the sensitive nature of the ongoing investigation, also died at the scene. Grant recently transferred to Austin from Sacramento, where he had been the assistant special agent in charge.”

A color picture ran above the fold. It showed Joe’s car with the windshield shattered, shot through. On the ground, visible between the milling law enforcement officers, lay a body draped by a sheet. The informant, identity unknown.

Mary stared at the photo, trying to imagine what had happened, how Joe had allowed an informant to get the drop on him. She looked closer. The informant lay several steps away from Joe’s car. From the pool of blood on the ground near his head, it appeared that he had been shot there, not in the car. Questions formed in her mind. Discrepancies with Bennett’s nervous and contradictory explanation.

She could hear Joe’s voice, snippets of the message. “Everything’s copacetic. Tell Sid. He’s one of the good guys.”

So there were bad guys?

The door to her bedroom opened. A curvy, attractive woman dressed in yoga tights and a lululemon jacket entered.

“All right,” said Carrie Kramer. “That’s enough of that. There’s a bunch of gals downstairs who are waiting to give you a shoulder to cry on. They’ve brought enough carbs to fill two refrigerators. I hope you and the girls like chicken potpie and grits. That’s what passes for comfort food around here.”

Mary put down the paper. “I’ll pass.”

“How ’bout some coffee?”

“Maybe later.”

Carrie sat down on the bed next to her. She was Mary’s newest next-door neighbor and the best friend she’d made in God knew how long. Carrie was her age, a mother of two girls and wife to a husband who, like Joe, worked far too many hours. Mark Kramer taught electrical engineering at UT and had recently taken a consulting job at the new Apple campus. Joe had “the job.” Carrie’s husband, Mark, had “the lab.” Like Mary, she was a de facto single mom.

Then there was the matter of their looks. Both were blondes a few pounds from being “athletic,” with hair cut to their shoulders; they were more or less the same height, with blue eyes, ready smiles, and a little too much energy. They couldn’t go out without someone asking if they were sisters. This led to spirited banter about who looked older. In fact Mary was older by a year, but in the name of détente and neighborhood peace, they decided to respond that they were the same. They called themselves the Texas Twins.

“You hanging in there?” asked Carrie.

“I can’t stop from thinking,” Mary began, “what might have happened if I’d just answered the phone.”

“It wasn’t your fault you missed Joe’s call. These things happen.”

“I wasn’t there when he needed me. I knew it was a mistake to let Jessie play with my phone.”

Carrie laid an arm around Mary’s shoulder. “You can’t go back, sweetheart. What’s done is done. There’s no saying you could have helped him anyway.”

“He called me at 4:03. I didn’t hear his message until after Don Bennett phoned two hours later. I sure as hell could have done something.”

“You told me he didn’t tell you where he was or what he needed. Who would you have called if you had gotten the message?”

Mary stood. “I don’t know…someone-anyone. Two hours, Carrie. Why didn’t I…?”

“Because it slipped your mind. Because you couldn’t have known what Joe was calling about. Because you’re a human being like the rest of us.”

“And then I went and erased the message. I don’t know how, but I did.”

“How do you know it was you? Machines screw up all the time. Mark’s iPad just goes and shuts down sometimes. He’s always yelling about losing this or that.”

“They don’t lose the last message your husband ever sent you.”

Carrie studied her. “What are you getting at?”

Mary dropped her hands and paced the room, exasperated at her inability to recall her actions. “All I know is that one minute the message was there and the next it was gone.”

“So someone else erased it?”

“I left the phone in the car when I went into the hospital. I guess someone could have broken into my car, erased the message, then locked the car back up. But even then there’d be a record of it on my message log.” Mary knew her Sherlock Holmes. Eliminate the impossible and what remains, no matter how improbable, is the truth. “You’re right. It was the phone. It had to be. Something just happened.”

“Take it to Joe’s office. Give it to what’s-his-name…Dave-”

“Don Bennett. Joe’s boss.”

“Have him take a look at it.”

“I don’t like him. He practically tried to rip the phone out of my hands last night. He scares me.”

“The FBI scares me, too, hon, but I trust ’em.”

“I know them better than you.” Mary tried her best to recall Joe’s words. She closed her eyes and saw them hovering just out of reach. “It’s just that I can’t remember everything he said.”

“Give it time. It’ll come.” Carrie nodded toward the door. “And the girls?”

“Jessie is in her room with her door locked. Gracie woke up and cried until she fell back asleep. They’re in shock.”

“Does Jess know about the message?”

“No,” said Mary forcefully, surprising herself. “I won’t tell her. It wasn’t her fault I missed the call. She was just doing what she always does.”

“She’s really into that tech stuff,” said Carrie. “Programming and creating apps.”

“Her summer school teacher told me that some people just get it, and Jess is one of them. He said she has the gift.”

“Mark was that way, too. Turned out good for him, even if he is still a geek.” Carrie stood and came closer. “What’re you going to do, hon?”

“I’m not sure. I can’t imagine moving again. The schools are good. Grace likes her new doctor. Besides, where would we go?”

“I’d imagine you’d want to be nearer your folks.”

“They’re all gone. I’ve got a brother floating around on an aircraft carrier somewhere in the Pacific, and Joe’s got two sisters in Boston. That’s it. I don’t have anyplace to go.”

“Texas has done right by us. You could do worse.”

“Do I have to become a Republican?”

“Mandatory after five years-otherwise they kick you out.” Carrie went to the door. “Can’t keep your fan club waiting forever.”

“Five minutes.”

“Take ten. I’ll stall for you.” Carrie winked and closed the door.

Mary picked up the newspaper again. She looked at the shattered windshield and the body on the ground. She contrasted the picture with Bennett’s muddled explanation of what had occurred. Something didn’t match. Or, as she’d heard some good ol’ boy say, “That dog don’t hunt.”

Mary walked to the bathroom, washed her face, put on makeup, and brushed her hair. It wouldn’t be right to show them how devastated she was. The admiral wouldn’t stand for it.

She picked up her phone on the way out, pausing at the door to access the calls log. She spotted the number she wanted right away.

“Federal Bureau of Investigation. How may I direct your call?”

“Don Bennett, please.”

12

It was not this hot in England.

Ian tried not to hurry as he crossed the broad expanse of lawn known as the Meadow. Christ Church, and the comfort of his air-conditioned office, were ten steps behind him and already he was sweating. He continued up Dead Man’s Walk, then cut over to Merton Street, passing Oriel and University before reaching High Street.

Oracle had its “Emerald City.” Google had its “Googleplex.” Ian had his own private Oxford.

There was New College and Radcliffe Camera and the Bodleian Library. There was even the River Isis. The buildings were exact replicas of the originals, built from the same English limestone and mortar on a three-hundred-acre plot of land overlooking Lake Travis, five miles from the Austin city limits. A little bit of England in the Texas Hill Country.

He crossed the High and entered a warren of alleyways, heading toward Brasenose, the “college” that housed ONE’s research-and-development labs. Each “college” contained offices, a cafeteria, and a quad where employees could get outside and recreate. New College housed the Server Division. Oriel housed Online Sales. And so on.

Great Tom sounded the quarter hour. Like the original hanging in Tom Tower, the bell weighed six tons and was cast from smelted iron. It tolled over a hundred times at nine each night, not in memory of the original students enrolled in Christ Church, but to celebrate each billion dollars of ONE’s annual sales. In the year of our Lord 2015, Great Tom was programmed to toll 201 times each night.

“Ian!” It was Peter Briggs, coming out of the White Stag.

“Come on,” Ian called. “They’re waiting on me.”

Briggs pulled up alongside him. “That bastard May’s remarks made it into an article about the race in the Reno papers.”

“The sports section.” Ian had seen the piece while doing a little background on Gordon May. “Right before the part about the race stewards denying his objection.”

“He sounds serious.”

“Like I said, he’s a sore loser. Now everyone knows it. Anything else about John Merriweather comes out of his mouth, we’ll sue him for defamation. Shut him up once and for all.”

“That’s what I like to hear.”

“To think,” said Ian, dismissing May’s monstrous accusations. “John Merriweather was a dear friend.”

The men walked a ways farther, leaving the main campus and continuing along a paved road toward the R &D facility, a black glass rectangle the size of a city block surrounded by a twenty-foot-tall fence.

“This is it, then?” said Briggs as they passed through the security checkpoint. “You get the cooling system all squared away?”

“That’s what we’re going to find out.”

“Better have,” said Briggs. “Utah’s ready to rock ’n’ roll. They don’t like delays in D.C.”

Ian ignored the admonishing clip to his voice. “Let me worry about D.C.”

“Whatever you say. You’re the boss.”

–

It was an object of beauty.

Ian ran a hand over the face of the machine. An undulating wave of black titanium as alluring as a centerfold’s curves glimmered beneath the lab’s soft lighting. Form married to function. The ONE logo had been painted across the panels in electric-blue ink that seemed to lift right off them. The apotheosis of design and intellect.

Titan. The world’s most powerful supercomputer.

Half a dozen engineers were conducting last-minute checks of the equipment. All wore hoodies or fleece. One sported a down parka. Outside, the temperature was pushing 100°. Inside, it was a chill 58°.

“Ah, Ian, welcome,” said Dev Patel, the chief programmer on the Titan project, hurrying toward him. “Can we get you a jumper?”

“I’m fine,” said Ian. “Are we all hooked up?”

“All according to your instructions.” Patel placed a hand on top of Titan. He was short and round, a native of Madras who’d come to ONE by way of IIT, Caltech, and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. “We’ve connected two hundred machines for today’s test. Our footprint is about four thousand square feet.”

“Two hundred? That enough?”

“Good lord, yes.” Patel tugged at the thatch of graying hair that fell across his forehead, looking like nothing so much as an aging schoolboy. “And then some.”

Ian patted him on the back. John Merriweather’s coup was to marry graphics processing units (GPUs) with conventional central processing units (CPUs) to create a hybrid that was at once more energy-efficient than anything before it and capable of an order of magnitude increase in computational power. Titan used 25,000 AMD Opteron 16-core CPUs and 25,000 Nvidia Tesla GPUs. “Memory?”

“Seven hundred ten terabytes,” said Patel, “with forty petabytes of hard drive storage.”

Seven hundred ten terabytes was the equivalent of all the text found in a stack of books running from the earth to the moon. “And that gives us?”

“A theoretical peak performance approaching ten exaflops-about twenty thousand trillion calculations per second-give or take.”

“That means we’re tops, right?”

“No one else is even close.”

Ian spoke over his shoulder. “Get PR. I want that information out to everyone on the Net a minute after the test is completed.” He put a hand on Patel’s shoulder and guided him to a private corner. “Is she ready?”

“I’ll keep my end of the bargain if you keep yours.”

Ian’s end meant seeing to it that the new cooling system functioned as advertised. Patel’s end meant pushing Titan to the max, getting all twenty thousand trillion operations per second from it. It was time to push the needle into the red once more. “All right, then. Let’s light this baby up.”

Patel’s eyes radiated excitement. He turned toward the engineers and raised his arms. “Light this baby up.”

The engineers retreated to their workstations behind a glass wall and placed noise-canceling headphones over their ears. The ambient buzz Ian had noted since entering the lab grew louder. A metallic clicking noise emanated from the machines, the cadence and volume increasing by the second, as if hundreds of steel dominoes were being shuffled and shuffled again.

“Would you prefer to watch the demonstration in a different manner?” asked Patel.

“Everest?” Ian struggled to keep from clapping his hands over his ears.

“Yes,” shouted Patel.

The men walked down a corridor to a smaller, quieter room. The room was empty except for one wall made entirely of dark translucent glass. This was Everest, the “exploratory visualization environment for science and technology,” a thirty-seven-megapixel stereoscopic wall made of eighteen individual display monitors.

Three vanguard codes had been selected to test Titan’s maximum operating capabilities. S3D modeled the molecular physics of combustion in an effort to lessen the carbon footprint of fossil fuels. WL-LSMS simulated the interaction between electrons and atoms in magnetic materials. And CAM-SE simulated specific climate change scenarios and was designed to cycle through five years of weather in one day of computing time.

“We’re running CAM-SE,” said Patel. “We might as well find out whether or not the earth is going to be here fifty years from now.”

“Might as well.” Frankly, Ian was more interested in whether Titan would be in working order fifty minutes from now or a flaming pile of silicon. He crossed his arms and faced the wall of black glass. Six closely spaced horizontal lines ran the length of the wall: red, yellow, orange, green, blue, and purple.

The room lights dimmed.

Phase One Initiated flashed in the upper left-hand corner. Titan had begun its work.

Below it a reading displayed the supercomputer’s internal temperature: 75° Fahrenheit.

The lines on the glass wall began wiggling, interweaving, dancing with one another as if bothered by a weak current. The temperature display jumped to 80°, then 85°. The lines’ movements grew more frenzied, each assuming a life of its own, oscillating into sine and cosine waves. The lines were a visual manifestation of Titan’s calculations as the machine worked its way into the complex code, analyzing billions of possible climate models. There were no longer just six lines but twenty, then thirty, and then too many to count, a rainbow of gyrating colors.

Meanwhile the temperature continued to rise.

A buzzer sounded.

Phase Two appeared.

Titan was working faster.

On command, the lines escaped their two-dimensional confines and leapt into the room. Ian and Patel were surrounded by a sea of multicolored, undulating wave functions, awash in an ocean of neon light.

120°

150°

The machine was heating too rapidly.

Ian said nothing. To speak was to scream. He glanced sidelong at Patel. The programmer no longer looked like an enthusiastic schoolboy. In the darkened room, his round, pleasant face illuminated by the wildly gyrating lights, he looked like a doomed prisoner awaiting a dreadful sentence.

170°

180°

Ian hummed to himself, blinking inadvertently each time the number rose. If Titan’s internal temperature surpassed 200° for a period of thirty seconds, the supercomputer would shut itself down. There would be no meeting at Fort Meade. The giant array in Utah would be removed and shipped back for repair. Months would be needed to rework the cooling design.

Despite his anxiety, Ian felt outside himself, part of some bigger scheme: intelligence, the universe, he didn’t know what to call it. Maybe progress. The first computers had used punch cards to tabulate election results. Then came transistors and silicon wafers and microchips. The latest was nanochips, chips as thin as a human hair, so small they needed to be viewed with an electron microscope. Today a smartphone retailing for $99 held the computing power necessary to launch Apollo 11 and land two men on the surface of the moon.

Titan possessed one billion times that power.

Deus in machina.

God in the machine.

Everest glowed blue.

The buzzer sounded again. The terrific noise grew.

Phase Three appeared.

Titan had reached its maximum speed. In a single second it performed as many calculations as the first mainframe had been able to perform in an entire week.

200°

“Shut it down,” shouted Patel. “We’re going to burn.”

“Wait,” said Ian.

It was all or nothing. Time to push the needle into the red.

Ten seconds passed. Fifteen.

“Ian…please. Shut it down.”

“Another second.”

“You must!”

And then something wonderful happened.

190°

The temperature decreased.

180°

And decreased again.

Patel grabbed Ian’s arm. Ian stood still, not protesting. The panel turned from blue to red. Patel began to laugh. “It works,” he said, though his words were impossible to hear above the clatter.

Ian nodded, saying nothing. His anxiety vanished. His calm returned. And his confidence, perhaps even greater than before.

“Of course it works,” he wanted to say. He had designed it.

13

In his short time in Austin, Joe had adopted Threadgill’s on North Lamar as his home away from home. The restaurant was a local landmark built inside the shell of an old service station and dressed up in fancy paint and neon lights. Mary regretted suggesting meeting there as soon as the words left her mouth, but Don Bennett had agreed so quickly, she hadn’t had the time to change her mind.

She found Bennett waiting inside, dressed in a three-piece suit, stiff as ever, seated at one of the booths and playing with the jukebox that decorated the table. “What are we listening to?” she asked as she slid onto the leather banquette.

“Elvis.” Bennett dropped a quarter in the slot and thumbed a button. Elvis Presley began singing “Hound Dog.” “Wanna eat?”

“You have time?” said Mary, surprised. “I thought you’d need to get out to the crime scene.”

“That’s shut down.”

“So you figured out what happened?”

“I already told you.”

“You didn’t seem so sure last night.”

Bennett stared at her but said nothing. He appeared to have cut himself shaving.

“The informant shot Joe, and Joe shot him before he died,” she said. “You’re sticking to that story?”

“Those are the facts.”

Mary let it go for the moment. The waiter came and handed them menus. Mary put hers down. Threadgill’s stock-in-trade was down-home cooking: fried chicken, catfish, collard greens. She and Joe always ordered the same thing: chicken fried steak. She grabbed a biscuit out of the basket and spread a dollop of honey butter across it. It no longer mattered if she fit into the LBD.

Bennett set down his menu. “How can I help?” he asked.

“I’d like you to take a look at my phone,” said Mary. “If you’re still interested, that is.”

“That won’t be necessary,” answered Bennett.

“For you or for me? I’m asking a favor.”

“I can’t extend the Bureau’s services to a civilian.”

“I didn’t leave the message. My husband did-minutes before he was killed in the line of duty. I’d think you’d be damned interested.”

“I’m sorry, Mary, but the Bureau cannot assist you.”

“Cannot or will not?”

Bennett leaned closer. “Mary, your husband died twenty hours ago. The Bureau extends its condolences. I’m happy to talk to you about his final pay package, insurance, and all benefits due to you and your family. But that’s all. Now go home. Be with your daughters. Grieve.”

“You’re not telling me what happened,” Mary said.

“The incident is closed.”

Mary took the front page of the morning paper from her purse and unfolded it on the table, turning it so that it faced Bennett. “I looked at this for a long time. Right away I knew something was wrong, but it took me a while to figure out just what. You see, Don, you said the informant got in the car and neither of them got out. But look, there he is on the ground. Fine-I’ll let that go. Maybe a question of semantics, you picking the wrong words. But tell me this: when exactly did the informant shoot Joe? Was it when he was already outside the car? Did his first shot miss and take out the windshield, or did he fire again after Joe shot him? See all that blood on the sheet by his head? I’d say the informant’s first shot had to hit Joe, because he sure as shit didn’t shoot him after Joe shot him in the head. I’m asking because yesterday at the hospital, the surgeon, Dr. Alexander, said that Joe was shot point-blank and that the bullet severed his spinal cord. The informant isn’t anywhere near to point-blank, and Joe couldn’t have pulled the trigger once he was shot. Joe would have called that ‘a problem of chronology.’ So tell me again, Don, what happened out there?”

Bennett said nothing.

“I’m waiting,” Mary said.

“Please, Mary.”

“Don’t ‘please’ me.” Mary pushed her phone across the table. “Are you afraid of what you might hear?”

Bennett blinked, his eyes holding hers, avoiding the phone. “Anything else I can help you with?”

“As a matter of fact, yes. Who exactly called 911? If Joe was all alone out there in Dripping Springs, it seems to me that no one would have found him for hours. No backup, right? That’s what you said. But the EMTs got there twenty minutes after he was shot.”

“The investigation is closed.”

“Yours, maybe.”

Bennett rose from the booth. “Are we done here?”

“No,” said Mary. “Not by a long shot.”

14

Don Bennett, age forty-eight, twenty-three-year veteran of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, special agent in charge of the Austin residency, former navy corpsman, winner of the Bronze Star, veteran of the first Gulf War, rabid Cowboys fan, lover of Elvis Presley, and father of five, stood in the blazing sun, phone to his ear, asking himself what he was going to say.

It was a few minutes past one in the afternoon, and Bennett was drunk. He’d waited for Mary Grant to pull out of the lot, then marched back into the restaurant, ordered a Jack on the rocks, and drunk it down in a single draft. Then he did it again. The alcohol did little to quiet his mind. Mary Grant’s questions were his own, if more crudely put. He possessed information she did not. He had answers to her questions. Some…not all…but enough to trouble his obedient self.

Bennett gazed up at the sky. It was white with heat, the sun a blinding abstraction. He asked himself the question again, the question he knew his master would ask, and he had his answer. Bennett considered himself a fine judge of character. He recognized a fighter when he saw one. A scrapper. Mary Grant was the kind of person who did something just because you told her she couldn’t, the kind who’d continue even if it brought harm to herself. It was not the answer he desired, but it was the truth.

The phone rang a third time.

Bennett was a fighter, too, he reminded himself. A scrapper. He’d made it out of situations his brethren had not. Still, there were rules, and rules had to be followed. He believed in the chain of command and in obedience to your superiors. He’d built his life on doing as he was told. It was a successful life. A happy life. There was no reason to change now.

“Yes, Don,” his master answered.

“She’s asking questions.”

“You couldn’t convince her otherwise?”

“She doesn’t buy the official version. He called her before the incident. Apparently he knew something was up.”

“What did he say?”

“I’m not sure. He left her a message, but she deleted it. She asked for our help to retrieve it. I declined.”

“Best we didn’t know.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Did you keep your mouth shut?”

“I did.”

“Of course you did,” said his master. “You’re a reliable man, Don. I appreciate that.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“One last question…”

“Sir?”

“Will she be a bother?”

There it was. The question he’d seen coming. It would be easy to lie. But Don Bennett followed orders. He believed in the chain of command.

“Will she continue to ask questions?” his master repeated.

“Yes, sir. I believe she won’t stop until she finds out the truth.”

A lengthy pause followed. Bennett could sense his master’s anxiety, and it quickly became his own. “Sir?” said Bennett.

“That’s all, Don. Take the rest of the day off. See the family. Consider it an order.”

Bennett hung up.

There was truth and there was honor. He had never known them to war with each other.

15

It worked.

Ian stood in the center of his office, feeling the perspiration dry on his forehead. His nerves were gratifyingly becalmed. His heart had stopped doing the quickstep. Titan’s cacophonous clatter was a distant memory.

“It worked.”

He turned over the words in his mouth like a piece of candy. The maximum internal temperature recorded at the peak of Titan’s frenzied, divinely ordered calculations-when each and every one of the machine’s 50,000 CPUs and GPUs had been pressed to their limit, straining to solve one of the world’s most complex equations, and in reaction generating their own “cybersweat” in the form of radiated heat-was 206° Fahrenheit, fifty degrees lower than previously measured.

Ian walked to his desk and sat down in his chair. He sat solemnly, aware of the occasion.

It worked.

Two words that unlocked the future…and might unlock the past.

His assistant’s voice came over the speakerphone. “Mr. Briggs to see you. You have calls from Mr. Roarke in New York and from Ms. Taggart in Hollywood. You need to leave in fifteen minutes to make it to your meeting downtown.”

“I’ll roll the calls as soon as I’m on the road. Tell Briggs to give me five minutes.”

Briggs could wait. First Ian needed to share the news of his triumph.

He turned the chair slowly and gazed at the satchel in the corner of his office.

It was a black satchel, old, worn, the leather creased and scarred, but still sturdy. A satchel built to last, but then, so was the British Empire. A strap and a lock secured the case. Above the lock, the initials PSP were embossed in gold leaf. They’d found the satchel in the parking garage next to his father’s car.

After all these years, he thought, after the endless queries, the fruitless leads, after exploring shadowy path after shadowy path, all to no avail, just maybe there was a chance.

His eyes rose, catching a shadow. A man was standing next to the satchel. He was tall and upright, dressed in a navy chalk-stripe suit, a maroon necktie done with a perfect dimple, lace-up shoes polished to a regal shine. “Lobb of London. Only the best, right, son?”

Peter Prince’s black hair was cut short, parted immaculately on the left and shining with brilliantine. He was a gentleman, to look at. A man of authority. He was not a man who walked out of his home one morning and vanished without a trace. He was not a man who left his satchel beside his car.

“It worked,” said Ian proudly to his father. “I fixed it.”

Peter Prince dipped his gaze. His eyes narrowed, searching the room.

Ian raised a hand in greeting. A smile pushed at the corners of his mouth. “Dad…over here…”

“Five minutes, my ass!”

Ian spun back toward the door as Peter Briggs stormed into the office.

“You going to keep me waiting all day, then?” Briggs said. “Think I came over just to gossip? I know how to use a phone, too. We’re not all of us idiots who don’t know what Everest stands for. Christ!”

“What is it?” Ian asked.

“Urgent.” Briggs sat down in a guest’s chair, snapping his fingers in the air. “You all there? This one requires your attention. Semaphore.”

Ian glanced over his shoulder. His father was gone. There was only the black satchel by itself in the corner. “What about Semaphore? ‘Tied off,’ you said. ‘Bank it.’ ”

“The wife. She’s asking questions.”

“Excuse me. ‘The wife’? What do you mean?”

“The agent’s wife. Mrs. Joseph Grant. She’s got quite the bee in her bonnet.”

The mention of the dead agent’s wife was like a dash of cold water. “How so?” asked Ian, his attention squarely on Briggs.

“She doesn’t believe her husband could have been killed by an informant. Claims there are discrepancies in the FBI’s story. Wants to know what’s what.” Briggs helped himself to a fistful of almonds from a bowl on the desk, flicking them into his mouth one at a time. “You know the type. Nosy. Doesn’t know when to let well enough alone.”

“Are there?”

“Discrepancies?” Briggs shrugged. “Don’t know. Doesn’t matter. It’s the call. He must have said something to her.”

“Not that I recall.” Ian had listened to Joseph Grant’s message several times and was sure he hadn’t mentioned anything about Semaphore or ONE. “Anyway, I erased it from her phone. No evidence there.”

“She’s a woman. She doesn’t need evidence. She has intuition.”

“And the rest of it…besides the woman?”

“Tied off.”

Ian averted his gaze. He was beginning to despise the term. “We can’t afford any problems. Nothing that might put things in jeopardy.”

“I understand,” said Peter Briggs.

“I know you do,” said Ian. “So it’s just the woman?”

Briggs nodded.

“What’s her name?”

“Mary Grant.”

“Her full name.”

“Mary Margaret Olmstead Grant.”

Ian wrote the name on his ledger. “Go ahead, then. But easy does it. Nothing heavy-handed. Level one and that’s it. We don’t want to stir things up.” Ian stood, signaling that the meeting was over. “She can’t find anything anyway. It’s ‘tied off,’ right?” He looked hard at Peter Briggs.

“Bank it.”

–

Ian stared at the name on the ledger.

Mary Margaret Olmstead Grant.

He knew what it was like to lose a loved one under mysterious circumstances. He knew about the power of unanswered questions. He knew about curiosity hardening to obsession. He also knew better than to take anyone for granted. Not even an ordinary housewife.

Ian called his assistant and asked her to push back his schedule fifteen minutes. He typed Mary Grant’s name into the Search bar and got three hits: Facebook, Austin real estate registry, and a Shutterfly account.

The Facebook account was under the name Mary Olmstead Grant, the private information available to her friends. Still, as a beginning it was promising. There was a picture of a tropical beach, two children walking at water’s edge. He guessed it was somewhere in southern Mexico, Costa Rica, the Philippines, or Thailand. A photograph of a woman he assumed to be Mary Grant was inset in the landscape. It was an odd photo, showing only half the woman’s face, purposely cropped to disguise her identity. Still, he could see that she was blond, pretty, and vivacious. Her eyes held the camera.

She listed her work as “household engineer.” She had studied at Georgetown. She lived in Austin. She liked Stevie Ray Vaughan, Cold-play, and Alfred Brendel. She also liked the American Cancer Society, Sacramento Children’s Hospital, and the Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure. She had forty-three friends.

Again, not much, but a beginning.

A private woman proud of her upbringing, not wanting to lose her maiden name and all that it meant to her. An intelligent woman with an education. A woman who had traveled the world. A woman who had been touched sometime in her life by cancer, either her own or a family member’s. A woman who valued her privacy and was not comfortable sharing personal information with strangers. A woman who chose her friends carefully.

Ian’s concern grew. A formidable woman, he sensed.

He drew up yesterday’s work log to locate the number Joseph Grant had called minutes before his death. He noted that Mary Grant was not currently a ONE Mobile customer. (This had not prevented him from using the competing carrier’s equipment to gain access to her phone. Traffic between wireless carriers demanded cooperation on the most intimate technological levels. He had nearly unfettered access to his competitors’ servers, routers, and relay stations.) ONE Mobile had strong market share in Sacramento. Perhaps she’d been a client and switched carriers upon her arrival in Austin.

He logged into ONE Mobile’s Sacramento database and plugged in her name.

Bingo. In fact Mary Grant had been a customer of ONE Mobile during her residence in Sacramento.

He pulled up the customary information: date of birth, home address, banking details (Mary Grant was an autopay customer), and Social Security number. He smiled inwardly. This last piece of information was crucial. A person’s Social Security number was a skeleton key that could unlock troves of personal, often confidential data.

He continued for a few minutes longer, downloading phone records for the prior two-year period. Digging deeper, he found a record of her voicemail password: 71700. He guessed it was either an anniversary or the birth date of a family member, most probably one of her children.

The Shutterfly hit yielded only two photos, but to Ian they were important. Both showed two girls seated together. One was dark-haired and olive-skinned, the other fair and sickly pale. Mary Grant’s daughters.

The real estate registry showed that Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Grant had purchased a home on Pickfair Drive in northwest Austin ninety days earlier for the price of $425,000.

All of this was information to be stored away. Nothing useful now, but it might come in handy later. He saved the pages to a new folder in his ONE Platinum account before placing a call to Investigations.

“This is Ian. I have a Social Security number for you. Give me a full workup. And make it a priority.”

16

“Mr. Briggs,” called the guard. “Your badge.”

Peter Briggs stormed past the porter’s lodge of Brasenose and continued to the elevators. He was fed up. There was only so much you could take of hanging around a bunch of grown men who grew sexually aroused talking about petaflops and hard drives and GPUs. He was certain that Patel had been sporting some wood as he brushed up against Titan.

Briggs got off at the third floor and headed for the operations room. A dozen men sat at desks positioned along the perimeter of the office. Not one of them gave a flying fig about petaflops or hard drives or GPUs. Briggs was certain about that.

“Fire under control in K.L.?” he asked.

“Damage localized to a chip storage area.”

“Plant back on line?”

“Yessir.”

“Outstanding.”

Running security for ONE was a twenty-four-hour-a-day job. Briggs had a thousand employees under his command, safeguarding the corporation’s offices and manufacturing facilities in twenty countries around the globe. His responsibilities broke down into three areas: physical plant and manufacturing, cybersecurity, and personal protection.

Cybersecurity was giving him the biggest headache these days. ONE’s servers were under attack from hackers day and night. Most came from China or eastern Europe. The Chinese attacks emanated from a military unit charged with gaining industrial espionage secrets from Western companies. The eastern European attacks came out of Bulgaria and Romania, the work of organized criminals contracted by smaller technology companies to steal ONE’s R &D. Between the two, ONE defended itself against more than five thousand attacks a day.

As was his habit on entering the ops room, he checked an electronic world map that broadcast the location of the company’s top executives.

Today he noted that ten were in Austin, four in Palo Alto, two in Mumbai, two in Guangdong, one in Berlin, and one in Nepal.

“Get the plane ready for D.C.,” he said to Travel. “Party of five plus crew. We fly at dawn. Boss wants the Kraut. Tell her to be at the airport at five a.m. and to make sure she has her bag of nostrums.”

Travel looked up. “Bag of what?”

Briggs patted his shoulder, pleased to be in the company of a man with a vocabulary nearly as limited as his own. “Never mind, lad. Just call Katarina and get the plane arranged.”

“Yessir.”

There was a new symbol on the map that Briggs hadn’t seen that morning. The symbol was a silhouette of a jet, and it appeared whenever company execs were en route or due to embark on a flight. He touched the jet and its flight information appeared on the screen.

ONE 7 / N415GB

JER-AUS 7.31 .

0700MST-1900CST .

ONE 7 was a Boeing business jet with tail number N415GB, departing from Jerusalem at 0700 hours local time and arriving in Austin at 1900 hours tomorrow night.

The Israelis were coming.

Briggs couldn’t help but feel his pulse quicken. Ian was right. They could not afford any more slipups. Not now, with Titan up and running. Not with the Israelis on the way.

Briggs continued to his office. First there was ONEscape, the browser, then came software, and after that hardware: servers, routers, switches-the machines that made up the Internet’s backbone-then ONE Mobile, the wireless phone carrier, and now, just a few months back, Allied Artists, the country’s biggest movie and television studio.

But all of it was but a prelude for the Israelis. Ian had called them his Praetorian Guard and talked about a “new Jerusalem.” Briggs knew better than to ask about a new messiah.

He sat at his desk and pulled up the report from his contact at the FBI. Semaphore. It was the case that wouldn’t die.

“Go easy,” Ian had said. “Nothing heavy-handed.”

But Briggs hadn’t gotten where he was by going easy. He hit speed dial for Firemen.

“I need a team to do a little scouting work for me. A local job.”

“Level?”

Level one, or L1, was a simple look-and-listen on a target’s phone and Net usage.

L2 added wireless surveillance, plus eyes on the subject for defined daily intervals.

L3 amounted to a digital cavity search-all of the above plus twenty-four-hour surveillance and infiltration of the target’s home or office with the goal of installing malware to take full operational control of all the target’s digital systems: tablet, laptop, desktop, mainframe, and mobile communications devices.

“L2,” he said.

“How soon do you want work to begin?”

“Immediately.”

“Have anyone in mind?”

In the end there was really only one team he could trust with the job.

“Get me Shanks and the Mole.”

17

Showtime.

Tank Potter parked at the back of the office lot and checked his appearance in the mirror. Hair freshly washed. Eyes marginally red. Shirt clean and pressed. All in all, not too bad after twelve hours in the clink.

He reached into the bag on the seat beside him for a box of Band-Aids. His hand shook as he freed one from the box and shook more as he struggled to peel off the wrapping.

Reinforcements needed.

He dropped the bandage and delved under his seat for his backstop, ducking his head below the dash to take a pull of tequila. His hand was rock-steady as he peeled off the wrapping and affixed the Band-Aid to his forehead.

“Thank you, JC.” Jose Cuervo, not the other guy.

For a minute he looked at the Statesman’s headquarters. Thirty days and all this was history. It didn’t come as a surprise. Every paper in the country was slashing its staff, and he was no Pulitzer winner. Even so, he’d thought it would be easier.

A last helper to calm the nerves and he was good to go.

He stashed the bottle, then rummaged in the glove compartment for his Altoids, counted out five, and popped them into his mouth. Fortified, he climbed out, feeling capable, calm, and only mildly hungover.

–

“Potter!”

Al Soletano stood outside his glassed-in office in the center of the newsroom, hands on hips, his face flushed a shade past fire-engine red. Tank raised a hand in greeting as he made his way down the main aisle. The newsroom was a sea of vacant cubicles. A plague zone, he thought as he entered Soletano’s office.

“Sit.”

“I’m okay.”

“I said sit.”

Tank sat down in the visitor’s chair.

“How you feeling?” Soletano was short, with a gut, a tonsure of black hair, and a voice that could be heard in all six neighboring counties.

“Not bad, all things considered.”

“Your head?”

“It hurts, but I’ll be all right.” Tank had spoken to Soletano as soon as he was freed from the holding cell. He had a story ready. He’d been in a fender bender, banged his head, and spent the night in the emergency room.

“You don’t have to be going fast to do some damage.”

Tank touched his bandage gingerly. “You can say that again.”

“Say, buddy, do me a favor. Hand me my glass of water, would you? I’m thirsty.”

Tank looked to his right, where a glass of water sat on the desk’s corner. The glass was full to the brim. He looked back at Soletano, leaning against the wall, not making the slightest effort. Tank clenched a fist, then picked up the glass. Water spilled onto Soletano’s desk. He set the glass down.

“I’m waiting.”

Tank stared at his hand, willing it to stop shaking. Standing, he picked up the glass and walked over to his editor. Halfway there, a spasm shook his hand and water sloshed onto the floor.

“And that’s after the snort in the parking lot,” said Soletano. “By the way, where’d you get hit? I didn’t see any dents-or any new ones, at least.”

Tank said nothing.

Soletano approached him and ripped the bandage off his forehead. “I hear you met one of my friends last night. Lance Burroughs. Young guy. Detective.” He circled his desk and picked up a piece of paper. “Your arrest report,” he said, by way of explanation. “You blew a point thirty-four. That’s four times the legal limit. I have to be honest, Tank. God knows I love to tie one on as much as the next guy, but point thirty-four…that’s enough booze to knock out Godzilla.”

“It’s been a stressful few days.”

“And nights. A federal agent murdered in our backyard and I’m buying the story from a stringer out of Dallas. It’s embarrassing.”

“At least you’ll have practice for when the suits finish the deal,” said Tank.

The suits were the private equity guys from Wall Street who’d been running around the place for the past month figuring ways to cut costs.

Soletano didn’t take the bait. He stood, arms crossed, shaking his head. “You used to be a decent journalist.”

The tone hit Tank hard. He’d been a damned sight better than that.

“There’s another conference later this afternoon,” he said. “I’ll be there. Did you read the release? Bennett is stonewalling us. Once we find out the informant’s identity, we’ll have a beeline to what the feds were looking into. I mean, Dripping Springs, for Chrissakes. That tell you something?”

“Maybe the CI’s from Dripping Springs?”

“It tells me that it’s a pretty big case if they’re meeting their CIs twenty-five miles away to make sure they’re not seen.” Despite the air conditioning, he was beginning to sweat. “You know how many FBI agents have been killed in the line of duty in the past twenty years?”

“Four.”

“Yeah, four. Not many. This one’s got legs. I can feel that there’s something here. Let me run with it.” He smiled sheepishly. “Everyone gets a DUI. It’s not a big deal.”

“You’re a day late and a dollar short, pal. I told you to read that letter.”

“One DUI. Come on. It’s a misdemeanor.”

Soletano snapped a finger at the arrest report. “You forgot to mention that it’s your second offense. Two DUIs in ten years. That makes it a Class A misdemeanor. Mandatory suspension of license for one year. Fine of up to ten grand. What you did is more than enough for rightful termination.”

“You’re firing me?”

“You fired yourself. You saw those suits in here. They get a chance to knock a hundred grand off their liabilities, they’re going to jump on it.”

Tank threw up his arms. His severance package gave him one month’s salary for every year he’d worked at the paper. The total came out to a little over $100,000.

“Let me have this story, Al. I’ll prove to you I’m the reporter I used to be.”

“What story?” said Soletano. “Just because the Bureau isn’t divulging the name of the informant doesn’t mean there’s a story. They’re probably waiting a day or two to get their ducks in a row, inform the guy’s family, and then they’ll release it. This isn’t Waco or Ruby Ridge. There’s no Pulitzer at the end of the rainbow. It’s just a case of an agent making a dumb mistake.”

“I’m not so sure…”

“I am,” said Soletano. “There is no story. You’re done. You blew a point thirty-four. You’re not some cute first-time drunk. You’re a monster. Don’t you get that? A point thirty-four. I’m surprised you didn’t spontaneously combust. I can’t have a reporter driving drunk all over town. The word liability mean anything to you?” Soletano opened the door and motioned for Tank to leave. “Get out of here. Go away. Get some help. You’re a sick man.”

–

Tank walked back to his car, hands in his pockets, arms stiff as ramrods to make sure he stood straight in case Soletano was watching. He opened the door and slid behind the wheel. All spirit went out of him and he laid his head against the steering wheel.

His hand dropped to his backstop and he took a healthy slug. Screw Soletano. He could watch all he wanted.

He dropped the bottle and grabbed the copy of the day’s paper off the passenger seat. The headline read: “FBI Agent Dies in Dripping Springs Shoot-out.” The story carried an AP byline, no name attached. The future of print journalism, he thought ruefully.

The lead paraphrased the Bureau’s press release, and the body offered nothing that indicated any actual reporting. No suggestions about what case the agent was working or any background on him besides the boilerplate info, no quotes from the widow, and, most important to Tank’s mind, not a whisper about the informant’s identity. He could have filed it from the holding cell.

Tank banged his fist against the glove compartment and took out the envelope with his name on it. An hour ago the letter had held the promise of a new life. A hundred thousand dollars went a long way. After expenses, he’d figured he’d have enough to hit Pedro’s five nights a week, go hunting in Nacogdoches in the fall, head down to South Padre Island at Christmas, maybe even get a haircut once in a while. It was a recipe for high living.

He started the car and gave it a little gas.

A decent journalist.

Soletano’s words scratched at something buried deep. He wasn’t sure if it was pique or pride. Whatever, they dug at something he’d suppressed for a long time. He suspected it was ambition, which he’d once possessed in abundance.

He kissed the envelope, then tore it in half and threw the pieces out the window. The future he’d dreamed of was gone. It was up to him to make another.

He unscrewed the cap of the bottle of tequila and brought the bottle to his lips.

Hell, he’d been a crackerjack journalist.

Tank took the bottle from his lips. For some unknown reason, he chucked it out the window, too. Al Soletano could clean up his mess.

Tank put the Jeep into gear and punched the accelerator. By the time he pulled out of the lot, he had his phone to his ear. Don Bennett was stonewalling about something, and that something was the informant. Tank still had one contact who might be of help.

“Austin Medical Examiner’s Office.”

“Give me Carlos Cantu,” said Tank. “Tell him it’s urgent.”

18

Mary stood inside the foyer of her home, the blast of air conditioning doing nothing to cool her temper. Forty minutes after leaving Don Bennett, she remained incensed by his behavior. One moment he was ripping the phone out of her hand, the next he didn’t want to glance at it. It didn’t take a genius to figure out that something or someone had changed his mind.

Mary shook her head, vowing action, and walked into the kitchen. She dumped her purse on the counter and took a bottle of water from the fridge. Her eye stopped on the colorful cans of energy drinks neatly arranged in the back corner. Joe’s drinks. She thought about throwing them out, then changed her mind. She needed him with her for a while longer.

Her phone buzzed. The number belonged to an old friend. Another condolence call. She let it roll to voicemail. She had more important items to attend to. There were the funeral arrangements to make, flights to book, hotel rooms to reserve. She couldn’t mourn. She had too much to do. But before any of that, something else required her attention.

If Don Bennett wouldn’t tell her what Joe was working on, she’d damn well find out herself.

–

Mary nudged open the door to Jessie’s room. “Hi, sweets. Can I come in?”

Jessie lay facedown on her bed, arms splayed over the edges. “Go away.”

Mary took a step closer. It was no time to argue. A truce had been declared between all mothers and their teenage daughters. “I need your help,” she said. “I’m looking for my in-house IT squad.”

A groan was the only response.

She entered the bedroom tentatively. Clothes covered the floor. A glass of root beer sat on Jessie’s desk, and next to it an ice cream wrapper. The posters of horses and boy bands were long gone. On one wall, done up as a lithograph, was a quote from Julian Assange about “information wanting to be free,” and on another a street advertisement for DEF CON, the hackers’ convention in Las Vegas. The room was essentially a battlefield. The frontline between adolescents and parents.

Mary sat down on the bed. She waited for an outcry, a command to get off, or just a plaintive “Mom!” Jessie was silent. Progress, thought Mary. She ran a hand along her daughter’s back. Fifteen years old. Already taller than her mom. Mary’s firstborn was a young woman.

“It’s about my phone,” she went on. “I think I lost a message.”

“So?”

Mary fought the reflex to pull her hand away. “It was from your dad.”

“When?”

“Yesterday.”

A moment passed. Still Jessie didn’t move. Mary gathered a measure of the sheet in her fist. She gave Jessie until three to move or to show the smallest hint of civility.

One…two…

Jessie grunted, then pushed herself up to an elbow. “Give it.”

Mary handed her the phone. “I thought maybe you could tell me how I lost it or if I can get it back.”

“Maybe.” Jessie sat up and put her feet on the floor. She cradled the phone in both hands, head hunched low over it like a priest blessing the sacred host.

“He called at four-oh-three,” said Mary. “But I didn’t check the message until around five-thirty.”

“I see it.”

Mary’s heart skipped a beat. “The message?”

“No,” said Jessie. “The call.”

Mary tamped down her disappointment. She caught a glimpse of the screen. Lines of letters and numerals and symbols as alien as cuneiform or Sanskrit. Her daughter, Champollion.

“Not here,” said Jessie.

“I thought maybe I deleted it by mistake.”

“And then deleted the deleted messages? That would be lame.”

“I didn’t do it. You can check-”

“The older messages are still there,” said Jessie. “I can read.”

“I listened to it once at home and then before I went into the hospital to see your dad. I told Mr. Bennett that I’d gotten it and-”

“Why?” Jessie sat up straighter, a hand pushing the hair from her face, tucking strands behind her ear. For the first time she looked directly at her mother. Mary found her gaze oddly innocent, frightened.

“I thought he would be interested in what your father said.”

“What did Dad say?”

“It doesn’t matter. It was about his business.” Mary took a breath. “And so when I came back for my phone, the message wasn’t there anymore.”

“Then why are you so hot on getting it back?”

Mary hesitated, suddenly slack-jawed. How had Jessie managed to take control of the conversation? “Dad said that he might be in trouble. He said that he loved us all very much.”

“He was in trouble? Like how?”

“I don’t know.”

“What did he say?”

“I can’t entirely remember. I was upset when I heard it.” Mary gestured to the phone, anxious to get clear of dangerous waters. “Do you think you can-”

“So he called when I was unlocking your phone?”

Mary nodded.

“And it was before…” Jessie stopped. Her eyes flitted around the room, gathering pieces of the puzzle. “So you’re saying it was my fault.”

“No, sweetie, of course not. I’m just asking for your help to see if we can get the message back somehow.”

Jessie tossed her the phone, stood, and brushed past her. “You’re trying to tell me that if I hadn’t been unlocking your phone, you would have gotten the call and maybe we could have done something to help Dad.”

Mary rose. “Of course not. You have nothing to do with it.”

“Really? Then why are you telling me about it?”

“Because the FBI won’t help me. Because I don’t know who else to ask.”

“He’s dead. What does it matter? Daddy’s dead.” Jessie threw herself back onto the bed. “Why did you tell me about the message?”

Mary sat down and placed a hand on her shoulder. “Jess, please.”

Jessie knocked the hand away. “It wasn’t my fault. Get out.”

“Jessie.”

“Did you hear me? Leave.” Jessie dug her head into her pillow. A sob racked her chest.

Mary walked to the door. Grace was there, peering in, eyes wide. Mary returned to the bed and knelt by Jessie’s side. “It wasn’t your fault,” she whispered. “Don’t you ever believe that.”

A cry escaped the pillow. A plea to break a mother’s heart.

“Why did you tell me, Mommy? Why?”

19

The man named Shanks drove down Pickfair Drive. Late in the afternoon, the neighborhood was alive with children riding bicycles and mothers pushing strollers along sidewalks. No one looked twice at the work van belonging to the nation’s largest phone and Internet provider.

Shanks parked at the corner of Pickfair and Lockerbie, across the street from the target’s home. “We’re here,” he said.

No response came from the work bay. He looked over his shoulder at the Mole, seated at the surveillance console, eyes locked onto the monitor.

Shanks climbed out and walked around to the sliding door. He was big and muscular, his pecs straining against his technician’s uniform. He rapped his hand on the door before sliding it open. “Let’s get this done. Too many eyes on the street for my liking.”

“Target is inside but not currently using her phone. Same goes for the girls.” The Mole didn’t avert his eyes from the monitor. He was small and wiry and pale. If Shanks’s uniform was too tight, his was too loose. Tattoos of snakes and daggers and skulls covered every inch of his thin, gangly arms.

Shanks poked his head inside the van to get a glimpse of the monitor. A dozen nine-digit phone numbers filled the screens. It was a wireless capture protocol called Kingfisher and worked by transmitting signals that mimicked the nearest cell tower to pull all nearby mobile calls out of the air. “What girls are those?” he asked.

“She has two daughters. They have phones, too.”

Shanks stepped outside. He didn’t ask how the Mole knew about the girls. “Just concentrate on the woman. Mr. Briggs said level two. Don’t get carried away.”

The Mole shifted his gaze to Shanks. “You giving me orders?”

Shanks came out of Cabrini-Green on the Near North Side of Chicago. He’d served his time in the Corps, and then harder time in Florida State Prison. He’d seen his share of hard types. No one had eyes like the Mole. Black as day-old blood and set a mile deep in their sockets. “Just do what you got to do and let’s motor.”

The Mole left his seat and grabbed his work bag as he stepped out of the van. He walked to the junction box, a beige pillar standing three feet tall a few yards from the corner, and pried off the plastic cowling. Penlight in his mouth, he scanned the connections terminus, moving down the handwritten addresses posted next to each. He paused, teeth clenching metal, hands holding an ordinary laborer’s tools. Once upon a time he’d been a star student at the MIT Media Lab. Negroponte’s favorite acolyte. Now he was the Cable Guy.

The Mole stopped at “10602 / Grant” and unscrewed the fiber-optic cable that delivered telephone, television, and Internet service to the home. With his free hand he drew a Y-cable from his bag and screwed the tail onto the terminus. He attached the fiber-optic cable to one fork and his black box to the other, checked that the connections were firm, then replaced the hood.

“Keep going,” said Shanks, who acted as lookout. “No eyes on you.”

The Mole selected a sturdy oak tree nearby with a clear view to the target’s home and affixed a micro hi-def camera to the bark. The camera was no larger than a shirt button and once camouflaged with a bit of putty would be invisible.

The camera and the black box were only superficial measures. The camera wirelessly transmitted high-definition images of the home in a five-mile radius. The box captured all digital traffic to and from the target’s house and passed it on to Peter Briggs: landline, television, cable, Internet. It recorded what numbers the targets dialed, what phone conversations they had, what websites they visited, what articles they read, what shows they watched on streaming content services like Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime, what books they ordered-you name it.

Neither provided a granular view of the target’s activities or, more importantly, her intentions. E-mails could not be decrypted. Banking transactions likewise. Anything requiring a password was beyond their grasp.

There was a better way. The Mole’s way.

He stared at the house, imagining its occupants. One adult. Two children. He’d done his research. It was so easy to find out all about them. Mary, Jessie, and Grace were their names. He could be at the front door in three seconds, and inside ten seconds after that. There would be at least one laptop, maybe a tablet, a phone for every member of the family. Each presented an entry point, a means to burrow into their lives.

The Mole thought about the girls. One was fifteen, the other eleven. How interesting it would be to know more about them. Whether they liked boys or girls, whether they drank or took drugs, whether they looked at pornography. The older girl was dark and tall. The younger was fair and delicate. He liked to imagine her fine wrists, her vulnerable neck.

“You done?” asked Shanks. “I don’t want to have to answer questions about what movies are on special this month.”

The Mole climbed into the van without answering. A moment later he was back in his seat, those deep dark eyes locked onto his machines as if he were some kind of droid powering up.

Shanks knew what he was thinking about.

Nothing good.

20

“It wasn’t your fault.”

Jessie sat on her bed, staring out the window. She had her Beats on, the music loud enough to crowd out any ugly thoughts. Her mom’s words played like a loop over the dark electronic groove, louder than the bass, louder than the guitars, overpowering everything. Everything except Dad.

Dad understood. Dad knew about code and software and how cool tech was. He didn’t think it was weird that she liked what she liked. He totally got the part of her that liked to disappear into the Net, the part that came alive when she held a phone in her hand. When she was connected.

Now he was gone. Dead. And dead meant forever. She tried to understand forever, but she couldn’t. It was too scary.

Jessie picked up her own smartphone-a cheap Android platform-and opened the mail she’d sent herself containing the screenshot of the log from her mom’s phone. Smartphones remembered everything. Somewhere there was a record of every call, every website visited, every keystroke the user ever made. You might erase texts or e-mails or voice messages, but you could never erase the traces they left behind. Not unless you destroyed the phone, and by that she meant grinding it up into a thousand pieces. Even then, there was a record at the ISP and maybe even the wireless carrier.

She brought the screen closer in order to read the blizzard of letters and numbers and backslashes. The notation showing all traffic to the number was clear enough: calls made, calls received, calls missed, voice messages, time, duration. She spotted the incoming call from her dad at 16:03:29 and ending at 16:04:05. (Phones used the twenty-four-hour clock.) She calculated that his message had lasted twenty-five seconds, because her mom’s greeting took forever.

“Hi. This is Mary. Please leave a message and I promise to get back to you as soon as possible. Have a great day.” Jessie mouthed the words. So cheerful, so original…so boring. Hey, Mom, she thought, news flash: they know it’s you. They dialed your number.

Jessie reviewed the lines of code that followed, noting that there were no further voice messages. It was 17:31 when her mom finally listened to her dad’s message. And 18:30 when she listened to it a second time. But nowhere in the lines of code did Jessie spot any instructions to delete a message. At least her mom wasn’t lying. With adults, you never knew.

“It wasn’t my fault,” Jessie admonished her mother. “It’s yours for not listening to it earlier.”

Jessie returned to a line of code that appeared different from the others. It was nothing but a jumble of letters and symbols. Meaningless. She was pretty sure she’d seen almost every kind of computer language, but she hadn’t seen this.

She sent a text containing the mysterious code to Garrett, the only other high school student in her class at UT. He was no Rudeboy, but he was okay smart.

“G. WTF is this? Found it on my mom’s phone. Help.”

Jessie dropped the smartphone on the bed, then pulled off her headphones and stood up. She felt different, like herself again. She realized that she hadn’t thought about her dad the entire time she was looking at her phone. That was enough to trigger another wave of tears. She cried for a minute, but that was all. She was too tired to cry anymore.

She got dressed. Jeans, Zeppelin concert T (the ’74 Stairway to Heaven tour). She brushed her hair and looked in the mirror long enough to make sure she didn’t have any zits and her face wasn’t puffy and blotchy. She pulled her shirt tight across her chest. She hated how big her boobs were getting.

She left her room and crossed the hall. Grace’s door was open. She lay on the bed reading.

“Hey,” said Jessie, poking her head inside.

Grace looked up, then back at the book.

Jessie saw the cover. Another mermaid. Ugh. She sat down on the edge of the bed. “Good book?” She had no idea where the question came from. She hated mermaids and Grace knew it, but she didn’t know what else to say. She was the big sister. She was supposed to console her little sister.

Grace put the book down. “You want to read it after me?”

“Not a chance,” said Jessie, then softened her tone. “I mean, no thanks.”

“You don’t have to be nice to me.”

“Yes, I do.” Jessie forced herself not to leave. “How are you doing, mouse? Feeling better?”

“I’m okay, I guess.” Grace rolled on her side. “I think I was just carsick.”

“I should have cleaned up the mess.”

“It’s okay. Mom did it.”

“I didn’t mean that. I mean about Dad.”

“I’m sad. I can’t talk about him or I’ll cry.”

“Me, too.”

“How’s Mom?”

“Mom’s mom. She’ll be fine.”

“She said you’re going to have to wear a dress at the service.”

“I know.”

“Are you?”

“Yes. For Dad.” Jessie glanced at the empty pet cage on Grace’s dresser. “Gonna get another hamster?”

“Maybe. I still miss Lucky.”

“Lucky didn’t do very much except eat and sleep. Whenever you held him he pooped in your hand. Is there something better you want? An iguana, maybe?”

“No!”

“How about a snake? A boa constrictor?”

Grace’s eyes widened in horror. Before she could answer, Jessie’s phone trembled. It was a text from Garrett. “Gotta go.”

“But-”

Jessie ran into her room and slammed the door behind her. The text read: “Wow. That’s some serious shit. Think it’s NITRON.”

“No way,” wrote Jessie. “NITRON’s for WCs.”

NITRON was a software language used exclusively by wireless carriers-WCs-namely phone companies like Sprint, AT &T, and ONE Mobile.

“You mess with the handset?” wrote Garrett. “Maybe you got ’em pissed.”

Jessie had never considered that it might have been something she’d done that had erased her father’s message. “Didn’t touch it. Swear.”

“No worries. We can ask Linus in class.”

Linus was Linus Jankowski, the TA who taught Jessie’s summer school computer class. The course was titled “Exercises in Extracurricular Programming,” but everyone in class called it the Hack Shack.

“For sure,” texted Jessie. “He’ll know.” The thought offered some relief. No one knew more about hacking than Linus. He’d almost won Capture the Flag at DEF CON last year.

“I’m really sorry about yr dad. That sux.”

“I’m ok.”

“No really. Feelin’ for you.”

“Tx.”

“TTYL.”

Jessie leaned against the door. She prayed that Garrett was wrong about the code being NITRON. She’d lied about not touching the handset. If the code had come from the mobile carrier, it meant they’d sent it because she’d unlocked the phone and that was against the rules. The code was probably an automated response she didn’t know about that did something crazy to the phone.

Jessie slid to the floor and covered her head with her arms.

Maybe it was her fault that her father’s last message had been erased.

21

Mary stood in the hall outside Joe’s office. It was four. The house was too quiet. Jessie should be rummaging through the refrigerator, complaining that there was nothing good to eat. Grace should be in the living room, watching an episode of Pretty Little Liars for the umpteenth time. Instead of melancholy and loss, she felt anger. A will to act. The silence acted as a call to arms, as stirring as a bugler’s tattoo. No one, she realized, was going to help her.

Mary flipped on the light. Joe’s office was a small, wood-paneled room with venetian blinds and a rattan ceiling fan. She took a look around before sitting at his desk. There were magazines and folders and a few paperback books, as well as the latest tomes from Home Depot on a dozen do-it-yourself projects. She saw nothing of interest that might be from his work. No court orders, no case files, no subpoenas, no warrant requests.

Somewhere there was a clue to what he had been doing. Jessie said that anything you did on a phone left a mark. People left marks, too.

Mary opened the drawer. It contained a riot of pens and pencils, erasers and rubber bands, unused DVDs still in their wrapping, and plastic packs of Zantac. There was a box of his business cards and another containing cards he’d collected, mostly from fellow agents and colleagues in the law enforcement community. She ran a hand to the back. Her fingers touched another box, this one containing a variety of flash drives. Several were standard stick drives, but the others were more imaginative, designed to conceal the aluminum dock. She found a silver pendant shaped like a heart, a big fat car key, a box of matches, and her instant favorite, a pack of bubble gum.

Mary carried the flash drives into the kitchen. One after another she plugged them into the desktop. All were unused. She found no stored information anywhere. Another dead end.

She returned to Joe’s office. A single personal decoration was on the desk: a small jolly brass Buddha, a souvenir of their time in Bangkok. They’d entertained Joe’s Thai colleagues often, hosting barbecues on the terrace of their apartment overlooking the Chao Phraya River. It was Joe’s practice to stage a charm offensive upon his arrival at a new posting. He’d invite the SAC, the agents he’d be working with, and any other noteworthy personalities. It was only now that Mary realized that Joe hadn’t brought home any of his new colleagues from the Austin residency.

There was something else. It came to her that Joe had given up speaking about his work to her. The FBI didn’t encourage its agents to divulge details of investigations to their spouses, but it wasn’t the CIA either. The Bureau maintained nothing close to a code of absolute silence. There was no “bromerta” among agents. And yet she couldn’t recall the last time he’d spoken to her about anything specific he was working on, other than the occasional trip to San Antonio for bureaucratic necessities.

She put down the Buddha and stood to leave. She paused at the entry and looked back. It took her a moment to spot what bothered her. The answer was nothing. The problem, she realized, was that the room was too clean.

Joe had the neatness habits of an eight-year-old. She’d spend an hour straightening up his office only for him to have it looking as if a hurricane had moved through ten minutes later. Her last effort to bring order from chaos had been five days ago. Since then, she knew, Joe had spent several late nights here, but there were no papers littering the floor, no empty cans of Red Bull in the trash.

And so? she asked herself. What am I driving at?

She didn’t know. Something was just…wrong.

Everything…and everyone…left a trail.

Mary started at the door and walked the room’s perimeter, tilting the bookcase, peering behind the easy chair, getting on her knees and looking under the desk. She found it lodged between the wall and the shredder. One crumpled-up ball of paper. She freed it gingerly and unfolded it on the desk, smoothing it with her palm.

Joe’s nearly illegible scrawl covered the page. There were mostly numbers, an address, some names, and a whole lot of doodles. Hardly the treasure trove she’d hoped for.

A phone number was printed at the top of the page with the name Caruso below it, and then “Exp. Confirmed 7/25.”

“Exp.” meant what? Expired? July 25 was only a few days ago.

A few inches lower, printed diagonally across the page, was an address: “17990 Highway 290 East. 3PM.” And then, a few inches further down: “FK. Nutty Brown Cafe. 1PM.”

Mary shook her head. Only in Texas could there be a Nutty Brown Cafe.

Below this were doodles of sticks and triangles, a dozen of them at least.

Mary hurried to the bedroom for her iPad and returned. First she typed the address into the query window. A satellite photo of burned central Texas landscape appeared, with a white line denoting Highway 290 running through it. The X showing the location of the address appeared in the middle of a tract of scrub. She zoomed in and dotted property lines appeared. Closer still, and a name. “Flying V Ranch.”

She zoomed out until the town of Dripping Springs appeared to the west.

The Flying V Ranch was where Joe had been killed.

Next Mary typed “Nutty Brown Cafe” into the query window. The café had its own website and advertised itself as a restaurant and outdoor music venue. Pictures showed a long, low-slung building set back off the highway, a white awning running its length bearing the café’s name. A twenty-foot-tall neon cowboy slinging a lasso welcomed visitors. She plugged in the address and a map appeared showing the café to be located on Highway 290, fifteen miles east of Dripping Springs.

“FK. Nutty Brown Cafe. 1PM.”

She assumed that Joe had met someone at the café at one p.m. yesterday. Was that someone “FK”?

She dredged through the names of Joe’s colleagues, looking for one that started with an F. She didn’t remember any, offhand. She asked ONELook to search “Boys’ names beginning with F.” A long list appeared, but she didn’t remember any Farleys, Franks, or Fredericks.

Or was “FK” the informant’s initials? Mary didn’t think so. It didn’t make sense to meet an informant in a public place, then drive out to a secluded ranch to meet him again a few hours later.

She returned to the phone number written at the top of the page. She picked up her phone and dialed. Four rings and then: “Angelo Caruso speaking.”

“Hello, Mr. Caruso?”

“State your business.” A crusty voice. Older. Tobacco-cured.

“I’m Mary Grant.”

“Do I know you?”

“My husband was Joe Grant.”

“Who’s that?”

“Special Agent Joseph Grant of the FBI. He was killed yesterday.”

A pause as Caruso cleared his throat. “I’m sorry for your loss, ma’am. But I don’t think I can be of help.”

“I saw your name and number on his pad and-”

“Then you know that I am a superior court judge for the state of Texas, Travis County. Any business I had with your husband must and shall remain confidential. May I ask why you are calling?”

“I had some questions about his work. I saw your name on his legal pad. I thought that maybe-”

“Your husband was a federal agent, Mrs. Grant. As such, his business did not concern his family. I suggest you halt your inquiries. Good day. And again, I am sorry for your loss.”

Caruso hung up.

Mary lowered the phone, stunned by the man’s bluntness. He might as well have slapped her across the face. Who was he to say that Joe’s business did not concern her or that she should halt her inquiries? “And F you too, Judge Asshole,” she said aloud.

It was at that moment that Mary Margaret Olmstead Grant formally assumed the role of her husband’s advocate, protector, and voice in this world.

I will find out what happened to you, Joe, she promised his spirit, though she had no idea what in the world she might be getting herself into. At that moment she didn’t care. Something was being kept from her. She wanted to know what.

Mary studied the wrinkled paper, her eyes fixing on the doodles scrawled across its lower half. They were pairings of triangles colored solid blue with little sticks extending from one side. No, not that. She had it wrong. Twin sticks connected at one end like the hands on a wristwatch, each leading to a blue triangle. The triangles were positioned differently. The first at twelve and three. The second at four and eleven. The rest at odd variations thereof. Phone doodles made while Joe carried on a conversation.

Mary folded the paper in half and stood. The thought came to her that Don Bennett wasn’t the only one hiding something.

And then she remembered that she still hadn’t examined one thing. Something that had come home from the hospital along with Joe’s shoes, belt, wristwatch, Marine Corps tie clasp, and the beloved Saint Christopher medal he’d worn around his neck since the age of thirteen.

She ran upstairs.

22

Joe’s belongings sat on her dresser where she’d left them the night before. A drawstring bag held his shoes and belt. A smaller zip-lock bag held his wristwatch, tie clasp, and Saint Christopher medal. Mary selected the remaining zip-lock bag, which contained his wallet. It was a standard leather billfold, scuffed and worn. A Christmas present from the girls to their dad three years before, to replace the horrid Velcro one he’d used for years. She removed it and looked inside. As usual, she was amused at how few credit cards Joe carried. There was a government-issued Visa for his work expenses and an American Express card for personal use.

Joe believed in paying off all his debts each month. It was a nice concept, but quaintly outdated in the era of a laptop for every student and prescription medications that cost $600 a month. Consequently Mary was in charge of family finances and merited an honorary degree in juggling balances between her four MasterCards and her bank custom credit line.

She slipped her fingers into the pouches beneath the cardholders. One side yielded several school portraits of the girls, an organ donor’s card, and a business card for a roofer who’d visited the house a week ago to check on a leak Joe couldn’t patch. At the bottom of the stack was a small, folded piece of paper, gossamer soft, fraying with age. Once it had been sky blue, but now it was white. She unfolded it carefully, her chest tightening as she realized what she held in her hands.

A younger woman’s flowery, hopeful script read: “You have made me the happiest woman in the world. I love you. M.”

Mary looked away quickly. It was the note she’d given Joe on their wedding day, hours before the ceremony. She hadn’t thought about it since, yet here it was, soft and frayed, evidently unfolded and read hundreds of times over the years. The sky-blue paper, her youthful, innocent handwriting, the crazily optimistic words, were an indelible snapshot of one day in her life. It was something to cherish and to treasure. Something permanent. She looked at the words again, then folded the note and slipped it back into the wallet.

That was that.

Mary sighed. She was pleased to have discovered the wedding note but disappointed that Joe hadn’t left her another clue. She wasn’t sure what she’d expected to find…just something to add to the skein of information gleaned from the crumpled paper in Joe’s office.

As an afterthought, she cracked open the wallet to count Joe’s money. She thumbed through a ten, a five, and four ones. There was a receipt, too. It was from the Nutty Brown Cafe and dated yesterday. She stepped out of the closet to read it in the daylight.

The time listed was 2:05 p.m. Items included one cheeseburger, one French fries, one Coca-Cola, one egg-white omelet with green peppers. One coffee.

On the flip side Joe had penned, “SSA FK 7/29.”

Mary forgot her disappointment. There was FK once again. If she was no closer to guessing his name, at least she knew more about him. “SSA” stood for Supervisory Special Agent. FK, whoever he might be, was not the informant. He worked for the FBI.

–

The walk-in closet was as big as Mary’s childhood bedroom. Two cabinets hung from the ceiling, Mary’s to the left. Joe’s to the right. She opened her husband’s. The smell of him wafted over her. Sandalwood and citrus. The scents were sharp and nearly provoked an onslaught of tears. Mary steeled herself and concentrated on the job at hand. Some spare change and a few golf tees were scattered across the top shelf. A box of matches from Chuy’s, a fun Mexican place downtown.

She started on Joe’s suits. He owned six or seven, usually buying two a year and retiring two. There weren’t too many casual Fridays with the Bureau. She found a napkin from Whataburger in one pocket, a few dimes, a handkerchief, and a bonus card from the local car wash. Her movements grew sloppier in lockstep with her frustration. She stopped returning his slacks to the rack, instead dropping them onto the carpet. The pockets were empty. All of them.

When she’d finished, she put her hands on her hips and sighed. She’d succeeded only in messing up the closet. One by one she picked up the slacks and hung them. She fixed the jackets on their hangers just so, with a half-inch between them.

“Nothing good comes easy.”

The admiral was having a last laugh.

A pile of dirty laundry lay in the corner. She scooped up the clothing, carried it to her bed, and dumped it there in a heap. Three shirts and a rumpled olive suit. She checked the pants first. A Kleenex. Two pennies. And a napkin from American Airlines with a tomato juice stain, which meant it came from a morning flight.

Memories of Joe flooded her mind.

He was seated next to her on a flight-she didn’t know where from or where to. It was early in the morning and he’d just ordered a tomato juice from the attendant. She looked on as he emptied the can into the plastic cup, then raised his gaze to hers and stared into her eyes, saying nothing, saying everything, saying I love you.

Mary saw herself from a distance, shaking her head, smiling warily, thinking to herself, Don’t spill that on your white shirt.

“Me?” said Joe. “Never.”

Mary bolted at the sound of his voice. “Joe,” she said aloud. “Are you here?”

He was there. He was with her in the bedroom.

The echo of her own words brought her back. The voice was in her head. Joe wasn’t there. He’d never be there again.

Keep moving, she ordered herself. You haven’t finished yet.

Mary ran a hand over the olive jacket. Her fingers delved into the pockets. She took hold of a piece of paper. She pulled and it snagged. She pulled again and came away with a boarding pass stub.

American Airlines. Grant, Mr. J. Flight 83. AUS-SJC. Seat 13D. Date: 6/1

On June 1, Mr. J. Grant had flown on American Airlines Flight 83 from Austin to San Jose.

Alarm bells sounded.

She checked the stub again. Yes…San Jose.

Mary ran downstairs to the kitchen and sat at the phone alcove. She opened the family agenda and flipped backward through the pages until she reached June 1.

“JG-San Antonio” read the entry in Joe’s block-letter writing.

Mary looked at the boarding pass. Not San Antonio. San Jose. A difference of sixteen hundred miles.

They had a rule. No matter how sensitive the case, Joe must inform her when he was traveling long distance. In return, she promised never to ask why or what it was about. The rule was inviolate.

Honesty was their bond.

Mary closed the agenda as if slamming a door. She wiped at the tears running down her cheeks. Joe had lied.

No, she argued. Not Joe. It was the Bureau. They had forced him to lie.

But she couldn’t accept that either. No one forced Joe to do anything. If he’d lied to her, it was his choice.

Mary slipped the boarding pass into her pocket.

Why, Joe? she demanded, some part of her still wondering if he just might be listening. What case could be so important as to warrant putting your wife’s trust, your marriage, and even your family in jeopardy?

23

“Don’t do it.”

From her window, Jessie looked on as Grace jumped higher and higher on the Kramers’ trampoline next door. On the fourth bounce she threw a front flip. Her feet landed well, but her forward momentum propelled her into the mesh siding. She appeared to strike the iron support bar and toppled to her side.

“Ouch,” said Jessie. “Get up.”

Her eye went to the Kramers’ kitchen. Of course Mom was keeping an eye on Gracie, too. The sliding door rocketed open and her mom dashed to the trampoline. In their house it was all Grace, all the time.

Jessie pulled her e-cigarette from her pocket and sparked a hit. She wasn’t jealous of the attention Grace got. It wasn’t that. It was just annoying how everyone expected her always to be all right on her own. “Jess has her computers.” Or “Jess doesn’t like to be bothered.” Or “She’s happier by herself.”

Yeah, right.

It didn’t matter anyway.

In fact she was proud of her sister. All that time in the hospital. All the terrible stuff they did to her, the puking, losing her hair. And now she acted as if it had never happened. Saint Grace.

Jess looked on as her sister got to her feet, giggling, and her mom went back inside, white as a sheet.

“Again,” Grace shouted, and started bouncing once more on the trampoline.

Jess shook her head. Her sister was pretty tough. She’d give her that.

She vaped again, then slipped her e-cig into her pocket and lay down on her bed with her laptop. Her wallpaper showed a picture of Def Leppard with all her favorite apps and icons of lots of her (supposed) favorite websites. She hit an encrypt key. Def Leppard disappeared and the Jolly Roger appeared, dotted from corner to corner with icons of her real favorite sites.

Jess double-clicked on an icon showing a large S. The Sugardaddies.com home page appeared and she felt the delicious tingle of excitement. It was her naughty feeling. She typed in her name, Lolita2000, and her password. Her profile page appeared. There was a picture of a tall, slim brunette in a bikini who was definitely not Jessie. Below it ran her description: “Good Girl Gone Bad. Naughty, but Oh So Nice.” There followed a short tease. “Only the most discriminating gentlemen wanted. I’m a smart, young, motivated woman interested in being mentored by a successful gentleman. Located in northern California but willing to travel and dying to see the world. I love great cuisine, stimulating conversation, and long, deep kisses that make me feel like a woman.”

She wasn’t sure about that last part, but lots of other girls on the site said similar things.

Her mailbox showed that she’d received sixty-seven messages in the past two days. A sample of the headers included “Hey Classy Lady,” from Nantucket Sailor; “Just How Naughty?” from Rich in NYC; and “You Are Smokin’ Hot!” from Julio J. Studley. Jessie was pretty sure that wasn’t his real name.

Halfway down the list she spotted a familiar handle: 40, Rich, and Bored.

Her heart quickened and she opened the message.

“Hi Lexie.” Lexie was her Net name. “Still waiting on that special pic you promised to send. I sent you mine. Did you dig it? Hope you put the five hundred bucks to good use. Consider it a down payment on a good time when we hook up. Did I mention I just picked up a new Benz S Class? Be a good girl-or a bad one!!-and I’ll buy you one, too. Gotta run. Send me that pic, pretty lady!”

She clicked on his handle, and several pictures of an okay-looking guy with dark hair and a tan standing next to a BMW came up. Forty was old, but not that old. Fifty was old. Forty was almost old, and this guy looked like he was younger. He even had a six-pack.

She opened another tab and typed in her bank’s address, then logged in to her account. The balance stood at $3,575. 40, Rich, and Bored’s payment of $500 had arrived the day before. At least she knew he wasn’t lying about the rich part. He’d already sent $1,000 the month before. The thought made Jessie nervous and ashamed. She knew it wasn’t right to steal money, but this wasn’t exactly stealing. She asked for it and men sent it. Of course, she promised to send pictures of herself and also to do stuff to them when they met. Even so, they knew that they were taking a chance. They probably rubbed themselves off in the shower thinking about her. Pervs. If they were stupid enough to send money to any girl who asked, they deserved to lose it.

Jessie got up and glanced through the window, making sure that Grace and her mom were still next door. She walked to the mirror and tried out a few poses that she thought he might find sexy. She lifted up her shirt to expose her midriff. Polar bears were darker. She turned around and stuck her butt at the mirror. God, no, Jess. Your ass is the size of a tractor.

Maybe she should just send him a picture like the one he sent her. Totally naked. She picked up her phone and hit the camera app, feeling that naughty sensation, daring herself to go for it…

The front door slammed. Terrified, Jessie froze. Footsteps drummed up the stairs. Jessie threw herself onto the bed. A second later Grace opened her door and bounded into the room. “Jess, guess what?”

Jess hit the encrypt key. The Sugardaddies website disappeared and was replaced by her fake home screen. She looked up, bored beyond measure, even as her heart was exploding. “What now?”

“Mom said we might get a dog.”

“Oh.”

“Wouldn’t that be incredible? I mean, we’ve wanted one for so long. A dog!”

Jessie looked back at her laptop. “Yeah,” she said. “Awesome.”

24

It was nine p.m. when Tank Potter arrived at the office of the Travis County medical examiner. The doors were locked. A single bulb burned at the end of the corridor. Tank rapped his knuckles against the glass and did his best to stand up straight. He’d kept himself on a tight leash all afternoon. One snort from his backstop an hour, strictly for medicinal purposes. By tomorrow the shakes would be a thing of the past.

A thin, dark-haired man in a lab coat rounded the corner and hurried down the corridor. Tank raised his hand in the Longhorn salute-pinkie and index finger extended, his other fingers curled into a fist. “Hook ’em, Horns.”

“Hook ’em, Horns,” replied Carlos Cantu, raising his own hand in salute as he opened the door. “Hey, buddy. We’re closing up shop. I can give you five minutes.”

“That ought to do.” Tank stepped inside the building and followed Cantu down the hall to the “icebox,” the room where the corpses were stored. The medical examiner shared space with the city morgue and handled autopsies for Travis and five surrounding counties, a geographic footprint that included Dripping Springs. Cantu wasn’t the ME or even the forensic investigator. He was just a morgue assistant whom Tank had known since his playing days, when he’d been a star and Cantu a student trainer who’d wrapped his ankle, laundered his uniforms, and folded his towels. Tank had kept in touch over the years, if only for this purpose.

“Thought you were covering politics these days,” said Cantu.

“I’m back in the saddle,” said Tank, dodging the question. “Wouldn’t miss this one for the world.”

“Something’s up with this guy. No question.”

“Really?”

The morgue looked no different from when he’d last visited, three years ago. Low ceiling, fluorescent lights, white tile floor and walls, and the inescapable, eye-watering scent of ammonia. Cantu pulled a holding tray out of the wall. The informant lay inside a pale green body bag. “We had the FBI in here all day, asking lots of questions.”

“One of ’em Don Bennett?”

“Who’s he?”

“SAC in the Austin office. Bald, mustache, looks like he has a rake up his ass.”

“He was here. But he wasn’t the one in charge.”

“Who was?”

“Short, gray-haired guy. New Yorker. All business.”

“Name?”

Cantu shook his head. “Ted? Or Ed? All I know is that he was the one ordering Doc Donat around and telling him what to do with the bodies.”

“What do you mean? The ME’s required by law to do an autopsy.”

“That’s just it. They’re sending the bodies to D.C. for the postmortems. I’m supposed to have them ready for transshipment by tomorrow at noon.”

“Both?”

“The guy with half a head and the FBI dude.”

Tank took this in. He was fairly certain that sending a body out of state for autopsy was not standard operating procedure. Postmortems of homicide victims were conducted by the nearest medical examiner. It was a question of cost, convenience, and timeliness. Decomposition began the moment a heart stopped beating and accelerated as time went on.

Carlos Cantu had one hand on the zipper. “Didn’t have a bean-and-cheese burrito for dinner, did you?”

Tank said he had not.

“Fair warning.” Cantu unzipped the body bag. Tank looked, then looked away, sucking down a gulp of air to steady himself. Timidly he returned his gaze to “the guy with half a head.” One eye remained, the lower half of a nose, lips, and a chin. The rest of the skull and brain was gone as cleanly as if a shovel had sheared it away.

The FBI’s press release stated that Special Agent Joseph Grant had been mortally wounded in the course of debriefing an informant but had managed to kill said informant prior to expiring himself. Tank had seen plenty of dead bodies. His time on the murder beat had given him a lesson in the fine art of gunshot wounds, from.22s that looked like little more than cigarette burns to.44 Magnums that went in big and came out bigger. No handgun was capable of this kind of damage. Tank’s childhood of hunting deer and javelinas told him that only a high-caliber rifle was capable of shearing off that much of a man’s head with a single shot.

“Can I look at the other guy? The Fibbie?”

Cantu dug his hands into his lab coat. “I’m pushing it as it is, Tank. I have to be out of here by nine-fifteen.”

Tank peeled off a twenty and put it in Cantu’s hand. “Would have bought us a case of Heini’s back in the day.”

“I’m good with a sixer of Shiner Bock.” Cantu pocketed the bill, marched down the row, and pulled out the tray bearing Joseph Grant’s corpse. He unzipped the bag and pulled it over the corpse’s shoulders, revealing the mortal wound. It was apparent that the body had come straight from the hospital. There was still tape around the mouth and dried blood all over the chest and torso. Grant had been shot a single time in the chest. The entry wound was the size of Tank’s middle finger, a round black hole.

“Can you lift him up?”

Cantu hoisted the corpse, exposing an exit wound the size and appearance of a crushed grapefruit. Tank had two impressions. First, no handgun did that kind of damage. Second, the diameter of the entry wound was too big to come from a pistol. They added up to a single, undeniable fact: Don Bennett was lying.

It was evident why the FBI wanted to get the bodies into friendly hands and away from prying eyes. Away from reporters like Tank.

“Can I put him down now?” grunted Cantu.

“Sure thing.” Tank walked back to the informant. He was already growing accustomed to the gruesome corpse-getting his sea legs back, so to speak. “No name on this guy?”

“John Doe.”

“Where’s his wallet?”

“All his valuables had been removed.”

“You lift his prints, dental records?”

“What for? The feds knew who he was.”

“Let me see his papers.”

“In the ME’s office with the valuables. Locked.”

Tank looked closely at the body. He tagged him early forties, five-nine or so, arms and legs like pins, soft belly, no tats, nice fingernails. He lifted one of the hands. Not a callus, scratch, or scar. A man who’d never done a day’s labor in his life. White-collar all the way. He noted that the ring finger on the left hand was creased but was not paler than the rest of the finger. He inferred that the informant had separated from his wife or divorced in the past ninety days. Someone would be missing him soon.

Tank used his phone to take photographs of the bodies.

“No pictures,” said Carlos Cantu. “You know the rules.”

“I’m not putting it on YouTube.”

“Erase them. Please.”

“I can’t do that. Not this time.”

Cantu blocked the door, arms crossed. Tank freed two more twenties from his money clip and extended them, something between a bribe and a peace offering. Cantu took the bills.

“Burning your bridges, Tank.”

“This may be the last one I’m crossing.”

25

Carlos Cantu returned to the icebox to put away the bodies. Forty years old and taking bribes to make ends meet. Not quite the way he’d expected things to turn out.

He slid the trays into their lockers and cleaned up the room, remembering the sunny afternoons at Royal Stadium, the burnt-orange jerseys running up and down the field, eighty thousand wildly cheering fans filling the stands, the old siege cannon firing after every touchdown.

The good ol’ days.

Cantu laughed dispiritedly. He’d been too much of a runt to play, but he’d enjoyed being a trainer. It had been his dream to become a doctor, but he’d dropped out senior year to look after his mother, who was ill. Time passed. His mother died. He’d never stopped wanting to be a doctor, or even a physical therapist. Somehow he never managed to get a degree.

Finished cleaning up, Carlos turned off the lights and locked the door. He checked that all the offices were empty and that he was the last to leave. On his way out he stopped at his desk. Unlocking his file drawer, he took out a zip-lock bag containing a wallet, a gold bracelet, and a wristwatch. He’d lied to Tank. It had been his job to bag the informant’s valuables. Dutifully he placed the man’s wallet and bracelet into an evidence bag and sealed it. He kept the watch for himself. It was a Patek Philippe. Swiss. Perpetual calendar. Eighteen-karat gold. Crocodile strap. Retail price $126,000, according to a site on the Net. He hoped to auction it off for no less than half that amount.

He turned it over in his hand. There were initials engraved on the back of the case.

“To H.S. Thanks, I.”

26

Mary Grant was coming to life before his eyes. Image by image. Pixel by pixel.

Not a picture of her. Ian Prince had no practical interest in her physical appearance. Standing in the center of his office at a few minutes before ten p.m., he was looking into her true self, her life as defined by her activity online.

Ian was having Mary Margaret Olmstead Grant indexed.

The office was large and airy, the size of a tennis court, with wooden floors and a vaulted ceiling. Windows offered a vista across the Meadow toward Great Tom. Ian’s gaze was not on the illuminated belfry, however, but on the holographic images that rose from knee level and formed a circular tower around him-a patchwork quilt of the web pages Mary Grant visited on a regular basis.

There was her home page at Amazon and her log-on page at Chase. There was her Facebook page and her Shutterfly account. Mapquest and Google. WebMD and Pandora. Citicards and Wells Fargo. There was the Austin American-Statesman and the New York Times. Huffington Post and Drudge Report. Yet another showed the portal to her health insurance company. Some of the pages were recent, as reported by the tap put on the Grant family’s online access earlier in the day. But more had come from her browsing history.

Another panel showed pages linked to her Social Security number. These included her credit report, mortgage information, home equity line of credit (from Sacramento), and federal tax information as reported to the IRS.

It was simplicity itself to retrieve the information. All ONE servers were powered by software containing a collection filter that Ian alone was able to access. The filter looked for all manner of personal data, everything from phone numbers to credit card numbers to Social Security numbers, and once found, stored it permanently. Ninety-one percent of all traffic on the Internet passed through a server, router, or switch manufactured by ONE.

He touched a screen hovering in front of his nose. The portal to the Austin American-Statesman opened. He noted that she’d been reading the article about her husband. Nothing strange there. He touched the screen and it shrank to its original size.

Next he looked at Mary Grant’s account at Chase Bank. Until he had a password, he could not go deeper. Likewise, he could not access her detailed credit card records or her insurance accounts.

Ian touched the screen and the page shrank to its original size.

For now, Mary Grant’s index was a precaution. If and when she became a threat, he would obtain her passwords. It would not be difficult. He would dig deeper. The circular tower would grow to contain hundreds of web pages. He would know everything Mary Grant had done in the past and everything she was doing in the present.

Most important, he would know everything she would do in the future.

27

It was late. The girls were asleep. Or at least Grace was. Jessie no doubt was on her laptop, doing whatever she did until all hours. Mary padded downstairs to Joe’s office. She had on her sweats and one of Joe’s Georgetown T-shirts. He was in her thoughts constantly, so much so that she felt almost as if he were still alive, only in a different form. Every doubt, he extinguished. Every fear, he allayed. She had only to say “I can’t,” for him to counter, “Of course you can.”

Mary set down her mug of tea and her iPad. Seated at his desk, she dug the boarding card out of her pocket. Her eye found the seven-digit code below his name. 7XC5111. Joe’s frequent-flyer membership number.

She called up the American Airlines web page, then selected “Rewards Program” and entered Joe’s number. A box asked for his password. She typed it in and was directed to Joe’s page.

Hon, she said to him, you’re so easy.

Mary had warned herself to be ready. Where there was smoke, there was fire. If Joe hadn’t told her about one trip to San Jose, there would be others, to either San Jose or elsewhere.

The page listed Joe’s recent trips. She began counting at the top of the page and continued through two more. Twenty-seven flights in all. She had her agenda open and ticked off each trip against her record. Many flights matched perfectly. She recalled Joe’s comments about the cases he was covering at the time. She had no qualms with those.

But many did not. There were two in November. One in December. Three in January. And so on through July.

Not just fire; a five-alarm blaze.

The phone rang. The call was from the funeral home. “Mrs. Grant, this is Horace Feely. I’m sorry to disturb you so late, but there seems to be a problem.”

Mary turned her chair away from the desk. “I’m listening.”

“To be brief, we’re unable to take possession of your husband. Usually the medical examiner releases the body after the autopsy has been performed. However, there seems to have been a delay.”

“What kind of delay?”

“In performing the postmortem. At the FBI’s request, the medical examiner has exercised his right to keep your husband’s body until such further time as decided. I would count on a week minimum.”

“A week. But-” Mary bit back her words. Anger wouldn’t change anything. She thanked the funeral director and hung up.

She put down the phone. No one had informed her that an autopsy was to be performed on her husband. What could a medical examiner find that the surgeons hadn’t? It was all part of the scheme, she realized. First Don Bennett refusing to help her retrieve Joe’s message, then Judge Caruso telling her to halt her inquiries, and now a delay of at least a week in performing the postmortem.

Not a scheme.

A conspiracy.

But for what? she asked, only to laugh derisively at her naïveté. Weren’t conspiracies always about the same thing?

Mary turned back to the desk and tallied her findings. Beginning in November of the past year, Joe had made sixteen trips to San Jose without her knowledge. Twelve while the family was in Sacramento and four since the move to Texas. For these most recent trips, the notations in the agenda read “Bastrop,” “San Antonio,” “fieldwork,” and so on. Never once was there a mention of San Jose.

Sixteen trips were enough.

Mary put down her pen. The conclusion was there to see plain as day. Joe had not come to Austin to work on municipal corruption cases. He’d come to follow a case that had begun in Sacramento, a case that required him to fly to San Jose, California, on a frequent basis and that had ended with him being shot by an informant while sitting in his car on an abandoned ranch in the middle of nowhere.

Mary powered down the iPad. For an hour she sat drinking her tea, contemplating her new reality. There were lies and there was deception, and then there was this: a secret life.

An idea came to her. Joe hadn’t called just to say he was in trouble. He knew she wouldn’t be able to help. He’d called to tell her the truth.

Joe knew about the conspiracy, too.

28

Darkness.

A penlight illuminates a patch of wall. Trophies on a shelf. A basketball. The pale light stops on a poster of a football player, #52 of the San Francisco ’49ers. Then closer. An autograph: “To Billy Merriweather, Your friend, Patrick Willis.”

The light moves again. Now it is on the boy’s face. He lies asleep on his bed, sheets pulled to his chin. He is nine or ten. Blond. We are closer now, close enough to see the fuzz on his cheek. A hand approaches the boy’s face. The hand holds a knife. It is a stiletto, the blade long, slim, razor-sharp. The blade traces the chin, the nose, and stops a breath from the boy’s closed eye. As frightening is the tattoo visible on the man’s hand. It is a skull with vipers squirming to escape the empty sockets.

A man whispers, “Die.”

End.

All this in six seconds.

Repeat.

–

Darkness.

A penlight illuminates a patch of wall. Trophies…

“How many times are you going to watch that?” asked Shanks.

“You don’t like it?” asked the Mole.

“I liked it fine the first twenty times.”

The two men had exchanged the white work van for a custom-built Mercedes Airstream and were parked in a commercial lot a mile from Mary Grant’s house.

The Mole put away his phone. He’d made several more Vines, six-second clips that he uploaded to the Net. All were similar in content. Only the actors differed.

He’d filmed the first inside John Merriweather’s brother’s home. It showed a sleeping couple and his straight-edge razor. A second came from inside the home of Merriweather Systems’ cofounder and second largest stockholder. The last was his favorite. It came from the home of John Merriweather’s daughter. Like the Vine he’d just watched, it featured a child-in this case, a six-year-old girl with black hair and a delicious birthmark on her cheek. It had been a warm night and the girl had been sleeping on top of her covers. At the very last moment he’d touched the birthmark with the tip of the blade.

“They worked,” he said. “The Merriweather deal went through, didn’t it?”

“Is that what they were for?”

“Don’t fuck with me,” said the Mole. “You know good and well. Briggs loved ’em. Said they even scared the hell out of him.”

Shanks moved to the rear of the van and lay down.

The Mole watched the Vine again. He was thinking of the girls inside the house. He wanted to film a Vine with them.