Reign of Evil

CHAPTER 27

Preeti knew what she was going to do even before she sat down at her workstation. She’d waited until the team left, assisting them where she could. She provided the SEALs with digital schematics of the museum and basement. Their integrated electronics suites were incredible. It was a testament both to how well-funded the American military machine was and to how impoverished Britain’s had become.

They left her alone with only the tall Navy man to keep her company. Of course, he was really there to guard the prisoner, but she’d at least been able to pry a little out of him about his past. The cultural and emotional makeup of military men interested her no end. Before she’d met Trevor, she’d had her own ideas, shared by most of the public, that the people who ended up in the military were those who couldn’t do anything else.

Trevor had joined because his family had a tradition of service going back hundreds of years. Walker had joined to be like his brother.

Genaro Stewart, she now learned, had joined because it was the only way he’d be able to afford college. His intention was to stay in long enough to have his loans paid off, then get out, but he’d ended up liking the service more than any possibility higher education could unleash.

They all had reasons for serving. She’d originally joined to help out Trevor, to show her appreciation for what he’d done for her and her brother. But that had quickly changed as she came to learn that she enjoyed doing something that made an impact greater than she could alone. What she was doing had an effect on everyone in her beloved country. And to think she never would have discovered any of this had the hooligans not decided to target her and her brother.

Her brother had provided her a log-in screen behind his firewall. It gave her similar superuser privileges. While he was busy trashing links his algorithms found, she’d do a little detective work. She went straight to the CCTV database. Although the Blackpool cameras had been interrupted during the attack, they wouldn’t show any problems prior to the attack. For the woman to have been in place to take pictures at the right time, she would have had to have been there previously.

Preeti spent an hour cycling through Blackpool images before she found her. Wearing a white dress and with blond hair, the woman behaved as if she knew she was being filmed. She kept her face down and away from every camera she came near. Preeti didn’t have enough to run face recognition. But she had a better idea.

She walked the woman to the point at which the CCTV cameras were interrupted. She already had her camera out and ready, possible proof of Preeti’s theory. When the cameras started working again Preeti was able to find and follow her from camera to camera until she got in a vehicle. The first was a municipal bus, which took the woman to a bus stop on Church Street. The woman got off, waited for ten minutes, walked west for three blocks, then boarded another bus, which backtracked to Devonshire Square. Then she took yet another bus, this one all the way to Blackpool North Railway Station, where she got out and went inside.

Preeti sat back. This next step was a problem. She spent the next twenty minutes hacking into the British Transport Police servers, which got her access to the cameras inside the terminal. She was able to view live feeds but couldn’t find any stored feeds. After another twenty minutes she found out where they were supposed to have been.

Someone had gotten there first.

“Bastard.”

Preeti could always check the train schedule, but without a clear biometrically capable shot of the woman’s face it would mean nothing.

She rattled her fingers on the desk for a moment. Had she missed something?

Of course she had!

She checked the footage from inside the buses. She got access to the cameras and found where the files should have been stored.

Again. “Double bastard!”

Someone was covering their tracks quickly.

She needed to hurry.

Then she had a brainchild!

She went back along the woman’s route of travel and marked the location of each ATM and found one at Grosvenor Convenience Store that had the perfect angle. It took her a few moments to hack into it; then she was able to back through the photos taken during transactions.

And there it was.

Or at least, there half of it was. She had the upper half of the woman’s face, seen over the shoulder of a haggard-looking man withdrawing money. The rest of the pictures had buses or taxis in them.

Then she zoomed into one of the faces in a bus window in another photo. The route of travel from Devonshire Square to Blackpool North had brought the blonde back by the ATM for the second time. The woman was good, but she wasn’t as good as Preeti.

There, in the window of the bus, she could make out a full side shot of the woman’s face, even as she kept her head tilted forward so she could hide from the camera in the front of the bus.

Preeti collected the image, cleaned it in Photoshop, then uploaded it to her biometrics program. Then she set it to search. It could take a minute, or a day, or a month, or forever. At the very least, her program would scour the system for matching faces in both real time and storage. Her guess was that the woman—or an associate—had gone in and removed evidence of her in storage, so it would have to be in real time.

She stood and stretched. She went over to the fridge and grabbed a can of Coke. Genie sat at a nearby table watching a TV episode on his laptop.

“Want one?” she asked.

He did. She gave him one, then sat next to him, watching the episode run on the screen. She had no idea what it was, but it looked like nerds sitting in a living room singing songs.

“Want to hear?” He pulled out one of his earbuds.

“No. Just trying to clear my head.”

“This shit will do it.” He angled his head toward the back room. “Anything to keep from thinking about that back there.”

“He just looks like an old man to me.”

“Whatever that is inside him was out for a while back at Van Dyke’s house. I saw it. It looked like a stick man, walking in the shadows of his house. One minute it was there; the next it was a pile of sticks.” He shuddered. “Some things you just can’t unsee.”

He put his earbud back in and resumed watching the show.

Preeti sat there as long as it took to finish the soda. Then she got up, tossed the can in the garbage, and went to the restroom. By the time she came out, an alert on her screen was blinking.

Stewart stood beside it. When she came up behind, he said, “I wasn’t sure if there was anything I should be doing.” He pointed to the screen, which showed a live image of a woman in a long coat who was walking down a city street. “Is that her?”

“Absolutely. Where’d she come from?”

He pointed to a car pulling away from the curb. “That one.”

Preeti copied down the plate number, then input it into another program, this one assigned to the National Automated Number Plate Recognition Data Center. She set her program to automate, then returned to looking at the woman… the woman who had stopped and was staring into the camera at them.

“She’s not looking at us,” he whispered.

“I think she is.”

The woman smiled and began to move her fingers and hands in a complex geometric pattern. The screen began to fuzz and pixilate.

Preeti felt fingers of worry dance along her back. She couldn’t be sure, but it felt as if the woman was in her head with her. Something. A presence.

She jumped forward and shoved the monitor onto the floor, where it crashed, pieces of plastic and glass shooting out in all directions. Then she ripped the cord free from the wall, removing all power.

Stewart fell heavily into his seat. “What the hell was that?”

“I don’t know, but now I’m scared.”

“Just now you’re scared?” Stewart grinned nervously. “This shit has been scaring me from the very beginning.”

“Do you know what I wish?” she asked.

He regarded her.

“I wish that we weren’t alone.”

They both looked toward the giant closed door of the hangar and the small door set in it.