Looking Glass (The Naturalist Series Book 2) Read online

  PRAISE FOR ANDREW MAYNE

  “In Mayne’s exciting second Jessica Blackwood novel, the cunning FBI special agent applies her magician training to investigating a bizarre explosion . . . A fast-moving thriller in which illusions are weapons for both good and evil.”

  —Publishers Weekly on Name of the Devil

  “Science supersedes the supernatural in this action-packed follow-up . . . With snappy prose and a smart protagonist, this is an adrenaline-fueled procedural with an unusual twist. Great reading.”

  —Booklist (starred review) on Name of the Devil

  “Mayne, the star of the A&E show Don’t Trust Andrew Mayne, combines magic and mayhem in this delightful beginning to a new series . . . Readers will look forward to Jessica’s future adventures.”

  —Publishers Weekly on Angel Killer

  “Professional illusionist Mayne introduces a fresh angle to serial-killer hunting . . . Mayne forgoes gimmicks, instead dissecting illusions with human behavior, math, and science without losing sight of the story’s big picture.”

  —Booklist on Angel Killer

  OTHER TITLES BY ANDREW MAYNE

  The Naturalist

  JESSICA BLACKWOOD SERIES

  Black Fall

  Name of the Devil

  Angel Killer

  THE CHRONOLOGICAL MAN SERIES

  The Monster in the Mist

  The Martian Emperor

  Station Breaker

  Public Enemy Zero

  Hollywood Pharaohs

  Knight School

  The Grendel’s Shadow

  NONFICTION

  The Cure for Writers Block

  How to Write a Novella in 24 Hours

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2018 by Andrew Mayne

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Thomas & Mercer are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781542047999

  ISBN-10: 1542047994

  Cover design by M. S. Corley

  CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE MUTT

  CHAPTER ONE 1-UP

  CHAPTER TWO COWBOYS AND INDIANS

  CHAPTER THREE PREDOX

  CHAPTER FOUR FAN CLUB

  CHAPTER FIVE THE ACCOUNTANT

  CHAPTER SIX NUMBER THEORY

  CHAPTER SEVEN COMMUNITY WATCH

  CHAPTER EIGHT LATCHKEY

  CHAPTER NINE THREAT ASSESSMENT

  CHAPTER TEN COLD CASE

  CHAPTER ELEVEN PERSON OF INTEREST

  CHAPTER TWELVE ACCOMPLICES

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN FOLLOW THE MONEY

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN PUBLIC ENEMY

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN FATHER FIGURE

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN OUTREACH

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN SIGNAL

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN EMERGENCY CONTACT

  CHAPTER NINETEEN OUTREACH

  CHAPTER TWENTY MISSING CONNECTIONS

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE TAGGED

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO CONFABULATION

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE WHITE CAR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR SIMULATION

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE DEED

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX BLOODHOUND

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN CONCERNED CITIZEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT ANONYMOUS

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE OVERLOOK

  CHAPTER THIRTY PARTICLES

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE RAIDERS

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO SAMPLE BIAS

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE WAKE-UP CALL

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR INQUISITION

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE JUSTICE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX NEW REALITY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN STAKEOUT

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT BELIEVERS

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE BOTANICA

  CHAPTER FORTY BLESSED

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE STONES

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO SEER

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE DUE PROCESS

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR JACKLIGHTING

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE THREAT ASSESSMENT

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX BIAS

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN FOURIER

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT PHOTO BOOTH

  CHAPTER FORTY-NINE SPEED ROUND

  CHAPTER FIFTY SAFE SPACE

  CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE INSECURITY

  CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO TRACKER

  CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE RETREAT

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR PACKAGE

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE HUNTING GROUND

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX INSIDER

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN LAIR

  CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT MAZE

  CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE SURROGATES

  CHAPTER SIXTY VIGILANTE

  CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE PARANOID

  CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO CONFESSIONAL

  CHAPTER SIXTY-THREE HOUSE CALL

  CHAPTER SIXTY-FOUR SHARING ECONOMY

  CHAPTER SIXTY-FIVE CLOSURE

  CHAPTER SIXTY-SIX RESPONSE

  CHAPTER SIXTY-SEVEN ROOM SERVICE

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  PROLOGUE

  MUTT

  Tiko kicked the deflated soccer ball down the alley, laughing as MauMau, the tan puppy with the chewed-up ear, chased it into the puddle, his too-big paws splattering mud and droplets everywhere.

  He loved that dog. It wasn’t quite his; it was more a village dog that sniffed around looking for scraps and chased after rats when there were none to find. But he was Tiko’s best friend.

  An outcast like the puppy, Tiko had been turned away by his mother when he was three and she realized his white skin and reddish eyes weren’t going to go away.

  She’d prayed for him and even had the woman from the next village, who people said could heal, try to cast out the evil. But it hadn’t worked.

  As others began to scorn Tiko’s mother for giving birth to a witch child, she sent him out for longer periods at a time, feeding him when she had to but making him take his meals outside and eventually sending him off on longer errands, not caring when he got back.

  He was four when he heard his mother explain to another woman that he wasn’t really her child; he was actually some friend’s poor child she looked after.

  Tiko was pretty sure this wasn’t true but didn’t blame her. He knew he was different, and it couldn’t be easy for his mother.

  When she was pregnant with a new child, Tiko’s mother had stood on the doorstep and kicked him out in front of all the neighbors. She renounced him, telling everyone that he wasn’t hers.

  From that day, he’d never been allowed back inside. At night if he came to the doorstep and cried from hunger, she might give him something. But if his mother had a man with her, she’d yell at him to go away, pretending she didn’t know him.

  Tiko learned to survive by staying out of everyone’s way and learning that some people would help him—but only if nobody saw them do it.

  There was the old lady with no sons, who would give him half a bean cake or some jollo when her friends made extra. There was Mr. Inaru, who had the repair shop and yard filled with rusted car parts. He let Tiko sleep there at night and slide between the bars to hide when other children chased him.

  They chased him a lot. And when they caught him, the
y punched him, pulled his hair, and called him a witch child.

  The reason he liked MauMau so much was that the dog didn’t hate him or merely tolerate him—he’d lick his face and cuddle next to him when it rained or it was cold.

  Tiko knelt down, patted MauMau, and picked up the soccer ball, curious whether Mr. Inaru might be able to fix it so it could hold air. Of course, he knew that it would be only a matter of time before the other children took it away from him.

  As he stared at the ball, he noticed a reflection in the puddle. A man—a very, very tall man—was smiling down at him.

  Tiko looked up at the kind man. He was dressed in black slacks and a white shirt, like men in his village wore when they went to work or needed to look important.

  “Are you Tiko?” asked the man in a voice so strong yet warm that Tiko would have answered yes no matter the question. But he merely nodded, too nervous to speak.

  The man’s large hand grabbed Tiko by the chin and turned his face from side to side. Instead of revulsion, he looked at him like Tiko looked at MauMau.

  “You’re a very good boy. Would you like to go for a ride in my truck?”

  Tiko had never been in a truck but had watched them roll through his village as men with guns headed to some far-off place, and sometimes he’d watched as they raced back with men lying across the beds, their eyes shut or screaming in pain as they clutched bleeding stomachs or limbs.

  Tiko nodded. Riding in a truck sounded exciting. Especially with this man.

  The man held out his hand for Tiko to take and led him down the alley toward the green vehicle parked at the other end.

  When Tiko looked back at MauMau, the puppy was sitting at the edge of the puddle, his head cocked to the side, trying to make sense of something but too young to understand.

  Tiko waved goodbye. For a brief moment, he could have sworn that he saw his mother’s face poking around the edge of the alley, watching. But when he looked back again, she was gone.

  The man opened the door to the truck, and Tiko climbed up into the seat. A smile spread across his face at the thought of how jealous the other children would be when they saw him riding in this truck.

  But the man didn’t drive through the village—he drove Tiko straight out of the community, using a smaller road that passed only a few huts, then a path that led deeper into the brush, far away from the other townships.

  As Tiko watched his town get smaller in the dusty rearview mirror, he saw something out of the corner of his eye: the nice man’s smile was no longer there.

  This was a different man from the one he’d seen in the reflection in the puddle.

  Tiko never would have gotten into a truck with this man.

  This was the man the other children teased him about—the man who took witch children away, never to be seen again.

  CHAPTER ONE

  1-UP

  I’m playing a video game in which someone could actually get killed. They don’t call it that, but that’s exactly what the Virtual Tactical Field Theater is. It’s a series of connected rooms with video projected on all the walls, creating a virtual space that’s the exact replica of a real place elsewhere in the world.

  Right now the virtual theater is an apartment in Houilles, a suburb north of Paris. The apartment’s tenant, Yosef Amir, an IT worker for a French bank, is across town at his sister’s birthday party. While he’s away, we have two men in the actual apartment in France. One is scanning the interior with a high-resolution camera, turning blocky pixels on our walls into images that are too good for the eye to tell the difference. Meanwhile, the other man—whom we call Blurry Man, because the cameras catch only his trail as he moves around the apartment—is using a small device that resembles a flashlight to scoop up hair from the shower, fibers from the furniture, and dust from the bottoms of shoes and the doormat.

  Every few minutes, he pops a cartridge from the scoop and hands it to a third man, who runs back and forth between the apartment and a FedEx truck outside, where about $20 million worth of equipment that would be the pride of any university laboratory sends us real-time data as it decodes DNA, searches for matches, and tries to build a model of everyone Yosef came in contact with. It’s a god-awful amount of data. Thankfully, we have software that helps us sort through it to achieve our intended goal: to learn whether a bomb will go off in a soccer stadium in the next twenty-four hours.

  Yosef’s name came up in an intercepted phone call between a known ISIS operative in Yemen and another in France. Normally, authorities would simply call Yosef in for questioning and run down everyone he knows, but lately that’s become problematic. Terror groups have been using the names of innocent civilians in their communications, causing far more people than the news has let on to get pulled into interrogations and have their lives upended while the real bad guys stay underground.

  “Dr. Cray, Dr. Sanders?” asks Emily Birkett. She’s our government liaison from the Defense Intelligence Agency. Late thirties, chestnut hair pulled into a ponytail, Birkett is a former air force officer who went to work for the spookiest of all the spooky government intelligence agencies.

  Kerry Sanders and I are civilians. Sanders is an anthropologist about my age, in her early thirties, who spent several years helping Facebook figure out your social graph—whom you know and what they mean to you—before coming to work for OpenSkyAI.

  On the surface, OpenSkyAI seems like any other Austin, Texas, technology firm in a bland office park filled with video-game companies and health-care businesses.

  What OpenSkyAI is, really, is a private contractor for the Defense Intelligence Agency that helps them sort through thousands of data points, deciding who should be renditioned to some black site to find out if they know something or are about to commit a crime that poses a clear and present danger to national security.

  Sanders is looking at a grid of all the faces pulled from the photos in Yosef’s apartment. “Facial recognition isn’t coming up with a match.”

  “Theo?” Birkett asks me again, this time a little more impatiently. “Yosef’s heading back now. Can I pull the team?”

  I’m walking around the apartment—well, the virtual version—staring into the open cupboards and closets, trying to see the unseen, while something in the back of my mind wonders how the hell I found myself in this situation.

  “I think he’s clean,” says Sanders.

  I want to agree with her. The thought of Yosef going through a life-changing ordeal because some asshole in Yemen pulled his name from a Google search sickens me. But I also know that just because it sickens me doesn’t mean I should call it before it’s time.

  I walk back into the kitchen. Yosef’s refrigerator is covered with photographs. Most of them are him and his girlfriend or his friends, smiling at the camera, laughing at a table filled with drinks. It’s the kind of thing you’d expect a typical Parisian millennial to have.

  We’d already searched his online presence. Every Facebook post, every like, every friend who liked his posts: it’s all been through our system.

  There were no red flags. That’s not to say there weren’t connections. We’re all three or four degrees of separation away from someone awful. Yosef has an uncle in Qatar who went to the same mosque as a man who is active in ISIS, but in this interconnected world, that’s tenuous at best.

  The problem with digital footprints is that the terrorists have gotten smarter. They know how to separate one life from the other. We can track Yosef, but if he has an alter ego and is smart enough never to link the two, catching him is next to impossible. Fortunately, most slip up at some point. Unfortunately, the ones who don’t are smarter than our systems for finding them. We’ve built a trap that breeds smarter rats.

  “Cray,” says Birkett. “I’m going to pull the team.”

  “No,” I say a little more forcefully than I intend.

  “What have you got?” she asks.

  “Hold on . . .”

  “What does your gut say?”
/>   “I’m a scientist. I’ve trained myself not to have a gut. I need a few more minutes.”

  “We’ve got everything here,” says Sanders. “We can let the team go and spend more time going over everything.”

  “We don’t . . .” I’ve tried to explain this to them a hundred times. A simulation, even one based on real data, is still a simulation. I know there’s a peanut butter jar on top of the counter, but I don’t know if that’s actually peanut butter inside until we have someone take a look. It could be C-4. I’m sure it’s not, but it’s a hypothetical.

  On the surface—and it’s all surface—this so-called noninvasive forensic examination is useful, but it’s no substitute for good lab work.

  “If it’s critical, I can stop him when he gets out of the subway station. But you have to tell me now,” says Birkett.

  I kneel to look at the photos on the refrigerator more closely. Most of them are printouts.

  Sanders is standing behind me. “We have all the photos. We sent all the faces through image rec. No connections.”

  I reach out to grab one, forgetting it’s just a simulation. “That one. Ask Blurry Man to get a closer look.”

  Yosef is smiling into the camera next to a pretty young woman of Middle Eastern descent with green eyes. She appears to be in her early twenties—a stunner.

  “Who’s she?” I ask.

  “She’s not in our database. We can extend it and probably get a name. But she’s not in our filter.”

  Blurry Man turns the photo over. There’s a date stamp from March and the name Most Special Events printed on the back.

  “Grab him,” I call to Birkett.

  She calls something into her headset. “Intercepting now.”

  “Who is she?” Sanders asks, repeating my question.

  “Hell if I know. It’s the photograph. It’s from a disposable film camera. The kind they have at weddings where they send them off to be developed, then mail the photos to you with a digital copy.”

  “We don’t have a wedding on Yosef’s graph,” replies Sanders.

  I stand and turn to her and Birkett. “That’s the problem. They usually give you digital copies of those photos. Yosef clearly didn’t use a digital copy to make this print. He chose to go analog, making sure there was no electronic trace.” I call to the operator controlling the visualizations, “Bring up Mosin Kasir’s apartment.”