Name of the Devil Read online

  No one in the operations theater speaks.

  We stand in stunned silence and wait.

  Seconds feel like lifetimes. I think of the little boy who always holds his sister’s hand as he takes the elevator. I think of the retired couple who send me a Christmas card every year. I think of all my neighbors. How many of them do I really know? Have I ever invited any of them over, even once? They live there. I just take up space. And they are in peril because of me.

  “All clear,” calls a voice over the open radio channel.

  “Our driver?” Winstone immediately inquires.

  “Some broken glass in the back of his legs. He’s fine.”

  “The occupants?”

  “We’ve got them into the lobby across the street. We’re now moving them to the next building.”

  A cheer erupts in the control room. Knoll nods at me. A flicker of a smile crosses Chisholm’s face.

  The smoke begins to dissipate, revealing the street and parked cars covered with debris. It could be a scene from the aftermath of any other terrorist bombing, except the cars are empty. The first five floors of windows are blown out, but the building structure is intact.

  “What about emergency crews?” asks a technician.

  “Hold them back,” says Winstone. “We need to send in the bomb robot.” He turns to me. “Is your guy going to blow it?”

  Before I can answer, we’re interrupted by the agent monitoring phone calls. “Boy Scout is on the line.”

  “Put him through the loudspeaker,” Winstone growls. “Is this what you wanted, Boy Scout?”

  “It’s exactly the kind of thing I hoped you’d do. I don’t need to ask who thought up the clever solution. But there’s no telling what the actual bombers will do when they realize what you’ve done.”

  Winstone looks confused.

  “Actual bombers?” he asks Damian.

  “Yes. The ones who put the device there. I’ve already gone through the effort of outing them, now that everyone is safe.”

  “Pardon me?”

  An agent holds her phone to her shoulder. “We’re getting reports that the media has already received calls from a group claiming responsibility.”

  “Who?”

  “X-20. It’s trending up on Twitter. Hold on . . .” The agent puts the phone back to her ear and listens for a moment. “Now we’re getting reports that the Filipino Marxist Muslims are taking credit.”

  “What the hell is going on here?” Winstone demands.

  “I took the liberty of calling out the real culprits,” says Damian. “I also sent time-encrypted emails to the editors of the major newspapers claiming responsibility for this bombing on behalf of X-20 in advance of the certified letters this afternoon.”

  Winstone looks to Chisholm and Knoll for an answer. “I don’t understand.”

  “I don’t imagine you would,” replies Damian. “Was the fake explosion Jessica’s idea? Low-yield charges to blow out the windows? Smoke bombs. Very clever. It looked quite convincing. Hopefully, the real culprits are second-guessing detonating the bomb now they’ve realized that the car didn’t hit the truck and it was all a ruse to get everyone out under the cover of the smoke.”

  “What are you getting at?” Winstone asks.

  “I’ve messengered the assistant-director the passport I lifted from a Colombian bomb maker I spotted leaving Jessica’s building yesterday. His brother-in-law is a known affiliate of X-20. The details aren’t important right now. Well played, Jessica. We’ll be in touch.” The line goes dead.

  Winstone turns to me, confused and angry. “What the hell was that about?”

  I’m only beginning to understand what just happened. I try to piece everything together. “Damian figured out X-20 was going to try to kill me by planting a bomb in the parking garage of my building. He knew the only way to save everyone was to explain how to fool X-20. The only way he could get us to believe him and follow his instructions, was by acting as if he planted the bomb.”

  “He could have just called it in,” Winstone barks.

  I shake my head. “To DC metro police? If they’d even taken him seriously, X-20 would have blown the building the moment a uniformed officer showed up. If he tried calling us as someone passing on information, it would have taken hours to reach the right people. This was the only way he could get our attention.”

  “Why?” asks Winstone.

  “X-20 wants me dead. After Mexico, they can’t target me directly now. I’m sure the alleged Filipino Marxist Muslims pointed out in their message are meant to imply that the officials from the Filipino embassy who live in my building or the US envoy who lives there is their target. It’s a cover.

  “The last thing X-20 wants is for themselves to be connected to this. By telling the media X-20 was responsible before they could pass the blame, Damian put this right on them. They wanted to kill me and have no one trace it to them.”

  “By taking out a whole apartment complex?”

  Knoll speaks up. “Anything too targeted would look suspicious. Instead of just taking out Jessica, take out a hundred people in the first major act of terror here since 9/11.” He’s still letting it all sink in. “This is . . . insane.”

  Winstone glances up at the building on the monitor. “Are they still going to blow the bomb?”

  “I don’t think so. They’ve already been outed. There’s no point to detonating the bomb to get rid of any evidence. We know they did it. We know why they did it. And I’m not in the building.” And never going back if I can help it.

  “To kill one FBI agent.”

  “Yes. I just don’t know why they want me dead.” I stare at the street filled with our staged devastation, glad it isn’t real.

  “I would think finding that out would be of paramount importance right now,” replies Chisholm in his gallows voice. “And yes, I know who you think their next target is supposed to be. The only thing about your hypothesis that lacks credibility is the name of whomever is behind the threat. Who wants you dead, Jessica? And why?”

  Who would kill a hundred innocent people to get me out of the way so they can kill one man?

  44

  “TELL US MORE about Damian Knight,” says Agent Arron, who has the defeated look of a man who knows he’ll never get to the bottom of the stack of files on his desk. He wants me to tell him something that’ll neatly tie Damian into the building explosion, the missing pieces of the Warlock investigation and possibly the disappearance of Amelia Earhart.

  I wish I had those answers too.

  I touch a pen to the pile of briefs I’ve already filed. “Is there something specific you want to ask me?” I’ve sat in this working group a half-dozen times. Every month or so, Arron and Kinsey, the other agent on the case, look at their calendar and get together to discuss what little progress they’ve made. They keep bringing me in, hoping I’ll reveal the vital clue they can’t find from their desks.

  I’d call them lazy, but this could be me in a few years. They’ve got a decade or so in the Bureau up on me. And with that, more cases than they can manage. This is just one more headache. And I’ll bet anything that after Damian’s stunt with the building, they got called into their supervisor’s office and yelled at for not making any more progress.

  DAMIAN’S NOT ACCUSED of any specific crime—yet—but he holds the distinction of being the most interesting of all of the FBI’s persons of interest.

  “Give us something,” pleads Kinsey, trying to play the less-exasperated cop to Arron’s completely exasperated cop. They both have the sallow complexions of guys who sit around drinking too much coffee and giving themselves stress ulcers.

  “Look, guys, he enjoys outsmarting me as much as you.”

  “But you manage to summon him like a genie whenever you need him,” Arron points out.

  “Not quite.” I hold up my
phone. “You have all the numbers he’s called me from. If you dial them, he won’t pick up. But if I do, he’ll call back.”

  When you’re dealing with a clever person, phone traces are useless in the age of Skype calls and burner phones. “Could you call him right now?” asks Arron.

  “For what?”

  “So we can ask him some questions directly.”

  “Like where he is,” jokes Kinsey.

  “I’ll do whatever the Bureau asks me to. But if this is just for your own amusement, keep in mind I’m pretty sure I only get to pull that card so many times.”

  “What if we set up a network trace in advance? Monitor IP traffic, TOR networks, the full NSA treatment?”

  “If you can get authorization, I’ll cooperate. Of course.”

  “Despite your personal history with him?”

  I don’t know if I should be offended or not. If one of them had a female stalker, or a jealous ex-girlfriend, would they be acting like their loyalty as an agent had been compromised? They can pretend the situation would be the same, but we all know it wouldn’t be treated that way.

  I tell myself I cooperate because I’m a good cop. The real reason? They’ll never catch him.

  “I would specifically because of my personal history.”

  “You know, Jessica, I’ve seen these kinds of obsessions before.” Arron folds his hands on the table.

  Oh my God. He’s pulling the paternal routine on me. He should know my history with father figures. I tense my jaw to stop myself from blurting out that I’m not his daughter on prom night.

  Kinsey weighs in. “This guy is more into you than you can imagine.”

  I can imagine plenty.

  The two of them are clearly playing out some routine they concocted before I got here. This is why Damian won’t be caught anytime soon.

  “The Wikipedia stuff is just weird,” says Arron, following their script.

  “Wikipedia?” I reply. What are they talking about?

  “You don’t know?” he counters, a little dramatically. He’s happy he caught me by surprise.

  “He’s constantly updating your web page. He’s your number one fan,” adds Kinsey.

  “We just want to make sure he’s no Mark David Chapman.”

  Their use of a John Lennon reference reveals just how unaware they are of the generational gap. At least Selena was alive while I was.

  “What about Wikipedia?” I ask again.

  Arron pulls up the page on his laptop. “You have an admirer that’s constantly editing your page and deleting disparaging comments. We can assume it’s not you.”

  “And you think it’s Damian?” This doesn’t sound like him at all. He has much better things to do with his time.

  “He goes through quite an effort to hide his IP address. Sounds like your boy.”

  Sounds like half the hackers I know.

  Arron turns the computer so I can read the entry. It’s pretty benign. There’s nothing there that Damian would care about, as far as I can tell.

  Then I see that there are at least a half-dozen photos of me, ranging from my teenage publicity shots for magic shows to snaps of me at crime scenes. Someone has been very obsessive.

  I knew this was out there. It’s hard to be confronted with it.

  One of the photos seems odd to me. I click on the larger version. It takes me a moment to see what is out of place.

  I pull out my phone and dial without even telling Arron and Kinsey why.

  Knoll answers. “What’s up?”

  “Are you in the building?”

  “Yep. Need me?”

  “Conference room 2-232. Now.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “I think the Warlock is trying to send me a message.”

  Arron and Kinsey give me a stunned look.

  “Shit. I’ll be there in five.”

  45

  KNOLL LEANS OVER my shoulder to see the screen more clearly. We’re looking at my Wikipedia page, specifically at an image of me holding a fan of cards, faces out. In it I’m sixteen or seventeen, wearing a silvery sequined gown and too much stage makeup. It’s from some European magic magazine that had a circulation of about two.

  “What am I supposed to be noticing?” he asks.

  I look up from my notepad where I’ve been making a graph and point to the fanned spread of cards. “See them?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I always fanned the cards in new deck order. Ace through king, king through ace, spades, diamonds, clubs, hearts. In fact, for photo shoots, I’d glue all the cards together. That was something Grandfather taught me. But someone Photoshopped these cards in a different order. See the queens next to each other? Or here, there are two four of clubs.”

  Knoll nods, telling me he believes I believe I see something, but he has no idea what the hell I’m talking about.

  “There are fifty-two cards in a deck, not including jokers. You can assign each card to a letter of the alphabet twice. That means you can spell anything with one deck if you never use a letter more than twice. There are more complicated schemes using letter frequencies, but this is pretty simple. They just used the same four twice.”

  Arron speaks up. “The Warlock, or rather Heywood, doesn’t have access to a computer. He’s currently awaiting trial for kidnapping and electronic fraud while we build the other case around him. He’s not allowed anywhere near a computer.”

  Knoll ignores him and takes a seat beside me. “Why do you think it’s him?”

  I want to say “a hunch,” but that won’t fly in this room. “Give me one second.” I pull up the file info on the Wikipedia image. It shows when it was uploaded. There’s probably even fingerprint data within the Photoshopped file itself. Every photo-editing software program used in a correctional facility embeds a special watermark. I save the image and send a copy to Gerald with a quick note.

  “Can you call the Beaumont penitentiary? Ask for whoever has the prisoner logs,” I tell Knoll.

  Arron and Kinsey are both slack-mouthed. They can see Knoll, a senior agent, is treating this seriously.

  Knoll puts his phone on speaker. “This is FBI Agent Knoll. I’m here with Agent Blackwood. We have some questions about inmate Heywood. I can get his number . . .”

  “No need,” replies a woman’s efficient voice. “I have it here.”

  “Has there been any change to Heywood’s computer privileges?” asks Arron.

  The woman types for a moment. “No. There’s nothing here. Still not allowed around anything electronic. We even dial his calls for him. And those are under a subpoena order.”

  Arron looks at me and shakes his head. “Maybe he asked someone else to do it.” He’s trying to throw me a bone.

  “Can you pull up his movement log? Where was he on . . . hold on,” I call out the date from the image upload data on Wikipedia.

  “One second.” More typing. “I have him in the print library. There aren’t any computers in there.”

  “Oh, thank you.” It was just a hunch. I want to take this up later, but beating an apparently dead horse in front of Arron and Kinsey would be bad right now.

  “No problem. Anything else?”

  “That’s all,” Arron replies, barely hiding his satisfaction at proving me wrong.

  “Okay . . .” She pauses. “Hold on. Wait a second. This is odd. Huh. I’m looking at the log on that date. Heywood was moved to another location before returning to his cell. He was in the room assigned to vocational training. It seems like there was a half hour before they realized their mistake.”

  The Warlock had access to a computer for a half hour.

  The man who hacked the FBI’s computer network.

  Shit.

  This is bad.

  Real bad.

  “Actually, it looks
like that’s happened a couple of times.” She seems confused, but unaware of what this means.

  Knoll gives me a look. I know what he’s thinking: The Warlock may be paying off someone in the prison to get him in front of a computer. It could be a low-level clerk, or handled through some other exploit he figured out.

  “Can you access IP logs?” I ask. “I want to know if there was any outgoing traffic to Wikipedia.”

  “Yes, one second. We have key-logging software. I show a session during that time period. A couple megabytes of upload.”

  “It’s him,” Knoll grumbles. He raps his knuckles hard against the table.

  Gerald has already emailed me back, confirming that the watermark on the image matches the serial number assigned to the copies of Photoshop in the Texas federal corrections facility.

  I’m trying to solve the code on the cards.

  I have the first three letters.

  Y O U

  46

  THE CONFERENCE ROOM is now full of agents who are working on different aspects of the Hawkton case. Word travels fast.

  Knoll is on the phone with Assistant Director Breyer, asking him to put some pressure on the Texas prison authorities to find out why one of the worst hackers the FBI has ever encountered has been getting computer time.

  What bothers me the most is that the Warlock clearly didn’t care that we found out. He wanted to remind us how smart he is. Why would he ruin a good thing?

  There’s only one answer, and it rattles me.

  Because he has a better thing going.

  Right now there’s a dedicated machine in the FBI computer center trying to solve his last puzzle. We’re at least a year or more from breaking it. Some think it’s a red herring; others think he really has some final plan that transcends everything else he’s done.

  I don’t know what to think.

  “What do you got, Blackwood?” Knoll is understandably antsy. We all are.

  I wish Ailes could be here. He’d make sense of it. Or at the very least, be a source of reassurance.

  I double- and triple-check my decoding. He used a simple cipher designed to capture my attention. A third grader would know how to figure it out if they realized it was there.