Clawback (29 page)

In the years since, she had left La Rubia far behind. She'd gone by more names than she could remember, but she hadn't forgotten the basic components of grand theft auto. Sitting there on the shoulder of Beaverhead Flats Road, Jessica carefully calculated the times and distances involved. She estimated exactly how fast she'd need to be going when she hit the bridge abutment—fast enough to deploy the air bags, but not fast enough to hurt her. And once the air bags collapsed, she had a fair idea of how much time she'd have in which to draw her weapon and have it at the ready before a certain passing Good Samaritan stopped and came to her aid.

Yes, when the lady in the red Prius stepped forward to see if Jessica needed help, she would be ready and waiting. Her primary goal was retrieving the card, but as the minutes passed, she realized that taking down a High Noon operative in the process would automatically create a whole new firestorm of problems. It also meant that her original plan of lying low in Peoria for a number of days was out the window. She and Jason needed to leave the country now. Tonight.

That meant making a whole new set of arrangements on the fly, something Jessica couldn't do on her own while driving back to Phoenix. She would need a chauffeur to make that possible, and it so happened that Ms. Prius was it.

Grabbing the garage door opener off the visor, Jessica stuffed that inside her computer bag before fastening the bag shut and belting it securely into the front passenger seat. Now she could be sure that she'd be protected by the exploding air bags, and so would her computer and listening equipment.

She checked her rearview mirror. She was ready now. She was a little disappointed that she wouldn't be taking Ms. Prius out immediately, but for the time being, she could handle a bit of delayed gratification.

P
ulling away from Haley's office, Cami was over the moon. As far as she was concerned, this was the best day of her life. The investigation she had undertaken all on her own earlier that morning had paid off big-time. Her solo efforts had made it possible to identify Dan Frazier's killers. Well, maybe she hadn't done it entirely on her own. Stu's enhancing techniques and his facial recognition software had put the final nail in the coffin, but without her finding something for him to enhance, none of it would have been possible.

She was still patting herself on the back when her phone rang. Once she saw who was calling, she almost didn't answer. What was it about her mother? She had an uncanny ability to rain on Cami's every parade. In this instance, however, the dutiful daughter won out.

“Hi, Mom,” Cami said. “What's up?”

“Your grandfather's birthday is coming up next month. We're having a party at the restaurant. Are you coming or not?”

Yes or no. That was Sue Lee, of course. Nothing at all subtle about the woman. She always came across in full frontal attack mode.

“I haven't worked here long enough to have any vacation time due me,” Cami said, hoping to dodge the bullet.

“That's why I told your grandmother the party has to be on the weekend. You do have weekends off, don't you? If not, you need to quit working for those people and find a job with decent benefits.”

The truth was, Cami worked around Stu's schedule, and he almost never took any time off. He was more than happy to work 24/7. No one at High Noon had ever implied that Cami was always required to be in attendance when Stu was. She took her days off as needed, always clearing them in advance. But taking time off and flying to San Francisco, where she was bound to be interrogated by a roomful of relatives who collectively disapproved of her career choices, was not something she needed right now. At all.

“He's turning eighty, you know,” Sue added pointedly. “There's no telling how many more birthdays he'll have left after this one.”

“I'll send flowers, Mom. I promise,” Cami said, knowing it wasn't good enough.

“I don't know why you have to be so damned stubborn,” Sue said.

Cami stifled an urge to mention that she was a chip off both of her parents' old blocks. She knew from previous discussions like this that her mother was happy to tell everyone within earshot that her husband was impossibly stubborn, while failing to see any trace of her own bullheadedness. Cami, on the other hand, was painfully aware of the presence of streaks of stubbornness on both sides of her DNA.

“And I don't know what's so important about this job of yours that you can't take some time off,” Sue Lee continued.

Cami had turned on to Beaverhead Flats Road. Her good mood had evaporated.

“We're taking down bad guys,” she said. “Virtual bad guys.”

“Well,” her mother sniffed. “I hope you're not putting yourself in any danger.”

At that point Cami's Prius topped a short rise and rounded a curve. Several hundred yards ahead of her, she saw a yellow car parked on the shoulder of the road. At least that was her first impression—that it was parked. Suddenly it slammed into something, hard. The rear end of the vehicle bucked into the air, and then came down again, hard. A cloud of steam shot skyward.

“Mom,” Cami said into the phone. “Someone just got into a wreck. I've got to go.”

Ending the call, she pulled over and rammed the Prius into park on the shoulder directly behind the wrecked vehicle. Leaping out onto the pavement, she ran forward in time to see someone—a woman—clawing her way out from under a layer of deployed air bags.

“Are you all right?” Cami demanded, coming up on the driver's side of the vehicle. “Are you hurt? Do I need to call an ambulance?”

And that was when she saw the gun, pointed directly at her. “No ambulance,” the woman inside said. “And unless you want a bullet in your gut, you'll do exactly what I say.”

Cami froze where she was, staring at the only thing visible in her universe right then—the gaping mouth at the end of a gun barrel. Not a virtual gun barrel by any means, one that was all too real and less than three feet away from her.

“Throw the phone away,” the woman ordered. “Now. Toss it out into the brush, as far as you can throw it. Then step away from the car door.”

Cami did as she was told. She threw the phone away and moved back onto the pavement, glancing up the highway as she did so. Unfortunately, no vehicles were visible—none at all. She and the woman getting out of the car might well have been the only people on the planet.

“Any other weapons?”

Cami shook her head. That wasn't exactly true. She had a Taser. After the events in Bisbee, Ali had insisted that Cami carry a Taser, but not a handgun. Not yet. She had spent some time at a shooting range, but she didn't feel proficient enough to apply for a concealed carry. As for the Taser? It was in her purse on the floorboard of the Prius, just behind the driver's seat. That meant it was out of reach right now—completely out of reach.

During the confrontation, Cami's limbs somehow had turned to Jell-O. Both her childhood kung fu master and Amir Silberman, her current Sedona-based coach, who was training her in the art of Krav Maga, an Israeli form of self-defense, would have told her that a lightning-fast kick could disarm her opponent, but not right then—not with Cami's legs trembling and threatening to collapse beneath her. There was no way for her to launch an effective counterattack right that minute.

“We're going to get back in your car,” the woman ordered. “You're going to turn around and drive toward Phoenix. You will drive at or beneath the speed limit. If you do anything at all to attract attention, you're dead. Understand?”

Nodding, Cami stumbled toward the Prius. As she did so, she heard the faint ringing of her phone, plaintively calling to her from somewhere off in the brush. She couldn't see the caller ID, but she knew who it was—her mother. That was who it had to be, not that it would do any good. When Cami didn't answer, Sue Lee wouldn't actually do anything about it. She'd just be pissed that Cami had turned off her phone and wasn't picking up.

N
either Bella nor Leland Brooks was pleased when Ali showed up at the house and stayed only long enough to change clothes. She came back through the kitchen in a turquoise-blue sleeveless sheath and a pair of matching three-inch heels. The dress showed her figure to good advantage, and the shoes did the same for her legs.

As Bella gave her a baleful look from her bed beside the fridge, Leland handed her a sandwich wrapped in clear plastic.

“Leftover meat loaf,” he explained. “I know you. When you're running around like this, you forget to eat.”

It wasn't so much what he said as it was the chiding tone behind the words that let her know he was unhappy, probably because his carefully thought-out meal plans for the week had just been thrown out the window.

“Thank you for looking after us,” she said. “I'm sorry this week has turned into such an uproar.”

“How are your folks doing today?”

“Better than yesterday,” she said, “and if I can pull off the appointment in Phoenix, maybe tomorrow will be an improvement, too.”

“Good luck,” Leland said, seemingly mollified. “But drive carefully.”

She left the house. Back on the highway, she was about to dial Stu's number when he beat her to the draw.

“Hey,” he said. “Are you on your way to that meeting with Lowensdahl?”

“I am,” she said. “Wish me luck and hope there aren't any traffic tie-ups. Otherwise I'm going to be late.”

“The traffic cams show everything flowing smoothly right now,” he said. “But I'm glad I caught you. I've got some news that you need to have before you go to that meeting, and your parents—both of them—are the ones who've saved the day.”

That was the last thing Ali had expected. When his number appeared on her caller ID she had figured he'd be on the warpath about still having Bob and Edie under hand and foot as well as about Cami being among the missing for so long.

“What did they do?”

“Your mom came in here a while ago with a handful of printouts—a dozen or so—that had been copied from posts on Jason McKinzie's Facebook page, all of them signed by someone named Ana Stander. Your mother came in to see me, all hot and bothered because she thought the Stander posts were different from all the others. Once I took a look at them, I had to admit she had a point. Most of the posts on McKinzie's Facebook page have faces on them—usually of Jason and some woman or other. These didn't. They were scenic shots only, accompanied by little notations like ‘Wish you were here,' and ‘Remember this?' ”

“So maybe Ana Stander and McKinzie had been to all those places together?” Ali asked.

“That's what I thought,” Stu answered, “but Edie insisted that didn't fit, either. The Ana Stander messages have been coming in for months now—for the better part of two years. Edie insists that when it comes to dating, Jason McKinzie is a ‘one and done' kind of guy.”

Ali laughed aloud at that. Edie Larson was big on commitment and heartily disapproved of people who routinely “played the field.”

“So she comes into my office with a fistful of paper,” Stu continued. “I don't do paper. I told her to have your dad send me the links. As soon as I downloaded the first one, I recognized it as a stock photo—the kind of thing people can use without having to pay the photographer a royalty. It turns out that's what they all were—one stock photo after another of scenery from all over South Africa. Seeing them got me to thinking: if McKinzie and Ana had been to all those places together, why didn't they post their own pictures or else pictures of themselves being there?”

“Maybe they're bad photographers?” Ali suggested.

“So I located another copy of one of the photos online, downloaded it, and guess what? The Ana Stander file was a hell of a lot bigger than the other one.”

“Steganography?” Ali asked.

“You've got it. Steganography all the way.”

Ali knew a little about steganography. It allowed for the easy encryption of messages by simply concealing the real correspondence within the pixels of a seemingly harmless photo. It was a tool B. and other High Noon employees often used for handling internal communications that had to be sent over easily penetrated public Wi-Fi systems in hotels or airports.

“In other words,” Ali said, “you know messages are there, but you can't read them, right?”

“Wrong,” Stu replied with a chuckle. He seemed to be in uncommonly high spirits. “It turns out we
can
read them,” he added, “and it's all because of your father. Just call it the revenge of the non-nerds.”

“My father?” Ali asked. “He doesn't know the first thing about steganography.”

“He didn't before today,” Stu said, “but now he does. The first time I mentioned steganography, he asked me if it was some kind of dinosaur, but he's on track now. In fact, he's the one who found the password.”

“To the encryption? Where?”

“Right there in plain sight in the stuff that came up in my data mining. He was doing just what you told him to do. He and your mom were going through that huge pile of links to find the ones applicable to our particular Jason McKinzie. Guess what? He found him right there in the middle of one of the downloaded hacks for the Ashley Madison Web site.”

“As in
the
Ashley Madison?” Ali asked.

“The very one. Ashley Madison is widely regarded as a cheaters' Web site. A bunch of hackers, armed with a raging case of righteous indignation, tried to blackmail the owners into shutting the site down by threatening to release private information concerning their members. Ashley Madison didn't budge, and neither did the hackers. The information went public on the Web. It includes the clients Web site names—their Ashley Madison fictional noms de plume—as well as their real names, billing addresses, private e-mail addresses, credit card information, and passwords.”