Authors: Tracey Garvis Graves
Heart-Shaped Hack (28 page)
A Saturday afternoon.
Kate was fairly certain he meant for her to meet him at the airstrip
this
Saturday. As in, two days from now.
What if I’m afraid to take this step? I’ve been hurt very badly.
She refreshed the screen.
Please know that everything is under control. I would never harm you, Katie. Never. So I’ll see you on Saturday? Around two?
Yes. I’ll be ready.
Make a couple of stops on the way and take a cab.
His message threw her for a minute, but then she realized what he meant—shake whoever might be following you—and fear gripped her.
I understand.
She took a deep breath, and when she refreshed the screen, the messages were gone. That night, when she finally fell asleep after lying there for hours, all her dreams were of him.
On Saturday, Kate pulled a large tote bag from the top shelf of her closet. She placed her wallet, keys, phone, a few toiletries, and a change of clothes inside it. Time seemed to drag, but at one thirty she walked to Wilde Roast Café—fighting the urge to look over her shoulder the whole way—and ordered a sandwich. She was trembling slightly and didn’t dare order anything containing caffeine to go along with her food. Fifteen minutes later, after forcing down as much of her meal as she could, Kate paid the check. She exited the restaurant and walked slowly down the street as if she had no particular place to be. After ducking into the tunnel that linked SE Main Street with the St. Anthony Falls parking ramp, she took out her phone and called a cab, waiting just inside the ramp’s exit onto Second Street until it pulled to a stop at the curb. Then she walked quickly to the waiting car and slid into the back seat.
“Where to?” the driver asked.
She gave him the address of the airstrip and tried to calm her breathing.
The plane was sitting on the tarmac when they pulled into the parking lot, the same one she’d seen Ian get into when she’d dropped him off. Still she hesitated. What if it wasn’t him?
“This is your stop, miss,” the driver said.
“I know. Give me a minute please.” With shaking hands, Kate dug her phone out of her bag and sent a message via the dating site.
I’m not sure if I should meet you today. What if it’s a mistake to go out with you?
Her stomach was in knots, and she thought the sandwich might have been a bad idea.
It isn’t. I promise. Just get out of the car. You can do this. I’m waiting for you.
Kate took a deep breath and let it out. The only thing standing between them was her fear. She handed the money to the driver and gripped the door handle, throwing it open. Committed now, she strode across the parking lot and through the open gate. She faltered a bit on the tarmac because there was no one waiting in the open door of the airplane.
I’ll stop at the top. I won’t get on the plane if I don’t see him.
Slowly she climbed the stairs, heart pounding. Too many emotions were competing for Kate’s attention. There was fear and anxiety, but most of all there was hope. That’s where she drew the courage to climb the final step and peer around the opening of the plane.
And there he was, standing there like some kind of ghost.
He lunged toward her and caught her right as her knees buckled. She wrapped her arms and legs around him, clinging to his body as she broke down, sobbing hysterically.
“Please don’t hate me,” he said, holding her so tightly it hurt, as if he was trying to meld her body to his.
She didn’t mind the pain because it grounded her and proved to her this was real. He lowered them into a seat, and she curled into a ball on his lap, her face pressed into his chest, fisting his T-shirt tightly in her hands. She couldn’t stop crying, couldn’t still the massive shaking of her body.
“What’s happening to her, Phillip?” Ian said.
“Just give her a minute,” a voice said somewhere off to her right.
“Sweetness, I’m sorry,” Ian said rubbing her back.
“Kate, my name is Phillip Corcoran. I work for the FBI, and I’m a friend of Ian’s. You’re safe, and everything is going to be okay. I want you to take a few slow, deep breaths.”
The words and the tone in which Phillip had delivered them helped to calm her a little. Ian’s arms were still wrapped tightly around her, but he loosened them slightly, allowing her to inhale fully. The smell of him, still so familiar to her, filled her nose as she breathed in. She nuzzled her face into his neck, feeling his warm skin against her lips as he stroked her hair.
“Everything’s okay,” he whispered. “I’m right here.” He held her for a long time, neither of them speaking, until gradually her shaking subsided. The shock and adrenaline rush had left her physically exhausted.
“The pilot is ready to take off,” Phillip said. “I don’t suppose you’d be willing to buckle her into her own seat.”
“No,” Ian said, holding her tighter.
He didn’t let go of her when they taxied down the runway or when the plane rose into the air. He never stopped rubbing his hands up and down her back, and he whispered in her ear, telling her he loved her, telling her how much he’d missed her.
Kate had never been so emotionally spent in her life. Though she tried, she couldn’t hold her eyes open, and she fell asleep in his arms.
The slight thumping of the wheels making contact with the runway roused Kate from an exhilarating dream in which Ian was alive.
Except that it wasn’t a dream because Ian was holding her on his lap, and the first thing he did when she opened her eyes was kiss her gently on the forehead.
“Where are we?” she asked.
“Just outside DC.”
“I can’t believe this is really happening,” Kate said. She touched his face, fingers skimming over his eyes, nose, mouth.
“Believe it, sweetness. It’s happening.” He wiped the tears that had filled her eyes and spilled onto her cheeks. “Phillip and I will explain everything when we get to the house.”
Phillip Corcoran lived in an older, well-maintained colonial-style home an hour outside the nation’s capital. His wife met them at the door.
“My name is Susan. Come in, dear,” she said, taking Kate by the hand. “Can I get you something to drink?”
Kate’s throat felt raw from crying. “Could I have some water, please?”
“Of course.” Susan patted her shoulder and gave it a quick squeeze before disappearing into the kitchen.
Ian was holding Kate’s hand, and he followed Phillip into the living room and led Kate to the couch. Phillip sat down across from them.
“Thank you,” Kate said when Susan returned and handed her a glass of water. She took a drink, and it soothed the burn in her throat.
“I’ll be upstairs if you need me,” Susan said.
Phillip smiled and nodded at her. Kate set the glass on the coffee table and turned to Ian. Dark circles rimmed his eyes, and he seemed exhausted.
“They found you,” she said. When she’d finally allowed herself to believe he might actually be alive, she’d started putting it all together. “That’s why you put your car in the river. You wanted them to think you were dead.”
“Yes,” Ian replied. “They found out who I was and where I lived.” Ian and Philip shared a glance. “But even worse than that, and the reason I did this, is because they found
you
.”
Kate felt as if the wind had been knocked out of her. “Me?”
Ian nodded somberly. “I realized it when you asked me to look at your computer. Your firewall had been turned off, you had a backdoor, and there were several shell scripts running simultaneously. I couldn’t do anything about it. If I had, they’d have known I’d discovered it.”
Kate’s mind was reeling, and she felt like a weight was pressing down on her chest. The room was suddenly too warm. “Do they know where I live? Where I work?”
“They know everything,” Ian said.
“How?” Kate asked. “How did they find you?”
“We’re not sure,” Ian said. “My computers are all clean. I would have known immediately if they weren’t. Phillip and I have some theories, but nothing we’ve been able to prove. But they would have seen us together as soon as they started watching me. Then it would have taken them no time at all to identify and hack you.
“You said if they ever found you there would be threats,” Kate said, her voice rising. “Disturbing threats.”
“They wanted me, Kate. Not you. The fact that they hadn’t made any direct threats yet meant they were probably planning to use you to draw me out, to force me to react in some way. And I would have. I’d have done anything they asked if it meant they’d leave you out of this. Even so, there’s no way I would leave you unprotected. Your new neighbor, Don Murray, is an FBI agent who works out of the Minneapolis field office. So does the man who follows you to and from work every day, and the two men who keep an eye on your street and the food pantry.”
Kate sat in stunned silence. How had she gone from running a nonprofit organization to being under FBI surveillance? She could not wrap her brain around it no matter how hard she tried. It was simply too surreal.
“We had to act fast,” Ian said, “before they could put whatever they were planning into motion. We got lucky because we didn’t have to wait long for another storm.”
“How were you able to convince the police, the media?”
Phillip answered her. “Ian abandoned the car on the side of the road. The streets were fairly empty because of the road conditions, and it didn’t take much to stage a collision that pushed the Shelby over the embankment. We called 911 ourselves and reported a car in the river. No one would have survived something like that, not in a vehicle without airbags and not in freezing-cold water. Then we leaked to the media that a body had been recovered and identified. The FBI claimed jurisdiction, and the only information we shared was what we wanted to make public.”
“There was a death notice,” Kate said.
Ian’s expression remained blank, but his features hardened and Kate detected a slight clenching of his jaw. “I wrote it.”
“After you found out about Ian’s death, did you google Ian Merrick on your laptop?” Phillip asked.
“Yes. I did a general search and then a more specific one. That’s how I found the death notice.”
“What about Ian Bradshaw?”
“Not on my laptop. I googled him once on my special phone after Ian said I wouldn’t be able to find him, but that’s it.”
Phillip nodded and seemed happy with her answer.
“What if I had? Would that have ruined everything? Why leave such an important thing to chance?”
“It wouldn’t have ruined anything, Kate,” Ian said softly. “Phillip just wants to know what we’re dealing with so we can do some long-term planning.”
“Within an hour of the crash, we blew Ian’s cover ourselves,” Phillip said. “We made sure the name Ian Merrick, and the news of his death, was all over the forum. We made sure they knew he was working with the FBI.”
“Did they buy it?” Kate asked. “After everything you did, did they believe you?”
“Anytime a hacker with any notoriety dies, there’s immediate suspicion that it’s a hoax and a call to arms for any hacker within a ten-mile radius to help verify the information,” Phillip said. “It’s the oldest trick in the book, and the only way it would work was if your reaction was genuine.”
Kate didn’t know what to say. They’d started following the steps of their carefully laid out plan before she’d even known there was a problem.
“Do I still have a backdoor?” she asked.
“Yes. That’s why Ian had to contact you the way he did. And even then it was quite risky. I wanted him to hold off a little longer before he reached out, but he said he couldn’t wait. Did anyone ever approach you, Kate? Ask you anything that might have seemed strange?”
“No.”
“Do you remember seeing anyone who looked out of place?”
“When I went to Ian’s apartment the morning after he didn’t come home, there was a guy near the bank of intercoms. He was young, midtwenties probably. It was hard to tell for sure because he had his hood up. I remember thinking at the time that he seemed to be watching me, but I thought it was because I looked upset. I was trying not to cry, and I didn’t want him to see, so I turned away. Then when I went to the storage facility I learned that someone had been there asking about when the FBI had come for the Escalade. Some young guy wearing a dark hoodie.”
“You went to the storage facility?” Phillip said.
“Yes. After I got Ian’s message on my dating account I got nervous and wanted to do some investigating of my own. See if anyone had shown up there and asked questions.”
Kate told them how she was able to get the storage facility employee to share the information. “But that’s it. I don’t remember seeing anyone else.”
Susan walked into the room and announced that dinner would be ready soon. Kate had no appetite, but Susan was kind so Kate smiled and gave her a slight nod.
“We’ll have to handle your move from Minneapolis a bit differently than Ian had planned,” Phillip said.
Kate looked away. They’d assumed she would go along with their plan for moving forward now that they’d brought her into the fold, but all she could think was
no
.
Because now that she’d recovered slightly from the initial shock, other thoughts had started to materialize.
Emotions were starting to bubble their way to the surface.
What Ian had done was not on the same level as hacking her credit card and computer or walking in on her in the bathtub.
He had let her think he was
dead,
which was the worst kind of hell you could put anyone through, and she was not done processing it.
Philip was too focused on what would happen next to notice Kate’s reaction. But Ian—a man who missed nothing—sure had. She could feel the weight of his stare, and as soon as she looked up, he locked eyes with her, comprehending.
“I need some time alone with Kate,” Ian said.
“Of course,” Phillip said. “I’ll call down when dinner is ready.”
A small guesthouse sat behind the main property. Ian carried Kate’s bag as they made their way along the flagstone path, neither of them speaking. Once they were inside, there was no mistaking the fact that the space belonged to Ian. The main room had a couch and a coffee table on which sat a laptop computer and an empty coffee mug. His tennis shoes were on the floor, and his favorite MIT sweatshirt, the one that was faded red and soft and that Kate had sometimes worn, was lying across the arm of the couch.
