1st Case - James Patterson Page 0,17

he said.

“Sure,” I said.

“Like what?”

“Like I’d tell you.”

Finally, he clicked on his flashers and turned sideways to face me on the seat. It gave me a little flutter in my chest that I loved and hated at the same time.

“Listen. There’s obviously some kind of a”—he moved his hands back and forth between us—“thing going on here. I’m not going to deny that.”

At least he wasn’t playing pretend with me. Extra points for that.

“Basically, that gives me two options,” he went on. “I can ignore it, and we go about our business. Or I can get you reassigned out of the office.”

“Then I guess you have to ignore it,” I said. “Because I’m not going anywhere.”

That internship at the Bureau was either going to be my ticket to the future or the last good opportunity I ever got. There was no way I’d be walking away from it willingly. Not to mention how attached I’d become to the case itself, and everything I felt like I owed Gwen Petty. And her family. And those poor, devastated girls at the school.

“So then we’re in agreement,” Keats said.

“Absolutely,” I said. “Except for the part about why we can’t ride the same elevator.”

“You really don’t know when to say die, do you?” he asked.

“Not usually,” I said.

“God help me, I kind of like that about you,” Keats said.

Good answer, I thought, but that was going to have to be enough for now. So I headed inside alone and rode the elevator to the sixth floor with a big dumb smile on my face. Whatever line I’d crossed in the car just then, I still got to keep my internship. I got to keep working this case. And I even got to keep the dirty little movies that kept running through my head, all about things that would probably never happen with Keats but were fun to think about anyway.

Not bad.

CHAPTER 18

MY SECTION OF the field office was called the CART—the Computer Analysis Response Team. It’s like a cluttered hybrid of a regular office and a lab. We had workbenches and computer arrays for eight people spread around the space. We also had floor-to-ceiling windows with a killer view of Boston Harbor. As work environments go, you could do a lot worse.

To get inside, I had to pass an armed security station by the elevators, a locked door in reception, and then a card reader on the door to the CART itself. It’s one of the few places in the building where open storage of evidence is allowed. That cut both ways. There was the pain in the ass of extra security, and then there was the fact that I had full access to the app from Gwen’s phone and could tear down copies of it as much as I liked.

While my former classmates at MIT were mounting demonstration projects and simulations to impress their professors, I was interpreting code for the FBI. All other emotions aside, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t also feeling just a wee bit cocky.

Once I was back at my bench, the first thing I did was send another copy of the app from my workstation to a burner phone I’d checked out of the lab. When the app loaded on the burner, I could see the same chat program I’d seen on Gwen’s iPhone. The difference this time was that I could monitor the conversation from both sides and see what the app sent back.

I started with the phone and sent out a simple text.

Hello.

It showed up immediately on my administrator’s screen, and I typed back a quick reply.

Testing, testing.

Not exactly Dostoyevsky, but that didn’t matter. Within seconds, I got a new pop-up window on my admin screen. The only thing in it was a single thumbnail image in the upper left corner. It looked like a white blur, so I clicked it open to full size for a better look. But even then, I wasn’t sure what I was seeing.

Before I could figure it out, another thumbnail appeared next to the first. I enlarged that one, too, and got a picture of myself this time. It was taken from below, practically looking up my nostrils.

When I glanced down at the phone in my hand, the camera was essentially pointed right at me. Before that, it had been pointed at the ceiling. And when I looked up, I saw the glare of a fluorescent fixture over my head. That explained the two photos, anyway. But not