1st Case - James Patterson Page 0,19

the back of the room. I probably should have been nervous, but there was too much else to think about. Not to mention how badly Eve would roast me later if I didn’t take advantage of the opening she’d just created. So I jumped right in.

“Basically, it’s a Swiss Army knife of surveillance tools,” I said. “It has geolocation-driven imaging and direct listening for sure, all running in the background without the user knowing it. The app doesn’t even have to be open, once the operating system is infected.”

It was strange to see all these seasoned analysts and agents scribbling notes in direct response to what I was telling them. On the inside, my impostor syndrome was raging, but on the outside, I kept it cool. I wanted these people to at least think I felt like I belonged there, even if that idea was still a work in progress for me.

“So basically,” Zack added, “whoever sends this app out has uninterrupted access to any user’s phone, once it’s loaded. The only barrier is about whether or not the user accepts the invitation to install the app in the first place.”

“Nobody does that anymore, do they?” Gruss asked. “Who downloads unknown attachments like that?”

I thought about Darren Wendt and almost smiled.

“You’d be surprised, Audrey,” Keats answered. “It’s the same kind of spear phishing that got some amateur hacker into the CIA chief’s personal email account a few years back.”

“Or the shutdown of those Ukrainian power grids,” someone else chimed in. “Remember that?”

“Anyway, moving on,” Gruss said with a note of justifiable impatience in her voice. She was the top brass in Boston. At the end of the day, this was on her. “Anything else to add?”

“The app also names itself for the given target,” I said, jumping back in. “When I opened the copy I sent myself, the files had already self-converted to an A H file format.”

“A H?” Gruss asked.

“For Angela Hoot,” Keats said, and ticked his head in my direction. Gruss looked over like she was memorizing my face. I’m not sure how much I’d been on her radar before that.

“And there’s no way to trace it back to the sender?” she asked, still on me.

“I’m sorry, no,” I said, and immediately saw Eve wince on her screen. Don’t apologize if it’s not your fault. It was one of her favorite pieces of advice.

“But we’re working on it,” I added quickly. “The problem is, with cloud-based computing, there are no rules about relative locations. They can route this through any server in the world if they have access to it.”

I wasn’t telling them anything they didn’t already know, but it seemed worth emphasizing while I had the chance.

And just like that, the meeting moved on without me. My head was spinning through everything I’d reported. Hopefully, I’d made a good impression, not that it mattered in anyone else’s bigger picture. The real mandate here was to get a handle on this quixotic piece of coding, ASAP. I forced myself to stay focused on the conversation at hand, while various members of the team threw out different theories.

“We have known victims in Boston, Binghamton, and Albany, yes?” Gruss asked the room. “What’s the radius here? Tristate? New England?”

“Hard to say,” Keats answered. “It goes back to what Angela was telling us. At this point, the pool of potential targets is as large as the internet itself. They can send this app to anyone they want.”

“That’s the second time one of you has said ‘they,’” Gruss pointed out. “Where’s that coming from?”

Keats’s eyes flitted over me before he answered. “This could be some kind of collective as opposed to a lone-wolf operation,” he said. “We’ve been considering the possibility. They still need feet on the ground for the actual murders, but it’s unclear where and how it’s coordinated. Just that it is coordinated. All of which points to some kind of team approach.”

SAC Gruss ran a hand across her mouth. There was no one in the room to be mad at, but you could tell she was pissed as hell.

“And that all means that the next targets, the people we need to make sure don’t wind up dead, could be—”

“Yeah.” Keats was right there with her. “Beijing, Cleveland, or two doors down,” he said. “This could happen literally anywhere, at any time.”

CHAPTER 20

I TOOK A short dinner break and walked out toward the harbor to clear my head. One of the perks of our office’s location was easy access to