1st Case - James Patterson Page 0,48

So I kept going. I ran my finger over the track pad, navigated my pointer to the attachment, and clicked.

Immediately, the attached file disappeared from my screen. But I had a pretty good guess about where to look for it and took only a few seconds to find it in my root directory, where it had replanted itself.

Everything about this was outside of the usual protocols, but I wasn’t going to stop now. So I rebooted the laptop to run the program. I should have been exhausted after the last twenty-four hours, but it was more like the opposite. As my laptop shut down and restarted, I felt like I’d just woken up and started a whole new workday.

When the screen finally came back on, I’d been directed to some kind of generic platform. It was nothing I’d seen before. If anything, it reminded me of the app we’d been chasing all this time. The design was simple, in three colors, with a rudimentary, almost intuitive interface.

A few clicks later, I realized I was looking at a database of some kind. The screen in front of me showed an empty form, with spaces for FIRSTNAME, LASTNAME, ADDRESS, PHONE, ISP, HOST, and NOTES. A few drop-down menus from the top ribbon showed me a dozen or more commands, all the usual kind you might expect from a rudimentary DB platform.

I stumbled around a little bit more and managed to run a sort based on one of those available fields, last name. That turned up just over twenty-one thousand records. I scrolled through several of them but didn’t see any names, addresses, or anything, really, that I recognized.

Then a new idea hit me, and I ran a new search, this time for a specific last name: Petty.

What I got next was a single entry for Gwen Petty, the first victim I’d known about in this case. A little more looking turned up Nigella Wilbur and then Reese Sapporo as well. All of them were listed with correct street addresses, if my memory served me right. Which I was sure it did.

“Jesus Christ,” I said. Something told me those twenty-one thousand records belonged to all of the people who had opened the app on their phone after receiving it, for whatever reason. And among those twenty-one thousand were the three known victims since I’d come on board. It was all pulling together.

“Everything okay in there?” George called from the living room, and I flinched. I’d actually forgotten he was out there.

“All good!” I called back. I wasn’t ready to share this yet, and even when I did, it wouldn’t be with George. First I needed to dig a little deeper.

And what I found next changed everything.

CHAPTER 52

IT TOOK SEVERAL hours to weed through the database’s code, but I finally hit the pay dirt I think that Eve expected me to find. It was a certificate thumbprint number, correlated to an anonymous user who had posted several updates through a server in Coba, Mexico.

Bingo.

Coba is a small town on the Yucatán Peninsula. It’s mostly famous for its Mayan ruins, but in my world, Coba was infamous as the last known base of a cyberterrorist organization called the Free Net Collective, or FNC.

With Eve’s implicit stamp of approval, I knew this was no coincidence.

Ironically, FNC’s terrorist philosophy was based on two principles that I stood behind completely: the need for internet privacy and the importance of net neutrality in the marketplace.

Their means, though, were both criminal and violent. They crashed servers, cleaned out cash accounts, and made physical attacks against any individual or organization they deemed hostile to their goals.

A year earlier, they’d disrupted internet service for over a million people on the East Coast after one ISP tried to introduce tiered pricing based on the internet content its customers were accessing.

Even worse, FNC had claimed responsibility for firebombing the home office of a Nevada congressman who had been leading the privacy deregulation charge in Washington. Two staffers and a housekeeper had been killed in that attack.

The rumors were that all of FNC’s operations had been moved offshore, since a joint raid between US authorities and Mexico’s Agencia Federal de Investigación had found the Coba facility empty. Most people I knew assumed FNC was working from a ship of some kind, or several linked vessels in the Gulf of Mexico, the Caribbean, or maybe even out on the Atlantic. The world was their haystack now, and they were one of its most notorious needles.

But none