1st Case - James Patterson Page 0,50

absolutely thrilled, at five thirty in the morning.

Keats relieved George for the last few hours of his shift. I’d see him again at the end of the day, with another agent assigned to me starting at 8:00 a.m.

That left me with Billy, Obaje, and two others, Miller and Gao, all hovering around my living room. I felt like I’d fallen into some kind of Russian spy novel, and not in a good way.

“I’m not going to go into too much detail,” Keats said, cutting off most of my questions, “but how long have you been in possession of those database files?”

I looked at the clock. “It’s been two hours and forty minutes,” I said.

“Can you say for sure that nobody else has seen them?” he asked.

“Of course not,” I said. “But I’m as sure as I can be, and I trust my source.”

“Eve?” Billy asked.

“Well … yeah,” I said. There was no question about obscuring anything at this point.

“Why didn’t you call right away?” Gao asked me. Keats was the lead interviewer, but that hadn’t stopped the other three from jumping in with questions of their own.

“Because I didn’t know what I had. As soon as I did, I called,” I said.

“What kind of keystroke log do you keep on your laptop?” Miller put in. He was taking written notes, too.

“I don’t,” I told him. It was never worth it to me to leave that kind of virtual trail as I worked. My own memory was good enough for that, and as for anyone else, it was none of their business. Or at least until now.

“What about—” Gao started to ask, but Miller jumped back in. They were practically falling over each other to get what they needed here.

“Hang on,” Miller said. “What other connected devices do you keep in the apartment?”

“My phone,” I said, pointing to where I’d set it on the coffee table. “And there’s a tablet in the bedroom that I hardly ever use.”

I started to get up but Obaje put out a hand. “Just tell me where,” he said. “I’ll get it.”

“Jesus. Pile on much?” I said. “I’m not the terrorist. You guys know that, right?”

Billy lowered his chin and gave me a stare. “I understand this isn’t any fun,” he said. “But do you know what you’re sitting on here?”

I saw his point immediately, and just as quickly as my temper had flared, I reined it back in. If anything, I was embarrassed for speaking out, considering the circumstances. I’d just introduced some highly sensitive information to the mix, with national security implications. There was no reason for the FBI to take my word on anything here. Just the opposite, if they wanted to do this right.

“Sorry,” I said. “I guess I’m still catching up.”

Billy’s eyes softened long enough to signal something like “Hang in there” before he went on.

“It’s going to be a long day,” he said. “And there’ll be more at the office later, starting with a polygraph. You just need to gut this out.”

I took a deep breath. It’s not like I couldn’t separate work and pleasure, but it had been only about twenty-four hours since Billy and I had been doing something very different at that hotel in Maine. It was a lot of gears to shift.

“Let me ask you this,” Billy said. “What do you make of it all?”

I appreciated the question. For whatever rookie complaining I’d been doing up to that point, it was also true that this was the kind of conversation I thought they’d come to have with me in the first place. I wanted to help, and in fact, I felt like I could, given the chance.

“I think the whole point was to write their own app from scratch,” I said. “And I think they did it for some really specific reasons.”

“Go on,” Billy told me. The others sat back and seemed to take me in in a new way—probably based on the trust that Billy was showing me right now.

The relevant truth was, all kinds of jihadists, drug dealers, gangsters, and terrorists used basic commercial apps like Snapchat and WhatsApp to communicate with their people. But even the likes of ISIS had gotten burned when it turned out that those mainstream apps were ultimately less anonymous and more hackable than they’d seemed at first. It happens all the time. Every “perfect” app is just another Titanic waiting for someone to come along and punch a hole in its supposedly impenetrable hull.

“My guess is they went