1st Case - James Patterson Page 0,53

off his machine and I thought I was good to go, his phone rang.

“Yes?” he answered. And then, “Okay, will do.”

My eyes flicked up to the red light on the ceiling camera and I wondered who might be watching.

“You can unhook yourself,” he told me. “Then wait here.”

The Velcro on my arm cuff made a loud ripping noise as I tore it off. “Wait here for who?” I asked. “What happens now?”

“Not for me to say,” he answered on his way out. A second later, I was alone.

After what felt like a long wait, I heard the metal door click open behind me. When I turned and saw SAC Gruss standing there, my heart sank. Whatever the special agent in charge of our field office wanted with me, this didn’t feel like a good sign.

I’d wandered pretty deeply into this case. Maybe more deeply than I should have. If I were taking bets, I would have said it was time to start looking for a new career.

“Quite a morning, huh?” Gruss asked as she pulled back the other chair and sat down.

“Yes, ma’am,” I answered.

She looked like somebody’s mother. I could imagine her at a PTA meeting pretty easily, although I also knew that Audrey Gruss had stared down some seriously intense casework on her way up, including a year in Mosul for the State Department and a key investigative role after 9/11. She was an interesting mix that way.

“Ma’am?” I said. “If it’s okay to ask, am I in trouble here?”

“Not necessarily,” she said.

I wasn’t sure what to make of that, or even how to respond. But Gruss kept going.

“Your IQ is quite impressive,” she said.

“I haven’t been tested since I was twelve—”

“Your track record at MIT, however? Not so much,” she said.

I was starting to realize that SAC Gruss had been watching me more closely than I thought. The question was, did she like what she saw?

“You’ve proven yourself to be an asset, Angela, but I’m honestly not sure what to make of you. I know you’ve been working closely with Eve Abajian,” she said.

“That’s right,” I answered. There was no sense denying it, but no need to go into details that Gruss wasn’t looking for, either.

“So let me ask you this,” she went on. “Are you as smart as you seem?”

“Excuse me?” I said.

“This database you’ve turned up,” she said. “Is that your work? Or Eve’s?”

I thought about Eve’s advice: Take the damn credit. And I thought about what felt right to me.

Then I split the difference.

“Eve found it and passed it on to me,” I said. “But I’m the one who cracked it open. Most of that legwork was mine.”

It was 90 percent true. Close enough. But Gruss was still just staring at me.

“If I may say so, ma’am,” I tried again, “yes, I’m as smart as I seem.”

Her eyes smiled, even if her mouth didn’t move. Then, like the polygrapher before her, she simply nodded and stood up to leave.

“Is that all, ma’am?” I asked.

“That’s it,” she said. “Keep up the good work. You’re free to go back to your desk.”

I tried not to look as relieved as I felt. I guess this meant I’d passed their polygraph, anyway, not to mention Gruss’s muster.

But I still felt like I was flying blind into a storm.

CHAPTER 57

WHEN I GOT upstairs, the office was on high alert. With the new possibility of involvement by a designated terrorist organization, everything had ratcheted up. Again.

Homeland Security and the Attorney General’s office had been looped in. Emergency plans were already put into place, along with increased server surveillance along the entire Northeast Corridor. Nobody had seen a response like this since the Boston Marathon bombing.

I didn’t know where Keats was anymore, but I spent the rest of the morning running theory and attack scenarios with Zack Ciomek and the rest of the CART team. It was gratifying and frustrating at the same time to hear that a lot of my own instincts paralleled what the higher-ups were thinking—but that they’d also already been tried or rejected.

“What about crashing the app?” I asked at one point. “We could flood it with server requests and at least cripple their operation for a while.”

“We did try crashing it a few days ago,” Ciomek told us. “It bought about an hour of time, tops. My guess is they have cloud-based backups on everything they touch.”

“Which means all they have to do is reload onto a new server and they’re back in business,” Candace added.

“With