1st Case - James Patterson Page 0,56

anyone who wanted anonymous communication online. It was how most people accessed the dark net, whether they wanted to buy drugs, watch a bootleg movie, or just poke around the web without anyone looking over their shoulder.

I’d known about all this since I was ten years old and starting to find ways around the parental controls Mom and Dad had put on the computers at home. It was kind of cute, the way they thought they could keep an eye on me back then. But that was before people had started throwing words like gifted, genius, and prodigy my way.

Lucky for them, I’ve always been the kind of genius who wants to use her powers for good and not evil. Unless of course you cross me, and then all bets are off.

Once I was in, it didn’t take long to find Hermes at all. A.A. was right. He’d been a busy little boy, promoting his app everywhere he could. I invented a new handle of my own—Pandora, just to keep with the theme. Then I used it to send Hermes a direct message on TorChat. It was the safest way I knew to open a cryptographically secure line of communication without compromising my own identity.

It was like putting a worm on the hook. Now I just had to wait and see what I caught. Or not.

To: Hermes

From: Pandora

Subject: FNC actual?

Hello. I’m interested in knowing more about this app of yours. How much are you asking for FNC access? And more important, what assurances can you give me that this is legit? If we’re not talking about FNC actual, I’m not interested.

Let’s talk.

Tx.

Pandora

CHAPTER 61

THE NEXT DAY, between working at home and another session at Eve’s, I squeezed in an early dinner with Mom and my sisters. For more than a week, I’d been begging off their invitations to come home, usually saying that I was too busy at work.

The full truth was, there was no way I could show up at my parents’ house with a security detail in tow and not worry Mom and Dad to death. Especially Mom. So this was the compromise, even if she didn’t know it.

We met at the Oceanaire, a few blocks from the office, and got a table near the bar.

For a while my sisters did most of the talking, which kept the spotlight off me, happily enough. I heard about field hockey, and SATs, and some boy named Neil, who was “almost definitely” on the verge of asking Sylvie to go out with him, once and for all.

“But what about you?” Hannah eventually asked. “Are you, like, a spy now?”

They knew I couldn’t say too much about work, but I also saw that hungry look in my littlest sister’s eyes. Unlike Sylvie, Hannah actually wanted to be like me, and in the meantime, she wanted to know as much as possible. Unlike my mother, who I think was stuck between wanting to know everything about my job and nothing at all, since it stressed her out so much.

“Not really a spy,” I told Hannah. “It’s more like Hansel and Gretel. I spend a lot of my time following virtual bread crumbs to see where they lead.”

“Cool,” Hannah said.

The bread crumb analogy was for Mom’s benefit, given her professional focus on fairy tales and my own desire to shift the topic away from me as subtly as possible.

“What do those crumbs symbolize, anyway?” I asked, as though the question might give me some needed insight—which, for all I knew, it might.

“In fact, that’s an easy one,” Mom said. She picked a piece of focaccia out of the basket on the table and sprinkled some crumbs across the cloth, in a little winding path.

“Bread is food, and that represents life,” she said. “As long as those crumbs are there, Hansel and Gretel have a way back, literally, but also figuratively.” Then she started picking the crumbs back up, just like the birds in the story. “However, when the crumbs are gone, there’s no way home again. And that represents the threat of death.”

“Something tells me there’s a lesson coming,” I said.

“There’s always a lesson,” Sylvie said knowingly. Hannah and I tried not to smile.

“So, is that what’s happened?” Mom asked me. “Did you lose the trail back home? Because God knows I’ve tried to get you out there for weeks, and it’s been like pulling teeth.”

So much for changing the subject, I thought. My mother has never been easily deterred. Maybe that’s where I get