1st Case - James Patterson Page 0,69

hours,” Billy said. “Other than that, you’re not to go anywhere.”

“Admin office?” I asked.

He pressed his own card to the reader on the door directly opposite mine. The little red light clicked to green, and Billy pushed the door open.

“Welcome to the end of the tour,” he said.

I followed him into a cramped, windowless office. A woman was sitting alone at a U-shaped workstation, and she stood up as we came in. I couldn’t help noticing her desktop computer, as well as the ASUS laptop sitting on her return. I wasn’t sure what that might mean for me, but it was something.

“Angela Hoot, this is Rena Partridge, one of our operations coordinators,” Billy said.

“Angela, hi.” She shook my hand with a reassuring smile. “If there’s anything you need—drugstore run, a message for Billy Boy here, or even just some kind of favorite foods—I’m your gal.”

With her short salt-and-pepper hair and the red glasses on a chain, she seemed like someone’s elderly babysitter, not a high-security-clearance FBI employee. I liked her right away.

“I’ll probably have to take you up on that,” I said. “Thank you in advance.”

If I needed to get online without the Android, this office opened up some possibilities, I thought. Maybe not with Rena’s desktop, which would be hardwired into the building’s network. But the laptop was an option—

“Angela?” Keats said.

I snapped back to attention. They were both looking at me like I’d missed something. Which, for all I knew, I had.

“Hon, you should get some sleep,” Rena said. “You look exhausted.”

I didn’t argue with that. I just thanked her again and followed Billy back out to the hall. He wasn’t kidding about the world’s shortest tour, either. Three steps later, we were standing outside my door like it was the end of some strange date.

Our night together in Portland seemed about a century ago. A past lifetime. Maybe a future one, too, but I couldn’t think about that right now.

“I’ve got to run,” Billy said.

“Of course,” I told him. “Thanks for bringing my stuff.”

He hesitated and tilted his head to catch my eye. “You know this isn’t your fault, right?” he said.

“That’s a complicated question,” I told him. “Maybe one for another time.”

“Right.” He looked at his watch. The clock was ticking for both of us. “I’ll check back when I can,” he said.

And one tick later, he was gone.

CHAPTER 75

NORMALLY, THE BEST way for me to get my head on straight is by hitting the trail with my bike. But “normal” was off the table right now, so I set up my trainer in the middle of the room and started riding in place.

I left the Android where I could see it, in case anything new came in. Then I got a good crank going, put my head down, and tried to synthesize everything I knew into a cohesive plan of attack.

As I turned the various factors over and around in my head like a Rubik’s Cube, I kept coming back to the same idea: geolocating malware. If I could sneak the right kind of self-loading program onto one of the devices these guys were using on their end, I could get back an IP address, and from that a physical location.

Which meant there was a possibility that I could actually find Eve without ever leaving the building.

The real question was how to get this done without them noticing, much less in the next four and a half hours.

I thought about what Eve said to me once: Sometimes you have to look past the code and into the coder. With people like Darren Wendt, that was easy. Darren had all the intellectual depth of a kiddie pool. He couldn’t have been more oblivious to the hacks I sent his way.

These guys were different. Maybe they were typical ego cases for hackers, but they were also smart as hell and well resourced.

Lucky for me, I was smart as hell, too.

I downshifted several gears and cranked the trainer’s resistance until I was riding up a virtual thirty-degree incline. It put an exquisite kind of pain into my quads and glutes, and I told myself there was no stopping until I’d figured this out or reached pure muscle failure, whichever came first.

Sticking with the malware idea, it made sense to target the Poet, not the Engineer. He was the one I knew for sure was in the same location as Eve, since he’d recorded her voice and sent it to me. He also seemed more human. Less focused. More