Come and Find Me A Novel of Suspense - By Hallie Ephron Page 0,18

Web site again—they’d posted a video of “Up in the Sky.” First she scanned the file to make sure it was safe. Video downloads were a favorite way to distribute malware, malicious little programs that installed themselves. When she determined it was safe, she ran the video.

It opened with a man wearing a black baseball cap with the word DIRECTOR printed over the brim. He bellowed through a bullhorn, “Okay, agents. Listen up!”

The herky-jerky footage felt as if it had been taken with a handheld camera by someone being jostled by the crowd. The time stamp at the bottom of the video read yesterday, 6:03 P.M. That had been about the time Ashley called to say that Aaron was toast.

The man held up his cell phone. The camera pulled back to show a crowd of about a hundred people, clustered around him on the broad steps in front of the trio of granite arches at the entrance to the Boston Public Library. Almost everyone in the crowd had on sunglasses.

The camera panned from the library to the expanse of Copley Square across the street, a spacious area with brick walkways flanked by a fountain on one side and Trinity Church on the adjacent side. The facade of the church glowed an unearthly pink in the setting sun. The camera continued around to the facade of a hotel, and finally back to the crowd gathered on the library steps.

There! Diana thought she’d caught a glimpse of Ashley. But it was too quick to be sure.

The screen dissolved to black, and after some titles it returned to a close-up of the man with the bullhorn.

“Yo, thanks for coming out,” he said. “Make sure Casey here has all your cell-phone numbers.” The woman beside him, who had long blond hair and was wearing bright green-and-yellow-striped tights, waved a clipboard. “Up the volume on your ringers full blast. Then spread out across the street in the square. Mill about.”

He continued giving directions as the camera pulled back to show the crowd, cutting to close-ups of individuals. None of them were Ashley. Jazzy percussion played through speeded-up footage of the crowd dispersing, people crossing the street to Copley Square and mingling with pedestrians in the plaza.

Then the screen went black and the word SHOWTIME! came up in white block letters. A wide shot of Copley Square took over the screen, followed by a close-up of a cell phone lighting up and the sound of cell phones going off. The ring tones weren’t synchronized, so all Diana could make out were competing piano arpeggios and the whooshes of speeding bullets that rose to the top of the cacophony.

The camera closed in on one woman in the square. She had her dark hair pulled back in a thick ponytail. She held her cell phone aloft and pivoted to face the hotel across St. James Street. The camera drew back to show scores of other similarly frozen, sunglass wearers facing the hotel, cell phones raised. A crush of Superman-themed cell-phone rings filled the sound track.

Snippets of video showing the reactions of pedestrians were spliced together. Some just kept going. Others stopped and stared, then turned to look across to the hotel. A cop on the corner pushed back his cap brim and watched, his mouth open. A man hoisted a toddler onto his shoulder and the woman with him, pushing a stroller, raised a camera and took a picture.

Diana whooped. It was perfect.

For a brief moment, Diana thought she saw Ashley. The red hat, which would have stood out in morning sun, seemed nearly black in twilight. But the camera panned away before she could be sure.

Focus shifted to the facade of the hotel. A spotlight shone on a window near the top floor. The view zoomed in as the window raised and a figure leaned out. It was a man in bright blue with a red Superman S in a yellow field on the front. He raised his arm—not a wave but a stiff-armed salute.

That’s when Diana realized that it was a mannequin in a Superman costume. The curl over his forehead would have done Christopher Reeve proud.

From behind, the figure was pushed out the window, headfirst. Its shoulders and ankles seemed to be attached to a wire. Then Superman was sailing through the sky across Copley Square, his red cape streaming.

Diana didn’t spot Ashley again as the camera pulled back and scanned the watchers who were pivoting in unison. Super-Dummy slid at a leisurely pace across