it required a retinal scan, and I knew Abby didn’t have any stolen eyeballs.
Someone had shoved something between the door and the wall. Hannah said she heard Grassi complaining about a security malfunction. Started last night.
My tension eased. Maybe they’d tweaked something when overriding my forced lockdown.
Hurry.
As if to reinforce Abby’s text, an alert pinged in my head.
GPS signal located.
At first, the hairs on the back of my neck rose. Could Grassi’s GPS chip have revived? Until I realized this was Hannah’s chip. We hadn’t seen it all day.
The grid that surfaced behind my eyes confirmed Abby’s text. Hannah was in the same place where we’d spotted the kids last night, lost in their virtual-reality worlds.
We’re coming.
Together, the three of us sprinted for Grassi’s VR lab. On the way, I checked in with Lucas and Daniel.
Abby found Hannah. She’s in the VR room. Can you come to the school ASAP?
The reply was instant.
On our way.
“We go in, grab Hannah, and get out. Deal?” I said. This was almost over.
Hunter and Samuel were already panting from the exertion of keeping up with me. We angled left from the pathway, the wind whipping our faces. The rain had slowed to a faint drizzle, but the grass squished beneath our wet shoes. As we ran past the fountain, I continued to search file after file, like an oar dipping through calm water.
The first twenty or thirty files were meaningless to me. Grassi was a data hoarder; he kept records of everything. Travel expenses, vacations. Taxes. Bank accounts and their balances, some of them overseas. More interesting was a list of foreign names, followed by seemingly random numbers. With more time to research, it would all come together, but right now, I wasn’t even sure what I was looking for. I was just grateful I could search and run at the same time.
I stumbled across something curious in the very next file, a saved email chain. Grassi only exchanged messages with one other person, and there was no associated name. The recipient’s address was a dead end; I recognized that immediately. But something about the other party’s writing triggered a spark of recognition. Something about the voice seemed familiar.
Behind me, I heard a gasp. Hunter had slipped on a patch of mud. I reached out and grabbed his hand while Samuel latched on to his waist. When he regained his footing, we took off again.
The VR building was one hundred feet away.
There was something about the way that one person worded things. Certain turns of phrase. They snagged at my memory, conjuring up a deep drawl and the inside of a secret military lab.
It was just a hunch, but I knew how to give it more certainty.
Initiate natural language processing.
Comparing sample to known subjects.
A few seconds passed, filled with the grunts of aching lungs behind me and the squish-squish of our pumping feet.
Match found: 94% accuracy.
The image appeared, complete with data on name, birthday, and any other information my memory had stored within its depths. My memory confirmed what my gut had known for a while now.
General Holland.
He’d been emailing with Grassi, at length.
This was just the link we needed.
Pausing at the door, I filled Lucas in. He, too, had some incriminating information.
Grassi is an alias, for one thing. The man in the photo is named William Shell. The numbers on the photo refer to my uncle’s—Holland’s—old army regiment. That’s where he and Grassi met. My uncle had a pin, exactly like that tattoo. The tattoo is of a symbol their entire troop adopted. And the pin had ended up at the fire that killed Sarah.
Did that mean Holland had set it himself? He didn’t match Maggie’s description. And why would he do that, anyway?
We’d reached the door. The security camera was dead and the door was ajar, just as Abby had described.
A quick scan didn’t alert me to any threats, so I motioned Hunter and Samuel to follow me in. The room was almost as dark in the daytime as it had been last night. Since neither Hunter nor Samuel had a flashlight this time, we had to slow way down to make sure no one tripped.
“Each of you, keep a hand on my arm. I don’t want anyone wandering off.” Using my night vision, I traced last night’s path through the room, past the appliance boxes and scattered tools. Nothing had been touched.
Nothing, that was, except the secret passage to the basement. The entry was flung wide open.