other option.”
Tatum’s phone rang. He checked the screen, frowned at the number on the display. Not a number he recognized. “Hello?”
“Agent Gray? Uh . . . this is Damien.”
“Who?”
“Peter? From Night Fangs.”
Oh yeah, the guy who sold fangs. “What is it?”
“It’s probably nothing, but I was just contacted by that guy I told you about. Dracula2. He’s asking me stuff.”
“What kind of stuff?” Tatum tuned out the noise of traffic, his entire focus on the phone call.
“It’s really normal stuff, for vampires. That’s why I thought it was nothing. I mean, there’s no creepy shit about pure blood, or nonconsensual biting, or anything like that. He just wanted to know how much blood he can take from a donor every day. So that’s good, right? I guess he found a willing donor.”
Jesus Christ. “Did you answer him?”
“Not yet. I called you first. But he’s still online. And he’s kind of impatient.”
“Okay, listen, I need you to buy us some time. Ask for details, like how much his donor weighs, what’s her height . . . ask if it’s a woman. Tell him you need to check charts—”
“There are no charts, dude.”
“I know that! I don’t care. Just tell him you’re consulting with an expert and that you’ll have an answer in an hour.” He glanced at his watch. It was two thirty. “No! Forty-five minutes.”
“Uh, okay, but—”
“It’s important that you talk to him casually.” If this was the unsub, and Tatum was sure it was, he was probably extremely paranoid right now. “Like you always chat online, okay? Don’t ask him for any specific detail—not his name, not who his donor is, nothing.”
“But what do I tell him in forty-five minutes?” Peter’s voice cracked, sounding panicky.
“You won’t tell him anything. By that time, we’ll be taking over.”
CHAPTER 48
Tatum had a vague idea of what he needed. They would get one of the Chicago field office tech geeks in front of a computer. Then, they would wait for the unsub to log in, at which point the tech geek would start some sort of cyberattack, muttering sentences like, “I’m hacking into the mainframe . . . now,” and “I’ll just reroute the encryptions. He won’t see it coming.” Finally, the tech geek would whirl in his chair and give them an address.
“It’s not that simple,” the tech geek said.
The tech geek, whose name was Barb Collier, was a woman in her midtwenties who chewed gum. She occasionally made a small bubble gum balloon and popped it with her sharp fingernail. The chewing and balloon popping were distracting.
“Listen, Barb,” Tatum said, checking the time for the tenth time. “We have fifteen minutes. A woman’s life depends on it. We need you to trace him.”
“I can’t do that. No one can do that,” she said. “He’s using a Tor-based browser. The whole point of Tor is that it can’t be traced.”
“But we’re the FBI,” Tatum said. “We have back doors, right? For emergencies?”
“No.”
“What do we have?”
“Can you get him to open a file?” She made a small balloon and looked at him expectantly.
Tatum considered it. “What sort of file?”
She popped the balloon with her fingernail. “Any executable. Any Microsoft Office file. Get him to run a JavaScript or Flash. A PDF file—”
“I can get him to open a PDF file,” Tatum interrupted.
“Good. PDF files have a ton of exploits I can use. I can hide a Trojan horse in the file . . . you know what a Trojan horse is, right? It’s a hidden program inside another benign program. Like the Greeks did with the wooden—”
“I know what a Trojan horse is,” Tatum said. “Vaguely.”
“So I can hide a Trojan horse in the PDF file. If he opens the file, I’ll gain complete control over his computer. I’ll be able to give you his IP, look through his files, activate his webcam . . . basically, he’ll be toast.”
“Let’s do it.”
They browsed online, found a few charts that had to do with blood donations, and pasted them into a document.
“It doesn’t have to make a lot of sense,” Tatum told her. “But we need to make sure he doesn’t suspect he’s being duped.”
“Is he technically savvy enough to know PDF files can hide Trojan horses?”
Tatum considered it. “I’m not sure. He’s using Tor, so that shows some knowledge. But more to the point, it’s likely that he’s very paranoid. So if he feels like something isn’t right, he might concoct a paranoid delusion that’ll make him unpredictable.”
“Hey, you’re not paranoid if they’re