Off the Grid (16 page)

33

G
race was standing in front of the Beast, watching as it spit out a stream of printouts, thinking that for all the miracles technology offered, there were just certain tasks that had to be done eyes-on. The Beast could sort, collate, and identify patterns on a massive scale, but it couldn’t take raw data and analyze the importance of its content. And it couldn’t tell her why a seemingly innocent activity like hacking and monitoring certain websites could earn you a jihad. That kind of analysis required gray matter.

She pressed a hand to the small of her back while she waited, trying to work out the aches and pains. After the past three months in sandals, she’d forgotten how uncomfortable riding boots were, and how their flat, unsupported soles threw your posture totally out of whack. They were designed to rest in stirrups, not walk you around.

When the printer finally finished, she grabbed a sheaf of paper, tossed it on her desk, then distributed the rest to Harley and Annie. “These are John’s e-mails from the last three months. Sort out all the ones he sent to law enforcement and read them line by line. He was monitoring terrorist sites and passing information on. There has to be something there.” She glanced over at Roadrunner, who was in a deeper hunch than usual in front of his computer, every single vertebra outlined in Lycra. “How are you doing, Roadrunner?”

He looked up, his eyelids heavy from lack of sleep and hours of screen time, but his mouth was actually toying with a faint smile. “Great. My latest caffeine buzz is finally kicking in, and I just sent Tommy Espinoza location traces for all the chat room posts he was so hot about . . .” His voice trailed off and he focused bloodshot eyes on Grace. “And he was
really
hot about them, and really secretive. Have you talked to Magozzi to get the scoop?”

Grace shook her head. “I haven’t talked to him since last night. But if Tommy is shook up, obviously something big is happening at MPD. Magozzi will call when he has a minute.”

Roadrunner bobbed his head. “Right, he will. But I’ve got something else, guys—I just found a pretty impressive chunk of malware on John’s computer. Somebody piggybacked on our butchered software. There were some eyes in his computer, and he didn’t even know it.”

Harley grunted and ran his fingers through his black beard, which was looking shaggier by the day. “Stupid. I still don’t get why he even bothered to modify our program if he was just data mining.”

Annie, the only one of them who’d managed to survive the long workdays splendidly coiffed, smoothed out the colorful feathers that adorned her skirt and did a quick read of an e-mail on top of her stack. “Here’s one of them. Listen to this—an e-mail sent to the FBI and police department in Jackson, Mississippi:
1624 Magnolia Street. Al-Qaeda domestic operatives. Possible weapons cache
.”

Harley slapped his leather-clad knee with a fist. “Well, holy shit on a shingle. That clever son of a bitch wasn’t just data mining—he was tracing traffic off the jihadist websites and homing in on their locations with our worm. And letting people who could do something about it know.”

Roadrunner frowned. “That still doesn’t explain the kind of trouble he’s in, does it?”

Grace shook her head. “I don’t know. Maybe.”

“Well, look at it this way, honey. Maybe these bad guys were getting busted left and right because of John’s information, and they decided it was time to stop him.”

Harley’s fingers clattered on his keyboard. “Well, I just did a quick search on that address, and the men who lived on Magnolia Street didn’t get busted. They got shot dead. Some gang thing, according to the news reports.”

Grace sighed and pushed up out of her chair. “Find the other e-mails and do a search on all of them. I’ll go cook some dinner.”

Harley beamed at her. “Go for it.”

34

G
race was doing what she always did when her good brain was too cluttered with a jumble of conflicting thoughts. There was solace in the kitchen, comfort in the very predictable behavior of foods that never varied in their response. Cook the onions and garlic and celery and carrots in a wading pool of good olive oil and bacon fat until they caramelized, growing sugar like a crop in a skillet field. They were browning now, releasing a sweet aroma, doing exactly what they were supposed to do, unlike most humans.

She resisted the strong impulse to disturb those nuggets of flavor, so she just breathed in the fragrance and felt her body relax.

No one set foot in Harley’s kitchen when Grace was cooking. They all knew better. Only John Smith had dared to enter this world, and only after he’d been invited. Of all the months at sea, all the experiences she had shared with him, the most vivid remained that day when John had cooked with her in this very kitchen for the first time; a silent, happily willing partner who found the same blessed peace in food preparation that she did.

She looked over at the cutting board where her Sig Sauer lay loaded and ready, thinking how odd it was to make magic with humble vegetables while a gun lay waiting. Annie, Roadrunner, and Harley were all upstairs, respecting her privacy certainly, but mostly anticipating her food. Normally she appreciated that, but tonight the kitchen was lonely.

She actually smiled when Roadrunner poked his head tentatively around the corner. His Lycra suit was black today, and for some reason that bothered her. His crippled, rawboned hands hung out of the snug sleeves, no place to go, nothing to do.

“Hi, Roadrunner. Half an hour to supper.”

He gave her a shy smile. “Smells great.”

“Bacon,” she said, jerking the skillet and sending the vegetables aloft to fall perfectly back into the pan where they belonged. “Your socks would smell good sautéed in this.”

“Grace?”

“Yes?”

“So far we found three more e-mails to law enforcement and ran the addresses through a search. All of the people who lived at those addresses are dead. One of them is the Minneapolis address of the house with all the explosives where Magozzi and Gino were working. The three dead men in the front yard. I tried calling Magozzi’s cell; no answer. Detective McLaren told me they’re in a plane, on their way up north working another case. They’ll be out of touch for another few hours.”

Grace just stood there, oil dripping off the wooden spoon and onto the stove. “John’s e-mails were getting terrorists killed?” she whispered.

“It looks that way. We haven’t gone through the whole stack, but it’s starting to look that way, which explains the jihad.”

“Oh my God.”

“There’s something else, Grace. I just took a call over the transom. Some FBI agent looking for John’s notes on the case we worked with him.”

She looked down at the skillet and moved it off the heat. “But that case was solved. Why would the Feds want his notes?”

“I don’t know.”

“Did you check him out?”

“Yes. Hung up, called D.C. headquarters. His ID number and name checked out. They said he wasn’t in the office, but that he worked from home like a lot of the agents. Seemed legit.”

Grace wiped her hands on her apron and looked at him. Roadrunner had icy blue eyes that most people glossed over nervously, the color seemed so cold. But Grace had always seen a warm heart behind those cool eyes. “So it seemed legit, but you don’t think so.”

He moved his bony shoulders. “Paranoia, probably. It all seemed right, but it didn’t feel right.”

“What did you tell him?”

“I told them the people that worked with Smith weren’t working here anymore.”

Grace looked down at the vegetables, coddled, perfect, knowing inside they would never make their way into the dish she’d planned. “Is the Range Rover still in the garage?”

“Yes.”

“Load the weapons in the back.”

Roadrunner’s body parts moved randomly. “All of them?”

Grace looked at him, connecting. “Yes.”

Her cell phone rang the moment Roadrunner left the room. A voice on the other end said, “Grace?”

She caught her breath and whispered, “John. You’re all over the Web. There’s a jihad on you.”

“I know.”

“And we just had a call. Someone looking for you. He said he was a Fed from D.C.”

“I know that, too. I had a tap on your line, and that call wasn’t from D.C., it was from Minneapolis. They’re here. Get out, Grace. All of you. Right now. Meet me at hole in one. Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

“Don’t pack, don’t think, just go.”

Grace punched a button on the intercom for Annie up in the office and spoke quickly, tersely. “Get down here fast. Bring Charlie. We’re leaving.”

For the first five minutes Grace drove very fast, squealing around corners, blowing past stop signs, carving a very intentional zigzag route through the neighborhood while Annie, Harley, and Roadrunner watched for a tail. When they gave the all-clear she slowed down.

Evasive driving, class. The cops learn it in the academy, but it isn’t rocket science. Never go in a straight line. Stay off the freeways, stick to the secondary roads. Backtrack when you can, make unexpected turns, park and turn off your lights, wait to see if anyone follows. And above all, blend into the traffic. A speeding car is a target, so stop for all the lights, don’t exceed the speed limit, and you are like every other car on the road. You are inconspicuous. Invisible.

Grace had learned that lesson well and followed it carefully as she made her convoluted way through the city.

35

T
he whine and grind of the engines jolted Magozzi awake. Apparently, he’d dozed off the second he’d buckled himself in. Gino was snugged into the seat facing his.

“You snore,” Gino informed him, his eyes focused on Fuhrman at the front of the plane as he made his final announcements, as if there were a planeload of passengers instead of just two.

“Are we there yet?”

“No. We’re taking off any minute. The gerbils are finally warmed up.”

Fuhrman walked down the aisle and stopped beside Gino. “Detective, I’m going to have to ask you to move to a seat on the other side of the aircraft.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Nope. You and your partner can’t be this close together. You remember what I said about barrel rolls, right?”

Gino’s face lost all color as he stood up. “You’re a funny guy, you know that?”

Fuhrman wisely kept a clamp on his smile. “Okay, we’re ready to go. Fasten your seat belts and enjoy the flight.” He disappeared into the cockpit and closed the shower curtain behind him.

Gino sat down, buckled in, and braced his hands against the seat in front of him. He tried to take some deep breaths, because somebody had told him once that it was supposed to be calming. That somebody was a moron, because all it did was make you hyperventilate, which he soon discovered. “The engines sound funny,” he puffed without looking at Magozzi, thinking that using up some spare air on words might help.

“Relax, Gino. We’re going to be fine. You want a puke bag?”

“No. Absolutely not. I hate to puke. I refuse to puke . . .”

The plane lurched forward and started speeding down the runway. Gino clutched his armrests and squeezed his eyes shut. “Oh my God.” And then suddenly they were aloft, bouncing up, up, up. A few minutes later, there was a thunk as the landing gear either went up into the belly or fell off, he wasn’t sure which. He figured he’d find out soon enough.

“There,” Magozzi said from across the narrow aisle. “That wasn’t so bad, was it?”

Gino opened his eyes slowly, careful to avoid catching a glimpse of the land receding through the crappy little windows. “It ain’t over, buddy.”

The loudspeaker suddenly crackled and Fuhrman came on. “We’re just about at cruising altitude now, folks, but I’d stay in my seats if I were you. We’re going to be hitting a few bumps in a bit. That little storm rolling in from the west seems to be getting a lot bigger in a hurry.”

Gino risked tipping over the stupid plane by turning to scowl at Magozzi. “Told you.” He cracked open the second vodka bottle.

36

G
o to the dark. Look for the darkest corner in the darkest part of any alley, any closet, any piece of the world you’re living in, and go there.

It was a survival skill Grace MacBride had never been formally schooled in, unlike the evasive driving tactics. This was pure animal instinct that most people lost in a childhood populated with caring people. But she’d never been that lucky, so the instinct had survived in her and had served her well. She responded to instinct long before thought could catch up, which was why she turned off the Rover’s headlights when she was blocks away from the country club.

The moon was big and bright, glancing off skittish clouds, and that, along with the regularly stationed streetlamps, made the headlights entirely unnecessary. When she pulled into the private entrance, the recessed lights on either side of the smooth asphalt were an unerring guide to the large, empty parking lot.

“Damn, the moon is brighter than Yankee Stadium on game night,” Harley whispered from the backseat. “We’re not exactly blending in here.” Charlie sat between him and Roadrunner, and both men had an arm around the dog, like a couple of kids clutching a stuffed animal for comfort.

They’d all been whispering since leaving Harley’s, except for that scary moment when Grace had almost hit a city bus and Annie had yelled out a warning. Normally she would have encouraged hitting one of the metallic behemoths. Damn things stopped traffic, took up the whole road, and the self-entitled, arrogant drivers thought they owned the streets. But tonight wasn’t the night to pick a fight with some overpaid city employee.

Annie scooched down in the shotgun seat as they cruised slowly to the edge of the parking lot closest to the eighteenth hole, where John Smith had lived through his first real police action with Gino and Magozzi last summer. She reached down to unclip her seat belt, which was wreaking dreadful havoc with her feathered skirt, but Grace apparently wasn’t parking. Instead, she gunned the accelerator and drove hell-bent for leather over the concrete curb that divided the lot from the course proper, and sped over the carefully cropped, meticulously tended fairways, leaving deep ruts behind as she headed toward the eighteenth green.

“Lordy, girl, what are you doing?” Annie gasped. “This is major destruction of property.”

Grace ignored her and finally came to a stop when she could see the moonlight reflecting off the red and white flag in the center of the last green. She turned off the key to stop the muted rumble of the SUV’s big engine, but kept her hand on it, ready.

“What are we doing?” Annie whispered.

“Waiting.” Grace looked out the side windows, into all the mirrors, through the windshield, but still never saw him coming.

Harley went airborne when the face suddenly appeared at his window, seat belt cutting into his gut. But he had his .357 out and pointed at the man outside his window before his butt came back down on the leather. “Jesus,” he muttered, his finger quivering on the trigger. The guy looked old, with a gray ponytail, a stubble of gray whiskers, and ratty clothes, surely some homeless druggie. Then the man smiled because there were four guns pointed right at him. That was good.

“Oh my God.” Harley released a tight breath, recognizing the rarely seen smile, if not the man. “It’s John.”

Grace caught her breath and the muzzle of her Sig lowered as John piled into the seat behind Grace, pushing Harley into the middle next to Roadrunner, and forcing Charlie into the cargo bay behind the backseat, which was fine with the dog since it gave his tongue a straight shot at the back of John’s neck. He whined a happy but subdued greeting as John reached back to fondle his ears.

There were no salutations, no small talk, but John did lean forward to put his hand on Grace’s shoulder, just for a second.

“You sure you weren’t followed?” he asked her.

“Positive.” Grace was already rolling the Rover toward the entrance road, lights still off. “Where to, John?”

“Just out of the city for now. Straight, flat roads where we can see a long way behind us.”

“Man, you’ve got some talking to do, amigo,” Harley said.

“Later. After we’re out of the city and certain that we’re not being followed.”

When Grace eased back out onto the quiet residential street, none of them saw anything suspicious, just parked cars in front of sleepy houses with no garages. Grace drove at the speed limit as all of them watched for a tail that might pull away from the curb to follow. Nothing. Eventually she made a turn to circuit Pattern Lake and started an evasive course that would eventually lead to the I-94 freeway. Northwest was the fastest road out of the city; flat and straight.

Behind Grace, John leaned back in his seat, took the first deep breath he’d taken in a while, and smiled just a little. He was back with the only friends he’d ever known and trusted, and this was the place where he wanted to live forever.

There was a vestigial survival instinct at work here. For a full half hour, none of the Monkeewrench partners said a word. They were tense with watchfulness, looking out the front, back, and side windows. Grace kept checking her mirrors, eyes on every vehicle that passed her. Occasionally she caught a glimpse of John, his head back, eyes closed, apparently sleeping. His face was smooth and at peace, like a child who implicitly trusts the people he is with to keep him safe. It made her wonder what he’d been through this past week.

Part of her wanted to wait for him to tell her what to do.
Drop the mains’l, Grace, but slowly now, then we can come about without being dumped by the crosswinds.
It was easy to take direction because she hadn’t known a thing about sailing, and those were the first moments she’d felt the blessed relief of completely trusting in someone else to do the right thing. The feeling of abdicating responsibility for her own well-being had been stunning. John was probably feeling the same thing now, closing his eyes because he trusted in the eyes of others.

But it was different now. She was on her roads in her territory and she knew exactly what to do without asking anyone. She left the freeway and stopped at the top of a long exit ramp, watching her rearview mirror. “There’s a Minnesota map in the glove compartment, Annie. Find a side road heading north.”

“I told you to get GPS in this thing.”

“Not for all the money in the world.”

“Can I turn on the map light?”

“No. There’s a mini flash in the console.”

After much quiet grumbling and paper rustling, Annie said, “One mile right, left on County 27 for a few miles—you have a destination in mind here? I can get you to Canada, North Dakota . . .”

“We need a pay phone,” John said from the backseat. “No gas stations, no place with lights.”

“Good luck with that,” Harley grumbled. “I haven’t seen a pay phone in a decade. The cells killed them.” Under most circumstances, Harley Davidson was a massive, imposing figure. Crunched into the middle of the backseat like the bad kid, big, booted feet straddling the transmission hump, he seemed a little diminished.

“Look for wayside signs,” Grace said. “The farther north we get, the better chance we’ll find a pay phone. They still don’t trust cells in farm country.”

Roadrunner released a sigh of relief. He never had a whole lot to say, but found the noise of his partners’ chatter somehow comforting. It had been too quiet for too long in this car, and the silence had been disturbing. “Who are we going to call?” he asked timidly.

“I need to call Magozzi,” Grace said. “If he tries to call me and gets no answer, he’s going to panic.”

“That’s who I need to call,” John said. “He and Gino are handling the murders in Little Mogadishu. That’s going to break this thing wide open.”

Annie looked back without shifting a single feather on her skirt. “We already broke this thing wide open, darling. Turns out you’ve been getting a lot of terrorists killed.”

John nodded. “So it would seem. I just don’t know how. How much else do you know so far from what you got off the copy of my hard drive?”

Harley folded his massive arms across his chest. “We know you were tracking terrorists off extremist websites and anonymously sharing your information with the law. Using our illegal worm, I might add, which you totally butchered when you tried to reprogram it. It busted up our firewalls and left your computer wide open. What’s that all about?”

John cringed. “I reprogrammed it to read Arabic and then used it to hack the private e-mails of the people who were signing on to the jihadist sites. That mined out a long list of suspects that the Bureau was missing—lone wolves, a lot of domestic solo operators. Not one of them was on the national or international watch lists, and that scared me.”

“But obviously you’re not killing any of these people, so who is?” Harley asked.

“The only thing I can figure is that someone who got a couple of my anonymous tips decided to start taking out bad guys without dancing through the system.”

“Wait a minute, John,” Annie interrupted. “Are you saying some people in law enforcement are taking your tips and going on a killing spree?”

“It’s possible.”

Grace had been listening to everything, even though she’d been focused on plotting a sensible course for them with Annie’s map of Minnesota and the GPS that resided in her brain. Highway 27 it was, for at least twelve miles. They’d make a new decision after that, if they hadn’t found a pay phone by then.

She finally looked up into the rearview mirror and saw all three backseat occupants staring at nothing, their faces pinched like deflated balloons as they considered the possibility that someone in law enforcement had read John’s warning e-mails and organized a nationwide network to kill terror suspects. At the moment, Grace didn’t care who it was. Right now, job one was finding a safe place.

She pushed down on the accelerator, cranked the wheel, and powered the Rover down the tiny, winding road that was County 27.