Thin Lines (The Child Thief #3)(85)

There was a pause from Gabby. “I don’t know. I didn’t have any way to research them, and I’ve never actually seen one before.”

“But they could have been,” Nelson replied.

“Yes,” Gabby said.

“In which case you need to watch yourself,” Nelson continued. “Where are you now?”

“In the middle of the ocean,” Gabby replied. “The same place we always are. I don’t think I was traced, though.”

“You wouldn’t know,” Nelson replied. “It would have been done by the firewall itself, and it would have been a recording and trace of the actual search, not your particulars. Even so, it could have led back to you. What have you been doing to protect yourself?”

“Standard proxies. Nothing new or different. And nothing less than what you taught me. How do you know it was a next-gen firewall?”

Nelson looked up and met my eyes, her expression deadly serious. “Because it’s the same thing I’ve been finding whenever I try to trace any of the events on the Authority’s timeline. Which means that there were once stories about those events on the web, and someone has gone out of their way to block those stories from the public eye.”

I felt like I’d been punched right in the stomach and coughed. I didn’t understand 99 percent of what Gabby and Nelson had just discussed, but I understood Nelson’s last statement. She was saying that she was finding the same thing when she searched for Little John hits as Gabby had found for hits on this millionaire guy. And that the firewalls they were both running into could track who had made their way onto a given website.

Gabby and Nelson had both been searching for something that someone was trying to hide, and they’d both run into firewalls that could have marked them. Someone had been setting traps.

And we had no idea who had done it. But whoever they were, they might be tracking Gabby—and maybe us—right now.





33





“But what does it mean?” Jackie asked for the fifteenth time since we’d gotten off the phone with Gabby. “How are they connected?”

“Put simply, it means that the millionaire Gabby found is most likely connected to Little John, just because of the similarities in their searches,” Nelson said, leaning over the timeline and putting her finger down to hold her place while she looked up at Jackie. “The firewalls she’s talking about—and the ones I’ve seen on my searches for Little John—are extremely specialized and very difficult to build. They wouldn’t exist on accident, and there aren’t many people who even know how to use them. The fact that we’re running into them during both searches…”

We’d hung up with Gabby moments earlier, having wrung all the information we could out of her, and after having given her a new assignment: tracking ownership of the house in which we’d found Corona.

At least with Corona’s house, we had a real address. And though it would have been beyond sloppy for whoever bought the house to leave a paper trail in regard to that address, we were hoping that there might be something there. Something that would give us a direction.

“After all, maybe she bought that house before she was involved with Little John,” Ant had said when he suggested it. “Before she knew to be careful about stuff like that. Right? But obviously the government knew that something fishy was going on. Maybe they got wind of her meeting with Nathan, and they were already after him, and realized that she was trouble too. In fact…”

He’d paused there, and I’d filled in the conclusion I’d already started coming to.

“Corona’s story might not be a cover story at all,” I said quickly. “It might be the truth. Maybe she’s been a rebel for even longer than she’s known Nathan. Maybe she’s the person who had to disappear because she got in trouble with the government.”

“Which leaves us with the question of what exactly she did to piss the government off so much that she had to disappear,” Ant continued.

“And how she managed to do it,” I said, staring at the trunk of the tree to help myself concentrate. “Her money must have come from somewhere. Probably her old life. So how did she just disappear with it? If she was rich and pissed off the government, why didn’t they seize her money when she went off the grid?”

“Maybe they don’t care about the money,” Jackie said with a shrug. “Maybe they care more about the joy”—her mouth turned down in distaste at the word—“of capturing the person they think did them wrong.”

“But then this random woman appears back in the world, with a ton of money and a pretty flimsy cover story, and if they suspected that she was the same person, or that this new person had ties to a well-known rebel group…” I muttered, putting the ideas into words as I thought of them. “Then they would have had their eyes on her. And she would have known it, or at least suspected. God, no wonder she was so freaked out about the Authority being on their way to her house. She’s seen up close and personal what they do with people they don’t like, and she might have escaped it once already. She must have been terrified.”

And she’d still taken the time to talk to us, write down a set of directions, and essentially hand us the keys to those motorcycles before saving herself. All so she could keep fighting the government with whatever tools she had at her fingertips.