Heart-Shaped Hack(75)

Kate’s mind was reeling, and she felt like a weight was pressing down on her chest. The room was suddenly too warm. “Do they know where I live? Where I work?”

“They know everything,” Ian said.

“How?” Kate asked. “How did they find you?”

“We’re not sure,” Ian said. “My computers are all clean. I would have known immediately if they weren’t. Phillip and I have some theories, but nothing we’ve been able to prove. But they would have seen us together as soon as they started watching me. Then it would have taken them no time at all to identify and hack you.

“You said if they ever found you there would be threats,” Kate said, her voice rising. “Disturbing threats.”

“They wanted me, Kate. Not you. The fact that they hadn’t made any direct threats yet meant they were probably planning to use you to draw me out, to force me to react in some way. And I would have. I’d have done anything they asked if it meant they’d leave you out of this. Even so, there’s no way I would leave you unprotected. Your new neighbor, Don Murray, is an FBI agent who works out of the Minneapolis field office. So does the man who follows you to and from work every day, and the two men who keep an eye on your street and the food pantry.”

Kate sat in stunned silence. How had she gone from running a nonprofit organization to being under FBI surveillance? She could not wrap her brain around it no matter how hard she tried. It was simply too surreal.

“We had to act fast,” Ian said, “before they could put whatever they were planning into motion. We got lucky because we didn’t have to wait long for another storm.”

“How were you able to convince the police, the media?”

Phillip answered her. “Ian abandoned the car on the side of the road. The streets were fairly empty because of the road conditions, and it didn’t take much to stage a collision that pushed the Shelby over the embankment. We called 911 ourselves and reported a car in the river. No one would have survived something like that, not in a vehicle without airbags and not in freezing-cold water. Then we leaked to the media that a body had been recovered and identified. The FBI claimed jurisdiction, and the only information we shared was what we wanted to make public.”

“There was a death notice,” Kate said.

Ian’s expression remained blank, but his features hardened and Kate detected a slight clenching of his jaw. “I wrote it.”

“After you found out about Ian’s death, did you google Ian Merrick on your laptop?” Phillip asked.

“Yes. I did a general search and then a more specific one. That’s how I found the death notice.”

“What about Ian Bradshaw?”

“Not on my laptop. I googled him once on my special phone after Ian said I wouldn’t be able to find him, but that’s it.”

Phillip nodded and seemed happy with her answer.

“What if I had? Would that have ruined everything? Why leave such an important thing to chance?”

“It wouldn’t have ruined anything, Kate,” Ian said softly. “Phillip just wants to know what we’re dealing with so we can do some long-term planning.”

“Within an hour of the crash, we blew Ian’s cover ourselves,” Phillip said. “We made sure the name Ian Merrick, and the news of his death, was all over the forum. We made sure they knew he was working with the FBI.”

“Did they buy it?” Kate asked. “After everything you did, did they believe you?”

“Anytime a hacker with any notoriety dies, there’s immediate suspicion that it’s a hoax and a call to arms for any hacker within a ten-mile radius to help verify the information,” Phillip said. “It’s the oldest trick in the book, and the only way it would work was if your reaction was genuine.”

Kate didn’t know what to say. They’d started following the steps of their carefully laid out plan before she’d even known there was a problem.

“Do I still have a backdoor?” she asked.

“Yes. That’s why Ian had to contact you the way he did. And even then it was quite risky. I wanted him to hold off a little longer before he reached out, but he said he couldn’t wait. Did anyone ever approach you, Kate? Ask you anything that might have seemed strange?”

“No.”

“Do you remember seeing anyone who looked out of place?”

“When I went to Ian’s apartment the morning after he didn’t come home, there was a guy near the bank of intercoms. He was young, midtwenties probably. It was hard to tell for sure because he had his hood up. I remember thinking at the time that he seemed to be watching me, but I thought it was because I looked upset. I was trying not to cry, and I didn’t want him to see, so I turned away. Then when I went to the storage facility I learned that someone had been there asking about when the FBI had come for the Escalade. Some young guy wearing a dark hoodie.”

“You went to the storage facility?” Phillip said.

“Yes. After I got Ian’s message on my dating account I got nervous and wanted to do some investigating of my own. See if anyone had shown up there and asked questions.”

Kate told them how she was able to get the storage facility employee to share the information. “But that’s it. I don’t remember seeing anyone else.”