The People vs. Alex Cross (Alex Cross #25)(65)

“I don’t know if we are bugged or not,” Rawlins said, taking my computer. “Based on the fact we both uploaded the contents of that flash drive from the man posing as Alden Lindel, I’ve been digging in our system, but I haven’t come up with anything definitive yet.”

“This is a smaller universe,” I said.

Rawlins winked. “I see that.”

He’d kept his Mohawk down and black, but he’d added dark eye shadow, which made him look somewhat demonic as he plugged my laptop into a closed network. Rawlins ran a number of tests and still didn’t find anything. He decided to search uploads my computer had made recently over Wi-Fi or Bluetooth.

“There you are, you bugger,” he said, highlighting a file with a nonsense name and extension.

The date stamp said the upload from my laptop had taken place from 4:33 p.m. to 5:29 p.m. the prior Monday.

I thought about that and realized the time frame coincided with my hour with Annie Cassidy. The beginning and the end of the session, when she’d been fooling around with her smartphone.

“That file was probably sent to her phone,” I said. “She must have been downloading it the entire time I was in session with her.”

“What’s in the file?” Batra said.

Rawlins clicked on the file, and it was quickly apparent that it contained a record of everything done on my computer for the previous fourteen days.

“Spying on us, the little roaches,” Rawlins said.

He analyzed the file further and discovered that it had been generated after an order from a piece of “elegant and ingeniously coded” malware Krazy Kat found buried deep inside my operating system and made to look like innocuous support code.

Once he had the malware identified, Rawlins searched for it on the FBI system and was shocked to find a copy sitting dormant on his own server.

“This is impressive,” he said, rubbing his chin. “I actively monitor for intrusions, and I never saw this. A deep, deep, deep Trojan horse, created by a master coder.”

“Can you figure out the coder’s identity?” I asked.

“I might. Give me that flash drive you got in the mail. We’ll launch it, see what happens.”

Before he did, Rawlins wrote tracking code designed to attach itself to any file the malware created. Then he plugged the drive into his server and launched it.

The mock firing-squad execution of Gretchen Lindel played, followed by the warning to me that the next time all the blondes would die. There was a screen flash before the video closed, just as there’d been when I uploaded it.

Rawlins stood there, drumming his fingers on his workstation, head swiveling as he studied the array of screens around him.

“C’mon,” he said. “Something happened there. Where are you?”

My cell phone buzzed. I took it out, saw Naomi was calling.

I answered. “Any news?”

My niece’s voice was strained. “The jury has contacted Larch.”

I closed my eyes, thinking, Hung jury, wondering whether my family could take another trial.

But then Naomi said, “They’ve reached a verdict, Uncle Alex. You need to come to the courthouse.”





CHAPTER


85


I TIGHTENED THE knot on my tie in the car as Sampson turned the corner toward the courthouse. From two blocks away, we could see the media mob waiting, anxious, no doubt, because it was pushing four that Friday afternoon and they were right up against deadline for the East Coast evening news broadcasts.

“The offer’s still there to go in through the prisoner-transfer door,” Sampson said. “Chief okayed it.”

“No,” I said. “I want them to see me.”

I glanced over and saw Sampson rubbing at the scar on his forehead.

“You okay?”

“I will be when I take my meds,” he said, pulling up across the street from the courthouse and putting his hand on my forearm. “We’ll all be right behind you, no matter what happens.”

But instead of being encouraged by his support, I climbed from the squad car with my mind reeling through all the counterattacks the assistant U.S. attorneys had made in their closing arguments, especially at our theory of the holographic gun images.

The glue could have come from their makeup, they said. The silicone came from something they’d all touched, probably the masks they wore or, as Watkins had suggested, the grime on the old factory floor. Wills had also hammered home how absurd it was to believe that two people would willingly die and another would willingly be wounded and crippled in order to frame me.

“Alex!”

Anita and Naomi were climbing out of a cab behind us.

“Let’s be as disciplined as we were on day one,” Anita said. “No one talks on the way into court.”

As we’d done the first day of the trial, we walked together toward the crush of cameras and klieg lights that flared and trained on us. The reporters’ shouting canceled out the protesters’ shouting, so all I really heard as we pushed on through the mob was a garbled roar of desperation and hatred.

Reaching the courthouse was a relief, but I felt distant going through security. I tried to focus on the officers wishing me luck, but I was thinking that my life as I knew it might be over in a matter of minutes and I’d be condemned to an eight-by-twelve, a target for every con who had it in for a cop.