edge. “I’ll meet you somewhere and bring you in if you want. We’ll get it all worked out. We need to find out who this guy is, why he’s been impersonating an FBI agent, and what he really wants from you. We can help each other.”
Just then I heard the lightest click on the line. It brought me back to myself. I weighed the pros and cons of just turning myself in. She was right; I’d probably be safer. But part of me had already decided that this meeting at the Cloisters was the only way to Max. Something inside me had seized on that, and even though I had no reason to think it was true, I just couldn’t let it go. If eight o’clock came and went and I wasn’t at the Cloisters, Max would elude me forever. I wasn’t sure if I could live with that.
“Okay, Agent Sorro, thanks,” I said.
“Where do you want to meet?”
“Um…I’ll think about it and get back to you.”
“Ridley-”
I ended the call then and sat there for a second, every nerve ending in my body tingling, my stomach in full rebellion. I had been lied to and tricked by Dylan Grace, my imaginary friend. I didn’t even know how to react or what to think. Oddly, I didn’t even feel that shocked or betrayed. In a way, I guess I had always expected him to be something other than what he appeared to be. It was almost a relief to know that I had been right about him.
I scanned the room around me. No one was looking in my direction, everyone hyper-focused on the screen in front of them. I wanted to scream for help, but of course I didn’t. Then I saw a young guy huffing and puffing his way up the stairs. He was pasty and soft but had a pretty face framed by a mass of golden curls; he wore tiny round silver spectacles. I was sure it was Grant. I felt scared suddenly that I’d led the poor kid into danger, that I’d wind up kneeling over his dead body on the floor. I thought about bolting, but he saw me and made his way over.
“I knew it was you,” he said as he sat down heavily. He took off his glasses and wiped them on the hem of his T-shirt. His shirt read THE ONLY THING NECESSARY FOR EVIL TO TRIUMPH IS FOR GOOD MEN TO DO NOTHING.
I didn’t say anything just out of surprise that he’d recognized me.
“Man, you are in some serious shit.” I heard admiration in his voice. “You must have done something pretty fucked up in another life to have this much trouble raining down on you again.”
I thought it was a pretty insensitive thing to say and told him as much.
“Sorry,” he said. “You’re right. How’d you slip the NYPD?”
I was taken aback by his question. It really was all over the place. Part of me had been hoping that Agent Sorro was exaggerating or even making it all up, part of some elaborate ruse to cover up a secret investigation into Max’s alive-or-dead status.
“I didn’t realize I was slipping them,” I said defensively. “I thought I was being taken into federal custody.”
He cocked his head and looked at me. “What do you mean?”
I told him the whole story, starting from the day Dylan approached me on the street, ending with my leaving him in Riverside Park. I even told Grant about the text message and my meeting at the Cloisters.
“Man,” he said, shaking his head. “This is bigger than I thought.”
He was enjoying this a little too much. It was annoying me.
“Pretty brave of you to come, considering a number of people I have come in contact with during the last few days are dead or have disappeared,” I said, paying him back for his earlier comment.
“No one’s going to touch me. I’m too high profile,” he said with a casual shrug and uncertainty in his eyes. I thought he might be kidding. Did he really consider himself high profile? I almost laughed but saw he was serious and gave him a knowing nod.
“Of course you are,” I said. He didn’t seem to hear the sarcasm in my voice.
“How did you hear about me? My website?”
“No,” I said. “Jenna Rich told me about you.”
“Oh,” he said, looking embarrassed. I wondered if he’d heard through other sources the not-so-nice things she had to say about him. I felt bad for him suddenly.
“She said you were a computer genius and that you had some interesting theories about Myra Lyall. I looked on your site and thought you might be able to help me.”
He seemed to brighten at this a bit. “Help you how?” he asked, leaning forward with alacrity.
I typed in the URL on my borrowed computer and up popped the red screen.
“I need to know what this website is,” I said. I told him about the streaming video of Covent Garden that I’d seen on Jake’s computer.
He slid in closer to me, pushed his little glasses up toward his eyes, and he smelled not unpleasantly like Krispy Kreme doughnuts. There was something teddy-bearish and appealing about him. He tapped away on the keyboard for a second and two small narrow windows opened. A curser blinked in one of the blank white spaces, waiting for a prompt.
“It’s waiting for a log-in and password,” he said, turning to look at me.
“How did you do that?” I said with grudging admiration.
He blew out arrogant disdain from his nostrils. “This is your basic cloak-and-dagger program. Wannabe spy shit one-oh-one.”
I noticed a sheen of sweat on his forehead and wondered if he was nervous or just hot. He was pretty out of shape, the room was over-warm, and even I’d felt a little breathless after the flight of stairs.
I shook my head. “I don’t understand.”
“It’s called steganography, deriving from the Greek, meaning ‘covered writing.’ It’s a way to embed messages within other seemingly harmless messages. There’s software, like Noise Storm or Snow, that allows you to replace useless or unused bits of data in regular computer files…like graphics or sound, even video. I just tabbed around until I hit the window where the prompts were hiding.”
I looked at the prompts, my mind already working on what my father’s log-in and password would be. Probably the same as his home computer; he’s nothing if not predictable. I reached for the keyboard.
“Wait. Don’t just make a quick guess. If you enter the wrong thing, you might alert the webmaster of an unauthorized attempt to enter the site. The prompts or the site itself might disappear altogether.”
I just looked at him, withdrew my hand.
“This is not typical of steganographic sites, though,” he said, as if thinking aloud. “I mean, usually it would be masquerading as something else, like a porn site, or even a mystery bookstore. Then messages would be hidden in elements of the site, like I said…images or sound files.”
“Or streaming video,” I said, thinking of Jake’s computer. He nodded.
“Those messages might be encrypted on top of that. There’s a program called Spam Mimic. Say there was a message waiting for you at a site like this. You’d get a message in your in-box that would look like ordinary spam that most people would delete. But you’d know it was an alert to check the site.”
I thought about my father’s computer, all the junk mail there. I wondered if one of those spam messages had been an alert that a message was waiting for him.
Grant went on. “When you click on the link, it leads you to the message site. You get your message and supposedly you have the means to decrypt it.”
“Who would set up this kind of thing?”
He shrugged. “The government has been making a lot of noise that terrorists are using communications like this. They want stricter regulations on the software that makes it possible to create these encrypted messages. They’re virtually untraceable. Unless someone stumbles on a site like this and knows what they’re looking at, there’s no way to even know it exists. More and more, this type of thing is preferred to phone communications. The government is nervous because it significantly cuts down on the ‘chatter’ they monitor through conventional counterterrorism measures.”
I wasn’t sure what he meant by chatter, though I’d heard the term before. I asked him about it.
“Yeah, the government can monitor terrorist activity by watching the frequency of communications between known terrorist groups. When they see an increase in communications-or even a falling off of communications- coupled with other things, say content intercepts or satellite observations, they know something is going on. But things like these websites, disposable cell phones, even Internet cafes like this one are making things a lot harder
