“Laser zapper,” I said.
“Exactly.”
After a minute the picture returned to normal.
Then there was nothing to see but an empty stairwell.
“So we still don’t know how they got in,” I said. “But this tells us something useful.”
“What, they knew how to dazzle the cameras? It’s all over the Internet.”
“No. They knew where the cameras were.”
“Why do you say that?”
“No fumbling around. Quick and efficient. You can’t blind the cameras if you can’t find them. They knew exactly where to look.”
“So?”
“The cameras are concealed,” I said. “One in a smoke detector, and one in an air vent. The smoke-detector camera isn’t all that original, if you’re familiar with what’s on the market. But the air-vent one-that’s custom. It’s a fiber-optic camera that’s like a quarter inch thick. Takes some serious skill to hit that one first time.”
“So what’s your point?”
“They got hold of the schematics. As well as my password.”
“Maybe from the security company that put them in.”
“Possibly. Or maybe from my own files. Right there in the office.”
“Not possible,” she said. “I’d have detected the intrusion, Nick.”
“Maybe.”
“Not maybe,” she said, defensive. “For sure.”
“Put it this way,” I said. “Not only did they know exactly where my cameras are, but they were able to disarm the system. Meaning they knew the code.”
“From your security company.”
“The company doesn’t know my code.”
“Who does?”
“Just me.”
“You don’t keep your code written down anywhere?”
“Just in my personal files at the office,” I said.
“In your file drawers?”
“On my computer. Stored on our server.”
“Oh.”
“You see?” I said.
“Yeah,” she said, and the other line rang. I saw from the caller ID it was Diana. “Someone’s gotten into the office network.”
“Or else we’ve got a leak,” I said. “Let me take this.”
I clicked over to Diana’s call.
“Nick,” she said, her voice tight. “I just heard from AT &T. I think we’ve found our girl.”
33.
Not until Alexa went away to boarding school did she learn that other kids, normal kids, didn’t have the kind of dreams she did. Others dreamed of flying, like she sometimes did, but they also dreamed about their teeth falling out. They dreamed of getting lost in mazes or realizing, with immense embarrassment, that they were walking around school naked. They all had anxiety dreams about having to take a final exam in a class they’d forgotten to attend.
Not Alexa.
She dreamed over and over about crawling on her belly through an endless network of caves and getting stuck in one of the narrow tunnels, thousands of feet underground. She’d always wake up sweating and trembling.
The thing about phobias, she’d learned, was that once you had one, some small part of your brain was always working to justify its existence. To show you why your phobia made perfect sense.
Wasn’t it logical to be afraid of snakes? Who could argue with that? Why wasn’t it logical to fear germs or spiders or flying in an airplane? You could die any of these ways, right? It wasn’t like your brain had to work very hard to justify any of these phobias.
Being in an enclosed space was the most deeply terrifying thing she could imagine. She didn’t require logic. She just knew.
Like a magpie forever gathering shiny little scraps, her mind collected the most horrifying tales, things she’d read about or heard from friends, stories that proved her fears were legitimate. Things most people barely noticed, she filed away obsessively.
Stories from history books of people who’d fallen ill during the Plague, gone into comas, declared dead. Stories she wished she could unread.
Coffin lids with scratch marks on the inside. Skeletons found with fistfuls of human hair clenched in their bony hands.
She’d never forget reading about the Ohio girl in the late nineteenth century who got sick and her doctor thought she’d died, and for some reason her body was placed in a temporary vault, maybe because the ground was too frozen to bury her, and when they opened the vault in the spring to put the body in the ground, they found that the girl’s hair had been pulled out. And that some of her fingers had been chewed off.
The girl had eaten her own fingers to stay alive.
Her English teacher at Exeter had made them read Poe. It was hard enough just trying to understand the guy’s writing, the strange words she’d never heard of. But his stories-she couldn’t bear to read them. Because he was one of the very few who actually got it. He understood the terror. Her classmates would say things like “That’s one sick dude,” but she knew that Edgar Allan Poe saw the truth. “The Fall of the House of Usher” and “The Cask of Amontillado”-all those stories about people being buried alive-she couldn’t bring herself to finish them. How could anyone?
Why was her fevered magpie mind dwelling on all those awful stories?
After all, she was living her own worst nightmare.
34.
“Her phone’s on and transmitting,” Diana said.
“Where is she?” I said.
“Leominster.” She said it wrong, like most people new to the state. It’s supposed to rhyme with “lemming,” almost.
“That’s an hour away.” I looked at my watch. “Maybe less, this time of night. How precise a location did they give you?”
“They’re e-mailing me lat-and-long coordinates, in degrees and minutes.”
“Okay,” I said. “That could be as big an area as a thousand square meters, the way these things work. But once I’m there I can start searching for likely locations.”
“Give me ten minutes.”
“Go back to bed. Otherwise, you’ll be a wreck tomorrow. I got this.”
“Technically, I put in the request. I’m not allowed to pass on the information to someone outside the Bureau.”
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll drive, you navigate.”
I QUICKLY gathered some equipment, including the Smith & Wesson and a handheld GPS unit, a ruggedized yellow Garmin eTrex.
As we drove, I told her what had happened in the hours since I’d seen her last: the surveillance tape at the Graybar Hotel, the guy who’d spiked Alexa’s drink and driven her away. Her “friend” Taylor Armstrong, the senator’s daughter, who’d cooperated in the abduction for some reason I didn’t yet understand. The streaming video. Marshall Marcus’s admission that he’d taken money from some dangerous people in a last-ditch attempt to save his fund, though he lost it all anyway.
Diana furrowed her brow. “Let me check the phone detail records.” She began scrolling through her BlackBerry.
“Yeah, I’d like to know when the last phone call was, in or out.”
“The last outgoing call hit the tower in Leominster at two thirty-seven A.M.”
“Almost twenty-four hours ago,” I said. “How long did it last?”
More scrolling. “About ten seconds.”
“Ten seconds?” I said. “That’s pretty short.”
I heard her scroll some more, and then she said, “The last call was to nine-one-one. Emergency. But it doesn’t look like the call ever went through. It hit the tower, but it must have been cut off.”
“I’m impressed. She must have been pretty spaced-out from the drugs, but she had the wherewithal to try to call for help. What calls did she receive around then?”
“A bunch of incoming, between three in the morning to around noon today.”
“Can you see who they’re from?”
“Yeah. Four different numbers. Two landlines in Manchester-by-the-Sea.”
“Her dad.”