Chapter 29 The Help That Is Coming
The Help That Is Coming
On Evan’s drive back to the Bronx, the flash drive in his cargo pocket refused to recede into the background of his attention. The metal rectangle dimpled the skin of his thigh, a loaded pistol with the safety off.
He dreaded having to watch what was on it.
But he needed to see if he could identify Anca’s captors, and that meant having to observe what they’d done to her.
For privacy, he booked a room a few blocks from Anca’s apartment. The hotel was a converted turn-of-the-century opera house, Italian Renaissance Revival with rusticated stone and tall arched windows. The room was cheap, clean, utilitarian.
Sitting on a maroon bed runner festooned with beige flowers, he stared at the laptop he’d picked up at a Best Buy, set up on the facing dresser. Firming his jaw, he withdrew the thumb drive from his pocket, inserted it, and called up the MP4 video.
The cursor floated above the PLAY arrow.
His mouth was dry. His hands gripped his knees.
The Fourth Commandment: Never make it personal.
He took a breath. Locked himself down.
And clicked.
He observed forensically.
A Hieronymus Bosch tableau.
Four assailants. Black ski masks. Stark lighting interspersed with shadow.
A horned-goat-skull tattoo glistened on the sweaty pectoral of the biggest man.
One of the others had a sunken chest and a tat as well, low-quality work that looked like a blue blob.
The third man was wolfish and muscular, a triangle of manscaped chest hair, eight-pack definition suggesting steroids or heavy supplements.
He was the definitive leader, silently directing movements and setting the tone in all its hideous variance.
The last guy cackled like a jester, repeating himself frequently: “My turn! My turn!”
Evan modulated his breathing, his heart rate. He took in data, noted details, assessed what might be useful. But then he felt it skittering at the edges of his thoughts, biting at his perception, tugging it out of shape.
Emotion.
Body temperature rising. Sweat prickling his eyes. He armed his forehead, refocusing, but it just came on stronger, hurling itself against the door, thudding to get in.
Don’t let it, he told himself. Do not let it in.
He looked for distinctive marks and scars, listened for spoken clues, noted cadences of speech, read posture and body language.
Goat-Skull Tattoo made only vowel sounds, unbridled id unrestrained by the alphabet.
Don’t let it in.
Eight-Pack grabbed a piece of Anca’s anatomy, made it bulge for the camera.
Evan hit PAUSE, took a moment to catch his breath.
He needed Joey on digital forensics ASAP but could he subject her to this?
She’d asked. She’d asked to come along. He emailed her the file, hesitated, and then sent it to Naomi Templeton as well.
The progress bar showed he was only fourteen minutes into the recording.
There was another hour and fifty-seven minutes.
It felt intolerable to watch any longer. And yet Anca had actually endured it.
He resumed.
The men shifted her sluggish body around on the bed, adjusting her as they pleased, feeding on her, off her, shaking her in the fangs of their depravity.
There was nothing she could say or do or be to make it stop.
She floated through the dimmed twilight between cognizance and oblivion, between life and death, suspended in a drugged purgatory.
Don’t let it in.
A compulsion nearly overtook him, to erupt to his feet and hammer his fist through the wall. But there would be damage. He would break a finger or dislocate a knuckle and healing time would be costly in the execution of his mission.
Don’t let it in.
The level of psychopathic detachment in the assailants was not unfamiliar to him.
He had encountered it plenty and even embodied it himself when a situation demanded reprisal of the become-a-monster-to-hunt-monsters variety.
Manny Llorente had learned as much. But right now, even as his eyes registered what was happening on the screen, his ability to observe it objectively began to slip.
Fighting to hold emotion at bay, to keep himself in check, to hold everything out except what he needed to note operationally, he’d—
—slid forward off the bed, taking the comforter with him.
Crouching, gangster low to the carpet, coiled like a snake.
The mattress was against his shoulders and the video kept on unimpeded and it didn’t show merely a victim and her assailants, it showed Anca Dumitrescu, the woman he’d come to know and admire, a woman who kept a stuffed-animal penguin from the Bronx Zoo and made jokes about holy water and clasped her tiny hands when she was distressed.
Without knowing it, his guard had lowered, and he had to take her in as her full self.
And now he was watching the violation happening to her specifically, to Anca, experiencing what she had experienced as a whole person with dreams and pain and fears and choices, not as an object being ravished or a victim to be analyzed or an ideal to be avenged, but a human subjected to the ultimate degradation and brutality, and he felt, he felt her.
His RoamZone was out and he had dialed Joey and she’d already answered and when he could find words, he said, “The video of Anca, it was uploaded to RedLite.”
Joey’s breath left her as if she’d been struck in the gut. “RedLite? They’re the parent company for, like, a kabillion porn sites.”
“I need you to find it, Joey. Do you understand?”
“You want me to—”
“Search it out there and everywhere it has been reposted online.”
“You want me to—deep-dive into that—see them, her like that? That’ll be awful.”
His cheeks were wet. “You are the help. Right now, for this, you are the help that is coming.”
“I understand,” Joey said. “I will. I will do it.”
“Erase every trace, take it down, hit it with a DDOS attack, anything and everything. I want this shit expunged. Period. Every IP address of everyone who watches it, downloads it, I want their device shredded. A worm or virus that infects any computer that touches this piece of content. A digital fucking STD.”
“Got it. I’ll—”
“Devine will have whatever RE or exploit tools you need. He’s got plenty of green-badged friends at the agencies.
Wipe that footage from every corner of the web.
Every viewing is another violation. There can’t be a single trace of what she went through out there.
For more miscreants to watch and … and…”
“You okay, X?”
“Identify those four animals. Gait biometrics, voice recognition, every single angle. They’re still out there. They’re out there and they will do this again. This is what they do.”
“X. You okay?”
“Yes.”
“You sure?”
“Just get it done.”
“X. I will.”
A pause.
“X?”
A longer pause.
“X?”
“Thank you, J.”
Click.
“Can you … Will you help me?”
Candy glanced over from her post at the living-room window. In the wake of Anca’s attack, her view of humanity had dimmed ever further. She’d been surveilling the street, hoping for somebody to do something terrible in clear view so she’d have a reason to beat them senseless.
Anca stood in the slim crack of the bathroom door, towel wrapped tightly around her midsection, steam rolling over her shoulders. An awkward, self-conscious slump, wisp of hair curled across her throat, Venus on that big-ass shell.
Candy said, “Yes.”
She walked over. Anca hesitated before stepping back and allowing the door gap to widen. The bathroom was small, close quarters, choked with steam.
Candy cleared her throat. “What do you need?”
Anca’s chin dipped, eyes lowered. She turned timidly and let the towel slide a few inches off her shoulder blade, showing the obscene drawing. The skin around it had been scrubbed red, the black marker faded but still clearly visible.
Candy wondered at the amount of work it had taken Anca to clear the matching filth from her cheek. In the mirror, Candy saw Anca’s features contort briefly into a sob. She fought her face back into control and Candy pretended not to have noticed.
Anca reached for a bottle on the lip of the sink beside a nearly depleted bag of cotton balls. She handed the rubbing alcohol to Candy. “I can’t reach it well enough.”
Candy set the bottle back down. “Olive oil works, too,” she said. “Gentler on the skin.”
“It’ll take longer.”
“It’s okay,” Candy said. “I have time.”
Anca’s cheeks were flushed from the heat of the shower or maybe from something else. Her eyes brimmed.
She nodded with gratitude.
It was either day or night, Devine decided, before realizing that was not exactly a Kantian bit of reasoning.
He lay in Egyptian-cotton sheets with a four-figure thread count, too tired to sleep, fragmented notions piercing his spinning mind, stuck through the white matter like shards.
He did not feel at home inside himself. And there was nowhere else to go.
Even so, he could not give up. A verse from Pirkei Avot fell like rainwater through the hollowness at his core: It is not incumbent upon you to complete the work, but neither are you at liberty to desist from it.
God, he loved the channelers of the first Book, those who’d leapt to touch the numinous unknown and pair it with the light inside every human.
Rolling onto his side, he used the meat of his biceps as a pillow, curling fetally. Shade-muted light fell in melon slices from the radius windows to lie across him. A moment of peace.
Then there came a tapping of footsteps. Two sets.
Rawlings cleared his throat. “Sorry to bother you, sir.”
“I need to go full cyberwarfare,” the girl said. “And there’s a next-level boot-and-nuke secure-eraser malware I need to access.”
Devine did not stir. Only his lips moved. “For what?”
“To wipe uploaded footage of a gang rape off the internet.”
The girl had put toughness into her voice to showcase resilience, but Devine could hear what it was covering. Horror.
They were fallen.
They were all so fallen.
When Devine blinked, he was surprised to see a wet spot on the pillowcase beneath his face.
“It’s behind about a dozen firewalls at NSA’s Tailored Access Operations,” the girl—Josephine?—said. “I can hack it but it’ll take time. I don’t have time. I need a shortcut. I need your help.”
A coldness fell upon Devine. An exhalation shuddered out of him like a shiver.
“I have an acquaintance at SIGINT at NSA,” Devine said. “A major general who visited here last fall and couldn’t help but bite a shiny, shiny apple.”
Rawlings said, “I know the one. May I call him under your authority?”
“You may indeed,” Devine said. “What time is it?”
“Time to rest,” the girl said.
Devine laughed. His whole body ached with the movement.
“That is,” he said, “one superpower I wish I had.”