21. Miles #3
“Lincoln’s here too; it will be faster with the three of us working on this together. We’ll get the system secure again.” Cain smiles then lets Doc sit in his seat to get me cleaned up.
***
It took four hours to get my system back and protected. I have more than five different systems running to make sure no one can get through, and my laptop with Sadie on it has four different VPN’s with extra protection on it. I can’t risk her getting hurt.
The phone is connected and the contacts load first.
Not names, codes. Alphanumeric identifiers, these are usually used by people who don't want their communication network traceable to anyone.
There are seventeen contacts. Each one is tagged with a city code that I start matching against the geographic overlay in my head before I've consciously decided to.
Phoenix. Denver. Nashville. Charlotte. Minneapolis.
My jaw tightens. These are the cities from the cases we’ve been investigating.
Not all of them, but there are five of them, and these were the cities where the camera gaps were created, and where the girls were taken.
They’re also where the pattern I identified three weeks ago was being executed on the ground by people with phones like this one.
"Five cities," I say. "These contacts are operational. Local coordinators, probably, people managing the ground-level work in each location."
Cain looks at the screen. "Can you identify them?"
"With time. The codes will have a logic to them, they always do. Give me the codes and enough cross-reference data and I'll find the people behind them." I scroll. "There's more."
The location history. Forty-seven days of movement data.
The phone has been in this city for eleven of those days, which means whoever it belongs to arrived eleven days ago.
Before the ambush, before tonight. They've been here for eleven days watching me, building to this. Or are they here for a girl?
Then there’s the messages. They’re all encrypted, but the encryption is commercial rather than custom, which means I can break it with the right tools in a few hours rather than a few days.
I screenshot the thread headers, timestamps, contact codes, there’s enough metadata to start building the communication map and keep scrolling.
At the bottom of the message history, one thread is different from the others.
It’s longer and more recent. The last message was sent forty minutes ago, after the ambush, after they left the house.
I open it. The message is in Romanian. My Romanian is functional rather than fluent, but the meaning comes through before I've finished the first line.
Package confirmed. Target aware. Escalate timeline.
I sit back. Escalate timeline. That means the ambush wasn't the end of the message, it was the beginning of a new phase. They know I'm close. They know what I found and instead of pulling back they're moving faster.
"They're escalating," I say.
The room has gone very quiet. Cain, Hayden, Mason, and Declan are all present.
"How long do you need?" Cain asks. Not for the phone, but for everything.
"To break the encryption? Hours. To identify the five city contacts? Days. To build enough of the network to move on it?" I look at the screen. "Longer, but I have more now than I had this morning and I'll have more tomorrow than I have tonight."
Cain nods.
The doctor tries again. I let him this time, not because the rib has stopped hurting, it hasn't, but because an argument about it is time I don't have, and Cain's expression suggests he agrees with the doctor's presence.
Doc takes longer than I wanted him to on me, but I have two cracked ribs, my eye will close further before it opens again, my lip needs nothing. I’m going to be sore for a few days, maybe two weeks, but it’s not going to slow me down.
The house settles around three in the morning.
Cain and Hayden are in the living room with Mason. Declan is on the phone to Trixie, keeping his voice low. My mother went home an hour ago after making sure every person in the building had eaten something.
I'm back at my desk. My rib is painful every time I breathe. The phone's encryption is forty percent broken. By morning it'll be fixed.
My family's lives are in danger. That I can manage, the Crawfords have resources, history, Cain, and each other. We know what this is and we know how to move through it.
Sadie doesn't know any of it.
She doesn't know who I am. She doesn't know what I've been doing. She doesn't know that the anonymous number saved in her phone as Ghost is the same person sitting at Grounds every morning.
She doesn't know that being close to me right now is the most dangerous thing she could be.
I look at the phone on the table.
For the first time since I found her, staying away from Sadie is not about patience or strategy or the careful management of distance.
It's the only thing that will keep her safe. I open the laptop screen and see her sleeping peacefully. She sent me a few messages about meeting up with her, but I ignored them. I need her to hate Miles.
I turn back to the encryption, and get to work.