Chapter 76
Ivy was in the trunk of a car. She could feel the vehicle rolling, could hear the engine thrumming.
But she couldn’t see anything.
The bag or sack or whatever it was that Tristan had put over her head was thick and heavy. Her own breath bounced back at her—sour, adrenaline-tinged, hot—making her sweat.
During the struggle, Tristan had somehow managed to bind her hands together in front of her.
Tight, thin. Zipties, most likely.
She tensed her wrists. Only ended up with more pain. Pain that numbed her hands.
“Help!” The sound was impossibly loud. Whatever leaked through the thick fabric rebounded off the trunk lid, echoed back at her. Ivy didn’t care. “Help!”
She needed to get out.
Not for her.
For Abby.
Abby, who had been loyal, been by her side forever. Before everything. After everything. Knew everything.
“Help!”
She tried to kick, but the trunk was too small to extend her legs. Only managed to bang her knees.
“Help!”
Ivy screamed until her throat was raw and she was out of breath. She waited, then screamed some more.
She recalled a true crime podcast in which a young girl in a similar situation as her—bound, hooded, in the trunk of a car—remembered each turn the car made. Later, when the girl somehow managed to acquire a cell phone and call for help, she’d told the police exactly where to go.
This had saved her life.
It was also impossible.
Ivy didn’t know if they were going left, right, up, or down. They could be in a goddamn spaceship heading toward the moon for all she knew.
Not that it would make a difference.
Tristan was going to kill her.
He was going to torture her for the information he wanted and then kill her. He’d planned all of this. The irony . . . him planning to capture her.
“You done?!”
Tristan had to shout from the front seat, and even then, Ivy barely heard him.
No, she wasn’t done.
“Help!” She banged her knees. “Help!”
They made a turn—right?—and Tristan said, “You can still save yourself, Ivy. Just tell me where the laptop is.”
All this for a laptop.
Sixteen dead for a fucking laptop, two more than the ominous email had threatened. Twenty-seven minutes, that was in the email, too, and she hadn’t seen the pattern, hadn’t recognized the significance.
The fucking laptop which contained Gene’s half of the Riemann hypothesis. Did that mean that Tristan had his father’s half all along? How? Where?
She shook her head.
It didn’t matter. What mattered was that her dad was right; it was too dangerous.
If one man—one demented, fucked-up TA—killed sixteen innocent people for it, what lengths would government agencies go to?
Ivy thought back to when she was a kid. Gene just a young man back then. Excited, full of life. Took her out to the Queen Anne’s lace field.
“Math is the key to everything, Ivy,” Gene had told her. “It rules everything, from the way this flower grows to the way our DNA replicates.”
“Is that what you’re doing, Daddy? At work? DNA?”
Gene laughed. Twirled a flower.
“No, sweetie. I’m working on the Riemann hypothesis.”
“What’s that?”
Gene passed her the flower. She tried to twirl it like her dad, but couldn’t.
“It’s the greatest math problem in history. A way to understand the distribution of prime numbers. The applications are endless.”
“I know prime numbers: two, three, five, seven . . .” Ivy got all the way to twenty-nine before stopping.
“You’re right. But things get more difficult the larger the numbers get.
Prime numbers run everything. They’re critical in cryptography—in codes.
Computer codes, cryptocurrency, the stock market.
The larger the prime number, the harder the code is to crack.
With huge prime numbers, even the best computers in the world can’t determine if they’re actually prime.
But if I can solve the Riemann hypothesis, then the equation can be used to predict all prime numbers.
Every single code can be broken in seconds. ”
The car suddenly lurched to a stop and Ivy blinked tears from her eyes.
Prepared herself to fight.
Never got a chance.
The trunk opened and Ivy thrust her arms upward. Cool air struck her from behind—she was facing the wrong way and hadn’t even realized it.
An arm laced around her throat, and Tristan dragged her out of the trunk.
She fell on the ground.
Ivy tried to scramble to her feet, stopped when she felt something sharp poke into her back, right between her shoulder blades.
“Try anything and I’ll sever your spinal cord. Your brain will still work, but you’ll never be able to use your legs again.”
To prove that he was serious, as if killing sixteen people wasn’t evidence enough of his pathology, Tristan pushed the knife. It split the fabric of her shirt and pierced her skin just deep enough to draw blood.
“Get up. Slowly.”
Ivy made it to her knees, then stood. Tristan shoved her left shoulder and she turned.
“Walk.”
Ivy took a few tentative steps, half expecting to fall off a ledge.
“Keep going. There’s a step. Another. One more.”
Ivy mounted the stairs.
“Stop.”
Tristan moved from behind her to in front, and Ivy thought about making a run for it. But which way? How far?
She couldn’t see a damn thing. Would probably cripple herself on the steps, save Tristan from doing the act.
She heard a series of beeps, then what must have been a lock turning. A door opened and Tristan was behind her again.
A gentle push.
The door closed and the lock engaged.
“Move.”
Ivy took another half dozen steps. Tristan grabbed a chair and shoved it against the back of her legs.
“Sit.”
Ivy was already sitting.
Tristan grabbed the top of her hood, pulled it off. Took a clump of her hair with it.
“Now,” Tristan said as she squinted and her eyes adjusted. “You’re going to tell me what you did in those twenty-seven minutes. You’re going to tell me where Eugene’s laptop is, or I’m going to turn you into a vegetable just like your father.”