Sliver Of Truth

REMEMBER HOW EASY it was for me to get away from Dylan in Riverside Park? It turns out he expected me to try to run from him. In fact, he wanted me to run.

“I thought you were hiding something. I figured I’d let you run and I’d follow, see where you led me. We were listening to your cell phone calls and were able to track your movements to the Internet café, the SRO on Forty-second Street. Then we lost you. Actually, you walked right by my partner. Nice job with your hair, by the way. You’ve got a whole Sex Pistols thing going there.”

“Thanks,” I said with a narrowing of my eyes. “You don’t look that great, either.”

“You made some calls from Inwood, so we headed up there. The last call we picked up was your conversation with Grant Webster. By the time we figured out where you were and got up there, you were gone. NYPD had already arrived-they’d been called about gunshots and a helicopter, but they didn’t know what happened. They were searching the area, picked up some shell casings from automatic and semiautomatic fire. That was it.”

“No sign of Jake.”

He shook his head. “No, Ridley. I’d tell you if I knew something. I promise.”

I nodded.

“We went to Grant Webster’s apartment in the Village.”

“Was he…?” I couldn’t stand to finish the question.

“Dead? Yes,” answered Dylan softly. I felt that sick guilty feeling that was becoming so familiar to me. I held some culpability for the things that had happened to Sarah, to Grant, to Jake, even to myself. I wasn’t sure how to deal with that. So I just blocked it out. Dylan went on.

“From his phone call, we knew you were in trouble, that he’d found something and tried to warn you. But Grant has some kind of kill button on his network. He managed to wipe all his data before he died. Anything he knew was gone.”

I shook my head. “I really doubt that. There must be backup somewhere.” I remembered his website, how he’d chastised people for not protecting and backing up sensitive data. He impressed me as a person who’d practiced what he preached.

“If there is, we haven’t found it.”

“He said I was walking into a trap, that ‘they’ thought I knew where Max was, that I could lead them to him.”

“Is that true?”

I gave him a look. “Um, no. You know, why don’t you believe me about this? You’ve been watching me for a long time now. If I was secretly communicating with Max, wouldn’t you know?”

“I didn’t know about the website. For all I know, you’ve been using the computer at your adopted parents’ house to communicate with him.”

I thought about what Grant had said about the government’s dislike of encrypted websites and steganographic software. I started thinking about that streaming video and how maybe it was just a way to hide a message. Again, I wondered what my father’s log-in might be. I was betting I could figure it out if I could get to a computer.

Dylan was watching me in that way that he had, as if he believed he could stare me into admitting all the many lies he’d thought I told. The sad part was I was just as clueless as he was. I sighed. What was obvious was that we didn’t trust each other. We could go around and around like this for hours. I didn’t bother repeating how I’d just found the website recently, that I had no way to log in.

“Anyway, the point is that we lost you,” he said. “I didn’t even know where to start looking. The fact that I’d taken you into custody when I really didn’t have the right to and then allowed you to escape caused me a lot of trouble. I was reprimanded and might have been suspended, except that I’m so entrenched in this investigation, I would be impossible to replace at this point.”

“So you do work for the FBI?”

He nodded slowly. “I work for the FBI Special Surveillance Group. We monitor foreign agents, spies, and others who are not specifically targets of criminal investigations.”

“Like me?”

He nodded. “And like Jake Jacobsen. The point is that I’m not exactly a field agent. I gather data, conduct surveillance, monitor communications and movement. If I see something suspicious, I raise the alarm. Jacobsen has been interesting to us because of his skills as an investigator. We’ve been on him for nearly two years. As a result, we’ve also been watching you.”