MindField Page 3
“I’m majoring in art technology.”
Chapter 3
Sashakovich-Ainsley home,
220 East Kirke Street, Chevy Chase, MD
September 11, 7:21 p.m.
The brick house sat in the middle of a high-walled compound and the walls were topped with razor wire. Cassandra Sashakovich had long ago stolen nearly a billion dollars from the United States government. She had hacked funds that were being used illegally to support a terrorist network sponsored in secret by the government. That was six years ago, before she married Lee Ainsley and adopted Ann Silbey Sashakovich. Now, she worked with Lee and Avram Shimmel for the United Nations Paramilitary Force, headquartered in Manhattan.
Cassie cooked dinner for herself and Lee. It was a small dim sum feast she had learned to prepare when she was a management consultant nearly a decade ago. She and Lee sat at the kitchen table. Cassie could barely hear the guards walking their rounds outside.
She reached into her pants pocket when her cellphone buzzed. The phone’s screen lit the entire kitchen of the huge home even brighter. She read the screen and smiled. “Lee, I just got a text from Ann. She says she likes this roommate better than the party girl she shared with last year.”
Lee Ainsley rose from his seat and rounded the table. He popped his head over his wife’s shoulder and read the text. “That’s one worry gone. I hope Ann can use her fingers to type now. That dictation software she tried was nasty.”
Cassie frowned. “Well, there is that.”
Lee still stared at the screen. “Ann says her name is Laura D. Hunter.” He turned and started up the stairs.
“Lee, what are you going to do?”
He spoke over his shoulder. “Let’s see who she is. No surprises for Ann this semester.”
* * *
It was nearly one hour later when Lee appeared in the compound’s laundry room where Cassie folded newly cleaned clothing. He said, “I googled Laura D. Hunter and filtered by age. This woman isn’t totally normal.”
Cassie looked up. “What makes you say that?”
Lee read the notes he’d typed onto his cellphone’s screen: “Her father murdered her mother for an affair the mother was having. He’s in prison now. Turns out, they were both bank robbers. Not hackers, but the old type of bank robbers. Guns and getaway cars. Laura was twelve when her dad murdered her mother. After that, she was raised by her grandparents.”
Cassie scratched her chin. “Should we tell Ann?”
Lee shrugged. “Yeah. But if she knows we’re snooping after her roommate, she might be angry with us. She already thinks we’re ‘helicopter parents.’ Especially what happened last year with the CypherGhost. I think we should encourage her to do her own research. She’s competent enough. It will take her less time than I needed.”
Cassie stopped folding. “Okay, then. Let me draft a text.” She pulled her phone from her pocket and her fingers tapped away for a few seconds. “Before I send this, you should read it. Here.” She showed him the screen.
Ann—what do you know about your roommate? Is she really safer than that woman you were paired with last year? Please let us know.
Lee shook his head. “No. Way too obvious.”
Cassie edited her message. “How about this?”
Ann—Glad your new roommate isn’t the monster you barely survived last year. Thanks for the message.
Lee nodded. “Yeah. Send that.”
* * *
Ann read her mom’s text and frowned. She was sure that she had correctly interpreted what the message really meant. She thought, Mom’s right. Knowing is better.
She waited until Laura left the room to get lunch. Ann figured she would be alone for at least a half hour. But it took her only half of that time to do a routine search. As the half hour passed, she completed hacking into Laura’s school records, then visited the site of her hometown newspaper. Laura’s different addresses pointed the way. She’d lived at one address for the first twelve years of her life, and the move to the second address was concurrent with a series of news headlines regarding a murder case. Ann read eight articles about how Laura’s dad dealt with her mom’s affair with—of all the possibilities—the mailman. The trial of her father filled six of the pieces. Not until the final one did it mention that the twelve-year-old Laura had ended up with her grandparents.
So, there was more to Laura than she had told Ann. Now Ann had to decide what to do with her new-found knowledge. Damn Mom for hinting I should look into Laura’s background. It took only a few seconds for Ann to decide she wanted to help Laura adjust.
* * *
Laura Hunter went to the student cafeteria and bought an egg-salad sandwich. She sat in a secluded corner and nibbled at it. She wasn’t really hungry. She was never hungry. But she knew she had to eat in order to live. She tried to focus on the vast opportunities that attending Stanford offered her. With just a bit of luck, I might carve out a future in academia. Then the word “carve” brought her past back. She heard her parents arguing as if they were right in front of her and it was happening now. She cringed at the memory of the foul language they used, yelling at each other until she remembered hearing her mother scream.
She shivered, remembering how she had emerged from her bedroom and walked to theirs. Her mother, still alive, was covered in blood, with more pulsing from her neck as she gasped. Blood spurted from her neck, covering the floor. The coppery smell filled Laura’s lungs and made her heave up her breakfast. She saw the dead body of a man in the corner of the room, his throat sliced open. Her father stood facing away from Laura, holding a blood-drenched knife. He sobbed.
Laura remembered how she had backed away and fled to her own room. She stayed there for a long time. Sometimes, she thought, I think my soul is still trapped there.
* * *
Frank Lucessi yawned as he opened the office door of his casita. He could hear the buzz of the jungle. The afternoon in Areguá, forty-five minutes southeast of Asunción, Paraguay, was more humid than usual for autumn. He wiped perspiration from his face using the sleeve of his Oxford button-down shirt.
He’d been expecting a call from an associate on a pressing business matter. He pulled the collar from his thick neck and tugged its front buttons from his barrel-chested torso in a failed attempt to cool himself off. When that didn’t work, he walked back into the room and closed the door. He sat at his desk. His Rolex told him it was 7:57 a.m. Any minute now.
The landline chirped. “Lucessi.”
“Santos here. We have several problems.”
“Crap. You told me this would be easy.”
“The FBI and Interpol are working together. It will be much more difficult to deliver the goods.”
Frank mumbled a curse word under his breath. “What do you need? More men? More baksheesh? More time?”
“Señor Lucessi, I cannot tell you as yet. Let me work a plan and I’ll call you back. Figure about two days.”
“Okay then. You have two days to come up with a tactical plan.” Frank slammed the phone down on its receiver. “Fuck!” He brushed a lock of black hair away from his eyes.
* * *
Robert Randall felt the buzzing in his pants pocket. He pulled his cell out and read the screen. “Randall.”
“Robert, it’s Don.” Don was an independent contractor Randall sometimes used. “We picked up on that guns-and-drugs guy you asked us to follow. Seems he’s up to his neck in a deal with one of the smaller cartels.”
Randall rose from his desk at the CIA and walked to the window facing the parking garage. He ignored his reflection, because at nearly fifty years of age, he looked much older. He hated how thin he looked, and being bald didn’t help. “Is he still in Budapest or has he traveled?”
“He’s been at his villa in Paraguay for the last two days.”
Randall thought for a few seconds. “So, this is drugs, not guns.”
“You’re as sharp as a pencil, Robert. What are you going to do?”
&n
bsp; “I’m heading to my apartment. I’ll pack a bag and I’ll see if I can find him at his villa. Make him an offer he can’t refuse.” Randall terminated the call. He smiled. He was sure he could turn Lucessi into an “off the books” asset. Things were going his way.
* * *
As she left her first class of the fall semester, Ann found her mind filled with questions. Most of them were about how she could ever read all the books on the list for this one class when she had four other classes that would also assign reading. Another was how to cope with her anger at Cassie for pushing thoughts about her roommate into her head. The most confusing and compulsive question was how she could start a conversation with the cute boy who sat next to her in class. Ann didn’t think of herself as attractive or sexy. She had no specific quality that could draw a guy. She was about five-foot-six and one hundred twenty pounds, just a bit heavier than last year. But their seats were so close she could read his name—Glen Sarkov—on his book bag, which she assumed held his assigned-reading handout notes and his notebook computer.
She tried to push his image from her mind, but she couldn’t. As she hurried to her next class along the brick-and-plaster walls of the quadrangle’s cloister, all she could see were his golden curls and his snarky lips. She found her interest in him interfering with her ability to walk. She sat on a bench in the campus quadrangle. Damn him! But what followed was, how do I meet him?
She felt the bench bounce a bit with the weight of another person and looked to her left. She gulped and the smile dropped off her face.
“Are you okay? You were stagger-stepping and I worried you might trip.”
He had a slight Russian accent that she hadn’t expected. But, before she could muster a word, he smiled at her and her heart melted.
“I’m Glen, Glen Sarkov. We’re both in Dr. Kallberg’s class on software economics.”
She tried again to speak. Her lips moved but the only sound she could produce was “Ahhhh.”
He laughed. “I see I’ve rendered you speechless. That’s never happened before.”
She recovered and smiled back. “Just surprised. I’m Ann Sashakovich. Were you following me?”
“No. Just on my way to my next class. Computer language development with Abrams.”
She was on her way to that very class. So, he was also a computer science major. They might easily have the same professors for many of the same courses. She rose from the bench and found herself once again steady on her feet. “Me too. We can walk together.”
He followed her for a few steps, then drew even with her. “What made you choose Stanford?”
“My mom went here, got her PhD in economics. She wanted me here. What about you?”
“Parents emigrated from old Russia. I was born in Moscow. My parents weren’t oligarchs. We moved here for a better life. And Stanford is the best.”
She nodded as they walked. So now I’ve met him.
* * *
The sign on the door in one of Washington DC’s older, dilapidated buildings read “Skorkin Consulting.” The offices within that corner of the building were either empty or threadbare, and Alan Skorkin’s tiny office appeared to discourage any client he might have from entering. Alan had purposefully set it up that way. Skorkin’s real purpose for the office was its usefulness as a mail drop.
He was built like a linebacker, but still needed to take a deep breath after climbing the three flights of stairs to reach his office. In his early fifties, he kept in shape, but still, that was more in terms of martial arts than physical stamina.
To better his odds of physical security, he’d spent months searching for an office building without an elevator. This building, in a run-down section of the nation’s capital, was particularly uninviting.
He popped the door open and picked up the envelopes lying near the door. As he rifled through them he saw one that caught his eye. No return address, and on the back was the single letter “K,” scribbled in pencil.
He opened the envelope and found a slip of paper small enough to fit inside a fortune cookie. It had what he knew was the address of a website, but without the “https://” prefix. He pulled his cellphone from his pocket and entered the address, which led him to a spot where he could enter his private key. He tapped the key into his cell and a plain-text message downloaded onto his cell. It made entertaining reading:
Clean up needed: 679 Excelsior Drive, Sunnyvale, CA. Dispose of 2 occupants and clean premises.
Clean up needed: 94287 Argonaut Avenue, Mountain View, CA. Dispose of 6 occupants plus any visitors, and clean premises.
50% of payment sent, 50% of payment on completion.
Skorkin smiled. He headed back to his apartment to pack a suitcase. He loved visiting California.
A friend of his in the government had funded a Silicon Valley tech startup. When the company no longer depended on its initial personnel for further development of its product, Skorkin sometimes was called upon to make the cofounders disappear for good. He wasn’t sure why his friend wanted them dead, but the pay was good and he enjoyed killing people.
* * *
Ann couldn’t focus on the lecture and was glad she’d decided to record it using the mike in her notebook computer. They sat in adjacent desks at the class. When the class ended, Glen asked her if she’d like to grab coffee with him. She focused her sight on his heart-shaped face. All she could do was nod.
As they walked to the cafeteria, he spoke but she just smiled at him. The wind blew his blond hair into swirls. She resisted the urge to pat them back into place. Was this love at first sight? No way, she said to herself. No, I just like him.
They sat across from each other, sipping cappuccinos. “I noticed your hands. Looks like serious burns.” He reached out and touched her scarred fingers. “You had multiple surgeries.”
It took all her willpower not to pull her hand away from him. “Yes, an accident.”
He nodded. “Still hurts?”
“No. The only thing still there is the scar on my mind from what I did to let this happen.” She hoped her fake bravado covered her lie.
“If you want to tell me, I promise not to say something stupid.”
“Maybe some other time.” She waited for his next comment, not sure if she was interested in pursuing him further. My hands. The scars. I’ll be deformed forever.
“So, listen, there’s a party off campus tomorrow night. Would you be interested in being my date for the evening?”
She thought again about him. She remembered Charles, her boyfriend in high school, and how he’d dropped her once he entered Harvard. She saw the face of Charlette, the CypherGhost she had murdered six months ago to keep her from murdering her mother and her friends. Ann sighed and forced herself to smile. “Sure, but don’t expect too much from me.”
He nodded. “Just a date then.”
* * *
Laura walked from her last class of the day. Late into the afternoon, it was still warm and bright, and she soaked in the sunlight as she crossed the quadrangle. Midway across, she slowed and stopped. Without understanding why, she burst into tears. At the other side of the quad, she saw a bench and she staggered over to it. As she sat, she dropped her book bag and her head fell into her hands.
She hated herself but wasn’t sure why. It had something to do with her parents. She could hear them screaming inside her head. She knew this wasn’t normal. The words she heard them say to each other were the same ones she always heard:
Ingrid: You should leave now. I hate you.
Frederick: I can’t leave. Someone has to watch you. You aren’t normal. Laura isn’t safe with you around.
Ingrid: I’ll kill you if I get the chance.
Frederick: That’s why I can’t leave. You’re dangerous.
She heard them get louder. Then she saw her father holding a knife and slash it across her mother’s neck. The sound made Laura sick. She remembered screaming.
She sat on the bench for nearly an hour. The sun set and
it grew dark before she could once again rise and walk to the apartment.
* * *
Ann felt hunger pangs and looked at the school library’s clock. Want dinner now. She packed her notebook into her book bag and rose. University Avenue had hundreds of restaurants of every description, less than a mile away. She needed the exercise after sitting for several hours. There was an autumn chill in the air outside. She decided to take a shortcut through the woods. No streetlights, but she felt confident she would only be in darkness for a few hundred yards. Less than three minutes.
About halfway across the wooded field separating the quad from Palo Alto city streets, someone hit her from behind and took her down. She rolled onto her back, ready to defend herself. Her attacker was a young male, possibly her own age. He wore a hoodie and landed atop her.
“Don’t resist or I’ll cut you.” He restrained her hands with one of his, using the other to drop his pants. He held a knife with his free hand and prepared to cut her jeans.
Ann concentrated on his penis and thought, FIRE! Her hands tingled, fingers glowing with heat. Then, as she watched, the man’s penis caught fire.
He howled and jumped away, using his hands to beat off the flames. Then he rose from her body and stared at her, turned, and fled
Ann, rose off the ground and aimed at his retreating bare ass. Once more, she thought FIRE! As he ran away from her, the bare skin on his backside burst into flame. She smiled as he continued running across the field.
Her hands cooled quickly and she saw no evidence on her fingers of the flames she had created.
She was sure her special ability had been given her by the CypherGhost, but had no idea how or why. All she was sure of was that using this skill had made her famished. Now, I must have food.
* * *
Ann sat rigid in the dining room of the Dynasty restaurant in Palo Alto. She tensed, waiting for it to happen. Any second now. She opened the menu and told the waiter, “mapo, hot and sour soup.” As the waiter turned away and headed off to the kitchen, Ann began to shiver. From the bottom of her spine up through the top of her skull, a freezing chill engulfed her. She watched her hands as they turned blue, then gray. Seconds passed before the chill faded. This always happened when she used her little trick. Setting her attempted rapist on fire tonight was the first time in over two months she’d attempted it.