Name of the Devil (25 page)

“
T
ELL US MORE
about Damian Knight,” says Agent Arron, who has the defeated look of a man who knows he'll never get to the bottom of the stack of files on his desk. He wants me to tell him something that'll neatly tie Damian into the building explosion, the missing pieces of the Warlock investigation and possibly the disappearance of Amelia Earhart.

I wish I had those answers too.

I touch a pen to the pile of briefs I've already filed. “Is there something specific you want to ask me?” I've sat in this working group a half-dozen times. Every month or so, Arron and Kinsey, the other agent on the case, look at their calendar and get together to discuss what little progress they've made. They keep bringing me in, hoping I'll reveal the vital clue they can't find from their desks.

I'd call them lazy, but this could be me in a few years. They've got a decade or so in the Bureau up on me. And with that, more cases than they can manage. This is just one more headache. And I'll bet anything that after Damian's stunt with the building, they got called into their supervisor's office and yelled at for not making any more progress.

D
AMIAN'S NOT ACCUSED
of any specific crime—yet—but he holds the distinction of being the most interesting of all of the FBI's persons of interest.

“Give us something,” pleads Kinsey, trying to play the less-exasperated cop to Arron's completely exasperated cop. They both have the sallow complexions of guys who sit around drinking too much coffee and giving themselves stress ulcers.

“Look, guys, he enjoys outsmarting me as much as you.”

“But you manage to summon him like a genie whenever you need him,” Arron points out.

“Not quite.” I hold up my phone. “You have all the numbers he's called me from. If you dial them, he won't pick up. But if I do, he'll call back.”

When you're dealing with a clever person, phone traces are useless in the age of Skype calls and burner phones. “Could you call him right now?” asks Arron.

“For what?”

“So we can ask him some questions directly.”

“Like where he is,” jokes Kinsey.

“I'll do whatever the Bureau asks me to. But if this is just for your own amusement, keep in mind I'm pretty sure I only get to pull that card so many times.”

“What if we set up a network trace in advance? Monitor IP traffic, TOR networks, the full NSA treatment?”

“If you can get authorization, I'll cooperate. Of course.”

“Despite your personal history with him?”

I don't know if I should be offended or not. If one of them had a female stalker, or a jealous ex-girlfriend, would they be acting like their loyalty as an agent had been compromised? They can pretend the situation would be the same, but we all know it wouldn't be treated that way.

I tell myself I cooperate because I'm a good cop. The real reason? They'll never catch him.

“I would specifically
because
of my personal history.”

“You know, Jessica, I've seen these kinds of obsessions before.” Arron folds his hands on the table.

Oh my God. He's pulling the paternal routine on me. He should know my history with father figures. I tense my jaw to stop myself from blurting out that I'm not his daughter on prom night.

Kinsey weighs in. “This guy is more into you than you can imagine.”

I can imagine plenty.

The two of them are clearly playing out some routine they concocted before I got here. This is why Damian won't be caught anytime soon.

“The Wikipedia stuff is just weird,” says Arron, following their script.

“Wikipedia?” I reply. What are they talking about?

“You don't know?” he counters, a little dramatically. He's happy he caught me by surprise.

“He's constantly updating your web page. He's your number one fan,” adds Kinsey.

“We just want to make sure he's no Mark David Chapman.”

Their use of a John Lennon reference reveals just how unaware they are of the generational gap. At least Selena was alive while I was.

“What about Wikipedia?” I ask again.

Arron pulls up the page on his laptop. “You have an admirer that's constantly editing your page and deleting disparaging comments. We can assume it's not you.”

“And you think it's Damian?” This doesn't sound like him at all. He has much better things to do with his time.

“He goes through quite an effort to hide his IP address. Sounds like your boy.”

Sounds like half the hackers I know.

Arron turns the computer so I can read the entry. It's pretty benign. There's nothing there that Damian would care about, as far as I can tell.

Then I see that there are at least a half-dozen photos of me, ranging from my teenage publicity shots for magic shows to snaps of me at crime scenes. Someone has been very obsessive.

I knew this was out there. It's hard to be confronted with it.

One of the photos seems odd to me. I click on the larger version. It takes me a moment to see what is out of place.

I pull out my phone and dial without even telling Arron and Kinsey why.

Knoll answers. “What's up?”

“Are you in the building?”

“Yep. Need me?”

“Conference room 2-232. Now.”

“What's going on?”

“I think the Warlock is trying to send me a message.”

Arron and Kinsey give me a stunned look.

“Shit. I'll be there in five.”

K
NOLL LEANS OVER
my shoulder to see the screen more clearly. We're looking at my Wikipedia page, specifically at an image of me holding a fan of cards, faces out. In it I'm sixteen or seventeen, wearing a silvery sequined gown and too much stage makeup. It's from some European magic magazine that had a circulation of about two.

“What am I supposed to be noticing?” he asks.

I look up from my notepad where I've been making a graph and point to the fanned spread of cards. “See them?”

“Yeah?”

“I always fanned the cards in new deck order. Ace through king, king through ace, spades, diamonds, clubs, hearts. In fact, for photo shoots, I'd glue all the cards together. That was something Grandfather taught me. But someone Photoshopped these cards in a different order. See the queens next to each other? Or here, there are two four of clubs.”

Knoll nods, telling me he believes I believe I see something, but he has no idea what the hell I'm talking about.

“There are fifty-two cards in a deck, not including jokers. You can assign each card to a letter of the alphabet twice. That means you can spell anything with one deck if you never use a letter more than twice. There are more complicated schemes using letter frequencies, but this is pretty simple. They just used the same four twice.”

Arron speaks up. “The Warlock, or rather Heywood, doesn't have access to a computer. He's currently awaiting trial for kidnapping and electronic fraud while we build the other case around him. He's not allowed anywhere near a computer.”

Knoll ignores him and takes a seat beside me. “Why do you think it's him?”

I want to say “a hunch,” but that won't fly in this room. “Give me one second.” I pull up the file info on the Wikipedia image. It shows when it was uploaded. There's probably even fingerprint data within the Photoshopped file itself. Every photo-editing software program used in a correctional facility embeds a special watermark. I save the image and send a copy to Gerald with a quick note.

“Can you call the Beaumont penitentiary? Ask for whoever has the prisoner logs,” I tell Knoll.

Arron and Kinsey are both slack-mouthed. They can see Knoll, a senior agent, is treating this seriously.

Knoll puts his phone on speaker. “This is FBI Agent Knoll. I'm here with Agent Blackwood. We have some questions about inmate Heywood. I can get his number . . .”

“No need,” replies a woman's efficient voice. “I have it here.”

“Has there been any change to Heywood's computer privileges?” asks Arron.

The woman types for a moment. “No. There's nothing here. Still not allowed around anything electronic. We even dial his calls for him. And those are under a subpoena order.”

Arron looks at me and shakes his head. “Maybe he asked someone else to do it.” He's trying to throw me a bone.

“Can you pull up his movement log? Where was he on . . . hold on,” I call out the date from the image upload data on Wikipedia.

“One second.” More typing. “I have him in the print library. There aren't any computers in there.”

“Oh, thank you.” It was just a hunch. I want to take this up
later, but beating an apparently dead horse in front of Arron and Kinsey would be bad right now.

“No problem. Anything else?”

“That's all,” Arron replies, barely hiding his satisfaction at proving me wrong.

“Okay . . .” She pauses. “Hold on. Wait a second. This is odd. Huh. I'm looking at the log on that date. Heywood was moved to another location before returning to his cell. He was in the room assigned to vocational training. It seems like there was a half hour before they realized their mistake.”

The Warlock had access to a computer for a half hour.

The man who hacked the FBI's computer network.

Shit.

This is bad.

Real bad.

“Actually, it looks like that's happened a couple of times.” She seems confused, but unaware of what this means.

Knoll gives me a look. I know what he's thinking: The Warlock may be paying off someone in the prison to get him in front of a computer. It could be a low-level clerk, or handled through some other exploit he figured out.

“Can you access IP logs?” I ask. “I want to know if there was any outgoing traffic to Wikipedia.”

“Yes, one second. We have key-logging software. I show a session during that time period. A couple megabytes of upload.”

“It's him,” Knoll grumbles. He raps his knuckles hard against the table.

Gerald has already emailed me back, confirming that the watermark on the image matches the serial number assigned to the copies of Photoshop in the Texas federal corrections facility.

I'm trying to solve the code on the cards.

I have the first three letters.

Y O U

T
HE CONFERENCE ROOM
is now full of agents who are working on different aspects of the Hawkton case. Word travels fast.

Knoll is on the phone with Assistant Director Breyer, asking him to put some pressure on the Texas prison authorities to find out why one of the worst hackers the FBI has ever encountered has been getting computer time.

What bothers me the most is that the Warlock clearly didn't care that we found out. He wanted to remind us how smart he is. Why would he ruin a good thing?

There's only one answer, and it rattles me.

Because he has a better thing going.

Right now there's a dedicated machine in the FBI computer center trying to solve his last puzzle. We're at least a year or more from breaking it. Some think it's a red herring; others think he really has some final plan that transcends everything else he's done.

I don't know what to think.

“What do you got, Blackwood?” Knoll is understandably antsy. We all are.

I wish Ailes could be here. He'd make sense of it. Or at the very least, be a source of reassurance.

I double- and triple-check my decoding. He used a simple cipher designed to capture my attention. A third grader would know how to figure it out if they realized it was there.

I hand my work to Knoll to check. He stares at it for a minute before speaking. “You believe him?”

“That's a question for Dr. Chisholm. My gut says he's not lying about this.”

Actually, my guts are twisted in a knot right now.

We're getting sharp looks from the others in the room because we haven't shared the transcription.

I hold up my notepad. “The code says, ‘You will know it when it is me.'”

“What's that supposed to mean?” snaps Arron.

“Hawkton isn't him,” I reply.

“And you believe him?” he asks skeptically.

“I believe he's a homicidal megalomaniac. Emphasis on the megalomania. He wants the world to know how smart he is. If Hawkton was him, then he'd either keep his mouth shut or take credit.”

“So why doesn't he come out and say it?” asks Kinsey.

“Because he still denies being the Warlock,” Knoll answers. “Heywood insists he's an innocent man, wrongly framed. He's only hinted that he's connected to the Warlock.”

“So he tells you,” Arron points to me. “You certainly attract the weirdos. They love you.”

“This one wants to murder me,” I remind him.

“There's a lot of that lately,” he says, almost as an accusation.

I keep my inner voice buried deep.
Screw you
. I didn't ask for any of this.

“Why didn't he kill you in the warehouse?” Kinsey prods. There's a skeptical tone to his voice.

“He implied it was under surveillance. But, yes. I believe he could have killed me, but chose not to. That was also when he thought he was way ahead of us and we didn't stand a chance of catching him.”

“But you did,” says Kinsey.

“We did,” I correct him. “We did. But he still held me responsible and tried to have an associate kill me. I have no doubt he'd try again if he had the chance. He hates me.” I saw it in his eyes when I last spoke to him. It's why I sleep with a loaded gun under my pillow. It's why I spend Friday nights in jujitsu classes. It's why I survived my trip to Tixato.

His anger is what keeps me going. I'm afraid if I stop, it'll all be over.

“If he hates you so much, then why did he want you to find that message?”

“For starters, I didn't, you did. I never would think to look at my Wikipedia page. Second, the message isn't necessarily for me. There's a whole cult of people now out there, obsessed with deciphering his messages and reading into his murders. I'm sure they're all over his case like ghouls looking for any clue or new detail.”

“Can I offer a theory?” interjects Dr. Chisholm from the corner of the room. I never even saw him enter. “He did it on your page because you're the only one he respects. Yes, he hates you and wants to kill you, but you're also the one who outsmarted him. Putting this message in an image of you, on your page, is a way to subvert you. An extension of a magic ritual using a personal object. He's using you to get his message out. He's trying to tap into your power.”

“My power?”

“Heywood is all about mystical iconography.”

“Do you believe him?” Knoll asks bluntly.

Chisholm ponders the question. “Yes. In this instance. He gains nothing from telling us this. It only reinforces his sense of ego. The Warlock never wanted to make his methods appear material, of this world. Nothing he did was personal,” he nods to me, “until Agent Blackwood interfered with his plans. Hawkton is extremely personal.”

“So we don't need to worry about the Warlock anymore?” Kinsey seems confused.

Chisholm raises an eyebrow. “Quite the opposite. This stunt tells us he's still got influence outside the walls of his cell. He wasted a good gimmick just to tell us not to be fooled. I'd be relieved if he tried to take credit. Now I'm even more convinced he has something else planned. But not now. Not for a while.” Then Chisholm turns to me. “Given recent events, I think you need to be even more careful. If he can change a web page while in maximum security, he can just as easily ask one of his acolytes to try to reach you again.”

They're coming at me from all sides. What started as a joke of a meeting about the Benny Hill efforts to catch Damian has turned into a stark reminder that even if I ever get to the bottom of Hawkton, there's an evil man biding his time, waiting to kill me.