Cold Silence Read online

  “You okay?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she said, a little breathless. “Just sore. Thank you.”

  “No problem, miss. Follow me outside where the police officers will question you. They will restrain you until they can verify your identity. Don’t be scared. It’s standard procedure.”

  Then he let her go and surreptitiously cradled his injured arm, leading the way until he had the door open. Officers rushed forward to grab the rescued hostages.

  Scotty paused beside him, wedging the door wider with his boot. “You okay, buddy?”

  Shane shifted and gritted his teeth hoping his best friend wouldn’t notice through the NVGs the fact that Shane wanted to hurl.

  “Sure.”

  He followed the rest of the guys outside and they headed to the rendezvous point to meet up and debrief. He paused to carefully flip up his NVGs as the power was restored and the world came glaring back to life.

  Unfortunately, that meant the others could now see the unnatural angle of his lower left arm as it rested across the top of his carbine.

  Gold team leader Payne Novak met him halfway with their medic. They wrapped his arm in a temporary splint and slipped a sling around his neck. All Shane could think about was how much it was going to suck getting out of his favorite flight suit.

  When Novak indicated that the ambulance drive toward them, Shane balked. “I can walk.”

  “And risk severing an artery?” Novak snapped.

  Well, maybe not.

  “You shouldn’t have moved once you realized it was broken.” Novak sounded pissed.

  Shane was valiantly trying not to vomit all over his friend and boss, so he didn’t bother to argue. Suddenly going to the hospital didn’t seem such a bad idea.

  Shane swallowed and asked quickly, “We lose anyone?”

  “No. Nor any hostages. From what we can gather, they killed the marshal who you discovered, plus the unfortunate court reporter before we started our assault.” Sobering news which proved the white supremacists had been serious about their intentions. “All six hostiles are dead,” Novak told him and Shane felt a crushing weight release off his shoulders.

  “In fact,” Novak smiled slightly as he indicated Scotty get in the ambulance with Shane. “You’re the only HRT casualty today.”

  Shane groaned, as much from embarrassment as pain. “The woman who came out with us, is she okay? And the judge?”

  Novak nodded. “Yep. Both shaken but no obvious injuries. There are easier ways to impress women, you know.”

  Shane shook his head, knowing he was never going to live this down.

  “I’ll expect a full report when you get back to Quantico.” Novak closed the ambulance doors and thumped the back to tell the EMT to get going.

  “Fuck.” Typing up FD 302s with his non dominant arm was going to take forever.

  “Of all the ways to be brought low—a woman in high heels was not on my bingo card today.” Scotty grinned.

  “Always expect the unexpected.”

  The EMTs blasted the lights and sirens, more for fun than necessity in Shane’s opinion.

  One of the medics started to come through to the back but Shane waved him away with his good hand. “This field cast will do until I get to the emergency room.”

  The guy nodded, seeming a little intimidated and Shane remembered he was in full battle dress and laden down with weapons and explosives.

  They went over a pothole and Shane swore again as pain streaked up his arm and lanced his shoulder.

  “You sound worse than Grace when she was in labor with Katie.” Scotty gripped Shane’s good arm hard though. Shane knew his friend was worried about him.

  “Grace is a badass.”

  “Strongest person I know,” Scotty agreed about his wife.

  “I have no idea what she sees in you,” Shane told the guy, though in reality Shane had never met a more compatible couple. Nor a couple more in love.

  “I got lucky. If you weren’t such a cry baby and, frankly, so fugging ugly, you might find true love, too.”

  “No sane woman would put up with our bullshit schedule or workload.”

  “Are you calling Grace insane?” Scotty gave him a mocking glare.

  “Well, she did marry you.”

  Scotty grinned again. “The guys are probably taking bets on exactly what you broke and how many pins it’ll take to fix and how long you’re gonna be out for. I’m guessing ulna and radius. Three pins but if you hear anything different, I want the skinny.”

  “I’m not going to need an operation.” Shane narrowed his eyes, trying to ignore the increasing pain radiating from his snapped bones. “I don’t need to be off the team. I can do my job wearing a cast.”

  “Sure you can. And you can breathe fire and shoot bullets out of your ass while you’re at it. We know this already—unless you have really bad gas…”

  Tears streamed from Shane’s eyes more from laughter than pain, but some of it was pain and that was humbling for a member of HRT. “I love you, man.”

  Scotty ruffled his hair like he was a little kid. Shane didn’t recall removing his helmet.

  “I love you too. But if you ever embarrass me like this again, we’re over.”

  “Next time, you take the beautiful young woman in high heels and I’ll take the judge, okay?”

  Scotty grinned. “Deal, but no one will ever be as beautiful as my Grace.”

  Sudden claws of envy scraped Shane’s insides, but he ignored them. He wasn’t ready to settle down. Maybe when he stepped away from HRT if there was anything left of him to give. Not everyone was lucky like Scotty and Grace Monteith. Not everyone got their happily ever after…

  1

  Seventeen days later

  A living nightmare was playing out in real time on Yael Brooks’s monitor.

  Horrifying didn’t begin to cover it.

  Her fingers raced over the keyboard as she scanned the flow of information streaming onto her second screen. She was searching for the location of the computer currently playing a live feed of a young woman strapped to a stainless-steel gurney in a room with breeze-block walls and a cement floor.

  The atmosphere in the Command Center was taut. The Joint Task Force had taken over a corner of the FBI’s Houston Field Office. The people assembled consisted of agents from cybercrimes, FBI headquarters, a large group from the FBI’s Critical Incident Response Group including profilers, negotiators, and operators from the Hostage Rescue Team, agents from the local field office and the original detective who’d been hunting this killer since the first known murder in Georgia. It also included a small team of civilians, including herself and some of her colleagues from Cramer, Parker & Gray.

  All the loaded weapons in the room made Yael nervous and she had to force herself to keep doing the job she was paid to do, the job that meant she belonged in this room, with these federal agents, chasing this monster.

  Terror was visible in every strained line of the captive’s face and body.

  Yael’s mouth became so dry it was difficult to swallow. Anya Baker was a brilliant young chemist who could have gone to school anywhere on a full ride. Instead, she’d chosen to live with her mom and dad and attend Rice University. This past summer Anya had interned with the FBI’s Houston office. She’d disappeared three nights ago after visiting a bar with friends.

  Anya’s parents were worried sick. From what Alex Parker had told Yael, they had every reason to be.

  Yael’s heart pounded and she knew she needed to dissociate herself from the fact it was a real woman on the screen, one who’d recently woken up, looking absolutely petrified, after being kidnapped by the freaking psychopath who went by the moniker Evi1Geni-us. Yael wiped her sweaty palms on her favorite black jeans. She couldn’t think about Anya Baker as a real person. If she did, she wouldn’t be able to focus on doing her job. Instead, she mentally shifted to gaming mode where she needed to win at all costs to take this bozo down.

  Tim Theriault, a new
hire at Cramer, Parker & Gray, pushed awkwardly through the heavy door with a tray of beverages from a local chain.

  “Not in here,” a scary female Asian American FBI agent name of Ashley Chen told him tersely. “Put it in the break room.”

  “But other people will take them…” The guy trailed off under Chen’s steely gaze.

  “Do as Agent Chen says,” Alex told him without moving his eyes off his monitor. “Then get back in here and help Laura.”

  Evi1Geni-us flaunted his dirty work via the dark web. Every three months, Evi1Geni-us kidnapped someone—random or targeted they weren’t sure yet—and auctioned off their method of torture and death to the highest bidders.

  Choose Your Own Murder Adventure.

  Yael’s colleague and best friend Laura Bay was tracking the cryptocurrency—or trying to as it was in multiple currencies being routed through more than one crypto exchange.

  “I’ve got something,” said Alex Parker.

  All heads swung in his direction. Her boss’s specialty was cellular communications although he was scary good at almost everything. Yael loved her boss. She also loved his smart, gorgeous wife, and their cute-as-a-button baby daughter.

  “In Houston?” Ashley Chen was the most aesthetically perfect person Yael had ever encountered in real life. Chen was also crazy good with computers, which proved the world really wasn’t fair.

  Yael had once been considered exceptional when working with code and tracking people over the internet. Nowadays, with the new crew she hung out with, she figured she was slightly above average—but the crowd she hung out with now were exceptional.

  Yael side-eyed the scrolling code on her screen even as she watched Alex nod in response to Chen’s question.

  “About twenty minutes northwest of here.” Alex checked a map.

  The intensity in the room cranked up another notch even as a swell of relief crashed over them all. Sweat started to form on Yael’s back. She swallowed to loosen her dry throat and turned her attention back to the information zipping down one panel on her screen. The task force hadn’t been one hundred percent certain Evi1Geni-us was still stateside, let alone in Houston. Based on past “events” the FBI behavioral analysts figured the auction would likely go down in the vicinity of where the victim had been kidnapped—at a storage location, empty property, or unused warehouse nearby. Unfortunately, in this part of Texas, at this time year, that didn’t exactly narrow things down.

  They hadn’t even been positive Anya Baker had been taken by Evi1Geni-us or that she was the intended victim for today’s macabre online auction until the bastard had turned the camera on ten minutes ago. Alex Parker had had a strong enough hunch that they’d all flown down here the moment the monster had posted an auction was imminent approximately an hour after Anya had disappeared.

  The task force had spent New Year’s Eve setting up this Command Center before crashing at a nearby hotel for a few hours’ sleep. Anya’s kidnap fitted the killer’s MO even though they hadn’t figured out exactly how the asshole chose his victims. That was one of the reasons it had taken so long to get even this close to the sicko.

  Three heavily armed, black-clad men hunched over their own monitors coordinating with the tactical units. Members of the Hostage Rescue Team were currently loaded into vehicles idling at two separate locations around the city. An Enhanced SWAT team made up a third group on the east side. She heard one of the three HRT guys in the room get on the radio to tell Echo unit to head northwest. They all knew Evi1Geni-us was tricky and he could be spoofing Alex in some way so the tactical units wanted to split up to cover as much ground as possible.

  “First voting option is up,” Agent Chen said quietly.

  * * *

  Option 1: Removing the bitch’s clothes using, A) Knife, B) Scissors, C) Bare hands.

  * * *

  Immediately the votes started pouring in. Out of the corner of her eye Yael watched her boss’s mouth tighten.

  The vultures who’d tuned in—at a cost of five thousand US dollars a feed, capped at one hundred feeds—got to vote on exactly how things went down from here. Each vote cost another thousand dollars. All attendees had to commit to a minimum of five votes per auction. The more votes someone made the more likely they were to receive an invitation to the next party. It was an exclusive club and demand far exceeded available slots.

  What viewers might not appreciate was that anyone who watched a murder without reporting it was facing possible accessory charges. Anyone who paid to watch a murder was looking at definite accessory and possible accomplice charges.

  “Scissors,” Alex told Chen who was sitting at her console with her mouse hovering over the vote buttons.

  The way Alex said it made Yael’s stomach churn. He’d been chasing this guy for a long time and she didn’t want to imagine what happened to Anya if the watchers voted “knife.”

  The feed from the crime scene was being shown on a large screen on the wall. Yael kept her eyes away from the images and concentrated instead on the software, which was coded in Python.

  One of the Hostage Rescue Team operators sat heavily in the empty chair beside her. “What sort of psycho spends their New Year’s Day terrorizing women?” He sported a sling and plaster cast on his left arm and a lethal-looking gun in a thigh holster on his right.

  Yael frowned and sent him a quick glance. He met her gaze with the greenest eyes she’d ever seen. He looked pissed.

  “Maybe it’s not their New Year.” She fixed her attention back to the screen, determined to ignore the presence of this very large, armed male sitting so close by.

  “Good point.” Ashley Chen gifted her a nod. “We need to send that observation to the profilers and see if it fits any other patterns of behavior.”

  The man on screen—dressed completely in black except for the scary Scream mask—moved out of sight and a second camera came online, this one with a bird’s eye view of Anya Baker’s face. Evi1Geni-us walked over to a table and picked up a pair of tailor’s shears. He dramatically snipped them in front of the camera before very carefully starting to cut up the woman’s jeans leg from the bottom to the top.

  Anya’s expression suggested she was screaming but there was no sound. There was never any sound on these videos, which lent the whole thing a surreal quality that was also stomach churning.

  Yael tried to breathe slowly in and out, the way she’d been taught when dealing with stressful situations. Don’t look at the screen.

  According to Alex, Evi1Geni-us had started selling the actual sound recordings as exclusive non-fungible tokens (NFTs) on the dark web. Yael didn’t know which was worse—Evi1Geni-us for doing the crime, or the customers buying this shit. Only so many of the attendees could be law enforcement and she knew Alex had spent a lot of time and effort creating several shady personas to be in a position to receive multiple invitations.

  “Getting some information off the blockchains. It’s a lot easier doing this in real time than trying to figure it out after the fact,” said Laura.

  After the auctions, Evi1Geni-us transferred the money to hardware wallets that were then disconnected from the internet and put in “cold” storage, which basically made them untraceable until he decided to spend that money. Unfortunately, he could probably cash out in a crypto exchange before they even caught up with the fact he was online.

  Identifying the people who were paying to watch however…much simpler.

  Yael spotted something in the script, scrolled back up the screen, leaned forward and typed in a few more commands. “I found the proxy server he’s using.”

  “Can you trace it?”

  Yael glanced at the HRT guy who was now leaning forward in his chair with a look of fierce concentration on his face. She could smell the piney scent of his skin and a trace of something sweet and metallic that made her recoil when she realized what it was. Gun oil.

  He caught her reaction and raised a brow.

  Damn. He was handsome as hell and probably kn
ew it.

  “It’s probably better if you don’t speak.” Her voice was gruff.

  Humor twinkled in his eyes. “You sound like all my ex-girlfriends.”

  “And your boss.” The tall, blond HRT operator who seemed to be giving the orders quipped with a forced grin.

  Rather than looking annoyed like most men she knew would, the operator sitting next to her gave her a slow smile, and then pressed his thumb and forefinger together and dragged them across his lips.

  It was obvious these men were trying to lighten the grim mood that had settled over everyone in the room, but hard to do that when a woman was being tortured online for paid entertainment and it was Yael’s job to find the torturer.

  She went back to her data, painfully aware of the man at her side but concentrating on the inflow of information despite the distraction. She didn’t like being on anyone’s radar. She liked to be unobtrusive and forgettable. And she absolutely hated guns. Ironic, considering she now worked for a security firm.

  His black-clad knee briefly brushed hers as he shifted position but he didn’t seem to do it on purpose. There was a lot of him and not a lot of space underneath her table. A quick glance at his face showed her he wasn’t paying her any attention. His focus was glued to the screen and he looked as if he wanted to crawl inside her monitor and throttle the sick bastard responsible for all of this.

  If only it was that simple. Except…if it were, she wouldn’t feel so safe, so removed from real-life consequences when she was online—a sentiment this Evi1Geni-us guy probably related to in spades.

  Evi1Geni-us relied on his ability to cloak his identity while committing his heinous crimes. Anya was depending on all of them to get past his defenses and expose him—to save her, and then lock up her attacker where he couldn’t hurt anyone else ever again.

  It didn’t take Evi1Geni-us long to strip Anya completely naked. The woman was bleeding from where the shears had occasionally snipped her flesh.

  Yael’s stomach rolled. She couldn’t imagine enduring Anya’s fate.