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“I thought you guys were at the hospital,” I said.
“We were,” Corey said. “Up until today. Last night when we got a call from Mr. Anderson saying he was going to check up on Brandon inside some house on Kiawah. He said you’d taken his car and were supposed to head to us. Only you never showed up, so we went looking for you. Kevin’s back at the hospital in case you showed up. We followed Mr. Anderson’s GPS on his cell phone. We were on your tail to Hannahan when you turned around, and then caught up with you at that building before we lost you again. The signal was hard to read after that. But where is Brandon now? With Alice or the other one?”
Did the cell phone not work because it was too close to Ethan’s tower? “Last I saw him, he was at Ethan’s house. I lost sight of him. Alice told me she had him. Actually, she told me he left me there alone. But she implied she had him, and didn’t need me anymore.” Sort of. She didn’t even imply she had him. It was just girl intuition when someone was lying. But if she thought she had Corey, then it was true she really didn’t need me anymore.
Corey’s face darkened. Raven’s did, too. They shared a look of silent conversation.
“Don’t plan anything funny,” I said. “I want to go save them, too. That’s what we’re doing. We can do it with the core.” The microwave beeped then and I took out the sandwiches.
“This is ridiculous,” Ethan said. “Really. Alice can’t be involved. She wouldn’t...”
“You told me you’ve only known her a few months,” I said. “And you married her.”
“So?” Ethan said.
“Yeah,” Raven said, his eyebrow up as he matched Ethan’s expression. “So what’s wrong with that? Sounds normal to me. In Russia, you could marry a girl the next day if you wanted. Happens all the time.”
I gave Raven the eye, for encouraging Ethan, for one, and for being weird. Russians married their girlfriends after a day? What?
“Exactly,” Ethan said. “So I’m not going to help you pin my wife for murder or conspiracy or whatever it is you’re planning. There’s no proof she’s done any wrong.”
Corey looked between the two men, looked at me and then gestured for me to be quiet. “How’d you meet her?” he asked Ethan.
Ethan seemed to calm down. “I ran into her at church. My father introduced us. I was working on my system in the steeple and while I was leaving, they were both there.”
“Had you ever seen her at that church before?”
“No,” Ethan said. “Although she said she’d been attending mass there for a while. She just moved to the neighborhood.”
“Kind of random, isn’t it?” I asked. “You bumped into her right after you were working on your project?”
Ethan scowled at me. “My father was talking to her first and introduced me. He was there to talk to the bishop in town. I was on a project that has nothing to do with underground networks like you said. I never even told her about the project and she’s never asked about it. I do a lot of work around the city and across the country. She’s never once asked about my work.”
“That’s kind of odd,” I said. I picked up a sandwich and started to eat. If I was going to argue, I needed to fill my stomach. “If I was with someone, I’d want to know about what they did for work. Especially if it was important to you.”
Raven reached over, grabbing one of the sandwiches and started eating with me. Avery shimmied over and took one from the plate.
Ethan frowned, and mumbled something. “That doesn’t mean anything. I liked that she wasn’t interested in my work.”
Corey quietly lifted his cell phone out of his pocket. He turned it on and then thumbed through the screen. After a moment of searching, he lifted it to show Ethan. “Is this her?” he asked.
Ethan studied the phone. “Yeah,” he said. “Her hair’s different, but that’s her. Is that an old picture?”
“That’s a security picture taken at an airport three months ago,” Corey said. “But the passport used to enter the country wasn’t for an Alice. It’s for an Anja.”
So Corey’s search for Alice’s face was working! I tried not to look impressed and happy we were on to something. Ethan wasn’t going to like this.
Ethan’s lips parted, and again he studied the image. “There’s got to be a mix up,” he said.
“No mix up,” Corey said. “She flew in three months ago. From Germany.”
It was my turn to stare. I dropped the second sandwich I’d started on. “Hold up,” I said, leaning against the counter. “Are you serious? Show me the picture.”
Corey turned the phone around, showing me the image. It was Alice, with the same cold eyes and the satisfied smirk that made me want to stab her in the face.
“She’s never been to Germany,” Ethan said slowly. “I don’t think so at least. She’s been here for the last six months or so. And before that she said she lived up north, somewhere near the Canadian border.”
“She doesn’t have a driver’s license,” Corey said.
“Yes, she does,” he said. “We just got married. She needed to show one to get the marriage license.”
“Did you see the marriage license?” Corey asked. “The national database didn’t show her having a driver’s license. It managed to get her passport picture, though, and then we discovered when she entered the country. It’s the only time she’s used the passport.”
Ethan fumbled for a moment. “Well, I…I don’t remember now about seeing the license. It’s probably at the house. We’ll have to get it turned in to get the certificate.”
“We should check,” Corey said. When Ethan opened his mouth to protest, Corey lifted his hand. “If you want to verify, one way or another, and clear her name, it’ll be better if we do it now, so we’re all in agreement when the police are called in. This could be mistaken identity, but if that’s true, then we need to get to the bottom of it before she’s pinned for murder.”
Ethan nodded abruptly. “That’s all I ask.”
“So,” I said. “If we’re okay with getting Axel and the others back in the meantime, I’ve got a plan.”
“I have one, too,” Corey said quietly, and turned toward the door. Raven did as well, and started walking away.
I dashed around the kitchen island, blocking the doorway. “Where are you going?”
“Out of the way, Kayli,” Corey said grimly.
“No,” I said. “You can’t just go after them.”
“I can,” he said. “This was my fault. I was the one that left my name in a security packet. They were looking for me, weren’t they?”
I nodded slowly. “But it doesn’t mean you run in and get yourself killed. If you go now, they won’t need Axel or Marc. They’ll kill them and use Brandon over your head to do what they want. Right now, they think Brandon is you. It’s the only advantage we have.”
“What advantage is that, exactly?” Corey asked. “So he gets killed in the middle of this and I don’t? How is that an advantage?”
I wasn’t sure, exactly, either. I was going on what Brandon had said. Keep Corey safe and out of the picture. Limited liabilities.
“Let me go,” Corey said. “I’l
l get them access to this...core.”
“There’s no access to get, “I said. “It’s not a real phone service.”
Corey blinked. “What is it? All the communication I read said it was.”
“She’s right,” Ethan said, stepping up beside us. “There’s no underground cell phone service. It’s a stingray interference experiment. It’s not even fully functioning. It’s to identify false tower signals. The Guard Dog security packet encrypts the signals so they bounce, or it basically double coats a phone signal in security code so it isn’t worth it for the bad guys to actually spend the time to decode. They might as well go after some easier signal.”
Corey’s jaw slackened and he stared at him. “So you weren’t creating the signals. You were borrowing them for testing your security features. Can the NSA listen in on it? Would it be illegal if the FCC and NSA couldn’t crack your code if something was masked in it?”
He nodded. “Maybe...I’m not sure. It’d be up to them to say something within the signal was illegal information and they would have to get a warrant for me to pull down the security encryption. But then, it wasn’t like anyone had access; it was in a closed beta test and only open to select people who agreed to be part of my experiment. They never knew which phone calls were encrypted and which weren’t. It would just randomly pick up a phone call signal from their line, and trace where it bounced off from, from different towers.”
“It’s why Randall Jones died,” I said. “I think… someone killed him to steal his cell phone, thinking this was that secret underground service.”
Corey scratched at his eyebrow. “It doesn’t matter now what it really is. It matters what this Eddie, and possibly Alice, think it is, and that they might be holding people against their will to gain access. We need to get the guys back before they discover it isn’t what they thought it was and kill everyone just to cover their tracks.”
“Here’s a plan,” I said. “I say we go back to the house on Kiawah. We contact Eddie and tell him we’ve got access, and we all agree to trade him access to the room and drop the code in exchange for the others being released. They get what they think they want, then we walk away.” I turned to Avery. “Then it’s your job.”
