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Now my world was a blur of preacher curls, lying triceps extensions, cable pulls, dead lifts, and hang power snatches. I jumped rope like a maniac and swung fifty-pound kettlebells. I balanced on a tilt board while holding sandbags in each hand. I was burning 400 calories an hour and replacing them with mass-gain supplements. I weighed myself religiously every morning, like a fighter in training. I was now up to 195. A twenty-pound gain in six months. All muscle. A whole new me.
“Let’s go, Doctor!” Meed yelled. “Let out your inner savage!” I knew she liked that joke. But it wasn’t a joke, not really. She was bringing out a side of me I’d never seen. Neverwantedto see. She was turning me into her own personal monster. And I still didn’t know why. No point in asking. Always the wrong question.
As I rested for a moment on the seat of the universal, I saw Meed glance up at the screen over the workout space. The TV was set to CNN, as usual. With Meed, it was all news, all the time. I looked up to see what was catching her eye.
At the start of a new report, a photo of a blue-eyed baby had popped up on a panel to the left of the anchor’s head. Meed cut the music. The sudden silence left my ears ringing.
“Turn up the TV,” she said.
I found the remote and clicked off the Mute button just as the anchor got into the meat of the story. His eyebrows were furrowed. His tone was concerned.
… Evan Grey, eight months old, the only son of MacArthur Fellow Devon Grey and his wife, research physicist Anna Grey, has disappeared from his parents’ remote campsite near Bend, Oregon. According to park rangers, the infant was napping in a portable playpen at the edge of a clearing in broad daylight yesterday, with his parents nearby. The couple noticed him missing at approximately 2 p.m. and immediately contacted the local ranger station. Other campers and local residents of the remote mountain community have joined the search, while the parents are begging the public for any information about their missing child.
The screen cut to a shot of the two young parents. They looked drained and scared. The mom spoke up, looking into the camera. Her voice was shaking. Her eyes were red.
If you know anything about where our baby is… if you have our baby… we just, we just want him back. We need him back. We’ll do anything. Please! Please contact us.
Her voice trailed off at the end, and her husband wrapped his arms around her. When the report cut back to the anchor desk, there was an 800 number in bright red across the bottom of the screen. The anchor wrapped up the story:
Anybody with information on the whereabouts of young Evan Grey, please call this anonymous toll-free tip line. For now, authorities are looking into all possibilities, including the chance that the baby may have been the victim of a rogue bear.
And then it was over. The next story was about a flood in Missouri. Meed grabbed the remote and muted the TV.
“Bear, my ass,” she said.
“It’s possible, right?” I replied.
Meed pounded her fist on the weight rack. “Do you have any idea how many kids are taken in the world every year?”
“Thousands?” I guessed. I thought that might be too high.
“Eightmillion,” said Meed. Her jaw was tense. It seemed like she was trying to keep herself under control. “In most countries, nothing happens without payoffs to the right people. No money, no investigation. After a year or so, the leads dry up, the case goes cold, the family moves on. The kid is just gone. Some of them pop up on sex-trafficking sites. Some of them get traded or sold. Many just vanish into thin air.”
“Okay,” I said. “But Oregon isn’t some backwater country. Seems like they’re on it, full force. They’ll find him.”
As usual, I could tell that Meed knew more than she was telling.
“Don’t get your hopes up,” she said. “That’s a very valuable child.”
CHAPTER 36
IT WAS 3 a.m. But Meed wasn’t even aware of the time. She sat alone in front of a crowded desk, scanning the screens in front of her. From her secure room behind the kitchen, she had a complete view of the entire loft. Cameras captured every angle with overlapping fields of coverage. No blind spots. With one click, she could shift to views of the elevator interior, the entrance hallway below, or the exit to the street.
One full screen was dedicated to the professor’s cell, with a shot from a wide-angle lens mounted in the ceiling. Dr. Savage was asleep now under a thin blanket, exhausted from the day’s workouts. He’d been down since 10 p.m. The professor’s schedule called for a solid eight hours of rest. Not Meed’s. Even after a hard day, her mind buzzed with activity. She’d always been a poor sleeper.
Meed leaned forward in her Aeron chair, focused now on a large computer screen in the center of the console. This was the heart of the system, with multiple windows displaying a constant flow of reports from every region of the globe. Custom software scanned for designated keywords and images, and elegant hacks opened the most secure government files. Meed hadn’t cracked everything—not yet—but her reach was wide and deep. And the whole picture was becoming clearer.
Her fingers danced over the computer keyboard, bringing up image after image on the screen in front of her—scrapes from news sites, police investigations, Amber Alerts, and the darkest corners of the dark web. The reports and data scrolled by in dozens of languages. Meed tapped from one window to the next with a flick of her right middle finger, translating in her head as she went, report after report, headline after headline.
INFANT MISSING FROM NEW DELHI SCIENCE COMPOUND
YEAR-OLD SON OF FRENCH TECH MOGUL DISAPPEARS DURING CRUISE
NORTH KOREAN CELLIST HOLDS OUT HOPE FOR LOST BABY
The reports and stories were spread over years and continents, too isolated and random to be connected. Some incidents, especially those from China and the Arabian Peninsula, had never been made public. The files started with blurry microfiche images, decades old, and accelerated through the turn of the millennium, with a spike over the past ten years. Babies with superior genes. Taken without a trace before fourteen months. All resulting in dead-end investigations.
The flickers on the screen reflected on Meed’s face. She froze on a recent picture—the blue-eyed baby stolen from the Oregon campsite just thirty-six hours earlier. No blood. No body. No leads. No trail. Same pattern. Law enforcement had no clue how a baby could simply evaporate without leaving a shred of evidence. It seemed impossible. But it wasn’t. It happened all the time.
