Page 65 of Girl, Bound

One room left, onelast door to kick down. Ella jerked her chin at Ripley, and they flanked itlike SWAT breaching a drug den. The knob turned smooth under her gloved hand.The hinges whispered a warning as she eased it open.

An office. Tiny,cramped, a glorified closet really. But every inch was crammed with high-techgear that screamed money. Sleek monitors, towers with more blinking lights thana Tokyo back alley, a nest of wires and cables that were straight out of a geek’sparadise.

And there, in thecenter of it all, the computer. The beast was already growling, fans whirringlike jet engines as it shook itself out of sleep mode.

‘Watch the door,’ Ellasaid. ‘Sing out if you hear anything.’

‘Careful, Dark. You’rebreaking protocol there.’

Ella was beyondcaring. ‘You want to catch this guy or not?’

Ripley showed herpalms in surrender, then melted back into the shadows. Ella turned back to themachine.

The monitor flared tolife. A login screen, a ten-digit keypad. Typical. Ella racked her brain,fingers poised over the keys. Draven's birthday? The day his mama spat him out?Too obvious. Same with his social or PIN. This son of a bitch would be too smartfor that.

Ella scoped the joint, looking forclues among the geek debris. Unused ThinkGeek boxes piled high like a nerdyJenga tower. A bookshelf crammed with dog-eared Tolkien books. And there,tacked to the wall like an altar to Middle Earth - a map of the Shire andbeyond.

Ella's gaze ping-ponged between thefantasy landscape and the login screen. When it came to picking passwords,folks tended to go with what was right under their noses.

Or perhaps in this case, right abovetheir heads.

She stabbed the keys. Lordoftherings.

An error shot up,asking her if she’d forgotten her password.

‘Damn it.’

Numbers and specialcharacters, she thought. She threw in a one, an exclamation point, a questionmark.

Same error. Themachine sneered at her in 8-bit Elvish.

She looked up again and scanned the mapabove her head. In the bottom left-hand corner, two words.

Middle Earth.

Ella tried her luck, and threw in a oneand an exclamation point for good measure – the most commonly-used number andspecial character.

Bingo. The desktopbloomed to life, spilling its secrets like a dockside snitch with a gun to his head.Ella scanned the icons, each one a window into Draven's diseased mind.TrueCrypt, Tor browser, a dozen other programs she couldn't even begin toparse.

But it was theinternet browser that drew her eye, the little icon pulsing like a tell-taleheart. Ella double-clicked.

Four tabs appeared,lined up like shots of poison.

The first three weredark, the web addresses strings of random numbers and letters. But the lastone, that was the killshot. That was the smoking gun she'd been praying for anddreading in equal measure.

Dark Confessor. Eventhe name tasted like blood on her tongue.

Ella's heart was ajackhammer, every instinct screaming at her to run, to bleach her eyeballs andhunt Draven down like the dog he was. But she was a cop and a damn good one.She had to know, had to see with her own eyes the depths of depravity this guy hadsunk to.

She clicked the firsttab. The page loaded with agonizing slowness, each spinning pixel of theloading bar a salt grain in the wound of her patience.

And then it was there,stark black words on a bone-white screen. A confession, poured out in theanonymity of cyberspace like pus from a lanced boil.

My company makes adangerous drug. I’m the only one keeping it from being produced.

No preamble, noflowery introduction. Just the ugly truth, served up like a shotgun blast tothe face.

What the hell wasthis?

---