Page 10 of Room Ten: Praise Times Three

As the guys head for the cages, I move toward a tiny clean room Victor installed for me right after coming to work for him. Not that I need a clean room for this, but it’s kind of my space to work, and I know where everything is. I loosen the four small screws and crack open the case, finding a simple tracker glued to the lid. A quick inspection shows me what I expect to see—a micro board with a few crossed wires interrupting the outbound signal by sending it through an additional board programmed to encapsulate the originating IP packet. Simple and straightforward, but this tracker is a surprise, and it’s definitely not supposed to be here.

The chip itself is also a relatively simple GPS tracker capable of broadcasting a signal any time they plug the Netgear hub in. That’s its only fallibility; it has no power source. Of course, attaching one would have made the tracker more obvious—or at least the scrambler device itself suspicious.

Prying the tracking chip off the lid, I turn to my shelf of goodies and pull down a device with input and output wires. I power up my laptop, connecting it to one side and bring up an Unix shell to input a series of commands. Because I don’t know if this tracker is being monitored in real time, I don’t want to power it up and have it broadcasting my location any longer than necessary. But at the same time, I need it to connect long enough to backtrack the signal and zero in on where this ex-IT guru is. Hopefully, it lands smack dab in the middle of the current area I’ve triangulated outside of Peoria, solidifying my original intel, which—let’s be honest—is half-assed.

I apply power to the chip and watch my laptop as the tracker turns on, orients itself, negotiates its lat/long coordinates, and then broadcasts them to a specific masked IP address.

“Oh, fuck you,” I mutter under my breath, working my magic to unmask said address.

In the background, a map pops open, drilling down every eight seconds to a location northeast of Peoria, but almost dead center of my grid.

Thank god!

“I got him!” I yell loud enough for the guys to hear me.

“You do?” Caiden pops his head in.

“Yeah, damn near dead-center of my original guess.”

“Of course it is. No one ever doubted you.” Caiden grins at the same time the door swings open and Reese steps inside.

“Do you know where we’re going?”

“Yep.” I throw my software up on the giant screen in the room and zero in on the rusty top of a trailer in the middle of nothing, the closest house two acres away. Placing a tag on it, I send the lat/long coordinates to their phones. “X marks the spot.”

Reese smiles. “It sure the fuck does. Let’s go.”

I remove power from the tracker and pack up all my shit, just in case we need it again. “Grab the portable generator.”

“Got it,” Caiden says over a Snickers bar stuffed in his mouth.

Seeing the candy, I remember none of us have eaten, and I’m starving. “Drive-thru on the way?”

* * *

Not even an hour after leaving Mr. Krushner’s property, we have a lock on Leti and are driving like bats out of hell down the interstate. I polish off the last of my sandwich, crumbling up the wrapper and stuffing it back into the bag. “We should call the other team.”

Caiden hits a button, and the phone rings over the car’s audio system.

“Yeah?” Case says.

“Hey. We’ve got a lock on Leti’s location and are heading there now. Meanwhile, I looked at this little Netgear hub, and while they programmed it to scramble the originating IP address, it’s also got a tracker inside of it. Whoever’s on the other side of this knows where this little hub is at all times, and if Epiphany has been carrying it on her, it’s been giving somebody her location within yards or better every time she uses it.”

“Interesting. That explains why they knew she was at her father’s residence,” Case says slowly.

I don’t think he understands how great this discovery is, and I’m getting more excited the more I talk about it. “It’s better than interesting. It’s because of this hub that we know where we’re going, because it popped hot on the location I’d triangulated off the phone call.”

They meet my excitement with silence. “That’s fantastic. Who’s in the car with you right now?”

Reese and Caiden exchange a look, and then Caiden says, “What’s up?” at the same time Reese says, “Yo.”

Another pregnant pause before Porter speaks. “So, the designer of this little hub is a woman, Claudine Humphrey—an ex-employee of Epiphany’s. From the story Epi told, she’s most likely a hostile ex-employee.”

“A woman? That’s not the typical kidnapper M.O.” Caiden glances at Reese and then back at me.

“No, but Epi said something that has me thinking.” Case explains something about a business opportunity Epi passed on and the dollar amount asked for as ransom, which was raised significantly higher once the kidnappers realized they didn’t have Epiphany, but a doppelgänger.

“Did you ask the client about this?” I ask, because they are right, the ransom amount is too weird.

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