I was on that road myself many times. Pros like Anna Rizzo kept me from being killed more than once. “You were doing God’s work,” I tell her.
“One day,” Rizzo continues, “I just had a feeling. We’d already done one sweep that morning, but I wanted to go out again. The CO said no. The experts had told him that they’d just reached a truce with a local tribal leader and that the road was safe. He told me that going back would disrespect the elder, show that we didn’t trust him. So I shut up and stood down. The next convoy that went out got hit. Multiple KIAs.”
Rizzo taps the frame over the charred scrap of flag. “That came from the lead Humvee. About all that was left. It’s my little reminder: Never trust the experts.”
CHAPTER 59
Bree
BREE STONE LOOKS OUT through the glass wall of her office onto Bluestone’s main floor. At midnight, the place is still humming.
She’d spoken with John Sampson earlier; he wanted to know if there’d been any progress in North Carolina.
“Alex has a few leads he’s chasing down, but nothing solid,” Bree told him. “The locals aren’t really exerting themselves to help.”
“I should be down there with him,” Sampson lamented.
“You and me both,” said Bree. “But we’ve got our work cut out for us here. Alex knows that.”
Bree glances at her coworkers, hunkered in cubicles over laptops or tapping on their phones. A lot of them aren’t much older than Damon. Bree is the most old-school investigator in Bluestone’s cyberworld. Day to day, she relies on her experience and judgment.
But right now, she’s questioning that judgment. She’s taking a risk that could put her whole career in jeopardy.
Bree rolls her chair close to her desk and pulls out a slip of paper with the proprietary passcode an associate gave her, the eight-number key to a software patch that will let her isolate information about Damon from the official searches related to the DC bombings. The passcode will grant access to the private data tranche from her terminal and nobody else’s.
Bree angles her screen away from the glass wall. Elena, her boss, is still in a late meeting with DC Metro. She hopes nobody will pop into her office unannounced.
She types in the code and waits.
It takes only a few seconds for Damon’s entire digital life to download in front of her. Page after page. Image after image. Site after site.
Bree sets a timeline limit for two weeks back and starts scrolling. The code is a crude edit to the main program, so the results are scattered and unorganized—a hodgepodge of GPS locators, credit card charges, Venmo payments, online searches, text messages, and emails, including his most recent ones to her and Alex days ago. But nothing after the morning he rode away on his bike. No communication or activity at all after that time.
Digitally speaking, Damon has simply disappeared.
Bree whips through a mosaic of images scraped from Damon’s iPhone library. She blinks and goes quickly past a series of Melissa posing playfully in the bedroom of the Maxwell Road apartment. She sees selfies of Damon with friends, with his bike, with his YMCA youth basketball team. She sees photos from a free-speech workshop, a voter-registration rally, and an anti-discrimination march. Bree freezes on a few of the frames and zooms in. Could whoever took Damon be lurking in one of those crowds?
She scrolls back and isolates an online-forum discussion from afew days before Damon was last seen. She finds conversations about Michaelson Woods, arrangements for protests, links to human-rights blogs.
Bree clicks through the conversations, looking for locations, meeting times, travel plans. She checks for bus tickets or plane or hotel reservations.
Nothing.
As she sifts through Damon’s online forums, Bree lands on a platform with an odd-looking interface. She’s familiar with Discord and Slack, but this is different. Totally encrypted with crude graphics like a throwback to the early days of AOL or Prodigy.
At the top of one forum, Bree spots the username Stonewall. A gay-rights discussion? Then she notices the other handles on the scroll: Lee. Davis. Longstreet. All icons of the Confederacy.
The snippets of exchanges here hit her like a gut punch.
White makes right, am I right?
MLK. No big loss.
Clean up America! Bring back White-Only bathrooms!
Black Crimes Matter!
Bree blinks hard at the casual cruelty of the hatred on display. What the hell was Damon doing in alt-right forums like this? Had he been spying? Trying to track these haters?
