For Money or Mayhem

{27} Eyes on Seattle

As soon as I was satisfied Andi and Cali were okay, I headed to my apartment. I was on a mission. I knew now that Mel had been snatched from the street by someone who knew where she would be and when. I knew that there was more than one person involved. And I knew that Mel’s time could be up already.

I launched all computers and dove directly into my previous searches. One of these bastards had to be Patterson or involved with him. Whom had Mel told she would be downtown on Thursday morning. Who was waiting for her? And where had she been taken? I received an Amber Alert notice on my cell phone as I was just diving in. Mel’s disappearance had been officially reclassified as a kidnapping. Jordan’s timing was perfect.

I started scanning the neighborhoods where I’d posted notices and the email that had come in as a result. Each notice I’d posted had been vandalized. A big stamp reading “Canceled” defaced each bulletin. I ran through the 250-some email responses I’d received since posting the notices and finally came to the one I feared.

“Too bad. Such a filthy slut. I want a nice girl.”

I called Andi but got no response. I’d been digging for over two hours since I left her and Cali. She must have turned the phones off so they could have peace while they slept and recovered. I left a message and went back to work. I didn’t want Cali out of Andi’s sight.

With the number of cameras in downtown Seattle, the obvious next step was to try to track where they had gone after the bus tunnel; and bus tunnels had twenty-four-hour camera surveillance. I tapped into the Metro site and started worming my way inside. Metro was a county agency and as a result I had to fight my way through a whole different set of protocols than those for the city government. I ended up using a crude hack to get to the video feed from KC Metro. From there, I had to search back through archives to find the date and time of the kidnapping. It was tedious work and I was already wishing I had more coffee. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d slept, but my eyes kept closing on me.

When I finally found recordings of the right tunnel and the right time, I kept replaying them and rechecking the time.

There was nothing on the tape that showed Mel entering the bus tunnel.

My options were running low. I opened my curtains and saw that it was dark outside. How long had I been at this, vacillating between intense concentration and sleep? I needed more coffee, and I needed more information. Why was Mel downtown when she should have been in school?

I slid my tablet into my belt-bag and crossed the alley to see Andi and Cali. I knocked lightly on the door, realizing it was already past ten o’clock and they could be sound asleep. A few seconds later, the porch light came on and Andi opened the door. She looked drowsy and fell into my arms as she pulled me through the open door.

“What a day,” she sighed. “I fell asleep in front of the TV.”

“How’s Cali?”

“She slept most of the day. I haven’t heard her stirring yet. I should get her some food.”

“The poor kid.”

“She thinks it’s her fault because she wasn’t with Mel. She said Mel wanted her to cut school and come downtown with her. Then with Olivia blaming her for Mel running away, she’s just been a wreck.”

“What did Mel want Cali downtown for?”

“Something about the prom. Mel kept telling Cali she had a surprise for her. Everyone was so dead sure Mel ran away that Cali believed it, too. What a mess.”

“Did anyone contact Olivia and James?”

“I called them right away, but while I was on the phone, the police arrived and they kind of freaked out and hung up.”

“I’d like to ask Cali some questions if you think she can handle it. The police are moving, but they don’t have all they need yet.”

“I’ll go see if she can wake up enough to talk and eat something. She didn’t even finish lunch.” Andi went down the hall and I stepped into the kitchen. It wasn’t like Andi to have left the food and dishes from the meal on the table, but there they were. I started cleaning up the mess we’d left and wrapped the remaining bread—already turning crusty—in a plastic bag. I heard Andi moving from place to place down the hall and then she burst back into the kitchen looking panicked. “She’s gone!”

“Jordan, we need help. It looks like Cali has gone to try to find Mel. Andi had her cell phone off so they could sleep this afternoon, but when she turned it back on there was a text from Cali that said, ‘Got a text. Going to help Mel.’ I don’t think Mel sent any text messages. Her parents cancelled her cell phone the day she went missing and it hasn’t been reactivated.”

“I’ll subpoena the phone records,” Jordan said, “but I can’t get into town to help you. I’ll put out an APB and an Amber Alert. As soon as I’ve got a search coordinator, I’ll forward the name and number to you. We’re getting ready to board Patterson’s yacht out in the Sound. I’m half a mile off-shore.”

“I’m going after her. I think I know where to start, at least. The correlation of the other missing kids over the past five years have all been going downtown sometime close to the last time they were seen. We’re starting at University Street Station.”

“There will be uniforms in the area. I’ll let them know to watch for you. Keep your phone live so we can reach you and let me know what you see. Don’t try to make a capture. Let the police do their job.”

“It’s not a job to me, Jordan. It’s Cali.”

I disconnected and grabbed Andi by the hand. She already had her jacket on and we went to her car. While Andi drove, I tapped into the gaming community. This wasn’t the game I intended to play tonight, but it was much more important than tracking down a credit card thief. Still, the EFC team could be useful. I sent the message via my office email. Even though I wasn’t using a tapped keyboard, I was sure my email would be monitored. Just to make doubly sure, I cc’d everyone on my team.

“Eyes on Seattle. Find the Kidnapper. Starting Now! It’s not a game. Big reward!” I attached the video of the original kidnapping, a photo of Cali, and estimated time she went missing. She had an hour’s head start.

I desperately hoped we weren’t too late already.

Andi drove down Third as we scanned the area hoping we’d see Cali on a street corner. You can’t get in or out of some of the garages down here after eleven, so we didn’t try to park. By the time we stopped at Madison, forty players had registered and were receiving data files from me for tapping into the city’s many cameras. I just didn’t have time to waste on bastards who weren’t playing my game, so I heightened my online defenses. I was here to find Cali and I needed every single one of my fellow geeks to help me do it. I started keying instructions into the tablet calling for maps of the city and camera angles on the bus tunnel entrance.

My cell phone chimed a text message and I read “Amber Alert: Cali is missing. We need help searching downtown.”

“Did you just text me?” I asked Andi.

“I sent a message to the faculty lounge list.”

“Good thinking. I’ve got online help, but we need feet on the street. We can use all the help we can get.” I heard Andi’s phone start buzzing with incoming messages as one by one our friends told her they were on the way. “No word from Cali yet?”

“No answer on her phone and no response to the text messages,” Andi said. Tears were running down her cheeks. She shook her head and turned the car onto Columbia and then raced up First to Pike and looped around on Second. My gamers started reporting in with images from cameras located in every conceivable place—garage entrances, bus stops, traffic cameras, banks. The number of feeds was overwhelming, and the fact that I was controlling four online computers in my home and office remotely didn’t help. The first images, of course, came from the EFC external camera recording from the past hour. It began running at 4X speed, streaming images of a mostly empty street. I had a thought and contacted a gamer I knew from experience to be a good strategic thinker.

“I think the kidnapper operates from these coordinates,” I said in my message. I fed him a package of data that included the IP address of Philanthropolis and the path I’d used to track him down. “He’s egotistical enough to think he could be online while we do an IRL search. Here are some known aliases. See if you can track him.” I got a grin in response and saw a team of players peel off into Philanthropolis.

Then I got an alert that chilled me. In the images playing on my screen I could clearly see Cali standing outside the bus tunnel entrance. The timestamp showed 9:50 p.m. Three minutes later, a man emerged directly behind her and dragged her back toward the tunnel with his hand over her mouth. This time the image was clear.

I immediately forwarded the clip to Jordan and got confirmation a minute later that an update to the Amber Alert had been issued, sealing off ferry and train traffic. The image had been forwarded to bus drivers, taxi drivers, and local media. “I need eyes in the tunnel at all stops starting at 9:50. Move outward from the tunnel in one block increments. I want every live camera in Seattle raided.”

A gamer message flashed on my screen. “Is that John Patterson in the video?” I replied in the affirmative and received a skull and crossbones emoticon. The gamers were pissed.

Jan and Donna Garrick rolled up beside us and asked where we wanted them to check. We sent them to cruise up and down the waterfront. That was where Seattle was most vulnerable and was the furthest out that I could imagine Patterson and Cali could have gone by now. Jordan had said Patterson’s yacht was anchored out in the Sound, so the Marina was a logical place for him to head. Sara Gates and Sandy Halstead were then sent south. Of all our friends, the two musicians would be most familiar and comfortable with Pioneer Square. Andi took over coordinating our friends as I started reviewing images flashing on my screen from various cameras.

He’d done it again. He disappeared into the tunnel entrance, but never showed up on the security cameras once inside. Andi turned up University and I jumped out of the car and headed for the tunnel entrance. Watching a live feed of the University Street tunnel and the EFC security camera on my tablet, I entered and headed to the escalator. I saw myself disappear from the EFC feed just after I left the street. I watched the tunnel cameras as I emerged into the tunnel at the bottom of the escalator. I didn’t come on camera until I was ten feet into the tunnel. In that ten feet, there was an access door to the maintenance shafts. I felt my stomach tie in knots as I tested the locked door. I sent a message to the police ground team and was joined in the tunnel five minutes later by two uniformed officers and a Metro maintenance worker. I was ordered to stay out of the tunnel as they unlocked the door and went in. I ran back up the escalator. All busses and trains were being stopped and the tunnel stations searched.

Andi brought the van around on Third to the entrance and was anxiously waiting for me when I came out. I slid into the seat next to her and gave her a hug. “We’ll find her,” I said with more confidence than I felt. “I swear we’ll find her.” She nodded. I could see her jaw clenching. Her hands both gripped the steering wheel so tightly her knuckles were blue.

I looked at the game status. Eighty more players had joined in the past ten minutes. Word had gone out that we were chasing down John Patterson. Once they saw the video of the kidnapping, the gaming community went out for blood. When one of their own became a pariah, there was no mercy. Everyone felt betrayed. But, predictably, nearly a dozen had joined forces with Patterson thinking it was just an exciting new game.

Damn!

I scanned the video feeds that were continuing to come in from around the city. It was just too much data for my tiny screen. I reached for my cell phone and dialed Jen.

“This isn’t what I intended to spring on you tonight.”

“I didn’t think so, but you never know.”

“Look, I’ve got too much information flowing in to handle it all. I need a filter.”

“You want us to watch first and feed you what we think is pertinent.”

“Is the whole team there?”

“Yes. Even Arnie and Darlene are set up.”

“I’ll transfer all the video feeds into the company and you can sort them out. I’m betting he headed north, but it wasn’t on a bus. There could be an access to his fricking office down there or a garage or a tunnel all the way to the Marina. But his yacht is anchored off Shilshole Bay. I’m betting he’s headed that way.”

“Route the feed to Supurnurd,” she said. “That’s Ford. He’ll distribute to the rest of the team.” I thanked her and hit the switch to distribute my info feed to Ford. I recognized the name. He was one of my six pursuers in the game a few nights ago. Well, if they were that good, then I definitely wanted them on my team. I could imagine the feed suddenly lighting up the eight-foot-wide screens in the various conference rooms around our office where a dozen windows could be opened onscreen and observed at the same time. I contemplated the maps of Seattle that now took over my screen.

Paula and Dick Wagner pulled up beside the van and handed coffee through the window to us. They had loaded their vehicle with mammoth urns and were handing out cups to everyone engaged in the search. Their coffee shop was in Pioneer Square and the name played off the most popular tourist attraction in the area: Under Grounds. I stared at the cup, thinking.

After the Great Seattle Fire of 1897 when more than thirty blocks of wooden buildings in downtown Seattle were destroyed, the city started rebuilding according to a new code—all buildings had to be made of stone, steel, and masonry. The new buildings went up almost as fast as they’d burned down. But in order to stabilize the constantly sinking and flooded streets, the city built retaining walls on either side of First Avenue that were ten to thirty feet high. They filled the street with sand and gravel and then repaved it. The new shops and buildings found they needed entrances on the second and third floors in order to let people in from the street and new sidewalks bridged the gap above the underground city.

A civic activist in the middle of the 20th century—known for his wit and for founding the popular Seattle Underground tourist attraction—once quipped that he could walk from King Street Station to Pike Place Market and never see the light of day. People joked that he would make the trip at night. But gazing into the pit that begins any reconstruction project in Seattle will quickly show that as much of a building on the western slope of the city will be underground as above ground. I was wondering if Patterson would ever emerge from beneath the City of Seattle.

My computer flashed with new video feeds and a message on the game boards. There was video of a couple emerging from the east side of First Avenue and crossing to enter an abandoned building on the west side near the Art Museum. Just fifteen minutes ago. I motioned Andi into action as she drove down the hill to First and began to circle the block. That’s an impossible thing to do. First rises away from the water as it approaches the market and for eight blocks there are no streets that connect to Western and the Waterfront.

“Where are eyes on that area?” I demanded, even as I was routing the new images to the police. From the Harbor Steps to the Market, no one had brought a camera online on the West side of First Avenue.

“Everything in that quadrant has gone dark,” Ford responded. “We’re working on a solution.”

The gameboard chimed and I dove into the alternate reality that my players were experiencing.

“We’re under attack! Every time a player moves, he’s knocked off the board. Patterson’s gathering players to his side and they’re pulling the plug on every camera in the area as fast as we can bring them online.”

“Philanthropolis is chaos. Defense systems are activating across every street. We’re digging tunnels to get from one area to another.”

“Wherever he is, he’s got more computer power in his hands than we have combined.”

The reports from the game board showed people pulling out, reporting viral attacks, and crashes. I sent out a general bulletin to all the game boards people were accessing, repeating my first statement and adding a warning.

“Eyes on Seattle. It’s not a game! Anyone aiding and abetting Patterson online will be prosecuted IRL.”

I saw a few people pull out of the game, but there was still a lot of resistance. Patterson knew we were searching in both physical space and cyberspace and he was hiding in both. But if he was launching attacks in cyberspace, I had to believe he was capable of launching them in the real world as well.

“We need to cordon off the waterfront so he can’t move west of Alaskan Way. If he gets out into the Sound, we won’t have a chance of finding him,” I told Andi. She pulled off Spring onto Western and stopped to send text messages to the Faculty. They had called in friends as well and by now there were at least thirty cars prowling the area. Police were at the doors of the building on First and were going in.

My cell phone rang and Jen barked at me.

“We’re going mobile,” she said. “You’ll get the first live video feeds within two minutes. I’m at the south end of the Market looking over the back toward the Waterfront. Ford is managing the feeds from the office. We grabbed infrared security cameras.” By the time she finished speaking, my computer was lighting up with feeds as my team lined up on foot down the Harbor Steps and along Western. Andi and I continued to move north on Western as I scanned the screen and she scanned the street.

My tablet and my phone alerted me at the same time. I flipped open the phone as I scanned the new images I was receiving from the video feed.

“Hamar.”

“Dag, it’s not good,” Jordan answered. “Coast Guard has just taken charge of the yacht and our police boat is headed in. The guy’s a maniac. The girl is dead. So is all his crew. He’s way off the deep end.”

“We’ve got a reading of body signatures going into a warehouse between Western and Alaskan Way. I’m following. We’ve got to stop him before he hurts Cali.”

“What do you mean, body signatures?”

“Part of my team is filling holes in the video with infrared.”

“Someday you’ll have to tell me how you get access to so many toys. I’m on my way.”

I looked at the message at the bottom of the video feed coming in to me with the infrared images. IGotUrBak.

“And I’ve got your ass,” I whispered. “But that’s for tomorrow.”

I tried to get Andi to wait with the car, but there was grim determination in her face as we moved toward the warehouse. Her only words were a whispered, “She’s my baby.” I shoved the tablet in its pouch as feeds continued to come in and Andi clutched my hand as we found the entrance and went in. I could hear sirens wailing in from the south, but they’d been going on and off all night. The security chain on the door had been broken and we pushed the door open. There was no light, but I used the LED on my keychain to cast a ghostly blue light out ahead of us—just enough not to stumble and fall over anything in our path.

At this part of Western, the street was higher than Alaskan Way, so we were two stories above the back of the building with another two above us. I bet on his moving down toward the back with a planned escape out toward the Marina. I signaled everyone to close in on the west side of the building. He was being surrounded. I got a triumphant cheer from the gamers as the entire area lit up with video feeds again. They’d neutralized him in cyberspace. In my mind, that doubled the danger in real life.

Seattle building codes require masonry and steel construction, but once inside the warehouse, huge wooden pillars supported wooden floors on which were stacked crates and palettes of unknown merchandise for an import/export company. We made our way down a stairway flashing the weak beam left and right and listening intently. I was surprised to find that once we’d reached the ground floor on the west side of the building, the stairs continued downward. This building was built below sea level. We’d seen and heard nothing since entering the building and both of us were sweating, our palms slippery where we held each other.

The scream from below us almost knocked us off our feet. We hit the last flight of stairs running and slid to a halt, faced with a sudden wall of fire. Across the warehouse floor, Cali was tied to one of the massive wooden pillars. I automatically hit 911 on my cell as we skirted the flames and ran to her.

Her face was bruised and her hands and ankles were duct taped to the pillar. I pulled out my pen knife and began sawing through the sticky mess while Andi comforted her daughter and checked for other injuries. Cali was in shock, staring fixedly at the fire as it progressed toward us while I stripped tape off her arms leaving huge red welts where it had stuck to her. The smoke was getting dense and I could barely see the stairs across the warehouse. When she was finally free of the pillar, she slumped to the floor.

The fire was spreading fast through the dry wooden crates and packing material that acted like kindling. Boxes were exploding from the inside as the heat outside increased. There was no time to waste. I scooped her into a fireman’s carry as we ran for the stairs. We were only two flights up to the lower ground level and we rushed across the floor, already feeling the wood heating up beneath our feet. We were running through a tinderbox. But the doors on this side of the building were all chained shut.

Damn! There had to be an emergency exit. But every access we found was padlocked and chained. We had no tools to break them. We sprinted to the stairs again, seeing flames shooting up the freight elevator next to them. Something exploded to our right and suddenly this floor was engulfed in flame. Andi pushed me from behind as I gasped for breath, carrying Cali up the stairs. We’d made the first landing and I turned to launch myself up the next flight when another explosion ripped the stairs from beneath my feet. As I fell forward, I pushed—no—threw Cali to the landing in front of me as the stairs gave way. I heard a scream behind me and dragged my body up with my hands. I turned to see Andi, still on the landing—trapped against the wall, the steps between us all but gone.

We locked eyes for a terrified moment. I reached out to her, but the gap was just too wide to touch. I had only the wagging stair railing to hang on to as I leaned over the inferno. Then she screamed at me.

“Save my baby! Please, Dag. Save Cali!”

I was choking on the smoke and my own tears as I mouthed to her “I love you.” I saw her return the motion as I threw Cali over my shoulder and charged up the remaining two flights to the Western Avenue floor and crashed through the doors.

A fire truck had just pulled up and I stumbled to a firefighter in full gear and dropped Cali into his arms. Before he could react, I grabbed his axe, turned, and dove back into the burning building.

Comments

Please feel free to send comments to the author at nathan@nathaneverett.com.