Double Cross (Alex Cross 13)

At the bottom of the page was another familiar icon from the original site. It was an image of a television set with a screenful of animated static. The box was larger than before but otherwise looked the same. Beneath it was a clickable link that read COMING SOON.

“Cocksucker,” Sampson blurted out. “He’s in our face—all the time now.”

I figured the icon would bring up a new image or a video of some kind, but instead the computer opened a blank outgoing e-mail. It was addressed to [email protected], presumably as untraceable as everything else he’d done.

Bree came back into the room and stood behind me. She started to massage my neck and shoulders. “I just let myself get overloaded. Won’t happen again.”

“Yeah, it will. What do you think of this?” I asked her.

“Well, it’s a direct communication, anyway. That’s something we usually hope for, right? On the other hand, replying means we’re still playing his game. But maybe we have to.”

“Sampson?”

“Seems like there’s more to gain than lose at this point.”

My fingers hovered over the keyboard, and I typed the first thing that came to mind.

You’re on your way down, you pathetic piece of shit.

“Um, Alex?” said Bree.

I was already deleting it, but at least I got a laugh from them. I tried something else.

I typed, What do you want?

Then I sat back and stared at the screen. “Simple. To the point.”

“Go ahead,” Bree said. “That’s the right question.”

So I hit “send.”

Chapter 97

THE NEXT ORDER OF BUSINESS was pretty clear to all three of us: we got the Cyber Unit at the FBI involved with the new site. Our contact now was Anjali Patel, a tiny woman, no more than five feet, with steely gray eyes. Kitz’s replacement. I wondered how much time Anjali had spent thinking about the fact that someone was killed doing the job she now had.

We met her in her second-floor cubicle at the Hoover Building. She had the new DCAK site up on two screens and was navigating from her laptop while she talked to us.

“Here’s the situation, guys. There’s no instance of DCAK anywhere in his code, including the metatags, which are what search engines look at. That probably explains why no one else has found it so far.”

“As long as it stays that way, we?

?d like to keep it up online,” Bree said. “We’ve got a potential communication going, and we don’t want to blow it unless we absolutely have to.”

That established, Patel moved on.

A few minutes later, she looked up from her work. “Here’s the other thing, guys. This site is something of a hybrid. Most of the content was posted using a normal file-transfer program, but two of the images, here and here”—she used her mouse to circle the photos of Kitz and his killer—“were moblogged.”

Before we could ask, she explained, “Posted to the Web using a mobile phone.”

“Is that easier to trace?” I asked, hoping that it would be but doubting it.

“In this particular case, yes.”

She slid a piece of paper around for us to see. It was a Verizon statement, with a billing address.

In Babb, Montana.

“Maybe he’s finally made a mistake. Does the name Tyler Bell mean anything to you?” Anjali asked.