The Senator: A Blake Jordan Thriller (15 page)

Ninety minutes after Landry left, I once again heard the familiar sound of an entry code being punched into the keypad outside of my holding room. I expected to see Agent Mallory walk in with a notebook and voice recorder to begin debriefing me. Instead, Bill Landry entered the room.

“What’s wrong? Did you find something on the flash drive? Did you get any new information?”

“Agent Mallory has someone working on the drive. That’s not why I’m here,” he said and sat down at the cold, steel table across from me. Landry hesitated for a moment, then began to tell me why he came back.

“We brought the kid in. After CPD talked with him, we had an officer drive him over. He was nervous and admitted to doing drugs over the past twenty-four hours. He didn’t want to say much but Mallory calmed him down and got him to open up and tell us what he remembered about Jim Keller. We talked about the warehouse and what he saw the man do to the senator. After he started to relax, he remembered something that he was supposed to tell us. He said he was so freaked out over the escape that he forgot about it.”

“What did he remember?” I asked, wishing I could have had a chance to talk with the young man myself.

Landry thought for a moment. It seemed like he was hesitating, unsure if he was making the right decision in talking with me. After a few seconds, he continued. “The kid said that Keller gave him a message to deliver, should he be able to get away.” I stared at Landry, trying to figure out why he was telling me this.

“What was the message? What did he tell the kid?” Landry looked at me.

“Send Blake Jordan.”

I leaned back in my chair, processing what he had just told me.

Landry pushed his chair back away from the table, crossed his legs, and put two hands on his knee. He looked me over, trying to gage how I was going to respond, but I kept my composure. I wondered how the FBI was going to handle the request.

“There’s no way that kid would have known who you were,” Landry continued. “It seems that Keller wanted you to assist in rescuing him.” I shook my head.

“No, he wanted me to
lead
the rescue. I told you, nobody knows the man better than I do.” Landry looked like it pained him to say the next words that he spoke.

“Listen, Jordan. I’m willing to let you help on behalf of the FBI on a provisional basis, but you play by my rules. You go off the rails or keep us in the dark on
anything
and you’re finished – understood?” I nodded.

“Understood.”

“I want the Bureau involved in everything. I’m assigning Mallory to work with you. I’m giving him authority to make decisions on my behalf. You need to do something, you go through him. No exceptions.”

Landry started to leave the holding room. “You’ll work from here.” I stood and stopped him at the door.

“I want Agent Davis brought to me. I need access to that flash drive and I need you to call DDC and have them send me an agent named Morgan Lennox so he can take a look at the drive. And I want to talk to that kid when you’re done with him.” Landry stared at me for a moment before responding.

“I’ll make a call and order a transport for Lennox. Agent Mallory will be right in.” I stopped him again.

“What about the charges against Agent Davis?”

“I can’t do anything about DDC, she still works for them. That’s Shapiro’s call. I understand he’s not a big fan of yours, so I think it’s safe to say that you’re finished there. I know Roger. He doesn’t backtrack on decisions. As far as
your
charges go, now that DDC has turned you over to us, that’s our call. So I guess we’ll need to see how you handle the next few hours. Find the senator and I’ll go easy on you. And if you don’t,” he tried to finish but I interrupted him.

“I will. I’ll find him. And I’ll get him back alive.”

A short time later, Jami was brought in. “Are you okay?” I asked and she gave me a small hug and sat down.

“Fine,” she said curiously. “But why aren’t they keeping us separated anymore? What happened?”

I explained as much as I could as quickly as I could. I told her about the kid and the message that Jim Keller had given him about me. I told her that I had just spoken with special agent in charge Bill Landry and how he had agreed to let me assist the FBI on a provisional basis.

“What about the charges, did they drop them?” she asked.

“That’ll be up to Shapiro.” Jami looked at me.

“And what about you?”

“Landry told me it depended on whether we saved the senator in time.” Jami looked confused.

“In time?”

That’s when Mallory entered the room. I didn’t have a chance to break the news to Jami about what the kidnapper was planning to do in just a few short hours. “We meet again,” he said as he walked up to the table where we were seated and Jami moved her chair over to give the man room to sit down and join us.

“Let’s level-set to make sure the three of us are on the same page on what’s happened so far and align on next steps, since you’ve already proven to not be able to follow basic instructions,” he said as he opened a manila envelope, started thumbing through loose papers, and pulled out a pen from his shirt pocket.

“You know we have the kid, his name is Tre. He’s right down the hall. Chicago PD brought him over a little while ago. CPD gave us a copy of their notes and we drilled down from there to probe and try to find out what else he knew. The kid was nervous but after a while, I got him to talk. He said that he remembered a message that the senator had given him to deliver –
send Blake Jordan
– that’s what Keller told him. And this ruled you out as a suspect in Keller’s kidnapping and is why we’re having this conversation, okay?”

Jami and I nodded.

“Shortly before the two of you were brought in, the kidnapper released a ten-second video.” Jami sat up straight.

“The Code 20 we heard on the way in?” Jami asked.

“Yes. The kidnapper plans on executing the senator at dusk.” Jami leaned forward.

“Tonight? That’s in just a few hours!”

“It is, so we don’t have time to waste. Agent Jordan has been given provisional status by the Bureau to lead the recovery efforts, but understand, as Landry has already explained, you are under my authority. That means you involve me in everything. You break that protocol and I will cut you off immediately.”

“What about the drive? Were you able to find anything on it?” I asked.

“Not much,” Mallory responded. “The encryption is hard to get around. But we did find your name in the sections that we
were
able to decrypt. Whoever the drive belongs to was doing a lot of research on you. Any idea why, Agent Jordan?”

“No idea,” I answered as I watched Mallory pull a flash drive out of an inner pocket of his sports jacket and place it on the table before Jami picked it up.

“This isn’t the same drive.” Mallory nodded.

“It’s a copy. We need to keep working on the original.”

“Did Landry speak with Shapiro about Morgan Lennox? I need him to look at this drive.”

“He’s on his way. Given how close we are to DDC, he should arrive any minute now. As soon as he gets here, we’ll check him in and bring him to you. What else do you need right now?” Jami looked at me and I knew that we were thinking the exact same thing. We needed to go to the source.

“I want to talk to the kid,” I said and Mallory nodded. Jami stood and walked around the table and took a seat next to me.

“I’ll get him now. And remember,” Mallory said, knocking on the framed two-way mirror that lined the wall to the right of where Jami and I were sitting as he got up to leave. “Keep me involved in everything.”

Jami and I talked with the kid while we waited for Morgan to arrive and get checked in. He told us his story, how he and his friends often went to the warehouse to smoke and drink and how his friends had ditched him yesterday. I asked about the initials scratched into the pipe. He said he didn’t see Keller do it. I wondered if Keller had even made the marks.

Morgan was escorted in just as we wrapped up with the kid and he was being taken out of the room.

“I try to distance myself from you two, but you just find another way to pull me back in,” he said with a half-smile before he laid his laptop bag on the table and sat down with us.

“It’s good to see you, too,” Jami said and handed him the flash drive.

“Shapiro’s not happy about this at all. I have to go back and work with these people when this whole thing is over, you know. You’re making things very difficult for me.”

Morgan grabbed the drive from Jami. “What’s this?” he asked and held the drive up to his eyes for a closer look.

“I found it at the warehouse, in the room the kidnapper was working from. We need to know what’s on it,” Jami explained.

“The Bureau took a look and found my name referenced on the drive, but weren’t able to decrypt most of it,” I added.

“Your name? The kidnapper knows who you are?”

“I don’t know what it means, maybe it’s a listing of the agents that would be at the United Center.” Morgan unzipped his bag and pulled out his laptop.

“Well, let’s give it a go then and see what we can find.” Mallory walked in as Morgan booted up his computer and helped him connect to the Bureau’s system. I almost forgot that he was watching our every move and listening to our conversation through the glass.

“Did either of you hack into my phone this morning?” I asked, taking the opportunity to ask both men the question that had been bothering me for the last few hours.

“No, Reed asked me to work on something else, but I would have known if anyone at DDC had been asked to do that,” Morgan said.

“We tried to access your phone but it was off the grid, I assumed you had turned it off and removed the battery because we weren’t even able to turn it back on. Why did you do that, anyway?” Mallory asked.

“I thought one or both of you might try to locate me and I wanted to stay dark long enough to get to Keller without you interfering,” I said and Jami looked at me. She knew I wasn’t telling them the whole story. The truth was that somebody
did
hack into my phone, I was positive about that. And my name was found on the flash drive.
Was it possible that the kidnapper knew more about me than I thought?

“Okay Blake, I’m seeing data but it’s all gibberish, as I expected. I’m going to run a process to apply a number of cryptographic keys and try to bypass the encryption scheme,” he said. Morgan ran the process and as it took over his screen, he leaned back and crossed his arms as he waited for it to finish. After a few minutes, Morgan sat back up.

“Alright I’m in,” he said. Mallory looked shocked.

“I’ve had my guys looking at this for almost two hours, how’d you access the drive so fast?” Morgan shrugged his shoulders and kept staring at the screen.

“There’s a problem, I’m not finding any geolocation data in any of the files. It should be here but I’m not seeing it. Are you sure this is the right flash drive?” he asked.

“No, it’s a copy,” Mallory explained.

“Well, I need the original,” Morgan said, raising his voice, and he pulled the drive out of the laptop and slid it across the table to Mallory who got up and left the room. I wanted to tell Morgan more about my phone, that I was sure that someone had tried to track me earlier that morning. But I didn’t know who else might be watching us from behind the two-way mirror. Maybe Landry. Maybe Shapiro. But Jami gave me a look that told me that she knew what I was thinking. That if my name really was on that flash drive, and if the kidnapper had tried to track me, it could only mean one thing.

This was personal
.

Mallory brought in the original drive and handed it to Morgan. He inserted it into his laptop and got to work, running his process on the drive as he did before. “That’s more like it,” Morgan said as it started to run. “The file sizes seem larger, so that’s a good thing. It means there’s extra data in them.”

It took a few minutes to run like the first time and Morgan took the opportunity to ask Mallory about the Bureau’s data security measures. “What kind of firewall do you have set up here?” Mallory crossed his arms.

“Next-generation firewall with an intrusion prevention system. No information can get out of the private network. We can’t even send anything to another field office without an override code.”

“Okay, it’s done. There’s a ton of files on here, Blake. I’m going to need to parse the data and perform an export of the terms found inside each of the documents and then isolate the GPS coordinates for where the files were created to understand what we’re dealing with. Shouldn’t take long at all,” Morgan said.

Two minutes later and the export was running. “I can see the results come in real-time as it runs.”

We were all anxious to understand what was on that drive and the locations where the files were created. “Jordan is a prominent word, it’s coming up a lot. I think he used this drive for researching online, it has a Web browser installed on it. Any Internet activity would be recorded on the drive, not the computer used.”

“What kind of timeframe are we looking at for last activity?” I asked

“Just a few hours ago, Blake. He visited
The Mitchell Wire
and a few other news Websites. There’s no other activity in the cache before then, he must have been in the habit of clearing it after each use. But I can still get to the search history.”

I watched as the script continued to run on the laptop and Morgan started to perform additional searches. He typed in
road
,
street
, and
avenue
. Anything to find an address before he’d start looking at names.

“What else are you seeing?”

“Looking… I see a Sayre Avenue.” I leaned in closer.

“That’s the warehouse where Keller was being held. What else?” I asked before Mallory chimed in.

“I think this is good and something we need to look into, but we have just a few hours until sundown. I suggest we focus on finding the locations where the files were created first, then we data mine to look for any names or addresses that may be on the drive that we can investigate. If we can find where the files were created, we might be able to find the location of the kidnapper.” Morgan looked at me.

“Fine,” I said and Morgan started working on skimming the GPS coordinates.

In a matter of minutes, Morgan built another process to run concurrently with the parsing script that was running in the background. I saw Morgan look at Mallory and then the two-way mirror that was directly in front of him before speaking. “The files were created at north forty-two sixteen by west eighty-six twelve.” Jami’s eyes narrowed.

“Where is that?” she asked. Mallory stood and looked at the mirror.

“Did you get that?” he asked and I saw the mirror shake as someone on the other side knocked on it twice.

“Alright, we’re done here,” Mallory said. He put his right hand on the gun latched onto his belt and walked toward the door and I stood up. Morgan frantically typed on his laptop as Jami looked at Mallory in disbelief. Bill Landry and Roger Shapiro entered the room and joined Agent Mallory at the door.

“This is over,” Landry said and Mallory walked past them and disappeared. Shapiro stared at me for a moment before speaking to Jami.

“Davis, you’re coming with me,” he said and Jami shook her head slowly. Mallory returned with a guard who walked over and brought us to our feet to separate us again.