Total pages in book: 90
Estimated words: 88960 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 445(@200wpm)___ 356(@250wpm)___ 297(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 88960 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 445(@200wpm)___ 356(@250wpm)___ 297(@300wpm)
Bingo!
It was Sonja, Amanda’s roommate.
I hurried to tech support, heart beating madly as I thought of what I could find. People rounded up for questioning weren’t allowed to bring inside any electronic device or sharp object inside the interrogation room, and any prohibited items were immediately handed over to tech support for temporary custody.
Please let this be it, Holy One. Please!
I breathed a sigh of relief when I saw a familiar face behind the counter. “Hey Greg.”
The nineteen-year-old intern beamed. “Blair, hi.”
“You know about the sirens we brought over for questioning?”
“Ah, yes. Do you need anything for evidence?”
“Umm, yes.” I couldn’t quite meet the younger boy’s gaze as I uttered the lie, but I reminded myself that desperate straits called for desperate measures. “I need the mobile phone of Sonja Patel.”
“Sure thing. Be back in a sec.”
I tried not to bite my nails as I watched Greg disappear into the storage room. Behind me, I heard the doors open, and a familiar voice ask in surprise, “Blair? What are you doing here?”
It was Lana.
Greg came back with Sonja’s phone in an evidence bag just as Lana reached my side. I saw her eyes widen, and I shot her a warning look when she started to speak. Turning back to Greg, I said quickly, “You’re a huge help. Thanks.” I swiped the bag out of his hand and dragged Lana with me towards her cubicle.
“What are you doing?” Lana asked under her breath.
“It’s my turn to have a hunch.”
Lana’s eyes widened when she saw me take the phone out of the evidence bag with my bare hands. “Blair! You don’t have any gloves!”
“We don’t have any time for that,” I muttered even I flinched inside. Mishandling evidence went against every work principle I had, but I had no choice. “Remember the Facebook chat you hacked into? This is the phone mentioned in it, the one Amanda liked to borrow.”
Lana’s face cleared, and I knew right away she understood what I was asking her to do. “On it.” She gave me a phone cable. “I need you to plug it in first. Fingerprints on that phone’s already one too many.”
Lana’s monitor lit up the moment I plugged Sonja’s phone in, and the other girl’s fingers flew over the keyboard as she ran a search on the phone’s contents, waiting for something – anything – to stand out. Ten minutes later, we found ourselves staring at a Craigslist ad.
$50,000 for a beautiful, adventurous woman who wants to turn her life around!
EVEN THE TIMELINE MATCHED, with the ad posting taken down just two days before Zeus was poisoned.
“Let me use reverse lookup for this,” Lana muttered.
“English please?”
“Oops, sorry. What I mean is that we have a special system–” Lana continued typing as she spoke, with her gaze flitting between her monitor and Sonja’s phone. “It’s far more advanced than what humans use, and it basically allows us to determine the physical location of a data source. So with this Craigslist ad, we might not be able to find out who sent it but we can at least pinpoint the sender’s exact location when this was ad was first uploaded.”
Countless rows of numbers kept zooming up Lana’s monitor while the screen of Sonja’s phone remained black.
“How long will this take?” I asked worriedly.
“Any moment now...”
Another minute passed.
“Lana—-”
“Be patient. It’s an automated search so I can’t do anything—-”
Sonja’s screen suddenly lit up, and the numbers on her monitor disappeared.
Lana’s face broke into a smile. “We got it, Blair.”
A map showed up on her monitor, zooming closer and closer until both of us inhaled sharply as we realized at the same time what we were staring at.
Pinpointed on the map was...the office of the CIA.
Chapter Twelve
RAIN HAD RESUMED LASHING the ground outside headquarters as I entered the CIA’s block of offices. Zeus was starting to wake, and a countdown had begun.
The whole place was still quiet and empty, with agents either out on the field or in the interrogation room. It was my first time to be here, and I tried to contain my anxiety as I looked down the rows of doors that lined up the long, high-ceilinged hallway. Don't panic. You can still solve this in time, Blair.
“Are you in?” Lana’s voice whispered out of my earpiece.
“Yes." I kept my voice low.
"Ready when you are."
My footsteps fell silently against the floor as I slowly moved forward, fingers curling helplessly against my thighs as I mentally lamented the loss of my wand. Without it, I was reduced to manual spells and hand-to-hand combat, two things I were absolutely not good at.
Looking back, I counted five pairs of doors that I had walked past. “Still nothing?” I asked under my breath.
“Just keep walking,” Lana urged.
Using the IP address provided by the Craigslist posting, Lana had wielded her kind of magic to hunt down our anonymous perp in the form of a GPS-tracking virus. After, she had installed a program in my phone that would allow her to locate whatever agency-issued device or equipment the perp had used, now made identifiable by Lana’s virus.