If I’d learned anything from Nana Mama, it was this: If you’ve screwed up, admit it and face the consequences. If you’ve crossed the line, admit it and face the consequences. If you’ve had lapses in judgment or viewed something with eyes full of prejudice, admit it and face the consequences.
“Any other course of action is deception and cover-up, which only makes the consequences worse for you in the long run,” my grandmother told me when I was a boy. “Deal with the mess you’ve made, Alex, and move on.”
Nana Mama’s advice had been proven true time and again, so I followed it once more in Rivers’s hospital room. Over the next twenty minutes, I laid out the bones of the story, from the earliest contact by M to the Wickr message I’d gotten moments before Rivers discovered the severed head in his subbasement to following him and rescuing him from the wreck of his sports car.
“We still thought you were M. Luckily, we got to you before your car exploded.”
“Lucky?” Rivers’s attorney said. “My client would not have crashed if you hadn’t chased him. He would not have run in the first place if he hadn’t heard you and Detective Sampson coming down the staircase. And my client’s rights would not have been violated if you hadn’t broken into his private bunker — twice — Dr. Cross.”
I held up my hands. “All true. In my defense, I was hoping against hope that I’d find Diane Jenkins or evidence of her in Mr. Rivers’s bunker.”
“No, you were hoping you’d find evidence that my client was M.”
“That too, no doubt about it,” I said, and I looked at Rivers, who was studying me. “I have been chasing M for years, Mr. Rivers. M has taunted me, threatened me, and generally run circles around me, Detective Sampson, and Special Agent Mahoney. Please forgive me for being obsessive, but my heart was in the right place. I did not want anyone to be strangled or decapitated or held against her will by M ever again.”
Cowles made a snort of derision and said, “Nice try. Look what happened to my client after you let your obsessions get the better of you. I’m smelling lawsuit.”
“So much for coming clean,” Mahoney said, looking disgusted. “I guess we’re done here.”
“No,” Rivers said. “And there will be no lawsuit.”
“Dwight—” his attorney began.
“No lawsuit, Sheila,” he insisted. “Even if they hadn’t been behind me, I would have been going way too fast for the road conditions. If they hadn’t been chasing me, I might be dead.”
“Well, that is absolutely not the way I see it.”
Rivers fixed his eyes on me. “He’s your Professor Moriarty, isn’t he, Cross? This M?”
I got the reference to Sherlock Holmes’s ultimate nemesis and shrugged. “You could say that,” I said.
“Holmes became too obsessed with Moriarty. Because of that, he almost died.”
“I remember.”
Rivers watched me closely. “I don’t know whether to be flattered or disgusted by the fact that you thought I could be M — or, rather, your computers did.”
“I apologize for the computers’ and my actions.”
He laughed. “One thing I learned in the tech world is that you never apologize for a computer’s performance. It did what its programmer told it to do. Nothing more. Nothing less.”
“Dwight,” his attorney said. “I think that—”
His eyes brightened. “You’ve got him now, don’t you, Dr. Cross? M? He has to be on the security tapes. You’re close, aren’t you?”
“If M was the deliveryman, we are. I hope so.”
Cowles chewed her lip.
“But how did M know you were watching me? How did he know to put the heads in my workshop and car and then alert you?”
“I don’t know.”
Rivers beckoned to his attorney. He whispered so softly, she had to bend closer as he repeated his words. She listened, then glanced at me and nodded.
Cowles came over to me, whispered, “Take your phone out of the room and shut it off.”
Chapter 51
I pulled out my iPhone, looked at it, then glanced at Rivers. He nodded.
I went out of the room and shut it off, then asked the nurse at the nurses’ station if she could watch it. When I returned, Rivers said, “I’d put your phone in DFU mode if I were you.”
“What’s that mean?”
“It kills any hidden app a hacker might have installed to access the mike and camera on your phone. Google it. DFU.”
I nodded, feeling invaded, creeped out, spied on, and determined to figure out if and how M hacked my phone and who knew what else. But how?
A nurse came in to say she had to take Rivers for a scan.
“We’ll leave you to it,” Mahoney said, and he motioned Sampson and me toward the door.
I stopped at the nurses’ station and got my phone, and then we went down the hallway and into the elevator.
“You’ve already looked at Rivers’s security tapes,” Sampson said when the doors closed behind us and we began to descend.
“Every one of them,” Mahoney said. “They all jibe with what Rivers said.”
“You see the deliveryman?”
“From multiple angles. And you can’t get a look at his face in any of them.”
“The van?”
“Tinted windows. No markings. Stolen plates.”
“So it was him,” I said. “M.”
“We might have had him if you hadn’t put mud on the lens of the camera above the door to the bunker,” Mahoney said. “All we could see was his shape when he made the deliveries and when he came back to lock you inside.”
I puffed up my lips and blew out my breath. “Blunder.”
“Yep.”
The elevator doors opened.
We exited and went outside.
“I think Rawlins should look at your phone, pronto,” Mahoney said.
“Agreed,” I said. “I’ll get it to him today.”
Mahoney hesitated and then gazed at me earnestly. “Rivers could have sued your ass off, and he would have won, Alex.”
“He still might if Cowles has her way.”
“The FBI doesn’t like its contractors getting sued.”
I felt myself flush. “Understood. It will never happen again. I promise.”
“Even the best of us have bad judgment from time to time,” Mahoney said, then he shook my hand and left. Sampson, who had been strangely quiet, said he was heading to his office to finish up some work.
“We okay?” I asked.
Sampson closed one eye before he nodded slightly. “We’re okay, but I’m not exactly happy. You could have gotten us worse than sued. What you did could have cost me my job.”
My stomach dropped because I knew deep down he was right. “I’m sorry, John.”
“I know. Just give me a little time to process, okay?”
The best friend I’ve ever had shot me a sad smile, then turned and lumbered away.
I watched him until he disappeared around a corner. I decided to walk home, mull things over, empty my head before a visit from yet another college track coach trying to recruit Jannie.
As I walked, I did my best to take my mind off Sampson, thinking that if Rivers was right, if M had slipped spyware into my phone, he was probably tracking me right now. Or he would have been if I hadn’t turned the phone off.
Feeling somewhat invisible for the moment, I started asking myself how it was possible for M to have gotten into my phone. According to the Wickr website, all anyone had to do to contact me on the app was call my phone. As long as I had the app, the message would appear.
I supposed there were any number of ways he could have gotten my number, but it didn’t explain how he’d figured out a way to track me and maybe listen in when I talked. Had M gotten close enough to me to clone my phone when I was using it? But when? And where?