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The rush of adrenaline from the conversation and the drink was making his head buzz. He needed to talk to the dean. Having the FBI show up at the university would be controversial. There would be questions asked. His future was at stake.
Illari turned back to her screen, which now shone blue. Seconds later, the wall of monitors all turned blue. Code began to stream across the sea of blue. As Dr. Estrada slowly rose, looking at the monitors arranged on the desks around them, they all went blue. The grad students were gasping in surprise and disbelief.
“What’s going on?” someone asked incredulously. “The servers are down. All of them.”
The pit in Dr. Estrada’s stomach deepened. A moment before, he’d been terrified of having to confess everything to the dean. But this was worse. A data breach was happening in real time. Hackers had infiltrated the institute.
He looked at Illari, who was frantically tapping on her keyboard.
“What’s happening?” he asked her.
“Ransomware attack,” she said. “They’ve taken over the institute servers. Everything is locked down.”
“You mean the data on the servers can’t be accessed?” he nearly shouted in terror.
“How did they get through our firewall?” she said, perplexed. “We have the best security in the world!” She slammed her fist on the keyboard. “It’s all locked away.”
“But surely the backups—”
Dr. Estrada’s throat caught. What if the man on the phone hadn’t been with the FBI?
CHAPTER TWO
FORD’S THEATRE
WASHINGTON, DC
January 8
The National Park Service presenter had a clear, strong voice. She stood in the middle of the stage in her uniform, capturing the attention of everyone sitting in the cramped wooden seats. The acoustics were incredible, but that was to be expected. Roth had never been to Ford’s Theatre before, but he knew the story she was telling. The story about the assassination of a president.
“John Wilkes Booth was waiting for this line to be spoken. The line that would cause a roar of laughter from the audience. Not that the line itself was humorous. No, the humor was in the irony of the line. About a man pretending to be cultured and proving he wasn’t. It was just the sort of line that would have appealed to Abraham Lincoln. He died laughing.”
Roth shook his head, mesmerized by her voice, by the delicious feeling of being part of history. His twin sons, Lucas and Brillante, were sitting next to him. He couldn’t tell whether either teenager was paying attention to the historian. They were looking over at the darkened booth where Lincoln had been shot. Since coming to DC, they hadn’t been able to do a lot of sightseeing, not with Jacob Calakmul undoubtedly hunting for them. Their guardian angel, Steve Lund, who owned the private security company Roth had hired to protect him and his kids after they’d survived the death game in Mexico, kept switching their hotels. He was vigilant about providing the security they needed, often in person, but even he realized that the family needed a change of scene from the hotel room now and then. Today, there’d be a double feature because this excursion to Ford’s Theatre coincided with a summons to FBI headquarters. They’d taken a long, circuitous route with lots of switchbacks to get there. Lund knew all the tricks.
“‘Don’t know the manners of good society, eh?’” the historian said with a drawl, pretending to be the actor who had spoken the lines. “‘Well, I guess I know enough to turn you inside out, old gal—you sockdologizing old man-trap.’” She paused, her voice lowering to heighten the tension. “As the audience roared with laughter, John Wilkes Booth stepped up behind President Lincoln with a derringer, pulled the trigger, and shot him in the back of the head.”
“Oof,” Brillante whispered. Lucas elbowed his brother to quiet him.
The presenter’s voice began to quicken with urgency. “Major Henry Rathbone noticed the smoke and tried to rush the man. Booth dropped his weapon, drew a dagger, and slit Rathbone’s arm to the bone. He then jumped over the balcony and onto the stage and uttered the line he’ll ever be remembered saying. Sic semper tyrannis.”
“‘Thus always to tyrants,’” Roth whispered, spellbound.
“In Latin, ‘Thus always to tyrants,’” the presenter said firmly.
Lucas glanced at his dad, eyebrows lifting.
Roth knew the end of the story, but with a few variations. Some thought Booth had broken his leg in the jump from the balcony edge to the stage. It was twelve feet to the floor below. Roth and his boys were in the balcony seating, and it did seem like a dangerous drop. But the presenter said there was evidence Booth’s leg had been broken later on, after being thrown by his horse. Many eyewitnesses had seen him run and mount a horse, using the stirrup with his left leg, the one that was supposedly broken.
That detail intrigued Roth. He’d heard the Lincoln assassination story many times, but the presenter’s talk had shed new light on it for him. It reminded him of a saying he’d read somewhere: “History is the process in which complex truths become simplified falsehoods.”
The presenter described President Lincoln being carried across the street and laid on a bed that was too short for him. And that’s where he’d passed away, having never regained consciousness. She received a loud ovation when her speech was finished, and everyone began to stand up to clear out of the theater so the next group of museum visitors could enter and hear the same story.
“Dude, that story was sick!” Lucas said. “It’s a bummer that he died, though. What if he’d stayed president?”
The stairwell was narrow and cramped, and they made their way down it carefully. Roth kept both of his sons in front of himself. He was more paranoid now than ever.
“Suki would have loved seeing this theater,” Brillante said somberly.