Page 33 of The Chain

“Yup. I knew the Appenzellers were gone. I was a little worried about an alarm but there wasn’t one.”

“You did well. I’ve done a few B-and-Es myself and it’s always scary.”

“We can go in through the back,” Rachel says when they reach the path next to the Appenzeller house.

“This place is a good choice, Rach. I like the brick,” Pete says. “How did you pick the lock?”

“I didn’t. I hit the mechanism with a chisel.”

“Where did you learn how to do that?”

“Google.”

They go inside and up on the first floor they grab a mattress and bedding from the spare bedroom. They manhandle it down to the basement. Rachel has already brought over the board to cover the window. “We’ll put it up with Marty’s old electric drill. I think that will make less noise than a hammer,” Pete says.

They put up the board and try to make the basement as pleasant as possible with sheets and blankets and a few toys and games Rachel brought over earlier. It’s devastating to think that if this actually works and they don’t get killed or arrested, a scared little boy will be down here soon. Rachel has attached a heavy chain to a concrete pillar near the mattress, and this sends a shiver down Pete’s spine.

They close the back door of the Appenzellers’ and return to Rachel’s house.

“Now what?” Pete wonders.

“Search my house for bugs. I hate the idea that they’re watching everything I do.”

Pete nods. “I can do that.”

He takes the wireless detector out of his bag. In the old days of analog-bugging equipment, you needed a radio receiver and complex equipment, but now a fifty-buck wireless detector can do the job. He goes through the house and then he gets to work on the phone and the computer.

“It’s largely a negative,” he says at last. “I did a thorough scan of the entire house from top to bottom. I looked in the basement and I even looked in the crawl space above the kitchen.”

“Did you saylargelynegative?”

“I did. You don’t have any bugs in the house. However, as I suspected, your Mac has been completely compromised.”

“How?”

“There’s a spyware bot on your Mac that, when connected to the wireless network, slaves the camera and also shows a live screenshot of whatever is on your home screen. It was fairly easy to capture your passwords after that. The bot has a randomly generated namethat doesn’t mean anything. Its destination is also encrypted.”

“How do you know how to do all this?” Rachel asks, impressed.

“Well, you know me, I’ve been tinkering with computers since the Stone Age days of the internet. Trying to get back into it more seriously. Private security is a big growth sector for former servicemen.”

“Can you remove the bot thing?”

“That’s a fairly easy task. But if I do, its absence will be noticed immediately.”

“Whoever it is that’s hacking me will know that I’m onto them?”

“Exactly. And if they know that you’re onto them, they will undoubtedly deploy further countermeasures. Just don’t use your Mac and phone until Kylie is back. Then I’ll kill the bot and wipe your machines.”

“They’re going to be calling me on my iPhone. I need it.”

“Just be aware, then, that they’ll be listening in on you, and your phone, of course, is also a GPS transmitter.”

“Could they be physically watching the house?” Rachel asks.

“They could,” Pete says. “They could be watching us right now. My guess is they’re not.”

Rachel shudders. “I keep seeing Kylie in that basement. She must be terrified.”