The Killer Collective (John Rain, #10; Ben Treven #4; Livia Lone #3)(5)

She decided to hold off on Kool Kat for the moment. “So the Secret Service hired you.”

“Yeah, they needed a way for any agent to communicate with any agent without ever being singled out as an individual. An anonymization app.”

“Meaning . . . ?”

“Well, if you could identify the members of a protective detail, before long you’d start acquiring actionable intelligence about the protectee, too. So in a way, shielding the agents was almost as important as shielding the principals. At least online.”

“And you’re saying you think one of the Child’s Play members is using that application? The one you designed for the Secret Service?”

“Well, it sure looks like my work. But I don’t know how one of these bottom feeders would have gotten a hold of it.”

She shook her head in amazement. It wasn’t his fault. This wasn’t his world. So his comforting notion that child rapists were all “bottom feeders,” some alien species divorced from the rest of humanity, had never been punctured.

“The obvious inference,” she said slowly, “is that the Child’s Play member who’s using your custom application is connected to the Secret Service.”

A long beat went by. Trahan shook his head and said, “Yeah, but . . .”

She waited, letting him work through the cognitive dissonance. After a moment, he said, “But those guys . . . I mean, there are a ton of psychological tests. Background checks. Polygraphs. Everything.”

“No test is perfect. Besides, I doubt any of the tests was aimed at uncovering a sexual interest in children.”

“I guess. But . . . what if it is someone in the Secret Service?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, what happens?”

She felt herself getting irritated. “The same thing that happens to anyone arrested for child exploitation. If the prosecutor does her job, he goes to prison, and then is kept away from children for the rest of his life.”

“I get that. But the Secret Service . . . I got to know some of them, when I was developing the app. Those guys have a mystique. You know, esprit de corps. It would be a big black eye for them if one of their agents gets frog-marched out of the White House on child-pornography charges.”

“Why is that our problem?”

“I’m not saying it is. It’s just—”

“I’ll never understand it. Really, I never will. People who care more about protecting an institution than they do about protecting children.”

He reddened. “That’s not fair. You know I care. And I’m not trying to protect anyone. Any institution, I mean. I’m just telling you, if it turns out a Secret Service agent is part of this Child’s Play ring, you’re in for some static when you try to get an arrest warrant. If you don’t want to hear that, if you want to pretend it’s not true, fine, it’s your party.”

She took in a long breath, then blew it out, giving herself a moment to calm down. She’d worked so hard to hide her buttons. And yet sometimes they were right there on the surface, waiting to be pushed.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’ve just seen the pattern so many times, and it’s maddening. But I shouldn’t have slotted you into it. You’re right, it wasn’t fair.”

He shook his head. “Don’t worry about it. I can see where it would have come across that way.” He smiled. “Pattern recognition isn’t a science. You have to allow for the exceptions.”

She nodded. “Anyway. If one of the Child’s Play members is a Secret Service agent, I might have a few bureaucratic battles to fight. It wouldn’t be the first time. But right now, it’s too early to say. You still have to confirm the anonymization app is yours. And then we’d need to unmask the person who’s using it on Child’s Play.”

About twenty minutes later, as she was sifting through data to determine which of the three Kuala Lumpur expats was the member who called himself Kool Kat, Trahan said, “Oh, man. This is bad.”

She leaned to the side so she could see him behind his screen. He looked slightly ill.

“The app is yours?”

He nodded, still looking at his screen. “It’s mine.”

She didn’t understand his distress. He must have really lionized the agents he’d met while developing the app.

“Okay,” she said. “So it’s what you thought. We have a suspected Secret Service agent member of Child’s Play.”

He looked at her and shook his head slowly.

“No,” he said. “We have six.”





chapter

three





RAIN


I waited a day to call Horton. I told myself it was because I hadn’t made up my mind. But I knew I was just playing it reluctant again.

I decided to keep it brief. The former colonel and I hadn’t parted on the best terms, and if I’d been overly solicitous, he would have recognized the behavior as an attempt to lull him, which would have been counterproductive.

“I understand you wanted to talk to me,” I said by way of greeting.

“I’m glad you called,” he said in his unmistakable Mississippi Delta baritone. “How’ve you been?”