There was a shuffling, and a face appeared in the aperture atop the ladder. It was a pale face, like that of a night creature accustomed to half-light; young, vulnerable, anxious. About eighteen or nineteen, nervous, with eyes that did not make eye contact. He seemed to be looking at the landing carpet between the two men below.
“Hello, Roger. I’m Jamie Jackson. I need your advice. Can we talk?”
The boy considered the request seriously. There appeared to be no curiosity, just acceptance of the strange visitor and request.
“OK,” he said. “Do you want to come up?”
“There’s no room up there.” The father spoke out of the side of his mouth. Then louder: “Come on down, son.” And to the Tracker: “You’d better talk in his bedroom. He doesn’t like to come down to the living room except when his mom’s here. She works at a grocery store checkout.”
Roger Kendrick came down the ladder and into his bedroom. He sat on the edge of the single bed, gazing at the floor. The Tracker took the upright chair. Aside from a small closet and chest of drawers, that was about it. His real life was in the roof space. Tracker glanced at the father, who shrugged.
“Asperger’s syndrome,” he said helplessly. It was clearly a condition that defeated him. Other men had sons who could date girls and train as car mechanics. The Tracker nodded at him. The meaning was clear.
“Betty will be back momentarily,” he said. “She’ll make some coffee.” Then he left.
The man from Fort Meade had used the word “peculiar,” but he had not specified how much and in what way. Before coming, the Tracker had researched both Asperger’s syndrome and agoraphobia, the fear of open spaces.
Like Down syndrome and cerebral palsy, both conditions varied in form from mild to severe. After several minutes talking in general terms with Roger Kendrick, there was no need to treat him like a child; no cause for baby talk.
The young man experienced extreme shyness in person-to-person terms, intensified by his fear of the world outside his home. But the Tracker suspected that if he could shift the conversation back to the teenager’s comfort zone—cyberspace—he would meet a quite different personality. He was right.
He recalled the case of the Scottish cyberhacker Gary MacKinnon. When the U.S. government wanted to put him on trial, London maintained he was too fragile to travel, let alone take jail. But he had invaded the inner sanctums of NASA and the Pentagon, slicing through some of the most complicated firewalls ever devised like a knife through butter.
“Roger, there’s a man out there, somewhere, hiding in cyberspace. He hates our country. He is called the Preacher. He gives sermons online, in English. He asks people to convert to his way of thinking and kill Americans. It’s my job to find him and stop him.
“But I cannot. Out there, he’s cleverer than me. He thinks he is the cleverest operator in cyberspace.”
He noticed the shuffling had stopped. For the first time, the teenager raised his eyes and made contact. He was contemplating a return to the only world a cruel Nature had ever destined him to inhabit. The Tracker opened a pouch and took out a memory stick.
“He transmits, Roger, but he keeps his Internet protocol address very secret, so nobody knows where he is. If we knew, we could get him to stop.”
The teenager toyed with the memory stick in his fingers.
“What I’m here for, Roger, is to ask if you would help us find him.”
“I could try,” said the teenager.
“Tell me, Roger, what equipment do you have up there?”
The teenager told him. It was not the worst on the market, but it was run-of-the-mill, store-bought stuff.
“If someone came and asked you, what would you really like? What would be your dream setup, Roger?”
He came alive. Enthusiasm flooded his face. He made eye contact again.
“I would really love a dual six-core processor system with thirty-two gigs of RAM, running a Red Hat Enterprise Linux distribution version, six or higher.”
The Tracker did not need to take notes. The tiny microphone in his medal display was picking up everything. Just as well; he had not a clue what the lad was talking about. But the eggheads would.
“I’ll see what I can do,” he said, and rose. “Have a look at the material. It may be you cannot crack it. But thanks for trying.”
Within two days, a van with three men and some very expensive cyberequipment arrived at the backstreet house in Centerville. They crawled around in the loft until they had installed it all. Then they left a very vulnerable nineteen-year-old, staring at a screen and believing he had been wafted to heaven. He watched a dozen of the sermons on the Jihadi website and began to tap.
• • •
The killer crouched low over his scooter and pretended to tinker with the engine as, down the road, the state senator left his house, tossed his golf clubs into the trunk and climbed behind the wheel. It was just after seven on a brilliant early-summer morning. He did not notice the man on the scooter behind him.
The killer did not need to stay close for he had made this run twice before, not dressed as now but in jeans and a hooded jacket, much less noticeable. He followed the senator’s car the five miles through Virginia Beach to the golf course. He watched the senator park, take his clubs and disappear into the clubhouse.