Meanwhile, DivSix’s super-randomizer is attempting to hack the pass codes on Rachel’s three laptops. The machine’s AI brain can generate a billion terms a second, learning and narrowing its search as it goes. Rachel apparently has prepared for this. We’re stumped. All I can find that’s intelligible is letterhead correspondence between Rachel and some two dozen professors, scientists, and activists around the world—apparently Righteous Men she was trying to warn of danger.

At least this reinforces Rachel’s claim of hunting Instancer, not helping him.

Rachel’s primary laptop is protected by four passwords in chaos-code sequence. The randomizer cracks the first three. I enter “Gehenna,” then “Megiddo,” twenty more.

On “Tz@dikim99,” the machine opens.

Again, every entry is in Hebrew.

ME

Fuck!

At least this time Rachel’s stuff is not in cipher. I enter “Reykjavik” in the search box. Up come hotel records, travel docs, surveillance logs.

MANNING

What the hell is this?

ME

Iceland. On five dollars a day.

At the Academy Annex in College Point we were taught the rudiments of hacking and blackout operations on the net. Rachel is light-years beyond this. She can code. She’s a master of encryption and decryption. Did she learn this in Israel, in IDF Intelligence? She knows how to generate dummy identities and use them to hop on a flight to anywhere, pay for everything once she gets there, then sail the bill into the cyber shitcan. Passports are child’s play for her. She has cranked out eleven e-versions that I can find without strenuous searching—five USA, two UK, one Danish, and three Israeli—all “liberated” from real people, with Rachel’s retinal, facial, and digital signatures stripped in. She can breeze through customs anywhere on the planet and leave no record that can be traced back to her. Money? It grows on trees for Rachel. She can hack into bank accounts, crack ATM codes, create credit card identities for herself, or steal an account outright. She knows how to use trapdoors, spider holes, crossovers, double-backs, and all kinds of masking, cloaking, and identity-snatch techniques. She employs these, as best I can decipher, to perform “drive-bys,” i.e., isolated EEs (“episodes of encroachment”) into the confidential personal and professional information of an organization or individual, and the targeted entities never even know their data has been compromised.

ME

This is how she travels. How she pays for everything.

Manning has pored through every drawer and compartment in the vehicle. He’s beyond exhausted. He flops down beside me on the banquette, staring in frustration at Rachel’s laptop screen.

MANNING

Find me something that puts her with Instancer at one of these murders.

I’m trying.

Mail?

Nothing.

Files? Sanitized or firewalled.

I bang through folder after folder. I can’t pull up texts, photos, videos. Even Rachel’s trash is indecipherable.

Manning rubs his eyes. He looks like his head is about to split open.

ME

Okay. Enough.