I flip through the folder Ailes gave me. Just a few sheets of paper summarizing the website hack. The GPS coordinate was encrypted with a key that took the FBI’s code-cruncher computer a week to crack.

A note from Ailes points out that the Warlock knew how long it would take because the body was only hours old in the spot when they found it. He’s underlined the words “extremely organized.”

Not “highly.”

Extremely.

This sends a chill down my spine. Ailes is suggesting what my professor had talked about, that this man could be smarter than any of us.

I remind myself that anybody with a subscription to Wired magazine could make a guess at how long it would take to tie up the computer, and the defacement wasn’t anything that hasn’t been seen before, but this in a way makes it more disconcerting. This may not have been done by a computer expert at all, but by someone who is smart enough to pick up the skills on the side to make a point.

Computer hacking is beyond me, so I focus on the facts I’ve been told. There’s the fresh body of a young woman who’s supposed to have been dead for two years. Some sicko calling himself the Warlock hacked a website and the forensic team has brought along a ground radar system that costs as much as this jet.

Maybe I do know something.

I unbuckle my seat belt and stand up. I call out to a redheaded woman in an FBI parka who’s standing in the aisle, drinking a cup of coffee and talking to another woman, “How far away is the cemetery from the airport?”

She replies in a polite Southern accent. “About a half hour, darling.”

So we’re headed to a cemetery. There’s no point in high-fiving myself for something everybody else already knew. I guess it should have been obvious. If you’re going to raise the dead, you might as well go to the source.

5

TWO SUVS ARE WAITING for us at the airfield. Danielle, the sweet redhead, finds an FBI jacket in an overhead bin and hands it to me as I exit the plane. On the ride to the cemetery I answer a few of her polite questions. Nobody is talking about where we’re going. The driver, a special agent out of the field office named Shannon, tells us we’re going to get a briefing at the location.

He looks to be in his late thirties. He’s got a muscular build and a shaved head. His eyes occasionally flicker back at me from the rearview mirror. He’s asked me twice who assigned me here. I explain that I’ve been sent as an adviser, but decline to explain why. I already feel out of place.

The sun has gone down and the sky is filled with dark, slate-colored clouds. Drab houses with lawns of yellow weeds give way to concrete and corrugated-metal buildings set back in cracked black asphalt and gravel yards. There’s a light rain that makes the roads slick. We pass through a bend in the road, and the red and blue lights of the emergency vehicles parked on either side come into view. Two television news trucks are across the street with their microwave masts pointed to their towers back near the city.