“I got two kids out there, somewhere, and I can’t raise them,” she said, holding up the bloody phone she had taken from Lisa Carver. “I’m scared to death for them. I want to know what’s made those cars lose their minds, and I want to know what you’re doing to make them stop.”

Ruskin forced a swallow, his Adam’s apple a marble moving below the skin of his leathery neck.

“I don’t know,” he said, looking Sandra in the eye.

“You don’t know what?”

“I don’t know how to stop them and neither do our tech people. That’s who I was talking to. It’s happening all over. Arrivals all over the country have gone haywire. It’s just . . . it’s just a whole lot worse here, on the island, since there are so many.”

“Do they know how it happened?” Sandra asked.

Ruskin broke eye contact. “No. Not . . . definitely. There are theories.”

“And what’s yours?”

He looked down. “A virus. A ransomware attack, maybe.”

“How would someone do that?”

Ruskin raised his hands, palms out, to shoulder level. “Can you give me a little space here?”

Sandra took half a step back.

“The security protocols are changed daily,” he said.

“Okay,” Sandra said. “So what does that mean?”

“It means anyone wanting access to the system would need to know the protocols for that specific day. And it was Lisa—Ms. Carver—who changed them, who inputted them.”

“Isn’t that kind of weird?”

“What do you mean?”

“The head of the company doing a task like that? I mean, wouldn’t that be a job for someone in your security or tech division? That’s like asking the head of General Motors to be the guy who turns out the lights in the plant every night.”

“She didn’t trust anyone else to do it,” he said. “Not after what happened with the Gandalf. Lisa was worried about retaliation.”

“Why? Because she was actually responsible?”

Ruskin shook his head, dismissing the question. “What matters is there were people who believed she was, and she had to protect herself. She didn’t trust anyone else to make the changes but herself.”

“Not even you?” Sandra asked.

Ruskin hesitated. “I was . . . one of the few that she trusted with that, yes.”

“So would she have done those new protocols for today—would she have done them here?”

“Yes. She’d have had to. She had her computer with her. In that pitiful green room you set up.”

“Really?” Sandra sneered. “You want to complain about the green room now?”

Ruskin looked away again.

“There must be some way these ransomware hackers could get into the system, from Russia or wherever.”

Ruskin slowly shook his head. “I don’t see how.”

Sandra sighed with exasperation. “Except someone did do it.” An idea occurred to her. “What if someone didn’t hack in?”

“What do you mean?”