“No,” he says quickly.

Peter studies him. “I’m going to call the police now.”

“No, you can’t, please, please,” Grant says.

“So you have been threatened?”

“No. I asked you to figure out where the email came from…”

“That. Yeah.” For a moment Peter seems to forget about calling the police. “So here’s what I did. I sent an HTML-formatted email with an image of you in it as a reply—I found a picture on my dad’s computer from the last barbecue we had at your parents’ house. You’re making a face at the camera. I copied the image to a server where I have administrative access at one of Dad’s companies. I sent it to the Gmail address. And I waited. That image is a little trap.”

Grant waits, hoping for an explanation, not sure what it all means. Peter smiles again.

“So our friend the Sender opens the email and the image loads. The Sender’s web browser sent a ‘GET’ request to my web server, trying to pull that image of you. I can check the logs to see the IP address of the Sender because he opened the email—the address of their computer on the internet, not their physical address. You understand?”

Grant nods again.

“So the email got opened. We were lucky. The Sender wasn’t using a virtual private network to obfuscate his or her location.”

“So where is the Sender?”

“I looked up the IP address. Whoever is sending you these emails is in Saint Petersburg, Russia.”

“Who is it?” Grant whispers.

“I used an IP registry to see what company in Saint Petersburg owns the IP address. They’ve not responded yet. They may not. I hear the Russians are not always cooperative. I told them that the person had been contacting a minor, though. That might make a difference. Assuming they even bother to read an email sent in English.”

Grant feels as though he’s been punched in the gut. “I was born near Saint Petersburg… Why would anyone have a CIA spy program on my computer and be sending me this stuff?” Grant’s voice shakes. I’ll have to talk to the police about the bad thing your dad did. What if his infected computer had infected Dad’s laptop? He’d copied something off Dad’s laptop not a month ago. And maybe Dad had something incriminating on his own computer, and now this person knew about it…

“Have you or your parents ever gone back to Russia?” Peter asks.

“No.”

“Did your parents have an enemy there?”

“No.” But…he doesn’t really know that, does he? An enemy? Who has an enemy?

“One other explanation. The CIA has been known to hack bad guys and mislead them into thinking the attack came from Russia. I can’t imagine why, but that’s the other possibility. Do your parents have any ties to the CIA?”