1
Day One
Traffic was light in the late evening, so DC’s national landmarks flashed past in rapid succession on Constitution Avenue: the Lincoln Memorial, the World War II Memorial, the Washington Monument, the Capitol. Under a fluorescent moon on a cold, cloudless January night, all that white marble looked downright funereal. Or maybe it just seemed that way because FBI special agent Lisa Tanchik was on her way to a crime scene.
As she drove north into Maryland with few cars on the highway, her thoughts replayed the day’s events, which had started with the class on cybercrime investigation that she had taught that morning at Quantico and concluded with a couple of bureaucratic skirmishes over her pursuit of a phishing ring. Today had been one of her dark days, when she watched life happening to her like a patient under anesthesia. Her depression was so constant a nemesis that she had given it a nickname, the Black Dog, a phrase borrowed from Winston Churchill. She imagined Black Dog curled in the passenger seat now, rising to sniff the air occasionally when the car jostled him.
She lifted her coffee from the cup holder and took a couple of strong sips. When she’d received the call to this scene, she’d been at her Dupont Circle home with her boyfriend, midway through her third glass of wine. Jon had questioned whether she was in any shape to take the call, but Lisa would not be dissuaded.
This was her first lead in months on a hacker whom she had been pursuing.
And now the hacker had graduated to murder.
On dark days like these, it helped to have a problem to work, so she thought about what she knew so far about the crime (next to nothing) and the likely perpetrator (quite a lot). She reviewed everything that she knew about the MO and characteristics of the hacker she had been pursuing for nearly a year. She wanted the details to be fresh in her mind when she reached the scene.
At 11:35 p.m., she parked in front of a faux-colonial apartment complex in Columbia, Maryland. Columbia was a bedroom community south of Baltimore and about thirteen miles from Fort Meade, the headquarters of the National Security Agency. A lucky break had brought her there. Lisa had issued a law enforcement alert for a very distinctive MO, and an officer with the Howard County Police Department had been diligent enough to read it and generous enough to alert her while the scene was still fresh.
Lisa downed the rest of her coffee, popped three breath mints, and stepped out of the car and into the cold.
The lights were all on in the apartment complex’s lobby. A young uniformed officer was questioning the manager. The officer looked up at the frigid blast of wind as Lisa pushed through the door.
“You’re FBI?” He sounded a little disappointed, like she didn’t live up to his expectation of what someone from the bureau should look like.
“Special Agent Lisa Tanchik. They’re expecting me.”
“I’ll walk you over.” Then, to the apartment manager: “Could you wait here for a minute? We’re almost done.”
The manager jerked his head, a tense nod. Lisa couldn’t tell if he was nervous about being in proximity to death or law enforcement. It was often difficult to distinguish the difference.
“So you’ve seen this sort of thing before?” the officer asked.
“Maybe. I’ll know better once I get a look. The voice mail I got from your boss didn’t provide many details.”
“Well, I’ve never seen anything like it,” he murmured.
There was another uniformed officer standing in front of the entrance to a two-story redbrick town house apartment. The door to unit C16 was closed, and there was already a strip of yellow crime scene tape across the doorway.
“She’s from the FBI,” the young officer said. “Special Agent—Tanchik?” He glanced at her for confirmation.
Lisa nodded.
When the door opened, the first thing she noticed was the lurid lighting. The small otherwise-dim living room pulsed with the bright white of a strobe. It had an immediate and disorienting effect.
The source of the flashing was the large computer monitor on a desk in the left corner of the room. A middle-aged man was splayed on the carpet nearby, his body twisted and back arched like a parenthesis, fists clenched. Lisa shielded her eyes. Murder scenes were always grim, but the harsh light, flashing at high frequency, added a particularly nightmarish quality. Along the rear wall, a large window looked down on a heated swimming pool from which spectral steam rose.
A man in a suit and overcoat who’d been standing near the window approached. He had a gray-flecked, close-shaved beard. The suit indicated that he was the homicide detective in charge of the scene.
He extended his hand. “Glad you could get here so quickly. I’m Detective Dexter Smalls.” He nodded to the flashing computer. “This look familiar to you?”
“It does.”
“This is some fucked-up shit.”
“Yes it is.”
“I didn’t want to touch it until you’d had a chance to take a look.”
“Thanks.” Lisa approached the monitor.
She pulled a yellow Post-it note from a pad on the desk and stuck it over the computer’s webcam.
“Why did you do that?” asked Smalls.
“Because for all we know the attacker has control of the webcam and is watching us right now. I’m also going to turn off the microphone.”
“Crap,” Smalls said. “You think that’s a real possibility?”
“I’d say it’s more likely than not.”
Although there was a dead body on the carpet only a few feet away, for Lisa the circuit board and other components encased in brushed chrome were the true crime scene. The killer would not have left any fibers or latent prints in the apartment, but that didn’t mean that there weren’t any clues to her identity.
After disabling the computer’s mic, Lisa turned her attention to the email attachment that was the source of the strobing light. She only glanced at it for a second, but it was enough to momentarily blind her, leaving an afterimage of green splotches swelling in her vision.
This was the same type of weaponized GIF that had been used in half a dozen other attacks that she had investigated, all of them aimed at victims who had been diagnosed with epilepsy. The victims had been tricked into clicking on the attachment, activating the strobe, and possibly inducing an epileptic seizure.
Her investigation, which was supervised by Special Agent in Charge Pam Gilbertson in the San Francisco field office, had begun nearly a year ago when the first strobe attachment had been sent to a journalist who had written several investigative pieces on white nationalist movements. There were no apparent links between the victims, except that they had all been journalists or strident political voices, whether from the Left or the Right. That told Lisa that the attacker was not an ideologue, but rather someone intent on deepening the divisions within the nation—and willing to kill to advance that objective.
In half of those cases, the strobe had failed to cause the desired effect. In three other cases, nonfatal seizures had been induced. It had been three months since the last attack, and this was the first fatality.
John Rosenthal had been very unlucky.
The strobe was designed to be difficult to deactivate, but Lisa had enough experience with the exploit to know how to turn it off. With a few keystrokes, she returned the room to its original dimly lit state.