Maggie K. Black - Amish Hideout

FOURTEEN

FIFTEEN

SIXTEEN

SEVENTEEN

EIGHTEEN

Extract

About the Publisher

Time was running out for Celeste Alexander. Her sneakered feet tapped on the floor beneath the desk. Her fingers flew over the keyboard so quickly it seemed more like a rapid dance than typing, knowing each keystroke could be her last before US Marshal Jonathan Mast arrived to escort her to her new life in the witness protection program. The early-morning sky lay dark over wintery Pennsylvania farmland outside the safe house window. She knew she should sleep. After all, she had no idea how long the journey ahead would be until she finally reached the small apartment in Pittsburgh that would be her new home for the months until she testified at Dexter Thomes’s trial.

It had been almost two weeks since an evil but genius computer hacker, who went by the online handle “Poindexter,” had stolen tens of millions of dollars out of the bank accounts of thousands of ordinary Americans in one of the largest bank heists in history, without even leaving his chair. But she’d found him and now he sat in a jail cell, thanks to a single curious thread that Celeste had started following online. When she’d gathered all the evidence she could, she’d tipped off the feds, and Dexter had been arrested. News had quickly spread through the online community that a self-employed computer programmer—a blonde, twenty-six-year-old woman, no less—had uncovered the true identity of the criminal the feds’ best minds hadn’t been able to find.

But the stolen money still hadn’t been recovered. The thought of letting a single one of those people wake up one more day with an empty bank account was unthinkable. Not while there was something she could do about it. She frowned. The battery was down to less than 10 percent and she’d forgotten the charging cable in the room upstairs where she’d slept last night.

“You gave her a laptop?” The voice of US Marshal Stacy Preston came sharply from somewhere behind her. “Please tell me you didn’t let her go online. The last thing we need is another misguided Poindexter fan trying to come after her and keep her from testif—”

“Really? You think I joined the service yesterday?” US Marshal Karl Adams shot back even before Stacy had finished her sentence. From what Celeste had seen, those two didn’t talk so much as volley sentences back and forth like some kind of verbal tennis match. “Of course not! She had a basic tablet with the internet capability disabled, and after scanning it for bugs, I let her borrow a keyboard.”

“And you didn’t think to check with me?”

“You were asleep!” Karl said. “Do you check every decision you make with me while you’re the one on lookout? It’s got zero internet capability. It’s not like I gave her a cell phone.”

Celeste gritted her teeth, blocked out the verbal sparring of the two US marshals in the room behind her and their sporadic walkie-talkie exchanges with the other marshals positioned around the remote property, and focused her eyes on the text streaming down the screen. Dexter might be in jail. But this would never truly be over. Not until the stolen money was found.

She breathed the prayer and kept typing, ignoring the red low-battery warning. Three days ago, she’d been seconds away from alerting the feds of her crazy suspicion that the unemployed college dropout she’d been digging into online was in fact Poindexter himself, when she’d felt what she thought was God prompting her to first download a complete backup copy of every line of code of his she could see. It had been the right move. By the time the feds broke down his door, Dexter’s machines had been wiped clean. But if the feds had found anything in the data she’d recovered, she hadn’t heard. Already she could see patterns in the data, though. Many sequences were eight or nine numbers long. Maybe phone numbers and social security numbers? If almost fifteen years of computer programing had taught her anything it was that nothing was ever truly random, no matter how it seemed. In the same way, there was always method and order in what God called her to do. At least, that was how she chose to see it and that was the hope she’d clung to when her apartment went up in a ball of flames.

She’d had no idea just how high a price she’d end up paying when Dexter had shot her a single flippant and cocky message on an online forum about Poindexter’s crime. She’d almost ignored it. The online world was a minefield filled with the kind of rude men who seemed to like insulting women for kicks. But something about the glowing way he’d referred to Poindexter in his posts made her suspect he was more than just an admirer of his. So, she’d figured out a way to track him down and followed the right lines of code to prove her hunch was right.

Finding him was the easy part. Getting over her own doubts had been harder. After all, she was a nobody—a freelance computer programmer living on her own in a tiny downtown Philadelphia apartment, taking on small projects while she looked for a full-time job and saved up her pennies to one day move out to the country and have a house of her own. The feds had promised her that she could remain anonymous. But even from behind bars, Dexter had other plans. Within hours of his arrest, her identity had been posted online and her entire nest egg had disappeared from her bank account. Two days later her apartment had exploded just as she’d been steps away from walking through the door. Now, less than twenty-four hours after losing everything but the clothes on her back and the contents of her purse, she sat in a Pennsylvania safe house, clinging to her belief that this was somehow still all part of God’s plan for her life.

The two US marshals behind her seemed to be fiddling with their walkie-talkies. Not that she could make out much of their actual words, just the clicks of them fiddling with the dials and switching channels, and a low murmur of concerned conversation.

“Is everything okay?” Celeste turned and looked over her shoulder, suddenly feeling very aware of her long blond hair as it brushed against her neck and shoulders. Would they make her cut it? Would they make her wear colored contacts to hide the natural green of her eyes? Would she ever be able to go back to writing computer code? Just how much about her life was going to change?

Stacy and Karl exchanged a glance. The pair had been the ones who’d picked her up from the Philadelphia police station and brought her here. Ginger-haired with a lazy grin, Karl’s more laid-back attitude had seemed to balance Stacy’s more focused approach, despite the fact the there was an odd tension between them, like cats with static electricity. Right now, both of them were frowning.

“Marshal Mast is running late,” Stacy said. She brushed her fingers along her temple and tucked a wisp of chestnut hair back into her tight French braid. “We haven’t been able to reach him. But at last check-in, Marshal Cormac, who’s patrolling the perimeter, reported that nothing seemed off.”

“Jonathan’s phone probably died.” A professional smile brushed Karl’s square-jawed face, and Celeste had the distinct impression he was doing it to be reassuring. “He’s technophobic, by the way. So whatever you’re working on, you’d better get it done before he gets here, because it’s possible he’ll make you give up the tablet.”

He couldn’t. Could he? She’d disabled its internet capability herself, and no one had touched it but her and the feds. It was as harmless as a piece of technology could be. The walkie-talkies crackled again. The marshals went back to talking in hushed whispers. She blocked them out, along with that old familiar nagging headache that always started in her temples before slowly spreading through her shoulders and arms until the very tips of her fingers seemed to ache. If US Marshal Jonathan Mast was technophobic, then she’d just have to outrace him and find where Dexter had hidden the money before he got there.