01-01-00 Read Free Page A

peace descending on her.
    â€œSoon,” she whispered, her catlike eyes glaring at the framed picture on the small shelf over the toilet. “Soon it won’t matter anymore.”
    The slim gun fit comfortably in the palm of her right hand, which remained steady, like a surgeon’s. With surprising calmness, Susan stared at her late husband’s backup weapon, the one he’d always carried in an ankle holster while on duty at the Department of the Treasury, the same gun he had used to teach her how to shoot at a range in Virginia. The well-oiled PPK reflected the overheads as Susan slowly pointed the muzzle at the ceiling before placing it under her chin, remembering a story her husband had told her about a fellow agent who’d killed himself “the right way.” The officer had done it in the bathtub to avoid making a mess. He’d also used only one cartridge in the semiautomatic. When he’d fired it, the recoiling slide had extracted and ejected the spent case, but a new round had not been chambered, leaving behind a safe weapon instead of a loaded one. Lastly, the officer had fired the gun under his chin instead of against his temple, where the skull could deflect the round, preventing it from inflicting the desired fatal blow.
    Susan closed her eyes, recalling that dreadful morning almost two years ago. She remembered Rebecca singing in the backseat while Tom checked his daily planner. She’d always dropped Rebecca at preschool first, then Tom at his work, before driving herself to the computer science building at Georgetown University to teach her daily classes.
    The thirty-five-year-old woman began to cry, tears streaming down her cheeks. She could still see the curved exit ramp, the rear bumper of a car suddenly appearing in her field of view. She felt the initial impact, airbags blossoming with the sound of a gunshot, the sky and the ground swapping places as the minivan went over the edge. Then nothing. She could remember absolutely nothing, until she’d awakened from a deep coma.
    â€œAnd into a nightmare that ends—”
    The phone rang in the bedroom. She frowned at the intrusion but ignored it, keeping her eyes closed, fixing her index finger over the trigger, feeling the familiar resistance of the firing mechanism, knowing just how much pressure the PPK required to fire the cartridge. For the past two years she had controlled her suicidal thoughts by going to the shooting range and imagining that the paper silhouette hanging from the track was—
    The phone rang a second time. The answering machine picked it up on the third ring.
    Her index finger tensed over the trigger as she listened to her own voice in the greeting, followed by three short beeps.
    â€œPick up, Sue. I know you’re home.”
    She frowned at Troy Reid’s voice echoing in her small apartment in downtown Washington. Reid, an old hand at the Bureau, ran the FBI’s high-tech crime unit. Susan was one of his top analysts. Following the accident and her release from the hospital, Susan had switched careers, opting to devote all of her energy and skills to catching hackers, starting with the elusive David Canek, also known as Hans Bloodaxe, the man responsible for her family’s death. She had immersed herself in her work as a way to forget the pain, the memories, the faces. As a way to purge her mind from a past that was simply too painful to remember, forcing all of her energy into achieving her personal vendetta. For months she’d set up traps at thousands of Internet service providers (ISPs) in the hope of finding her hacker. She’d eventually caught Bloodaxe with one of her software traps, buried deep inside an ISP in Portland, Oregon. Susan had also nailed over a hundred hackers in just under two years with the Bureau, earning a sterling reputation as top cybercop. But all of the fame and recognition didn’t prevent her from spiraling into a deep depression after