Power and Empire

The North Texas Crimes Against Children Task Force was housed in a nondescript hangar leased by the Federal Bureau of Investigation on the northeast side of Dallas Love Field Airport. The three agents that made up the ICAC — or the Internet portion of the Crimes Against Children Task Force — worked at a bank of computers in a windowless area with their backs to the far wall. These two women and one burly man — all parents themselves — spent much of their workday posing as children, engaged in online conversation with some of the sickest minds on the planet. It was a target-rich environment — with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children estimating 75,000 would-be traders in child pornography online at any given time.

The ICAC workstations were purposely situated with their backs to the walls, giving them some semblance of security and allowing them to look up and view a glimpse of the seminormal life of their brothers- and sisters-in-arms in the bullpen just a few yards away.

The CAC Task Force Commander, FBI Special Agent Kelsey Callahan, didn’t believe in separate offices. If her team was going to wade through the river of shit that the perverts they hunted caused, they should do it together as a unified group. She did, however, put her desk at the head of the open bullpen so she’d have direct access to the whiteboard behind her.

No straitlaced Betty Bureau Blue Suit, Special Agent Callahan wore a Neiman Marcus silk blouse in subtle pink and stonewashed jeans over hips that she wished were a smidge smaller, but that were still small enough so as to make the .40-caliber Glock 23 in the holster on her belt look huge. Her instructors at Quantico had called her curly copper ponytail a “murder handle.” She considered chopping it off for the academy, but she’d had long hair since high school — and besides, she needed to cling to every last vestige of femininity in this overly masculine profession. Callahan resolved early on to unleash nine kinds of hell on anyone who got close enough to even touch her hair — and went on to prove that resolve to an exuberant defensive tactics instructor who thought he’d teach her the error of her thinking and grabbed her from behind. She’d dislocated her own shoulder but ruptured the instructor’s testicle. Her injuries saw her recycled into the next class of NATs — New Agent Trainees — but the badass reputation that followed her into her career was worth repeating three weeks of training. The reputation of being what Texas Department of Public Safety sergeant Derrick Bourke called “a half a bubble off plumb” only added to her success leading the North Texas CAC Task Force.

Sergeant Bourke’s desk was to the immediate right of Callahan’s, facing the bullpen, but the forty-year-old trooper and father of three now stood beside her, looking over her shoulder at the files on the screen of the standalone laptop at her desk.

It was Sergeant Bourke who had brought her the USB drive, retrieved the night before by a trooper posted to Mansfield. Department of Public Safety computer gurus had run all manner of diagnostics to check the drive for viruses. FBI techs had double- and triple-checked it for remote access Trojans, ransomware, and other viruses. Even after the device had been pronounced free from malware, FBI higher-ups still directed it only be inserted into a computer with the modem disabled and not attached to any network.

Bourke leaned in, his hand on Callahan’s desk. “Looks like some kind of spreadsheet,” he said. “Accounting records maybe… and encrypted notes.”

The FBI agent scrolled upward, nodding. “Not encrypted,” she said. “Coded. We can open them. We just can’t tell what they mean. I see the word ‘coronet’ a lot. Mean anything to you?”

“Nope.”

Callahan mused as she scrolled, as much to herself as to Bourke. “I’m not finding anything to give us a location of this Eddie Feng bastard. After what Blanca Limón told me about him, I really, really want to find this guy.” She leaned back in her chair and looked up at the sergeant. “I’ll let the organized-crime squads figure out the rest of the trash on this thumb drive. What I do need is to have a little chat with the guy who pays for sex with a little girl as young as Blanca. According to her, there’s another girl, a friend of hers named”—Callahan looked at the printed FBI 302 beside her laptop—“Magdalena Rojas. The guy your trooper killed dropped Magdalena at some creepy mansion in the country. She is at this very moment being made to do God knows what. If we find this Eddie Feng and squeeze him a little, maybe, just maybe, we can find her.” Callahan took a breath, as if she was coming up for air. Bourke, who was used to her passion, stood by and listened.