Page 108 of Mastermind

I recognize the voice. It’s Gerald Voigt’s.

I don’t stop fighting. I have no idea what his intentions are.

“Jessica got your message! We’re here to get you out.” He throws a backpack to my feet. “Put this on.”

The men holding me release my arms and let my body drop. After I stop putting up a fight, one of them uses a key to unlock my restraints.

“What’s going on?” I ask.

“No time. Put the armor on,” says Gerald.

I strip off my prison uniform and climb into the black jumpsuit from the bag and start slipping on the armored vest. The other men put the boots on my feet and lace them up.

A mask and helmet are placed on my head, and I’m ushered through the door they entered, escorted amid an armored phalanx. We reach a stairwell and race up three floors. Each time I stumble, a steady hand props me back to my feet.

Another armed man is waiting at the top of the stairs. He pushes open a door, and the cool night wind blows through, touching the exposed parts of my face.

I forgot what the world smells like. I stop for a second, only to be shoved along.

Outside, there’s a Black Hawk helicopter with its rotors spinning. A hand pushes my head down, and I’m guided through the aircraft’s side door. The other men climb inside, and a moment later we’re aloft.

Out the helicopter’s window, flashing lights illuminate the prison grounds as alarm bells continue to chime. I take off my helmet, and Gerald hands me an intercom headset so I can hear him over the noise of the helicopter.

“Like I said, we got your message,” Gerald tells me over the comms. “We didn’t know where you had been transferred until then. We’d also got intel that said a hit had been put out on your life. When we contacted the warden of the facility and asked for protective custody, he said he had no record of you being there. We were able to get a judge to give us an emergency court order to remand you to FBI custody.”

The adrenaline starts to fade, and I feel my heart rate go back to normal. “I figured I was about to be killed.”

“You were right,” says Gerald. “We have an intercepted phone call from the warden to one of the leaders of the Aryan Nation. They were gonna put you in general population in the morning. You would have been dead by afternoon.”

I nod.

“Heywood wanted you dead.”

I nod again. “I’ll explain why.”

“We’ll debrief you at headquarters. I don’t know if these microphones are monitored.” Gerald glances at the cockpit, letting me know he doesn’t trust the men running the retrieval not to tell others what we discuss. “I’d also like to know how you were able to send us an email with your location from the most secure supermax prison on the planet.”

When we’re in a secure place, I’ll show him the markings I clawed into my arm: x9x.us/escape

One of my greatest fears is having all my weapons and secret tools taken away from me.

But my greatest fear of all is losing contact with the outside world.

Before I set out to catch N2, the serial killer nurse, I created several safeguards in case I found myself in difficult situations. One of them was a computer system that would allow me to make contact with anyone I wanted to reach, even when I couldn’t access a computer myself.

The secret was to get someone else to send the message for me. While none of my captors would ever do this willingly, they might do it unwittingly. Especially if I used their curiosity against them. In this case it would be their desire to understand the message I’d written, a seemingly innocuous URL for a website.

If I were your prisoner and you found out that I’d scratched a mysterious URL on my arm, wouldn’t you want to know where it led?

x9x.us is a website I set up on a server that records every single network request sent to it and the location of who sent it. When you go there, all you see is a standard “Coming soon” placeholder, but behind the scenes it’ll perform different functions depending upon what instruction follows the slash mark.

x9x.us/attack90 will launch a denial-of-service attack against whoever accessed the URL ninety minutes after they try to access it.

x9x.us/911 will look up the address of the sender and have a robotic voice make a call to the local 911 dispatch.

x9x.us/files will load a script onto the host computer and quietly upload its entire hard drive to the server.

x9x.us/escape sent an email to a short list of people that included the location from which the request was sent and a message from me saying that I might be in trouble.