A Girl Named Digit by Annabel Monaghan Read Free Book Online Page A

Miami and Vegas.”
    I had a feeling that either John had nothing else to do (which was unlikely given the length of the Fruitcake Line outside his door), or he thought this was a fun diversion.
    We printed out Creepy’s face and went up three flights to what passed for their CSI lab. It differed from TV in two major ways: first, it was populated by both attractive
and
unattractive people and, second, the lights were on. All the way.
    John took our photo and scanned it into one of the workstations, typed some stuff in, and said, “Now we wait. This could take a while. Our system has over one million . . .”
Beep.
A match.
    And there it was—a profile shot of Creepy, right next to the parking garage shot.
    “Jonas Furnis.” John was staring, stunned, at the screen. “Time to call my boss.”

Got Issues?
     
    John pulled out his phone to arrange for someone to cover the Fruitcake Room. Then he called his boss and asked if he could meet with him urgently.
    Now this was the attention I’d been waiting for. He definitely believed me, and I was definitely thrown a little off-kilter by it. We took a third elevator bank, more fingerprint reading, to get to the boss’s office.
    Steven Bonning was sitting behind his desk, banging furiously on his computer keyboard. His desk was covered with precariously stacked paper, coffee cups, and a half-eaten hot dog. He looked about fifty and in need of a comb. “What is it, John?” The fact that a teenage girl was also standing there did not seem to register.
    “Steven, this is Farrah Higgins. She seems to have discovered a terror cell working in L.A. that may have been responsible for the events at JFK this week. They appear to be connected to Jonas Furnis.”
    I straightened a little, waiting for the confetti to start falling from the ceiling. “Well, it was nothing. I mean, I was glad I could . . .”
    John jumped in and recounted in his robot’s voice the events of the past few days, starting with the code on my TV and ending with the Creepy match. John and his boss looked at each other meaningfully and did not say a word.
    Steven stayed seated behind his desk; in fact, he hadn’t really moved since John started talking. He looked very calm except for a single bead of sweat that dripped down the left side of his face.
    Silence is so awkward, isn’t it? I jumped in. “So you guys have his picture and his name, you even know where he works, so I guess you should go arrest him, then? This Jonas guy, I mean.”
    Steven smiled a little sadly at my naiveté. “It doesn’t really work like that. He would be aware of being identified. He is gone by now; family moved away by the morning; TV operation wiped clean of anything incriminating.” He spoke slowly and punctuated each sentence with the strangest tic: after each phrase he shook his shoulders twice in a way that seemed almost involuntary and then punched his left fist into his right. Shudder, shudder, punch. I’m no expert, but it seemed like this guy could benefit from some hypno-relaxation techniques.
    John added, “And this guy isn’t Jonas Furnis himself. He’s a known terror operative working within the Jonas Furnis organization.”
    “What’s Jonas Furnis?” I asked, though I had a feeling I really didn’t want to know.
    John answered. “Jonas Furnis himself has not been spotted in over seven years and is presumed to be dead. He’s the son of groundbreaking environmentalists who did a lot of work in the mountains of Colorado in the early eighties. They both died of cancer in their fifties, leaving Jonas Furnis alone and committed to waging war against the environmental toxins that he believed were responsible for their deaths. He was in and out of jail for arson at several small manufacturing plants that didn’t meet EPA standards during the mid-nineties. Those arrests won him a huge following, which has grown and evolved into a major eco-terror organization. Over the past ten years, they have moved into