Free The Keepers of the Library by Glenn Cooper

into drugs, Mr. Piper?”
    He shrugged. “Couldn’t tell you.”
    The agent sniffed it. “There’s residue.”
    “Shocking,” Will said.
    “You never smelled it coming from his room?”
    “I live in Florida. I’m not here much.”
    The agent looked down his nose. “I see.”
    The other agent asked what SocMedia sites the kid used. FB? Socco? Light Saber?
    Will asked him which ones had 3-D images.
    All of them, was the incredulous reply, as if he were a caveman for asking.
    Through a Q&A process about Will’s recollection of sites from the times he’d seen Phillip online, the agent decided he used Socco. He unfurled his own NetPen to find Phillip’s public page. After Nancy confirmed she hadn’t a clue about his logon ID, the agent obtained an e-summons from a federal duty judge and shot it to Socco security. The whole well-worn judicial process took less than an hour before the agent was on Phillip’s private pages.
    “Bingo!” he said with brass in his voice. “He was chatting with someone new to him named Hawkbityesterday afternoon at 2:35. At 2:42, they were tunneling.”
    “What the hell is that?” Will asked.
    The agent showed him little deference and less patience. “You haven’t kept up with things, have you, Mr. Piper.”
    “I try not to, Special Agent—are you Finnerty or Johnson?”
    “Johnson,” he replied sharply.
    “You need name tags. You look like twins.”
    “Tunneling is a hacker term for using a key-management-encryption system for ultraprivate NetChats. Using anything more than a 604-bit-key elliptic-curve algorithm is illegal since we can’t break it.”
    “Oh,” Will said blankly.
    “Hello!” Agent Johnson said suddenly. “He used a 620-bit key. That’s a potential crime, Mr. Piper. It’s a big no-no, and I suspect your son knew it.”
    “Whatever you say, pal. Are you telling me you can’t decipher it?”
    “Not a chance.”
    “And any fifteen-year-old can get it off the Net?”
    “The world we live in,” the other agent said. “The terrorists are like pigs in shit with tunneling. We break the keys, the hackers keep coming up with longer ones.”
    “Show me the stuff you
can
read. From this Hawkbit.”
    Will read the chat transcription. Hawkbit was a girl. Huge surprise.
    Nancy burst in with Linda Ciprian. “They found his car! It’s at the long-term parking garage at the International Terminal at Dulles.”
    “Is anyone checking the airlines?” Will asked.
    “We’re all over it,” Ciprian said.
    “Nancy, he was online with someone he met yesterday who called herself Hawkbit,” Will said. “She read his essay and told him he was the only one she could trust. Then they tunneled, which I just learned is …”
    “I know what tunneling is,” Nancy said.
    “Looks like I’m the odd man out. My guess is this Hawkbit called, and our Phillip answered.”
    Nancy was surfing her Pen. “Find Hawkbit.” She held up the thin screen and showed him a picture of a yellow, daisylike wildflower. “They grow in Europe, parts of Asia, Australia, and New Zealand.”
    Will sighed. “Well, twenty-eight hundred bucks will get him just about anywhere in the world, at least one way. He didn’t even leave us a note! When I find him, I swear, I’m going to beat the stuffing out of him.”
    “Do you have the IP address of Hawkbit?” Nancy asked Johnson.
    “We’re working on it,” he said. “It looks like it’s offshore. We’ll need an international warrant.”
    “Get a judge and get a signature,” she barked.
    I n short order they learned that Phillip had boarded United Flight 57 from Dulles to Heathrow which had departed at 8:20 the previous night. He’d paid for a round-trip open-return ticket with cash. The flight had landed at 8:30 A.M. in London so he had a nine-hour head start on them. It didn’t look like he’d taken a connecting flight so the presumption was that he was still in the UK though a dash to the Continent via the Chunnel or ferry