“Please,” Schrader sobbed, his chest heaving. “Please. No more.”
Sloat stepped in closer, so Schrader could see his face. “We don’t want to do more, guy. This is no fun for us. Just tell us how to shut down those videos and we’re done. You get a nice warm bed—dry bed—and no more of this shit. Okay?”
“I told you,” Schrader said, crying. “I can’t shut it down! I can only reset it. Oh, God, I wish I could shut it down, I wish I could, I wish I could, please, no more, please don’t do it anymore, please . . .”
“Shhh,” Sloat said, patting him on the shoulder. “Shhh. Tell you what, we’ll take a little break.” He looked at Tyson. “Stay with him. I’ll be back in a few.”
He went out to the garage and called Rispel from an encrypted burner. She answered instantly. “Did you get it?”
“No,” he said. “Not only did we not get it, I don’t think he has it.”
“What do you mean?”
“What I told you before. He says he set up the system with this kind of scenario in mind. If he doesn’t reset it within a specified time frame, the system uploads whatever it’s programmed to upload.”
“Then get his passcode and reset it yourself. It’ll buy us time, at least.”
“He already gave us the passcode. Twelve-digit number, nothing complicated. But he claims he can only reset it from encrypted keypads installed in his various houses. And—”
“He has a house that can’t be more than a thirty-minute chopper ride from where you’re standing.”
“Look, first, I don’t want to go someplace where US marshals are likely to be looking for him, okay?”
A pause. She said, “What about the other houses?”
“And second, he says the keypad requires biometric credentials. Fingerprint, retina scan—”
“Then take him personally and press his finger and his eyeball wherever they need to go.”
“And a voice-stress analyzer. You get it? We could take him to one of his houses and press his finger and stick his eyeball and whatever else, and put a gun to his head and make him say the magic words, and the voice-stress analyzer is going to say, Fuck off. This guy anticipated duress. And prepared for it.”
There was a pause while she absorbed that. “I’m not buying it,” she said. “Why didn’t his lawyer warn anyone of this?”
Sloat considered that. “You said they let him go six years ago, right?”
“Yes.”
“My guess? They were expecting the same thing would happen this time. Or at least hoping.”
She didn’t respond, which he knew from experience meant she didn’t disagree.
“But then at some point,” he went on, “maybe he sees what happened to that guy Epstein. And decides he needs to be more careful. Some kind of dead-man setup, just in case. Maybe he goes even further, and architects it not just to protect against someone suiciding him, but to ensure everyone’s motivated to get him out of jail ASAP. And to ensure he can’t be under duress. Give the guy credit, it’s clever.”
“Maybe too clever. You don’t think he’s making it up?”
Sloat considered. “While we were boarding him? No.”
“You and I both know people will say anything to make it stop.”
“That’s my point. What he’s telling us isn’t making it stop. It’s making it continue. We’ve done him six times now. He’s crying, he shit himself . . . If he could give a dark web URL where we could log in and use the passcode without him, something like that—I think he would have told us by now.”