Authors: Hallie Ephron
Come and Find Me (18 page)
“Help yourself to more coffee.” She tossed the words over her shoulder. “Our meeting’s not for hours.” She opened the Gamelan presentation template and began to reshape the memo.
A while later she glanced over at Daniel. She recognized the cow-skull logo on the Web site that he was looking at—Cult of the Dead Cow—the online meeting place for hackers worldwide. Daniel had been one of the founders of their Ninja Strike Force, the elitest of the elite.
Soon he was yawning again.
More coffee.
She tried to telegraph the thought.
D
iana took her time over the presentation, fiddling around with transitions and special effects that she’d normally never have messed with, stretching out what should have been a thirty-minute job. Daniel stayed at Cult of the Dead Cow for about a quarter of an hour. Then he opened a window with a bright green background and boxes and lists—probably a system management tool. After that he was in OtherWorld. He projected a combat sim on the curved silo wall. Diana had to turn away to keep from feeling seasick at the 3-D effect. Finally he pumped his fist and the gunfire and explosions stopped.
Then, for a while, there was just clicking and the odd
ding
or
whoosh
. He was probably in e-mail. She heard him yawn. She didn’t look around when he got up to pour himself yet another cup of coffee.
A little while later, Daniel leaned back in his chair, stretched his legs out in front of him, and folded his arms across his chest. He yawned and rubbed his face.
A few minutes later, he started to nod off, jerking awake and then subsiding. Finally he nodded off completely, tilting sideways. Diana waited. And waited.
She was about to get up when he gave a snort and sat up.
Diana pretended she was still working. Daniel had gone through more than half the pot of coffee. There should have been enough Xanax to make the average person comatose. But it would be a fatal mistake to consider Daniel average.
He sat forward, looked around, stretched and yawned, then settled back again. His eyes drifted shut and his head fell sideways. Full stop.
Diana waited, not daring to breathe. Daniel didn’t stir. She cleared her throat. No response. She scraped her chair and coughed. Still he slept.
She walked over to him. With his mouth and his jaw slack, his face completely relaxed and unwired, Diana could see both the man she’d fallen in love with and the one he’d turned into. Then and always, he was so self-centered, so completely focused on whatever mission he’d set himself at a given moment, that he was willing to throw the people who loved him off a virtual cliff.
Once upon a time, Diana had let him mold her, shape her. If she’d been an apt pupil, then losing him wouldn’t have broken her. But she’d allowed herself to depend on him to reflect back her very identity.
She looked around. He’d certainly found the perfect place from which to sow his brand of chaos. The mill was isolated, apparently abandoned, the silo like a bunker with its three-foot-thick walls.
She gazed up the wall, tracking a path connecting a rebar that was just a step up from the mesh floor to one just a few feet higher, to another one, and another, and on up to a rebar within easy reach of the hatch that led to the outside world. For any experienced climber, it wouldn’t be a challenging ascent. No more difficult than the practice wall she’d once trained on—the “baby wall,” Daniel had called it—after she’d mastered her terror of climbing it for the first time.
But climbing even a baby wall, alone and without a safety harness, was suicidal. Just imagining herself, halfway up and untethered, made her want to throw up. Besides, she had no intention of running away.
As she reached past Daniel for his laptop, she heard a sound. It was a faint but precise dinging, as if someone were tapping a key on a miniature xylophone.
Ding-ding-ding. Ding-ding-ding.
It continued, irritating and persistent. Daniel twitched in his sleep. She hovered over him, trying to locate the source. Finally the sound stopped. That’s when she noticed that a message-waiting alert was flashing on his screen. But that hadn’t been where the sound itself originated.
Diana shifted the laptop over to the edge of his Daniel’s worktable and pulled her chair up to it. She clicked on the alert.
The text message that popped open was from Jake. It was a short note, saying that his plane was leaving on time and he was waiting to board at Logan.
Diana replied the way she imagined Daniel would have done, with a simple “A-OK.” Anything fancier and Jake might have realized that the reply hadn’t been written by Daniel. She wanted to convey an impression of business as usual.
But what exactly was their “business as usual”? Compromising data—she got that. But then what? There had to be more to it.
She toggled through Daniel’s open applications, pausing at a bright green network management screen. She stared at the network name at the top of the screen. Volganet. This was where data stolen from MedLogic had been copied. This was where her laptop kept trying to send GPS coordinates, betraying its location.
Damn them. They weren’t working
with
Volganet. They
were
Volganet.
Diana scanned the screen and found a list of users with registered access to Volganet. She scrolled down through the more than thirty entries. JWILSON. BPACKER. PHREAKANOID. ACIDFI. MKATE. It was a mix of hacker handles and conventional user names.
There was SOK0S—that was Daniel. NADIAV was there too. Account status:
LOCKED
.
Next, she navigated through the hierarchies of files on Volganet. At the top level, directory names were short and cryptic. One that caught her eyes was ML. MedLogic? NH and UI. Those could be abbreviations for Neponset Hospital and Unity Insurance—Gamelan clients that had bolted the minute she’d gotten a lead on their hackers.
Diana drilled down, through folders within folders. She felt sick. She’d thought she was such a hotshot security consultant when, in fact, she’d been nothing more than a puppet, a front for Daniel and Jake. They’d taken advantage of the trust she’d built and used her as their Trojan horse. She’d given them unfettered access to these companies’ systems, enabling them to help themselves . . . to what?
Opening some files at random, she found a bill for outpatient treatment; a medical history complete with name, address, and Social Security number; a DNA profile like the one stolen from MedLogic; a lab worker’s personnel file; a cancer patient’s treatment regimen; a script for Paxil.
Her gaze traveled from the computer screen to a pair of servers that sat on the floor. They were good-size computers, about the size of mini-refrigerators, each with drawers stacked on top. Those would contain slots for hard drives, a data farm. All told, she guessed there’d be room for tens of thousands of gigabytes—much more than they needed for any business she’d thought they were in.
How long had she been acting the fool? The dates on some of the folders went back six months. That had been during the time when Daniel was still out of the country, or so he claimed. Was there even a single fact in his supposed time line that she could check?
The mill—the property sale had to have been registered. That she could confirm.
She brought up a map of New Hampshire. She found Mill Village, traced the Merrimack River a few miles north to where she guessed the mill was located. Most likely it was in Merrimack County.
She found the Merrimack County’s online registry of deeds, created an account, and got as far as the inquiry screen. She set a range of 2008–2010 in the
TRANSACTION DATE
field. The only other piece of information she needed was
LAST NAME
.
She knew it was unlikely, but she tried Schechter, Daniel’s last name. No match. Then she tried Jake’s last name, Filgate. Back came a match for a Michele Filgate, but the property listed was on Main Street in Concord. Then she tried Wilson, then Packer, and on through the surnames she’d extracted from the list of system users.
Out of ideas, she tried typing in her own last name.
Bingo.
Diana Highsmith had purchased the four-acre parcel with three vacant industrial buildings for $1,660,000 on . . . Diana blinked . . . August 11, 2008.
Diana felt as if she’d been dropped, the air knocked out of her. Daniel and Jake had used her identity to buy this property four months
before
her life had been shattered by Daniel’s disappearance. They’d been planning, knowing that they’d need a bunker where Daniel could live off the grid.
Now she knew for sure what she’d been afraid to contemplate. There’d been no accident. Daniel hadn’t been free-climbing without a harness. He hadn’t been climbing at all. It was all a sham, orchestrated for her as an audience of one. She felt sick and angry, furious with herself. How could she have loved this man, trusted his friend? She was a complete fool.
Daniel must have started hiking back to civilization as soon as Diana had cleared the first ledge and was safely out of sight. He’d cried out from below and thrown his helmet into the crevasse. She might even have passed near him as she scrambled down, racing to base camp to bring help.
Had he felt even a twinge of regret or pity, or only relief at the baggage he’d shed and excitement at the new opportunities that were about to open up to him?
W
hen Jake had brought her the urn, supposedly from Switzerland and supposedly containing Daniel’s ashes, Diana had finally stepped through a portal from before to after, from together to alone. Holding the urn, she’d realized that she’d never again feel Daniel’s arms around her. Hear his ready laugh when she teased him. Watch pleasure suffuse his face as he enjoyed her body.
Now, looking at Daniel asleep in the chair, his face as tender and vulnerable as a child’s in repose, she wondered if she’d ever really known him at all. If she had, she’d certainly lost him long before he catapulted himself out of her life.
Maybe he’d loved her—for five minutes. But longer than that? He couldn’t love anyone but himself.
One thing was clear: Daniel had never intended to give up hacking. His offer to partner with her and go legit had been a setup designed to gull her into traveling to Switzerland in order to celebrate the transition. He and Jake had had other plans, and she was the witness they needed to make them happen. After that, she’d become the docile, blindfolded helpmate, the princess in the tower whom they needed to bring their plans to fruition.
What could have been worth the betrayal? As if Diana had finally asked the right question, the dinging sound started up again.
“Huh? What happened? Where’s . . . ?” Daniel flailed, looking wildly around the room and tipping sideways, nearly falling out of his chair.
“Whoa, take it easy.” Diana jumped up and grabbed his arm.
Ding-ding-ding.
The sound seemed louder, and Diana spotted the source—barely visible in Daniel’s pocket was the tip of the distinctive plastic arc of his Bluetooth receiver. It occurred to her that though cell phones didn’t get a signal in the silo, his computer probably had a voice messaging program like Skype. He’d need a headset like the Bluetooth in order to hear and talk.
“Di?” Daniel looked at her, confused, his pupils dilated.
As she steadied him, she hooked the receiver and slid it from his pocket, folding it in her hand to muffle the sound. “You just fell asleep,” she said.
“Jesus.” Daniel tried to push himself to his feet but fell back, and all the while the damn thing kept dinging. She fumbled with the receiver until she found the button that turned off the sound and pressed it.
“What the hell’s the matter with me? Feels like . . . feels like . . . I dunno . . .” His words slurred together. “Am I sick?” He touched his face. “My computer. Where . . . ?” He put his hands down in the empty spot on his desk where his keyboard should have been and sat there hunched over, his mouth hanging open.
“You’re not sick. You were just exhausted. You fell asleep practically on top of your keyboard, so I moved it aside. See? It’s right over here.”
Daniel glanced over at it. “Log out. Need to log out,” he muttered. “Need to . . . shut down.”
“You already did that.”
“Did I?”
“Remember? Right before you fell asleep. Come on. You need to lie down and rest.”
She wasn’t sure he’d heard her. But then he licked his lips and nodded.
She helped him sit on the floor. “You want to work all night, you should at least put a mattress or a couch in here,” she said.
“Mmmm.” He crossed his legs like a little kid sitting at a campfire. “Jake?”
“He’s in Maryland. For the meeting with Vault?”
“Oh, yeah.” He started to tip sideways. Stopped and looked at her. “What time is it?”
“We have plenty of time. The meeting’s not for another couple of hours.”
“But I need to . . .” Again he tried to push himself up. He was like the blow-up clown toy she’d once had that kept bobbing upright no matter how many times you smacked it down.
“I’ve got it under control. We’ll be ready,” Diana said.
“But . . .” He mumbled something unintelligible.
She knelt beside him and wrapped her arm around him. He smiled and gave her leg a weak squeeze. Rank, coffee-scented breath rose to meet her.
“You don’t need to worry,” she said. “I’m finishing up the presentation. Adding some material I researched. Enumerating the benefits and assessing the downside of doing nothing.” She went on, making it up as she went, allowing her voice to rise and fall in a gentle rhythm like this was a bedtime story. “Don’t worry about Jake. He’s probably in the air. I checked. There’s no weather to speak of in Baltimore. Looks like his plane is scheduled to land on time.”
She went on and on, inventing status updates. Little by little she felt Daniel go limp. She eased him the rest of the way down onto the floor. He turned over and curled up. She took off her jacket, folded it, and slid it under his head.
Then she waited. Daniel’s eyes were closed. His breathing evened out. When his computer beeped, she slowly got to her feet and went over to it. Another message-waiting alert had popped up on Daniel’s screen. This time it was a voice mail.
She hooked the Bluetooth over her ear, turned it back on, and clicked open the message. “New message, marked ‘urgent,’ ” said an electronic voice. A pause. Then: “Dr. Kennedy? This is Ashley Highsmith. You treated me at Neponset Hospital and left me your business card?” Ashley’s voice sounded decidedly odd. Lighter and breathier. “I’m running a hundred-and-three-degree fever and”—she coughed and wheezed—“my chest aches.” In the background, Diana heard a mockingbird singing. That had to be Pam’s birdie clock. “My fingers and toes are swollen. Please. Call me.” The phone number she left was Pam’s.
When the message finished playing, a window popped up asking Diana if she wanted to return the call. She glanced quickly at Daniel. He was snoring. But before she could click yes, an e-mail message from Jake appeared. He’d sent it just seconds earlier, at 2:31
P.M.
An hour and a half to go, just in time for him to get to Bethesda for the meeting. His message to Daniel began:
Plane delayed. Finally at BWI. Did u c? ^5!
On the next line was a link. Diana clicked and a news article came up.
DNA evidence proves the impossible
Federal law enforcement officials confirmed today that DNA collected from blood evidence at the scene of a recent bank robbery matches the DNA of a woman who died five years ago after undergoing a bone marrow transplant. When asked how this was possible, officials had no comment.
This was worthy of a high five? Diana read the rest of the article, then read it again, trying to wrap her head around the implications. Blood evidence at a crime scene matched a woman who’d died after undergoing a bone marrow transplant. How was that possible?
Diana rocked back in her chair. The implications were staggering. Every defense attorney in the country would be saving that news clip to read to their next jury, proof positive that DNA analysis was unreliable. Talk about instant reasonable doubt, and it could infect every case that involved DNA evidence. Daniel would have called it sabotage in defense of privacy.
Surely it was no coincidence that the file stolen from MedLogic was a DNA profile, or that one of the files she’d opened on Volganet was a DNA profile too. Many of Gamelan’s clients would have had DNA profiles of patients stored in their databases. How many of them had Jake and Daniel amassed?
Diana retraced her steps, looking for the DNA profile she’d found earlier. It didn’t take long. In the same directory, there were hundreds and hundreds more.
Now she understood why Jake and Daniel had been desperate to ensure that Gamelan’s relationship with their newest client got off to a smooth start. Working with Vault would give them access to thousands more profiles—Vault stored the health records of federal prisoners, civil servants, and elected officials. Anyone who’d had a DNA swab, or fertility treatment, or registered to donate a kidney or bone marrow. Possibly even elected officials whose DNA had been collected just in case their remains had to be identified.
Diana knew how easy it would be to alter the records in a DNA database, merrily swapping one person’s profile for another’s. Corrupt DNA databases—you’d only need to hit a couple—and you could upend Big Brother. To someone like Daniel, as the slogan went, that was priceless.
But with Daniel and Jake’s usual thoughtless, scattershot approach, not every person who found himself implicated by DNA evidence would be dead. Innocent people would find themselves standing trial and others would get away with murder. And if the scheme was discovered, Diana would surely look as if she’d been partner to the conspiracy, if not the ringleader.
Now she understood why they’d had to bring her in. She’d given them no choice. The minute she’d intercepted that DNA profile from MedLogic, she’d outlived her usefulness. When she found Volganet, she was a hairsbreadth from figuring out what was going on. By bringing her in, Daniel must have thought he could control her. After all, she was isolated, alone. And she still had to be in love with him, didn’t she?
Diana glanced down at Daniel. His eyelids quivered and his shoulders twitched. He was having a bad dream. Poor baby. But whatever was going on in his sleep, it was nothing compared to what he was going to wake up to.
She found the screen that had popped up and returned “Ashley’s” call.