Deceived (23 page)

Shirtsleeves
rolled up, frustrated and hot, Nick reentered his car. He reached for the
Norfolk map, picked up a pen, and "X'ed" out the last motel
.

He swore
silently.

The desk
receptionist had been incredibly accurate. With the aid of a phone book she had
marked sixteen hotels and motels on his map within a five mile radius of the
port, and all turned out to be no more than a block from where she indicated. Not
that it had done him any good; closing on five hours and he'd learned nothing. He'd
worked his way inward, toward the port, crossing off hotels as he went. No one
had turned up a guest record of a Scott Johnson.

Compounding his
bad luck, twice that morning he had swung by Kiajong Shipping, each time
finding the same thing he had found the night before
—
no activity. The
place looked empty.

Nick had three
choices now: he could broaden his search of hotels beyond the five mile radius
he had arbitrarily set, he could hang out indefinitely in Norfolk waiting for
activity at the shipyard, or he could head home. He leaned toward the last
option. If Scott had spent the night in Norfolk, by no means a certainty, he
would likely have taken a room near Kiajong Shipping
—
a five mile radius
seemed reasonable. As for hanging out in Norfolk, Nick decided his time might
be better spent hitting up connections in the FBI and the Commerce Department
for a rundown on Kiajong Shipping
.

Nick checked
the map for bearings. East two blocks to the port road, then north a mile to
the highway which would take him back across the James River. He swung out of
the hotel's parking lot and a few blocks later into a gas station's. His fuel
gauge showed less than an eighth of a tank.

He filled up,
bought a soda for the ride home, and asked to use the men's room. The
attendant, his biceps marked by barbed wire tattoos, handed him a key chained
to a bulky metal plate.

The men's room
met Nick's expectations only because he had none. The floor had not seen a
broom or mop in recent memory; the sink was rust stained from a constant drip;
two dispensers of condoms substituted for a mirror. Nick searched for a
relatively clean place to set his soda can, and settled for pinning it under
his arm. A row of curled business cards was tacked to the wall above the urinal
—
services
that might pique dockworkers' and seamen's interests: 900 phone lines, escort
services, and rooming houses
.

The last pair
of cards caught his eye.
Rooming houses.
Both advertised their vicinity
to the port.

The desk clerk
hadn't marked either on Nick's map; not surprising given their rather unique
form of advertising. Nick could guess what the rooms were like, just the type
of seamy places that might have appealed to Scott.

He took the two cards from the wall.

Nick's visit to
the first rooming house, as seamy as he imagined, served only to increase his
frustration, and he entered the second, the closest to Kiajong Shipping, with
lowered expectations. Behind the beaten and peeling counter, a pale bearded man
with pronounced hollows under his eyes and a cigarette dangling from his lip,
greeted him with indifference.

"Hi,"
Nick said as he approached the desk.

The clerk
nodded absently as he extracted the cigarette from his mouth. "Room?"

"No."

The clerk
tucked a thumb behind a large silver belt buckle and glowered. "What can I
do for you then?"

"I'm
trying to track the movements of a man."

"Good
luck." The clerk answered perfunctorily, leaving the "fuck you"
unspoken. The cigarette went back into his mouth for a quick puff.

"I think
he might have stayed here a couple of weeks ago."

"Was that
supposed to be a question, mister?"

Nick nodded. "Yeah,
I suppose it was. I was hoping you could check your guest list."

The clerk took
a long drag, burning almost a half-inch of cigarette to ash as he studied Nick.
"Can't do that."

"Why
not?"

"My policy
is I don't open up my guest registry to every shithole who walks through the
door, that's why." The clerk leaned forward over the counter aggressively.
"Any other questions?"

Nick pulled out
his identification, held it up for the clerk to see. "I'm not just any
shithole; I'm a federal shithole. With the General Accounting Office, Office of
Special Investigations."

The clerk gave
Nick's I.D. only a passing glance, but it had its affect. The man adopted a
less threatening posture and when he spoke again sounded a bit less sure of
himself. "Well I'm sure your mama must be real proud, but unless there's a
warrant in there too, I can't help you."

"I'm
trying to keep this simple, okay? You can save yourself some major headaches by
cooperating. I give you the man's name, you check your records. The man didn't
stay here, I leave, that simple. His name was Scott Johnson and
—
"

"Scott
Johnson?" the clerk interrupted.

"Yes."

The clerk
grabbed a ledger from under the counter. He thumbed through a few pages, then
shook his head, a flat, self-satisfied smile on his face. "So I'm not the
first one the fucker stiffed, huh?"

"Excuse
me?"

"You're
investigating him, right?" The clerk dropped the stub of his cigarette
into an empty soda can. "Good. Son-of-a-bitch seemed like a nice enough
guy, but those are the ones you have to look out for, aren't they?"

Nick shook his
head as if to clear it. "I'm sorry, I'm not following you."

"Scott
Johnson. The asshole stiffed me. Checked in, paid for one night, but ended up
staying for three. Never paid me."

"Mr
…
?"

"Schneider."

"You
remember him, Mr. Schneider? Scott Johnson?"

"I think I
just say I did, didn't I? Dark hair. Lanky. Same age as you or a little
younger. Took me for eighty-eight bucks, or at least tried to. I tend to
remember people like that."

Nick felt a
rush of excitement. "You have an imprint of his credit card?"

Schneider
pointed to a sign on the counter that said:
NO
CREDIT CARDS
. "I took it up the ass long enough. You have any idea
what Visa, MasterCard were charging me? Three and a half percent off the top. I
deal only in cash."

More likely the
credit card companies didn't deal with Mr. Schneider, Nick guessed. "Then
what did you mean by he
tried
to take you for eighty-eight bucks?"

"Someone
skips out on me, I don't rely on credit cards or anybody's good nature. And I
don't listen to excuses. I lock their things up, tight. Padlock them in my
storage room. Amazing how many assholes suddenly discover a few extra bucks in
their wallets when that happens."

Padlock them
in a storage room.
"You have some of Mr. Johnson's property?"

"Sure as
hell do. Worth a bit more than eighty-eight bucks too, I'm betting. Not many
clothes, but one of those fold up computers
—
it can't be cheap. Figure
I'll end up coming out ahead."

Scott's
laptop.
Nick forced his voice toward calm. "Mr. Schneider, I'd be very
interested in taking a look at Mr. Johnson's things."

Schneider
shrugged. "You pay his bill, and you can take them the hell away with you
for all I care."

Nick reached
for his wallet, began counting out money. "That was eighty-eight
dollars?"

Schneider's
eyes betrayed greed as they locked on Nick's fold of bills. "Plus
interest."

Nick pulled out
another twenty
.

"And the
storage fee."

Nick added
another twenty to the pile.

"The
money," Schneider said, scratching his fingers in the air.

Nick held the
stack just beyond Schneider's reach. "After you give me his things."

Schneider
nodded eagerly. "You got yourself a deal." With that he disappeared
into the back room.

Nick stared at
the computer screen, a pencil locked sidewise in his mouth, his face
illuminated dimly. He sat in his GAO office, lights off, door closed; no one
had seen him enter other than the night security guard and Nick intended to
keep it that way.

"Tremont
Engineering," the screen said, and below that "Password"
followed by six spaces. He looked to the scratch pad to his side. Across the
top:
ANDREW F. MCKENZIE
, and below,
various anagrams and abbreviations. He removed the pencil from his teeth and
scribbled another
—
ANDYFM
—
then
typed the letters into the computer. He pressed
ENTER,
the screen went momentarily black, then, as had happened at least three
dozen times before, "Invalid User
I.D.
"
flashed on the screen.

Nick threw his
pencil across his office. "Dammit," he swore silently to no one
.

He looked to
the window, to the darkening horizon beyond, and saw his own reflection there,
a disembodied frowning face glowing faintly. He closed his eyes and rubbed his
temples, frustrated at his lack of progress.

To his side lay
a manual, a software user's guide. He tapped a finger against its spine, then
with a groan opened it to page one and began to read anew, recommitting himself
to making sense of the instructions.

Fifteen pages
later he felt lost and started over, this time underlining sentences in the
manual as he went.

A door creaked
open behind him, and with it a wedge of light from the hallway swung across his
office wall and engulfed him. He swiveled on his chair.

Meg stood
there, as surprised to see him as he was her.

"
Meg.
"

"
Nick…
Sorry
…
," she stuttered. "I didn't think you would
…
Didn't
think anybody would be here." She looked down, red in the face. "I
was going to check something. On your computer. I'll
…
Sorry." She
looked at him uncertainly.

"Come
in," he waived to her, his throat suddenly dry.

She stepped
forward hesitantly as he cleared the screen he had been viewing and popped a
floppy disk from the computer. "Want to shut the door?" he asked.

Meg did,
enveloping herself in near darkness. She reached out and found the light switch
.

Unsure of what
to say or how to give voice to all he felt, Nick jumped to the obvious
question: "How have you been doing?"

"Good."
Meg shuffled her feet. "
…
Yourself?"

"Okay. You're
here late, for a Sunday. I expected the place to be empty."

Meg smiled
flatly. "I sort of thought the same thing." She said it as a question
—
strictly
speaking Nick shouldn't be in the office and Meg knew it
.

"Yeah,
well
…
" Nick fidgeted with a tape dispenser instead of finishing the
thought. Finally he said, "Meg
…
the message you left me
…
I
meant to get back to you."

She looked
away. "You've had a lot on your mind. You don't have to explain."

"Actually
I think maybe I do. Though I'm not sure if I can. I've
…
It meant a lot
to me, you coming over the other night. It helped."

Meg raised her
eyes to his, still uncertain. "I'm glad."

"I've
spent a lifetime facing problems on my own, Meg. Out of necessity. Maybe that's
not a very good habit but it's a habit that dies hard." Nick felt the heat
rise in his face and cleared his throat. "You said you wanted to check
something?"

Meg nodded. "I'm
still trying to run down the cause of the spread sheet errors."

"This
late? On a weekend?"

"My
schedule's full-up; all I've got is after-hours."

Nick indicated
a chair and Meg sat. Now that they'd turned to work, her words seemed to flow
easier: "Since you've left I've tried about everything I could think of. Reviewed
old drafts, ran a diagnostic on my computer, but keep coming back to square
one: what happened, shouldn't have happened. The spread sheet tallies
automatically
—
there's no human element involved. And it's not as if the
spread sheet program's new to the market; if it had bugs, people would have
discovered them by now. Right?"

Nick bobbed his
head. "I would have thought so."

"Me too. So,
well
…
I'm just about out of ideas."

"You run a
virus scan?" Nick asked.

"A couple
of them."

"And?"

"Didn't
find a thing. So tonight I started sorting through my computer's allocation
units, comparing disk space against
—
Well, it's complicated, but I
uncovered a hidden file."

Nick raised his
eyebrows. "The cause of the problem?"

"Not
exactly, but
…
The file was camouflaged, Nick. Attached to the startup
program. As if someone didn't want it found. It occurred to me that
—
"
Meg paused. "You're going to think I'm crazy."

"Go
ahead," he encouraged her.

"Well,"
she began tentatively, "once we talked about the possibility that somehow
someone was keeping a step ahead of our investigation
…
do you remember
that?"

Nick nodded. "I
remember."

"I'm not
saying we were right, but if we were, I might know how they managed it. Let's
say someone got access to our computers, hacked into them somehow and planted a
file
…
the file I found tonight."

Nick lifted his
eyebrows in disbelief. "Why would anybody want to do that?"

"The file
I found, it's some sort of user log. It creates a record, a list, of every key
stoke, every command, typed into its host computer. Someone with access to the
file could learn everything done on that computer. On my computer." Meg
evidently read Nick's face because she raised her hands defensively. "Okay,
the file
might
simply be a relic from a prior user,
might
serve
any number of purposes, but I got a brand new computer when I joined the GAO,
Nick. Where'd this file come from? And like I said, the way the file was hidden
got me to thinking."

Nick shook his
head. "C'mon, Meg, no one just hacks into a GAO computer. We've got pretty
damn good firewalls here."

"So does
the Pentagon and it's been hacked into before." Meg shrugged. "Anyway,
it's the only explanation I've come up with for what happened to the spread
sheet."

"So
someone hacked into the system and planted the user log on your computer. While
they were at it they manually corrupted the spread sheet. Is that it?"

Meg nodded. "Farfetched
or not, that's the theory. I came to your office to test it. If someone
was
trying to monitor our investigation
…
well, I'm guessing my computer
wouldn't have been the only one they paid a visit to."

"You want
to check whether I have the same hidden file on my hard drive," Nick
guessed.

Meg nodded.

Nick rose and
offered his chair to Meg. "Be my guest."

"Thanks."
She brushed past him and assumed control of the computer. Her hands, until then
folded stiffly before her, came alive over the keyboard. Nick tried to follow
her actions and the changing screens but soon became hopelessly lost.

Three or four
minutes passed, then Meg stopped suddenly and rapped her knuckles against
Nick's desk. "Got it," she said triumphantly.

Nick peered
over her shoulder. "What?"

"The user
log. Same place on your computer, attached to the startup program."

Nick saw a
column of words, letters, and symbols stretching the height of the screen. "What
am I looking at?" he asked
.

Meg gestured at
the computer monitor. "A record of the commands typed on your computer in
inverse chronological order. See, on the top here. That's the last command you
input. You closed a screen." Her finger traced down the column. "Before
that you had typed
ENTER
, and before that
a series of letters:
A-N-D-Y-F-M.
" She
looked at Nick inquisitively.

Nick ignored
her confusion. "You really think someone has been monitoring our
investigation through our computers? Through this hidden file?"

Meg took a deep
breath. "I'm not sure. But I checked some other computers on my floor
—
they
don't have the same file. I find that odd, don't you?" Without waiting for
Nick to answer, Meg pointed again at the computer monitor. "Nick
…
The
letters you were inputting:
M-C-K-E-N-Z
.
A-F-M-C-K-E
.
E-I-Z-N-E-K
,
are they variations on Andrew McKenzie's name
…
the owner of Tremont
Engineering?"

"I
…
"
Nick paused. "I don't know if I want to get you involved in this."

Meg's frown
indicated her disapproval. "If it involves McKenzie, I
want
to be
involved. Unless, of course, you think I wouldn't be up to it."

"No. No."
Nick shook his head to emphasize the point. "In fact I could use your
help, it's just
…
I'm in pretty deep trouble, Meg. You're better off
steering clear."

"I'm not
worried. Tell me how I can help?" Meg looked up at him, eyes unflinching,
and held the stare until he nodded slowly
.

"Okay,"
Nick said. "Those strings of letters, they're my rather inept attempts at
breaking a password."

Meg cocked her
head and Nick explained. He described his activities of the last few days: the
sweatshop, his conversation with Jing-mei, the manifest of the
Shansi
and the resulting trip to Norfolk, Kiajong Shipping, and the rooming house. "I've
gone through everything stored on Scott's laptop
…
found nothing of
interest. Then I noticed a disk in the floppy drive." He held up the disk
he had set next to the computer. "I tried to open it
—
that's when I
hit a roadblock. I got a screen, Tremont Engineering across the top, room for a
six character password below."

Meg said
nothing, her eyes wide in rapt attention.

"I came in
to try Viking." He didn't need to expound, Meg would recognize the name
—
a
program designed to defeat encryption systems and passwords, this particular
one the intellectual product of the NSA. "But I can't make heads or tails
of it. I always left this stuff to the techies. To Scott." He shrugged. "So
I gave up for awhile and started punching in guesses. The string of letters you
saw, those were variations on McKenzie's name. I tried variations of Tremont
Engineering before that. Didn't get anywhere."

"I've used
Viking," Meg said, before holding out her hand. He handed her the disk. She
inserted it into the floppy disk drive then rubbed her hands together. "Okay,"
she said, "let's see if we can crack it."

"Wait a
second, Meg
…
"

Meg raised her
eyebrows. "What is it?"

"The user
log, can you disable it?"

Meg nodded. "Better
if someone doesn't have a record of what we're doing right now, huh?
…
Yeah,
I disabled mine already."

Soon Nick was
forgotten; the computer held Meg's rapt attention. "Okay, disabled,"
Meg announced after five minutes. Success in breaking the password did not come
as easily. Another half-hour passed and with it Meg's confidence. "Arrgh,"
she screamed finally, running both hands through her hair
.

Nick leaned
toward the computer, one hand on the desk, the other on the back of Meg's chair.

"Viking
keeps getting caught in loops. It's not coming up with anything. Whatever
encryption system McKenzie installed on this disk, it's real, real good."

"Scott
must have got in. How did he do it?"

Meg shook her
head. "I don't know. Maybe he's just a better guesser than you are. If I
knew a little more about McKenzie
—
his birthday, his mom's maiden name,
the names of his childhood pets
—
I'd make a few guesses myself."

"What do
you suggest we do?"

Meg shrugged. "The
computer lab can to crack this, I'm sure of it. I know my way around the basic
theories, but they're the experts. If nothing else they'll have the mainframe
run through the entire universe of possibilities. With a six character password
that could take a while, but they'll get it done."

Nick looked to
the ceiling. "There has to be another answer. If we can figure out how
Scott did
—
" Nick stopped mid-sentence. His face went momentarily
blank.

"What is
it?" Meg asked.

Nick bit the
knuckle of his thumb. "I'm just wondering if
…
" Nick's
briefcase leaned against the wall; he grabbed it and popped it's snaps,
revealing a laptop. He handed it to Meg.

"Scott's?"
Meg guessed.

"Yeah."

"What do
you want me to do with it?"

"Your
computer had a hidden file; my computer had a hidden file."

Meg caught his
drift. Excitedly, she opened the laptop and started the machine. "The user
log."

Nick nodded. "Let's
say you're right: someone
was
monitoring your computer, my computer. Why
not Scott's as well. And if the user log is on Scott's computer
—
"

Meg
interrupted, finishing his thought. "It's going to list all the commands
Scott inputted. So if he typed the correct password at some point, we'll have a
record of it."

Nick nodded
again, smiling now. "That's what I was thinking."

Hardly a minute
elapsed before Meg announced success. "It's here, Nick. The user log. Same
place, attached to the startup program." She pressed a key and displayed
the file.

Nick's chest
tightened as the screen filled. It produced a strange feeling in him, accessing
this last record of Scott's life
.