Mortal Crimes: 7 Novels of Suspense (63 page)

Her brain was racing, synapses careening around and bouncing off the walls like bumper cars, as she tried to make sense of the connection. It couldn’t be a coincidence.

“I’ll get back to the bribery thing in a minute, but stay with me, okay?”

As he got deeper into his story, his voice gathered force. Maybe she hadn’t saddled herself with a bumbling wimp, after all.

“When I joined the company, they were selling systems software, but that was it. A client bought it, loaded it on their system, and used it to monitor things locally. I was given a project to update the software to make it more robust. I’m not really a software developer, so I left the basic program and started playing around, just kind of pretending I was a hacker. I had an idea, but I wasn’t sure it would work. I worked on it, here and there, whenever I could, in my free time for a couple of years.”

“
You
developed the remote monitoring capabilities?”

She stared across the table, hot chocolate forgotten, at the unassuming man who had revolutionized the remote monitoring industry and, at least according to SystemSource’s publicly-filed financial reports, had rocketed the small company from a niche software provider to a billion-dollar player.

He beamed. “Yep.” Then his face fell as he remembered the hell that singular achievement had thrust him into. “So, I modified the software so that it could be used to monitor and control almost any computerized system from anywhere with an internet connection. My boss went nuts. I got a huge bonus and a promotion to lead the project. As you can imagine, clients loved it, and the systems started flying off the virtual shelves. But then everyone needed to have it tweaked. Like, a security guard monitoring an apartment building is gonna need different capabilities than a building engineer trying to maintain a constant temperature and humidity.”

“Sure,” she said. What he said made sense, but an icy fist grabbed her chest. She had a feeling she knew where this story was headed, and it was nowhere good.

He plowed ahead, oblivious to her rising dread.

“Pushing out patches was labor intensive and time consuming. But for the first eighteen months, I just did it. I was working, I dunno, nineteen hour days? They assigned me a bunch of interns, but I had to go over all their coding and check it because an error could be disastrous. I was drowning.”

He stopped suddenly and stared out into the night, his gaze on the illuminated skating rink, but she knew he wasn’t seeing it. He gnawed on his lower lip but didn’t speak.

“So, I bet it seemed like a good idea to just go in through the back door you left yourself and tweak the software already in place, huh?” She was careful to keep her tone understanding. She didn’t want to lose him now.

“It was. I get it, you know, clients don’t want to think their systems are vulnerable. But this is safe. I’m the only one who can get in and modify.”

“But you can’t be sure of that.”

“I’m pretty sure. I hid my program in a security subkernel.”

“Uh-huh,” she said blankly.

“It’s complicated, but imagine that there’s a vault buried underground. That’s where my program is. Users aren’t going to stumble across it. And even a relatively sophisticated hacker who’s looking for it isn’t going to be able to find it.” He grinned at his ingenuity.

“That was smart.” Again with the neutral tone.

“Thanks.”

She hesitated. But she had to know, so she asked the question.

“Did you tell anyone at the company what you were doing?”

He ran a hand through his hair, a frustrated gesture. “Not exactly.”

She waited.

“They didn’t ask, and I didn’t mention it. But there’s no way my boss didn’t know that something was up. I was being crushed by work and meeting all those deadlines—they didn’t want to know.”

Willful blindness. Plausible deniability. The hallmarks of corporate cowards the world over.

She nodded.

“And, if they
didn’t
know at first, they
had
to know after the VC infusion.” His tone was fierce.

“VC infusion?”

“Right around the time that Womback and Sheely were screwing around trying to bribe Jorge Cruz, SystemSource was looking to spin off some subsidiaries. I’m not a business guy, but from what I understood, the company grew too big, too fast. It was a wild ride. The deal guys suggested selling off some units and maybe doing, uh, a reverse offering or something? Taking the company private again? I don’t know the details.”

“Okay,” she said, filing the information away. She wasn’t a transactional lawyer. She’d need someone to explain the details to her if they proved important. “And, this VC thing—?”

“Right. A venture capital company approached management.”

“Venture capital? But SystemSource was already huge, and publicly traded at this point, right?”

She didn’t know much, but she knew that venture capital companies specialized in helping startups grow. SystemSource would have been well past that stage.

“Right, but these guys came to us anyway. They offered an exorbitant amount of money for a tiny stake in the company.”

She scrolled through her memory, trying to recall seeing any mention of such a deal in the SEC filings, but drew a blank. She made a mental note to ask Rosie.

“Do you know the venture capital firm’s name?”

He shook his head. “No. But it wouldn’t matter. The deal was structured through all these intermediaries to try to keep it sort of hush-hush. All I know is the sales people were probably under the same marching orders the programmers were under.”

“Which were?”

“Don’t mess anything up. We needed to show these investors that we were solid. Anybody who blew a deadline, missed a quota, went over budget—you were getting canned. No excuses.”

“So, you think the sales reps tried to bribe Mexico because they were under pressure to produce?”

He shrugged. “Probably. Maybe? All I know is I was. I was back to around the clock even with my back door.”

“Why?”

“The company set up a meeting between me and some suit who represented the VC guys.”

“Suit? A lawyer?”

His eyes drifted to the ceiling as he tried to remember. “Maybe. I’m not sure. I wasn’t sleeping much at that point, and, honestly, it’s all a blur. I don’t remember the guy’s name, and I know I didn’t get a card. Anyway, he wanted assurances that I could continue to customize the software if the sales volume continued to increase. I said, yeah, because I knew that was the right answer. And he pressed me for details—how could I be sure? What level of customer modification could I guarantee? How could I guarantee it?”

“What did you say?”

“He said the conversation was private. So, I told him. Not in detail. I was careful to explain that nobody else could get in through my back door, but that I could.”

He stared at her, misery seeping from every pore.

Her throat felt tight and dry. “The venture capital group—or whoever this guy represented—knows that you, and only you, can get into all these systems?”

He nodded, tears shining in his brown eyes.

“And now they have my mom.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Aroostine raced down the stairs to the Metro station. Franklin’s words echoed in her mind as she clattered down the metal stairs, her scarf trailing behind her like tail feathers.

She jammed her card up against the reader and ran through the terminal to the platform for the Red Line, dodging an elderly couple and earning a dirty look from a lank-haired college student leaning against the column.

She didn’t have time to care.

If Franklin was right—and the lump of lead lodged in her stomach told her he was—then Rosie was right, too: something important was hidden in her trial preparation materials. Something so important that someone was willing to resort to violence—and who knew what else—to keep it secret.

The metro train rushed up to the platform and stopped with a disconcerting squeal of brakes. She elbowed her way to the doors of the closest car and waited for the passengers on the car to exit. A young couple struggled with an enormous stroller. One of the back wheels was stuck in the gap between the car and the platform.

On autopilot, she bent and helped the father raise the wheel, then stepped into the half-empty car with his thanks hanging in the air as the hydraulic doors whooshed shut behind her.

She flopped into the nearest seat and stared unseeingly at the public service announcement poster in front of her while she ran through what she’d learned from Franklin.

One, the business person—or lawyer or whoever it was—he’d met with on behalf of the venture capital group was not the same man who contacted him after his mother’s disappearance. He was adamant on this point. He’d said the “suit” had been a typical white guy. No discernable accent or ethnic heritage. The man on the phone had the stilted speaking style and vocabulary of a nonnative speaker and a noticeable, but indeterminate, accent.

She unearthed a pencil and scrap of paper from her bag and scribbled
Could accent be an act?
Then she resumed ticking off points on her mental checklist.

Two, Franklin’s mother had been abducted after the defendants had filed the motion
in limine
in the FCPA case. The man knew Franklin could access court records. He grabbed Mrs. Chang to make sure Franklin followed his instructions.

She steadied the paper against the back of the seat in front of her and wrote furiously, recording the questions that flitted through her mind:

Why delete the opposition instead of waiting to see if the judge granted motion? Did something in opposition worry him—or was he worried about something in the defendants’ motion? Can’t ask defense counsel why they only objected to one exhibit—they won’t discuss strategy. But, why would they do that?

Overhead, a staticy, garbled voice announced the station. The train rocked to a stop. A thin woman who’d been dozing on the bench across from her jolted to wakefulness.

“Did he say Fort Totten?” she demanded in an urgent voice as she scrambled to her feet and edged toward the door.

Aroostine snapped into focus. “Uh, I really wasn’t listening.” She squinted at the words on the wall. “Yeah, it looks like this is your stop.”

The woman nodded her thanks and rushed out the door.

Aroostine glanced at the map. Two more stops until her destination. She needed to pay a little more attention or she’d end up missing her own station.

Three, the man was willing to kill. A shiver crept along her spine, and she hugged her coat tight around her body as if it were the cold and not that knowledge that caused her chill. But she couldn’t ignore the evidence. Despite Franklin’s protestations that he was careful, the facts were that someone could have died as a result of the fire; she could have died when he tampered with the equipment during her surgery; and both his mother and her husband’s lives were entirely in the man’s hands. The fact that, as far as they knew, he hadn’t yet killed anyone seemed to give Franklin some measure of comfort. Not her. The unvarnished truth was they were dealing with a sociopath.

Be careful. He’ll exploit any vulnerability he discovers. Rosie? Rufus? Mom and Dad Higgins? Mitchell?

She scratched out Mitchell’s name and rolled her eyes at herself.

She glanced out the window to confirm the train was rolling into the stop before hers.

Four, to his credit, Franklin was being honest with her. He’d tripped over the words and she’d had to prod him a few times, but he’d copped to spying on her movements, listening to her calls, and telling the man about the message she’d left for Joe and how he’d tracked down Joe’s personal information and shared it with the man, even though he’d known the man would use it against her.

She bit back her anger. It was hard to fault him. For all his brilliance with computers, he was a weak and naive person. He was trying to save his mother, by whatever means necessary.

He’d apologized over and over, begging her forgiveness. She’d told him they had to move on. But it was hard to let go of the hot rage in her belly. If anything happened to Joe—