Repairman Jack [08]-Crisscross (8 page)

He knew he should read more but couldn't keep his eyes open.

Tomorrow… he'd try again tomorrow…

MONDAY

1

Jack awoke early on Halloween with vague memories of a dream about xeltons and Hokanos… all of whom bore strange resemblances to Abe and Mama Amalia.

He was heading for the door to grab a cup of coffee at the corner deli when his phone rang. The 305 area code on the caller ID told him who it was.

"Hey, Dad."

They'd been in touch almost weekly since their Florida escapade. The bond they'd forged then had not attenuated despite the months and miles since they'd last seen each other.

"Jack! I'd hoped to catch you before you went out."

"Good timing. Another thirty seconds and I'd have been gone. What's up?"

"I'm coming north to do some condo hunting next week."

"Oh? Where?"

Jack closed his eyes. Please don't say New York—
please
don't say New York.

As much as he enjoyed this renewed closeness with his dad, he did not want him living down the block, didn't want him in any of the five boroughs in fact. He was a good guy but he tended to be too curious about his younger son's lifestyle and how he earned his living.

"I was thinking of Trenton."

Jack pumped a fist. Yes!

"To be near Ron and the kids."

Ron Iverson was Jack's sister Kate's ex—but it hadn't been a rancorous divorce and Dad had stayed close to his grandkids, Kevin and Lizzie, all along. Even closer since Kate's death.

"You've got it. And it puts me just an hour away from the city via Amtrak." He cleared his throat. "Anyway, I've got to get cracking on finding a new place. The sale of the place down here closes in less than a month."

"The Tuesday before Thanksgiving, right?"

"Right. And I can't wait to get back."

Jack could hear the anticipation in his voice.

Dad added, "I thought maybe we could get together for dinner in Trenton. They've got some nice restaurants there. Kevin's away at college but Lizzie is still around. Maybe—"

"Might be better if you came up here, Dad. We've got the best restaurants in the world."

He didn't think he could bear spending hours at a table with Lizzie. Since Jack had been the last family member to see Kate alive, she'd have all sorts of questions about her mother, questions he couldn't answer honestly—for Kate's sake.

"You sound like you don't want to see Lizzie. You've never known her, Jack. She's a great kid and—"

"She'll remind me too much of Kate and I'm not ready for that. Not yet."

"Someday you'll tell me what happened to Kate up there, won't you."

"Someday, yeah. But I can only tell you what I know." Which was everything. "Call me when you're back in the good ol' Garden State and we'll set something up."

"Will do."

Jack hung up and let out a deep breath. Sometimes he got sick of lying. It wasn't so bad with strangers, but with family…

And on the subject of lying… he was going to have to do some to Jamie Grant. He wondered if she'd be in her office this early. Wouldn't hurt to try.

He'd realized from his stint with
The Book of Hokano
that it wasn't going to tell him about the inner workings of the Dormentalist Church. It was all doctrine. He needed someone who'd looked under the hood.

He still had his copy of
The Light
from yesterday, so he looked up the number again. He dug out a business card from the secretary's bottom drawer and dialed Grant on his Tracfone.

After working through the phone tree he heard that same gruff voice say, "Grant."

She was in. Did she sleep there?

Before she could hang up on him again he quickly explained that he was a private investigator who had been hired by the family of a missing Dormentalist to find their son.

Hey—not much of a lie. Almost true.

"Dormentalists go missing all the time," Grant said. "They get sent away on ML—that's 'Missionary Leave' to the uninitiated—and don't tell their families where they're going. Most of them pop up again a couple of years later."

"Most?"

"Some are never seen again."

"This woman's certain her son is still in New York. Said he was acting strange."

She snorted. "A Dormentalist acting strange—how ever could she tell?"

"She said he'd started wanting to be called by another name and—"

"Ah. That means he was getting into the top half of the FL situation."

"F—?"

"Fusion Ladder."

"Yeah, well, look. I think I'm going to have to go inside and I'd like to ask you a few questions about the organization first."

"What's in it for me?"

He'd figured it would come down to this.

"I'll feed you whatever I find inside. And if you want to know something specific, I'll do my best to run it down for you."

She didn't answer right away, but he could hear her puffing away on a cigarette.

Finally, "What's your name?"

Jack glanced at the business card: "John Robertson."

He'd met Robertson years ago and had not only saved his card, but printed out a few copies of his own with a business card program.

"You licensed?"

"Of course."

Well, the real John Robertson was. Sort of. He was dead now but Jack kept renewing his state private investigator's license.

"You'd better be, because I'm going to check on that. Show up here at noon. If you're legit, I'll tell the front desk to let you come up."

"Great. Thanks a—"

"You licensed to carry?"

He wasn't sure if the real Robertson was. "Why do you want to know?"

"Just fair warning: Leave the artillery home or else you're gonna have to answer a lot of questions when you set off the metal detector."

"Okay. Sure. Thanks."

Metal detector? Did newspapers now use metal detectors?

2

It was almost ten A.M. when Jack arrived at Russell Tuit's apartment. Jack had looked him up a few years ago—before his conviction—and had made the mistake of pronouncing his name
Too
-it. "Tweet," Russ had told him. "As in Tweety Bird."

"Hey, Jack," he said as he opened his door. Jack had called earlier, so Russ was expecting him. But apparently he wasn't expecting how Jack would be dressed. "Wow. Look at you. You didn't have to get all spiffed up for me."

Jack wore a blue blazer over gray slacks, a blue oxford shirt, and a striped tie—all for his meeting with Jamie Grant.

"Oh, hell! I didn't? You mean I could've worn jeans? Damn!"

Russ laughed. "Come on in."

His tiny two-room, third-floor apartment overlooked Second Avenue in the East Nineties. His five-story building looked like a converted tenement, wrought-iron fire escape and all. Even though the Tex-Mex bar and grill next door had yet to open for the day, his front room was redolent of grilled meat and mesquite smoke. Rumbling traffic from the street below provided sub-woofer Muzak.

Russ himself was the quintessential computer geek: a pear-shaped guy in his early thirties, big head, short bed-head red hair, and a blackhead-studded forehead; he wore an
i-pipe
T-shirt, baggy jeans, and ratty flip-flops. Looked like he'd been designed by Gary Larson.

Jack glanced around the barely furnished front room and noticed a laptop on the desk in the far corner. He hadn't asked during their brief and intentionally oblique phone conversation, but he'd been sure Russ would have some sort of computer.

Jack nodded to it. "You're not worried your parole officer will drop by and see that?"

"
No
problem. My parole says I'm not to go online or consort with other hackers. But not to have a computer at all—that'd be cruel and unusual, man."

"Staying offline… knowing you, how're you going to survive twenty-five years of that?"

Russ had been caught hacking into a number of bank computers and coding them to transfer a fraction of a cent of each international transaction to his Swiss account. He'd been sitting back, collecting well into six figures a year until someone got wise and sicced the Treasury Department's FinCEN unit on him. His lawyer pled him down to two years of soft time in a fed pen but the judge imposed a quarter-century ban on going online.

He offered a sickly grin. "Only twenty-two-point-three-seven-six years to go." The grin brightened. "But you've heard of cyber cafes, haven't you?"

"Yeah. You're not afraid they'll catch you?"

"I'm pretty sure they're monitoring my lines, but they don't have the manpower to follow me every time I go out for a cuppa." He rubbed his hands together. "So. Whatcha got for me?"

"Well, it's what you're going to get for me."

"Long as it's not an online thing, I'll see what I can do."

"Okay. I need to find a way to erase a hard drive and make it look like an accident."

Russ dropped into the swivel chair by his computer. "Windows?"

Jack tried to envision the computer he'd seen in Cordova's attic back in September. It hadn't looked like a Mac.

"Yeah. Pretty sure."

"Well, you could reformat it and reinstall Windows, but that doesn't happen by accident. He'll know." He leaned forward. "Why don't you tell me exactly what you want done."

Jack hesitated on baring the specifics, then realized he didn't have to.

"This guy's got certain files on his computer I want to wipe out, but if just those files disappear, he'll know who's behind it. So I want to wipe
all
his files."

"What about backups?"

"My gut tells me he stashes those someplace where, say, a fire wouldn't hurt them."

Russ grinned. "And you want to follow him to the backup."

"You got it."

Not exactly, but why waste time explaining it to someone who didn't need to know.

Russ thought a moment, then snapped his fingers. "Got it! HYRTBU!"

"Her taboo? I don't need voodoo, I—"

Russ laughed and spelled it for him. "It's a mischief virus. Deletes all kinds of files—docs, jpegs, waves, mpegs, gifs, pdfs, and just about every other suffix you've ever seen—without harming the programs. In fact, it doesn't just delete the files, it
overwrites
them."

Jack was relatively new to computers. He'd bought his first about a year ago and was still feeling his way.

"What's the difference?"

"When something is deleted, it's still there on the disk. You can't get to it through the operating system because its references are gone from the system tables, but it isn't
gone
until it's erased or overwritten with another file."

"But if you can't get to it—"

Russ was shaking his head. "You
can
get to it. All you need is a data recovery program, and there are dozens of them."

A scary thought, that.

"But HYRTBU overwrites every file and leaves a doc with the same name in its place."

"Doc?"

"Yeah. A document file, each with the same message: 'Hope You Remembered To Back Up!' Get it? It's an—"

"An acronym, yeah." Jack was baffled. "You mean someone sat down and spent all that time writing the code for this HYRTBU thing, just so he can screw up strangers' hard drives?" He shook his head. "Some people have way too much time on their hands."

"Guy probably justifies it by telling himself he's teaching his victims a valuable lesson: Always back up your files. I bet once you've been hit by HYRTBU you become a compulsive backer-upper."

"But still…"

"Hey, it's like Everest, man. You do it because it's there. Back when I was a kid, in my phreaking days, I used to break into the phone company's computers just to see if I could. And then I'd push it to see how far I could go, you know, seeking system mastery. Of course later I figured how to get myself free long distance, but that wasn't how it started."

"All right, Sir Hillary, how do we get HYRTBU into this computer?"

"Easiest way is to send it with an e-mail. Guy opens the attached file and, if he's doesn't have his AV setup to screen e-mail,
kablooey
—he's toast."

"Audio visual?"

"Antivirus software."

"I don't know the guy's e-mail address, don't even know if he goes online."

Russ looked glum. "Everybody goes online. Everybody but me." He sighed. "Well then, you've got to get to his computer and physically slip the virus into his system."