SPYWARE BOOK (15 page)

“I’m hoping we could help you in that arena,” said Vasquez.

“All right,” sighed Sarah. “I’m listening.”

“You’re husband is a fugitive at this point, Mrs. Vance. There is a federal warrant for his arrest—”

“Yes, you showed it to me last night,” Sarah interrupted.

“And we have received information that shall quickly lead to his arrest,” continued Vasquez.

Sarah sat up and frowned at them. “What information? From whom?”

“We almost got him last night, Mrs. Vance. And we have the make and license plate of the car he’s driving,” said Vasquez, watching her reaction closely. She was disappointed by her look of confusion.

“He didn’t have a car last night,” she said. “Did he rent one?” she asked, then stopped quickly.

Johansen stood up suddenly. “Could I use your restroom, ma’m?” he asked Sarah. “We’ve been in the car all day.”

Sarah waved him down the hall and turned her attention back to Vasquez.

“It doesn’t matter,” Vasquez told her. “But what does matter is that we are about to catch him. I’m assuming here that your husband is innocent, Mrs. Vance.”

“And he is.”

“That will be determined, Mrs. Vance. However, I must point out that if he openly runs from capture at that point, it will look very bad for his case.”

Sarah frowned, but said nothing. She went back to massaging the remote and clenching the phone.
There,
thought Agent Vasquez,
the hook is planted.
She decided to go for broke.

“Of course, if you could help us in any way—”

“No!” said Sarah, turning on them. “No way. You people can pay your informants and catch him if you can, but
I’m
not going to help you find him. Why don’t you people find my son instead of bothering us about a piece of software?”

At this point Johansen quietly returned and sat back down on the couch. The two agents blinked their eyes and squirmed a bit.

“The truth is, Mrs. Vance, the FBI won’t get involved in the disappearance of your son until the local Sheriff’s office declares the case to be a kidnapping. Right now, it’s still being investigated as a possible run-away.”

Sarah stared at them in disbelief. “He’s only six years old.”

“Yes, well, this is an unusual case. There’s been no ransom note, no witnesses, no contact of any kind other than the 9-1-1 call. However, I believe the FBI will be called in today. I think the local authorities have been overwhelmed by the virus and all the publicity about it.”

“So you’re telling me that they have simply forgotten about my son? Is that why that detective hasn’t been back to see me?”

Vasquez looked down, embarrassed. “The good news is that we have a new suspect in the virus case.”

“Who?”

“A Mr. John Nogatakei.”

“Nog? Why that fat bastard,” Sarah breathed. “Yes, yes, he might do something like this. I’m surprised I didn’t think of it myself.”

“So you see, Mrs. Vance, your husband’s flight may be totally unnecessary.”

“I’m still not going to turn him in,” she snapped back. “Does Nog have anything to do with my son?”

Vasquez thought of Nog’s apartment. To her, it appeared that Nog could easily be unbalanced. His background didn’t help him, either: An anti-social loner who associated with hookers and had a lot of money and time on his hands. Perhaps he really had taken the kid.

“What would get you to contact your husband?” she asked. She said it easily, hoping Sarah wouldn’t think about the implications of her answer.

“I’ll tell you what would do it,” said Sarah, grabbing up her photo of Justin. “Bring my son back to me. Help me get him back instead of hassling me.”

Vasquez sucked in her lips. It had partially worked, Sarah hadn’t said that she
couldn’t
contact Vance. But her answer left things unclear.

“What if we offered to take on Justin’s case,” asked Vasquez. She could feel Johansen’s surprise even as she said it. “I mean us, personally.”

Sarah opened her mouth, then closed it. She looked out the window at the unkempt lawn. “My son or my husband, eh?” she muttered. “Bitch.”

“That’s not it at all, Mrs. Vance.”

“Yes it is,” said Sarah with tears welling up in her eyes. “Yes it is, you want information or you won’t do your jobs properly. Well, you can just get the fuck out of here.”

Awkwardly, they stood up and left. At the door, Vasquez turned back. “I’m going to see if we can take the case on for you anyway. If we can get our people back at the San Francisco office to see it all as one case, there should be no problem.”

“Great!” Sarah said. She slammed the door behind them.

#

The two of them drove the car around the block, then rolled it quietly back up to the corner where a well-placed hedge provided cover. With binoculars to his eyes, Johansen watched the front door of the house. Vasquez fiddled with the wiretap equipment, trying to eliminate the background squelch.

“Are you sure you planted the thing right?” asked Vasquez, looking annoyed. The sun was hot and the headphones weren’t helping.

“That phone she has a death grip on is bugged, I guarantee it,” he said. He glanced away from his binoculars and gave her a look. She knew that he had detected her mood, and understood it.

“You stretched things a bit back there,” he said.

“Yes, I know. Have you seen anything?”

He turned back to watching the front door. “If she’s contacting Vance, I’ll be damned if I know how. Maybe she has a CB radio in there.”

She made an exasperated sound as she fiddled with the signal. The NSEC had power, you had to give them that. The moment they contacted them, the federal wiretap warrant was burning in their hands. This case was bigger than anything she had ever handled before, and she felt certain that her progress was being closely monitored. Other teams were now involved and the higher-ups were riding everyone hard.

“Did you mean what you told her?” asked Johansen, keeping his eyes to his lenses this time. She glanced at his broad back. There had to be three square yards of white fabric in the man’s shirt.

“Yeah, I guess I did.”

“You might have told me first.”

“You’re right. But I didn’t know it first.”

“Sounds like she got to you as much as you got to her.”

“Sometimes it’s like that. Part of the job.”

“May I point out that we aren’t a kidnapping detail? That we’re strictly a high-tech unit?”

“Well, there’s nothing low-tech about this case.”

“So you want to do it, if we can get the assignment?”

“Yes. Are you in?”

“We’re partners, aren’t we?”

“Yeah.”

They fell silent for a time. The front door didn’t open. The phone didn’t ring, nor was an out-going call made.

“I expected her to go for it right away,” she said.

“Maybe Vance was smart and didn’t even give her a way to contact him,” Johansen commented. “He had to have left in a big hurry, after all. You know—Whoa, hold on a sec.”

She leaned up and craned her neck. She touched his shoulder, and cursed herself for feeling a tingle in her fingers. “What is it?”

“She’s coming out. She’s out. She’s walking toward us?”

“Damn! Does she see us?”

Johansen was silent for several seconds. She cursed his back and smelled the slight taint of sweat that an entire stick of deodorant couldn’t completely erase.

“It’s the Trumble’s,” he said at last. “She looked both ways, walked quickly and snuck next door to knock on their door. She looks like as guilty as a junior high shop-lifter.”

She laid her head back against the headrest. She couldn’t stop smelling him for some reason. She rolled her eyes at herself. She was the guilty junior-high kid here.

“We’ll have to bug the Trumble’s.”

“That means another warrant.”

“Let’s get to work.”

Without another word, they shut down the surveillance and started up the car. She blessed the air conditioner when it came on. It pushed back the California afternoon heat. It also killed Johansen’s hot smell.

. . . 53 Hours and Counting . . .

Ray had a problem. He needed electrical power and anonymity. He couldn’t go to the college or a friend’s house. And motel rooms seemed too obvious, he didn’t want to be where anyone would expect to see him. He finally decided that the public library would have to do. The odds weren’t too high that he would meet a student or a colleague there, he reasoned, as they would normally use the campus library. Just in case, he bought a baseball cap and a pair of gasoline-colored glasses that were advertised as ‘driving shades’. He had once read somewhere that the best disguises were simple ones that made a person look as if they came from a different walk of society. With this in mind, he had bought a plaid shirt, worn levis and a pair of old work boots at the thrift shop downtown.

Feeling a bit silly, he approached the glass doors of the ski-chalet style building. It had been built in the seventies, when bonds for library construction had been easy to come by. Now, with cut-back hours and a mostly volunteer staff, it had turned into a hangout for elderly people and the homeless.

He walked past a row of unwashed, sleeping men in the carrels. Most slept with their heads cradled on their folded arms. Ray felt sorry for them. He supposed it was better than sleeping out on the grass. Here it was quiet and air-conditioned. Perhaps they spent the nights wandering the streets. The elderly patrons were mostly clustered around the newspaper and magazine racks. There, they quietly ran out their lives. Occasionally they flipped a page or cleared a throat. For them, he supposed, it was better than sitting home alone watching TV. One thing was clear: few of the patrons studied here anymore.

He headed to the back of the library and sat in one of the reserved rooms that was unlocked. Flipping on the light as if he owned the place, he quietly plugged in his computer and set up the cell phone modem. He wondered how long it would be before his pursuers would find out about that purchase.

In no time he dialed No Carrier. There followed a few tense minutes as he had trouble getting access. At first, all he could get was a busy signal. But he kept trying and finally got in. Logging onto the system, he typed in:
foghorn leghorn.

The system came back with a cryptic message, then a question. Ray was immediately on guard; Jake had said nothing about additional security.

Which came first, the chicken or the egg?
the system asked him.

He was at a loss for what to do. His hacker days were long ago and far away. He simply hit the enter key and hoped for the best.

Actually, it was the rooster!
printed on his screen. He groaned quietly. It was a joke. Jake must have set up this account to automatically fire a bad joke at you when you logged on, like a dirty fortune cookie.

Next, he ran his eavesdropping software. The program watch the connections and listed three private conversations that were currently in progress. Ray clicked on one of them, just to see if it worked.

Zelda:
can’t tell you that. it would ruin everything!

WhiskeyDick:
give me a break, sylvia.

Zelda:
YOU give ME a break.

WhiskeyDick:
i don’t care what you else you did with him, I just want to know about what happened in the car.

Zelda:
‘-) *wink* *wink*

WhiskeyDick:
I’m getting really tired of your shit.

Zelda:
OH COME ON!

There was a lot more like this, but he quickly lost interest and broke the connection. The two chatters continued typing to one another without a clue that he had listened in. The software worked. He made a mental note to give Jake an A for the semester—even if he had to fill out the grade sheet from behind bars.

It was time to set his plan in motion. He typed in a private message and addressed it to Santa. When he was done, he sat back and rubbed his eyes. He sighed and settled into his chair. He had no idea how long this stake out might last.

. . . 52 Hours and Counting . . .

The van broke down just outside of Davis. At first, Spurlock had planned not to drive through Davis at all, it made him nervous to return to the scene of the crime, that wasn’t his style at all. He was a highway-flier, a man who hit a place, did his deed, whatever it was, then was back on the freeway and cruising before the local cops had even been alerted. He stayed small-time and he stayed close to the highways. It had worked like a charm and kept him out prison with only two six-month exceptions. Up until now, that was.

But in order to cross the Sacramento Delta, one almost had to use the I-80 causeway. He could have detoured up through the side streets for miles in either direction hunting for another bridge, but that would have eaten up time, gas and increased the risk of something going wrong. All he wanted to do right now was blow right through Davis and make it to the other side.