“I really must meet this chap,” Jones said, switching to his sarcastic-posh accent.
“I’m sure it can be arranged.”
“Then if you don’t mind,” he said, “my four comrades and I are now going to be quite busy for a while, trying not to die. If we are able to string a couple of nonfatal days together, we may then return to your proposal.”
“How can I help?” Zula asked.
“Stop killing people,” he suggested.
PART II
American Falls
Day 6
Curtis. Peter Curtis. It had taken Richard many hours of devious googling to pin down the surname of Zula’s boyfriend. The lad’s insistence on using a different pseudonym on every system that he accessed had made this maddeningly difficult. If Peter and Zula had checked in to the Schloss as regular guests, Richard would have been able to access Peter’s credit card data. As it had happened, though, they had stayed in Richard’s apartment as personal guests.
The decisive break in the case had been achieved by Vicki, she of the Grand Marquis ammo run and the bearskin rug anecdote. She was currently a senior at Creighton. She apparently had a serious case of insomnia or a large personal stash of Adderall. Vicki had access to Zula’s Facebook page and to her Flickr photo-sharing page. She also had some of her own photographs that she’d taken during the re-u. She had put together a portfolio of pictures of Peter and then made use of an Internet site that employed facial recognition technology to search the Internet for pictures of the same, or similar, faces. This had produced a lot of false positives, but several candidates had turned up, including a series of photographs taken at DefCon three years ago of a presentation given by a man identifying himself as 93+37. Richard had no idea how to pronounce this, but he could see that if 93+37 were flipped around in a mirror, the “9” would look a little bit like a “P,” the two central “3”s would look like “E” s, the “+” would still look like a “t,” and the terminal “7” would look a little bit like a lowercase “r,” yielding “Peter.” The sum of 93 and 37 was, of course, 130, and so Richard had gone to work googling various combinations of “130” and “93+37” with “security” and “hacker” and “pen test” and “Seattle” and “snowboard” until he had begun to establish some leads, in the form of message boards and chat rooms, that Peter, or a person weirdly similar to Peter, had been in the habit of using. And in this manner he had begun to establish a sense of what Peter was interested in, who he hung out with, and what he did in his spare time. He was, for example, strangely interested in something called tuck-pointing, which was the process of repairing old brick structures by putting fresh mortar—historically correct mortar, it went without saying—into the spaces between the bricks.
Parsing a series of messages posted on a snowboarding site, Richard guessed the name of the shop in Vancouver where Peter had purchased that high-tech snowboard he was so in love with. Some more searching had uncovered the name of the shop’s proprietor. Richard had reached him at an hour of the morning that was apparently considered to be punitively early in the snowboarding world. Richard had explained matters to the shopkeeper and persuaded him to go back into his records and dig up the name on Peter’s credit card. And this had thrown open the Google floodgates and enabled Richard to get the address of Peter’s building in Georgetown from King County real estate records.
At about nine in the morning, almost exactly twelve hours after breaching Zula’s apartment, he found himself circling the block in question. The yellow handle of his sledgehammer was projecting vertically from his passenger seat, all but announcing his intentions to anyone who looked into the windshield; like a fourteen-year-old boy trying to tame an erect penis, Richard kept pushing it down and it kept snapping back up. The building was not hard to identify; it had recently been tuck-pointed.
Since he did not have the benefit of sympathetic neighbors in this case, Richard parked on the street and made his first approach to the building as a pedestrian, sans sledgehammer. It was a brilliant sunny morning of the sort that Seattle would occasionally lay before its desperate residents in the early spring; wild rhododendrons in the vacant lot across the street were showing red blossoms, and hobbyist-pilots were taking off from Boeing Field in their little planes. Richard pounded for a while on what he took to be the front door, then wandered around back. Two large roll-up doors fronted on the alley. Between them was a single human-sized door. Richard was knocking on the latter when a pickup truck pulled into the alley and rolled to a stop, close enough that he could have reached out and touched it. The engine shut down and the door swung open. Out came a lean, close-cropped, stubbled Caucasian male in his thirties, dressed in a scarred brown leather jacket over faded and frayed Carhartts. “Looking for Peter?” he asked, stepping to the roll-up door on the right and inserting a key into a massive tamper-proof padlock that dangled from its hasp. Before Richard could answer, he continued, “I haven’t seen him in a week and a half.”
“Really.”
“Pisses me off too, because he’s my landlord, and I want him to fix my Internet. Do you have any idea where he is?” The man dropped to a squat, gripped a handle on the front of the big door, and stood up, heaving it open to reveal a dark bay filled with welding machines and the paintless steel tools and tables favored by those who worked with unbelievably hot things.
“I’m investigating his disappearance.”
The man straightened and turned to look at him. “You a cop?”
“Private investigator,” Richard said, “hired by the family.”
“So they don’t know where he is either?”
“He and his girlfriend went missing a week ago.”
“Exactly a week, or—”
“Last they were seen was Monday afternoon.”
“My Internet died Monday night, late.”
“Heard any disturbances, or—”
“No.”
“But you’re only here during business hours?”
“My hours are irregular,” the man said, “but I don’t sleep here.”
Richard nodded at the roll-up door on the left. It was secured by another massive padlock. “Is that his bay?”
“Yup.”
“I don’t suppose you have a key?”
The welder thought about it. “Yeah, I got one.”
“Mind if I borrow it?”
“Sorry, but I don’t lend out my equipment.”
“I beg your pardon?”
The man stepped forward into the darkness, reached out, grabbed something, and pulled hard, putting his weight into it. He began backing toward the alley. As he came into the light Richard saw that he was towing a two-wheeled cart loaded with a pair of gas cylinders, regulators, a length of hose, and a triple-barreled torch. “My key,” he said. “Opens just about anything.”
While the welder halved Peter’s padlock—a procedure that took all of about three seconds, once he got his torch up and running—Richard ambled around in the alley, looking at the upper-story windows that he supposed belonged to Peter’s living quarters. They were old-fashioned multipaned casement windows with metal frames. He noticed that one of them had a missing pane, right next to the latching handle on the inside.
“It’s all yours,” the welder announced, stepping back. “Mind your hand, it’s going to be hot for a while.”
Keeping well clear of the hot parts, Richard got the door unlatched and hauled it open.
Damn, but there were a lot of cars in here. As if Peter had been running a chop shop. In a few moments he identified Peter’s boxy van—the one he and Zula had taken up to B.C.—and Zula’s Prius, which had been parked as far back in the bay as it would go, apparently to make room for a little sports car that had been shoehorned into the remaining space. The latter had B.C. plates. The keys were still in its ignition.
Hands in pockets, Richard ambled around. The welder remained on the threshold of the big door, perhaps wisely declining to trespass.
“There’
s your problem,” Richard announced. He was standing before half a sheet of plywood that had been screwed to the wall and used as a surface for mounting telecom stuff: cable modem, routers, punch-down blocks, phone gear. In two places, cables had been severed, their cut ends carefully pushed back into place so that the damage was not obvious. One was telephone, the other was the black coax line that had formerly run to the cable modem.
This was the first suggestion of actual wrongdoing that Richard had seen. Of course, the fact that Zula (and, apparently, Peter) had disappeared was more than sufficiently alarming that he’d thought of nothing else for the last couple of days. But in all of the investigating he had done so far, he had not seen actual evidence that human maleficence was involved. He suspected it, he feared it, but—as the Seattle detective assigned to Zula’s missing persons case doggedly pointed out—he couldn’t prove it. The appearance of those two severed wires thus struck him as deeply as a pool of blood or a spent shell casing.
He pulled out his phone and texted John: CALL OFF THE MOUNTIES. PETER’S CAR HERE. ZULA’S TOO. He decided not to mention the third car or the severed wires for now.
“You recognize this sports car?” Richard asked. His voice sounded funny to his own ears: dry and tight.
“Nope.”
“Well. I’m going to look upstairs.”
“Yup.”
He’d hoped that last night’s forced entry to Zula’s apartment would be the last time he’d have to expose himself to the possibility of seeing something horrible. Now here he was climbing another staircase toward another possible crime scene. This time he considered it much more likely he’d see something that would scar him for life. But it was his responsibility to shove his face into this particular psychological buzz saw and so he reckoned he should get on with it.
What he found, though, was not what he’d expected. Peter’s apartment contained no persons, living or dead. Nor were there any signs of violence or struggle, with two exceptions. One—which he had anticipated—was the missing windowpane, which had clearly been used by someone to break into the loft. The shattered glass was still sprayed over the floor below it.
The other was a wrecked gun safe standing against the wall in the corner of the loft. Something comprehensively bad had happened to it. Its finish had been burned away in a line that went all the way around its top, as though it had been attacked with a thermonuclear can opener. The entire top of the safe had been sliced off and thrown on the floor, where hot metal edges had burned into the wood. Instinctively Richard scanned the ceiling for smoke detectors and noted that they were all dangling open, their batteries removed.
This part seemed almost like a waste of time, but he stepped forward and looked down into the safe and verified that it was empty.
He walked back down the stairs and found the welder. “I could use your professional opinion on something.”
“Plasma cutter,” was the welder’s verdict, after he had come up the stairs and got a load of the ruined gun safe.
“Do you have one?”
“No!” said the welder, and shot him a look.
“I wasn’t accusing you,” Richard said, holding up his hands. “I was just curious what they look like.”
“It’s a box,” the welder said, holding up his hands to indicate size. “About yay big.”
“Portable.”
“Totally.”
“Portable enough to take it through yonder window?”
“That would be a bit of a stretch. I would recommend stairs.”
“So someone probably used the window to get inside and get a door open, then carried the plasma cutter up the stairs.”
“Yeah,” said the welder, “but I don’t think your average burglar carries one around on his person.”
“Agreed,” Richard said.
The welder looked over his shoulder, a little uneasily, at Peter’s apartment. “Seen anything else … funky?”
“No,” Richard said, “nothing funky.”
“Fuckin’ weird, man,” said the welder, and left.
Richard found his way to the front door, which had a deadbolt, a chain, and a pushbutton lock in the middle of the doorknob. The latter was locked, but the other two weren’t. After breaking in via the window, the burglar must have unlocked this door from the inside and used it to bring the plasma cutter in and out, and used the button to secure it behind him when he’d left.
So, to all appearances, the plasma-cutter gun-safe caper had happened when the place was already vacant.
But how did its being vacant square with the presence of three cars in the bay? And why would the sports car’s owner leave his key chain in the ignition? Generally, people needed their key chains for other purposes, such as getting into their houses.
Turning around, he noticed a red LED gleaming at him from the top of a shelving unit where Peter was in the habit of storing his raincoats, hats, and boots. He walked closer and found a little webcam, mounted there with a web of white nylon zip ties. An Ethernet wire trailed away from it and disappeared into a hole in the wall. Richard traced it back into the shop area where the cars were parked, and found a place, not far from the plywood panel with the telecommunications gear, where a computer must have sat at one time. It had been on the bottom shelf of a workbench. Above it were a monitor, keyboard, and mouse, but their cables dangled into the space below. A power cable and an Ethernet wire were there too.
Richard assumed that the computer must have been taken, until a minute later when he literally tripped over it while circling the sports car. The CPU—a simple rectangular box—had been thrown down on the concrete floor and attacked with the plasma cutter: a single pass cutting down the side of it, slicing through the stack of drives.
Richard cursed. He’d imagined he was on to something. Peter had set up security cameras around his place. Perhaps one of them had captured some footage of interest. But the intruder had anticipated this and made sure that the hard drive was destroyed.
He orbited all the cars, peering in through their windows, not wanting to disturb the evidence any more than he already had. Peter’s had not been fully unpacked; whatever had happened must have happened shortly after they’d gotten back to the place on Monday night.
He was jotting down the license plate number of the car from B.C. when his ears picked up a familiar clicking and whooshing noise: the sound of a hard drive coming awake and going to work.
Following the sound, and assisted by some conveniently placed Ethernet cables, he got underneath the flight of wooden stairs that led to Peter’s loft, and found a little box, mounted to an improvised shelf and plugged into an outlet through a string of extension cords. It was a Wi-Fi access point. A little bigger than most nowadays.
It was bigger, he realized, because it wasn’t just a Wi-Fi router. It was also a backup device. It had its own built-in hard drive.
NONE OF THE jihadists was in a great hurry to explain anything to Zula, but she pieced the following data together from looking out the windows and from half-understood Arabic.
They had been saved by the light of dawn, which had shown them a place to touch down: a landing strip that, however, was evidently too short for this kind of plane. It dead-ended in woods. Which seemed an awkward way to lay out a landing strip. But as Zula began to understand, the people who had put it there hadn’t been afforded a lot of choice. This was some sort of valley in high mountains. It was spacious enough, wandering across several square miles of high cold territory, but its shape was convoluted, and its bottom was hacked up by gullies and ridged with outcroppings of hard rock, leaving few alternatives as to where a landing strip might be constructed. And culture shock might have been a factor; maybe Pavel and Sergei, accustomed to big international airports and Hyatts, had not made allowances for north woods bush-pilot dash, and had imputed prudence, or at least sanity, to the architects of this strip.
Or maybe they had just been desperate and unable to make any other choice; or maybe they’d had guns to
their heads.
The landing strip was part of an industrial complex that, from Zula’s point of view, wandered and sprawled aimlessly into parts of the valley that were hidden behind trees. Encouragingly, this included a small compound of buildings only a hundred meters or so from the landing strip. These all looked the same, and it was obvious enough that they were prefabricated structures that had been brought in on trucks and bolted together. Some of them looked like storage units, but one had a rust-fuzzed chimney protruding from the three feet of snow that covered its roof. Its south-facing wall was fortified by at least two cords of stacked wood. Zula watched through a window as one of the soldiers slogged over to it, moving at a pace of perhaps ten feet per minute as his legs broke through hip-deep snow on every step. When he finally reached the front door he destroyed its lock with a burst of submachine gun fire and staggered inside. A few minutes later, smoke began to emerge from the chimney.
THE DISCOVERY OF the hard-drive-equipped Wi-Fi unit under Peter’s stairs placed Richard at a distinct fork in the road. He reckoned that this property housed so much evidence of wrongdoing that the police would have to send someone around to investigate. The physical link between this crime scene and Zula—her car was parked right in the middle of it—might pump a bit of energy into the investigation of her disappearance. But Richard had already gone the cop route and found it not nearly as productive as driving around with a sledgehammer and retaining the services of men with oxyacetylene torches.
And yet on the other hand, if the cops did finally get serious about this, they could do things he couldn’t, such as get access to phone and motor vehicle records.
So he adopted a hedging strategy. He unplugged the Wi-Fi hub and threw it in his car and drove it to the Seattle offices of Corporation 9592. There was an information technology department there, which had a little lab where they assembled and repaired computers. No one was there; it was Sunday. In a manner that would spark outrage tomorrow morning, when his depredations were noticed by technicians coming in for work, Richard opened up toolboxes and pulled computers from inventory and generally made a mess of things on someone’s workbench. He opened up the Wi-Fi hub and removed the drive. Following instructions drawn from all over the Internet, including even a YouTube video, he connected this to a computer and made a copy of all the files on the drive. He then drove the reassembled Wi-Fi device back to Peter’s building, where he plugged it in just as it had been before.