He repeatedly emphasized that the saboteur was someone who really knew what he was doing, as if the technician was secretly envious of whoever was clever enough to create such destruction.
Shrew innocently asked which image was the culprit, and he replied unequivocally that the worm was launched by a photograph of Marilyn Monroe. As he continued to explain the havoc caused by the mutant worm, Shrew was imagining the conspiracy behind it. Whoever was involved in Marilyn Monroe’s murder almost half a century ago still had a vested interest in the public’s not knowing the truth.
That pointed at the government, which implied politics and organized crime. Maybe there were terrorists back then, she considered. Maybe these people were somehow connected and had their eye on Shrew, all because she’d been foolish enough to take a job she knew nothing about and served at the behest of anonymous people who might be criminals.
For all she knew, the technician on the phone was a criminal, a terrorist, or a government agent, and this business about the Marilyn Monroe photograph launching the mutant worm was an attempt to muddy the waters so Shrew didn’t figure out what was really going on: The website had self-destructed like those tape recorders in Mission: Impossible, because without intending to, Shrew had inserted herself into the middle of a massive plot against a world power or an Evil Empire.
She felt extremely confused and overwhelmed by anxiety.
“You realize, I hope,” she said to the alleged technician, “that I have no idea what’s going on. I want no part of it, and never intended to be part of it. Not that I know anything. Because I certainly don’t.”
“It’s complicated,” he said. “Even for us. I’m trying to tell you this is a very sophisticated code someone’s written. Has to be. By code I mean a computer program that’s embedded in something that seems innocuous, such as a data file or an attachment.”
She didn’t care what he meant, and she didn’t care that the mutant worm couldn’t be stopped and that all attempts to shut down and restart the system had failed. She glazed over as the technician suggested they could attempt loading an archived earlier version of the Gotham Gotcha site, but his only other available servers didn’t have much disk space and were much slower, and that also could cause a crash. Possibly, they should purchase a new server, but that couldn’t happen instantly, and he’d have to clear it with the “business office,” and in the UK it was five hours later than it was here, so he wasn’t going to get anyone.
He pointed out that loading an earlier version would also mean Shrew would have to repopulate the website and repost all the latest information, and fans would need to be alerted that e-mails and images they had sent should be resent. The fixes required of Shrew would take days, maybe weeks, and the public was going to be angry, and those who most recently had joined the site wouldn’t be in the older version of the database and would be deeply offended. The website could be down for days. It could be weeks.
When the Boss found out the worm had been launched by the Marilyn Monroe morgue photo, at the very least, Shrew would be out of work. She had no backup plan. It would be like a year and a half ago, only this time there would be no windfall from a job offer made by anonymous strangers. This time she really would have to give up the apartment, which was the same thing as giving up what little she had left of who she used to be. Only worse. Life for virtually all decent people had only gotten harder. She didn’t know what on earth she would do.
She thanked the technician and got off the phone.
She checked to make sure all the blinds were closed, and poured herself another bourbon and gulped it down as she paced, half mad with fear, and near tears, as she thought about what likely would happen next.
The Boss wouldn’t fire her directly but rather would have that UK agent who barely spoke English do it. If the Boss was really tied in with some terrorist sect, then Shrew’s life was in danger. An assassin could find his way inside her apartment while she slept, and she’d never hear him.
She needed a dog.
The more bourbon Shrew drank, the more depressed, scared, and lonely she got. She contemplated the column she’d posted several weeks before Christmas that mentioned the same chain of pet stores Terri had recommended after Ivy had died and she’d offered to pay for a replacement.
Shrew went on the Internet to check.
The Tell-Tail Hearts pet shops’ flagship location happened to be the one nearest her, and it stayed open until nine.
The loft was an expansive open space of exposed beams and brick, and floors of polished tobacco wood, all pristinely restored and modernized. Other than work stations, black swivel chairs, and a glass conference room table, there was no furniture. There was no paper, not a single sheet of it.
Lucy had invited Berger to make herself at home. She had emphasized that Berger was safe and secure. All of the phones were wireless and equipped with scrambling devices, and the alarm system was probably better than the Pentagon’s. Somewhere in here Lucy probably had guns and other lethal weapons that were illegal enough to hang her from the Tappan Zee Bridge like a pirate. Berger didn’t ask, and she didn’t feel safe or secure. Nor did she make an effort to change that. She simply fretted, reflected, and deliberated.
Annie Lennox was playing in the background, and Lucy was in her glass cockpit, surrounded by three video displays as large as most living room flat screens. In the soft light, her profile was well defined, her brow smooth, her nose aquiline, her face intense, as if there was nothing she’d rather do than navigate through what was already giving Berger a headache. A real one. The kind that always ended the same way, with her lying down in a dark room, holding hot compresses over her eyes.
She stood next to Lucy’s chair, rifling through her briefcase, hoping a Zomig might be lurking somewhere, because that was the only medication that worked. The blister pack she found tucked between the pages of a legal pad was empty.
Lucy was explaining more than Berger really wanted to know about what the neural networking program was acquiring from one of the laptops found in Terri Bridges’s apartment, and the technology involved. Berger was frustrated that Lucy refused to start on the second laptop—one that apparently had been solely dedicated to the Internet. She was anxious for Marino to call with the e-mail passwords. The question was whether she would still be here when he did. The bigger question was why she was here at all. A part of her knew, and she was unsettled by everything and nothing, and didn’t know what to do. She and Lucy had a striking problem on their hands. They had more than one.
“Ordinarily, when you delete a file in an operating system, you’ve got a good chance of getting the data back if the recovery is attempted quickly,” Lucy was saying.
Berger sat back down next to her. Bright white bits and pieces of text, fractured sentences and words, reconnected in the blackness of electronic space. She thought about putting on her tinted sunglasses. She had a feeling it wouldn’t help. This was going where it was going, and she wasn’t going to stop it.
Had she sincerely intended to stop it, she wouldn’t have taken a taxi to the Village tonight, no matter the crisis, the urgency, and the logic in what Lucy had told her over the phone, when she’d called to suggest Berger take a look at what was developing. She’d been alone with Lucy before, but that was years ago, when Scarpetta’s astonishingly complicated and high-risk niece was too young and Berger had been too married. One thing she didn’t do was violate contracts or lose cases because of technicalities.
She had no contract now, and Lucy was older, and the only technicality was whatever Berger decided to manufacture.
“But it doesn’t appear Terri ever had a reason to recover anything she deleted,” Lucy said, “which is why you’re seeing some fairly large chunks of intact text mixed with fragments of all sizes, many so small they’re nothing but shards. The longer one waits to recover deleted or corrupted data, the more opportunity for newly created data to occupy areas on the hard disk freed up by the deletions. And that makes it
harder for the software to locate what was originally there.”
What they were seeing, in summation, were bits and pieces of a thesis that offered, in part, a historical perspective on forensic science and medicine, and psychiatry, which wasn’t necessarily surprising. Records searches and information from Terri Bridges’s parents indicated she was enrolled at Gotham College, where her father was the dean, and was working on a master’s degree in forensic psychology. Berger watched forensic words and phrases stream by as the familiar pain heated up in her temples and crept toward the backs of her eyes.
She noted references to the Body Farm, and to Bellevue and Kirby psychiatric hospitals, and the names of numerous forensic experts well known in their fields, including Dr. Kay Scarpetta. Repeatedly, there were references to her, and that was why Lucy had made the comment earlier that Berger might be tempted to fire her. She was more than tempted. For a number of reasons, that would be the wisest course of action.
For one thing, it appeared that Terri—or whoever had been using this particular laptop—had collected hundreds of articles, video clips, photographs, and other published media pertaining to Scarpetta. That meant a conflict of interest, and a very serious one, which was further compounded by another problem that probably had been there from day one.
Berger remembered being startled by Lucy the first time they’d met eight years ago in Richmond, startled in a way Berger had found as exciting as it was, realistically speaking, unfortunate back then. Foolishly back then—when she was in her late thirties and had almost convinced herself she’d gotten beyond certain temptations, as evidenced by the life she had prescribed for herself. She could answer no. The fact was—and at age forty-six, she was quite clear about this—she wouldn’t have needed to answer anything had there not been a question.
“The laptops are installed with what I call over-the-counter security software, the settings preprogrammed, preloaded.” Lucy had wandered off on that subject. “Not something I’d use because it recognizes only known viruses, spyware, et cetera. And the known ones aren’t the ones I worry about. She’s got anti-virus, anti-spyware, anti-spam, anti-phishing, firewall, and wireless PC protection.”
“Unusual?” Berger rubbed her temples.
“For your average user, yes. She was security-minded, or someone was. But not security-minded the way people like you or I would be. What she’s got here is the type of protection I see with people who are worried about hacking, identity theft, but aren’t real programmers and have to rely on prefab software, a lot of which is expensive and not necessarily what it’s cracked up to be.”
“It may be that she and Oscar Bane had paranoia in common,” Berger said. “They feared someone was out to get them. We know he fears that, at any rate. He certainly made a case for it when he called last month and had a rather unfortunate conversation with Marino. Not really Marino’s fault. Were the same scenario to happen all over again, I still wouldn’t take Oscar Bane’s call.”
“I wonder if it would have changed anything had you taken it,” Lucy said.
“On the surface it wasn’t any different from all the other nutty calls we get every day,” Berger said.
“It’s still too bad. Maybe you could have made a difference.”
Lucy’s hands were strong but graceful on the keyboard. She closed a programming window she had opened on the screen, and once again the deep space was restored and fragmented text streamed through it, moving, finding its missing parts. Berger tried not to look.
“If I played the recording for you, you’d completely understand,” she explained. “He sounds like a nutcase. Almost hysterical, and he goes on and on about somebody or a group of people taking over his mind electronically, and thus far he’s resisted being controlled by them, but they know every breath he takes. At the moment, I feel somebody’s doing the same thing to me. I apologize in advance. On rare occasions I get these headaches. I’m trying like hell not to get this one.”
“You ever gotten cybersick?” Lucy asked.
“I’m not sure what that is,” Berger said.
“What about motion sickness?”
“I do know what that is, and yes. I can’t look at anything in a moving car, and as a kid I always threw up in amusement parks. And I don’t want to think about it right now.”
“Guess you won’t be flying with me.”
“Police helicopters don’t bother me. As long as they don’t take the doors off.”
“Disoriented, nauseated, vertigo, even seizures and migraines,” Lucy said. “Usually associated with virtual reality, but any computer display of motion can do it. Such as watching all this shit. I happen to be one of the lucky ones. Doesn’t affect me. You can throw me into full-scale crash simulation all day long, and it doesn’t bother me a bit. I could be a test dummy at Langley. It’s probably what I should have done in life.”
She leaned back in her chair and tucked the tips of her fingers into the front pockets of her jeans, her physical openness an invitation, somehow, and Berger’s eyes were drawn to her the same way they were to a provocative painting or a sculpture.
“So here’s what you’re going to try,” Lucy said. “You’re going to look at the monitors only when I think you should see something. If you continue to feel bad, I’ll spool off the data I want you to see, and you can look at it in static word-processing format. I’ll even break my rule and print stuff. Anyway, don’t look at the monitor. Let’s go back to what I was saying about what software protections are loaded on the laptops. I was suggesting we should see if we find the same software loaded on Oscar’s home computer. See if we find evidence he’s the one who purchased it. Can we get into his apartment?”
Lucy continued to say we, and Berger didn’t see how there could be a we.
It was completely reckless for there to be a we, Berger kept telling herself, kept trying to talk herself out of it, only to talk herself right back into it.
She shut her eyes and rubbed her temples and said, “It’s easy to assume it was Terri who was researching Kay. But how do we know Oscar wasn’t? Maybe these are his computers and he had them at Terri’s apartment for some reason. And no, right now we can’t get into his computer or computers. Whatever computers he has in his apartment. We don’t have his consent, and we don’t have probable cause.”
“His fingerprints on these laptops?”
They were on a nearby desk, both of them connected to a server.
“Don’t know yet,” Berger replied. “But that wouldn’t necessarily prove anything, since he was in and out of her apartment. Theoretically, we don’t know whose work this is. But what’s certain is Kay is a focus. You’ve made that point.”
“She’s more than a focus. Don’t look, but what’s happening right now? It’s sorting by footnotes. Ibid. this and that, and dates. Footnotes that seem to correlate with quotations from my aunt.”
“You’re saying Terri interviewed her?”
“Someone did, supposedly. Keep your eyes shut. The computer doesn’t need your help or approval. It’s sorting by references, thousands of them in parentheses, from multiple drafts of the same thesis. And hundreds of these parenthetical references pertain to interviews conducted at different times. Alleged interviews with my aunt.”
Berger opened her eyes and saw fragmented words and sentences streaming by and reattaching.
“Maybe they’re transcripts of interviews on CNN or newspaper interviews,” she suggested. “And you’re right. Next time I’ll ask. That just made me dizzy. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I should leave.”
“Can’t be transcripts,” Lucy replied. “Not all of them or even most. Chronologically, that can’t be right. Scarpetta, November tenth, and Scarpetta, November eleventh, then the twelfth and thirteenth. No way. She didn’t talk to her. Nobody talked to her. This is bullshit.”
It was indescribably strange, looking at her looking at the monitors and bickering with her computer creation as if it were her best friend.
Be
rger realized Jet Ranger was under the desk, snoring.
“References to four different interviews that took place back-to-back, four days in a row,” Lucy said. “And again here. Three days in a row. See, that’s exactly what I mean. She doesn’t come to the city and go on TV every day of the week, and she rarely does newspaper interviews. And this one right here? No fucking way.”
Berger considered getting out of her chair and saying good-night. But the thought of riding in the back of a taxi right now was unbearable. She would be sick.
“Thanksgiving Day? Impossible.” Lucy seemed to be arguing with the data. “We were together in Massachusetts Thanksgiving Day. She wasn’t on CNN, and she sure as hell wasn’t giving an interview to a newspaper or some graduate student.”
17
The cold wind was biting, and the half-moon was high and small, illuminating nothing as Scarpetta and Benton walked to the morgue.
The sidewalk was almost deserted, the few people they passed seeming aimless with very little in life. A young man was rolling a joint. Another young man leaned against a wall, trying to stay warm. Scarpetta felt eyes on their backs, and she felt vaguely unsettled. She felt exposed and uneasy for reasons that were too layered for her to readily identify. Yellow taxis sped by, most of their lighted rooftop signs advertising banks and finance and loan companies, typical after Christmas, when people face the consequences of their holiday cheer. A bus boasted a banner ad for Gotham Gotcha, and anger touched Scarpetta like the tip of a spear.
Then she felt fear, and Benton seemed to sense it and he found her hand, and he held it as they walked.
“It’s what I get,” she said, thinking about the gossip column. “I did a pretty good job avoiding the limelight for twenty-something years. Now CNN and now this.”